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| Library of Congress |
Americans consider themselves innocents. Pure, noble, removed from the degraded world outside our borders, both physical and mental.
True, that pose takes considerable effort to maintain: our own brutal history must be whitewashed, ignored or suppressed. Teachers squelched, books banned, libraries purged. Faith-fueled prudes, at least when it comes to the conduct of others, we simply banish entire realms of human behavior, and if those outside of our beloved norms are not guilty of crimes, then crimes are imagined for them.
This leads to lives of constant surprises, as the white-hot fervor of our imagined purity hits the cold waters of reality. We are continually indignant, aghast, vibrating with shock when forced to confront the obvious.
Take Monday night. As you no doubt know by now, during a game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals, 24-year-old Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after an ordinary tackle, nearly dead on the field, as medical technicians struggled to get his heart started.
Fans wept, prayed. Pundits cogitated, then delivered the awful news.
“Football is a violent sport,” revealed a headline in the Times of Northwest Indiana. “And we love it.”
True enough. And sincere, like the prayers after mass shootings, the pious noise that masks our inability to change in any substantial way.
Even concern about violence on the field misses the point. Football players don’t die on the field; they die off it. The average life expectancy of an American man is 79, if he’s white; 68, if he’s Black. If he played in the NFL, however, that falls to 59.6 years, according to a Harvard study of thousands of players over decades. Most of those ex-football players die from heart disease, at a rate 2.4 times that of Major League Baseball players, who as a group live seven years longer.
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Yes, we should ask ourselves even though I'm afraid that the answer that we're going to find is very disturbing. It's about the money of course. And bloodlust on a sanitized level
ReplyDeleteIt is not news that football is a violent sport. However, it is not a gladiator fight in the Roman Colosseum. It is not bullfighting.Those who choose to play do so, now more than ever, knowing the immense risks they are taking. One must assume the glory, money, and their competitive fire outweighs the dangers for the participants. There are myriad layers of strategy involved in football beyond the collisions.Regarding those of us who enjoy this controlled mayhem, let us be. That's why they make 31 flavors, no?
ReplyDeleteYears ago, in college, my health class had the college football team's physician as a guest speaker. He spoke about his love for the game, the thrill of game day, and the fact that, if he had the power, which he obviously didn't, there would never be another college football game. He said that 50% of the players received injuries that would haunt them the rest of their lives. This was before the knowledge of CTE.
ReplyDeleteYou noted that the average football game lasts 3 hours. Did you know that the average time the ball is in play, the average time the game is actually played, is 12 minutes? This is why pro football was a peripheral sport, lagging behind bowling and wrestling as a TV phenomena until television instant replay was invented. Without instant replay, the game is as visually engaging as, well, bowling. But that pitiful 12 minutes of play, once a week for part of the year is one of the reasons for pro football's success. With 6 days, 23 hours, and 48 minutes a week of dead air (OK, there is the 2 hours or so of instant replay) there are untold opportunities for ex athletes to blather endlessly about the gossip and intrigue of last weeks disasters, player's lives, coaches imploding, and most importantly - betting, betting, betting. The odds are the holy grail. The actual game? 12 minutes of brief bursts of gut knotting violence. And then a week of endless blather.
I’ve heard the 12 minute figure cited before, and it’s always done in a way that makes it sound like it’s some sort of outrage or a scam, but really, so what? Just like baseball, football is not a game of flow, so there’s a lot of “dead” time, but that doesn’t mean that the viewers who enjoy watching the games are getting jipped. The ample dead time between plays is often rapt with tension and anticipation, and, for me anyway, all part of the dramatic arc of the games.
DeleteThat said, I do like hockey better than baseball or football, but I like them all, just as I like reading, listening to music and watching movies, as long as they’re not routine, formulaic, predictable, by the numbers, unit shifting widgets, which means just about anything that comes out of Hollywood these days.
You've heard it cited because it's the truth - except it's actually 10 minutes and 41 seconds: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704281204575002852055561406
DeleteAgain, so what?
DeleteInstant replay had nothing to do with football becoming popular. Two things did. The point spread and the 1957 championship game in which the Colts won in over time. Up until that point college football might have been bigger than pro football.
DeleteStill sticking with "sports are the same thing happening over and over," I see. With the bonus today of it directly following your remark about reading "War and Peace" twice.
ReplyDeleteA lot of folks love doing the same thing over and over. We live in a ritualistic country. How many people buy an album (how's that for a dated reference) or download a song in order to listen to them once, for instance?
But the reason people love sports is precisely because what happens, within the framework of being the same, is always different. Exciting conclusions to games can be quite unpredictable. Surprisingly often, now that the computerization of statistics has made the most inane occurrences searchable, it is noted that something has never happened before in the history of the NFL or Major League Baseball. You know what is the same? Any given page of "War and Peace" the second time one reads it.
Your buddy Eric Zorn wrote yesterday "I admit to experiencing dissonance in my attitude toward football" which he then flatly called "the greatest game in all of sport." Alas, while I long considered college football my favorite sport to watch, I'm closer to watching the amount you do than to the amount Mr. Zorn or the average American fan does, these days.
Your paragraph about life expectancy, which Zorn tweeted as a "good and uncomfortable point," and this column in general represent the kind of iconoclastic reasoning we could use more of in this delusional society, notwithstanding my opening salvo. In a similar vein, I'd like somebody to study the carbon footprint of a Cubs or Bears game...
People play sports for the competition and/or the fun and/or the exercise. The better ones make a living out of it. Those not quite good enough to turn pro have to work for a living. My fire department was loaded with former college athletes. More firefighters die each year than pro athletes but they do it for reasons similar to pro athletes; the bucks, the glory, and they are in fact providing a service to many (i.e. entertainment, protection).
ReplyDeletePeople watch sports for a wide variety of reasons not least of which is the suspense. It's not really the same thing over and over again but I suppose if you're not a fan, it is.
Football, hockey, and basketball are quite vicious but none compare to NASCAR where almost all people go to see the crashes, not the hours of round and round.
I haven't followed the Bears since 1985, or college football at all. Pro football bores me more than soccer, less than tennis, and about the same as baseball. But I don't think we are ready to give it up. Football brinks too much joy and a sense of accomplishment to those who dedicate themselves as players and coaches. We can make the game physically safer for the players, and financially more prudent for the communities that depend on the sport as entertainment and revenue.
ReplyDeleteMy love for baseball, which began late (in junior high) far surpasses anything I've ever felt for football, basketball, or hockey. My next-door neighbor played football in high school, as did his father before him. Both were short and fat and built like fire hydrants, and both died of heart attacks before they reached sixty.
ReplyDeleteWe played flag football in junior high gym class, and I hated it. Occasionally played touch with friends on playgrounds or empty lots, in my teens, and liked that better. We got rough. We got bruised and bloody. It felt good to get mean on a Sunday, after striking out on Saturday night.
Went to a lot of high school and college games, mostly to socialize and on dates, but the home team usually stunk...and usually lost. I attended exactly one Bears game as a kid, at Wrigley, on a snowy November Sunday, and froze. I've never had much liking for the NFL. It was the sport of Republicans and Fascists...often one and the same. The college game has always been more my thing, but not all that much.
Then I moved to Clevland, where the Browns are everything, so I've half-heartedly followed them. The last 25 years of Cleveland football have been about the same as my 60-plus years of Cubism (the baseball team, not the art movement). I don't watch them anymore...it's too frustrating and depressing and sad. I get too pissed.
I figure the NFL dodged a bullet this time, and it's only a matter of time...a when, not an if...before somebody gets killed. Not a heart attack, either. Killed outright.
My one question to Mr. S is this: Where and when was that game-day image made? What fascinates me most about it is not who's playing, or the shoes or the socks or the pants or the jerseys. Or the fingerless gloves. It's not even those rudimentary helmets, which I assume are made of leather. Nope. None of those. It's the FOOTBALL itself. It looks about as big as an averaged-sized watermelon. Wuzzup with THAT?
I think it is a genealiation that the NFL is for Republicans and Fascists. Plenty of democrats like football. As for some one dying in the field this has not happened unless you include Chuck Huges who died in a football game against the Bears. However it was not from getting hit but a heart attack. I read that he was dead before he hit the ground, but I read the other day that they were able to start his heart but was dead by the time he was at the hospital. More football players are going to die young from CTE than would ever die on the field.
DeleteThe shape of the football became more like today's when the forward pass came into being in 1906.
ReplyDeleteThe current football shape is from 1941.
This page has a history of the shape https://mentalitch.com/the-history-of-the-football-the-actual-ball/
But it's wrong on that Wilson has a secret tanning process.
All the leather is made by Horween Leather at Ashland & Elston, with their special process used.
Interesting that the company founder, Arnold Horween played for the Bears in the 1920s, but changed his name from Horowitz, so he wouldn't embarrass his family by playing football.
Thanks for that reference to Horween Leather, Clark St. I've gone by that building many, many times and wondered how there can be a tannery still operating at that location in the 21st Century, but never bothered looking into it. Uh, it's probably because it's a family-owned company whose founder is quoted on their website: "We should take the best of everything; the best hides, the best oils, the best dyes and finishes – then we do whatever it takes to make that leather the best. The price goes on last, and if we cannot sell it for what it is worth, we should not make that leather." The current owner: "Developers call every week. They say, 'What do you want to do about your land?' I say 'I'm going to make leather, I think, that's what we’ve always done.'"
DeleteCool to know that all NFL footballs and NBA basketballs start out as leather produced right there.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/06/25/inside-the-last-chicago-tannery-bucktowns-horween-leather-co/
Since 1955, the official NFL footballs have been made at the Wilson factory in Ada, Ohio. Each football is handmade from cowhide sourced from Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa. The hides are tanned in Ada with a "top secret football-weather-optimizing tanning recipe." 130 people working at the factory produce nearly 4000 footballs every day. Each football is made up of four pieces and a synthetic bladder, and each cowhide can usually make up to 10 footballs.
DeleteI don't know where you got that from, Grizz, but as Clark St. indicated above, it seems to be wrong. This article seems pretty definitive, discussing the leather in a particular football, starting with a steer in Bluffton, Ohio, on to Horween in Chicago, then back to the Wilson plant in Ada, ending up with the Bengals kicker kicking it in warm-ups in Atlanta.
Delete"Pro football was a small fraternity back then, and the Horween brothers were friendly with another Chicago player-coach: George Halas. That relationship is how the family business became the only leather supplier for Wilson, tanning every NFL football for the past 77 seasons."
https://www.si.com/nfl/2019/01/31/how-cow-becomes-football-horween-wilson
I knew something like this would happen, but I went ahead and posted it anyway. Silly me. So the cowhide goes from Ohio to Chicago and then back to Ohio again? Makes a lot more sense, from a logistical point of view, to go from KS-NE-IA to Chicago and then to Ada...a direct west-to-east path. But the truth is, I don't really care either way.
DeleteAll I do care about is when that enormous football was being used in a game and whether or not there were even laces on it. That would be a good indicator of when the image was made and whether or not they were throwing it, or still just running with it.
My comment is an excerpt from a much longer piece that appeared online in 2014 and has a lot of information about how and where footballs originated, and about the way they have evolved over time.
https://gizmodo.com/were-footballs-ever-really-made-of-pigskin-1513061556
That's some disappointing misinformation from Gizmodo, then. What are we to do if we can't trust everything we read on the internet?! ; )
DeleteAs for logistics, the SI article says that "the vast majority (of steers come) from large ranches in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska or Ontario" but doesn't really explain how this smaller Ohio farm with 10 head of cattle got involved.
The problem now, since all you care about is the old-timey round football, is that the photo was atop the blog, not attached to the piece itself. Decades from now, when historians are poring over these comment threads while producing the definitive, multi-volume opus, "EGD: An Intrepid Journalist Documents the Decline of American Civilization," they won't know what you were referring to. : )
That football wasn't round. It was the size and shape of a watermelon. But now it's all moot, unless Mr. S. decides to bring it back and puts an end to all the hoo-ha.
DeleteLook closely at Offensive Lineman in any college or pro football game, specifically at the knee braces they wear. Preventative, I assume, to the injuries suffered by contact and possibly because the human knee was not designed to carry so much weight. Kids who play football from Pop Warner through college don't anticipate the lasting effects, at least my generation didn't. Bears HOFer Dan Hampton had knee surgeries almost every year during his college and pro careers. Coworkers at WSCR would describe the ordeal of his waking from a nap at the station, his body diminished by years of hard contact. Playing sports is a joy. Catching a hard one-hopper down the third base line and making the long throw to first is a rush. Avoiding a block to stop a runner on fourth-and-one makes you feel a little taller and tougher. When you realize that you are not good enough to advance in your favorite game, it hurts, but I am not that unhappy today that I wasn't fast enough to make the high school football team.
ReplyDelete