January 1985 is my earliest clear memory of watching American football. It was Super Bowl XIX, which featured two hall of fame quarterbacks in Dan Marino of the Miami Dolphins and Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers. Played on a beautiful Californian afternoon with President Reagan conducting the coin toss live from the White House, the game epitomised everything glamorous and bombastic about the National Football League.
Of course I wasn’t actually there basking in the sun at Stanford Stadium. As a 17-year-old student in Glasgow, I barely had the bus fare to get into town, never mind hop on a plane to the west coast. Instead I was sprawled on the sofa watching it on the fledgling Channel 4, a station that couldn’t afford normal sports coverage, so instead they bet on the exotic and incomprehensible in the hope of luring a late-night Sunday audience.
Thirty years on and I’m now a long-suffering and obsessive NY Giants fan, fully immersed in the cultural and commercial phenomenon that is the modern NFL. Baseball may revel in its moniker as America’s pastime, but football is undoubtedly America’s dominant sport. With a record TV broadcast deal of $5bn dollars per year, 20 of the top 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world, and the largest ever US TV audience of 120 million for this year’s Super Bowl, the NFL dwarfs all other US sports. One of the reasons that football is so dominant is that obsession is amplified by scarcity.
With a mere 16-week regular season, NFL action is rationed, with home fans getting only eight games a year. Discounting a few truly meaningless pre-season games, the season doesn’t kick off until the middle of September, yet a champion is crowned by the first weekend in February. Compare that five-month compressed sprint to the ludicrous never-ending deluge of football in Scotland, where Scottish League play-offs that can run into June blend almost seamlessly into July Europa League qualifiers.
An easy explanation for the popularity of American football is that it’s tailor made for TV, with frequent breaks in the action to attract advertisers, but the same holds true for baseball and basketball. Sociologists seeking pop-culture credibility also try to explain football’s attraction by how the game reflects the unique American psyche. How the disciplined and methodical taking and holding of territory mirrors the idea of manifest destiny and the opening of the American west. How the heroic quarterback marshalling and directing his team is no different from a young lieutenant leading and inspiring a platoon of marines on the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima.
But there’s another darker, and to me far more plausible theory, that explains the popularity of the game. It’s our base appetite for violence as entertainment that goes back to the Roman Coliseum and beyond. From its earliest days as a college game in the late 19th century, grid-iron football has always incorporated elements of primitive tribal warfare. The clash of two lines of men pushing against each other for supremacy conjures images of the Spartans driving the Persians off the cliffs at Thermopylae, with a spiralling piece of pigskin rather than spears being chucked over the shield wall.
Just as in rugby, there is a deep reverence in American football for the ‘big hit’ and the assertion of masculine virtue that comes from the physical domination of an opponent. But there has always been a price to pay for that violence, and that price is now becoming better understood and less acceptable. Despite its huge popularity, the result may be that we are now close to the apogee of popularity of the current incarnation of the game.
The coming crisis may turn out to be just another inflexion point in the longer history of American football, as unacceptable levels of on-field violence has been a recurring issue. In fact in the early 1900s, it took the intervention of President Teddy Roosevelt to save what was then still just a college game. In the 1905 season there were 19 on-field fatalities at the high school and college level, with the causes of death ranging from severed spinal cords and fractured skulls to broken ribs piercing lungs and hearts. After a particularly brutal Harvard-Yale game the local newspaper in New Haven memorably described one player’s face as resembling ‘a plate of chopped beefsteak’. In the words of the then president of Harvard College, football had become ‘a blood sport more brutalising than prize fighting, cockfighting or bullfighting’ and colleges started to disband their teams.
However, Teddy Roosevelt subscribed to the Duke of Wellington’s theory that the battle of Waterloo was won ‘on the playing fields of Eton’. Roosevelt believed that America needed to teach its young men to ‘hit the line hard’ if it was going to become a global power; so he intervened and hosted a summit at the White House. The resulting rule changes and the introduction of helmets and pads improved player safety, and the game gradually evolved from gory trench warfare to the faster more athletic game we see today.
Although better equipment and training have almost eradicated on-field deaths in the NFL, we are now developing a far better understanding of the longer-term neurological impact of playing American football and the statistics are terrifying. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) results from the cumulative impact of head blows, some of which may lead to concussions, but many of which produce no short-term symptoms. CTE is a degenerative brain condition that starts with mild memory loss but can evolve into Parkinsons, dementia, depression, and a range of other neurological conditions. While CTE has been recognised as a risk in boxing for many years, it rose to prominence in the NFL via the 2012 suicide of Junior Seau, a star linebacker who suffered from depression. Seau’s family blamed his death on the NFL and requested a full autopsy, which then showed tangles of Alzheimer-like tau proteins in his brain and clear evidence of multiple traumatic brain injuries.
As part of a recent $700mm class action settlement with over 5,000 ex-players, the NFL admitted that a third of retired players may be suffering from CTE. However, mounting scientific evidence suggests this is vastly understating the problem. Two separate series of autopsies on ex-NFL players show CTE incidence rates at a staggering 93% and 96%. Another peer-reviewed academic study concluded that if you are a retired NFL player aged 50 to 54, you are 14 times more likely to have serious neurological problems than the general population. The evidence is increasingly clear; if you play American football at the professional level, you will almost certainly end up brain damaged as a result.
This conclusion is hardly surprising when you understand the forces involved. Richie Gray, the giant second row on the current Scotland rugby team, is an imposing 6ft 9 inches and nearly 20 stone, but he’s a positive lightweight compared to many NFL players. Lineman in the pro game now regularly weigh 25 to 30 stones, and are often in the 6ft 6 to 6ft 8 height range. To understand the blunt force trauma when one of these giants hits you, think back to your high school physics and remember that force is equal to mass times acceleration. In the 2014 NFL draft, offensive tackle prospect Greg Robinson from Auburn University weighed in at nearly 24 stone, but he could also run 40 yards in 4.9 seconds. Unfortunately for the brains of NFL players, Robinson is not a freaky outlier; he is the new normal. When these giants collide – as they do 100 to 150 times per game – they are condemning each other at a minimum to a middle age of lost car keys and more likely the personality destroying darkness that comes with a scarred and traumatised brain.
As attention begins to focus on the neurological cost of the game there is also increased scrutiny of the cultural costs of promoting on-field violence. The central question is whether asking footballers to live for a decade or more in the Temple of Mars, where violence and the infliction of pain are lauded and celebrated ultimately undermines their ability to be functioning members of society. Just as many Vietnam veterans found that their war experiences scarred them for life, can football players leave violence at the door of the stadium? I’m not talking here about the iconic image of the blonde-haired, Prom King quarterback who is also a bit of an arrogant blowhard. I’m talking about the misogynistic, gangsta mentality that now seems to dominate NFL locker rooms. The poster child for this issue is the running back Ray Rice, who was recently caught on video beating his wife unconscious in an elevator, and who is only the highest profile example of the NFL’s burgeoning domestic violence problem.
When you weaponise men both physically and mentally and pay them huge amounts of money to play angry, it undoubtedly spills over into other aspects of their life. America’s willingness to lionise on-field violence while ignoring its off-field ramifications is personified in Ray Lewis. The 17-year NFL veteran was a quintessential hard man in his playing days, but he was also implicated in the stabbing of a man outside a nightclub in Atlanta in 2000. Despite the victim’s blood being found in Lewis’s limo and the white suit Lewis was wearing that night never being recovered, he escaped with an obstruction of justice conviction. Despite his criminal record, Lewis is now a respected TV analyst and by extension a role model for up and coming players.
My schizophrenia about all of this is personal. My 10-year-old son plays American football and suits up each weekend to go out and run into people. In what is truly a team sport, even a big and slow kid like my son has a valuable role on the team, and through the game he’s learning a lot about personal responsibility. But just last week a team-mate was stretchered off the field after a tackle with a suspected neck injury, and in the space of just seven weeks this autumn seven high school players in the US have died as a direct result of football-related injuries. Although our son loves the camaraderie of the game, we’ve already decided that we won’t let him play in high school, and we are not alone. Over the last few years participation in youth tackle football has fallen 10%, while ‘flag football’, which offers a non-contact version of the game, is on the rise.
Unfortunately, I suspect there will always be a steady supply of poor but athletically-gifted teenagers willing to sacrifice their minds and bodies for fame and fortune. The broader question facing the game’s regulators and the TV networks that increasingly rely on live sports to drive advertising revenue, is whether the human and societal cost is worth paying. If they attempt to downplay the mounting evidence that, over the long-term, taking the field in an NFL game is just as dangerous as walking into the Coliseum to face the lions, then maybe another White House summit is in order to once again save American football.
By Alan McIntyre | November 2015
