Football

This article is dedicated to all you non-football lovers. I know you’re out there.

November 8, 2011

NU Magazine - November, 2011

FOOTBALL.

What is it about this savage sport that is so transfixing? The Super Bowl had 111 million viewers this year, a new record.

Is it the fact that in football, flab is confused as muscle and an obese body is an athletic physique?

Is it the fact that the risk of paralysis and death perpetually hang over those playing the game, like a deadly pendulum?

Is it the violence, the thrill?

Let’s face it: football is pointless.

The risks, death by a tackle, or a coronary attack outweigh the single benefit — the entertainment of millions of fans.

Sometimes I watch football with my father. You know how the camera often shows close-up footage of the players during their breaks? The stomachs that jiggle like Jell-O, the tight pants accentuating the thigh flab. Forget high-definition televisions, it makes me want to vomit when it’s pixilated!

I ask my father if he notices how overweight some of these players are. Sure, once in a while you get that lean quarterback and wide receiver, but the linebackers — they’re mammoth.

My father replies that it’s all muscle; they need the mass. Seriously? I know the difference between flab and muscle. These players are carrying waterbeds where stomachs, or abs, should be.

Football can cause more injuries than other sports. Football is linked to dislocations, fractures, and concussions in a routine game, and paralysis in an intense game.

Then there are the medical studies linking football and its related conditions to Alzheimer’s, dementia, ALS, and early death. Think back to the headlines:

An NFL player suing the league for a career-ending helmet-to-helmet hit.

A high school player in upstate New York, dead from a head injury.

The Daily Beast columnist, Buzz Bissinger, says that serious injuries, either caused by obesity or injuries during the game, are “occupational hazards.”

According to neuropathologist Brian E. Moore, “Fans are willing to spend a lot of money to see men slam into each others’ heads on the field.”

Football venerates violence. Young boys watch these players glorify it and then conjure up aspirations of one day growing up to earn glory and money giving a man a broken bone or two. Bissinger says, “This is the way fans want football players to play.”

Why?

Every year, thousands of boys walk onto the field, their teeth primed to be loosened, their bodies prepared to be beaten to pulps.

Football excuses what any animal could do, and allows, even encourages, young children to pay more attention to the field than to the classroom and the health of the body.

We encourage heaviness, fatalities, and ferocity, so as to achieve that…rush, that sick sense of pleasure in watching men collide as if they were trains.

But we can’t encourage it any longer. The crippling injuries and deaths are piling up. The number of parents having to watch their sons lose the ability to walk is ascending.

Enough is enough.

The cost is too high. Be that vote or the bodies of our children, the minds of our children, and the lives of our children will continue to slip away as we, supposedly complex and refined human beings, continue to support a barbarian sport.

Game over.

Amanda Glatt, 14, attends Livingston High School and is a member of Nu’s teen board.