For several years now, sports fans of a certain cast of mind have been declaring their intention to quit watching professional football, on moral grounds. What cast of mind is this? A rare or, perhaps, hypocritical one, to judge by the numbers, which show ever-higher TV ratings for the N.F.L., in spite of the drumbeat of grim news from neurological labs, trainers’ tables, and police blotters. Evidently, unease has emboldened only those whose allegiance to the gridiron was notional in the first place. Either that or all the discussion of modern-day gladiators has produced a rubbernecking effect, in which we keep tuning in to see if the decline of the nation’s most popular form of entertainment is finally upon us. (It is not—yet.)
The trouble with football-related brain injury is one of abstraction. The real damage is separated by years from the jarring (but thrilling) impact that we watch in real time—and, even then, it’s a game of odds. Nearly thirty per cent of players, by the league’s recent admission, will suffer from accelerated cognitive impairment. Yet, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, N.F.L. veterans still live longer, on average, than the general population. (They are wealthier, for one thing, and in some senses healthier—less prone to respiratory and digestive diseases, less likely to commit suicide, even.) Those retired linebackers who report difficulty remembering why they’ve left one room for another will often say, on camera, that they have few regrets. Meanwhile, the men in uniform—on the winning team, at least—seem so transparently to enjoy their Sunday afternoons at the line of scrimmage. This provides cover enough for a diagnosis of guilty pleasure. Sugar is bad, too, but Halloween is coming.
There was, on the other hand, nothing abstract about the recently released video of the Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée, Janay Palmer, in a casino elevator, last February. The fact that they have since married changes nothing about the appalling act of violence, or the gut sense that there ought to be no room in public life for a man who carries out such an act, and no pleasure derived from watching him put such strength to less harmful use. It has become one of those clarifying moments, after which it is no longer possible to immerse oneself in a fog of ambiguity. Another video, released seven months ago, showed Rice dragging an unconscious Palmer out of the elevator, and was somehow not enough.
Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, has always styled himself a stern parent of wayward boys, but he nonetheless found cause, at first, for leniency with Rice, in the form of a two-game suspension. Leaving aside the open question of whether N.F.L. officials had previously seen the earlier video (the former F.B.I. director Robert Mueller is investigating), the truth is that it was easy for many people not to visualize the act. The Joe DiMaggio who emerges in Richard Ben Cramer’s biography was a violently abusive husband, but he remained a hero—the Yankee Clipper—to the end.
Perversely, the league’s botching of the Rice case may have done more good than any well-intentioned initiative could. A swiftly administered eight-game suspension, say, would likely have engendered pushback in some corners, as grist for the otherwise worthy argument that Goodell too readily scapegoats individual players, the ones risking body and mind, in the interest of “protecting the shield,” as he likes to say, referring to the N.F.L. logo. (By imposing heavy fines and suspensions for particularly dangerous tackles, he has seemed to suggest that football’s challenges are behavioral rather than institutional.) What’s more, Goodell relied on the judgment of prosecutors, who let Rice off with the equivalent of a warning, for guidance in his own executive process. That would be more defensible if he hadn’t established a precedent for treating recreational pot smoking as a kind of football felony, deserving a four-game suspension, or worse.
Instead, the outrage has spread. Without Rice and Goodell as context, the investigation of the running back Adrian Peterson, for “disciplining” his four-year-old son with a tree branch, might not have made front-page news anywhere other than Minnesota, where his status with the Vikings is now on hold. (It took pressure from team sponsors, including the Radisson hotel chain—and from Minnesota’s governor—to force him off the active roster.) Nor would many of us have heard of Jonathan Dwyer, a less heralded running back, who is alleged to have broken his wife’s nose. And then there is the case of Greg Hardy, a defensive end, whose ex-girlfriend testified that he choked her and threatened to kill her.
These issues are not unique to football, of course, even among professional sports. According to a database that USA Today maintains, the N.F.L.’s athletes are arrested at a lower rate than the male population at large—though domestic abuse remains an outsized problem—and this year is on track to see the fewest arrests of league players since 2000. But the news of the past few weeks has animated the latent ugliness in the sport’s culture of sanctioned violence in a way that images of tau proteins in the brain have struggled to do. The shield that Goodell protects, we are often told, is worth ten billion dollars in annual revenues, and a lot of the animosity he now faces derives from the smugness implicit in the idea that so much money can’t be wrong.
Dethroning Goodell, who earns forty-four million dollars a year, may satisfy a primal urge not unlike the one that causes us—some of us, at any rate—to root for Tom Brady’s sacking. Football is supposed to be a tough business. But Goodell is ultimately a figurehead, answerable to the billionaire (or near-billionaire) team owners, who benefit greatly from public support, in the form of tax breaks and stadium bonds. We know Goodell’s salary, for instance, only because the league office files as a nonprofit, a trade association acting on behalf of its franchises. This game is not a public utility. It is private entertainment.
The death of football, according to the declinist scenario, would have to originate with women—mothers who, having read the medical findings, would forbid their sons to play Pop Warner, which in turn would reduce the teen-age ranks aspiring to play under the lights on Friday night, and so on up the chain. That’s a slow process, but disgust with the organization is bound to speed it up. Women are also increasingly angered by the response to domestic violence; in recognition of that, Goodell announced last week that the N.F.L. will earmark some of its profits to help fund abuse hot lines. A league that boasts that some forty-four per cent of its fans are women has to do much more than dress its players in pink for breast-cancer-awareness month to convince those fans that “the best thing on television,” as Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, put it last week, is family-friendly. Suddenly, the people who talk about abandoning football seem almost to mean it. ♦
