I hate to admit it, but every time I see a football game on television, my mind spins back to the lions and the Roman gladiators chasing one another around the coliseums of the Roman Empire. There is only one catch: I”m rooting for the lions to win!
That is surely not the general American attitude toward football extravaganzas. Most Americans can seemingly watch them forever, howling with joy. They repeat to their friends in a hushed awe how football players earn the “profession” they have chosen for themselves.
Unquestionably, what most American men — and now women, too — get out of football games is enjoyment of the peculiar form of violence it entails. Football”s violence is different from hitting a baseball and seeing it take off like a bird flying out of the ballpark. Football violence is not everyday violence. No — football”s violence is personal.
“Football isn”t a contact sport,” John J. Miller, national correspondent for National Review who has written on football, told a gathering last year at Hillsdale College. “It”s a collision sport that has always prized size, strength and power.
“This was especially true in its early years. … Nobody wore helmets, face masks or shoulder pads. … The most unsporting participants would even try to gouge their opponents” eyes.”
If this manages to make some football aficionados look more civilized than in early years, the fact is that the difference isn”t really great. Today the fans flocking to football”s killing fields pretty much accept that one-third of all professional players will suffer some kind of cognitive impairment in their later years, many deadly serious. Already this October, three high school boys have died while playing football. On and on it goes.
But perhaps what is damning and ultimately dooming big-time and just plain big football players is that they are now threatening others, particularly their girlfriends, wives and children. There”s always one story that turns the tide, and the one in which star running back Ray Rice socked his wife in the elevator after a party and then did not pick her up and carry her out, but instead dragged her by her feet — that may be the one this time.
Increasing numbers of football fanatics are heard considering whether a super-violent game that endangers both young boys and old ones on the playing field, and their supposedly “loved ones” as well, really is going to play forever into the future it thought it dominated.
Both football and, to a lesser degree, baseball, a game of infinitely more class and dignity, are coming to a time of decision. Both have been vying for superiority in the sports pages since the beginning of the 20th century. But football has, at this moment, taken top billing, perhaps because the American people desperately love football”s head-to-head cracking violence.
Whether recent events could mean there is a chance for baseball to return to the premier place it held for so many years is difficult to say. But there is no question that more and more people, critical of football for all of its excesses and head injuries, wish it could.
The great baseball player Ernie Banks, still affectionately called Mr. Cub from one end of the country to the other, is very much in the public prism. On a recent cover of Sports Illustrated, octogenarian Ernie was in one of his noble poses. And, yes, baseball WAS noble in those days, a description nobody would ever apply to football.
Also on the cover is a wonderful quote from Ernie. “Any fool can be ebullient in victory,” he apparently told the writer, probably with reference to the Cubs” decades of losses, “but only an aristocrat is undaunted by defeat.”
America has been in the throes of wondering what on earth is lowering America”s status in the world. One of the reasons doubtless would have to do with sports. Football is a nasty, vicious, frightening sport that lowers our status in the world. Baseball is a casual, elegant sport that makes you want to know more of the players. What better place to start turning things around?
Georgie Anne Geyer has been a foreign correspondent and commentator on international affairs for more than 40 years. She can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
