Call it admiration for courage or call it blood lust. Many fans seem likely to remain untroubled by football’s violence. Here’s why.
Football is violent. That is a significant part of its appeal for many, including Willa Cather (1873-1947), once a University of Nebraska student, who published two essays praising football.
Willa Cather: It makes one exceedingly weary to hear people object to football because it is brutal. Of course, it is brutal. Homer is Brutal. Tolstoy is brutal. Football is one of the few survivors of the heroic. There must always be a little of the barbarian lurking. When the last trace of that vital spark–the exultation of physical powers, that fury of animal courage dies out of the race–then Providence will be done with us.
Football’s violence hit me when I was twelve. My suburban hometown, Montclair New Jersey, had state-championship high school football teams during the late 1940s and 1950s. And we played football, too.
As kids, my friends and I regularly played sports, including touch football, which was fun, although I was far from a star. But suddenly in 8th grade, we began playing tackle football. I can’t recall why, but probably some friends decided we should begin preparing for high school ball. We played our first tackle game on a vacant lot behind my house. Six on-a-side, we had no helmets, no shoulder pads, no cleats, or any other equipment beyond our sneakers.
I was a skinny lineman, trying to block on offense or rush on defense, until Gordon, carrying the ball, ran directly at me. I bent, preparing to tackle him, not knowing anything about tackling. I’d just grab him. As I reached for him, he shot out his right arm, stiff-arming me, and smashing his hand into my face, which was a perfectly legal move. My head snapped back and I fell.
Pain shot through my neck. Dizzily, I struggled to stand. That game ended my career as a tackle football player.
The Montclair High football team was the undefeated New Jersey state champion my senior year in high school. Several of my grade school friends played on that team, an undertaking that received pages of praise in our class yearbook. Gordon was the starting fullback. The words under his football photo read “Gordon hits the line hard, always digging for the extra yard.”
As an adult living in Berkeley, I became a mild fan of pro football, drawn to watching Joe Montana and the great S. F. 49er teams of the 1980s on TV. But I hadn’t been to see a game in years until, that is, a glorious fall day when my brother Steve was visiting an old friend. It was an ideal afternoon to attend a college football game and we decided to see Cal and UCLA play.
Twice during the first half as the player caught a pass, a defender smashed into his back and he lay in agony on the field. Minutes later, a fullback was crushed by several defenders and lay prone in similar agony. All three players were so seriously injured that they had to be carried off the field on a stretcher and rushed out of the stadium in an ambulance.
We three were horrified by the time the last ambulance left, just before halftime. “This is sick,” Steve said, “Let’s get out of here.” We left. That was the end of my football-watching life, including on TV.
Bruce Jenkins (photo courtesy San Francisco Chronicle)
Some football fans assert that the game’s violence, though troubling, is essential to its artistry. The sports columnist Bruce Jenkins wrote “For some fans, (professional) football is all about the macho mentality,” and it is distressing that some football players can be “bent on utter destruction.” It is especially distressing, Jenkins continued because “concussion-studies, make-it-safer rules. and disturbing injuries,” make football violence “increasingly difficult to appreciate.”
However, Jenkins found football redeemed. “It’s the presence of great athletes, with all the risks involved, that make it all worthwhile. That’s the essence of the game: exquisite beauty in the face of violence—pure art, Rembrandt on the football canvas. It’s that looming danger that completes the picture. That’s always been the hook for me. Like so many sportswriters, I’ve addressed the concussion crisis, the National Football League’s oblivious response to medical studies, and a growing sentiment that football is dying—slowly but inexorably. I heard from a reader asking, ‘How can you acknowledge all that and still enjoy the sport? Easy. The tightrope act. The man with a thousand moves.”
The “macho mentality” of some football fans can descend to despicable. Andrew Luck, a Stanford graduate and for six years the star quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts, abruptly announced his retirement during preseason training in 2019. Luck stated: “I’m in pain. I’m still in pain; I’ve been in this cycle. It’s been four years of this injury-pain cycle. I haven’t been able to live the life I want to live.”
On the day of Luck’s announcement, fans at a Colts’ preseason game booed him as he stood on the sidelines. Later, other fans attacked him for being “soft,” “lacking in commitment,” and other supposed character flaws. Ann Killion, a columnist for the S. F. Chronicle, wrote: “This was a scary view of the ugliness of football, of the sick underbelly of a game in which intolerance and lack of empathy too often seem to be the currency of fans…. Maybe it’s the result of the increasing violence of the sport. If we really thought these were actual humans colliding into each other at top speed, it would be hard to process.”
At my 35th Montclair High class reunion, I reconnected with Peter, an old friend, who was a starting end on the football team. In 1956, he was six feet two and weighed over 215 pounds, which was huge back then for a high school player. Under his football yearbook photo was: “Big and strong, Peter was always rushing the passer.”
By the nineteen-nineties, he’d become a successful lawyer in Washington D. C. Sometime later, I stayed in D.C., and we went out for a lingering dinner. Our conversation turned to his football playing and I asked him, “Did you like the violence?”
Peter smiled. “I loved the violence! And it was legal!” There is violence in many sports, including baseball and basketball, but football’s violence is at the core of the game, and players suffer accordingly.
Among the most severe of football’s health dangers are concussions. Many studies have established that playing football risks repeated head trauma. The Concussion Legacy Foundation encourages children thirteen and under to avoid tackle football, asserting that kids who start that contact sport at age five have ten times the risk of developing degenerative brain disease than kids who wait until they are fourteen. Some parents, aware of concussions and other health risks, refuse to allow their children to play tackle football, but some families and boys decide independently to avoid it. So, participation in high school football has declined every year since 2008.
There has been extensive discussion and debate in recent years about football concussions and making the game safer. The National Football League conducted a series of concussions studies and then adopted complex rules governing what must happen if a player might have a concussion. College rules have likewise changed in an effort to reduce brain or other serious injuries.
Still, football remains a “full contact” sport. Some former fans have turned against the game because of its violence, especially from concussions, including Steve Almond, as he explains in his book Against Football.
Concern about football’s violence is not new. In 1905, there were nineteen deaths in college games. Several colleges had ceased playing football, and others were considering it. President Roosevelt, a football fan, became concerned about rising public sentiment against the game. He held a meeting of college officials, which led to creating a new intercollegiate organization to regulate football. That organization, which became the NCAA, adopted various rules designed to make the game safer.
They did … a bit. Deaths declined to eleven in both 1906 and in 1907, injuries fell significantly, and energy for abolishing football diminished. College rules continued to evolve slowly, lessening some brutal aspects of football. In 1939, helmets were required. In 1957, grabbing an opponent’s facemask was outlawed. Similarly, the rules of high school and youth football have been changed in an effort to make the game safer. California passed a law limiting the time that high school players can participate in full-contact practice to ninety minutes, twice a week. While these rules changes have made football safer, it remains seriously risky and players continue to suffer concussions.
Despite the increasing evidence of brain damage, there will always be good athletes. like Peter. who love football’s violence. And there will always be parents who encourage their kids to play or at least allow them to play. There will be fans, like Jenkins, for whom football’s artistry overrides their understanding of the sport’s violence. Finally, there will be fans across America dedicated to observing modern-day gladiators in action.
Football will not die, but what is its future? Here’s what I think.
The game is deeply culturally entrenched in many parts of the country. It may continue on essentially unchanged, except with fewer young or high school players. Perhaps major rule and equipment changes will reduce football’s mayhem to safe levels. But is that really possible? Can any rule changes reduce football’s violence so that concussions and other traumatic injuries become rare while simultaneously retaining the game’s appeal to fans? Or could those turned off by the game’s violence become powerful enough to compel rules changes that prevent concussions? If football remains as violent as it is now, will it dwindle in popularity as boxing has?
Football’s future is uncertain. If I had to bet, I’d go with football making more rule changes to try to increase safety but remaining essentially unchanged.
The artist Frederick Remington played football at Yale under the legendary coach Walter Camp. Remington later objected to Camp’s decision as chair of the rules committee to prohibit the vicious “flying wedge,” where many players from one team smashed simultaneously into a single opponent. “You are not going to civilize the only real thing we have left, are you? It is the only game left for a man to play.”
Football’s violence will continue to appeal to those believing, with Remington, that men, “real men” (that is, those who endure serious pain and keep playing the game), are heroic. Call it admiration for courage or call it blood lust, many fans seem likely to remain untroubled by football’s violence. The sport will endure.
