I should probably have my head examined, for I still like to watch football — perhaps all the more so because, aside from wearing pads in the seventh grade (though I don’t think we played any games) and aside from some touch football (I always wanted to be an end, not a blocker), I never played it.
“I don’t feel their pain,” I said to Russell Bennett, a fellow fan (though not of the Steelers, but the Dolphins), the other day.
“No, we don’t feel their pain,” he said. “We celebrate it.”
That did give me pause, as the incontrovertible truth does every now and then. And yet, maybe if I had played it, I would be less enthused, like combat veterans confronted by the bravado of new recruits. I read about all these brain trauma studies, the latest having to do with players at the University of Rochester whose midbrains showed the frayed signs of numerous non-concussive hits (maybe they’ll heal in time, you think?), and still, in the teeth of
the evidence, which is mounting, I persist.
Why? A good question. I guess because violence, at least in its inchoate stages, can be exciting, enlivening. Keep it this side of stomach-turning — and keep me out of the immediate fray (unless you’re standing on the other side of the net) — and I’m with you, cheering and jeering all the way.
I’m not so rabid, though, that I would have, as some did, booed Andrew Luck upon learning of his retirement. What were they thinking? (Perhaps some people don’t have to withstand any hits to be cognitively impaired.)
Well, it is a violent game, and we Americans by and large revel in it, violence being embedded as it is in the national psyche. Rugby, plenty violent and action-packed, but with less head cracking and brain rattling, may win out in the end. As John Feinstein said on the “NewsHour” the other night, it used to be the moms who said no to football, but now the dads are too.
Meanwhile, go Steelers!