I read about this guy who didn't like football last week. He claims it's a brutal game which harks back to our gladiatorial times. I fully agree with his point but think it might serve him well to reassess whether that's such a bad thing. Has he been to Spain? They still fight bulls there. All they did was exchange the Roman lion for an animal which can't readily eat a human with its mouth.
I grew up playing football. My parents are both UT alumni and football was always on in the house. Come fall each year, it was time to go get weighed, fitted for pads and commit hours of each week and weekend to the game. I grew early and started out as a lineman, pushing around other early bloomers in cleats and ill-fitting football pants with the tail-bone pad sticking out above the ass in the back. Later on in high school my height dictated that I should be a receiver and defensive back. I was particularly awful at the latter, letting wideouts from North Denver burn me on out-routes I had no business covering.
But the experience taught me discipline and that we aren't made of glass, plus a little contact doesn't hurt anybody but in fact makes you stronger. One could disagree when the concussion-prone NFL is in question, more on that in a minute. Other than getting hit "over the middle", a term used to describe devastatingly unforeseen bodily damage on passing routes, by burly linebackers, the most uncomfortable feeling I can remember was on sunny yet cold days after it had snowed and iced over the night before. Getting tackled hurts. Getting tackled into the icy puddles that would form on the less than manicured soccer-cum-football fields in south Denver hurt your feelings. Your bones. The cold muddy slush covering your body under your pads for the next hours only added insult to injury. But it wasn't injury. And old coach of mine used to ask if your issue was "an owie or an injury", an important distinction for anyone who's thinking about being a cry baby at any point. "No blood, No foul", is how people insensitive to dangling limbs or internal bleeding might phrase it.
More-over than making ya' tougher, football serves a severely important social function, just like gladiator games did, but in a much shinier, glossier context where the ad space sold is as much an impetus as any to keep the hits coming.
Society isn't all candy canes and gummy bears. People have beef, social strife caused by you name it: class inequality, racial tension or just downright ignorance. People also need avenues to blow off that stress, social blow-off valves that prevent any serious violence on a broad scale. Putting your love, hate, angst or passion into a team with the name of a beast like the Lions or Bears or mythical creature like a Titan or Giant is far better than putting it into a name like the Crips or Bloods or any number of less malignant, but still corruptive groups that society gets involved with. That energy is well spent on intensely passionate, but politically pointless teams, an opiate for the masses. Soccer and Cricket serve much of the same function, worldwide.
When I lived in New Orleans for college the Saints weren't a particularly spectacular team. They actually earned the name the "Aint's" by the some of the cities more cynical, long-time residents. After Katrina, an enormous speed bump in everybody's life at the time, the team's future in NOLA was questionable as moving the franchise became a topic of discussion. When they won the Super Bowl a couple years later, people freaked. It was so symbolic to see the team that plays inside the Superdome, a veritable battle shelter during Katrina, win the big one. It symbolized a complete return to a city that care constantly forgets.
So yes, football is rough and it's great anytime the league changes a rule to prevent concussions and the like. But people are rough. People have the need to see aggression acted out one way or another, it's evolution and an impulse we've learned to put into healthy outlets, but as the sanctimonious John Elway has famously been quoted as saying recently... "Let 'em play!"
