We call it football.
A game that evolved from the REAL football (what we call soccer, which truly and completely focuses on the role of the foot) into something completely different, and then hijacked the name of its distant relative. A "sport" that glorifies everything antithetic to sportsmanship.
It's the true "American pastime," having overtaken baseball decades ago. Year after year, the most-watched television event according to the Nielsen ratings is the Super Bowl. Even the name "Super Bowl" is a commodity, with the National Football League essentially claiming ownership of the term and preventing non-football business entities from even using those two words just to reference their own customers who happen to plan to watch the game while using their non-football products. (You have to call it "The Big Game" or something like that. Just wait until the NFL later claims ownership of "The Big Game" too.) Major League Baseball has never prevented the use of "World Series" by non-baseball business entities; indeed, we now even have an officially-recognized "World Series of Poker," among other uses of that phrase.
Never mind that the moniker "Super Bowl" didn't even originate from any professional football league. The first two games, in 1967 and 1968, were officially known as the "AFL-NFL Championship Game." The phrase "Super Bowl" originated as a mere afterthought from then-Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt, whose team played in the American Football League prior to its 1970 merger into the NFL. Even the "Bowl" part originated in college football decades before that.
But the phrase "Super Bowl" caught on with fans, so professional football took it and ran with it, as it were. American capitalism at its finest: take credit and make millions, even billions, from someone else's idea.
But what we Americans call football is a "sport" that is violent by nature. Other than boxing, American football is the only sport where hard contact that can cause injury is a REQUIRED component. Even hockey doesn't require collision of body parts from two separate bodies. Even rugby, from which American football developed, didn't require it, which is why only American football requires covering nearly the entire body with pads and shields. And as we've seen over the decades, all that protection still hasn't stopped a long list of debilitating and even life-threatening injuries.
The NFL itself reported 149 concussions in 271 games played during the 2022 season, the most recent from which data are currently available. This was an 18% increase over the previous season. In a 2015 study, 57.5% of concussions in the NFL occurred during practices. 38% of retired NFL players in a 2016 study showed signs of traumatic brain injury. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative condition that has progressively incapacitated what appears to be a majority of NFL players in their later years.
The data are no less alarming for youth tackle football players. A study last year by the Boston University CTE Center found that playing football for more than 11 years is tied to less white matter in the brain, and could lead to poor impulse control and thinking problems. From 2005 through 2014, a total of 28 traumatic brain and spinal cord injury deaths in high school and college football were identified. That's an average of nearly three deaths of youth from football injuries per year.
It's time to face reality: football is a deadly sport.
But American football has become such a powerful institution that few have dared address its dangers.
Not organized labor. The National Football League Players Association pushes for better protections for players through improved padding and minor rule changes penalizing certain types of hits, but the inherent violence still exists - and so do the injuries. I'm a 33-year union activist, but all the union strength in the world won't change that unless the union is willing to advocate for radical change in working conditions - which the NFLPA will never do, because it will require eliminating the tackle from the game.
Not politicians, either Democrat or Republican. Heck, we have a football coach in the Senate right now.
I came from a football school, the University of Southern California, graduating between the late Charles White and Marcus Allen. (I even have friends in San Diego who know Allen.) But I can no longer watch nor listen to football games. I stopped watching the NFL years ago after what it did to Colin Kaepernick, but one story after another about retired players suffering the effects of repeated head trauma during their NFL careers, coupled with repeated stories of high school players paralyzed by a single hit on the field, have made it impossible for me to find enjoyment in watching football at any level. The only football personality I truly enjoy listening to is Shannon Sharpe, and that's because he's never been afraid to take the conversation off the field of play and talk about what's really important.
It's time we reconsider tackle football (and boxing) as legitimate sports.
But we never will.
Can we at least protect our children?
We can count on one hand the number of elected officials who've had the courage to at least stand up against the political establishment in behalf of our children. There have been a tiny few legislators at the state level who've had the guts to introduce legislation banning tackle football for children. So far they've run up against almost universal opposition from their legislative colleagues from both parties.
The latest effort comes from a Democratic member of the State Assembly in my home state of California: Kevin McCarty of Sacramento, a relatively progressive Democrat who bears no ideological resemblance whatsoever to the similarly-named Republican former Speaker of the House of Representatives. Last year, Assembly Member McCarty introduced a bill (Assembly Bill 734) which would "prohibit a youth sports organization that conducts a tackle football program, or a youth tackle football league, from allowing a person younger than 12 years of age to be a youth tackle football participant through the organization or league." The bill sat idle in the Assembly Committee on Arts, Entertainment, Sports, and Tourism for nearly a full year before finally being taken up for a vote last week (1/10/24), when it passed on a 5-2 party-line vote. It's still a long way from becoming law, but, for the sake of our children, it deserves the attention and support of a lot more Californians, and Americans, than just five Democrats in the California legislature.
Maybe it has a chance this time around. Even the NFL itself went with flag football in last year's Pro Bowl. Snoop Dogg, a big basketball and football fan who resided in my Assembly district during at least some of my own runs as the Democratic nominee for the Assembly, is once again forming a youth flag football program this year.
Taking the violence out of at least youth football in America is the right thing to do. It's a movement we should get behind.
Let's not punt this time.