On parent’s weekend, I sat down with my mother and father to watch a college football game between the University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee. I’ve cheered for UGA for most of my life with near-pathological intensity, and my posture towards this game was no different. The 2015 season glittered with promise in the hands of running back Nick Chubb. On Georgia’s first offensive play, however, a spinning Chubb planted his left leg, which bent backward to an ornithological angle. After this, my care for the game flickered and went out.
The question of how to respond to the intrinsic violence of football is nothing new. Every few years, online skirmishes break out in response to a high-profile injury or death. Some journalists demand stricter safety regulations, and some even call for the boycott of American Football as a sport. Eyes probably ought to roll at certain sensationalist rhetoricians who call football a “bloodsport,” but there is something unmistakably gladiatorial about the game. We love this element of violence in football. I love it. Little can compare to the guttural outrush of collective breath that follows a big hit — the savage satisfaction of it. But at some point we must admit that football preys on our thalamic thirst for youthful violence, tribalism, and digestible narratives of conflict and redemption.
Further, it’s worth examining how this tribalism bleeds into our rhetoric in discussions of football’s violence and how, as the news of each young broken spine emerges, rhetorical battle lines form that parallel the tense pre-snap lines at the line of scrimmage. On one side, think pieces emerge which condemn football as brutish, even immoral. On the other, writers react with the blind rage requisite when someone has dared attack a near-sacred institution of American society.
Thus the battle lines form.
It’s the pacifist vs. the traditionalist, the mother vs. the coach, the bathetic vs. the callous, the anti-football vs. the pro-football. Rather than witnessing something that amounts to humane engagement with the important questions these injuries raise, we as readers watch as shrill pundits knuckle into the journalistic mud.
I’m still a fan. I will watch. Perhaps the sport’s popularity will dwindle in proportion to the damage it inflicts on young bodies, perhaps it won’t.
This year my college football hopes have been dashed, but soon I won’t remember the 2015 season. I’ll remember the way Nick Chubb sank back into his shoulder pads with his eyelids half-closed, passing out from pain as trainers lifted him onto a cart; the way the game went on with its brutal logic and Chubb, limp, looked very much like the child he is.
