Against Football (8 page)

I've had a lot of difficult conversations with friends in the course of writing this book, none more so than with my neighbor Sean.

Sean is a former football player and what I like to call a fracture-level fan. Some months ago, he showed up at my house with a cast on his hand from accidentally punching a wooden bed railing during a game. (I myself have punched many wooden objects during games, always intentionally and never with sufficient force to break a bone.) It might be worth mentioning that Sean is six-four and 260 pounds. When I talked with him at the outset of this project, he looked at me
for a few long seconds then said, in a quiet, imploring voice, “Please don't take this away from me.”

For the past five years, Sean and I have sought refuge from the pressure cooker of family life. We have done this
not
by tearing out of our homes and jumping on the motorcycle Sean has been rebuilding for the past three years and gunning it down to Daytona Beach and guzzling enough tequila to participate in an ironic wet T-shirt contest for sad, middle-aged men and then blacking out—but instead by watching football games together. That's the “this” I assumed he meant.

But it turns out Sean's fandom is far more organic than mine. He grew up in semi-rural West Virginia, football country. He was a natural from early on, a kid with that rare combination of size, speed, and agility. Virtually everyone in his life expected him to become a football player, especially his father. When I asked him why he quit, he told me this story:

When he was about eleven years old, his team played a rival with the best running back in the league. It was Sean's role, as the star of the defense, to contain the kid. On one play, Sean met the running back just as he was about to burst through a gap. The running back lowered his head, in the same instinctual way Darryl Stingley had, and their helmets collided at full speed. The kid fell and lay motionless.

The kid's coaches, and later his parents, ran onto the field. Smelling salts didn't revive him. Eventually, an ambulance appeared. Sean was convinced he'd killed the boy. He began to
cry. But what Sean remembered most vividly was how, right after the tackle, his teammates kept slapping his helmet, as if he'd just done the most heroic thing ever, which, in a purely football sense, he had. He also recalled trying to walk away from his teammates, because he didn't want them to see that he was crying. Even three decades later, recounting this episode shook up Sean.

The running back did not wind up paralyzed. That's not the point of the story. It was the tremendous anguish Sean felt over his power to harm another boy, and to be revered for this power. A burden heavy enough to make him walk away—despite his love of the game and his natural gifts.

Because of his size, Sean has spent the rest of his life having to tell people he doesn't play football. And even though he's now a respected digital archivist at M.I.T., with a beautiful wife and two children, there's still some core part of him that wishes he had played, that knows he squandered a shot at greatness. Football remains the unrequited love of his life.

And now here I was—his designated football buddy!—suggesting that even being a fan of the game was wrong. Don't we turn to football precisely to escape such complexities, to watch the miracle of supreme bodies at play, to pretend, however briefly, that life is just a fearless game?

Still, I can't help thinking about something else Sean told me, which was how, in the hours and days after he delivered his big hit, he kept asking the same question of his coaches: “I didn't do anything wrong, did I?”

I was on an airplane watching television, which is not a statement that would have made sense even ten years ago, but there you go. Thank you, America. Among the suite of channels was the NFL Network, which I predict will soon be the world's most popular cable channel and will spawn a second and third channel, if it hasn't already. I wasn't supposed to be watching football, but they were showing the NFL Combine, where the league gathers top college prospects to put them through their paces. I couldn't resist.

The drill I happened to see was for defensive backs. They had to backpedal then whirl around and catch a ball fired at them at about 200 mph. Afterward, a gentleman named Peter Giunta, the secondary coach for the New York Giants, called the prospects together to give them an inspirational speech. Giunta was bald and intense. His rhetorical style fell somewhere between General Patton and Tony Soprano. “It is a privilege to play in the National Football League,” he began. “It is not your
right
 … You have to do the right things, not only on the field but off the field. They've done security checks on you, background checks. I don't wanna read about
you in the papers. We live in a great country. We all have the power of choice.”

He continued on this theme for several minutes. Then he called upon Bradley Roby, a projected first-rounder from Ohio State, to lead a final cheer. The players huddled up. “We all know why we're here,” Roby barked. “ ‘Get money!' on three.”

One, two, three. Get Money!

It is always refreshing when people are honest in this way. And it is particularly refreshing when it comes from the NFL, because there is so much horseshit swirling around regarding the economic forces that drive the game.

The most persistent myth about the NFL is that, because of its revenue sharing system, it is somehow socialist. To quote the writer Chuck Klosterman: “The reason the NFL is so dominant is because the NFL is basically Marxist.”

Klosterman has written a lot of intelligent analysis of the NFL over the years. This is not a prime example.

As noted, NFL owners in large cities agreed to divide TV proceeds equally back in 1962, in part to create competitive balance on the field. That is not Marxism. It is, at best, a canny form of market manipulation. But the history is far more problematic. In fact, Pete Rozelle had signed a TV contract in 1960 on behalf of the entire league—a deal struck down by a federal court as a violation of antitrust law. Rozelle went to Washington, and lawmakers obediently passed the
Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which allowed the NFL and other leagues to circumvent those pesky antitrust rules and to sell TV rights, collectively, to the highest bidder. The law essentially made the NFL a legal monopoly.

But just as a thought experiment, let's pretend the NFL really
were
Marxist. Here's what that would mean. First, there would be no private ownership, and therefore no team owners. The teams, though they would represent different cities, would belong to the State. Employees would be paid according to the Marxist edict:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
A top quarterback such as Peyton Manning would not be paid $18 million every season. He would be paid based on his needs, let's say $100,000 per year. The worker who laundered his jock strap, or the custodian who mopped the floors of his locker room might be paid just as much as Peyton Manning—perhaps more if they had greater needs, say, a lot of children or sick parents. Star athletes could still ostensibly earn huge sums in endorsement deals from private industry, though the league would have to decide whether these payments violated its Marxist tenets. Commissioner Goodell would not receive a compensation package of $42.2 million, as he did in 2012, nor would his deputies earn millions.

In fact, one of the most fascinating questions that arises from a truly Marxist NFL would be the question of what to do with the staggering profits, which would no longer be divvied up by a cabal of geriatric magnates or funneled to a pack of vainglorious athletes. We can safely assume that
its operating costs would be a fraction of the nearly $10 billion the NFL is projected to earn this season. The balance—$9.5 billion?—would be available for redistribution to societal needs such as early education, medical and renewable energy research, intervention for at-risk populations. Fans would be in the strange position of justifying their support of pro football by pointing to all these good works.

A Marxist NFL, in which salaries were no longer grossly inflated by our blessed free market, might spur other felicitous outcomes as well. Players could choose to join clubs in the cities or states where they actually grew up. With obscene economic incentives removed, players and fans might experience the sport as a purer form of meritocracy. As with the NCAA basketball tournament, competition would hinge on team and regional pride rather than individual earning power. There would be no more parasitic entourages or predatory agents. And almost certainly, athletes would make more sensible decisions regarding their own health.

Do I realize this will never
ever
happen? That lawyers would descend from their penthouse aeries to sue the bejesus out of all parties? That the players themselves would flee the NFL in droves to join for-profit leagues, or form their own? That Rush Limbaugh's head would explode as he tried to process the concept of a “socially-conscious blood sport.”

Yes. Which is my point.

The NFL is the opposite of Marxist. It is the epitome of
crony capitalism, a corporate oligarchy that has absorbed or crushed all potential competitors, that routinely extorts municipal and state governments, and openly flouts its tax obligations while remaining, in the words of
The Atlantic
's Gregg Easterbrook, “walled off behind a moat of antitrust exemptions.”

The league's players are among the most specialized employees on earth. Every aspect of their job performance is filmed, analyzed, measured, and submitted to public scrutiny. Minute differences in efficiency translate into mindboggling pay discrepancies. It is this ruthless workplace that compels so many players to play through pain, shoot up steroids, etc.

Much is made of the communal virtues imparted by football: sportsmanship, teamwork, self-sacrifice. But a genuine Marxist would note that these qualities are placed in the service of contests whose outcomes are irrelevant to the fate of the worker. Football is the ultimate bourgeois indulgence. Its civic function is to distract the proletariat from the aims of the revolution and to serve as a means of indoctrination into thought systems that are individualistic and materialist.

Think about it, folks. Last season, the Minnesota Vikings paid a man named Jared Allen more than a million dollars
per game
to maul opposing quarterbacks. The “market”—meaning us, the fans—has determined that Allen's value is roughly $18.5 million per year. The State of Minnesota pays an elementary school teacher an average of $38,000 per year. Paramedics make $42,000; cops, $28,000. That makes one
quarterback mauler worth 474 elementary school teachers. Or 440 paramedics. Or 661 police officers.

Let us pause in astonishment and torment.

The closer you look, the worse it gets. Consider that in 2013, lawmakers in Minnesota voted to allot $506 million in taxpayer money to the Vikings to help them build a new stadium—despite facing a $1.1 billion state budget deficit. They did this because Vikings ownership had made noises about relocating the team, a tactic routinely used against politicians who live in terror of losing a franchise. The new stadium increased the value of the team by an estimated $200 million. The owners, who are multi-millionaires, pay $13 million per year to use the stadium, which sounds like a lot until you consider that they earn
hundreds of millions
in TV revenues, ticket sales, concessions, and parking. This helps explain why teachers and social workers get paid what they do in Minnesota.

Here's the totally nutso part: the Vikings' ownership actually
underperformed.
Based on research done by Judith Grant Long, a professor of urban planning at Harvard, taxpayers provide 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums, as well as footing the bill for “power, sewer services, other infrastructure, and stadium improvements.”

The perfect example: Seven of every ten dollars spent to build CenturyLink Field in Seattle came from the taxpayers of Washington State, $390 million total. The owner, Paul Allen, pays the state $1 million per year in “rent” and collects
most of the $200 million generated. If you are wondering how to become, like Allen, one of the richest humans on earth, negotiating such a lease would be a good start.

In New Orleans, taxpayers have bankrolled roughly a billion dollars to build then renovate the Superdome, which we are now supposed to call the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Guess who gets nearly all the revenues generated by Saints games played in this building? If you guessed all those hard-working stiffs who paid a billion dollars, you would be wrong. If you guessed billionaire owner Tom Benson, you would be right. He also receives $6 million per annum from the state as an “inducement payment” to keep him from moving the team.

That's the same amount Cowboys owner Jerry Jones would pay each year in property taxes to Arlington, Texas, where his fancy new stadium is located. Except that Jones doesn't pay property taxes because, like many of his fellow plutocrats, he's cut a sweetheart deal with the local authorities.

In the old days, NFL owners were rich men who accepted the risk of losing money as the cost of doing business. Thanks to the popularity of the game, the NFL and its owners—with the collusion of politicians—have created what amounts to a risk-free business environment. According to Long's data, a dozen teams received more public money than they needed to build their facilities. Rather than going into debt, they turned a profit.