Writing in the current issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has a fascinating and gruesome story about the sometimes severe prices paid by men who play organized football. Unfortunately, as a hook, he attempts to draw a moral equivalence between dog fighting and football that simply doesn’t make sense. His argument is basically that dog fighting is an immoral breech of trust between a dog and its owner and that football players are subjected to similar breech of trust when they are left to deal with the after effects of playing. It’s both sensationalist and tenuous and it’s really too bad because it distracts from an otherwise serious topic.
The better parts of the article, which to be fair make up the bulk of the word count, deal with not only the hideous mental after effects sometimes suffered by football players but also how the blows to the head that cause those injuries are sustained. It’s worth reading in full, but long story short the repetitive and unavoidable head trauma that comes with football can cause serious brain damage that may not manifest itself for years. Autopsies performed on ex-football players show brain deterioration of a kind usually associated with Alzheimer’s disease, but to an even greater degree.
Science is just beginning to understand both how these injuries are sustained and the parameters of the risk associated with them. Since these things are still so ill understood it means that all of the guys who have played football (or are playing football) were (or are) subjecting themselves to considerably more risk of long term health problems than they understand. It is in relation to that last point that Gladwell attempts to link football to dog fighting.
What he’s trying to do is demonstrate that we’re being hypocritical in so vehemently condemning dog fighting while looking the other way on football and the damage it does to the men who play it. In order to do so he glosses over one critical difference between the two and completely ignores another. Gladwell brushes right past the first one here, in a single sentence:
No amount of money or assurances about risk freely assumed can change the fact that, in this moment, an essential bond had been broken.
Football players, especially at the professional level, are pushed to play beyond what may be morally condonable, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are people and have more options than a dog. Gladwell quotes ex-NFLer Kyle Turley’s description of playing with his eyes crossed, of playing concussed. It’s not pretty. But Turley cites an incident form 2003 and he didn’t retired in 2007. Now, would he have retired earlier if he knew more about what might happen? Maybe, maybe not. Should he have been better informed and should we make the risks more explicit for current and prospective players? Absolutely. But either way Turley has more information and more options than a dog whose owner forces it to fight. These two things are not two faces of the same coin.
The critical difference that Gladwell outright ignores is the fact that a lot of the information about just how brain damaging football can be is relatively new. It’s not like there was some organized conspiracy to cover up the fact that football players get concussions (or that some of the really unlucky ones can be paralyzed or worse). Pete Rozelle never sat back in a large leather chair, knotted his fingers Bond-villain style and said, “Many of these men will suffer and die and I care not a whit!” The results of dog fighting, on the other hand, are immediately apparent.
Nobody ever gets into football, especially at the professional level, thinking it’s going to improve their long term health. It is no secret that it is a violent game that chews up and spits out bodies. That these particular risks, of multiple repeated blows to the head commonly suffered most by linemen and linebackers, have until now been overly discounted seems true. All that means is that these risks need to be mitigated as much as possible and then factored into the price of playing football. The nature of the game isn’t about to change, nor is the fan’s enthusiasm for it. Gladwell concludes:
There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.
Exactly. We cheer those men on precisely because they do things that ordinary men cannot. Doing the extraordinary is and always has been extremely risky, whether it’s a race to the South Pole, up Everest, or into the last uncharted jungles on the planet. We reward those who risk danger with fame (and often money), it has always been so.
Current players should be monitored better and retired players should be treated better by the league (and the financial juggernaut) they helped build. But trying to draw a moral line from dog fighting to how football treats its players just doesn’t work. Gladwell has still produced an article that is very much worth reading, but the dog fighting angle is both unnecessary and nonsensical.
