BASEBALL USED to be our national pastime. But now professional football is America’s game. And why not? It’s a violent, capital-intensive spectacle carried on with reckless disregard for human health and safety. Kind of like our foreign policy, or our criminal justice system.
Last fall, 45 of the 50 most-watched TV shows were National Football League games. It is the most profitable of the major sports. The average NFL franchise brings in $286 million per year, compared to $237 million for Major League Baseball—despite baseball’s 162-game regular season vs. football’s 16.
This year the TV audiences for football are expected to grow, and NFL total revenue is expected to top $12 billion. Nothing seems to put a dent in the U.S. enthusiasm for the game. Some coaches have offered cash rewards for the injury of opposing players. Multiple players face charges for violent crimes. The Patriots cheat in the playoffs. And the game just gets more popular.
Maybe that will change this Christmas when the movie Concussion, featuring Will Smith and Alec Baldwin, is scheduled to be released by Sony Pictures. Concussion tells the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Pittsburgh forensic pathologist who discovered the decisive link between repeated minor head trauma—such as from huge men crashing into each other dozens of times a day—and the bewildering array of mental illnesses that afflicts many NFL retirees.
Omalu’s story, detailed in a 2009 GQ article by Jeanne Marie Laskas upon which the film is based, is a classic David and Goliath tale. In 2002, Omalu, an immigrant from Nigeria, was working at the county coroner’s office when he became obsessed with the brain of Mike Webster, a former Pittsburgh Steeler who died at age 50 after decades of debilitating mental illness. Eventually Omalu’s findings were published in the journal Neurosurgery in an article titled “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a National Football League player.”
The NFL went after Omalu hammer and tong and any other scientist (even the older and whiter ones) who endorsed his findings. The league’s strategy seemed modeled on that of the tobacco companies, which maintained for three decades that there was no definitive link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
People who saw early cuts of Concussion came out comparing it favorably to The Insider, the 1999 film about a tobacco whistleblower. But the NFL may have even more power than Big Tobacco once had. A Sept. 1 New York Times story cited emails (released by last year’s hack of the Sony computer system) indicating that Sony took some of the “bite” out of the film in response to complaints from the NFL.
Still, the movie is bound to force some to reconsider the sport. They may not stop watching the games on TV, but they may think twice about letting their children play football. And the NFL knows that will be the first step in the sport’s inevitable decline.
We’ve always had an anti-NFL policy in my family. We’ve generally not watched any pro games except the Super Bowl. And when one of our sons really wanted to play football in the local park league, we flatly refused. Because even before the science emerged, I knew from experience that banging young heads into each other was a bad idea. If I were ever tempted to waver, a deep scar on the bridge of my nose reminds me. It marks the spot where, as a high school offensive lineman, my helmet used to slide down onto my nose whenever I launched myself, forehead-first, into the chest of another player.
That shouldn’t happen to anybody’s child, at any age.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!