Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I was working on a longer post, but I’m not going to get it out by the end of today and you all know how meticulous I am about this stuff.

So instead, let’s briefly talk about one of the reasons I hate football.  Reason number, let’s say, five:  Football is a form of dressed-up violence that puts intolerable acute strain on its players.  Kevin Everett suffered a spinal cord injury during the Bills’s season opener.  The twenty-five year-old athlete may never walk again.  What’s most depressing about the injury is that it wasn’t the result of anything terribly unusual. Nothing weird happened during the play in question.  Mike Utley, who suffered a spinal cord injury in 1991 that has paralyzed him below the chest, called Everett’s play a “good form tackle.”  Apparently good form in football can occasionally disable you for life.

This is not the same as the damage that marathon runners do to their knees.  The chronic injuries that result from that sport accumulate over thousands of hours of runs.  It’s not the same as, say, a skier landing on his face and permanently disfiguring himself.  Everett’s injury and others like it happened when everything on the field went basically right, and it happened in one instant.

Here’s another.  Ted Johnson’s life is mess due to severe post-concussive syndrome sustained over the course of service to the New England Patriots.  Again, in the normal course of play, men weighing hundreds of pounds kept slamming into his brain, and now, thanks to a mix of PTSD and physical health problems, his life is a complete mess.

Football is basically violent and fundamentally dangerous.  You’d think all that danger would make it interesting, but it still feels like a bunch of guys getting together to mow a big lawn with their bodies.  Something so violent should at least throw a couple of hungry lions into the mix.  Exactly how football has become one of the most lucrative pass times in America mystifies me.