So the NFL Draft is ongoing as I write. All the big hype went to the first round last night, with unseemly levels of outrage and angst over who got drafted when or didn't get drafted until or didn't get drafted at all, having to wait for the indignity of being drafted in the second round. Horrors.
In the meantime I must report that, alas, I found no ethical way back into football.
Yes, I actually used my final paper for my spring ethics class to find a way to follow football as a fan -- not so much for myself, but as an exercise that might be of some comfort to others. I couldn't find it.
Some basic details:
1) Tertullian and Augustine basically mocked me for even asking the question. While there were others of antiquity who expressed their horror/disgust/general rejection of "the games" as a general phenomenon (no, their scorn was not limited to the gladiatorial contests; pretty much any competition was repulsive to them), those two were the most extensive in their denunciation of the games and their deleterious effects -- on the competitors to be certain, but most especially on those who watched those contests. Augustine in particular wrote of his acquaintance Alypius, who seems to have been turned into a stuporous drooling lump by the sight of the games. Tertullian was particularly scornful of even the attempt to justify viewing the games, or for that matter the theater. There isn't, on the other hand, much of any attempt in early Christian thought to address those games in anything like a positive way, despite the occasional encouragement towards physical wellness in the form of metaphors like Paul used from athletic endeavor. Let's be clear that the point is not to equate football with the gladiator contests. Even as there is a great deal of disfigurement involved in the modern game, it doesn't actually kill people -- at least, not immediately. Long term? Well, we've covered that ground.
2) Shockingly, I didn't find any kind of ethical comment on the First Deadly Age of Football. That, as sports buffs recognize, relates to the earlier days of the game, when President Theodore Roosevelt stepped in to demand changes to the game in 1905 after a number of deaths due to on-field injuries. Perhaps it was Teddy's response that short-circuited any response from the Christian ethicists of the day, but I frankly was surprised to find nothing commenting on the game and its particular destructiveness at that point. (There were comments from earlier, in the late 1800s, but they tend to react against sports more generally -- baseball as much as football -- and for general roughness of character as much as physical harm, if not more.) NOTE: if you know of any comment from that particular period specifically on football and hits physical harms, please let me know!
3) There has been a decent amount of comment on sports more generally as a part of society and culture, and Christian reaction to/embrace of it. These sometimes seek to explore Christian participation in sport, while others specifically explore fanship and its relation to Christian thought and behavior. As most of them were written before the severity of football's brain-trauma crisis became clear, most of them do not address the subject. One exception is Shirl Hoffman's Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports (Waco: Baylor U. Press, 2010), which acknowledges some of the earliest cases of CTE to gain publicity but situates CTE within a broader range of injuries related to football. Still, though, the most prominent publication on the subject remains in the secular sphere, with the bellwether volume League of Denial as the most prominent book to address the subject.
4) Specific comment on football and CTE is only starting to leak out, in smaller but more widely accessible media such as journals and blogs. One example of the latter can be found here, in which a Virginia pastor comes down on the side of giving up the sport. The journal Christian Century has taken to a good bit of comment on football in its blogs and some articles, and some of those address the specifics of the CTE issue and Christian response. Benjamin Dueholm can't abide it anymore, while Rodney Clapp still tries to find a way to enjoy the sport. Clapp's position is rather unimpressive: because the violent aspects of the sport are not those he enjoys, he takes it as acceptable to continue to follow the sport. Dueholm is less sanguine: he rigorously pursues a more stringenly ethical course, noting that (in a real money quote) "social ethics, especially Christian social ethics, does not wait upon the letter of the law or defer to the judgments of 22-year-old men when deciding which things should be embraced and which things shunned."
And therein is the challenge. Even the question of looking for loopholes becomes an ethical problem. As long as this cloud hangs over the sport -- one in which lives have already been lost, and others irreparably (so far) damaged -- any following of the sport is going to be, at best, tainted with a form of ethical guilt. No matter how flashy the spectacle, no matter how much characters like Johnny Manziel or Richard Sherman or others are ready and willing to jump up and distract you and me from the physical destructiveness of the game, giving it our allegiance is never going to be less than problematic at best, and quite possibly (quite likely) unethical as well.
Sorry, folks. I tried.
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