About three years ago, in the wake of the death of Junior Seau, Coates, in one of his contributions to The Atlantic, allowed himself to reel from the news in print. After immediate reactions to the news and to some of the reactions to the suicide (as it was eventually ruled), he put forth a startling declaration:
I know now that I have to go. I have known it for a while now. But I have yet to walk away. For me, the hardest portion is living apart -- destroying something that binds me to friends and family. With people with whom I would not pass another words [sic], I could discuss the greatest running back of all time. It's like losing a language.
Coates also disavowed any intention to "force his morality" on anyone else:
I'm not here to dictate other people's morality. I'm certainly not here to call for banning of the risky activities of consenting adults. And my moral calculus is my own. Surely it is a man's right to endanger his body, and just as it is my right to decline to watch. The actions of everyone in between are not my consideration.
One brief followup on the Seau story followed in 2012, and a larger consideration of the broader issue appeared last fall, prompted at least in part by the case of John Abraham, lineman for the Arizona Cardinals who ended up missing all but one game last season due to concussion symptoms, including memory loss. At the time there were reports that Abraham might return to the team, prompting Coates's reaction. (Abraham did not play again in 2014 and so far does not appear to have played this season, though I've found no formal announcement of his retirement, or indeed any further news of his condition.)
Coates, reflecting his own "mix of spirituality and atheism," moves further to reflect on the body more generally, not specifically on the brain and football's damage to it -- given the acknowledged history of injury in football as a consistent, if not deliberate, part of the game.
I've not seen any indication of Coates returning to the issue in print since that last column in The Atlantic. I could, of course, be wrong. Pierce, however, seems to have a long memory, and maybe hold a grudge a little.
Even at his best Pierce is an ass, a little bit at least. Beyond his more general commentary, Pierce also writes about sports with some regularity, in recent years for the ESPN-affiliated site Grantland, Bill Simmons's last legacy with that media empire. At times his sports commentary seems even more inflated with his signature mix of rapier-sharp rhetoric and self-righteous dudgeon than his general commentary. That mix was at full boil in Pierce's Grantland commentary on the death of Evan Murray. (Murray, you'll remember, is the New Jersey high school quarterback who died of a lacerated spleen after a hit in a game on September 25, the fourth such death related to football this season.)
Unlike Coates, Pierce is quite ready to legislate against football, at least for anybody (or any body) under the age of 21. (Yes, he actually says that nobody under age 21 should be allowed to play football.) He manages to invoke both Teddy Roosevelt's "cleaning up" football back in the early twentieth century and the old gladiatorial games.
But then he just gets stupid.
Let us be plain. For the moment, anyone who writes about American sports who chooses to boycott American football [note: that last phrase carries a hyperlink to Coates's most recent column in Pierce's entry] because of the inherent and inevitable damage to the individuals who play the game is doing only half their job.
Say what?
Later:
To cover American sports while boycotting football is to make a conscious choice to ignore the most garish form of the basic commodification of human beings that is fundamental to all of the games.
Really? How in the hell do you get to that conclusion, Mr. Pierce?
Coates, for his part, acknowledges that he continues to follow the issues around football. I'm not sure that his comments (sporadic that they are) are any less on point for not actually watching the gladiatorial spectacle, which Pierce seems to think is a sine qua non for being able to bear witness to the crisis. At this point Pierce (pardon my French, coming up) is engaging in the kind of self-justifying bullshit that briefly got Harry Frankfurt on the late-night talk-show circuit a few years ago.
Unlike Coates, for whom sports comment is a minor part of his output, Pierce is deeply invested in writing about sports, and was before his current Grantland gig. Were Pierce to follow through on what I can only assume are his genuine and deeply felt opinions about football in its current state, he'd have to give up a significant and presumably lucrative part of his career. And football, for all its moral conundrums at this point in its history, is still by far the most lucrative thing for even an occasional writer on sports to cover. After all, more people watch it than any other sport in this country, and those who watch it tend to consume it voraciously. Anything about football -- particularly such juicy bits as Deflategate and Spygate (both of which conveniently sit within Pierce's New England/Northeast orbit) will get eyeballs galore.
From here, Pierce looks like a man in a severe crisis of conscience, looking for any way to justify ogling the deadly spectacle even as he knows he is complicit in it by doing so. By zooming on the youthful Murray and his fellow high-school fatalities, he believes he has his out: the sport kills children, so don't let children play it -- but we must continue to watch the adults beat themselves literally senseless.
Of course, Ta-Neishi Coates doesn't really need a nobody like me to defend him. And Charles Pierce doesn't really care what a nobody like me says. And of course, the real reason I had to write about this tonight, even way too late, is because the person being attacked here, even if unintentionally or in ignorance, is me.
I am, after all, a person who presumes to write about sports, even if all of about twenty people ever read it. And I do so, by my own admission, while no longer watching football on any level. The oddity is, of course, that in order to do so, I probably follow football more closely, in a backwards way, than a lot of people who actually watch the game. In the process of casting my nets wide to gather as much information as possible, I end up knowing way more about football than I would normally choose.
Part of the difference between myself and Coates or Pierce (about whose religious beliefs I have no clue) is that I write about football, or sports more generally, specifically out of my faith. One might even call it a calling, of a non-professional sort at this point. Unlike Coates, I can't quite make the claim that my decision is exclusively personal; otherwise this blog wouldn't exist.
Christianity, when done right, is not an individual endeavor. If I truly claim to be somehow a part of the body of Christ (now there's a metaphor that's going to have to be addressed in this context sometime soon!) I can't pretend that my choices can possibly be enacted in isolation. They affect my place in the body. I am required to bear witness to that choice and why I have the gall to believe it is faithfully motivated, and why I actually have the audacity to claim that a Christian can't ignore the questions, even if others come to different conclusions than I do.
Another example: Pierce singles out the deaths of teenagers as somehow more awful than the deaths of older men, such as Junior Seau. The death of a seventeen-year-old kid might provoke all sorts of emotional reactions of horror or sorrow or grief, but I don't think it's a tenable position within a Christian ethical framework to suggest it is worse than the death of Junior Seau or Dave Duerson or Mike Webster, or the murder-suicide to which Jovan Belcher was driven. Pierce seems to be somehow unwilling to acknowledge that players of those generations were not rightfully informed or aware of the damage they were experiencing and its long-term consequences. You knew your body was going to be broken forever, but you didn't know your mind might be destroyed in the process.
No, Charles Pierce isn't going to shame me into watching next week's NFL games as some kind of noble suffering. And nor am I going to stop writing about football, and sometimes other sports, in the process. And there is nothing at all ethically compatible about those positions; in fact, I will claim that they are quite compatible, and even necessary components of one another.
So deal with it.
Let's get really blunt here; was his life worth less than Evan Murray's?
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