Is anybody even raising questions out there?

In case there was any doubt, I'm really not the only person out there trying to raise questions about the ethics of watching football. And if anything, I'm a little late to the game.

Note: some of these various sources may have been referenced in previous blog entries. That's o.k.

One of the earlier and more big-splash entries in questioning football was this piece in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, all the way back in 2009. For the most part the article does not engage in ethical argument; much of its energy is in documentation, recording the experiences of ex-NFL player Kyle Turley; early efforts by Dr. Ann McKee and Dr. Bennet Omalu, two of the principal researchers who detected chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of deceased football players; and the research efforts of Kevin Guskiewicz at the University of North Carolina, seeking to quantify and document the force of the blows football players take. However, when Gladwell begins to wonder if football is any different in a moral sense than dogfighting (the Michael Vick case was recent at the time), that's ethical judgment even in the mere raising of the question. Gladwell's conclusion -- that nothing will change as long as people continue to follow the game with their dollars -- is not new to regular readers of this blog.

With time, other ethical ponderings began to surface, sometimes in out-of-the-way places. An author by the name of Nathan Bransford wondered out loud if watching football was an ethically viable activity anymore. Citing Gladwell's essay, Bransford also notes several player suicides (Dave Duerson and Junior Seau among them) as well as the vicious injury and eventual death of Washington Huskies safety Curtis Williams in 2000 (which Bransford witnessed live); Williams lingered, paralyzed, for a year and a half after his injury. Bransford keeps his ethical query simple:

"But should we really be supporting a system that incentivizes people to destroy their brains for our pleasure?"

Indeed.

As far as I can tell, Bransford has not returned to the subject.

The blog of the Kenan Institute for Ethics posted in 2013 a starkly titled entry, "A Fan's Moral Imperative: Is Watching Football Ethical?" About a year later, the journal Commonweal put forth a similarly themed entry by its digital editor Dominic Preziosi, "What are the ethics of watching football?" Both entries are more devoted to question-asking than actual ethical argument (that's not a criticism, by the way; this was more than most corners of the ethical sphere were doing at this point). Both clearly seem to be written by authors who really didn't even want to be asking questions at that point, much less even hinting at possible answers that might damage their football-watching habits. Prizes at least performs the valuable service of asking a pertinent question and making a pertinent point:

But are there criteria for such a decision? ... but it does seem as if we're at the place where someone might need to, if people are in fact serious about challenging the role hundreds of millions [of] nonparticipants play in putting the long-term health of thousands at such great and provable risk. 

I challenge Preziosi's description of spectators as "nonparticipants" -- simply not being on the field does not equal participation in the sport, and in fact I will argue that it is precisely that "participation" of these "nonparticipants" that perpetuates the irrevocable and unavoidable damage of the game as it currently exists. Nonetheless, that is a prescient point; it's time for some criteria. While there are discussion of sport ethics on a more general plane, they aren't always good at getting down to this particular nitty-gritty question.

HuffPost Religion actually took enough of an interest in the subject to wonder if watching football was actually a sin. At least, it took enough interest to put together a podcast on the subject.

Probably after Gladwell, Ta-Neishi Coates would be the most famous non-sports person to weigh in on the subject (Charles Peirce writes plentifully about sports so he doesn't count, and Coates is probably more famous that Peirce anyway.) The death of Junior Seau was the deal-breaker for Coates; as he put it at the end of this piece in The Atlantic, "I'm out." Coates also makes the distinction between seeking to have the sport banned (a non-starter) and refusing to watch (easily doable). You will note that this blog hews to the latter position.

You will note that these entries so far take no particular religious position; some of the authors are explicitly not religious persons and others simply do not make any kind of religous argument part of their own argument or claim. Benjamin Dueholm provides an exception. Writing for the Christian Century in 2012, Dueholm begins the process of asking explicitly Christian moral questions about the game and the fascination with it, even -- or especially -- among Christians as its destructive capacity became clearer and clearer. Not surprisingly Dueholm turns to the ancients and their critique of gladiatorial spectacle in his own reflection. His conclusions are must-read;

Christians, too, need pastimes and diversions. The question is which ones honor the image of God and the call to justice and equity. 

Aye, there's the rub. "Created in the image of God," if we take it seriously, is a theological proposition that cannot help but call into question any activity that mars said image beyond repair or healing. That is one theological point of contact for Christian ethical discussion on football and its damage.

There are more yet to come.

It hasn't always been easy to find, but ethical wondering is out there...

Playing games after Orlando

One "game memory" that is still pretty strong me is a memory of the absence of games.

This was, as some of you might remember, the week following September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). Major League Baseball was most affected, with a week's worth of games having to be postponed and rescheduled, resulting in baseball's first World Series to stretch into November. College football and the NFL ended up missing a week of games themselves, but that only amounted to one game in those sports. This was of course necessitated by the grounding of air travel in the US; indeed many of those MLB teams had a challenge getting home from the road trips on which they were engaged at the time.

I have the distinct memory, by about Friday of that week, deeply regretting that there was no game to which to go. Mind you, I was living in Tallahassee at the time, and the closest team, the Tampa Bay (Devil, at the time) Rays, were more than five hours away (and they were closer than the Atlanta Braves; I had actually measured this in the only way that made sense to me, by going to games in both places and comparing the distances). Nonetheless, that Friday night, even as I knew it was a practical impossibility, I ached for it. I ached for it, even as I was somewhat ashamed for doing so.

There was, as best as I could comprehend it, a desperate need to be among other people in a way that had even the tiniest tinge of normal to it. The week of course was filled with many different types of gatherings at churches and city halls and capitals and courthouses and all manner of other public places. But the very point of such gatherings was their not-normal-ness. The very point was the abnormality and the mind-numbing and mind-blowing horror of what had happened.

Games did resume, eventually, and while there were memorials and ceremonies at the "first game back" at minimum (and particularly pronounced ones at the first games back for the New York teams, the Mets first and then the Yankees), there was still baseball. The rules of the game were still the same. The interruption of baseball ritual by the displacement of the seventh-inning stretch with "God Bless America" (a disruption that seems to be receding somewhat but has long overstayed its appropriateness) marred the longed-for normality of a ballgame, but it was still baseball, gosh darn it.

There aren't many kinds of disruptions that can get games called off. (Whether or not this is a good thing is a discussion that is needed at some point, but this isn't the night.) A riot in a city can get that city's teams to postpone or move games, and natural disasters can sometimes cause cancellations or relocations (the Florida teams can get put off by hurricanes, as can teams in Houston, and earthquakes have been known to cause cancellations and postponements in California).

Our current situation is one in which a crime or tragedy with nationwide repercussions has no effect on the scheduling of games, but has a major effect on how said event is carried out, locally for certain and nationally in some cases. The latest instance of this is the set of responses to the murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an event with definite national repercussions and reverberations but one most intensely felt in central Florida.

Though I don't know for certain (I really cannot watch every game, after all), the standard response that I would guess happened pretty much everywhere was the traditional moment of silence. That could be done, and I'd guess was done at baseball games on that Sunday, probably at the next game of the NBA Finals (that I did not get to see), and probably at a number of minor-league baseball games as well. The Orlando Magic, the city's NBA franchise, was no longer playing; that left local commemorations to Orlando City SC, the city's MLS club; Orlando Pride, their new team in the Women's Professional Soccer League; and to a secondary degree the Tampa Bay Rays; obviously they're not in Orlando, but they are the closest MLB team and it's not a crazy drive. (The Pride were away last weekend; their next home game is Thursday night.)

The Rays, to a degree, had the first chance, and coincidentally Friday night's game had already been planned as a "Pride Night"; thus the team had a ready-made vehicle for recognizing and honoring the families of the victims, and stepped up their efforts pretty effectively, it would seem; Friday night's game was a sellout. Do not underestimate the significance of this; the Rays do not get sellouts, outside of Opening Day, and sometimes not even then. Orlando City followed the next night with their own effective commemorations (another thing that just doesn't happen: a game stoppage at the 49th minute as a moment of silence was observed). The city's franchises in the Arena Football League and the East Coast Hockey League also held commemorations at their immediate next games.

On the national level perhaps the most effective commemoration, subtle but unmistakable, occurred last Thursday night, during the US Men's national team's match against Ecuador; team captain Michael Bradley took the field with his more typical captain's armband replaced with a rainbow-colored armband with the logo #OneNation emblazoned on it. The USMNT and MLS (which had been on a break for the Copa America Centenario tournament in which the USMNT was playing) had hit the airwaves with video messages of support for Orlando and the victims' families (at least one prominently featuring among its voices Sporting Kansas City's and USMNT's Graham Zusi, an Orlando native).

These commemorations are, sadly, in line with a pattern that has had the tragic opportunity to become well-established.

I really don't make any claim that any of this is wrong in any way. Sadly, with such tragedies allowed to be routine, it's only going to become an even more well-established pattern. And particularly on the local level, I really don't think a team can do any less, nor should they do so.

There is one thing I still have to caution against, though. It is a caution similar to the one expressed here, against thinking that sports can fix us. Sports might be a tool to do so, but can't do the job.

As sports can't fix us, neither can sports heal us.

Earlier today Richard Lapchick contributed this column to ESPN.com. Lapchick is no ordinary ESPN foof; he has a rather formidable title and role as the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida, and the director of UCF's Institute For Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (For the Florida geography-impaired, UCF is in Orlando.) You might have heard of that Institute for its reports on such things as graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates for teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, or its "report cards" on racial and gender hiring in Major League Baseball and other big-time sports programs. Being able to be critical of big-time sports and its ethical shortfalls is part of his job.

Side note: I can't think of many things that would entice me to leave my current vocation, but if a Christian-affiliated college, university, seminary, or divinity school were ever to create that kind of institute ... I'd at least have to think about it.

Being based in Orlando, Lapchick has had a front-row seat to the city's response to the Pulse attack and to the reactions of its sports franchises in particular (he acknowledges being at both the Rays game and the Orlando City match in the article, and even speaking to Orlando City's squad last Friday). Most of what Lapchick has to say in the article I have no problem with, but there is one sentence that just can't go unchallenged:

Sports can heal and unite and can change society forever.

Forever? Really?

If you followed that link earlier you know I already have a problem with the notion that Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier didn't heal anything. It changed the US forever, yes. It opened eyes, sure. It changed many Americans, no doubt. But let us be blunt: does the United States look like a healed country to you in terms of racial relations?

Similarly, while Billie Jean King made an undeniable difference for women in sports, it would be a major stretch to suggest that women in sports have anything like equality with their male counterparts (for one example, the US Women's National Team in soccer is now embroiled in multiple legal proceedings against the US Soccer Federation over unequal pay, even though the women are vastly more successful than their male counterparts). For that matter, the United States doesn't look all that much like a healed country in terms of gender relations either.

Sporting events can be moments of respite or relief, which can be a part of a healing process. You can't grieve 24/7, and if a communal experience of catharsis in a sporting event can provide that brief period of relief or respite, all to the good.

But healing, people of faith or no faith should know, doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen instantaneously. It is a process that takes time, and deep engagement with the source of the grief. It isn't about "getting back to normal," because that "normal" is never coming back. Some new place becomes "normal," but it's a "normal" that will never forget the attack in this case.

The survivors of the Pulse attack, or the family members and loved ones of the victims, did not wake up "healed" on Sunday because the Rays and Orlando City played games on Friday and Saturday, and they were invited. They may have awakened to the realization that many more people cared for them and empathized with them and maybe even grieved for them, felt their pain or shared their sorrow to some small degree. They may have even been able to sleep for the first time in days, who knows? But the process of healing is still only just beginning for them. And if those games and the outpouring of care and affection they showed provided even just a little bit of that relief and respite, all to the good.

But let's not put the words "heal" and "forever" together here. There are just as many homophobic people around as there were before the Pulse murders. That particular hatred is not going to end because of a couple of sporting events, any more than racism was eradicated by sporting events in the wake of the Charleston church shooting last year, or by Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron. Sport simply isn't that powerful.

What it can do is still pretty amazing in the face of such shock and grief. Sporting events are still places where people who wouldn't even give each other the time of day elsewhere are united in common purpose. That's almost church in some ways (or a more successful example of what church would hope to do, maybe?).

Christian faith acknowledges one healer, called a Gentle Healer by some, a Wounded Healer by others, both accurate enough. Again, though, I don't think that in this case any particular religious affiliation is required to get that healing is too deep and too long a process to be accomplished by any sport, or certainly by any one game. It can be a step or a part, but it can't do it on its own, and evidently not forever.

Note the armband.

Weekly Reader: Hockey takes its hits

A way to touch on multiple stories before they go cold: the Weekly Reader (or am I the only one who remembers that from elementary school?)

Two stories from the world of hockey came to my attention this week. One was inescapable if you follow the sports world much, the other less so, but both serve as reminders that there are other sports besides football that face a reckoning over how they damage their participants beyond repair.

One such story: the death of Gordie Howe.

The stories flew fast and think about Howe, a legendary figure in the sport who played professional hockey (at least once) in six decades, a feat normally the province of baseball players like Minnie Miñoso. Unlike Miñoso, Howe was an active, full-time player for most of those decades. Howe played into the 1979-80 season as a Hartford Whaler, alongside his sons, after having made his NHL debut in 1946. A one-shift stint with a minor-league team in 1997, when Howe was freakin' 69 years old, completed the six-decade trifecta.

Of course, one can't talk about such a long career, one marked by Howe's willingness to duke it out on the ice, without acknowedging that Howe had been diagnosed with dementia four years before his death.

The obvious, if disturbing, question is whether Howe's brain will be given for research to determine if he possibly had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); given how determinedly his sons pushed back against reports of Howe's dementia at the time, I'm not optimistic -- not only because of the loss of understanding of the condition, but also because the supposition, or even the assumption that Howe actually had that disease will be a cloud both lingering and being ignored in hockey, which has plenty of trouble dealing with its own brain-trauma crisis.

Stephen Peat's story made it into the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, offering up a reminder that this sport has its own walking wounded. It still remains true that CTE can only be diagnosed after death, but if you were going to draw up a list of symptoms and conditions you would look for in a living person with CTE, based on accounts of those persons who lived with the condition, you would basically end up describing Peat's current life.

[Here is where I could use some help from someone who follows hockey much more than I ever have. Peat, like a number of those former players felled by CTE, was an "enforcer," one whose job (at the risk of oversimplifying) was to get in fights on the ice. Was this in part to "protect" star players, the likes of Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby (who, given his concussion history, evidently wasn't protected very well if that was the case)? I'm seriously asking. Unlike football, with which I grew up and can still remember very well even without actually watching games any more, I have never spent much time being exposed to hockey and don't pretend to get the culture at all, even as it seems to be trying to change at least on the NHL level. So anyone who can explain: were the likes of Stephen Peat getting into fights so the likes of Gretzky wouldn't get caught up in them? If that's the case, then the NHL is really going to have hell to pay where the likes of Peat are concerned. Sacrificial lambs indeed. That would be a serious abdication of stewardship, particularly if it really does turn out that NHL higher-ups were more aware of concussion risks than they let on for years.]

And just in case you missed it in that link, Peat is 36.

Other sports stories of concern and note:

*Another former women's soccer national-team stalwart announced that she would be donating her brain for CTE research. As noted before, very little of the CTE research out there has included women, even though they've played games with contact involved for some time now. Unlike Brandi Chastain, Briana Scurry has had a noted and non-minor history of concussions that ended her career. At the same time, a family history of Alzheimer's is also present. Scurry also devotes a part of her website to such issues and has testified before congressional committees on the subject (and was scheduled to do so again today).

*The sudden death of a once-popular MMA fighter may well spark its own set of rumors about whether brain trauma was involved, but good grief, in that sport there are so many other possibilities...

*At least for now, the only way for a Cuban ballplayer to get into MLB is by defection. Another defector was cleared by MLB today to sign with a team.

In football:

*CTE research marches on, NFL support or not.

*From the "waiting on science our savior" department: while helmet development continues, this article explains why pretty much no helmet ever (at least one in which one could practically play football) will ever be able to prevent concussions.

*More "science our savior": a new research project based in Pittsburgh (the unfortunate "birthplace" of CTE) aimed at seeking actual therapeutic options.

Not sports-related, but sort of:

*As brain trauma was becoming a concern in sports, much of the early research involved both sports leagues and the military, under the observation that similar symptoms could be observed between, say, football players and soldiers who had been injured in action in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Now new research suggests that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as found in soldiers may well be a physical injury, not just a psychological one -- and not quite the same as CTE.

And this is just potentially deeply disturbing:

*Is Russia trying to disrupt Euro 2016? Their team is on a "suspended disqualification" in the tournament after fracases between fans of England and Russia, both inside the stands and outside. Yes, it's England's fans that have the reputation for hooliganism, but that was years ago, and Russia looks much more like the aggressor in this case. And apparently it happened again today, with fans of Wales also getting drawn into the action this time.

While English courts have acted quickly to punish their offenders, the same cannot be said for Russian authorities. If this Reuters report is even the tiniest bit accurate, these incidents are not merely sports-related; they come little short of acts of war. I mean, trained hooligans? Is this how far Vladimir Putin has sunk?

And oh, yeah, guess who hosts the World Cup in two years?

Stephen Peat in his enforcer days

The Band Geek: college version

I have in a previous entry explored the degree to which my young life, in ways I didn't see at the time, was governed by the rhythms and schedules of football, at least during the fall, due to my membership in the marching band. Another past blog post explored one early if not quite informed introduction to the spectre of catastrophic injury even at the high school level, again as part of that marching band experience. However, it is needful for me to admit that this was not the full extent of my band-geekery.

I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't). There was good reason for this besides the football team's ineptitude; Wake's basketball team was actually pretty good in those days (and this was pre-Tim Duncan), and had a sort of moment in the spotlight when an upset win over DePaul (they used to be good, too) prematurely ended the career of their longtime coach Ray Meyer, a sentimental favorite to win it all or at least get to the Final Four in his final season. Delaney Rudd, Anthony Teachey, Danny Green (not that one), and the next year Muggsy Bogues showed up. Good times.

The college marching band experience was a little different, mostly because (1) the games were on Saturdays instead of Fridays, which gave the experience a slightly different vibe, and (2) Wake Forest simply wasn’t that good. Dublin High’s teams were not necessarily perennial playoff winners, but they usually won more than they lost. Wake’s teams didn’t. (This was in 1983 and 1984, long before the Demon Deacons’ inexplicable run to the 2006 ACC championship and Orange Bowl appearance on January 2, 2007.) When the most ardently cheered player on the team is the punter, you know the team isn’t that successful. (To be clear, the punter deserved the cheers: Harry Newsome was an All-American in 1983, and went on to an NFL career with, I think, the Steelers and the Vikings.)

The university’s athletic department recognized the general lack of appeal of a poor team with a small alumni base, and during the two seasons I was in the marching band the games tended to be followed by some kind of entertainment show or concert. Because of these I got to see Bob Hope live (clearly Wake’s students were not the intended targets of these shows), as well as the Four Tops and Temptations, so the effort was worthwhile for me at least, and I was not so young and stupid as to be unable to enjoy such legendary acts. Some of the acts were less familiar to me, which got annoying as the band absolutely was not allowed to leave early in those cases. This also provided me an introduction to the mingling of sport and entertainment that would become another piece of the puzzle in these later years, sorting out the ways in which football generates and keeps its hold on its acolytes with spectacle and distraction.

Road trips could be a different affair as well. Back then, some combination of North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Duke was certain to be on the schedule, and those were pretty quick trips. Others could be longer and a bit more involved. As well, sometimes the road trips only involved a pep band, with no time spent on the field (I remember a game at Richmond -- yes, Wake Forest traveled to a game against a 1-AA team -- that was pep band only. Back then they were still playing at the stadium that now houses the Richmond Kickers soccer team.) 

Maybe the most notable road trip was to Georgia Tech, if only because several of my high-school classmates had chosen to attend that school. I snuck off for the third quarter and spent it among them, in a Georgia Tech student section, in my Wake Forest band uniform (this was a real marching trip, no pep band). The other memorable (and much less pleasant) part of that trip was a girl I was interested in making it clear she was dating a rich sophomore instead. As you can note, very few of my marching band memories from my Wake Forest time really involved the actual game of football at all, aside from cheering for the punter. (Wake Forest also hosted a high-school marching band competition, for which we band members were assigned various tasks. That was more fun than any game I ever attended.)

After transferring away from Wake Forest in the middle of my sophomore year (to major in music, ironically), my exposure to live football became much less frequent. My new school didn’t field a football team, and aside from one trip the next fall to see Wake Forest at Georgia Tech and catch up with my old band mates, I saw very few games live, mostly during my time in graduate school at Florida State; my fellow grad students in my degree program generally got together to get tickets for one game per season. Otherwise, I frequently spent football Saturdays across the campus, working in the music library. Most of the time, though, the game was on our television at home.

While there were no major on-field injuries during the games I saw at Wake Forest (at least not that I remember), I did get an early introduction to the signature malady of the current age of CTE: the concussion. In my first semester at the university one of my classmates in an introductory theatre class was a walk-on football player, whose hopes to play for the Deacs had been derailed by a concussion suffered during pre-season training. Or at least it was supposedly a concussion. At least a few folks suggested he had suffered more than one, and you couldn't really be certain that wasn't the case.

He was as nice a guy as you could hope, but clearly not all was right with him. On more than one occasion he would be found in class zoned out, completely having lost track of all going on around him, noticing nothing but the headache. The professor didn't really know what to do with him in those situations. Part of the responsibility for this class was to work as off-stage personnel for the theatre division's fall production (Shakespeare, but I don't remember what). This fellow and I were both assigned to the costume shop. There was enough of a challenge for him and his enormous hands trying to manipulate sewing needles and replace small buttons. On the bad days, it was impossible.  He made it to most of the classes, occasionally missing because, as he would later explain, he just couldn’t get around the pain. By the end of the semester his symptoms had abated somewhat (and I do emphasize somewhat), but while he tried again, to my recollection he never made Wake’s active football roster. But since I was only there for one more year, how would I know? He might just have gotten on the roster later, as messed up as his brain clearly was.

I wish I could say I was enough of a prophet to see from his difficulties that it was all going to end badly, and that football was a sport with a serious head trauma problem even at that time. No, I didn't see that coming, being in a way still too close to it, I guess. Though my direct experience of the game was going to wane in the intervening years, I certainly wasn’t ready to walk away from it yet. That was still years in the future.

If a punter was ever going to look like an All-American, this was it. Harry Newsome at Wake Forest.