The void

So, as you might have noticed if you have ever spent a lot of any time on this blog, there are some concerns about the long-term health effects of all those hits football players take.  And a significant part of this blog's concern is to try to determine just what the role of the fan, particularly the fan who also professes to be a follower of Christ, in responding to this sensitive issue and possibly forcing leagues or teams or programs to be accountable for how the athletes under their charge are treated. One hopes not everyone has to come to the conclusion I have reached, but the one thing on which I will insist is that, to confront this issue with anything like integrity, no options can be off the table. To presume that football must continue in basically the same form in which it currently exists -- or even that it must continue to exist at all -- is to abdicate responsibility.

With that in mind, it is challenging and a bit depressing to look into the literature in the fields of theology, Christian ethics, or pretty much anything vaguely related, and discover that ... there's not a lot out there. Not on the specific question of football brain trauma; I can of course acknowledge that it's still somewhat early in the process of understanding the issue. No, to be honest, there's not a lot out there on the general ethics of sports and injury, period, that might provide a foundation for addressing the contemporary issue.

Football, of course, has its history of fatalities in the game, well before the modern concussion-brain trauma wave with the attendant premature deaths and suicides. Things were bad enough in Teddy Roosevelt's day that he more or less called a summit to demand changes in the game to make it less fatal. Of course, at the time the fatal consequences of these injuries were much less separated from the immediate injury; players died on the field or soon afterwards from those injuries.  While that still happens even today, it is mostly restricted to high school players. Occasional debilitating injuries can happen in the NFL or NCAA, the type that result in paralysis, for example, and the occasional death resulting from practice in extreme heat (see Stringer, Korey) also occurs, although teams are at least a little quicker to recognize those hazards and act accordingly, although it doesn't necessarily happen until after a player like Stringer dies.

No, part of the challenge here is that the fatal consequences can be years separated from the immediate blow or blows that led to the brain deterioration. This opens up a more challenging ethical front to consider. However, there isn't necessarily a very strong foundation of dealing with injury and its long-term consequences from an ethical point of view.

Players in many sports have experienced injury that had adverse effect on their future health. Sometimes it was almost comical, unless you were the one suffering the effects. Legend has it (emphasis on "legend") that pitcher Carl Hubbell, one of the aces of the game back in the 1930s, had his arm so affected by his use of the screwball that in his later life his left arm hung by his side with palm facing outward, instead of inward like most folks. (No, there's no photographic evidence out there.) Football players like Earl Campbell end up in wheelchairs or walkers with raging arthritis or other physical decimation. Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas, in the years before his death in 2002, had to have both knees replaced and ended up with his once-strong right arm virtually unusable. Other such stories abound. 

You would think this might draw ethical or theological notice. Apparently not.

Leland Ryken, in his 1987 monograph Work & Leisure in Christian Perspective, wrote: 

            The criterion of physical and emotional health also sets boundaries for legitimate leisure pursuits. Some physical recreations simply have a bad track record for injuries. Boxing, professional wrestling, football, and perhaps skiing fall into this category. Devotees of such sports will not like my negative comments but the relative likelihood of injury in such sports is a moral issue.

Note that date: 1987. That's well before the broader world even began to have a clue about CTE. Give the man some credit for speaking out on the subject early, and speaking on the more general tendency for football to maim its players.

I don't know if Ryken's personal popularity or friendships took a hit after that publication, but there were not a whole lot of other authors taking up his concerns in the intervening years. Some general ethical or philosophical writing did examine sports injury generally, but mostly in the sense of its psychological impacts on the injured athletes. Some writing on pain as a component in physical training for athletes also pops up here and there, frequently in response to the kind of ecstatic embrace of pain one finds in pop-cultural consideration of athletics ("no pain, no gain") or the pain embracing biographies or autobiographies of athletes such as Lance Armstrong (although one may have to read that one a bit differently in retrospect). These ethical considerations focus on the athlete and his or her relation to pain, and largely do not deal with the fan's response or responsibility in the face of such injury.

Now, with a more insidious long-term threat having come to the fore, Christian thinkers seem to be having trouble coming to grips with it. Shirl James Hoffman, a kinesiologist who has of late in his career turned to the questions of Christian faith and sport, has touched on the issue slightly in his Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports, and Tom Krattenmaker does also in Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks Into Pulpits and Players Into Preachers. However, as you might guess from the respective titles, their primary interests are elsewhere; namely, in examining the uncomfortably close embrace of the church (its more evangelical precincts, primarily) and sports (most often football). That theologically suspect union is probably a factor in reluctance to look too closely at the brain-trauma issue, to be sure, but it is still a different subject.

On a more popular level, I can point you to two articles in The Christian Century. In one, Rodney Clapp desperately tries to reconcile his zeal for football with its more destructive contemporary results, and resorts to the hoary cliche that it's not the violence that he loves (notwithstanding the impossibility of separating whatever it is he loves about football from the violence). In the other, almost a year later, Benjamin Dueholm is somewhat more direct in facing up to what his article's subhead calls "the moral hazards of football." Even here, though, Dueholm is not strictly focused on the concussion-brain trauma issue -- he also casts a net over the then-current "bounty" scandal of the New Orleans Saints  -- but to his credit, he does cast at least some glance into the comments of early Christian writers such as Tertullian and Augustine, thus opening to a consideration of the moral hazards of entertainments not just on the on-field participants, but those in the stands as well.

So at minimum it seems safe to say there is some space for trying to look at this issue from the theological/ethical/philosophical point of view, and with the fan's particular place in the economy of injury at the forefront. In other words, I can't find a good reason to give this up.

Direct head-to-head contact. It doesn't seem to be going away, so neither can ethical inquiry...