Reflecting upon Football’s Carnage

high-school-football-hit In my opinion, the greatest football poem ever written focuses on the violence that is a fundamental aspect of the sport. Sensitive fans like myself are constantly at odds with themselves, feeling guilty for watching as players maim themselves for life. Should I really be rooting for my Broncos’ Wes Welker to return following his second concussion in four weeks? Shouldn’t I rather be hoping that he retires so that he doesn’t suffer a third blow to the head, along with possible dementia by the time he hits fifty? Shouldn’t I just stop watching rather than give this violent sport my implicit consent?

What kind of a game is it where, each week, we measure success first by who wins and second by who doesn’t get hurt? Season-ending injuries have been wreaking havoc with such teams as the Patriots (Wilfork, Mayo, Bronk), the Packers (Rodgers), and the Colts (Wayne). We are participants in a drama where, as James Wright puts it, players grow “suicidally beautiful” and “gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.”

I’ve been telling myself that I’ll turn my back on football when Peyton Manning retires, but this sounds a bit too much like an addict promising to quit drinking or drugging. I’ll let you know what I do.

Writing about this poem in a previous post, I noted that “Wright’s fathers, living ruptured lives, hope for some kind of escape, some kind of renewed virility, through the football prowess of their teenage sons.” While we can’t entirely ascribe the rise in football’s popularity over the past 30 or 40 years to the stagnating economic fortunes of the middle class, they’re not entirely unconnected. The high school boys in the poem may sense their parents’ desperation.

Here’s Wright:

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

One other thought. A few years ago I had a basketball player who suffered five or six concussions. I tried to persuade him to stop playing but his father, as least by his account, wanted him to keep playing and so he did. It finally took another concussion, followed by migraines, blurred vision, and slowed thinking, to get him to stop. Parents have got to stop living sports through their children.

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