LAS CRUCES – It’s not that I’m a sore loser.
My high school, though brand new, had a mostly winning
football team that made it to the state finals. When I was in college, our team
went to the Rose Bowl, and some of the guys went on to legendary pro careers. I
was fortunate to get to know a couple of them. They were great guys.
They weren’t sore losers either, but I still remember, decades
later, that they were often very sore winners. With all that padding and
training and muscle mass, those healthy young men, in their late teens and 20s,
sometimes moved like my elderly grandfather after a major operation.
And I remember a legendary defensive end, a very bright,
funny and yes, gentle soul, who hated it when the crowd made a famous chant of
his friendly two-syllable name, with “Kill!” on both sides of a vicious cheer
sandwich. Let’s call him “Buddy.”
What I’m about to criticize are cherished American pastimes
more beloved that apple pie, so I’m not going to use real names. I can’t ask
Buddy’s permission. He’s a contemporary of mine who died many years ago. He was
diagnosed with CTE, a neurological condition related to concussions and head
trauma.
“Kill, Buddy, Kill!”
This is a column I’ve been planning to write for a very long
time, an Emperor-has-no-clothes cry of the heart that I’ve wanted to shout
since I saw my first football game, followed quickly by my first boxing match
in a childhood that starred what some consider the greatest of all time, a boxing
icon we lost not long ago.
Recently, a wise Las Cruces friend (we’ll call her Molly) sighed
and said, ”Why do we pay people millions of dollars for doing things they’d be
arrested for doing anywhere but a football field or a boxing ring?”
And why are we so surprised when there is a spillover of
violence, carryover behaviors that result in child and spouse abuse and battery
outside the arenas or playing fields (occasionally by a pro athlete, and all too
frequently by super-charged spectators)?
And what does it say about those of us who are fans? Just
how are we different from the ancients we call barbarians, who enjoyed watching
gladiators fight to the death, or were entertained by lions consuming
Christians?
I have heard all the lines about form and beauty and
brilliant strategies. And there are many sports that are all that and more,
that, beyond a doubt, build fit bodies, discipline, endurance, and all sorts of
virtues. Hooray for all that.
But however you sugar-coat it, the goal of boxing is to hurt
your opponent. Prohibiting striking below the belt is a gentlemanly gesture but
a cop out, when it’s just fine to strike above the neck and cause permanent
brain damage. Why were we so shocked when a champ bit off a part of his
opponent’s ear when we would have applauded him for a first-round knock-out?
And football. Is the goal to maneuver the ball to the goal
through brilliant strategy, great skills and brotherly teamwork? Or is it to
knock down, hurt, punish, hit hard and stop-at-any-cost? Are we watching it for
the strategy and camaraderie, the form and art? Or for the violence? If not for
the latter, why don’t we evolve into touch football?
There are other sports that are gory and potentially lethal,
usually involving other devices: guns, racing cars, canyon-leaping motorcycles.
And there are undeniable risks, hazards and even possible serious injury or
death in almost any sport (and even artsy enterprises like ballet or movie
stunts).
But boxing and football are one on one, and a major (if not
the major) goal is to hurt, to do things, as “Molly” accurately said, that we
would arrest and punish and jail people for deliberately doing any place else
in civilized society.
Boxing is not a gentlemanly sport and football is not worth
the death or maiming of a single little boy. And the millions of dollars we pay
our champions are not fair compensation for their premature disability and
death. If we really think about it all, well, we should be ashamed of
ourselves.
“Kill, Buddy, Kill.”
I wish, all these years later, I’d yelled “Quit, Buddy,
Quit!” Or, find another sport, another way to share your wonderful talents.
That we hadn’t run out of time to say, “Live, Buddy, Live.”
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