Vol. 192: Football: Curse or blessing?

Better ask: Compared to what?

Football season is upon us again, and so are the inevitable calls for its elimination, not to mention my own conflicted feelings concerning this violent sport.

Last month, a study concluded that at least one in four National Football League players might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a progressive neurological disease caused by repeated impacts to the head.

“The sport is inherently, fundamentally violent,” writes John Gerdy, author of Ball or Bands: Football vs. Music as an Educational and Community Investment. “It is what it is, a brutal game.”

No question about that. Thoughtful people have attacked football for years— centuries, actually. In last week’s New York Times, letter-writers unanimously denounced the game as “indefensible” and “a barbaric sport that should have been banned” while rhetorically wondering, “We are civilized people?”

But what should be done about it?

Christians vs. lions

As a former football player who cherished the experience, I’m always troubled by this debate. Organized football seduced me as early as seventh grade with its unmatched combination of physical and mental challenge. The notion of choreographing all those X’s and O’s on paper, and then testing those plans on a field against a savagely human defense, fascinated me then and still does.

With the passage of time, I’ve also come to perceive the critical role football played in my education. As I’ve said before, many of my most valuable life and career lessons— how to handle adversity, how to function as part of a team, how to push myself beyond my presumed limits, how to give and take criticism— came not in a classroom but on the football field.

To its critics, football is a lucrative spectator sport, staged to provide an outlet for bloodthirsty but sedentary Americans, who from their living rooms applaud bone-crunching hits much the way Roman spectators used to cheer when lions gobbled up Christians. These armies of armchair warriors may indeed explain the popularity of professional and big-time collegiate football. But what explains football’s broad popularity among amateurs?

Hegseth and testosterone

A few years ago, the New York Times reported that many former women’s colleges, having gone co-ed, had discovered that a varsity football program was an ingenious way to attract male students, many of whom would happily pay $25,000 or more in tuition for the opportunity to play college football. Even in lands where soccer is king, like France or Russia, American-style football leagues are cropping up lately. The 2014 documentary film Touchdown Israel revealed that hundreds of Israelis— Jews, Arabs, and Christians alike— are voluntarily spending $800 each for equipment and devoting two or three nights a week to practice on improvised soccer fields for the privilege of playing in organized American-style football leagues. Presumably, football offers them some benefit that they don’t get from soccer.

We must also wonder why football is embraced by a diverse range of serious educational institutions that have little else in common— from the Groton School (whose Episcopalian founder Endicott Peabody made football the centerpiece of his “muscular” brand of Christianity), to intellectual hothouses like the University of Chicago (which revived varsity football in 1969 after a 30-year absence) and M.I.T. (where players say that Saturday’s game is the easiest part of their week), to a Quaker college like Guilford in North Carolina, to my own Fieldston School in New York (operated by the Society for Ethical Culture, for goodness’ sake!).

What explains this broad appeal of a sport that so many people find revolting? I would chalk it up to two factors: (1) the innately aggressive nature of most young males, endowed as they are with high levels of testosterone, and (2) the fact that football is actually less violent and more intellectually stimulating than the alternative outlets dreamed up so far, like boxing, dueling, jousting, gladiator combat, bullfighting, auto racing, skydiving, riots, rumbles, and, of course, war.

Testosterone is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. Some folks even like it. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth— granted, not the brightest bulb on the planet— has advocated testosterone replacement therapy to optimize soldiers’ fighting capabilities and support their combat readiness.

Or consider the American West of the 1850s, which was initially settled almost entirely by men under 30, unrestrained by the domesticating influence of women or the cautioning influence of older men. In a mere ten years, these rough and rambunctious young males transformed what had been called “the great American desert” into farms and towns connected by stagecoach lines. They also drank and fought with each other a lot and died young. Their world was called the Wild West for good reason.

Organized riots

Jeremiah Ford, Penn’s athletic director in my student days, had a ready retort whenever anyone suggested that Penn should give up football. “If colleges eliminated football,” he reasoned, “the students would organize their own teams.” That, in fact, is precisely how American college football began in the 1870s— as a relatively benign alternative to the “organized riots” that occurred each spring among college students driven by the need to work off their masculine aggressions.

Modern American football originated in the soccer games played in European cities, villages, and schools for centuries before America was settled by Europeans. These early games shared certain common characteristics: They remained largely “mob” style contests, with huge numbers of players attempting to advance a ball into a goal area, often by any means necessary. According to legend, during a school football match in 1823 an Englishman named William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it, thus creating a new style of play in which running with the ball predominated instead of kicking. But rules were few, and violence and injury were common. The brutality of these mob-style games led to widespread protests and pressure to abandon them.

A Harvard tradition known as “Bloody Monday” began before 1827 (and maybe as early as 1800), consisting of a mass ballgame between the freshman and sophomore classes. In 1860, both the town police and the Harvard authorities agreed that Bloody Monday had to go. But just 13 years later, Harvard sponsored its first football team. Yale, under pressure from the city of New Haven, also banned all forms of football in 1860. But Yale resumed football just 12 years later. In 1914, to house its football team, it built the Yale Bowl— at that time, the world’s largest sports facility.

Knute Rockne confronts Congress

What made Harvard and Yale change their minds?

The best answer may lie with the legendary Knute Rockne, who coached Notre Dame from 1918 to 1930. To Rockne, football was a vital societal outlet. Instead of allowing young men to direct their natural competitive drive and aggression into actual violence or warfare, he said, the sport provides a structured, disciplined environment for channeling that energy.

This philosophy became central to Rockne’s view of football— not just as a game, but as a tool for safely harnessing the raw intensity of youth.

In 1926— yes, exactly 100 years ago— Rockne was summoned by a Congressional investigating committee to answer the charge that football was too violent. He replied:

“All young men are potentially violent. In Europe, they fight wars. Here, they play football.”

Too often, we tend to discourage harmful activities without considering what might arise in their place. In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general’s discovery of a link between cigarettes and lung cancer led many Americans to give up smoking. But these ex-smokers still needed something to put in their mouths. So, yesterday’s national lung cancer crisis has now been replaced by a nationwide obesity crisis.

As my late colleague John Guinther used to observe, to get better answers, ask better questions. Concerning football, the better question is: Compared to what?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com