His big point was where does free will actually begin? One thing Gladwell does really well is show how pro athletes are basically conditioned to play with injuries, which they shouldn't, not simply out of bravery, but out of fear of losing their job. So, does that conditioning, along with all the conditioning they've recieved since Pop Warner, nullify free will? We talked about Earl Campbell and how busted up he was at the end of his career, but how he insisted that he'd do it all over again. Is he conditioned to believe that? How much social programming has led him to believe it was all worth it? Like I said, I argued for free will, and basically believe in it.
Anyway, all of this came back to me today reading this piece in the Times about child prostitutes. There's a meaty section where pimps describe how they get a girl on the street:
After using court records to compile a database of over a hundred convicted pimps and where each is incarcerated, The New York Times wrote letters to each more than two years ago. In the ensuing interviews by phone and in letters, more than two dozen convicted and still incarcerated pimps described the complicated roles they played as father figure, landlord, boss and boyfriend to the girls who worked for them. They said they went after girls with low self-esteem, prior sexual experience and a lack of options.Leaving aside the naked ruthlessness and mental bullying, this was amazing to me. It's also worth noting that for all the psychological tricks, there's a serious element of physical coercion. But I was left with impression that I kind of demonic possession was necessary to make it all work--a conditioning, a bending of free will. I want to state loudly and clearly that there are serious differences between professional athletes and child prostitutes. But for whatever reason, I thought back to Gladwell's piece and how pro athletes, and like fight dogs, are conditioned to do things that often weren't in their interest.
"With the young girls, you promise them heaven, they'll follow you to hell," said Harvey Washington, a pimp who began serving a four-year sentence in Arizona in 2005 for pandering a 17-year-old and three adult prostitutes. "It all depends on her being so love-drunk off of me that she will do anything for me...The pimps view themselves as talent managers, not exploiters.
"My job is to make sure she has what she needs, personal hygiene, get her nails done, take her to buy an outfit, take her out to eat, make her feel wanted," said another pimp, Antoin Thurman, who was sentenced in 2006 to three years for pandering and related charges in Buckeye, Ariz. "But I keep the money."
Wayne Banks Jr., a pimp serving at least 40 years in Hazelton, W. Va., for the sex trafficking of a minor and related charges, wrote that the girls have to be convinced that the pimp is best equipped to handle their clients and finances.
"Seems more despicable to me to give something so valuable away as opposed to selling it," he wrote, describing his pitch to persuade girls that prostitution was a smart business decision.
When recruiting, some pimps said they prowled homeless shelters, bus stations and shopping malls or posed in newspaper advertisements as photographers and talent scouts. Others said they worked Internet chat rooms and phone-sex lines.
"I'll look for a younger female with a backpack," said Mr. Thurman, describing how he used to drive near schools after hours. "I'm thinking she's leaving home, she's leaving for a reason, she had a fight with her parents or she just wants to leave home."
The similarity between pimping and certain aspects of certain NFL coaches is the cold dismissal of the person as any sort of human being. You read these guys talking about women, and its almost cannibalistic--they regard the young women as meat. And you read Ted Johnson's account of his relationship with Bill Belichick and it's kind of the same thing.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
As a female who was never involved in football at any level, I'm wondering what level of physical and mental coercion is common in high school and college ball. Do the coaches or other players browbeat boys into doing their will? What are the consequences for kids who don't do as they're told?
In my experience, football coaches, even at the little league level are more prone to be overly competitive than their baseball or basketball counterparts (can't speak to any other sport, or any experience other than my own). And practices, in comparison to the other sports are brutal. I remember the first day I ever woke up as a kid feeling like I couldn't move was the morning after my first football practice.
Kids who don't do as they're told don't get to play. Either they warm the bench or, ultimately, they get kicked off the team. Since the football (and sometimes basketball) players are seen as the pinnacle of the social hierarchy at most schools, that alone is a pretty powerful weapon.
Depending on the coach, it can be a completely benign weapon, too. There's nothing inherently wrong with teaching kids to work hard, or to sacrifice their own comfort for the team, or to accept instruction from the coach and/or other players.
The problems arise when the player (1) learns to accept the coach's judgment over their own and then (2) the coach turns out to be more interested in winning than in the best interests of his players. Of course, (2) is inherent in the incentives for coaches. Do you risk losing the game (and maybe your job) by benching your star player who may (or may not) be concussed?
We need to figure out how to tell coaches they will lose their job if they play the concussed star player when they should let him sit with no long term consequences.
But that's the thing-- the consequences of letting the player sit out are immediate and impact negatively on the season and the coach. The consequences of making him play take years to come out. We need to put our athletes' health over their success, and who's going to do that, even at the high school level?
School boards, principals, parents, fans, etc. It's not that far fetched that with some better education about brain injuries all around that we could have difference incentives. The first people to do it will get some scorn, but it doesn't take too long for it to work out. I'll bet that there are going to be a lot fewer heat stroke deaths from football in the near future because of the publicity it has gotten.
Football is a pretty hard sport since you start. After the first day of football practice I didn't want to get out of bed, but I had 4-5 hours of practice ahead of me. Practice was hard, but games would beat you down more because the adrenaline keeps you from feeling it until the next morning. I remember hearing a story about Jerome Bettis (retired RB of the Steelers) who claimed that after every game he couldn't get out of bed the next day.
What are the consequences? Since we did conditioning as a team, anybody who gave up would cause the entire team to start over at the beginning. The coach may not play you, may ride you hard at practice, make you stay late and do more work after practice if you don't conform. However, the biggest punishment was not being allowed to play in the game. We all wanted to play and win.
I'm convinced it's not the coaches who do the brainwashing, but you come in wanting to play. Nobody there needed any convincing to run back out onto the field. It has to be the coaches job (especially at the high school and under level) to force players to sit out because of injury for their own safety. Coaches that don't do this are doing a disservice to their players and shouldn't be coaching high school football imo.
I didn't play football beyond early high school, but even for my mediocre team, there was a great deal of pressure to play through injuries. By way of example, a friend of mine had back pain and asked to sit out drills; after a few practices of doing so, it was made clear he wouldn't play if he didn't practice. There was a great deal of questioning of his injury, and whether he was tough enough, by coaches as well as by teammates.
After more pain, he finally had an MRI that revealed a small crack in one of his vertebra. He wasn't in danger of being paralyzed, but he shouldn't have been playing.
Finally, even at a younger age the sport can be brutal. Several "tackling" drills are brutally violent. One man with the ball and a tackler. Man with the ball can't take any evasive action. I still remember what it felt like to get hit by a guy who would soon be an all-state middle linebacker. It was the first time I really understood "seeing stars."
Watching truly gifted athletes play the sport is a beautiful thing. I really enjoyed playing it myself, but was far from gifted. Nonetheless, I think Charles Barkley had it right on a sports talk show I heard him on a few weeks ago: the guys who go out and play football at a professional level have to be a little different, a little crazy.
This is why the coaches need to make the decision to sit the player, because most players will choose to play through the pain. It's not the coach who conditioned them, but their peers play a big part of it, which seems to be the case and not being able to play. For what it's worth in high school, if you can't practice you shouldn't be playing in the games.
This all points to coaches needing to make the right decision because we can't trust teenagers to do it themselves. The teenager will want to play and will want to prove how tough they are, so it's the adults responsibility to say no.
The drills are insane. Ring of fire. Oklahomas. And there's all this crazy shit that doesn't have names. I only played in high school and I'll second every comments who said that the first time they thought they couldn't move was after the first day of football. I take muay thai now. I spar. There's some head contact. But the force of the impacts are nowhere near some of the impacts I've seen and or been involved in in football and that's with less protective gear. Obviously, if I was out there with Shogun my view of the impacts might change but...
I've seen friends play with crack vertebrae (they didn't know it was cracked), seen friends back out there lifting weights and running 4 and 5 days, sometimes 10 days after getting scoped.
I've had injuries question. Played through ankle problems I probably shouldn't have. I've seen a kid being forced to sit out by coaches because he was so clearly concussed it was surprising that he was even awake.
Football is a beautiful sport and I love it, but Gladwell's article scared me. Not so much for me or the guys I played with because we played 4-8 years max and not at the highest levels and were very well taken care of by football standards. But for the pros and collegiates, past present and future, and for the kids playing that aren't as looked after as I was.
The common Bussie story is that running backs feel Sunday on Monday morning when they come into the league. As the years go on, they start to feel Sunday into Tuesday, and Wednesday. It's time to retire when you feel Sunday on the next Sunday. (Unless the supposed best qb of all time just beat you and your teammate is bawling his eyes out on national tv because he couldn't get you to the Super Bowl. Then you stay one more year to go home to Detroit.)
Some high school injury stories from me - I tore my hamstring and chipped my pelvic bone in a football scrimmage. Our trainer, Doc, an old old man who was not in fact a doc, told me I had a bruise. I kept playing for a couple weeks through the pain until I went to see a real doctor. I was a back-up wide receiver, so there wasn't a lot of motivation to keep playing - just a lack of resources dedicated to the students' health. Shortly after I graduated, the high school decided to get a real doctor to be the trainer.
I also broke my foot playing tennis. We didn't know how bad it was during the match, so I kept playing cuz we needed to win the match to make the playoffs for the first time in our school's history. I got a cast after seeing the doctor and removed it to practice for the playoffs. There wasn't any reason for me to do this - tennis had no status at my school, scholarships weren't a possibility - besides competition and pride. I played on it in practice (not in team practice, but on my own) and then begged to play in the playoffs. My coach couldn't make our playoff game, and my athletic director as substitute coach refused to let me play.
We lost.
I don't know what that says about free will, I just thought I would share.
I'm wondering what level of physical and mental coercion is common in high school and college ball
Enough that dozens have died of heatstroke (you'd think they'd learn to keep gatorade on hand at practice, but apparently that would be coddling).
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/09/29/galanos.football.deaths/index.html
Besides the football players' place on the high school social ladder, it's worth remembering that for kids of above average intelligence but not brilliant, athletics is their best (maybe only) shot at a college scholarship.
(you'd think they'd learn to keep gatorade on hand at practice, but apparently that would be coddling).
Despite the fact that we had "old school" (lots of yelling and cussing) coaches when I was in high school 23 years ago, the single biggest offense you could commit during later Summer 2-a-days was forgetting to bring your water jug to practice. You would get run to death for forgetting, but then you would be provided water for the remainder of practice. I'm not sure WTF these coaches who don't allow water at practice are thinking, because your players simply can't reach peak performance if they're dehydrated.
I'd hate like hell to think it (coaches who don't allow water at practice) was still prevalent, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was playing junior high and high school football, it was an article of faith among most coaches that letting you have water during practice would make you soft.
Somebody who works for me had her nephew try out for football. Don't know exactly what kind, but he's 11. Coach didn't let them have water except at specific times and controlled how much. Not allowed to bring your own water or gatorade, etc.
He was having issues, showed symptoms of dehydration and finally quite the team. But hearing that story, I wanted to get that coach removed (or beat him down, maybe both), as did my (west point grad) father who was no stranger to brutal physical practice in ranger school. The kids are 11 and playing football, what possible justification is there to control their water and risk dehydration and heat stroke? Are they going to be in a football game somewhere where they don't have access to water? Not unless their coach in that game is a control freak sadist who arbitrarily bars it.
What's going on with these guys is a tribal hazing thing. They dealt with it when they were teenagers in the 50s/60s/70s, and by god now the kids are going to deal with it. Questioning the wisdom of their training is questioning the wisdom of their old coaches which is a little like sacrilege -- even if part of them hated the old bastards.
I started playing football when I was 8. The decision to do so pretty much changed my life forever pretty much made me who I am now. I'll keep it brief.
I had initially signed up for soccer (as most kids do, and I had done in years prior) and football. However, it soon became clear that due to scheduling I could only do one. My parents informed the respective coaches that I'd be making a decision soon. Initially, I chose soccer. It was more fun, my friends played it, etc. When my mom called the football coach to tell him I was quitting, he asked to speak with me first. I should add here that I developed pretty early and was always one of bigger kids my age.
The coach said he wanted to speak with me before I quit. He pressured me to stay, saying I'd help the team and I'd grow as a man. Knowing that my dad basically felt the same way, I eventually gave in. Now, this conversation sorta makes sense if it were occurring with a freshman in high school. It doesn't with an 8 year old.
I never really got hurt playing football. In fact, the only time an injury ever forced me to the sidelines in any sport was when I broke my thumb in basketball. The pain was horrible at first, but I wanted to go back in, as my brother was on the other team. I did, but didn't do much. The next day I had a game in a different league. My mom, not a nurse, taped my thumb and I played because our other good player was out. I dropped 16, we lost, and I went to get x-ray'd to find out the bad news.
I'm skipping a lot in between, but at 15, I was completely miserable, moreso than even most 15 year olds are. I told my mom I thought I had depression, she argued with me about this, but eventually agreed to go to the doctor to be diagnosed. He asked me a lot of standard questions, but one in particular stood out. He asked me about what sports I played. I told him, but he must have noticed something when I said football. He pressed me on it a bit, I didn't want to say much about it because I had finally made it to high school and I had a shot at making varsity the next year. He told me he thought I should quit.
I wasn't angry, I was perplexed, but as August came, I realized the thought of going through 2-a-days in a sport I didn't really care about was more than I could stand. What point was I trying to prove? I never went to try outs and instead joined the inaugural men's volleyball team, had a fantastic time, and was a standout on the team.
I'm not saying my depression went away because I quit football. There were other things, certainly. But I was shocked that it really was the trigger to get things rolling for me.
This is why when people question Barry Sanders retiring when he could have broke the record, I get angry. If you don't like this game, you shouldn't be playing it. There's a sense with fans and coaches that the players owe them something. When it gets down to it, no, they don't. Maybe in practice, maybe in a game, but if you want to quit, you're not walking out on anybody.
So much for brief.
Man, the prospect of another summer of two-a-days almost made me quit football my senior year of high school. But I convinced myself that I owed it to myself and my teammates to at least try, and I ended up playing and enjoying that final season.
I feel you on that. I remember waking up for the first day of two -a-days my senior year, and almost crying at what was awaiting me. You get over it, though. Of course practices leading up to the season suck. That's why NFL players hold out until training camp is over. But nothing beat playing on Friday nights. Nothing. I still miss it, honestly.
To be clear, the reason I quit was because I didn't like the game anymore. I might have avoided the two a days there, but basketball made up for it. One of the players who was on the soccer team in the fall lost 10 pounds during basketball season.
I played one year of varsity football as a junior. It was intense - four hours of practice per day in the summer, then three hours during the school year. Despite playing competitive soccer, hockey and basketball, I've never been as fit as I was when I was playing football.
Except it was the most excruciating mental torture I've ever experienced. The coaches spent all of their time destroying our psyches. Guys quit or got kicked off the team left and right.
I got hit in the back in practice and fractured a bone on my spine - even though I was wearing a kevlar vest. I kept playing for a week even though I couldn't breathe or lift my right leg above my waist. After I finally went to the doctor, I showed up at practice in street clothes to tell the coach. He couldn't believe I was going to sit out that week's game - after, we were playing a crappy team and I was starting at running back.
Just a couple of months on this team had instilled me with such a deep sense of guilt that I actually felt like I had let my teammates down by getting seriously injured. I came back way too early for no good reason.
I never played football again. In fact, I quit pretty much every organized sport after that. It was the worst experience I've ever had in the world of sports - though not that far ahead of dealing with basketball coaches.
1. All events have a cause.
2. Human actions are events.
3. Human actions have a cause.
4. All events with a cause are unfree.
5. Human actions are unfree.
I think this five point proof given to me in my undergrad metaphysics class is bulletproof. And the easy responses (usually, the first instinct is to deny 4) really aren't low hanging fruit. I think there are a lot of good reasons to PRETEND that we have free will. And I'd never deny that it always FEELS like we have free will. But any argument that hinges on the actual existence of free will is probably an argument that needs more scrutiny.
Martin Luther argued against the existence Free Will too. (although I don't remember exactly in what context he meant - it' sbeen a while.)
The analogy Martin uses is that humans are like oxen in a yoke, and it is either God or the Devil that has the reins. So, a relatively dim view of human nature that doesn't lend itself well to discussions of moral agency.
But what if the 'cause' is internal?
For 4 to be true 1 has to mean that "All events have a fully determinate cause" rather than just causal influences. If that is true than quantum mechanics seems to indicate that 1 is false.
That turns out to do surprisingly little to help the case for free will. But it is a mistake to base the case against free will on a kind of determinism that our best science doesn't support.
I wholly agree.
""All events have a fully determinate cause" rather than just causal influences. "
Could you please elaborate on the distinction here?
"If that is true than quantum mechanics seems to indicate that 1 is false."
Not sure I follow this either. Quantum mechanics is about the peculiar problem with describing/understanding things at an atomic level. But this problem does not imply that what is going on (i.e. what is being described or understood) does not have a "full determinate" cause or does it? I mean, if it had no determinate cause, then would it even make sense to talk about probabilities or bother trying to understand it?
Nice quote at wiki (on resolving the paradox posed by quantum mechanics - "many-worlds" interpretation):
"While the multiverse is deterministic, we perceive non-deterministic behavior governed by probabilities, because we can observe only the universe, i.e. the consistent state contribution to the mentioned superposition, we inhabit."
With regard to the first question it is possible to elaborate with an ordinary kind of example. We can certainly imagine (I think) that the situation is that in deciding whether to go into football there are a number of causal factors that go into it (I love the game. I am capable of making a career of it (this one in the negative turned out to be causally sufficient in my case) I am afraid of injury. I have other options. The money is great, etc. If some of these changed then I would be more or less likely to decide to make a career of football. So there are all causal influences on the decision. But even when all of these causal factors are considered it is still possible that I might choose either way. Making sense of what such a choice is turns out to be what the free will debate is about. But having causal influences does not mean being fully determined.
With the second, quantum mechanics at the observational level works like the football decision above. I can set up a situation in which a particle will hit a screen. I can tell you what the distribution of particle hits will be if I run this experience many times. But I cannot tell you where any one particle will hit.
It is natural to think that this means the particles began in different states and I was just ignorant of which particle was in which state. But there are reasons for thinking this ignorance explanation doesn't work. And while it is possible to describe quantum mechanics in deterministic terms, one needs to do something weird like the many worlds interpretation you mention, or allowing for relativity violating action at a distance as David Bohm's interpretation does.
I suspect the reason that "the first instinct is to deny 4" is because 4 is a value judgment. That particular five point proof is precisely as valid as my proof that human actions are "bad." (Substitute "bad" for "unfree," and the proof works just as well).
Though perhaps that just indicates that my first instinct is the reductio ad absurdem.
I would take issue with the "a" in "a cause" in 1 and 3, if not in 4. Events have causes, and in deterministic cases the same set of causes will lead to the same outcome.
Not everything is deterministic, however, as mentioned by Lon -- this was one of the huge shifts in physics in the last century, and physicists fought it tooth and nail until they could no longer deny the evidence (especially Bell in the 1960s.)
Aside from pure non-determinism, however, you also have chaos. In a chaotic system, minute variations in initial conditions lead to vast differences in outcomes. The classic example of this is the butterfly flapping its wings in Japan leading to a hurricane in Florida, but there are other systems that work this way.
Then you add in emergent properties, and the fact that some of the initial conditions to any decision are internal and unquantifiable, I I would argue (in fact, I am) that any attempt to predict what initial conditions will lead to what result in human actions will be essentially meaningless, which is in a practical sense indistinguishable from a free system.
You also seem to be defining "free" and "unfree" as a binary, that either something is completely free (no influence at all) or it is unfree. I would say that it is undeniable that externalities influence our actions, but I do not believe that that is incompatible with free will - in fact, I think that free will requires one to look at a situation in making a decision. Some of the influences are not conscious, that is also true. But that is very different from saying that no human being placed in the same position could ever be capable of making a different choice. External influences and probabilities do not disprove free will as I understand it.
Note that this is different from my answer to the question that I think TNC is grappling with. If you put someone in a cell and then come back the next day and they are still there, I don't think that really answers the question of whether they have free will.
Hah, a physics teacher would try to teach you that simplistic BS. Philosophers have for quite a while been arguing that free will is not uncaused. Just because there is no such thing as counter-causal will does not mean that choice is impossible.
Absolutely. You just made my point in two sentences. Though I don't necessarily agree with your assessment of physics teachers -- I believe Guizot said it was his/her metaphysics teacher.
Oops, you're right Polywogy, my apologies to all physics teachers, Guizot's especially. As a professional philosopher who works with scientists, I'm used to hearing that kind of stuff from physicists. I wouldn't be surprised to see a metaphysics teacher put that up on the board but I would be surprised if s/he didn't provide a counterargument.
You are both right that philosophers have favored the kind of free will that comes from rejecting 4 above at least since the 1600's. It is less clear that they have made convincing cases for doing so though.
A lot of the arguments seem to turn, as Polywogy's does above on the idea that if we can't know the causes this is significant to the nature of an action being free. And this seems to be a mistake. It is clearly signficant to why we can convince ourselves that our actions are free. But arguments based on ignorance of what is actually going on behind the scenes seem problematic.
The strength of these arguments to philosophers is largely based on a feeling that moral responsiblity must exist, that requires free will, and this kind of compatibalist free will (or soft determinism) is the least clearly incoherent version.
The argument for the kind of free will that considers it significant to deny 1 above (Libertarian free will) essentially boils down to thinking that compatibilist free will is even more incoherent than libertarian free will.
The other difference is that while soft determinism usually generates the kind of noise needed to make its view look less clearly incoherent by appeal to science, for libertarian free will the noise often comes from the incomprehensible nature of God instead.
Actually, to be clear, my argument was that there is no proof either way.
Observationally, people do things that are not predictable based on any amount of observation of their previous state. This could be due to chaotic systems, unknown initial conditions or unknown laws, but it could also be because people have free will.
Philosophically, I am not convinced by the 5 points above. Some people may be, like some people are convinced that Descartes proved God. I am convinced by Descartes' argument that I exist, but his argument for God is not convincing to me.
Thus, since I have not been convinced philosophically that free will is impossible, and seeing observationally that there is evidence for non-deterministic decisions, I argue that it comes down to opinion.
"1. All events have a cause.
2. Human actions are events.
3. Human actions have a cause.
4. All events with a cause are unfree.
5. Human actions are unfree."
Wow: you had a philosophy professor who had never heard of compatibilism? How peculiar.
It is more likely that he or she had a philosophy professor who thought this was a good way to kick off the debate on free will. You can get the two main views of free will by challenging the premises 1 and 4 and you can see the counterintuitive nature of the two views.
A philosophy professor who ended the discussion there would deserve to be criticized. But one who began the discussion there is not doing too badly.
The This American Life piece "Pimp Anthropology" covered a lot of similar territory. The description of how pimps would go about picking up women to turn out at bars was terrifyingly fascinating. Definitely a recommended listen if you have an interest in the subject.
I see your point, TNC, and I kind of agree with you, but these are grown men we're talking about. The player culture of the NFL encourages playing hurt than anything coaches or League management could do in terms of psychological pressure. I'm with lebecka--the threat of this kind of coercion is far greater, it seems to me, at the youth and college level (especially college, where you have scholarships involved).
Except you don't get to the NFL unless you've already established your "mental toughness" at the college level, and you don't get the Division I scholarship unless you've established it at the high school level.
I think we need to identify what, precisely, it is that we're worried about. The real problem is with football, not athletic toughness in general. The "play through the pain" mentality exists in every sport. No one gets to play English Premiere League soccer or Major League Baseball without playing hurt / exhausted in their younger years and in the pros. What makes North American football different is the effect on the brain of repetitive collisions. Personally, I think football has a real problem here, one that will require dramatic changes in how the game is played.
I agree. But I think the necessary changes are so dramatic that you couldn't call it "American Football" anymore. Which means you'd have to kill the most profitable professional sport in the US, and one of the most profitable in the world. Good luck with that...
Look at how many of those girls in the article were abused in some way-- they come to normalize the abuse. In the same way, the stupid stuff that happens to your in high school and college ball become normalized. You play through the injuries; you ignore the signs of heatstroke; you decide Coach is verbally abusive just because he cares.
One doesn't have to say that free will is "nullified" to say that conditioning can be extremely effective. Conditioning is the purpose of advertising.
Sports that have been played and played in certain ways fore a long time are under scrutiny from modern medicine, and the findings are going to upset a lot of people.
We now know that we cannot safely decelerate the head as is done play after play in football without injuring the brain, which continues to move until it's stopped suddenly by the skull. Malcolm Gladwell's article in The New Yorker is scary in it's detailing of research going on at North Carolina that shows that sub-concussive events, involving impacts up to 1g are happening to college football players several times a day, in practice as well as in games. And the cognitive impairments now being diagnosed in former pros are the cumulative effects if impacts experienced since high school.
I figured out the hard way running track and cross-country in college that 60+ mile training weeks on concrete and asphalt were not part of evolution's plan for the human knee. This is much, much worse.
Football will have to get beyond the denial stage at all levels of the game in order to address this. It can be done. Major auto racing series used to regard death and serious injury as part of the deal. That began to change in some series in the 70's. Formula One has reduced it's toll of fatalities to three deaths in the last 25 years. Things can and must be made safer. If they aren't, who will grow up playing this game long enough to turn pro?
TNC:
Here's the parallel, as I see it - in all three circumstances, there's an exploitation of the assumption that loyalty is reciprocal. The victim gives his loyalty upward, and assumes that it will be returned - but the exploiter instead pursues his own interests, at the victim's expense.
But that's also were the similarities end. Dogs are adolescents; adolescents are not adults. The dogs have limited cognitive resources and few options. There's no meaningful sense in which they're exercising a choice. And so we, as a society, have banned dog fighting. The exploited teenagers are highly vulnerable. They have no money, no support network, and often, little sense of self-worth. They do, in fact, make a choice, but it tends to be an ill-informed decision based on deception. As a society, we've chosen to criminalize even consensual sexual relations between adults and minors, because even in the absence of these confounding factors we don't believe that the basic inequalities in power and position and the inferior decision-making capacities of adolescents can allow for any true measure of consent. And that's where the circumstances are ideal, and the teen may be able to back out. In prostitution, even as the teen gains more information or time to reflect, she is rarely allowed to change her mind. It's part of what makes the arrangement particularly odious.
Contrast that with pro football. You can't even enter the league until you're three years out of high school - in general, at least 21. Almost all NFL players pass through college; they have some degree of advanced education, even if it is often of dubious value. And they enter into their contracts of their own free will. They can always choose to retire and pursue other options. It's a painful decision, to be sure, but there's no threat of physical coercion to keep them on the team. They're not dogs who can be put down, or exploited teens who would be beaten or murdered.
Which doesn't excuse what the league, the teams, or the coaches have done. But conflating pro sports with prostitution or dog-fighting does little to illuminate the issue. There are, in fact, useful reforms that ought to be implemented, to bolster the information available to players and empower them to take greater control of their own risks. It's unrealistic to ask a coach to protect the health of his players, and then base his job-security and compensation on his won-loss record. It likewise makes no sense to have physicians who report to the team evaluate players and advise them. It's these conflicts of interest that lie at the heart of Gladwell's critique, and they need to be addressed. As part of the forthcoming labor negotiations, the player's union needs to negotiate a right for players to sit out practice or games or to don a red jersey, without forfeiting pay or jeopardizing their contracts - provided that they are acting on written medical advice. And then it needs to arrange for team physicians to be jointly hired by the team and the player's union representatives - or, alternatively, for players to have a guaranteed right of access to a roster of union-certified doctors. The people making medical evaluations need to have the health of the patient foremost in their minds - and not other considerations. If players understand that their coach is the guy who's going to push them to play, as long as he sees any advantage in it, and that their doctor is going to urge them to protect their health, they'll be far better positioned to weigh and evaluate those two competing perspectives.
The dog-fighting analogy, however, doesn't suggest these solutions. If we simply write off the ability of players to exercise free will, then there's little point in trying to bolster their capacity to make informed decisions - they're just pawns in an insidious game. In this case, I fear, the analogies serve to obscure rather than to illuminate.
What if physicians weren't assigned to teams? Say there was a medical database that contained a file on every player. A team of docs are rotated around the league on a weekly basis (like how refs are rotated for games each week), and every Thursday they have to make a report to the league or to the union recommending what players be held out of competition that week? Of course it wouldn't be perfect, and players and teams would attempt to game the system, but I think something in that direction would be helpful.
dwhite:
I like that you're thinking creatively here. I'm not sure you've got a perfect solution - there's a lot to be said for continuity of care, which is why I don't switch doctors every time I'm sick - but severing the connection between doctors and teams is the crux of the issue.
From today's testimony by former exec Gay Culverhouse:
It's not that complicated, really. The question of free will is not a matter of absolutes. These players have some capacity to exercise informed consent; if we care about them at all, it's incumbent upon us to bolster that capacity, however imperfectly. It's never going to be a decision they take without regard to the consequences - its impact on their teammates, fans, finances, and families - nor one taken in a vacuum that disregards the sum total of their prior experiences. But they can and should have access to unbiased evaluations. They can and should be able to confide in a physician, without fearing repercussions. And they can and should be able to sit out games and practices on medical advice, even if their coach doesn't like it.
They're not dogs, they're men. And they deserve better from the league, and from us.
The claim that football and dogfighting are of a piece is somewhat ambiguous, and I'm not sure any of the ways of understanding it are completely convincing.
One question is whether the role of the players and the dogs are of a piece. Another is whether the role of the fans of the two sports are of a piece. A third is whether the role of the owners and coaches/trainers is of a piece.
With the players and the dogs, the difference between human beings and dogs does seem to be relevant here. While I think it is possible to brainwash people so that they have no more real choice than dogs, the Gladwell article is not convincing in the idea that the actual conditioning goes that far. Some of the choices being made look foolish. On the other hand, they are choices to make large amounts of money in a short career by people who will largely not have an opportunity to make similar money later.
As far as the fans go, the difference between a sport in which the hurting of the participants is the point and one in which it is a consequence seems pretty clearly significant. It diminishes a bit if the fans become convinced that injury is an inevitable consequence.
The case seems strongest for the similarlity between dog owners in dog fighting and coaches who disregard the well being of their players. I don't know how many coaches this actually applies to. Andy Reid, in Philadelphia, seems to take seriously keeping players out of the lineup, or bringing them in slowly, when they are hurt. Being in Philadelphia and an Eagles fan, that is the example I see most of. It clearly does not completely protect his players. Despite trying to ease Westbrook into the lineup it did not protect him from a knee to the head on Monday.
Some of the examples from the article actually do more to support the idea that players are hiding injuries than that coaches are ignoring them. Of course if the coaches are encouraging players to hide their injuries that becomes a distinction without a difference.
Okee dokee. Yesterday I wrote a version of the following on absurdbeats's blog (which you should really check out and hey, it looks like today she's even talking about us! http://absurdbeats.wordpress.com/), but I'm going to write it again here, because, apparently, I want all y'all football fans to hate me and never speak to me again....
I truly cannot stand football, in any form, at any level, and this is because football has long seemed to me to be a kind of male pornography, a situation in which (at the professional level) we pay people to live out our unhealthy and entirely non-reality based fantasies about what constitutes the most authentic expression of their gender — in this case, an ability to really, really hurt another people.
We value men who are successfully violent, and this is a way to tame that violence while still getting to enjoy it. I believe that football — like porn — damages not just the people-objects we pay to role-play for us, but also the society which supports it, because of what it tells the men and women, boys and girls in our society about our expectations of men.
The conditioning doesn't begin with the first peewee football team a boy plays on, nor is it limited to his team experiences. It is deeply embedded in our society, and is expressed at every turn.
Having said ALL that (!), I'll admit that, when I look at the crowds at games, the human variety in them, and folks' genuine enjoyment, it’s clear that there is some rather sizeable piece of football that I Just Don’t Get.
"another" should be "other" ("... an ability to really, really hurt other people").
Crap.
I think your last assumption is the most accurate; You really just don't get football.
"[...] we pay people to live out our unhealthy and entirely non-reality based fantasies about what constitutes the most authentic expression of their gender — in this case, an ability to really, really hurt another people."
You boil the sport down to idolizing violence, yet the sport's most popular figure, The Quarterback, is not tasked with so much as touching another player. Often times the best wide receiver is one that avoids contact better than anyone else on the field. Commentators often celebrate the "sure tackler" - that is, the guy that wraps his arms around an opponent rather than charging for the big hit. The strategy involved - more akin to chess than anything else - makes up a significant amount of the interest in the game as well.
No doubt the sport is violent. It just also happens to be a lot more than that.
This is correct. It's the athleticism and courage and grit and strategy-and-tactics-wise intelligence on display. Football has a million very particular and sometimes complicated rules precisely to keep the game from becoming a big gang fight or wrestling match. That's what all those holding calls are about, why you can't so much as touch a receiver before he's caught the ball except incidentally, why even when the QB has the ball you can't tackle him the same way you can tackle other guys, why the most appreciated 'clean hit' is a simple dive down to sort of trip a guy up because it tactically works the best and *isn't* very violent, etc.
I don't think those rules have anything to do with decreasing violence (except WRT to QB's, who are moneymakers for the NFL). Those rules were all introduced in the last 30 years to increase passing and scoring.
The NFL does introduce lots of little rules to reduce injuries (e.g., the "horse-collar" rule they put in a few years ago, and the "in the grasp" rule they used to have for sacks), but, frankly, all of it is motivated by the NFL's desire to make more money. Injuries to star skill-players and low scoring games are bad for business.
Pesto: point taken about the QB-tackling rules; I was speaking to the general rules of what is considered fair contact, what's holding vs. what's acceptable pushing or tackling. Correct me if I'm wrong, since I've only become a football fan in the past couple of years and it's taken me a while to understand the basics, but my impression was that the rules regarding this topic - I'm talking about how the rules governing contact on non-ball carriers, the holding penalty, etc. - are meant to keep football played in a very particular way, specifically to keep its strategic and tactical level high and to keep it from becoming six simultaneous wrestling matches. Like, the contact is just to get past somebody, not to take him down (unless he's got the ball and even then it's just to bring him to his knees) or pin him or hurt him neccessarily. That is, the violence is not the point of it, it's not really a celebration of male violence. Someone upthread essentially made the point that the main problem injury-wise is the concussions from repeated collisions / head deceleration. This is what makes ellaesther's point a fair one, because, is this really avoidable in a way that keeps football as football?
sv, when I was a kid there was no 5-yard rule on receivers -- a DB could make contact with any receiver, as long as he didn't hold him or touch him while the ball was in the air.
OL's were not aloud to touch defensive players with open hands or to stick your arms out to block them -- doing so was called "illegal use of hands" and was a 10 yard penalty (holding was 15). That's why in films as recent as the mid-70s you see OLs holding their elbows out, with their fists touching each other in front of their chests.
A while longer ago, it was legal for defensive lineman to smack OLs in the head (Deacon Jones was famous for doing this).
The NFL figured out that passing and scoring were popular, while "Ground Chuck" style offenses were less popular (and lucrative), so they changed the rules over time to make it easier to pass and to pass-protect. At the same time, they utterly ignored the introduction of steroids, which actually made players more violent and dangerous. I don't think violence and injuries had much to do with the rules changes, except to the extent, as I mentioned above, that the League doesn't like stars to stand around on the sidelines.
Fortunately for the NFL, injuries that manifest themselves at age 40 or 50 don't have any impact on their bottom line. Andre Waters earned them plenty of money before his brain damage led him to kill himself in his retirement.
When I said that I don't "get" it, I meant that I don't get the appeal -- I know that there is a lot of mental prowess involved, and anyone who came of age in the Chicago area during Walter Payton's day cannot be blind to the fact that violence is not always what wins games.
Having said that: Fair enough. I have focused on the part that disturbs me, not on the parts that don't disturb me.
But you haven't really argued with my point, which is that we as a society place an enormous value on men being violent. I see football as just one expression of that.
and @ TNC: Believe me, I suspend my opinions every Sunday and many Mondays all season long, whenever I walk through my own living room. I don't, in fact, express this opinion almost ever, and I certainly don't try to convince anyone. I don't even talk about it with my husband anymore, as I figure the man actually wants to enjoy the game, not hear my anger another time. And I don't even try to tempt my son and daughter away from the television. Pretty much, I fume in silence.
Ella, you're not trying hard enough.
I don't think anyone was asking you to stifle your views. That would be suspending your disapproval. Instead, you might try suspending your opinions, and trying to imagine the world from the perspective of those with whom you disagree. It's almost always a fruitful exercise, irrespective of the nature of the debate. If you think that fans love the violence, and the fans tell you otherwise, before assuming that they're lying or deluded, you might try to understand what it is they're telling you they like about the sport. At the very least, you'll better understand how to constructively engage and rebut their arguments. And who knows? You might even change your mind.
Your point is not that we, as a society, place an enormous value on men being violent - it's that football is an expression of that value. Those are two separate claims, and along with a number of other commenters, I'm inclined to dispute the latter claim. The violence is a part of the sport, but I don't think it's the crux of its appeal, nor do I think it's necessarily a bar to its enjoyment.
@ Cynic Nah, I'm good.
I spend my entire life, professional and personal, trying to see the world from the other side, and often getting into fierce arguments with those who are on my "side" because I refuse to write off the opponents we face.
This (+ my post at absurdbeats) is quite literally the first time in more than 40 years of living that I have admitted to this opinion in a public forum, because I know how singularly unpopular it is.
As an American, I am surrounded by football love - football fever - football adulation for months and months out of every year, and (as I said) the game has a constant presence in my own home. I managed to form these opinions in spite of the fact that I have never once heard anyone else express them, but rather, live in society in which nearly everyone appears to feel rather powerfully that I am wildly mistaken. I've done a lot of thinking, have watched games, have heard reports from my college football playing cousins, and, open-mindedly, arrived at an opinion with which American culture writ large disagrees. This indicates not a lack of thought, but, I would submit, rather more thought than should have gone into it in the first place.
And not for nothing, but my admission that there is something that I clearly don't get is, in fact, a mellowing of how I once felt, about 10 years ago.
"But you haven't really argued with my point, which is that we as a society place an enormous value on men being violent. I see football as just one expression of that."
Perhaps, perhaps not. If I'm inclined to argue this point, I'd say that it is not so much the violence that receives value in our society, but victory and triumph. Unfortunately, violence is oftentimes inseparable from the two. If we are guilty of something, it's our ignorance of the fact that victory and violence often go hand in hand - so much so that applauding one necessarily applauds the other.
But we still love a good David and Goliath story; we still love when brains trump brawn.
Not to psychoanalyze, but I think this is key. There's a difference between politely holding your tongue, and actually trying to understand what someone is getting. You can live with it all day, in your house, and in your face and not really be trying to get it.
I don't want to overdo this, because I don't think everyone has to enjoy football. I don't particularly "get" opera, and that's fine. But I also understand that my barrier to "getting it" is also a barrier to me holding a deeply-informed, if controversial opinion about it. What makes Gladwell's piece so strong, and his indictment of football so hard to shrug off, is that he clearly does get it. And yet he thinks the pro game may well be dangerous.
Again, I'm willing to be dead wrong about this, and I hope you aren't insulted--but I often find that when I don't get things, the deeper truth is that I don't want to get them, or rather, I'm not interested in doing whatever work it might take to get them. You're free to feel how you want, but I'd very humbly submit that if you don't actually "get" football--and I'd suggest that if you aren't interested in getting football--you can't really expect anyone who does get football to seriously regard your opinion on its societal implication.
I think you're basically right, ellaesther, and I'm someone who used to watch quite a lot of football, and I can still enjoy watching it from time to time. But I really don't like the incredible violence that's an intrinsic part of the game, or the way the NFL, in particular, deals with it. And I think fans do get sucked into the exhilaration of the violence, almost inevitably. I personally find that watching football tends to "feed the wrong wolf" so to speak.
Yeah, what is thrilling about football, and the carnage that results from football, are separate issues though related. I don't think anyone watches football to see people get hurt. For sure, we all go "ooh" when a really violent collision occurs, but we all want to see the players on both sides get back up and return to the huddle. Everyone claps when an injured player gets up and walks off the field unassisted. And we all die a little when they aren't even moving and an ambulance has to take them away.
If we are guilty, it's of hypocrisy, not "yay broken bones and blood". We clap for the injured player out of relief that he wasn't hurt worse, that this thing we enjoy didn't cost some kid too much this time. If we really knew how much blood was lost, what the real cost is of playing this game, we would like it less rather than more (most of us anyway). And as more reporting/muckraking, as well as science, emerges on just how damaged many of the players are, as a culture we are likely, gradually, to start turning away from football in the way that we did a couple of decades back with boxing (Muhammad Ali's deterioration alone probably cost boxing as many followers as his prowess and outsized personality brought to the sport to begin with).
I'd suggest trying to get it. I really would. Note I didn't say trying to like it. I'd suggest suspending your own opinions and really trying to understand what people get out of it--as opposed to convincing that what they get out it is wrong. I'm pretty sure you'd find it enlightening.
Agreed. I wasted a lot of hours hating football because of opinions much like ellaesther's. I still don't always get it or like it, and the injuries the players sustain bother me, a lot. (And this quote made me sick: "Robert has always cared for him," said a team official. "But Ted Johnson is a very sick young man. We've been aware of the emotional issues he's had for years. You can't blame all of his behavior on concussions.") But the game is more than violence.
It's simulated war, basically. Obviously not anywhere near as violent, and the numbers are even. However, these are people using complicated tactics to reach a goal, and violence is used to advance or prevent that goal from being reached. It's fun to watch. Also, it's worth noting that there were spectators at the Battle of Bunker Hill, among other battles. I think it is somewhat instinctively entertaining.
I told a geeky friend of mine that it was basically a turn-based RPG with padding and helmets.
So true.
Makes a lot of sense
TNC, I think the question is whether it's possible to separate, in the real world, the things people love from the things that destroy the players's lives.
I remember you posting a video retrospective of Ronnie Lott a year ago or so. I grew up in the Bay Area, and watched the 49ers entire run of great teams, and I remember Lott vividly. IIRC, you particularly mentioned his massive hit on Icky Woods in the Super Bowl, after which Woods wasn't a factor in the game any more.
That kind of hit is exactly the kind of hit that destroys players' brains. Now, I don't have my hands on that post from so long ago, and I'm not going to put words into your mouth here. But Ronnie Lott exemplified playing through pain (e.g. the whole "cut off the tip of my pinkie so I can play" episode) and inflicting punishment on his opponents, even if it wasn't done with a Jack Tatum-like swagger. And to the extent that a fan could look at Lott's hit on Woods and say, "That's what being a great football player is all about," then I'd say that fan's appreciation of football is bound up in the kind of violence that maims players permanently and destroys their lives.
It's a little more complicated than that:
http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/you_dont_wanna_see_ronnie_lott.php
And while I take your point it's really reductive to see football as essentially, and mainly, about hitting. That's a big part. But it's not the only big part. If that doesn't thrill, that's understandable. But I think a conversation that sees football only through the lense of violence isn't likely to go very far, if only because, that isn't all we see.
I can't take Mixed Martial Arts. But that's me. I'd hesitate to deliver a verdict on it, because I don't know it.
Rereading your comment Pesto, the simple answer is that you can't take one post--out of the many I've written about football--and use that to explain why I love it. Th doesn't strike me as fair.
I'm not doing that, Ta-Nehisi. If you can find the part of my comments upthread that say, "TNC, your love for football boils down to this one thing..." then quote it to me. What I actually said was (a) I couldn't quote you directly and I wasn't going to put words in your mouth; and (b) to the extent that a fan admires a hit like Lott's on Woods, to that extent "that fan's appreciation of football is bound up in the kind of violence that maims players permanently and destroys their lives."
I worded that very carefully. I'm not saying that appreciating Lott's hitting ability means that a fan wants players to be maimed or injured. And I'm not saying that appreciating that aspect of the game means that a fan doesn't also appreciate strategy, or the balletic athleticism of a wideout, or the quick decision-making and precision of a great QB. Hell, as I said, I've watched and enjoyed quite a lot of football myself. That doesn't mean my fandom is the same as yours, but it does mean that I "get" what's fun to watch about football.
I don't think any fan enjoys watching Tim Krumrie or Joe Thiesmann getting his leg snapped in two, or seeing Napoleon McCallum's leg get twisted into two pieces. I do, however, think that a lot of fans (myself included, to be honest) enjoy watching big hitters like Lott when they flatten guys. Maybe part of the enjoyment has been the assumption, in the backs of our minds, that NFL players are such amazing athletes that they aren't suffering really serious damage from those hits. But the evidence seems to indicate pretty strongly now that it's not just the Tatum/Stingley hits that destroy guys' lives.
In your piece introducing the Lott video, that you link above, you give a different perspective:
The problem, I think, is that guys are sacrificing their minds and their sanity as well. That seems like a bigger price to pay than ripped up knees or bad backs, especially if they don't realize that they'll be paying that price when they deliver or receive those hits.
So, what I'm saying is that the appreciation of those kinds of hits, and the players who deliver them, is bound up in a really serious kind of violence -- a violence whose severity hasn't been recognized until recently, but seems to be very real and very, very dangerous. And that, to the extent that one's appreciation of the game is based on that kind of hitting, one's appreciation is, in fact, based on, in the end, pretty serious violence.
Is that 10% of a fan's appreciation? 25%? 50%? That's not for me to say. I don't even know how I'd say it about my own appreciation for football. But my gut feeling about my own watching of football is that it's like junk food to me: tasty and appealing, but especially if I have too much of it, it makes me feel kinda gross and it's bad for me.
Fair enough. I'd only add that's it's bound up in a lot of other things, also. And that it just strikes me as really judgmental to say that football destroys the lives of players. I think you could marshal a number of NFL cats who would say it saved them.
Yeah, I was wrong to say that so absolutely, as if the violence inevitably destroys players' lives. What I should have said, in retrospect, is that it's a kind of violence that runs a substantial risk of destroying players' lives, even at a distance of 20 or 30 years. At least since people started studying it recently, that's what the evidence seems to indicate.
Which, to get back to the original issue, raises questions like: how dangerous is it, really? how much do players know about those dangers (different at each level of play?)? and, to what extent can players act on that knowledge?
Even if you fall on the "free will" side of things, I think there's got to be a whole lot more information available and genuine freedom to decide.
It'll be sad if Steve Young ends up suffering from dementia, locking himself in a dark room, a decade or so from now. I loved watching him play (fighting for yardage after his helmet came off! in a preseason game!), and for now he's perfectly lucid despite all his concussions. But if he ends up like Andre Waters or Mike Webster in a few years, will it all have been worth it?
Incidentally, I really hate this debate. When you declare something like this...
...there just isn't much more to say. It's such a sweeping indictment. Your mind is pretty made up. It's almost like you're not really in it for any kind of dialogue.
I apologize (quite genuinely) for bringing it up. I realize that, given the comparisons to dogfighting and prostitution, it felt like a reasonable thing to say here, but in retrospect, I can see that a community in which the game is so highly valued was not the place. I wouldn't crash your Super Bowl party to deliver this screed, not even if you were involved in a serious discussion of your own concerns about the game -- but being online can make it easy to forget that however cyber the social setting, it's still a social setting. I overstepped, and that was rude of me. I apologize.
you apologize so much ellaesther! personally i'm glad you bring up these points and speak your mind.
Yeah, I didn't want an apology--even if I hate it.
Hi Ella--I love football, played it as a kid, been a fan for decades, but don't entirely disagree with you. There is a pornographic element to it. However, here are some caveats:
All spectator entertainment has a quality of voyeurism and exploitation to it. As a young man reading poetry in public venues, I often felt hollowed out and depressed after readings, felt like I had been somewhat of a spiritual porn star, and still think that poetry requires a kind of open heart surgery for others, all the while poets are as exploited a class of workers as have ever existed on earth. Here, here feed on my soul; moved you to tears? important to your life? two free copies? oh thanks so much, you can keep this exclusively for the next three years, chop up my stanzaic structure any way you like, and even reject it after all that years later.
Secondly, it strikes me that football is an easy target, but when it comes to physical exploitation; football players have nothing on ballet dancers, among many many others, who live out unhealthy, non reality based fantasies on stage. How does one understand an actor who must night after night on stage play out madness or abject villainy?
Finally, to some degree we do have to understand that men are aggressive and competitive, need to be both intellectually and physically skilled, are compelled to confront both danger and mortality, require ferocious discipline to stand up to life's blows, and need to deliver--whether that is biological or environmental, it is something that appears to be universal. To see this all channeled by play and artistry can also be a salutary inspiration, not to mention a cathartic experience--the purpose of tragedy.
But beyond all that there is an exhilaration about actually playing. Did I go body surfing as a teenager, when I quite often risked life and limb, simply to "be a man"? I suppose that was part of it, and better to do that than go off and do other things with that energy. But the real reason I did it over and over for hours and days and weeks on end was because I loved doing it.
This
Really insightful comments and great point about ballet dancers. Surely gymnasts, divers, and other child athletes fall in this category.
I love your second to last paragraph.
On your last point-- I can't follow sports news (or even really watch any sports on a "must-see" basis) anymore because it's often about minutiae (contracts, personal disputes, "storylines") that are so far removed from what we loved as kids-- the pursuit of an objective measure of excellence, and the pure fun of running around and being alive.
Gymnastics and jockeying (is that the word) also have endemic eating disorders, which can lead to another ton of health problems, while we're on it. I can't even watch gymnastics competitions any more-- they depress me too much.
"We value men who are successfully violent, and this is a way to tame that violence while still getting to enjoy it."
This, to put it mildly, doesn't begin to address why those of us who love sports value or valued, Woods and Nicklaus, Bill Russell, the Williams sisters, Pete and Andre, Michael Phelps, Jesse Owens, Darra Torez and Kerri Strug, or Henry Aaron and Derek Jeter.
It's not why some of us are up early on the weekends to watch the English Premier League or Serie A or stay up late at night to catch F1 races in Asia (in my case, not by watching TV but by following the live timing charts and reading the commentary on the F1 website).
Put another way, we value sports and the athletes who play them in this culture and for the same reasons they are valued in other cultures where the leading sport, football (soccer), doesn't begin to approach the level of violence that American football does.
You may not get sports, and I know a lot of people who don't. But football is not an outlier. It is played and enjoyed for the ways in which it is similar to other sports, not for the ways (violence and the potential for serious injury) that it's different.
@ all who responded - first of all, please note my apology to TNC below -- I am sincerely sorry to have brought this up, because it was, plain and simple, rude of me.
I will only say, to those who brought different sports (or professions) into the argument, that I was talking about something that I see as being very specific to football. That's what I see, but I am very clear that I'm in a tiny minority in seeing it. I can't get into how I don't see this as analogous to ballet, or golf for that matter (golfers were mentioned), without re-stating the very argument that I have just admitted was rude of me to make. So I won't reply to the various replies, but please understand that this is not me ignoring you -- it is rather an effort to bow out of the conversation as gracefully and respectfully as I can.
Apology ABOVE, apparently.
I did not think your post and point was rude, rather heartfelt, though I can certainly understand how some might find it dismissive; I don't feel owed an apology, nor feel ignored, and I think it provoked a whole variety of responses that are worthy of your reflection, though I understand that all that oppositional response, its adamance, might be--how to put this--hurtful because of your risking an opinion that you would not even feel safe to risk in your own household.
Don't like football do ya? All that macho posturing and aggressive testosterone wigging out in the living room, eh? George Carlin's all time funniest routine discussed the difference between baseball and football, just in its imagery, and in a lighter fashion made some of the same points.
My response to you was not to win an argument, nor dismiss your concern, but to try to clarify in a way that would be helpful to you in understanding why others get football, why so many men, who are quite serious about the same issues with which you are concerned, get it, so that it would not be such an alienating issue.
But I do, because I don't understand your confusion about my analogy vis a vis ballet dancers, wish to extend a clarification: as a father of a daughter who early in life was interested in ballet and having at that time read books by ballet dancers in which they wrote quite movingly about the kind of physical torture they had endured and what extremes of punishment their choreographers demanded from them in order to present a fairy tale view of femininity, I found it to be an apt analogy and did not mean it to be flippant nor dismissive nor tangential.
Of course my daughter got such a charge out of it--those girly costumes and showing off her natural gracefulness--(and was quite fickle in her passions at the time), so I gave her nothing but encouragement. The next year she was running circles around the boys on the soccer field.
I view athletes who play physically dangerous contact sports, especially football, as something like mercenary soldiers. They willingly put themselves in harm's way for what personally motivates them--whether it's the money, the fame, the glory, or just the sheer thrill of pushing themselves to work their hardest and be their best.
Girls who get turned out by pimps, on the other hand, have to subdue their will to that of an surrogate father figure, in hopes of "getting" their dreams fulfilled. Glory, frankly, is out of the question. However you want to view it legally or even morally, it can't be called free agency--becoming a prostitute effectively relies on a sense of limiting one's options, rather than expanding them.
In short, both have their youth and inexperience taken advantage of by money men for what they are willing to do with their bodies. But while pro athletes are, perhaps, exploited for having an abundance of self-esteem, young girls and women are targeted by pimps for their lack of it.
"But for whatever reason, I thought back to Gladwell's piece and how pro athletes, and like fight dogs, are conditioned to do things that often weren't in their interest."
"Conditioned" is the loaded part of this idea that I can't get behind. People, not just athletes, do things that are not in their best interest all the time. It is definitely not in my best interest to sit here, reading your blog and commenting instead of doing the work that I am paid for. Yet I do it anyway. No offense to your mind control techniques, TNC, but I am not conditioned to make this decision.
People make choices. Influence comes from every angle, often times conflicting with each other. Maybe coach is saying walk it off, while Mom is saying sit it out. Maybe teammates want you to suck it up, but girlfriend is looking forward to some downtime for once. The influences are everywhere. The actor will take most of it in and then choose how to proceed. Sometimes the objectively right decision doesn't match the subjectively right option. Sometimes people are just stupid.
But a decision is made, for better or worse, and I keep coming back to this website.
That's not the job you're looking for...
At the Oakland Raiders training-camp-meeting when head coach Tom Cable broken the jaw of asst. coach Randy Hanson, there were three other assistant coaches who were witnesses to the incident. Interviewed by the police and Napa County district attorney investigators these three assistant coaches gave a different version of how it happened than either Hanson or Cable. Who doesn't think that their jobs and futures in the NFL would be threatened if they witnessed against their boss, the head coach? For coaches, this is 'playing hurt.' Yes, they were conditioned and programmed to lie for the coach, out of fear for losing their jobs. Ethic Soup blogs post on the subject is at:
http://www.ethicsoup.com/2009/10/what-broken-jaw-da-wont-file-charges-against-raiders-coac-tom-cable.html
"Who doesn't think that their jobs and futures in the NFL would be threatened if they witnessed against their boss, the head coach?"
I don't. This is the hapless Oakland Raiders we are talking about here. If anything, your longevity in the NFL is threatened by staying with that team more so than turning on it.
I also don't think anyone in the NFL is bending over backward to protect Tom Cable. He is just another in the long line of also-coached for the Raiders. The NFL is a multi-billion dollar company, and Cable is the head coach of a bad team. I suppose they would just as well throw him under the bus to save themselves the headache of covering up this proposed conspiracy theory. The players people pay good money to actually watch, convicted of lesser crimes, have been kicked to the curb. It seems to me completely inconceivable that they would do much to cover up something like this.
My guess is that it's the culture of the NFL to place a very high value on loyalty to one's head coach. It doesn't matters that it's Cable or the Raiders, if an assistant is judged, within the fraternity, to be "disloyal", they will have a very difficult time finding another job.
Isn't it Sandy Koufax that said something along the lines of professional sports being a self-liquidating business? All I know is that when I took a hit in high school football and felt warm water all over my right arm (which was dry), it was time to be done. I mean, those were the kinds of hits that were rewarded with cheers and validation from the coaches. Personally, I didn't really want to keep playing without that reward, but at the same time that rush didn't really make up for the terrifying notion of my nervous system getting hijacked by a linebacker.
Does rugby have the same problems? Or does using all that padding create an illusion of safety and result in more serious injuries?
IIRC, the padding is a big part of it. Another factor (again IIRC) is the sheer size of a lot of the guys involved. You get hit by a 300-pound guy, you get hit.
The padding, helmets and facemasks result in the players being able to hurtle themselves at each other at breakneck speeds that does not happen without padding because players would be broken too quickly. I would say the padding contributes to the chronic brain problems that players have, because without that padding you wouldn't see frequent hits involving two heads crashing into each other.
I've seen this argument before, and it makes sense, but I'm not so sure. Remember, Teddy Roosevelt was ready to ban football, back in the days before thick helmets and facemasks, cause too many players were being killed on the football field.
I played football (off and on) from the time I was 8 until I finished high school and I'm now at the end of my tenth year of playing rugby. There is no doubt in my mind that collisions in football are more violent and damaging than the ones suffered in rugby.
Rugby has similar concerns going on right now. Apparently, concussions are not uncommon. According to one source, http://www.injuryresearch.bc.ca/Publications/Fact%20Sheets/rugby%20fact%20sheet.pdf:
"Between 5-25% of rugby injuries are head injuries, including concussions. In youth aged 10-18 years, 35% of injuries are fractures, of which 24% involve the clavicle. Superficial injuries represent 20% of rugby injuries, followed by head injuries and sprains (16%). Of
the head injuries, 44% are concussions."
That means that 7% of the youth injuries are concussions.
I'd bet 3 of the most likely sports to look at for similar problems would be rugby, Australian Rules Football, and ice hockey.
I like Guizot's proof above, but then I got lost in the follow up comments with the quantum mechanics and the Latin. I think the free will argument is weak.
One interesting thing about TNC using that argument is that it's an argument that conservatives use all the time. It's akin to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"--e.g., my dad came over here as an immigrant with nothing and now he owns half of Staten Island, so why can't they (usually black people) do it too? Why does the government need to give these handouts?
The whole logic of that argument is that there are no causes, only individual choices.
I also don't by the free will argument in this case for this reason: the choices people make change based on place and historical location. A high school student is more likely to play football in Texas than in other states, right? Players today are less likely to return quickly after an injury than they were 20 years ago. Clearly, culture and knowledge and peer pressure other factors impact peoples' choices.
But looking back at the post, I don't think it's necessary for me to give any reasons against the free will argument. Given your last two paragraphs, TNC, I don't understand how you stand by the free will argument.
And here's the other question, which I'm more interested in: how do you enjoy a game when you know that with every hit, another Ted Johnson may be in the making?
When we were 10 we didn't know what we know now. But armed with what I know, it's a lot harder to be a football fan these days. (That said, I haven't sworn it off completely.)
I'm clearly wavering a bit. A post doesn't have to have a definitive answer. Indeed, if I don't have a definitive answer, I shouldn't act like I do.
Agreed, but what threw me off was this: "Like I said, I argued for free will, and basically believe in it." I hear you though.
Right. Honestly I haven't read the Gladwell article yet. I know there's some cowardice in that hesitation. My first reaction when I even heard about the article was "he's just doing this to get attention." I don't want to confront what could be the truth, hell, maybe even what I KNOW to be the truth.
I really resented the game after I quit. But if it weren't for Premiership, fall sundays would be some of my favorite days of the year. I just don't want to deal with quitting that I guess.
You should read it. I think Gladwell's being a bit hyperbolic with the dog comparison, but you really should read it.
I agree with Persia. I usually find Gladwell to be incredibly facile and Panglossian, but I really liked this article.
No, I know. I will. Reality is just hard thing to face sometimes.
We talked about Earl Campbell and how busted up he was at the end of his career, but how he insisted that he'd do it all over again. Is he conditioned to believe that? How much social programming has led him to believe it was all worth it? Like I said, I argued for free will, and basically believe in it.
If you're actively playing in pro sports, you've been devoting dozens of hours each week to playing that sport since you were in grade school. It's your entire identity. So, what else are you going to do? There are only a few examples of pro athletes who find a new calling/career after the sports one is over. Getting to pro requires a crazy level of focus and dedication, usually to the exclusion of much else, that just doesn't leave room for considering options or consequences. I'd call it sorta free will.
Agreed, but what threw me off was this: "Like I said, I argued for free will, and basically believe in it." I hear you though.
Oops, that was for TNC above.
The identity issue is huge. I'm convinced that Favre's retirement waivering has a lot more to do with his identity than his "love of the game."
It's phrases like that that make me despise most sports writers.
I've never been a big football fan, but I've certainly watched my fair share of games. My question is: how long has this been known? Obviously, there is evolving science on the issue, and things like the sub-concussions that Gladwell reports may genuinely be news to people. But haven't the damaging effects of football been observable for quite some time?
So have we collectively (players, coaches, owners, fans, media) just been ignoring it, because we don't want to believe it?
I bring this up because free will or no (I'm a firm believer but was a terrible philosophy student so am ill-equipped to argue the point), the whole notion of conditioning v. choice v. consent is tough. I don't think the culture quite conditions players like dogs (or members of a cult), but it certainly encourages looking at injury only as an obstacle to further playing, rather than an effect on a person's body and therefore, future. Most coaches are surely not completely uncaring - who wants to see guys debilitated for the rest of their lives - but knowing the severity of any given injury in that moment can be tough. Players know they can be screwed up, but maybe not realize that every hit takes a toll.
Honestly, not that I don't care or feel for pro players, but my greater concern is for kids, who won't ever make serious bank for playing the game. It seems a lot of kids play football for some or most of their childhood and stop - how many of them are experiencing debilitating effects later?
If the sport can't be played at any level without these effects, then we have a serious reconsideration of the sport ahead of us.
I can't help but remember Dave Chappelle's recitation of Iceberg Slim's "bottom bitch" story and admire Jim Brown and Barry Sanders a little more.
Allow me to get my Marx on:
The NFL (and, arguably, the NCAA), are businesses; the playing field, the workplace; and the players, workers. Given this, I don't think it makes sense to talk about the dangers to players solely or even primarily in terms of free will vs. conditioning.
This is about workplace safety. To state 'Hey, these guys wanna be there' does not excuse the dangerous conditions under which these men labor. Miners have historically labored in dangerous conditions because they felt they had to; they formed unions (now, unfortunately, broken in too many places) to force owners to change those conditions.
It's time for the Players Association to step up and act like a damned worker, rather than company, union.
What protections would be put in place that would protect the player more? Would the players even agree to these protections? Even in certain jobs there are risks (see the Deadliest Catch), but plenty of people do it. People even do things like climb Mt. Everest (and pay over $50,000 for the opportunity) despite the risks.
I'm just saying that the players may be fine with the conditions which is why the players association has done nothing. Why would the union change conditions that the players are fine with?
There is a difference between recreation and work. Climbing Mt. Everest is, for most non-Nepalese, recreation; playing football in the NFL is work.
As to what should be done, well, on the Gladwell thread I mentioned the need for greater research, both longitudinal (of football players) and comparative (to hockey & rugby, say), with an eye to both short- and long-term safety.
I also think that the league could consider rules changes. I have no idea what those changes could or should be---I'm a fan, and have no particular expertise in these areas---but this is where I think the PA could step up: They ought to be able to come up with their own suggestions, and build those changes into contract negotiations.
This would, of course, take time. What to do in the interim? I don't know. Both the league and the PA could do a better job of tracking people now---and, of course, of taking care of them.
Amen, absurdbeats.
People will condition themselves to do things if they think it's in their interest. How many hours have you spent mastering your dps rotation in WoW? How quickly can you get a deathcoil off when you get jumped? Anything you can do without thinking about it is conditioned. That doesn't mean that conditioning is a bad thing, but I don't think anyone can reasonably argue that people have totally free will, or even mostly free will.
I don't see why there is an either/or to this issue of conditioning vs. free will. That is, it seems to oversimplify such an issue to think both aren't in play.
People rebel against conditioning all the time. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus. People kick substance addictions. What's more, having viewed the game of football, some players--how many times do we have to bring up the Emmitt Smith game against the Giants--respond to situations in which pain might be an obstacle because of their own personal passion, for which they are appropriately credited. Some players like Steve Young, who all his life lived to play football retire, however reckless their play appeared, when medical evidence shows it is no longer safe to play.
Certainly, genetic inheritance, environmental factors, might narrow an individual's options, but to say choice does not exist or is an illusion, from my perspective, cannot explain individual difference and rationalizes effects that are not necessarily inevitable.
An aside, there is a great short story by Octavia Butler, "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," which among other things explores this issue with all the late Ms. Butler's courageous insight.
Several years ago I was in Bombay for business, on and off for months at a time. One weekend I went with a friend to see a movie at an English theater. We were early and the weather was nice, so we walked around the arcades in the area for a while-- there were a lot of street vendors and such. After about ten minutes of strolling around in broad daylight in a pleasant neighborhood, we turned a corner and walked past a group of child prostitutes (same daylight, same neighborhood). They were children-- real children-- they looked pre-pubescent and should have been kicking soccer balls around a playground-- but their eyes were dead and their faces completely devoid of any emotion, just painted up like dolls to complement their bright clothing. As we walked past, a taxi pulled up and their pimp-- an enormously fat woman-- got out and started screaming at one of the girls. The rest looked on apathetically.
To this day, that moment is the single most tragic, heart-breaking, infuriating, exhausting, draining thing I have ever seen in person-- and that includes all of the daily tragedy of poverty and degradation of Bombay and similar cities.
Those kids were not people to that pimp or her driver. They were commodities.
I played football through high school varsity. My good friend and business partner played a while longer-- he was a college All-American and spent nine years in the League. He'd agree that NFL coaches and GMs do what they are paid to do, which includes making calculated choices about how to use players. Players know this, understand this, and quickly get used to this-- and they believe that that is why they are paid. There's basically two classes of guys: those who have to pay attention, and those who are basically guaranteed a job. For the former, the motivating dynamic is fear for a paycheck. For the latter, there is often a lot of tension, because it's hard for a young coach who never played pro ball to motivate guys who dominate grown men for a living. For the first group, there's some element of fear that could potentially relate to the pimp. But in general, at the pro level, I don't think there's any real comparison between NFL coaches and those who pimp children.
FWIW, my partner and I agree that there is basically NO reason for any boy to play tackle football before junior high at the earliest. Football is probably the only sport left where a kid can start playing in 11th grade for the first time, and still get a D-1 scholarship. If you are 8 years old, you can learn teamwork from soccer, lateral movement from tennis, conditioning from basketball, etc. I doubt there's a single coach at the under-12 level (if even that) who can teach actual football skills to kids-- so what's the point of forcing bad football habits on them at a young age?
Btw, my buddy thinks the dynamic between pro coaches/players and college coaches/players is very different. But I gotta bounce so I'll save it for another thread.
Ever since I read the Gladwell article I have wondered what you all would think of it. So glad I checked in.
The thing about the article that made me think I can never watch another football game again (and I'm not a huge fan, but do appreciate it) is the brain damage. If someone wants to go out there and get banged up every week, I think most anyone knows they are signing up for that - potential broken bones, screwed up backs, etc. And that seems like something you can knowingly take on. Take what you want and pay for it.
But Gladwell's article shows the extent of the brain damage, much of which occurs without concussions, but just from the repeated hits and nothing much shows up, until years later when you are 50 and have dementia.
And like with boxing, it is hard for me to buy the free will argument, because you see a disproportionate number of disadvantaged kids who end up in these sports. Not to say that disadvantaged kids can't exercise their free will - but it just seems to me that when rich white peoples' kids are boxing and playing defensive positions in the NFL in significant numbers, I'll believe that free will is really at work in the system.
and, yes, i know that talent has a lot to do with it and not just anyone can play defense in the NFL, but...
I have to argue for free will.
I'm 40 years old and I play rugby for a Third Division team, the bottom rung of the rugby ladder. I don't know that I've ever played a game in front of more than 100 non-players and I damn sure never made a nickel playing. My wife hates it, my kids are tired of being dragged to games, and I'm slowly destroying my body by continuing to play, but I'm having a hard time giving it up.
My ortho cleared me to play this week after taking two weeks off because of quadriceps tendinitis and I'm chomping at the bit to get back on the field.
The visceral thrill of playing is something that I have a difficult time describing. There's a slow burn of excitement when you arrive at the pitch and prepare to play; taping up, slipping on braces, and lacing up your boots. For a while you're standing around with your mates cracking jokes, maybe taking some practice kicks, fooling around, and then your Captain calls for the team to take a lap. The joking around stops. You're circled up and stretching, you begin to game plan.
In my case, I stick close to the other forwards particularly those who play in what is known as "the tight 5." (here's more on the tight five from a guy who plays in the same union as me, http://wesclark.com/rrr/tight_5.html) We run through our set pieces, giving each other a few knocks around to get the blood flowing and finally the starting lineup is called.
Depending on what I'm called upon to do a particular day, I pull on my jersey. 1, 3, 4, or 5 if I'm starting, 16, 17, 18, or 19 if I'm coming in off the bench. I step on the pitch and the concerns of the world disappear in an instant.
I am no longer a father or husband or neighbor or friend, I am a rugby player. I become part of a hive mind of 15 men that has one goal, to get and keep possession of an oblong ball. All I want to do is to push 15 other men, who wear the wrong color and have the audacity to think they may touch MY BALL, backwards until me or one of my mates presses that ball to the ground in the try zone. There is no pity, no pain, no fear; just me and 14 stout men moving in a violent but somehow beautiful organized chaos.
It doesn't matter about free will. It doesn't matter whether someone who is now brain-damaged "would do it all again." (Why should we give any weight at all to the opinion of someone who now has brain damage?) Many drug addicts would tell you the same thing anyway, so what.
I firmly believe that all Americans, at least, if not persons in less enlightened places, have a God-given right to be damned fools, whether by hiking out in the wilderness or 4-wheeling into the desert with inadequate water or climbing cliffs or playing football. Or whatever, so long as no one else is endangered. On this basis I would ban dog fighting (the dogs have no choices) but permit football.
But I'm an American too, and so I have the same privileges. As an American, what I don't want to be, personally, is an enabler of behavior I think is wrong. So I won't go to football games (or watch boxing matches, God forbid!) or otherwise fund people who think brain damage is perfectly OK so long as they get what Hill Rat calls a "visceral thrill." (And children, by whom I mean anyone under 18, should be prevented by force if necessary from doing such things.)
Get your visceral thrills on your own dime. And Godspeed.
The comments are already pretty deep on this one so I am not sure how many people will read this but I think when it comes to football its a lot more complex than a black and white discussion of whether it comes down to whether playing with pain/jury is a matter of free will or not. Now with younger kids in little league all the way up to maybe junior high you can say that its probably mostly about coercion. In those situations there really is not a lot of upside for the kids themselves in playing other than just for enjoyment. So when a little league coach is pushing a kid who is hurt to play I would say he is the most like a pimp.
But after you get to about high school age then players have their own motivations too to play with pain/injury. Whether its impressing the girls that they are "tough" or trying to attract the attention of college recruiters or in some cases just to prove it to themselves, a lot of these kids make their own decision to put themselves in that situation. Hell there are times when some coaches who are actually responsible will tell a kid whose hurt that they can't play only to have the kid go ballistic because in their mind they are ready.
Now I am not naive enough to say all coaches are that responsible, but there are more than you think. I know a lot of time coaches get branded as these a holes who only care about winning but in my experience by in large most of them care more about their players and getting them better than just winning games.
As players go on to higher levels again they have even more personal motivations. And on top of that they also usually have more safety nets as well. In college just about every team has a trainer and that trainer generally is going to error on the side of caution. Back in the day trainers were basically just puppets of the coaches but in modern times most of them have the ability to overrule any coach or player for that matter when it comes to player safety.
But even in that situation some guys will want to play when they probably shouldn't. They will lie to the trainer about how much pain they are in, they will lie about how much a hit has affected them. All because they want to get on that field and play. Again that doesn't mean the coaches aren't on their asses about playing too. But the players themselves have a lot more leeway now to wait until they are fully healed before they participate again and yet many of them do not take advantage.
Now when it comes to a story like Ted Johnson's you feel for the guy tremendously. But don't think that he wasn't also himself factoring in not wanting to lose his position and wanting to continue to make good money. No matter what Belicheck did to try to make him play hurt he had every opportunity and right to say no. The problem is the consequences that would have come with that decision. And the thing of it is that Ted Johnson had played so much that even if the Patriots didn't want him he would have had opportunities else where.
Again I am not absolving Belicheck here because I am pretty sure he DID pressure Johnson to get out there before he should have. What I am saying is that a pro player or for that matter most college players are not analagous to a prostitute in a pimp-prostitute dynamic. They have other options and for the most part they are made aware of those other options on an ongoing basis. Deciding to play with an injury isn't for any of them all or even mostly about being coerced into it. Its about them making a judgement for themselves about how they should handle the situation.
The one thing you have to remember about playing football is that nothing about it is really rational. Playing in an NFL game has been compared to being in a car wreck 30 or so times. But for 16 weeks guys line up and go through it year after year after year. For the people who have never played football would you willingly submit your body to 30 car crashes over a 3 hour period? Well, most people wouldn't. So pain and injury are pretty much a part of the game. So really when it boils down to it if you are going to say that somebody playing with a major injury is about coercion then you almost have to say that every guy playing the game in the pros is being coerced every single week.
Take it from somebody who took took Toradol shots for 10 weeks straight just to keep playing the game.
I definitely agree with you about how the dynamics change as players grow up. That's why I said before, I just don't think it makes sense for boys to play tackle (as opposed to flag) ball before junior high or possibly high school, even (maybe especially) if they are college prospects. And I don't think pro players are being pimped, though in college it might be a better analogy.
But about nothing really being rational, I wonder about something. I have heard guys say that most players in the NFL would play in the NBA if they could-- either they have the wrong body or didn't develop basketball skills early, but whenever the decision came, football was the best option for them to make it to the next level (HS or college). If that's true, I'd say that guys who go pro basically want to be pro athletes at an early age (as opposed to specifically being football players), and football is their best option-- so high school guys do what it takes to get to college, and college guys get what it takes to go pro, and bubble guys do what it takes to make the regular roster, etc. Basically every guy on an NFL roster was a star in some other high school sport. If the economics and availability weren't there, wouldn't a lot of those guys be playing baseball, or boxing, or playing soccer or something? I agree that the game itself is irrational at some level-- but isn't the _decision_ to play the game pretty rational, given the other choices at hand and the potential payoffs?
I can only speak for me and my experiences. I don't think most kids start off even thinking the NFL or even college is in the realm of possibility when they first start playing the game. They watch it on TV and they have their heros and they want to be the next so and so but not in their wildest imaginations is going pro possible. But they play, maybe because they like it, maybe because their parents want them to but for whatever reason they play. And as time goes on they get better and their body usually gets bigger and so it goes. But you have to think about how many guys get to the NFL after having gone to junior colleges or no name programs that draw less than some high school games in Texas. Most cats at Troy State don't necessarily think when they go there that the NFL is the likely next destination but both DeMarcus Ware and Osi Umenura played there. Most guys just want to play maybe until their junior or senior year and then they might actually be able to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Now don't get me wrong, there are some guys that seem like they are predestined for greatness. Say for instance Maurice Clarett. Everybody just assumed even when that kid was in high school that he would be an NFL guy some day. But the overwhelming majority of NFL guys didn't come up with that kind of shine behind them. They just loved the game, loved hitting people, loved hearing the roar of the crowd.
Now one thing about when people say NFL guys would play basketball if they had the chance, a lot of that is just about hubris because of the kind of outstanding athletes that are in the NFL. I have said many times that the caliber of athlete in the NFL blows the NBA away by far. I mean it isn't even close. NFL guys are on average, bigger, stronger, faster, quicker and can jump higher. But height is usually the factor. But that doesn't mean those guys would just have automatically ended up in the NBA. As athletic as many of them are, most of them couldn't hit a fat bear in the ass with basketball let alone a three pointer. So I am not sure that when people make that statement that it means what you think it does.
I was thinking about it a little differently-- kids love games at a young age for a variety of reasons. I agree that when a kid is 15 he generally has no idea if he's pro material-- but he does know that he's better than many of the guys he plays with, so if he's thinking about college (even JC or walking on at a small school), at some point he probably starts to focus on one sport more than others (obviously there are exceptions-- but a lot of kids make trade-offs like going to football camps instead of playing AAU summer ball, or leaving the track program to focus on off-season football training, etc.)
Now obviously there are guys who just love one sport to the exclusion of all others from a a very young age-- and probably that's even more the case in basketball and baseball, since those guys seem to start specializing earlier and earlier.
But it seems to me that for a lot of reasons, few athletes are going to focus on track instead of football, or soccer instead of baseball, if they have a chance at playing one of the "big 3" money sports at the college level. Maybe because they like the money sports better, or maybe because they're pushed by family or coaches or schools, or maybe because they think they have a better shot at playing at the next level (especially when choosing among "money" sports, e.g., a guy goes to School A where he can play baseball as a freshman, rather than to School B where he'll redshirt in football), or maybe because the "money" sports have more scholarships or walk-on spots and better recruiting programs that identify prospects earlier and steer them better.
Probably it's a combination of all those factors that varies by person, but I think it ties a little into the free will vs. conditioning question TNC posed. If a guy could play college football or college soccer, and he chooses football, is it because he intrinsically enjoys football more, or could it also be partly external-- football is more popular than soccer, which means more push from outside forces (coaches, parents, friends, recruiters), and also more potential to make money? (And the popularity and money reinforce each other-- more popularity means more money means more air time means more popularity, reaching all the way down to youth leagues).
Even if the athlete has no pro prospects, I can see how the way the system is set up would steer them to focus on the "money" sport where they have the most potential to play the most.
I don't know if I'm making sense. But thanks for your earlier thoughts anyway.
(I'm not touching the "which league has better athletes" debate. Are there any guys left in the NBA who played high school varsity football anymore? Seems like they have to start specializing in basketball when they're 6 years old....)
Thanks sg; I always like reading your commentary; and it seems more than appropriate that you chimed in here.
Welcome. Just hate I came in so late to the thread.
If I could stick a knife in my heart
Suicide all over the stage...
Would it satisfy you?
Would it slide on by you?
Would you think the boy's insane?
I know it's only rock n roll, but I like it!"
The public spectacle of self-destruction has a long and dishonored history, going back at least to the contests of the gladiators in ancient Rome. Even NASCAR watchers are said to be hoping for a horrible crash.
So long as there is a market for it, so long will there be people who for whatever reason are willing to supply that market.
It comes back to us. How much fun is it, should it be, to watch men incur irreparable brain damage, over and over again?
While from a philosophic point of view there are problems with the notion of free will. From a more every day persepective we have a sense of what kinds of cases we should count as free. And there are real differences between the child prostitution case and the football case.
What makes the prostitution case work is that pimps prey on girls who do not have a family or outside support system. That allows the pimp to effectively control the inputs to the victim who is both young and has no one to turn to. It is central to the process that the pimp prevents the child prostitute from having outside relationships that could offer a different perspective. In fact there is usually a grouping of people so that the message is reinforced.
The football conditioning may start young. But in all but rare cases the coaches simply do not have the kind of control over the players that could reasonably count as threatening to free will. (There might be cases in which the parents work with the high school coach or the parent is the coach). And then the player passes on to new people who might have similar views but lack the continuity. So in general the intuition that free will makes the difference seems right.
I missed that article, but it's worth noting that a couple of studies on the West coast estimated the average age of entry into prostitution as 14 or younger, and that better than 90% of those in one study reported both physical and sexual abuse prior to leaving home. I worked for a feminist group that helped women get out of the sex industry back in the 1990s, and the free will question came up with great frequency and vehemence around that work. For my part, I don't know what the free will distinction really means: all choices are constrained by some set of internal and external factors, and if you're lucky enough that those constraints don't chafe you, it looks something like absolute freedom. But the poles aren't real - no choice is entirely free, none entirely forced.
Maybe I've been reading you too much, TNC, but this whole post just reminded me of white populism.
Well, first it made me think the Republican Party (how, often, Republican voters vote in direct opposition to their own self interest) and that led me to white populism.
It seems to me that in certain poor, white areas of the country white populism is practically bred into children. I remember being in high school and not being gay myself, simply being a member of the gsa got me tagged a faggot. And I would think that in some areas that works racially as well. Where if you don't subscribe to white populism you are in many ways ostracized. It is just easy to sit there while your father listens to rush limbaugh and not think anything is wrong when he says that AIDS in africa is a scam. People are conditioned that it is their enemies who are more important than what is best for their situation.
Their enemies being the evil liberals who want government to control them by taking away their guns and giving out reparations through health care.
This comment may be a little sloppy as I'm still working it all out in my head. But this is just what occurred to me while reading the post. I hope it's not condescending. It feels like it might be.
Thanks for this discussion TNC..I on't know what to think. But I do know that all the boys I knew growing up in ATL played football, and I don't want any more of those boys to damage themselves in this way playing a game. They should at least have full knowledge of the risks involved.
I think of all those parents pushing their pee wees (1st graders playing tackle football) had to watch a documentary on the subject before signing the kids up, less kids would get "signed-up".
Where is the free will when you are 6?
In some communities it is football or nothing.