Liam Day wonders how parents letting a 5 year-old play football is much different than the “tanorexic” mother who put her 5 year-old in a tanning bed.
Two weeks ago I wrote on the death of a 43-year old former athlete who died of leukemia. Here I write about the death of a 43-year old former athlete who died at his own hands.
Junior Seau played linebacker in the NFL for almost twenty years and did it almost as well as anyone else ever has. His suicide comes as a shock to many fans. It may come as a wake up call too.
Much of the commentary written in the wake of his death has focused on the likelihood that brain trauma suffered hit after hit, game after game, season after season, contributed to Seau’s death. Andre Waters, a former NFL running back, committed suicide in 2006 at age 44. An analysis of his brain revealed that it looked like an 85-year old man’s, one, moreover, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
This begs many questions. Is it any longer safe to play football? Is there anything the NFL can do to make playing football safer? Are we, the league’s fans, complicit in the premature deaths of the players we cheer for and whose jerseys we buy? Perhaps more fundamentally, at what age is it appropriate to allow children to begin playing the sport?
None of these questions are exactly new. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker a number of years ago comparing football to dogfighting. The NFL’s television ratings continued to soar.
Yes, there has been and will be much handwringing over the next few weeks, but, I guarantee, as soon as summer camp opens, all will be forgotten. Fans will gear up for their fantasy football drafts, reporters will file stories about whether the Saints can overcome the suspension of their coach and four players or if the Packers and Patriots did enough during the offseason to shore up their defenses, and the owners will probably even go back to pushing for an 18-game regular season, which, if anything should be clear by this point, isn’t in the best interest of the players’ health.
I’m not sure what it will take to make a dent in the NFL’s popularity. And I’m not sure what it says about our society that, at the dawn of the 21st century, football reigns supreme in America’s athletic firmament. The only other sport that approaches it is car racing.
Of course, football isn’t the only violent sport. It isn’t even the most violent. That designation would have to go to boxing or ultimate fighting, but boxing’s popularity has been declining for 40 years and I can’t imagine, or perhaps I don’t want to imagine, that UFC will ever be anything other than a sport on our society’s fringe.
Football, though? The Super Bowl has become our national holiday. College football wields an influence over our state colleges and universities that undermines their missions. Perhaps the best television drama of the last decade was about the travails of a high school football coach in a town whose raison d’être seemed to be little more than to support the high school football team, a show based on a movie based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a real town. Pop Warner football is a national organization with more than 400,000 participants as young as 5.
Think about that. 5-year-olds playing football. It approaches child abuse. One of the most popular stories on the internet last week was about the tanorexic mother who brought her 5-year-old daughter to the tanning salon. She had her daughter taken from her by child protective services. We should do no less to the parents who sign their 5-year-old sons up to play Pop Warner football. What, really, is the difference? Both parents are making decisions on behalf of their children, knowingly exposing them to activities that, though legal for adults, pose significant health risks that are now well-documented.
I have heard the argument before from football fans, who attempt to absolve themselves of complicity in the harm being done to the players who entertain them on Sundays during the fall, that the men who put themselves in harm’s way are adults who have made the decision to play football of their own free will. Some say that to them the trade seems reasonable, a trade that they themselves might even make if they had the talent, that in exchange for a shortened life they’d happily take the riches and fame football affords.
But NFL players don’t just materialize fully formed on our television sets as 21-year old rookies. They’ve been playing the game for years, some since they were as young as 5. Is a 5-year old capable of exercising his free will in the choice to play football? Is a 12-year old? Is a 16-year old?
We have any number of laws proscribing the choices children and adolescents can make to engage in activities that are deemed bad or potentially harmful to them. Children cannot drink, they cannot smoke, depending on the state, they cannot engage in sexual intercourse with adults until they are 16 or 18. As a society, we have passed these laws because we understand that, developmentally, children have not the necessary faculty to weigh the dangers these activities pose and make the decisions on their own. In short, they lack full frontal lobe development. Football should be treated no differently.
Photo courtesy of jdanvers
About Liam Day
If you really want to prevent children from being harmed and abused, forget about a law against football and go for something that affects far, far, far more kids – create a law against parents feeding their five year olds “chicken” nuggets and fries (and similar nutrition free, fat and sugar laden non-food).
The classic zero nutrition, fat and sugar laden American fed to American children does far, far, far more damage to millions of more children than football ever will – since statistically about 0% of children will make it to the NFL, but 50% will become unnecessarily obese and, as a result, suffer diabetes, heart disease, cancer, gout, and many other illnesses – as a direct result of eating the crap too many children are fed, starting as toddlers or younger. By five years old they are absolutely hooked on that crap.
This is meant to be slightly humorous but cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are no joke. So, yeah, concussions are a problem but a tiny one compared to many children’s diets and sedentary lifestyle.
I think there are a few issues that get conflated here, and I’d like to try and parse them out.
First, the damage done to football players in terms of shortened life span really only applies to a small number of football players. Few boys that play in the junior football leagues will actually make their high school teams. Fewer of them will be good enough to continue to play in college. And a tiny percentage of the college players will actually make it to the NFL.
The real damage is only traced (at present) to NFL players, which are going to represent the smallest portion of 5-year-olds that pick up a football (because there are at least 3 major rounds of cuts to get there). As a result, I’m just not sure how proximate the damage is between “has ever played football” and “shortened life span.”
I think the next real issue has to do with volition. The author suggests that playing football is not a “choice” made by a 5 year old. I cannot speak for the author, but when I was 5, I desperately wanted to play baseball. It looked really fun, and the people who all played it said they liked playing it. Now, maybe I only wanted to play baseball because it was the sport most watched in my parent’s home, but make no mistake: I wanted to play it.
The final issue seems like it would be about “trade offs.” Football can be a great way for children to gain access to a college education that they may not otherwise have access to. This cannot be ignored. Is it dangerous? Sure. But so is the military, and most of us are okay with ROTC paying for college in exchange for service.
Mike,
It’s funny. I was thinking about ROTC (and even more so Junior ROTC) as I was writing the post and how it fits in with youth football. It’s a fair question.
As for the fact that the real damage is only traced (at present) to NFL players, I wonder whether that isn’t due to the fact that most of the research in this area has focused on former NFL players. Perhaps this is an area in which the research needs to be pushed down to the younger levels of competition.
As for volition, is it volition if a person cannot fully weigh the “trade offs” of which you speak? A lot of kids would choose to smoke and drink because it looks fun. Would we claim that making those choices truly represents volition? Would we let them do it?
Despite what might be considered a pat closing, I do recognize that these questions are not easy ones to parse. And I have to disclose that I’m a big Patriots fan. They are the Boston team I follow most religiously. That being said, the goal of my piece was to raise these questions in the hope that more people will begin to parse rather than blithely ignore them.
Thanks for the comment.
Liam
Full disclosure: I enjoy football. Particularly pro football, where the players get paid for the risks they take. Sure, the average career is short and health issues can certainly linger past the day when your career ends. But pay-for-play is more honest than the date rape and fag jokes atmosphere of the college racket, and woe to the kid who whose promising high school career is ended by injury.
However, my wife has said she’ll forbid any tackle football playing by our sons, and I’m on board with that. I’d much rather see them end up as the doctor than the player.
It’s no secret that football does a lot of what boxing does: organized mayhem and a career opportunity for poor kids who are wiling to sacrifice their bodies. The crowd oohs and aahs over the big hit. We all do. The thing is, football wraps itself in the flag, old fashioned masculine virtues, and martial valor, while boxing is disreputable, fixed, and vulgar. Football is Dixie and the wholesome Midwest. Boxing is Las Vegas. Now, after spying, bountying, and concussions, it’s not so clear. Will the next performance enhancing drug scandal get swept under the rug? Those drugs certainly contribute to the punishment that players take.
At the five year old level though, the hits aren’t much. It’s like gateway football.
Oh, and btw: participation trophies for five year olds are not the end of the republic.
I think everyone is jumping the gun on Junior Seau. It’s estimated that roughly 80 men commit suicide each day in the US. So unless you are claiming that the other 79 or so that day killed themselves because that were accountants, carpenters,firefighters etc., let’s let the facts come out. An uncomfortable truth about our soceity is that we’ve always enjoyed watching young men compete in ‘Gladiator’ rolls (NFL, WWE, MMA) and we treat them as ‘Disposable’. After all, when one player can’t go on ‘ we give him a ‘Special Night’ and send him off, to be replaced by someone younger and never to be heard from again. The game must go on!
I think this is an interesting question. Penn & Teller had an episode of Bullshit where they talk about the fear a lot of people have about violence in video games making kids be violent in real life. At the end they basically asked this hypothetical question – what if video games had been invented before football? Watching someone play video games (even violent ones) was a huge industry, with teams and it was aired on television and everything? Then along comes someone who suggests that actually, a better sport would be to actually play football in real life. Everyone would be out of their minds with worry about the violence and the injury.
I enjoy watching professional football just as millions of others but I also occasionally watch rugby, a brutal contact sport. It’s one hell of a game – no pads, no helmets and so far as I know no CTE. If rugby were promoted on a level with football more people might begin watching, it could possibly replace football – and head injuries might go bye-bye. Boxing? Trash the gloves. Bare handed boxing would reduce head trauma – CTE – maybe eliminate it altogether. Lots of broken hands and fingers, though.