Is football really a ‘moral abomination’ like this New Yorker writer says?
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By Alex Manley
Football is America’s favorite sport. But it might just be bestselling author and New Yorker essayist Malcolm Gladwell’s least favorite. In a clip from an interview Gladwell did with Bloomberg TV’s Emily Chang (scheduled to go live at 8:30 p.m. tonight) the Blink author tore a strip off tossing the ol’ pigskin around. Here’s perhaps the most compelling quote:
“Can you point to another industry in America which, in the course of doing business, maims a third of its employees?”
In addition to excoriating the NFL for the rate at which its players end up with serious medical problems after their football careers, Gladwell also condemned the league for its handling of the Ray Rice saga and suggested that it reflects how the league is out of touch with reality and that football is “socializing young men into a culture of violence.”
His conclusions? As parents increasingly push their kids towards other, less violent sports, fewer of them will go on to will play college football and professional football will eventually die off and become a shadow of its former self.
Do you agree that the NFL needs to do more to protect its current players? Is the game fixable or will it ultimately become “ghettoized” as Gladwell claims?
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This article originally appeared on AskMen.
For more from AskMen, see:
HOW LEARNING TO COOK WILL KICKSTART YOUR WEIGHT LOSS
WHY WEIGHT LIFTING IS BETTER THAN CARDIO FOR FAT LOSS
THESE MEN AREN’T JUST WINNING ON THE FIELD – THEY’RE WINNING AT LIFE
Photo credit:Ed Yourdon/flickr
A lot of people are expecting that these shocking statistics will lead to some sort of national outrage against the sport. The NFL certainly is afraid of that. I’m not so sure that’s a real danger. Most fans and players will just shrug and say, “so what?”
Maybe revealing all this maiming will make football as obscure as boxing. No one ever made any money from showing boxing on TV, right? : – )
Pretty shocking accusations, but hard to disagree with most of his argument…