My friend was watching Monday-night football with his three young sons when the infamous video of football player Ray Rice appeared during halftime commentary.
His boys, 6, 8 and 10, knew nothing at the time of the February incident involving the Baltimore Ravens running back, or the hidden camera that caught Rice punching out his then-fiancee in an elevator.
Except now they did.
“My kids aren’t so sheltered that they don’t know about violence,” said my friend, Craig Foreman, a high-school girls basketball coach and history teacher.
“But this was hard, as they kept showing the video clip, the hard punch and Rice dragging her out of the elevator. My boys knew Rice, that he was a great runner. To see him like this was hard on them.”
My friend did his best to say the right thing. He told his sons people make mistakes. He told them even sports heroes make mistakes, and Rice made a big one. He told them no one should ever hit a woman, or anyone for that matter, unless it’s in self defense.
Craig’s red-blooded American sons, avid sports fans who play basketball, baseball, flag football and soccer, still had trouble understanding.
“The video was so real. And they were in shock,” my friend said. “They kept saying ‘He is so strong, why would he do that to her?’ It was one of those moments I dread as a dad where I saw a piece of innocence lost in all three.”
I imagine conversations like this playing out in homes throughout the country as emerging stories of abuse from within the ranks continue to cast a dark shadow over the powerful NFL. The most-watched sport in America, football is a game many kids hold in reverential regard. It’s a sport many of them play: About 285,000 kids ages five-to-15 belong to organized football leagues supported by the largest American youth football organization, Pop Warner.
I imagine conversations like this being difficult for us parents.
I also imagine them being confusing for our children.
Because what we aren’t saying, what we’re leaving out of the discussion about immoral behavior, is the fact that football itself, especially pro ball, might be immoral, too.
Not all football players hit their wives or children. But all pro players are trained up to be vicious and destructive, and many end up destroying their brains and dying early in the process.
Consider the New Orleans Saints’ bounty program, in place the year the team won the Super Bowl in 2010, wherein players allegedly were paid bonuses for hard hits and for injuring other players. Consider emerging evidence about concussions and dementia, the cumulative effect of so many hits on the brain. Robert Stern, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University, says head-to-body football slams are equivalent to a car traveling 35 mph into a brick wall, and that pro players sustain these kinds of hits 1,000 to 1,500 times per year. Detroit Lions running back Reggie Bush, too, likens an NFL game to “being in a car crash.”
The NFL a year ago awarded damages of $765 million to 4,500 players, many of whom suffered a variety of brain-related ailments, including Alzheimer’s, who had accused the league of concealing the dangers of concussions and playing injured players. After decades of dodging public concerns about the effects of football on the human body, the NFL also recently acknowledged football players have a 30 percent greater chance of Alzheimer’s or other dementia than the general population. The average life expectancy for pro players, is 55 years, 25 years below the national average, according to a University of North Carolina study.
The game of football is brutal and punishing. Yet season after season, we not only celebrate and glorify it, we send boys as young as 5, weighing as little as 35 pounds, to its midget leagues. Flag football and midget-league football play is decidedly different from a matchup between 350-pound adult defenders. Yet here is where young men begin to learn what it means to go helmet to helmet, shoulder to shoulder and to take the opponent down before he takes you. Here is where our sons begin to study, carefully scrutinize, revere and emulate the professionals, to learn the terms “smash mouth” and “snot bubble” — a phrase that suggests hitting another player so hard, you create a bubble of snot.
Here, too, is where their brain tissue can start degenerating before it’s had a chance to fully form: Eighty percent of all organized youth sports concussions occur during football, says Dr. Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University Medical School and author of “Concussion and Our Kids: America’s Leading Expert on How To Protect Young Athletes and Keep Sports Safe.”
Partly in response to developing research about concussions, Pop Warner two years ago announced upgraded safety rules for its young players that include limited contact time during practice. Certain drills are forbidden, including head-on blocking and tackling from three yards apart. The NFL has also instituted stronger youth safety initiatives, including a helmet replacement program for underprivileged populations. The NFL last spring also instituted a number of new player-safety rules, including prohibiting the defense from blocking below the waist during scrimmage kicks.
Critics, meanwhile, say such rules will never be enough for a multi-billion sport that celebrates gladiator-like violence, that cheers on the hardest hits in “the pit,” that uses terminology like “knocked him silly,” “headed into battle,” “had his bell rung,” “got his clock cleaned.”
The continued violence of football is what propelled NPR Weekend Edition host Scott Simon this weekend to tell an ESPN commentator he won’t be watching football anymore. The continuing violence of football is what prompted President Obama to tell a New Yorker reporter earlier this year that if he had boys, he would not support their playing pro ball. The sustained violence and corruption of the sport is why my sister, a diehard Saints fan who lives in New Orleans, told me she is done watching the game.
The continued violence of football is also why I told both my boys, now 17 and 25, when they were younger, “I’m sorry, but, no, you can’t play football.” It was the only extracurricular activity I ever told any of my kids they couldn’t do. Frustrated at the time, they have since thanked me.
That Monday night after my friend’s sons saw the graphic video depicting Rice punching out his wife, dragging her halfway out of the elevator and then stepping over her motionless body like a bag of trash on the sidewalk, each of them said a prayer before going to bed.
They prayed 27-year-old Rice, once the belle of Baltimore and the Ravens, would get help.
They prayed his then-fiancée, now his wife, would be okay.
The eldest son also prayed he would never have to see such real-life violence in his own world.
Given that, he might want to consider praying for one more thing: a world in which there is no football.
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