Now that the weather is turning cooler, I can watch NFL football without feeling guilty about forsaking precious outdoors time by becoming a bystander to a ghoulish goulash of athleticism, commentary, celebrity, and advertisement that’s been simmered in a stock of atavistic brutality. It’s football — America’s game!
Yesterday I watched the NY Jets — the scourge of the NFL, if you want to know my opinion– badly beat a beleagured Buffalo Bills. Initially I was confused by the pink accroutements donned by the football players, because pink really does not mesh with the Bills’ royal blue and orangy-red, but after seeing the Buffalo Jills all decked out in pink cheerleading gear I remembered that the NFL wore pink last year to honor Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And of course I’m not some pro-breast cancer maniac, but the irony of pro-football raising awareness about breast cancer whilst forcefully using their bodies to pummel, clobber, and projectile tackle one another is rather striking. Because I swear these NFL players are getting heftier, stronger, faster, and longer-limbed. And every year, it seems like more and more players get driven off the field on the flatbed cart like some big dumb wounded animal.
Also yesterday, I felt an actual twinge of pity for Philadelphia Quarterback Micheal Vick as he became the cream cheese in a Redskin sandwich. Strangely, I can’t watch boxing because it’s too brute but football doesn’t phase me. Watching Vick’s upper-body getting flattened made me wonder about a society where dogfighting and animal cruelty is taboo but football is the national spectator sport. Here is a man who was disallowed from participating in his savage sport as a punishment for essentially engaging in the canine analog of football. We are the bloodthirsty spectators, ignoring the fact that the men who play football for an extended period of time will almost certainly develop brain damage.
So how is it that I — a shy woman who votes left, listens to and plays classical music, practices yoga and meditation, gives money to Doctors Without Borders, and has the capacity to literally lose consciousness at the sight of blood — can watch football, knowing that these men are battering themselves into a slow or fast demise? Sigh. I honestly don’t know. Football ignites almost a primal emotion within me, and I have no doubt that if I lived in the Roman Empire, I would in an amphitheater, cheering for the pursuit of gore and glory.
