Winter 2012 in The Feminist Psychologist
Tales from the Front Lines of Mothering
by Misty Hook
My beloved son is 9 years old and he absolutely loves football. He and my husband participate in several Fantasy Football leagues, they watch football games together every Sunday during season and he loves to play. The last several years he’s been playing flag football. This I enjoy. I even played intramural flag football myself in college. It’s fun, good exercise, a nice display of teamwork, everyone can play and, best of all, no one gets hurt. If it were only about flag football, I wouldn’t worry. But it isn’t. There are so many things wrong with not only professional football but football at increasingly younger ages as well.
I’ll start with professional football. In 1905, a University of Chicago professor called football a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” Yes, exactly but now it’s even worse. For the moment, I’ll forego my many objections to the negative climate impact, the blow to communities, the crass consumerism and the unimaginably large sums of money that fund a sport instead of the needy. Instead, I’ll focus on the game itself. If you strip football down to its bare essentials, what you have is a bunch of grown men hitting each other for the sake of a ball. Like boxing, it’s the glorification of violence but on a much grander scale. This is not something I want my son thinking is a good thing.
Research has shown repeatedly that watching violence, hearing about it or even being in the same room with an object used specifically for violence (like a gun) increases the chances that a person will be violent themselves. Thus, is it any wonder that football players exhibit startlingly high rates of violent behaviors off the field? They frequently are accused of things like rape, domestic violence, assault, dog fighting, sexual harassment and sometimes even murder. An astute observer might note that the majority of these violent behaviors are directed toward those who have less power in our society. You know, like women. As a mother, I work hard at getting my son to see the gender disparities in society and to regard women as equal partners in the world. I don’t really want to tell him what rape is (how I wish I never had to!) but what else can I tell him about why I want Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback of the Steelers and twice accused of rape, to lose the SuperBowl? And I am left to explain how, even though justice is supposedly blind, people who have money and a marketable commodity (their athletic talent) can get away with doing things that are wrong, especially if these things are done to women.
Even with all of this, the violence off the field pales in comparison to what happens on the field. At the end of the day, you’ve got a bunch of overly muscled men hitting each other with as much force as possible and it takes its toll. In addition to the general bodily injuries, they’re now finding (although this could not truly be a surprise) that football is affecting the brain as well. Researchers recently linked football-related concussions with higher rates of depression, mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, chronic traumatic encephalopathy — a disease caused only by head trauma that typically results in progressive cognitive decline — has been found in the brain tissue of many deceased players, several of whom committed suicide because one of the symptoms of this is crushing depression. If that’s not bad enough, the truly scary thing is that experts believe it's caused not just by concussions but also by subconcussive brain trauma. In football parlance, this means little hits. The kind of hits my son would be getting if he decided to play tackle.
I’ve been lucky that my son has been content to play just flag football and not “advance” to tackle. However, the pressure to play “real” football gets stronger the older you get. My son is now starting to feel that pressure in that he can no longer play for his old coach and team unless he plans on playing tackle. He wants to do it and my husband is willing to let him (although he understands the risks, he also played when he was young) so I am the only hold-out. So far I am holding the line, saying no and continuing to speak out against the evils of tackle football and football culture in general but it isn’t easy. Oftentimes I feel like an outsider yet my son’s mental and physical health may depend on my perseverance. Maybe my refusal to give in will teach him what true strength – not just what he sees on the field – looks like. If that happens, both he and I will have won.