Garry Wills: Blood Lust and the Super Bowl
[Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His latest book, Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer, was published in October 2010.]
...If we look back at photos from the past—say, the era of the football hero Red Grange in the 1920s—it is surprising to see how little protected the players were, with leather skull-cap helmets and minimal padding of the shoulders. But the players now are bigger, faster, steroid-enhanced, and trained to superhuman feats. The Packers’ defensive line for this year’s Super Bowl weighs on average 320 pounds. Besides, the equipment supposedly protecting these giants amounts to lethal weaponry—big crash-impact helmets and semi-metallic shoulder pads, which can be steered into opponents with tank-like impetus. Protections become projectile armaments.
This “protection” is like the boxing gloves mandated by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules in 1867. Some supposed they were meant to protect a fighter’s hands. Their real function was to make it possible to strike at an opponent’s head with maximum force. Back in the days of bare-knuckle fights, the only way to do real damage to another man’s head, without crippling oneself, was to break his nose with the heel of the hand. Otherwise, the long bouts were waged with wallops to the muscle-padded torso. The gloves made it possible to score knockouts to the head—and to do that head permanent damage, registered in the high degree of dementia among fighters.
The same “gain” has been achieved for football with the heavy helmet. When the amount of concussions—and the possibility of law suits—began to disturb owners and referees, some new guidelines were used against head-to-head collisions. More penalties began to be called. The violent headhunter James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers was fined $75,000 for a vicious helmet-to-helmet hit on Mohamed Massaquoi of the Cleveland Browns. But fans, protesting, sent the millionaire player donations to pay his fine, and a picture of his mayhem was sold in gift shops as a souvenir. Players and others claimed that violence is the essence of football. When a knee injury made the Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler withdraw from this year’s NFL championship, he was called “wussy” and denounced on Twitter by his fellow NFL players. Playing through pain is the point of the game, and broken bodies are the price of fame. Your whole future life does not matter compared with the game....
Read entire article at NYRB
...If we look back at photos from the past—say, the era of the football hero Red Grange in the 1920s—it is surprising to see how little protected the players were, with leather skull-cap helmets and minimal padding of the shoulders. But the players now are bigger, faster, steroid-enhanced, and trained to superhuman feats. The Packers’ defensive line for this year’s Super Bowl weighs on average 320 pounds. Besides, the equipment supposedly protecting these giants amounts to lethal weaponry—big crash-impact helmets and semi-metallic shoulder pads, which can be steered into opponents with tank-like impetus. Protections become projectile armaments.
This “protection” is like the boxing gloves mandated by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules in 1867. Some supposed they were meant to protect a fighter’s hands. Their real function was to make it possible to strike at an opponent’s head with maximum force. Back in the days of bare-knuckle fights, the only way to do real damage to another man’s head, without crippling oneself, was to break his nose with the heel of the hand. Otherwise, the long bouts were waged with wallops to the muscle-padded torso. The gloves made it possible to score knockouts to the head—and to do that head permanent damage, registered in the high degree of dementia among fighters.
The same “gain” has been achieved for football with the heavy helmet. When the amount of concussions—and the possibility of law suits—began to disturb owners and referees, some new guidelines were used against head-to-head collisions. More penalties began to be called. The violent headhunter James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers was fined $75,000 for a vicious helmet-to-helmet hit on Mohamed Massaquoi of the Cleveland Browns. But fans, protesting, sent the millionaire player donations to pay his fine, and a picture of his mayhem was sold in gift shops as a souvenir. Players and others claimed that violence is the essence of football. When a knee injury made the Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler withdraw from this year’s NFL championship, he was called “wussy” and denounced on Twitter by his fellow NFL players. Playing through pain is the point of the game, and broken bodies are the price of fame. Your whole future life does not matter compared with the game....