Three quarters of a century ago, the preeminent cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”
Baseball favors a measured, pastoral rhythm, Barzun wrote. Baseball has a democratic cast, requiring every player to come to bat, even pitchers who usually are not very good at it. Much is left to chance in baseball, and this keeps Americans who like taking chances on the edges of their seats. There is no game clock in baseball. Baseball leaves fans and spectators time for conversation. Baseball’s rules provide checks and balances. Placing the mound out 90 feet evens the odds between batter and pitcher. A bit like the United States Constitution balances governance, Barzun thought. So the game fit the country. That was then.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1954, and baseball, once key to understanding the currents of our character and our psychology, has slipped to a distant third in popularity. Basketball has climbed past baseball to the number two slot, with about one and a half million watching a game on television. But a single regular season football game now attracts 20 or 25 million American viewers, and that adds up to about 150 million football fans in the United States. It’s no contest.
Baseball, played in a park, tuned to slow, summer, rural rhythms when a third of Americans still lived on farms. Football fits a corporate, urbanized, keyed-up America. Football plays out in bursts of rigidly timed intervals. Football is minutely planned and efficiently managed. Artificial intelligence now sits alongside assistant coaches, helping them crunch data in the booth high above the field. Football makes players specialists not just in their roles in the game, but in their very bodies. (No one, even from a distance, will mistake an offensive tackle for a sleek defensive safety.) Where baseball is leisurely, football is explosive and best understood among the predatory sports, Barzun thought. Football requires violent physical contact on every play.
Chuck Klosterman, a sports essayist, has written a wry and intelligent meditation simply titled Football. He offered an audacious prediction. In another six or seven decades, he believes, football will have gone the way of fencing, horseracing, and boxing. Culture changes. Sports come and go.
We no longer routinely carry swords, and so fencing is niche as niche can be. Hundreds of thousands of horses once traveled American city streets. So we loved watching them race. And boxing was once a manly rite of passage; we took our lumps and gave them. Prizefighting, the pinnacle of that spirit, now festers with brain injury and corruption, living mostly in pay-per-view. Mixed martial arts satisfy bloodlust for some.
Collision Is the Name of the Game
On the eve of the season opener here in my football-involved hometown, I tested the notion of the game’s eventual eclipse on several fans, fellow panting gym rats. This question invited a chorus of derision. The consensus? No way. But when inquiring about the epidemic of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) among famous NFL players—Frank Gifford, Junior Seau, Ken Stabler, Brett Favre, perhaps Jason Kelce, so he believes—the confident opinion faltered.
One mother didn’t mind me asking a follow-up about her son, an enthusiastic hockey-playing third grader, what she would say the day he asked for permission to play football. Hockey has its own injury profile, she acknowledged, but football raised special concern for her because the toll of playing football is cumulative. (She has a medical background.) She pointed out that it is not just the concussion that knocks players silly that bodes ill; it is the micro-concussion of routine collision that adds up. And collision, as the TV commentator might say, is the name of the game.
But Football Fosters Fortitude
It is easy to list the virtues of the game. Football depends upon teamwork, as every player has a vital task, even the unexalted linemen who make the big plays possible. (I watch the front line with special care in the weekly contests, having played the line both on offense and defense back in the late Paleolithic.) But bolstering fortitude may be chief among the bonuses of playing football.
Football is not for the unresilient. Football players learn to huddle up and bounce back. And further, playing football entails steeling oneself to pain, a kind of bravery that eludes us in our comfortable, protected lives now. Football teaches a player to shake it off. That lesson proves close to invaluable. How else can we learn it?
But…
But the compounding effects of cumulative impact that accompany blocking and tackling almost certainly cannot be shaken off in the long run. Football is dangerous. The bad effects linger. The longer players play, the worse the effects.
The clinical picture has sharpened since I wrote about it four seasons ago. The most alarming study, released this August, found that of those former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 who had arranged to have their brains autopsied, 91.4 percent tested positive for CTE.
So, what are we to do with such an alarming finding? Protective equipment might be improved to the point where players are padded like the Michelin Man. Klosterman poses the pointed question, “Why has society coalesced around a sport that wrecks people’s brains?” We like the strategies and marvel at the skills, of course. But his answer is subtler. Though football is not a blood sport like boxing, it is still the near prospect of the devastating hit that makes the spectator sport compelling.
The Future
So. Should football be banned? Nonsense. It is hard to imagine Ohio in fall without football. The same can be said for Michigan, Nebraska, Texas, and Florida. We are conditioned to assume that popularity entails permanence. Klosterman envisions our current life as the future’s history.
And that makes it easier to picture that the millions of individual family decisions over the next three generations will begin to starve football of talent and allure. Those mothers and fathers who steer their high school kids to safer sports will shrink the pool of gifted recruits. When college football—the feeder system—eventually dwindles, the professional game will soon shrivel.
In that projection, football will end not with a ban, but with bare, emptied stadiums.
The mother of the young hockey player got a laugh from the group with a further speculation. By the year 2100, she predicted, not implausibly, sentient robots would be playing the game. “And they wouldn’t need helmets.” But that is the crux, isn’t it?
