Football: A gladiatorial sport

By: Brendan Monroe

Posted: 10/30/09

It was an otherwise ordinary October day when Ryne Dougherty, a 16-year-old linebacker at Montclair High School in northern New Jersey, tackled the opposing team's ball carrier. The tackle itself was not anything special-it was not replayed on ESPN, or even noted on the team's post-game report-except for one thing. Dougherty, a junior at the small school of 2,000, died after suffering a massive brain hemorrhage from the hit.

"It's unreal," said Malika Miller, a Montclair High junior and classmate of Dougherty. "Someone sitting next to you a couple of days ago is just gone like that."

"Gone like that" is a good way to describe the health and lives of many football players who inevitably develop complications from years of hard hits and jarring blows. The truth is that Dougherty's case, while tragic, is not at all unique. There have been hundreds of football related deaths, and that is just in this decade. Take last week, for example. On the evening of Oct. 20, offensive lineman Erick Gutierrez was taking part in a full-contact practice at his Marion County high school, when he collapsed to the turf after a play. Despite his teammates' and coaches' best efforts, the young man could not be revived and was pronounced dead when medical authorities arrived. Gutierrez is the second high school student in Georgia to die as a result of playing football in the last six months, after Cook County running back Roy White died in similar manner after a tackle during a practice drill.

In professional football, Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett sustained a life-threatening spinal cord injury in his first game of the 2008 season, and New York Jets running back Leon Washington suffered a comparatively minor broken leg on his first rushing play on Sunday, Oct. 25, requiring season-ending surgery. A bad back and aching joints are minor consequences, however, in a sport where an increasing number of former players end up developing dementia or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE for short. CTE is a progressive neurological disorder that works similarly to Alzheimer's disease and is inextricably tied, at the very least, to a shorter life expectancy and brain and functionary problems. Whether an individual has played football for two years or 20 matters little in the face of such crippling and increasingly common neurological disorders.

Like America, ancient Rome was famous for games that pitted an individual or team of individuals against another. Following the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, Emperor Honorius officially banned gladiator games in 404 A.D. As in gladiator matches, football and its equally vicious cousins, boxing and wrestling, feed off the bloodlust of the populous. That is, the essential desire to see an opposing team or player get beaten to a pulp and reduced to a mangled pile of limbs on the field.

In one of the most poignant and relevatory scenes depicting this bloodlust in the flim "Gladiator,", Maximus, the hero and titular gladiator turned to the bloodthirsty crowd in the arena after defeating his opponents and yelled, "Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?!"

American boys are told, when growing up, that they have to be tough and physical in order to be considered real men. This is enforced everywhere from the home to the playground, from boot camp to the football field, and it furthers American society's increasingly misguided perception of masculinity. Just as boys in school are taught to hit back, young adult males in football are taught to punish their opponents, using their own bodies as battering rams. How does American society react to all this? With accolades, of course; the bigger the hit, the louder the applause. ESPN's highlight reel-oriented programming demonstrates this by consistently choosing clips of the "best" (or worst, depending on one's point of view) football hits of the week to replay. This only glorifies the violence in an increasingly violent sport.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention illustrates this American obsession, stating that "The popularity of contact sports in the United States exposes a large number of participants to risk for brain surgery."

What do the NFL and collegiate football teams propose to remedy this problem? Better helmets. While one wonders why such helmets are not already readily available, the truth is that a couple of inches of plastic is simply not going to absorb the shock of a 300-pound man colliding with another player at full speed.

Recognizing the cruelty of a sport that requires the incapacitation and destruction of one's opponent is the first step towards the inevitable moral realization that football, like gladiatorial games, has no business being part of a society that holds itself to be civil. Unless American society and football teams are willing to switch to watching and playing flag football, the only viable solution is to outlaw the sport altogether, just as gladiatorial games were banned in Roman times.