The Average American Male

      The common American Male is five feet and nine inches tall.  He weighs a hundred and ninety one pounds.  He is thirty-four years old and makes thirty-six thousand dollars a year.  He has roughly thirty-six years to live.

      The common American male believes he is physically fit.  He’s wrong.  He would save, on average, a thousand dollars a year if he exercised regularly.  He doesn’t.  His resting pulse is about seventy beats per minute, and he can run a mile in eight minutes and thirty-four seconds.

      Every weekend during the fall, the American Male will grab a few cheep domestic beers and an assortment of his favorite fatty snacks.  He will plop down on a couch or an easy chair, turn on the television, and watch himself some football.  For those of you not familiar with the spectacle, it consists of twenty-two overweight prima donnas battering themselves into an early senility. 

      The common American Male will cheer.  Loudly, and unintelligently.

      Approximately twenty-five million Americans will join him in celebrating our twin national vices of violence and obesity.  They will throw away three to nine hours of their lives and come away a little dumber, a little fatter, and—half of the time—a little more prone to beating women and children. 

      You might argue that football is harmless entertainment, or that I’m characterizing the sport unfairly.  You’d be dead, flat-out wrong.  Football is murder on the athlete’s brain; it contributes heavily to our obesity epidemic; it turns males into something less than men; it weakens our nation and wastes billions of hours and trillions of dollars.  Football is a recreation so disgusting, dehumanizing, debasing, and dangerous that it is a moral evil. 

      God hates football.

      So should you.

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Slouching Toward Senility

            In 1954, the Gallup polling organization asked Americans if there was a link between smoking and the development of lung cancer.  Only forty-one percent said that there was.  Nine in ten respondents had heard reports of the science linking smoking and lung cancer, but fewer than half had decided to believe them. 

            This is just one example—but a particularly useful one—of people’s willingness to disregard evidence that they don’t want to believe.  Fifty percent of adults in the 1950’s  smoked; nearly everyone knew and admired a smoker.  Believing that smokers were slow suicides was an unpleasant reality, and so millions of people simply decided not to believe it.

Of course, huge amounts of money were spent covering up the terrible consequences of smoking; by the time the damning facts began trickling out, the revolting and deadly addiction permeated the culture so thoroughly that took decades—and millions of dollars—to counteract the damage Big Tobacco had wrought.

            Thankfully, decades of efforts by lucid and courageous thinkers have marginalized the impact smoking has on our civilization.  Sensible restrictions exist to minimize the harm smoking does to society.  While far too many people still suffer terrible health consequences for their poor decisions, those who opt to addict themselves do so with full cognizance of the fact that they are prioritizing a moment of pleasure over a lifetime of emphysema, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, and social stigma.

            Football, despite similar long-term health detriments, is still rationalized not only into acceptability, but into desirability.  Legion are the fathers who aspire to sire star quarterbacks or wide receivers.  Participation numbers in Pop Warner leagues are staggering and rising.  Over a million boys play high school football in America each year. 

The tide, however, is turning.  As more evidence comes out about the disastrous health effects of football, more credence is lent to critiques of its psychological, cultural, and moral effects.  In forty years, I hope society is able to look back on the father who pushes his son into football with the same disgusted sneer of contempt we might give a father who shares a pack with his seven-year-old. 

This blog aims to encourage and accelerate that development in our civilization.  Sports and entertainment do not have to be revels in and revelations of our vices; we are a better nation than that, and I hope we soon will prove it.

Suicide is an Ugly Thing

            Suicide is an ugly thing. 

            When a man points a gun at his chest, thinks his final thoughts, and pulls the trigger, some unlucky soul is the first person on the scene.  This is quite often a spouse or a family member—someone who knew and loved the victim, someone with a lifetime of memories of the human being whose guts are now smeared all over the upholstery. 

            This might seem an overly grisly description, but to make a choice wisely you must understand the consequences clearly.  One ordinary Thursday, February 17^th, former National Football League (NFL) player Dave Duerson took a shotgun, pointed it at his chest, and pulled the trigger.  According to autopsy reports, he suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma—the type of trauma incurred during a game of football.  Because of his CTE, he had trouble thinking clearly and suffered from depression.

            Dave Duerson was a real man, a human being with friends and family.  While there are certainly complex causes to any suicide, it’s virtually certain that football caused Duerson’s CTE, and that CTE contributed monstrously to his suicide. 

In 1979, Duerson was given the chance to play professional baseball.  Had he chosen that path, it’s likely that the man would be alive today.  He’d wake up every morning, relishing the chance to watch his three sons and his daughter grow into young adults.  He’d spend quiet hours enjoying good books and good music, and playing with his grandchildren.

I cheered for Duerson when I was a five-year-old fan of the Chicago Bears.  Was the vicarious thrill I got from watching him chase an oddly-shaped bladder worth the pain his loved ones felt on February 17—and every day after?

We might argue that Duerson chose his own path, that he could have opted to steer clear of what he should have known was a dangerous profession.  Aside from being callous, this line of reasoning is specious; Duerson was shielded from knowing the full risks of his chosen profession by NFL suits interested capitalizing on his life and youth.  He, and many millions of young men, were sold a dream based on a lie.  Even if he had made a choice fully-informed, could you justify building your own frivolous enjoyment on the back of his suffering—and the suffering of his children?

Litany of Disease and Death

Sadly, Duerson’s case is far from isolated; as of this writing the Bedford VA CTSE Brain Bank has studied the brains of fifteen former NFL players.

Fourteen of them suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.  That’s 93%.

Worse, the majority of these players played in an age when players were smaller and slower, and collisions less violent.  Lew Carpenter retired in 1959, prior to the Green Bay Packers win in the first Super Bowl.  That team did not have a single player who weighed 260 pounds—roughly the average weight for current NFL players.  The speed of the game has also increased; the fastest fifteen times for the forty-yard dash have all been recorded since 1999, and twelve of those times have come since 2005.  Higher weights and higher speeds mean higher-intensity collisions. 

Photograph of a diseased brain.

If Lew Carpenter, victim of a slower and less dangerous game, died with an advanced case of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, what is coming?  What will happen to the tens of thousands of young men who participate on a regular basis in this game?

Are the following cases the tip of the iceberg?

On January 21^st, 2009, former NFL player Shane Dronett threatened his wife with a gun.  For three years he had been suffering from increasing paranoia and anger.  At first, they thought it was caused by a brain tumor, but its removal did nothing to change his behavior.  As his wife fled for safety, Dronett turned the gun on himself. 

Autopsies revealed Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.  He left behind two daughters.  He was thirty-eight years old.

For 30 years, Lou Creekmur’s thinking slowly clouded; after his death he was found to have advanced CTE. 

On December 16^th, 2009, Chris Henry died after a domestic dispute; although he was never diagnosed with a concussion during his playing career, he was found to suffer from CTE.  He was only twenty-six.

On July 7^th, 2005, Terry Long committed suicide by drinking antifreeze.  He was found to suffer from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. 

The list goes on: on May 25^th, Tom McHale died of a drug overdose.  He had CTE.

Justin Strzelczyk fled from police against the flow of traffic on September 30^th, 2004.  His actions were so bizarre that he was assumed to be under the influence of drugs or alchohol.  He wasn’t.  He suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. 

On February 6^th, 2008, John Glenn Grimsley was shot and killed while at his home in Texas; although the shot was later ruled accidental, he too was found to be suffering from CTE. 

November 20^th, 2006: Andre Waters committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.  Analysis of his brain tissue reveals signs of brain damage caused by football. 

All these men unwittingly sacrificed to play a child’s game.  Every day spent in dementia, every suicide, every funeral procession: football caused them all.

Joe Perry died on April 25^th, 2011, from complications relating to dementia.  After his death, Donna Perry, Joe’s widow, stated, “We have to look at what [football] is doing to our children.”

Football great “Iron” Mike Webster retired with amnesia, dementia, and depression.  His thinking was so clouded that he chose to live out of a pickup truck.  In 2002, Iron Mike lost his battle with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and died at the age of fifty, a shell of what he was and what he could have been. 

Webster’s estate sued the NFL and won $1,180,000 in damages.  The NFL fought the ruling, but eventually was held liable.  Could your school be responsible for disabilities its football players incur?  

Real Lives

      An old and wise saying states that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of a million is just a statistic.  Our minds are simply incapable of processing a multitude of tragedies, so we gloss over them. 

      It’s telling that the old saying is most commonly attributed to Joseph Stalin.  It’s all too easy for evil men and women to manipulate our intellectual laziness.  In response, we ought always to recognize that a million deaths are a million separate tragedies.

      And, in this case, a dozen deaths are a dozen separate tragedies.  We ought to weigh carefully the lives of each of these dozen men against our own weekend pleasures and ask ourselves whether our enjoyment is worth their lives. 

      Furthermore, we need to remind ourselves that the cases of former NFL players are only the beginning.  There are roughly 42 times more athletes playing in college—roughly 42 times more collisions, and roughly 42 more times as many athletes exposed to potential brain injuries.  They are far more likely to suffer in anonymity, but they will die just as ignominiously and just as senselessly. 

      There are almost 500 times as many athletes who play football in high school as in the NFL; although collisions are less forceful in the pros, they are still significant enough to cause an awful lot of concussions: 2011 study in the Journal of Athletic Training found that there are approximately 67,000 diagnosed concussions in high school football every year—and it would be naive to think that there aren’t a great number of concussions that go undiagnosed: surveys suggest that nearly 50% of all high school football players report symptoms of concussions during any given season.  Additionally, even sub-concussive impacts can cause Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, as demonstrated by the case of Chris Henry, the 26-year-old football player who died with CTE.

      It is no stretch to say that our nation has chosen to give our young men a hundred thousand concussions every year. 

      That, of course, is just a statistic, but we need to remember that each and every one of these concussions is a step down the road toward that man, sitting in his living room and thinking confused and unhappy thoughts, pointing a gun at his chest, with his hand trembling on the trigger.

Risks and Rewards

Of course, we do dangerous things everyday.  I can hear the specious analogies already:

“Yeah, but thousands of people die in car accidents every year!  So why don’t you just ban cars while you’re at it!”

It’s true that we do things with risk every day.  The CDC estimates that a hundred and thirty people are killed each year by falling out of bed; even sleeping in a bed entails some risk.  The real issue is whether an activity can be justified with a risk-reward analysis.

A risk-reward analysis is an incredibly useful framework for helping to make decisions; in its simplest form, it’s remembering to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”  Do the risks outweigh the rewards, or vice versa?

Intelligent, rational, common-sense decision making is so closely related to risk-reward analysis that it’s practically defined by it.  A smart decision is one with more expected reward than risk.  A stupid decision is one that entails more expected risk than reward.

Going to bed obviously entails more reward than risk.  If you do, you take an infintessimally small risk of dying, or having your cat attack you in your sleep, or any of the other myriad of unlikely events that might befall you.  If you don’t go to bed, you run a nearly certain chance of going insane and dying.  Ergo, smart people go to bed.

Driving is a little more complicated.  It is certainly more risky than going to bed:  Approximately 20,000 people will die while driving this year.  It certainly offers less reward; after all, for most of human history, people survived just fine without cars.

Of course, they didn’t survive nearly as well as they do now.  Driving is an incredibly important component to modern civilization; without it, we would likely live in a far less advanced society with far shorter life spans. 

Furthermore—and this is an incredibly important point—there are very few alternatives to driving.  Biking and horseback riding are certainly healthy, viable ways to get around, but they can only take civilization so far.  In order for us to get the world we live in, with the marvels of modern medicine and agriculture, we need a quicker method of transportation.

Smart people, then, drive.

But how does football stack up in a risk-reward analysis?  Any reasonable person would agree that it entails significant risk.  Perhaps the risk is less than that of driving, but it is certainly far more than the risk of going to bed.  What is the reward?

Essentially, the reward is knowing with some degree of certainty which group of young men is more capable of manipulating an oddly-shaped inflated bladder in such a way that the sum of six times the number of times in which they were able to hold the ball on a colorful patch of grass, the number of times they were able to kick the ball though two posts after holding the ball on the colorful patch of grass, and three times the number of times they were able to kick the ball through the posts without first holding it on a colorful patch of grass (as well as twice the number of times they were able to cause the other team to fall on another colorful patch of grass, a hundred yards distant) is greater than the identical sum for another group of young men—providing, of course, that the manipulation of the bladder causes possession of the bladder to move forward by ten yards with no more than three incidents where a player is holding the ball while a knee is touching the ground, or while crossing over two lines perpendicular to the colorful patches of grass, and that following each such incident the team line up in such a fashion that…

Essentially, the reward is knowing who is better at the most convoluted and arcane set of objectives outside of “Calvinball”.  Essentially, football proves nothing.

Fallacy

I recently read an article about parents might want to rethink their use of “sippy cups” because children have to visit the emergency room each year with sippy-cup-related injuries.

These articles appear from time to time.  The author identifies some common household item and informs us that the item actually hurts a certain number of people each year.  Usually, the item is as innocuous was possible: teddy bears, toilet paper, sippy cups, etc.  Quite often, the statistics are misleading: “Since, 1970, 40,000 people have been injured by using Cuddly-Soft Moist Towelettes.”  Of course, over the course of forty years, that works out to a thousand a year.  Ten million people might use Cuddly-Soft Moist Towellets each year, which means that only one in ten-thousand of them get injured.  However, saying that CSMT’s have a one-in-ten-thousand chance of injuring you doesn’t make for nearly as interesting of a story. 

This kind of story does two things.  First, it makes us feel like America is becoming sissified.  It makes it seem like our society views everything, no matter how harmless, as potentially dangerous.  Second, it makes us suspicious of statistics used to demonstrate harm. 

Both of these things make it very difficult to argue that something is actually harmful.  Conditioned by a barrage of silly, scare-tactic stories, people automatically conclude that any scary story must be silly, and that the numbers used must be fudge or—at the very least—misleading.

Football apologists are already using both of those arguments, either in their heads as they read this book, or to others as they discuss it. 

However, this is not one of those instances.  Intuitively, most of us realize that using a sippy cup and playing football cause unbelievably different degrees of risk.  The numbers would certainly support that intuition: sippy cups are NOT the number one cause of emergency-room visits for young children.  Football IS the number-one cause of brain injuries for young men. 

Don’t be tempted into dismissing a ridiculous and irresponsible risk just because people are afraid of stupid things; weigh the risk with sober judgment and decide whether its benefits warrant the dangers.

Opportunity Cost

Perhaps, then, there is sufficient reward in playing football.  Perhaps the reward is the physical fitness gained through participation in the sport (the entire set of posts on football and obesity is, right now, laughing at that assertion—along with the section on football and illegal drugs).  The teamwork?  The discipline and dedication required to perform well?

Here is where it is essential to recognize the idea of opportunity cost.  Are there alternatives to football that provide those same rewards, without as many risks?

Certainly so.  Most sports build fitness as well as or better than football.  Any team sport requires teamwork and can teach it at least as well, and quite often better, given the less regimented and more free-flowing nature of many team sports.  Any sport at all requires discipline and dedication to perfect.  Very, very few sports are as damaging to the individual and to society as football.  There are better alternatives.

Ergo, smart people don’t play football.

Urgency

Cassandra, insane, before a burning Troy.

In ancient Greek mythology, the god Apollo became infatuated with a beautiful mortal named Cassandra.  He bestowed upon her the gift of prophecy; however, when she spurned his advances he twisted the gift he had given her.  She was doomed to prophecy truth, but never to be believed.

On May 2^nd, the newspaper headlines sent a chill down my spine.  I had been toying with the idea of creating this blog for some time; I was becoming more and more convinced that lives were in at stake.  Then, I opened the news.  Junior Seau, formerly a hard-hitting linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, was dead of a gunshot wound to his chest. 

I had known, intellectually, that football players were going to kill themselves while I was writing this blog.  In fact, given the total number of athletes involved in football each year, the scenario was almost certainly doomed to come true.  However, Seau’s suicide gave me a jolt of urgency.  Although swifter creation of God Hates Football would in no way have prevented Seau’s suicide, there are parents right now signing their children up for football who might be dissuaded.  It sounds overly dramatic to say that the lives of those children hang in the balance—but it’s true.  If a million children decided to take up some other sport, some number of them would be spared the addled brains the football can cause.  Their lives do indeed hang in the balance.

It is an awful thing for a truth to be disregarded; it is just as senseless if that truth is never heard.  If you agree that the risks of football far outweigh its rewards, tell somebody.  Tell your neighbor.  Share this book.

And for goodness sake, if you have been considering signing your son up for football—don’t!

The Pregnant Lineman

Brain damage isn’t the only way that football can kill you.  In 2010 the highly-esteemed New England Journal of Medicine published a study relating obesity to the risk of death within ten years.  The study only looked at non-smoking white males, but it is certainly reasonable to assume that similar trends exist among non-white males.

The study used Body Mass Index (BMI) to evaluate individual’s weights; the BMI essentially measures a person’s mass relative to the square of their height, on the assumption that a taller person will weigh more than a shorter person with an identical build. 

Individuals with abnormal BMI’s had higher risks of death.  Individuals with very high BMI’s had much higher risks of death.

Whenever someone suggests that football’s emphasis on producing morbidly obese players might constitute an unwise health risk, the NFL goes to great lengths to dispute the use of BMI as a measure of obesity.  They will contend that because football players have “athletic” builds and very high strength levels, their inflated BMI’s are not nearly as dangerous as those achieved by non-athletes.

The NFL’s objections are wrong-headed on two accounts.  First, although it is always healthier to be active than inactive at any given BMI, many of the health issues associated with obesity affect individuals regardless of whether the weight is muscle or fat.  Abnormally high BMI’s are dangerous even if the individual is carrying around lots of muscle instead of lots of fat.

Second, there are not many 300-pound lineman in the NFL who are anything resembling lean.  Very few are carrying around 8% body fat—or even 18% body fat. 

Want proof?  According to the World Health Organization, body fat percentages for males between the ages of twenty and forty ought to be no higher than 19%.  According to a 2005 study by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, the average offensive lineman’s body fat percentage was 25%.  With an average weight of 308 pounds, that means your typical NFL lineman was carrying around an extra 18.5 pounds of blubber. 

This is about how much a doctor would like to see the average American woman gain. 

During pregnancy.  

Morbidity

So, NFL players are too fat—or at least, many NFL players are too fat, particularly offensive linemen.  Is that the end of the world?

It could very well be the end of theirs.  That study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that obesity significantly increases the chances of dying within ten years, and morbid obesity really increases the odds of death.  For individuals who are only slightly overweight (with a BMI of 25.0-27.4) the odds of dying within ten years are only about 1%.  For those who are obese (BMI’s between 30 and 34.9), the chances rise to about 1.4%.  But for those who are morbidly obese (BMI’s 35-39.9), the risk jumps to 2%, and when the BMI to 40-49.9, the odds of dying within ten years are essentially 3%.

Grave and spoon.

Obese people were 40% more likely to die than those who were simply overweight.  Morbidly obese people were 100% more likely to die, and super obese people were three times as likely to die—even when compared with overweight individuals.

Connect the dots.

We have made a national religion of a sport that rewards and glorifies obesity.  Across America, thousands of young men—virtually none of whom are underweight, and many of whom are already so heavy that they put their health at risk—are being asked to pack on the pounds.

This is a travesty.  A coach who asks an overweight young man to become even fatter ought to be decried as abusive.  Instead, our culture glorifies and rewards these coaches—we are willing to sacrifice the health of young people so that they can help move that oddly shaped inflated bladder more effectively. 

In 2009, I read an article by Mike Herndon, a journalist with the Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama.  He wrote about the “success” the Auburn Tigers had in identifying players who would be able to gain weight.  Knowing the impact of obesity on life expectancy, his examples sound downright macabre:

Spencer Johnson once weighed 240 pounds; his BMI was 30 and his odds of dying in the next ten years were only 1.3 percent.  Auburn got him up to 291 pounds and a BMI of 36.4; his odds of dying in the next ten years increased to 1.9 percent—and increase in his risk of death of about 46%.  Success!

Jay Ratliff came to Auburn weighing 230 pounds with a BMI of 28.  He had about a one-in-a-hundred chance of dying in the next ten years.  He went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys at 300 pounds with a BMI of 36.5.  For his efforts, he increased his odds of death by 66%.  All right!

Sen’Derrick Marks owes fair Auburn for increasing his risk of death by 37%.  Over at Alabama, they made Evan Mathis 40% more likely to die, Chris Samuels 42% more likely to die, and Jay Ratliff 52% more likely to die. 

Things are even more grotesque in the professional game.  The Green Bay Packers wanted nosetackle Howard Green to play at 360 pounds, with a BMI of 46.2. 

I am 6’2” and weigh 180 pounds.  My BMI is 23.1; within the normal range, but not exactly underweight.  I have about a 0.8% chance of dying in the next ten years.  They are asking Howard Green to weigh twice as much as I do, and to have a risk of dying of approximately 3.1%; compared to me, he’s almost four times as likely to die—and similar examples are easy to find across the NFL.

For the sake of comparison, the pain-killers Darvon and Darvocet were pulled from shelves in 2010.  Some studies estimated that for each 120 million prescriptions, the drug may have caused as many as 2,000 deaths. 

If you prescribed Darvocet to 240-pound Spencer Johnson, you increased his risk of death by, at most, 0.0015%.  If you switch him to the offensive line and make him gain fifty-one pounds, the effect is over 30,000 times more dangerous.

At the time of this writing, the makers of Darvocet were fighting a lawsuit which some experts said might have bigger repurcussions than the famous lawsuit against Vioxx. 

Each year, coach Joe Whitt at Auburn prescribed something thousands of times more dangerous to several of the young men placed in his care.  He is not alone.  Thousands of professional, college, and even high school coaches are giving young men the same unbelievable, deadly prescription: bulk up.  Gain weight.  Get heavier.

Why do these men ask their athletes to assume risks that the FDA would leap to ban?

To win a child’s game.

Kate Middleton

Football fat has another way of impacting the health of our nation.  It is less direct, but broader, because it affects everyone.  To discuss this wider impact, let’s talk about the Dutchess of Cambridge, a shoe company, and Joe Camel.

In 2011, Wolverine Worldwide set sales records by moving $1.4 billion dollars of footwear.  Although Wolverine is primarily known for its sturdy boots and casual Hush Puppies, one of its stars of the year was a lesser-known brand: Sebago. 

Sebago sales took off when Kate Middleton took a Canadian boat tour in mid-July.  On one of the days of her voyage she wore Sebago boat shoes.  And all of a sudden, sales started to take off. 

Now, Sebago boat shoes are just great.  They’re well-made and look very nice.  However, they were just as well-made and good-looking before Kate Middleton slipped them on over her shapely toes.  The association of the product with an admired, extremely attractive individual didn’t change the product, but it certainly changed the product’s perceived value.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year to chase after this branding effect.  According to Forbes magazine, Michael Jordan’s brand generated $1 billion in sales to Nike alone—eight years after Jordan had last played competitive basketball.  The effect is obviously a powerful one: we want to become more like the people we admire, and we’re willing to pay good money to try to do so.

Cigarettes again provide useful insight.  When television and radio advertising were banned in 1964, approximately 42% of the American adults smoked.  After five years without television and radio branding, the figure was down to 37%.  By 1990, it was down to a quarter of American adults, and now it is fewer than one in five.  Branding changes what is perceived as acceptable or desirable.

This effect is not only driven by advertisements and celebrities; we change to become more like the peers we admire as well.  Recent research by Mir M. Ali, Aliaksandr Amialchuk, and Frank W. Heiland concludes that “[t]he social transmission of weight-related behaviors is a viable explanation for the spread of obesity in friendship networks”.  If a young person spends time with others who eat fast food, shun exercise, and gain weight, that young person is more likely to fall in line.

Another study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, studied over 12,000 people and examined what happened when one person gained weight.  The study made a shocking discovery: when someone’s friend became obese, that person was 37% more likely to become obese themselves.  News outlets jumped on this report: fat can be contagious.

We become what we admire, and we become what we habitually see.  Have we reached a tipping point, then, with regard to obesity? 

The statistics are shocking: percentage of obese Americans (BMI > 30) has tripled since 1960.   The percentage of morbidly obese Americans (BMI > 40) has risen by five hundred percent.  Obesity costs America $190 billion dollars a year in health costs; that’s over 20% of every medical expense in the nation.

Because obesity is strongly correlated with higher absenteeism from work, Eric Finkelstein of Duke University estimates that obese Americans cost businesses $30 billion dollars, simply due to lost productivity.  And because our cars have to lug overweight Americans around, they burn a billion more gallons of gas than they would if we weighed the same as we did fifty years ago.

What does any of this have to do with football?

Well, certainly thousands of young men whose coaches pressure them into bulking up contribute directly to the issue; however, reasonable people ought to conclude that the effect of branding plays a role.

Little Johnny sees Big Bubba Lineman and his belly tumbling around on national television.  Dad loves Big Bubba, which means that Johnny does, too.  When Johnny starts to notice his own little bundle of blubber, he’s downright proud of it; he’s a little more like that guy on TV.

Don’t believe it?  Here’s a the way an article on bleacherreport.com introduced a slideshow called “Glutton Bowl”:

“[T]his is American football. We like to drink multiple beers with hot dogs and hamburgers at 10 a.m. before the games officially kick off.

Isn't it natural for us to be drawn to the big guys that get it done on the field every week? As a big guy myself, I have to be honest—I tend to cheer a little bit harder for the fat boys.

Here's an homage to the guys that do their part to re-define what a professional athlete looks like—these are the men that made it honorable to be huge.”

Sound familiar?  If it doesn’t, you haven’t been paying attention.  Football coverage is replete with similar examples.  The sport can’t hide from the obesity, so it revels in it.  Fat is glorfied.

If branding is powerful and fat can be contagious, can the impact of all these hulking bulks be anything but detrimental?  Are there millions of Americans who can thank football for thinking it is “honorable to be huge”?  Have we somehow made it un-American to be healthy, and American to be disgustingly obese?

If so, it costs us billions of dollars.  More importantly, obesity kills as many as a thousand people every day. 

In nine years, the nation has lost over 4,000 soldiers in Iraq; obesity kills more people every week.  We glorify obesity at our peril

You can Help

What can you do about this?  Obviously, if you hear about a local coach asking an overweight young man to bulk up, you can report it and protest it.  Expect to meet a form of resistance that completely ignores a rational risk-reward analysis; on-field prerogatives will be given undue emphasis.  When they tell you that it will help the team, or help his athletic performance, help them to reprioritize.  Remind them that concerns about health ought to outweigh any concerns about winning a child’s game.

Obviously, keep yourself and any loved ones away from the game of football.  There are a hundred other healthier and safer activities in which to participate.

But more than than, turn off the game.  Watching football can make obesity see normal or admirable; it warps the viewers perspective on acceptable or desirable weight.  Encourage others to do so as well.

I repeat: TURN OFF THE GAME!

All Doped Up

There is one final way in which the game of football damages our national health: performance enhancing drugs (PED’s).

PED use is absolutely rampant in the NFL.  The NFL denies it.  They use all of their public-relations machinery to make it seem like there is no problem.  They even used their leverage to induce ESPN to cancel Playmakers, a highly-rated and critically-acclaimed series, in large part because it created the (true) impression that professional football players use steroids to cheat.

This is understandable, but abhorrent.  The league has seen first-hand what happens to other sports in which cheaters get caught: high-profile, highly-publicized PED busts create the impression that the sport has a drug problem.  This negatively impacts the sport’s image.  Ratings go down, money dries up. 

It’s better for the bottom line to pretend that you have a stringent testing, set up a laughably weak testing policy instead, catch a few offenders who are brazen or stupid enough to still get caught, give these offenders nothing more than a slap on the wrist, and rake in the cash.

Could that possibly be true?  Well, it’s fairly easy to prove that football has deleterious effects on players’ brains.  The cases and the statistics speak for themselves.  It’s just as easy to demonstrate football’s emphasis on unhealthy weight.  Because of the wall of misinformation and obfuscation put up by the NFL, it’s more difficult to persuade your average person on the street that professional footballers are a bunch of steroid-inflated cheaters.  However, the evidence is compelling:

First, compare the testing policy of the NFL to that of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA)—the organization in charge of testing Olympic events, and the most stringent testing agency on the planet.  WADA requires athletes to inform them of their whereabouts every single day, so that they can be available for random drug testing.  Both blood and urine samples are taken and analyzed for the presence of PED’s, their chemical byproducts, masking agents, or the chemical byproducts of masking agents. 

A player is presumed to be responsible for whatever is in their body; ignorance is no excuse.  In fact, there are almost no excuses whatsoever.

The NFL, by contrast, conducts one annual blood test, in which they might detect the presence of a substance like Human Growth Hormone (HGH).  Dr. Gary Wadler, former chairman of the WADA, called the protocol “blatantly ridiculous”.  They state that they conduct random drug testing, but lineman-sized loopholes exist. 

For instance, the New York Times reported in August of 2011 that NFL players are NEVER tested on game days.  This is unbelievable.  Olympic athletes are always being taken from the finish line to the testing area—it will happen to every single medalist at the next Olympics.  The sports care about whether or not they are clean.  The NFL does not; it is not in their interests to catch teachers.  Refusing to test on game days makes it legal, de facto, for players to take any drugs which clear the system in twenty-four hours.

There have been numerous reports that players are given advance notice of impending tests, several days in advance.  This completely defeats the purpose of random testing.  There are no repercussions in place for players who are not available for their random tests; players who know they’ll test dirty can simply make themselves scarce.  According to Don Catlin, former director of the Olympic Analytic Laboratory at UCLA, even a few hours of notice is sufficient to allow athletes to get away with substantial PED use.  Several days’ notice essentially makes the entire program worthless.

Shawn Craford tested positive under WADA protocols.

Michael Garvin never tested positive under NFL protocols.

 

Conspiracy and Penn State

But, you might protest, could there really be that broad of a conspiracy?  Wouldn’t somebody spill the beans?

Consider Penn State University.  Over the course of a decade, a number of people in positions of power worked in conjunction to cover up something even more sordid than performance-enhancing drug abuse: the sexual assault of children.  An investigation into the incident determined that, for over ten years, the school President, vice President, athletic director, and head football coach had “failed to protect against a child sexual predator”.  A significant contributing factor in this awful debacle had to have been the desire to protect the school’s Big Football program.

If rooting for good ol’ PSU can cause men who knew better to cover up criminal sexual conduct, then do you think it would be much of a stretch for the football culture to cover up PED use?

Victims of the Crime

So the NFL’s testing protocol has been assembled to give the best possible appearances with the least possible impact.  Why else would you announce that you will begin testing for HGH, for instance, and then implement the test so laughably poorly that it is guaranteed to catch absolutely no one?

Consider that the WADA, utilizing the best available testing protocols, doesn’t catch all of the cheats.  Marion Jones, who had her Olympic medals stripped after admitting to prolonged PED use, passed 160 tests.  The cheaters are almost always a step ahead of the authorities, even if the authorities are allowed to use every weapon in their arsenal.  Tie both their hands behind their backs and put a few cement blocks on their feet—as the NFL and the players’ union have deliberately done—and you have no drug testing policy at all.

To make matters worse, football allows for all sorts of excuses.  As of this writing, 111 players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.  How over a hundred players were stupid enough to get caught is mystifying enough.  What’s more amazing is that only 54 of them were suspended.  So, even if you do get caught, there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that you’ll get absolutely no punishment whatsoever.

Additionally, the financial incentive to cheat is much, much greater in football than it is in Olympic sports.  Superstars like Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps make millions of dollars, but the vast, vast majority of Olympians are, these days, working full- or part-time jobs to make ends meet.  If a long-distance runner takes Erythropoietin (EPO), it gives him or her a better chance at making a couple thousand bucks.  If a running back takes steroids, it gives him a better chance at making millions.

Football players have a much greater reward associated with performance-enhancing drugs, and a much, much smaller risk.  Is it any wonder, then, that a 2009 study by Scott Horn, Patricia Gregory, and Kevin Guskiewicz found that players suspected that 90% of professional football players had used steroids?  As far back as 1990, when the game was less lucrative and the players much smaller, a survey of NFL players found that 67% of offensive linemen admitted to using steroids.  These days, the 90% figure is probably not far from the actual mark.

Some people have no philosophical objection to the use of PED’s.  They players, they’ll argue, have the right to do what they want to their own bodies.  They understand the risks, and decide to assume them.

Unfortunately, this creates an environment in which only PED-users can be successful.  It means that when a young man starts aspiring to play in the NFL, he will one day be forced to decide whether to forgo that aspiration for the sake of his health.  PED restrictions exist—or at least, they ought to exist—to try to level the playing field, so that individuals who want to compete cleanly are able to do so without having to sacrifice their health.

Unfortunately, the way drug testing is conducted in the NFL—with its winks and nods to drug users—nearly forces any NFL aspirant to make that choice.

Creeping Impact

The impact is starting to be seen at the lower levels of football.  Most NCAA Division I football players would love to play professionally.  They all want to win.  The pressures are adding up to more and more drug use in the college game.

On average, every team at a bowl game has one player who is going to test positive for PED’s.  Again, the tests can only catch a fraction of the—especially since the NCAA affords athletes 48 hours notice about tests.  The actual figure is likely much higher.

Jason Scucanek, who played for Brigham Young University (BYU), stated that on his team, he had proof that over a dozen players were using steroids, and that the number might have been as high as twenty.  Keep in mind, this is BYU; the school is hardly the anything-goes, football-first institution that you might find in the Deep South.  If BYU has twenty players on steroids, what do you think is the case at Florida, Florida State, LSU, Alabama….

Even at the high school level, football players are abusing PED’s.  A 2003 survey of 15,000 players found that six percent admitted to PED use.  With over a million boys playing football each year, that’s 60,000 high schoolers taking steroids!

Once again, the health effects are hardly worth it.  Liver damage.  Enlargement of the heart.  Increased risk of heart disease and death.  Depression.  Suicide.  Testicular atrophy. 

And again we have to ask why our young men are choosing to shrivel their balls and shorten their lives?

To succeed at a child’s game.

Get Out

I started taking anabolic steroids in 1969 and never stopped. It was addicting, mentally addicting. Now I'm sick, and I'm scared. Ninety percent of the athletes I know are on the stuff. We're not born to be 300 lb (140 kg) or jump 30 ft (9.1 m). But all the time I was taking steroids, I knew they were making me play better. I became very violent on the field and off it. I did things only crazy people do. Once a guy sideswiped my car and I beat the hell out of him. Now look at me. My hair's gone, I wobble when I walk and have to hold on to someone for support, and I have trouble remembering things. My last wish? That no one else ever dies this way.

--Lyle Alzado, former NFL great

Lyle Alzado: 1949-1992

             You can save somebody from that fate.  If you play football, stop.  Get out of a sport where your highest aspirations are almost forced to include steroid use.  Get into a sport that cares about catching drug cheats. 

            If you have a son, keep him away from the game.  Don’t let him get sucked into the mania that inclines otherwise rational individuals to ruin their lives for a moment’s glory.

            Spread the word.  Get other people out of the sport, too.  Turn off the game, and encourage others to do the same.  It’s guaranteed to make our lives healthier, happier, and longer.

Our National Religion

           Playing football increases your risk of brain damage.  Coaches around the country routinely and reprehensibly encourage dangerous obesity in their players.  A culture of steroid abuse affects tens of thousands of Americans and prevents clean players from having any shot at participating at the highest levels.  Obviously, football is bad for the physical well-being of our nation.

            However, football impacts the nation’s psyche is ways that are just as, if not more, harmful.  This chapter explores the ways in which football weakens us spiritually; paying special attention to how it weakens our notions of manhood and masculinity.

            It’s only fair to begin this chapter with a caveat: I, like most Americans, am a Christian.  When I say that “God Hates Football”, I’m not merely stating in a strong fashion that I hate football.  I actually believe there is a God, that He wants us to take care of our minds, bodies, and spirits, and that participating in football contradicts His will. 

            My religious beliefs define my perspective on how we ought to live our lives.  Whether something is physically healthy or not is primarily a scientific matter; there is very little room for debate.  However, whether something is spiritually healthy is, I recognize, a matter of considerable debate.  I hope to make this book persuasive to individuals from all religious backgrounds, and so I will try to make my arguments as broadly compelling as possible.  However, fellow Christians ought sometimes to find my reasoning more persuasive than non-Christians. 

            However, this may not be the case, for reasons that greatly disappoint me.  I find it particularly galling that in many areas of America, the two dominant cultural forces are Christianity and football; they breed a sort of syncretistic, bastardized religion. In this new church, Sunday services and drunken tailgating go hand-in-hand; bounty systems are praised in casual conversation by the same preachers who extols from the pulpit the virtues of loving thy neighbor; and the fruits of the spirit are praised for an hour and denigrated for a hundred and sixty seven.

            Religious convictions are, definitionally, your beliefs about the deepest and most important questions that confront human beings.  Is there a God or gods?  If so, what are he/she/it/they like?  Is there life after death?  What is the meaning of life? 

            Deeply held convictions about the answers to these questions ought to shape in a foundational, fundamental way our answers to other, less essential questions.  In this case, whether or not a particular form of entertainment ought to be pursued becomes not, primarily, a question of whether we find it to be entertaining.  Rather, we ought to ask whether it conforms to our vision of what life ought to be like, and what type of world we ought to live in.

            You might have noticed that there is a religion or a religion-like perspective that would disagree that questions of obligation ought to shape our opinions of entertainment.  Pure hedonists—individuals who believe that our purpose in life is the simple maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain—could draw the perfectly sound conclusion that the most pleasureful entertainment is the best entertainment.

            I find hedonism to be an extremely repugnant way of answering life’s big questions.  However, a hedonist could very reasonably and consistently sit down to eat fatty foods, drink beer, watch cheerleaders jiggle, and have a grand old time screaming at the television. 

            The problem is that only a very slim minority of Americans actually believe in pure hedonism.  Most of us believe that there are moral obligations that go beyond our own pleasure.  Most Americans profess to believe that we ought to take care of our minds and bodies, that we ought to make use of our gifts to make the world a better place, and that it is better to help others than to hurt them.

            The problem is that our cultural fixation with football belies these professions.  Instead of taking care of our minds and bodies, we glorify their abuse.  Instead of making the most of our gifts, we—at best—squander them on a child’s game, and at worse allow them to be battered and destroyed.  Instead of promoting noble collaborative efforts, we incentivize the coarsest forms of violent competition.

            In short, football shows that America is not a Christian nation—not really.

            At heart, we are hedonists.

A Short Anecdote

           The gym is small and badly-lit.  All day, a gaggle of middle school basketball players has shuffled, jumped, and strutted over its court.  The sound of dribbling basketballs echoes off the walls, and the pools of dribble sweat are, sometimes, wiped off with an old white dirty towel.  Some of these players practice good personal hygiene; many do not, and the gym smells.

            Parents crowd onto the three rows of uncomfortable bleachers.  Some are red-faced and angry; others are sweaty and nervous; others are just plain hot.  The shrill twill of the referee’s whistle brings a groan.  The offending player looks confused.  We have reached the end of the tournament, and this is the Championship Game.

            Even so, the players are gangly and ungainly.  Their jump shots and bounce passes are larval—one day, they might grow into real jump shots and real bounce passes, but not yet.  One of the ungainly young men, however, is dominantly gangly.  He stands a head taller than the rest, and consequently blocks shots and scores with relative ease.  His team would be far in the lead if it weren’t for the other team’s star, a short, lithe, graceful young man for whom the ball is a natural extension of his hand.

            This player, the only real athlete on the floor, has two tan band-aids plastered to his sweating skin.  Now, with only minutes remaining in the game, he drives the lane and is fouled.

            It is a hard foul but does not appear particularly dirty.  The tallest player on the court, the other team’s star, swatted at the ball and raked his hand down the back of the shooter’s shoulder.  However, it opens up yet another cut. 

            The graceful athlete, in accordance with the rules, has to leave the game to get a third band-aid; they cut is so long that they actually need a fourth and a fifth.  When he reenters the game, he is so sweaty and bloodied that one of his band-aids falls off.  He re-exits the game and reenters moments later, only to have the same thing happen.  Over the last four minutes of the game, he has to leave four times.  His team does not score without him on the court, and the taller player’s team pulls away to win. 

            In the midst of the celebration, standing high above his team, the taller player looks ecstatically joyful.  Actually, that’s not quite accurate.  Given the context, you can tell that he’s ecstatically joyful.  Without context, if you simply looked at his face, he would just look angry.

            If you would have seen him before the tournament, he would have looked calm and focused, his face concentrating on a particularly important bit of minutia.  He was in the hotel bathroom, standing over the sink with a pair of clippers, trimming his fingernails so that each of them had three distinct, sharp, jagged points.

            Each of the five crucial band-aids was the result of those sharpened fingernails.  The cuts were made deliberately.

            These are not sour grapes.  My son was not the graceful athlete diabolically sliced up by some borderline psychopath. 

Quite the opposite: I was that taller player.  That borderline psychopath grew up to be me.