And For What?

In September of 2012, Parade Magazine published an article about Christians in football.  The article discusses a collision between Sylvester Stamps, a running back for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Mike Singletary, a notoriously hard hitting linebacker for the Chicago Bears.

The hit left Stamps crumpled on the field, and Singletary searching his soul.  “What I am doing?” the article quotes him as thinking.  “There’s something wrong with this.”

“Lord, I love you so much,” Singletary prays, “and I’m out here hurting people.” 

However, after wrestling with whether he wanted to leave the game, Singletary decides in a breathtaking display of illogicality that he ought to continue to play football because God gave him a gift to play the game.  Consequently, he would try to “play as hard as [he] could to honor the Lord.”

Mike.

If there is something wrong with football, the solution isn’t to play football harder.  If a murderer realizes that murder is wrong, he shouldn’t decide to continue murdering because God made him awfully sharp with a knife. 

This sort of breathtaking, perfectly illogical rationalization allows Christians throughout the country to continue a sinful, injurious pursuit.  Some of them have left competitors with serious, lifelong injuries.  Some have shortened someone’s life by years.  Some have killed. 

And for what?

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Let’s be honest: the real reason so many men participate in football is to remind themselves that they’re men.  In an increasingly egalitarian world, there are fewer and fewer spheres which belong exclusively to men.

To a certain type of man, this causes great consternation, and this consternation begets overcompensation.  These men will start to find amusingly deep, gravelly voices on pick-up truck commercials particularly persuasive, and will more strongly support just about any war you’d like to wage, just to prove that they’re men.  This isn’t a joke: it was confirmed by a study at Cornell University about male responses to perceived threats to their masculinity.

To another type of man, one who doesn’t need to be reminded of his masculinity despite living in a coed world, the typical response to egalitarianism is more apathetic.  They shrug.  These men don’t need ostentatious displays of maleness; if they want to be reminded of their gender, they look in the mirror after getting out of the shower.

As formerly all-male spheres become less and less segregated, however, all those unconfident and overcompensating males gravitate away from normal sports like baseball, basketball, and track and field, toward Ultimate Fighting Championships, demolition derbies, and, yes, football.

Now, it’s not incidental that all these “hypermasculine” sports are moronic.  The competitive drive, in many circumstances, can be edifying both for the individual and for society.  Our market economy, despite whatever critiques you may have of it, has driven a rapidly-improving standard of living for decades.  Striving for and reaching a difficult competitive goal can be incredibly memorably rewarding.  But if you exaggerate anything hard enough, it becomes ridiculous.  Football is a perfect example of this ridiculous exaggeration.