The Ethics of NFL Fandom
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by Wade Garrett
Buffalo Bills Tight End Kevin Everett was severely injured in yesterday's game against the Denver Broncos. During the course of a routine special teams tackle, Everett's head snapped back awkwardly, and he fell to the field as if he had been shot. He was taken off the field on a gurney and rushed to Millard Fillmore Hostpital in Buffalo, where he received emergency surgery on his spinal column, which had been severed between the third and fourth vertebrae. The doctor who performed the operation described it as a "catastrophic" and "life-threatening" injury.
Today brought some good news; apparently Everett has regained limited movement in his arms and legs, and the swelling of his spinal column has been kept to a minimum. There is apparently no infection.
The last time an NFL player was paralyzed was 1991, when Mike Utley was paralyzed from the chest down. Prior to Utley, two players in the previous fifteen years had been paralyzed by injuries sustained on the field. On the play that caused Utley's injury, his head was down when it rammed into another player's chest, and was forced downwards by the force of the collision. In the wake of that injury, coaches at every level of football, posters in ever locker room, and broadcasters on every network have emphasized the importance of keeping one's head up when making a hit. To the casual fan, one of the scariest parts about Everett's injury is that his tackling form on the play was close to perfect. Even when perfect form is used, a helmeted head can be hit with enough force to snap it backwards with sufficient force to break a professional athlete's neck.
This perfect-form injury raises all sorts of ethical questions. Absent improper form, can athlete hit another athlete hard enough to break his neck, without the assistance of steroids?
Can a person, in good conscience, enjoy a sport in which the athletes are nakedly wounding themselves for our amusement?
Have NFL fans made peace with the fact that, once every eight or nine years, a player is paralyzed?
If so, have they made peace with the fact that a significant number of retired players report that they now experience chronic headaches and consistent short-term memory loss, from sustaining repeated concussions and blows to the head during their playing career? What about the comparatively lucky players, who are able to play full careers without sustaining neurological or spinal injuries, but who, later in life, need help getting out of bed, or up a flight of stairs, because their joints have been ruined by years of constant pounding? Not to mention all of the players whose careers were cut short by torn ligaments and compound fractures.
Moreso than any other sport, NFL players suffer the consequences of earning a living playing a contact sport. I continue to love and root for my hometown Buffalo Bills, but I would suspect that I am not the only fan whose love of the game has been mitigated by my awareness of the toll it takes on the players who are paid so well to entertain us on Sundays and Monday nights.
Wade Garrett lives in New York City. His blog is called Common Sense Dancing.
You put your body through 10 to 15 years of training camps, practices and games and your bound to have problems...concussions, arthritis, etc...
Its those painful creaks and slips that get you...
You are right about the moral issue though Steel town...
By being an NFL player you consent to this, much like others doing numerous jobs consent to their own dangers (window washers on high rises)...coincidently, they are payed very well (window washers make significant hazard pay)