MacGougan at Large

Notes on My Ineffectual Boycotts - 1

Football

I was born and raised as a football fan. As a kid growing up in Washington State prior to the advent of the Seahawks, I primarily rooted for the UW Huskies. I watched NFL games on our black and white TV every weekend and had a shoebox full of pro football trading cards. My older brother and I pooled our earnings from a year of publishing a neighborhood newspaper and bought a football, with which we would run elaborate plays against a phantom defense in the cul de sac in front of our house. 

(A quick word from our sponsor: If you’re trying to imagine two boys publishing a neighborhood newspaper, you might want to check out Newspaper Boy - a fictionalized version of my 1960s Washington youth set in 2000s Connecticut. I self-published it several years ago on Amazon. I’m sorry it’s not available elsewhere. Speaking of ineffectual boycotts, I know Amazon is a pretty tempting target.)

I became disillusioned with football sometime around the turn of the millennium. By the way, this posting is about to become a buzz kill. If you want to keep being a happy football fan, skip to another column.

What put me off was CTE, the brain injury that a lot of football players get. CTE is to football what black lung disease is to coal mining. And CTE is the worst, the scariest, injury that I can imagine. It doesn’t just cause pain to you. It brings pain and danger to your friends and family members, because it changes your personality in frightening ways. You become angrier, less patient, likelier to hurt those around you. Probably because of this, many CTE sufferers become suicidal. Nobody wants to become a dangerous monster.

Yes, college players get free tuition and pro players make a lot of money. But nothing can be adequate compensation for CTE. 

Part of the challenge of addressing this issue is that football is played by big, strong guys whom we admire for their toughness. Worrying about their health and well-being can feel like missing the point of football. If football was played by dogs, I’m pretty sure we would have banned it already.

Many football players forbid their children from playing football. I guarantee you that they aren’t worried about bumps and bruises. They’re worried about CTE. 

In recent years, football leagues at all levels have instituted new procedures around concussions. This probably makes the players incrementally less likely to get CTE, but I think not dramatically less likely. My layperson assessment is that it’s like switching from unfiltered to filtered cigarettes. Are you now less likely to get lung cancer? Yes. But, if you really want to reduce your risk of lung cancer, you’d be better off quitting cigarettes altogether.

So I’ve been boycotting football in general and the NFL in particular for the past quarter century. During that time, the NFL has become a juggernaut that appears to be taking over the universe. Not content to rule broadcast TV, it now gets big bucks from streaming services. Not content to rule Sunday morning, it keeps branching out to new days and time slots. Not content to rule North America, it looks to expand to Europe and Asia.

Warren Buffet has been after me lately to find out what all I’m thinking of boycotting. He’s ready to invest in anything on my list.