Let 'Em Play
Young men will always seek ways to prove they're tough, we'd do well to let them
I never played football. Not that I didn’t want to, it was a lack of opportunity. The town I grew up in (Groton, MA) was, at the time, pretty small. We had maybe 5,000 people or so, and the local schools offered soccer, not football. No Pop Warner, and no scholastic pigskin. But I’ve always loved watching the game.
What attracted me to the game, which I didn’t have access to, was the violence and toughness of the players. This was the Lawrence Taylor heyday, and my team, the New England Patriots, was terrible. But we occasionally got a Giants game on TV, and LT was a beast. Football seemed like a thing that tough kids did, and a way to prove you couldn’t be intimidated. My first love was basketball, and when we played basketball games against a larger town that had football, the kids on the team boxed out a little harder, fouled a little rougher, and seemed a bit more intense than the other small towns without football. I was jealous.
Moreover, football was a way to not only BE tough, but a way to be a part of a team that valued you for your toughness. When I was young, I really wanted to be important because I was tough. This, of course, ultimately led me to Naval Special Warfare. If I had been a football player, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up there, but who knows?
But football, by the early 2000s, had a problem. Starting with the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a neuropathologist working at Boston University, who performed an autopsy on an ex-NFL player (Mike Webster) and published his findings. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a progressive neurological disease characterized by a buildup of tau proteins in the brain, which inhibit neuronal activity in the parts of the brain that control emotions and store memories. The effects on the patient are similar to Alzheimer’s, with memory impairment and emotional lability. It’s a devastating disease, with no treatment, and no cure, and can only be diagnosed after death, with slices of the victim’s brain under a microscope
And it was all over the news, from MSNBC to Fox. A paper was published showing upwards of 90% of NFL players who BU had studied had it. Participation in youth football plummeted by over 30%. Football, which for decades had boasted the highest participation rate amongst high school athletes (in part because football rosters are larger than other sports), even took a back seat to track and field in terms of total participants. Moreover, there was no concurrent growth in soccer and cross-country participation nationwide, the other fall sports with the highest participation rates at the scholastic level. The kids leaving football weren’t switching sports; they were doing nothing instead.
There are serious scientific issues with the BU studies. So much so that I use them as an example to teach undergraduates at the University of Vermont what a “selection bias” is. If you haven’t heard of scientific bias, what it means is a distorted conclusion drawn from unrepresentative sampling. The BU study didn’t show that all NFL players had CTE, it just showed that all NFL players suffering symptoms of CTE while alive who then donated their brains for medical research after death had CTE.
Those are very different things. But the shit had hit the fan for football participation.
The kids who were no longer playing football were no longer playing anything. But what they were doing, in staggering numbers, was logging on to social media. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that in the echo chambers of the internet, misogyny and the fetishization of guns would find a ready audience of young men who longed to be seen as tough.
When I was a young man, I wanted to be a part of a group, and I wanted to be athletic and tough. This is hardwired in young men; there is no off-switch to this evolutionarily advantageous behavior. Human beings are social animals with a mean streak, and a tribe needs fighters. Young men desiring to be in that role is as natural a part of human development as acne and wet dreams. The tribe without young men to defend it does not last long.
So that’s the issue. Football gives young men what they are biologically programmed to want, and it gives it to them in a way that doesn’t involve competition with physically weaker groups of humans. It’s a whole lot harder to be a bully on the gridiron towards another athlete than on Snapchat to some kid at school.
The football problem is one aspect of the growing problem men have been facing over the course of my lifetime. Masculine identity, in the not-so-distant past, could be based on tangible success in roles largely reserved for men: athletics, the military, and occupation. Of course, I am not arguing women should not serve, or play sports, or be in the kitchen (unless it is by choice). But with the end of the draft in 1972 and as physically hard occupations either disappeared entirely (mining and factory work) or became populated by females (most white collar occupations), there was only one avenue left for boys and young men to prove themselves.
And it’s not cross-country.
There are real safety concerns about participation in tackle football, but there are also ways to mitigate that risk, chief among them delaying contact and tackling as late as possible in childhood. But there are real safety and societal concerns about taking away the best avenue young men have to channel aggression and learn about mental toughness, competition, and teamwork.
Lawrence Taylor, in multiple interviews, attests to almost quitting football as a junior in high school. He said it was too hard. But it wasn’t, and he didn’t. Instead, he learned that hard work, patience, and a sense of duty towards your teammates is rewarding, and occasionally, can even lead to greatness. This is a critical lesson for young men to learn, and it’s best they learn it early.
As my friend Sebastian Junger put it so well in his classic book Tribe, “Humans don't mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
But football doesn’t.
Let the kids play.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-01-24/youth-football-participation-declining-amid-safety-concerns
https://nfhs.org/resources/sports/high-school-participation-survey-archive
Let them play! Thanks for this Dan
When I was young, my youngest brother was ostracized and prohibited from playing football because he wore glasses. I watched how it hurt him terribly, as our two other brothers excelled at sports. David was a cracker-jack quarterback who could throw a ball like nobody’s business, but he was cast aside and made to feel inadequate due to his eyesight. From that moment on, he was verbally abused and ridiculed by our father because he wasn’t ‘man enough’.
Let them play? Not unless they fit society’s idea of a man. The effects of this abuse stayed with David until adulthood.
My brother committed suicide. That’s what society does to those who don’t live up to their standards of ‘man’. I can’t tell you how much I’d rather see our youth read instead of getting their brains pulverized by ‘playing’.