A thin line between safety, mayhem
League wants to package a game in which players can be maimed with a corporate veneer of respectability
When you attend a Super Bowl, you come to understand the idea of packaging.
There are booths full of products and services eager to be sold. There are extravagant parties hosted by corporate sponsors, where you see stuff like DJ Lil’ Jon throwing Bud Lite T-shirts into a crowd at the Playboy Mansion, which in Indianapolis last month was in fact a Hampton Inn dressed to the nines. There is the Star-spangled Banner and the flag and the halftime show, brought to you by Bridgestone. You will see the full power of U.S. corporate tribalism, dancing around the bonfire.
But what is the bonfire, exactly? What is it do we think we are watching?
Next year, the Super Bowl will be in New Orleans, where debauchery and voodoo rule, and where football was redefined a little on Wednesday. National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell did not just bring down the hammer – he swung it like Thor, suspending Saints head coach Sean Payton for a full season; former Saints and current St. Louis defensive coordinator Gregg Williams indefinitely; Saints general manager Mickey Loomis for eight games; and Saints assistant Joe Vitt for six. He fined the Saints $500,000, and docked them second-round draft picks in 2012 and 2013. Players will probably be next. Roger Goodell, hanging judge.
They were suspended for carrying out, or failing to stop, or trying to cover up, a program administered by Williams that paid players bounties for injuring opposing players from 2009 to 2011 – $1,500 U.S. for knocking a player out of the game, $1,000 for a cart-off, which was referred to in a Saints memo as “Crank up the John Deer (sic) Tractor.” At one point, there was a $5,000 bounty for Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers; at another, $10,000 for Brett Favre. The players contributed the money. Sometimes Williams did, too.
“All of us are responsible for maintaining the integrity of our league, and also making sure we’re doing everything possible to ensure the safety of our players,” Goodell told the NFL Network. “The game doesn’t need to be played this way. And that’s made clear by players, head coaches that I’ve spoken to. We need to change the culture. This is another step to changing that culture. This type of behaviour, and accepting this type of a program, will not be tolerated.”
This is, of course, rich in both senses of the word. Clearly, Goodell is trying to draw a line between the good ol’ football culture and the modern era. He wants us to think what we are watching is distilled savagery, rather than a gangland war.
Yes, the league is concerned about player safety, at least when it comes to its star quarterbacks, who have been granted more protection under the rules. No, a team operating a bounty system designed to hurt players – a team that ended Kurt Warner’s career, and ruined Favre’s ankle, and whose defensive coordinator allegedly did the same in Buffalo and Washington, the team that apparently started Peyton Manning’s road to neck surgery – cannot be allowed to continue doing so. Yes, the coverup is as punishable as the crime.
But this was not just about player safety. Whether players are paid extra to hurt one another or not – and it is a thin line, if a real one – football grinds up players, erodes their bodies, and in some cases destroys their brains. The research into concussions and CTE will, eventually, knock on the NFL’S door. There is a class-action lawsuit involving at least 305 former players over mistreatment of past concussions that is working its way through the system in Philadelphia, and another featuring 11 former players was recently filed in New Orleans.
A wise man once said if football was invented yesterday it would be banned tomorrow. It could theoretically be litigated to death, too. Former All-pro defensive-tackle Kris Jenkins talked to the New York Times’ Greg Bishop about his career last year.
“Piles, oh, my God, they’re brutal,” Jenkins said. “I’ve had my ankles twisted. I’ve been bit. I’ve done stuff. I’ve tried to break guys’ elbows, pinching people, twisting ankles, trying to bend up their arms, pop an elbow out. Why? I had to fight back.”
He also said his brain remained fogged, and added: “I can’t blame anybody for my death. I made the choice to play football. … We consider football a gladiator sport because we understand you’re going to get hurt. You’re putting your life on the line. You might not die now, like in an old Roman arena, but five, 10 years down the road, you could. You know that.”
The NFL knows what football is, and yet Goodell and NFL owners – and one presumes, NFL sponsors – wanted and still want the riches of an 18-game season, which was resisted during collective bargaining over safety concerns from the players. But you can’t tell players football is safe enough to play more of without stamping on the most violent elements of the game.
So, of course, this might have been a common practice in football – former Saints receivers Joe Horn alleged that every other team had a bounty program, and specifically said Kansas City and Atlanta paid for cart-offs.
Goodell is trying to sell football in a world where we are learning rapidly about the devastating effects of head injuries, and in a world where a generation of football players is returning, crippled, to demand its due. He wants a league with a corporate veneer of respectability and an acceptable degree of mayhem.
Football, in this day and age, requires packaging. So Goodell mounted Sean Payton’s and Gregg Williams’s skulls on the grill of his limousine, as a warning to the others. Hurt each other if you must, boys. But don’t just do it for the money.