Many reasons to boycott the NFL, but I’ll still watch
Reporter and activist Shaun King has asked fans to boycott the NFL in response to the way the National Football League and its owners have essentially shut Colin Kaepernick out of a quarterback position.
I have been in this position before. At the beginning of the 2015 season, football and I ended a three-year separation.
On a whim in 2001, I had picked the New England Patriots as the team I would patiently fall in love with. Beginner’s luck granted me a team that would show me not just how to play football but how to win football.
I loved football for all the wrong and right reasons: It was beautiful, a symbol of America (which as a Canadian, I took a perverse and metaphoric enjoyment) and it was explosive. The on-field intensity echoed my inner teen turmoil, making it grand and entertaining. Games were also the perfect length for getting homework done, so there was that. I grew up and my world grew, too. It dawned slowly that in football, women didn’t matter. There were big and small instances, each as troubling as the next. The one that broke me was the league’s handling of the allegations that Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ quarterback, had sexually assaulted two women — one in 2008, another in 2010. Fans, pundits and the team alike came together as one to say: yeah, hmm, but he throws a ball really well.
His ardent defenders said Big Ben throws the ball super good, though.
I was aghast. After half-heartedly watching, I stopped altogether.
Sports has always been political. It is hopeful to not want the world of play to be shaped by the same terrible deep dark things that shape our ongoing world.
Football has always had a close relationship with racism, misogyny and cruel complicity. It’s easy to forget that before he was one of the league’s first marketable (to white audiences) Black athletes and before he was on trial for murder and a symbol of Black (in)justice, O.J. Simpson was a known womanizer and domestic abuser. It is also easy to forget that the majority of NFL players are young, notwealthy Black men working for extremely wealthy white men. The NFL combine, a needless audition of sporting prowess, looks eerily like a slave auction in ways I’ve preferred not to think about.
If you look closely, the seeds of hate and hurt are sown all over the football field. Misogynists snap on their helmets every single day. There are racists in crisp white collars and ties overseeing the field. Fans may cheer for one team, but in so many cities, they’re on opposites sides of the racial divide.
I know I don’t have to water those seeds. I could choose to spend my time doing more meaningful things. The Football Book Club, for example, is a group of guys who read a book each week instead of watching games on Thursdays, Sundays and Mondays. Their reason: the increasingly undeniable science that concussions cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease suffered by many NHL and NFL players. (The NFL specifically has, at different points, denied, buried and minimized the impact of the disease on its players.)
Still, I find myself watching the games. In the year that inaugurated Donald Trump, a white supremacist with the diplomatic skill of an axe murderer, I still cheered for the New England Patriots when they won the Super Bowl. The Patriots’ coach and owner — and arguably, quarterback — are Trump supporters.
From my first personal boycott to the questions posed by this one, here’s what I have learned. Boycott the NFL if you want. Refuse to buy the gear, opt out of watching games and do all the counterprogramming you want. That is your choice. It will go on without you. Sure, they’ll make small concessions. I’ll take good odds that they’ll launch some pro-Black charity as a sop to the half-committed boycotters.
The NFL is the Colosseum. Just like it does on the streets and in its prisons, the empire will throw broken Black bodies where it wants.
Every week, I will watch, wondering if any of it is worth a ring.
Vicky Mochama is a co-host of the podcast, Safe Space. Her column appears every second Thursday. She also writes a triweekly column for Metro News that mixes politics, news and humour.