Is it time to abolish football?

Along with Christmas, Super Bowl Sunday is my favorite day of the year. Those are the times of peace on earth, one because almost everything is shut and people are at home with family and you can go for a walk or a bike ride and see hardly anyone, and the other because everyone's home eating chips and guacamole in front of their room-dominating TVs and the streets are even emptier, and for longer. The super mood may be slightly subdued this year since a player's heart stopped on the field a few weeks ago and he almost died in front of millions watching on television. But the game will go on because there's so much money at stake.

We know that football is the most popular U.S. sport, and with the possible exception of boxing the most brutal, and that its brutality is a big part of its appeal. Since I've always been small for my size and therefore played quarterback or running back during my brief boyhood career on the playground gridiron, the players I've most admired were the smaller guys whose moves or speed or agility or great hands outsmarted and outmaneuvered their bigger opponents. Watching the small, slow, yet miraculously elusive Jaguar Jon Arnett return a kickoff in the L.A. Coliseum at a Sunday game with my dad in the 1950s was as good as my life ever got as a boy, even though I hated the Rams.

So, yes, when I was young I loved football, played it — even tackle on adolescent weekends with my friends at Coldwater Canyon park — watched it on TV, went to games and idolized Johnny Unitas and Raymond Berry and Lenny Moore and Alan “The Horse” Ameche of my beloved Baltimore Colts. But it's been decades since I had any interest in watching a game above a bar much less in person. I know there are still moments of surprising grace and extraordinary athleticism even among 300-pound linemen, but at some point I got too soft or sensitive and the game got too violent for me.

It also got too big, not just the noisy vulgarity of the spectacle and the obscene billions driving the industry, but the athletes themselves, who are grotesquely larger than ever and faster and stronger so that no matter how much armor they wear, the impact of their collisions is potentially lethal and gives the field of play the air of a killing field. It's just too gladiatorial for my aging taste. It's also too much like war, based as it is on the violent conquest and acquisition of territory.

By now of course we know the long-term consequences of constant hits to the head no matter how high-tech the helmet. A lot of former players lose it mentally, prematurely, thanks to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which the doctors can only diagnose postmortem when they slice the late player's brain apart to determine what drove them mad. By then it is too late, and even future CTE sufferers won't benefit because blows to the head (and every other body part) are baked into the game.

Instead of building more and more layers of pointless padding, football should be played naked, like the ancient Olympics, and let there be squads of beefcake weightlifters on the sidelines to carry the fatally injured off the field. If you pay them enough millions, you know there'll be no shortage of strapping young dudes willing to risk everything for the promise of the glory of human sacrifice, a great tradition in the Americas dating back to the Aztecs.

Or maybe football, like bullfighting on its last spindly legs before collapsing, should be abolished. Soccer is gaining popularity as a far more elegant and subtle game, rough enough but played by normal-size people without padding whose aggression is addressed to the ball and not to the opposing humans.

So enjoy the Super Bowl and all the guacamole you can eat, and pray for crashing hits with no major injuries. I'll be out enjoying the peaceful streets.