Welcome to the Machine

Two days after my father passed away from stage 4 CTE, I had to travel to military training. I decided to drive. As if somehow ordained, the day was Super Bowl Sunday, and the roads across the southeastern United States were virtually clear. While football culture spent the day glued to the television, I traveled quietly over 700 miles and escaped the machine. It was an example of what life can be, beyond the game.   

In late January, 2019, I got the call I always knew I would dread. Although my father had been having some serious long-term physical and neurological problems for a very long time from playing football in college and the NFL, nothing could have prepared us for how rapidly his last days came and what brought us all back together for one final vigil to bear witness to what the machine had wrought.   

In April 2016, a U.S. federal appellate court approved the settlement agreement in the case of In re: National Football League Players Concussion Injury Litigation. The league agreed to an uncapped compensation fund that would potentially cover over 20,000 retired players in exchange for a release of all concussion-related claims against the league. A lawyer who helped negotiate the settlement for the retired players, said players, "Will now receive much-needed care and support for the serious neurocognitive injuries they are facing.” Unfortunately, this hasn’t happened in the overwhelming majority of cases.  To call what transpired a "settlement" in the classic, legal sense, is in and of itself a lie. As former players have learned over the past five years, it is actually a Byzantine claims management process set up by the league to make it almost impossible for players to receive much-needed medical treatment and care that they already qualify for under the terms of the agreement. Claims are deliberately drawn-out, delayed, and rejected in the hopes the players will pass away before the league has to make good on their agreement. As a result, it can be argued the NFL has hastened and is responsible for their deaths.

In this episode, I take a contemplative visit back to the empty stadium where many years ago my father and I played and were part of championship teams, twenty-five years apart. I think back on everything that happened then and everything that happened afterward, and I ask, was it all worth it?  

Universities and college football fans preach about their concern for the well-being of the "student-athletes" who attend their schools.  But this facade crumbled when the worst pandemic in a century hit the world and they feared they might not get to watch football. The result was a forced, chaotic, shortened, and illegitimate season, the personal health costs of which we will never be able to measure, and it opened a window into the true hearts and minds of college administrators, fans, and college football culture.   

In the second of a two-part social and cultural analysis, I discuss the concepts of habit, myth, and tribalism as they all combine and relate to American football. In previous episodes, I’ve argued that one of the explanations for why football only exists in America and why intelligent people would still continue to watch and participate in something they know is dangerous to the short and long-term health of its players is something I call tribalism. Tribalism exerts an unseen, undiscussed coercion on people to continue doing things they know are unhealthy. People are all tribal to some extent, and some are more affected by it than others. In some ways, it is part of the DNA, but in most cases, it is directly connected to our environment and upbringing; the family we are born into, the community in which we grow up, the schools we attend, the friends we make, our schooling, and our life experiences all go into this mix. But there is a path to change.

In the first of a two-part social and cultural analysis, I discuss the concepts of habit, myth, and tribalism as they all combine and relate to American football. In previous episodes, I’ve argued that one of the explanations for why football only exists in America and why intelligent people would still continue to watch and participate in something they know is dangerous to the short and long-term health of its players is something I call tribalism. Tribalism exerts an unseen, undiscussed coercion on people to continue participating in things they know are unhealthy. People are all tribal to some extent, and some are more affected by it than others. In some ways, it is part of the DNA, but in most cases, it is directly connected to our environment and upbringing, the family we are born into, the community in which we grow up, the schools we attend, the friends we make, our education, and our life experiences all go into this mix. But there is a path to change.  

Luke Kuechly was one of the best linebackers in the NFL for the entirety of his eight-year career. But he will perhaps be remembered foremost for a searing picture he provided into what can happen when a player in the prime of his life and at the top of his abilities suffers a serious concussion on a single play. He would retire from the game at the age of 28.  

There was a time when I believed football had been "good" to our family. But that was a very long time ago. The more I watched my father's post-NFL life develop, the more I realized that rather than "giving" him or our family anything, it had taken much more. In exchange for playing four years on the college level and eight in the NFL, it had given him meager wages, no transferable job skills for life afterward, a list of injuries, no health insurance or medical care for conditions resulting from his time playing, and something more hidden, insidious, and permanent, that would begin to reveal itself shortly after he retired. And these are the same things the sport takes from the rest of those who play it for a significant period of time and their families.     

In this episode, I update my original Sports Illustrated piece from 2015, in which I described what suffering a concussion in a football game is like and the day many years later when I finally faced the truth that I could no longer conceal my true feelings about the culture of enablement that surrounds the football industry.

A middle aged man who grew up in Texas lived alone in a small apartment in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He was unmarried and had no children. He had no family in the area. He had apparently chosen the city at random. He slept in a sleeping bag on the floor of his apartment because of an old back injury. He worked at the local Sunshine Food Stores stacking shelves by day. After work and in his free time, he wrote. But the imposing man who looked like a college English professor looked out of place. How and why did he come to choose that place, and who was he?

What if the same law firms that represented Big Tobacco also represented the NFL? Would that raise any questions in your mind? We know what happened to Big Tobacco after decades of claiming that nicotine was not addictive and covering up the link between smoking and deadly diseases like lung cancer. It cost Big Tobacco 246 billion dollars. Big Tobacco's disinformation campaign was led by some prominent law firms. And it just so happens that the NFL has employed the same law firms as Big Tobacco. Is there a pattern here? 

In 1995, the University of Texas gave a man named Ron McKelvey a full scholarship to play football. McKelvey then went on to play defensive back in all twelve regular season games for the Longhorns and would have played in the Sugar Bowl against Virginia Tech on New Years' Day 1996 if it hadn't been for one problem: Ron McKelvey was not Ron McKelvey; he was Ron Weaver, a 30-year-old man who had already played out his college football eligibility. Had he not outed himself to a reporter it's highly unlikely anyone would have ever found out. The school and coaching staff claimed they had no idea they were playing an ineligible player. Was that and is that even possible? And what bigger questions does the incident raise? Did race play a part in any of it? In any event, after the dust settled, only one thing was certain; the only person punished was Ron Weaver. 

If you're a college football fan, have you ever stepped back and asked yourself why you care about whether 18 to 22-year-old young men win or lose a football game? There are reasons people invest significant emotional energy in the athletic achievements of 18 to 22-year-old young men. It just might be in their sociological “DNA.”

The machine cannot run without fuel.  And fans and "sports writers" provide that fuel. The irony is, neither group really knows much at all about football or the long-term costs to the people who play it and their families. But they act like they do, especially the never-have-played sports writers who provide erroneous narratives. It becomes incumbent, then, to dismantle these inaccurate narratives and set them straight with some hard-learned truths.