[After a brief decline, the number of US television watchers of
professional football is once again on the upswing. Here are the six
ways the National Football League groomed us for Trump and is still
trying to keep us in its formidable grasp. ] [[link removed]]

A VOTER’S GUIDE: THE SIX WAYS FOOTBALL GROOMED US FOR PRESIDENT
TRUMP  
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Robert Lipsyte
December 12, 2019
TomDispatch
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_ After a brief decline, the number of US television watchers of
professional football is once again on the upswing. Here are the six
ways the National Football League groomed us for Trump and is still
trying to keep us in its formidable grasp. _

Eli Harold #58, Colin Kaepernick #7 and Eric Reid #35 of the San
Francisco 49ers kneel on the sideline during the national anthem in
2017., Michael Zagaris/Getty Images

 

Because everything is so Trumpian these days, there’s less air or
space for the only other mass entertainment that promotes tribalism
and toxic masculinity while keeping violence in vogue: football.

In the age of The Donald, it’s hard to remember that football was
once the nation’s greatest television reality show. Because real
people actually got really hurt in real time, you could be sure it
wasn’t fake news. Now, football is just another runner-up to
President Trump, whose policies actually get people killed.

And yet football is still here, in plain sight, waiting to resume its
cultural dominance once Trump is gone.

To avoid any further erosion of its base, it is cosmetically modifying
itself at every level with “reforms” focused on the image of
increased safety. From small rural high schools
[[link removed]] to
the Fifth Avenue offices
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the National Football League (NFL), plans are being generated to
protect America’s most popular and prosperous sport from the two
things that could destroy it -- the players’ mortal fear of having
their brains scrambled and the fans’ moral fear of awakening to
their complicity in such a process.

The players, mostly black and conditioned to believe football is their
best ticket out of modern Jim Crow, have not yet fully awakened. But
fans, despite being conditioned to believe that supporting your local
team is little short of a civic responsibility, have more options.
They are, after all, mostly white and not as likely to need to
sacrifice their health for their short-term livelihood. There’s hope
that, in the end, those fans will come to understand, for example,
that watching the Super Bowl is casting a vote for the values that
have helped bring us the show most dangerous to our survival as a
civilization, the Trump administration.

FOOTBALL’S PLAYBOOK

As a voter’s guide, here are the six ways in which football groomed
us for Trumpball and is still trying to keep us in its grasp:

1. INFLAME RACIAL DIVISIONS: Helping to spread America’s primary
disease, racism, is Trump 101, but the NFL got there first
[[link removed]].
Seventy per cent of its players are African-American. At the start of
this season, only four head coaches and two general managers of the 32
teams were men of color. Only two owners were not white men: the
Jacksonville Jaguars' Pakistani-American Shahid Khan and the Buffalo
Bills' Korean-American Kim Pegula (a woman).

So, who would have thought that the same year -- this one! -- would
mark not only the 100th anniversary of the NFL but the 400th
anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans on the soil
of what became the United States of America? Somehow, neither
milestone has been celebrated all that much this year -- and never
together. In his indispensable book on race and sports, _Forty
Million Dollar Slaves_
[[link removed]],
former _New York Times_ columnist William Rhoden maintains that, by
cutting off black athletes from their history and communities, the
sports industry has managed to control them. “The power relationship
that had been established on the plantation,” he wrote, “has not
changed even if the circumstances around it have.”

To make sure the NFL owners would stand firm against players kneeling
during the national anthem, President Trump called
[[link removed]] Dallas
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to say, according to a sworn deposition
given by Jones and reviewed by the_ Wall Street Journal_, “Tell
everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

No wonder that these days, whole teams or many members of them refuse
[[link removed]]invitations
to the White House.

2. CRUSH DISSENT: The CliffsNotes saga of former San Francisco 49er
quarterback Colin Kaepernick is pretty straightforward -- a star
(though not a superstar) refuses to stand for the pre-game national
anthem as a protest against racism, particularly of the white-police
variety. His act is spun as disrespect to the nation and its flag.
Thereafter, no team will hire him because he would be a
“distraction.” That was three years ago and, ever since,
Kaepernick has kept himself in playing shape, becoming a martyr to
some, a loser to others, and one of the genuine heroes of this
generation of racial activists. He has collected millions of dollars
(and given away
[[link removed]] more
than a million of them) from both a Nike campaign
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a settlement
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the NFL in return for withdrawing a collusion case he had brought
against the league. More recently, a league-sanctioned open workout,
hastily organized for him to audition for a new quarterback
job, collapsed
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bad intentions and confusion.

Perhaps most interesting is the striking lack of support Kaepernick
has received from many of his fellow players. Are they against his
demonstration or fearful of antagonizing their owners and endangering
their own jobs (which only last
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on average, slightly more than three years)? After all, at a 2017
rally, Trump told
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same owners (a striking number
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them donors of his) that they should respond to protesting players by
saying, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He’s
fired. He’s fired!”

He really didn’t have to tell them. They understood that holding the
line against the Kaepernicks of this world means keeping the
progressive barbarians at bay, something already baked into the game.
The canceling of the Other, of anyone not on the team (so to speak),
be they rivals, uncooperative college faculty, or most women who
aren’t moms, cheerleaders, or girlfriends who understand that the
team comes first, remains the norm.

3. NORMALIZE BRUTALITY: Football was born in brutality. In 1909, the
year 26 football players died, former Confederate colonel John
Mosby reportedly called
[[link removed]] the sport a
"barbarous amusement" that "develops the brute dormant in man's nature
and puts the player on a level with... a polar bear." This from a
cavalry raider once known as the “Gray Ghost.”

Although the game has since been made safer, it’s always been a
contest battled out man-to-man and based on the violent aggrandizement
of territory. Attempts to create rules to avoid, say, crippling blocks
and tackles have generally been met by howls of anguish from
chickenhawk fans who cried out: don’t sissify football.

Particularly in the warfare between offensive and defensive lines,
football is a game of domination by bullies. The most notorious of
contemporary bullies (and yes, he’s a Trump supporter
[[link removed]]) is Richie
Incognito. As an all-star offensive lineman at Nebraska, he picked
fights that probably would have ended his career at most other
universities. But he was such a good player that Nebraska sent him
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the Menninger Clinic for anger-management counseling. This, however,
proved no cure for the six-foot-three-inch, 300-pounder and Incognito
eventually was kicked off the team. While some pro teams refused to
draft him on the basis of “character” issues, the St. Louis Rams
did so in 2005. He played well (and with bad character). He was
routinely picked for all-pro teams, while, in 2009, being voted the
“dirtiest player in the league.” In 2013, he bullied
[[link removed]] a
fellow 300-pound Dolphin, Jonathan Martin, off the team and eventually
out of football.

Not surprisingly, the NFL is as practiced when it comes to reaching
out to bad boys as the present administration is. (Chief Petty Officer
Edward Gallagher, one of three SEALs tried for war crimes, whom
President Trump intervened
[[link removed]]repeatedly
to protect, has been referred to as the Richie Incognito of the
SEALS.) Incognito, who continues to pile up a police record
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played this season with the Oakland Raiders while Martin, a Stanford
graduate, stillstruggles
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his depression. 

4. SUSTAIN INEQUALITY: Recent legislation in California allowing
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athletes to share in any profits from the sale of their images has
been both hailed and attacked as revolutionary. It’s the beginning
of a fair new deal in the saga of the “unpaid professionals” and
the end of amateur sports as we knew it. There was always a very good
reason for keeping jocks on an unguaranteed dole called
“scholarships”: control. But an even better reason was keeping all
the profits for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA),
the colleges, the apparel companies, and the retailers.

The crushing economic inequality in college athletics (especially in
football and basketball, the so-called revenue sports) has been
justified by the “free” education that “student-athletes” -- a
term concocted by former NCAA Executive Director Walter Byers --
receive, if indeed they go to class and graduate. If indeed they even
have time.

The ripping-off of college athletes has been carefully ignored by
legislators, universities, and fans. Later in life, Byers would
aptly call [[link removed]] the NCAA "a
nationwide money-laundering scheme," but this phenomenon runs through
all of sports. The 32 NFL teams collect more than $13 billion in
revenue annually and protect themselves with elaborate “salary
caps,” so that no team can start spending too wildly on players or
launch the football equivalent of an arms race. Of course, by the time
you turn pro, the least you can make is $495,000 (this year’s rookie
minimum) with millions more for first-round draft picks.

As Colonel Mosby pointed out so long ago, the real problem still
begins in college. As he put it
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notorious that football teams are largely composed of professional
mercenaries who are hired to advertise colleges. Gate money is the
valuable consideration." 

5. APPLY THE LIE: In the deadly tradition
[[link removed]] forged by Big Tobacco and climate
deniers, the NFL relentlessly insisted that there was no relation
between brain trauma
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the game, even as middle-aged former players slipped into early
dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), and Parkinson’s disease. For
years, the league was dismissive and stonewalled on the issue. In all
of this, the media and a cult of faux masculinity were accomplices.
Those head-banging hits you’ve been wincing at on TV? Just dingers a
real man should be able to shake off.

It took a young _New York Times_ reporter
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Alan Schwarz, a young pathologist, Bennett Omalu, and the brothers
Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru-Wada, with the help of a _PBS
Frontline_ documentary, “League of Denial
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finally get the story out in full. And it would prove a particularly
hard sell for fans invested in the game. They generally didn’t want
to give up their viewing pleasures, however guilty, and tried to
justify them by claiming that the players were well aware of the risks
and well compensated for them, even if the settlements crafted by NFL
lawyers have never seemed adequate
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the damage done.

As Americans learned that the damage was usually caused by thousands
of hits to the head -- from pee-wee football through high school and
college -- youth football participation started to drop
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Even successful pros began to say that they wouldn’t allow
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sons to play football.

More troubling yet to the NFL have been decisions
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stars like Andrew Luck, a 29-year-old quarterback who quit while he
could still walk and think.

6. CONTROL THE MEDIA: Covering football from high school to the pros
can be a walk in the park or a slog through hell, depending on whether
the reporter is considered part of the booster squad or a
“ripper,” out to score his or her own points in opposition to the
team’s brand image. Admittedly, even in this heightened moment for
sports journalists, few reporters have been physically attacked by
coaches or athletes, although intimidation, micro-aggressions, and
attempts at shunning have always been common. Lately, real-time access
to key players has been harder to come by and has led to more
speculative coverage, which, in turn, often results in adversarial
writing, sometimes in defiance of media employers.

Not surprisingly, then, leading a recent “stick to sports”
campaign have been football’s media partners, not its players or
fans. Anything that seems remotely political, even if posted on
private social-media platforms, has been subject to being shut down.
Jemele Hill, an ESPN star now writing for the _Atlantic_, may be the
most striking example
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far of a good journalist ousted in this way, but many have also been
lost to devastating lay-offs
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ESPN, _Deadspin_, and other sports sites where real coverage has been
giving way to cheaper, uncontroversial puff pieces.

Ultimately, in such a climate, political figures, too, may feel ever
more comfortable expressing themselves aggressively to journalists on
critical coverage. Here, as David French described it
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is a possible harbinger of such a future:

“In 2017, the congressional candidate Greg Gianforte
‘body-slammed’ the _Guardian_ reporter Ben Jacobs after Jacobs
tried to ask him questions about health-care policy. It was a
cowardly, criminal act. Not long after, Trump praised him. At a
campaign rally
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the president of the United States said of Gianforte, ‘Any guy that
can do a body slam, he’s my kind of -- he’s my guy.’”

“My guy,” by the way, went on to win his Montana seat in the House
of Representatives.

For those who remain unconvinced that an unqualified vote for football
is a vote for Trump, the Jock Culture Department
[[link removed]] of _TomDispatch_ suggests
you follow Richie Incognito to the Menninger Clinic. For those who
promise to at least remain open on such subjects, however, we’re
prepared to look the other way while you watch the Super Bowl in
a SportsWorld
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ever more toxic by the racism, sexism, classism, and violence
encouraged, or perhaps more accurately, marketed by Donald Trump. And
while you’re watching the festivities (and the head-banging to
follow), hang on to the possibility that this will be the
president’s last Super Bowl as national head coach.

[_Robert Lipsyte, a _TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]]_, was
a sports and city columnist for the _New York Times. _He is the
author, among other works, of _SportsWorld: An American Dreamland
[[link removed]]_.]_

_Copyright 2019 Robert Lipsyte. Reprinted with permission. May not
be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
[[link removed]].  xxxxxx thanks TomDispatch for
sending this article to us._

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