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Grantland: The Conservative Case for Football
GrundleStiltzkin
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The Conservative Case for Football
Chaffetz was making what we might call the conservative case for football. Arguments once restricted to Roger Goodell can now be found nesting in book-length tracts and Politico op-eds. It’s not just that football has been politicized — everything in the known universe has been politicized. It’s that football has been placed in a familiar political frame. The conservative frame is thus: A cherished American institution is being dogpiled by nanny-staters, media elites, P.C. dogmatists, trial lawyers, union organizers, and — for conservatives, this covers most of the former — those who would make us a softer, wussier people.
Enter Teddy Roosevelt, the GOP’s stand-up defensive end. “I think much of the outburst about it hysterical,” Roosevelt remarked of football. Anticipating Goodell’s talking points by 100 years, Roosevelt argued that football wasn’t innately deadly but could be fixed by “severe refereeing.” He convened a White House summit of top coaches. He punished a negligent ref by slow-walking the man’s appointment at the Naval Academy. Underlying Roosevelt’s push was the idea that men unshaped by rough sports were “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”
Roosevelt’s words, with only a slight update for modern slang, form the first plank of the current conservative case for football. Bennett told me, with no small measure of pride, that he got two concussions playing in high school and at Williams College. When Bennett went to the University of Texas for graduate school in the 1960s, he befriended a Longhorns lineman named Gary Shaw. One night, they had an off-campus scrimmage. “It was after a few beers …” Bennett said. “I admired the hell out of his Orange Bowl ring. I wanted to see what a Southwest Conference guard does. I went up against him. That was my third concussion.”
Indeed, one key difference between liberals and conservatives is that the latter tend to describe football’s violence as a feature rather than a bug. “You look at a game like Ole Miss–LSU,” Stevens said. “People were falling in the fourth quarter. It was brutal. But that’s the essence of the game. It’s called Death Valley. It’s not called Eternal Life.
Finally, conservatives see another familiar enemy casting a blimp-size shadow over football. It’s liberal guilt. President Obama told The New Republic that he and fellow fans were “examin[ing] our consciences.” It’s a sacrament of modern sportswriting to express guilt about watching the game or swear it off altogether.
“I think that’s utter gibberish,” Stuart Stevens said. “It’s like watching a bullfight and feeling sorry for the bull.”
“Guilt?” Laura Ingraham said. “I feel energized watching football. I feel like I need to be in better shape.” Ingraham said if anything gave her a pang of conscience on Sundays, it was promos for network TV series that showed people hopping into bed with one another.
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