26 Time February 3, 2020
only have I introduced my son to a
problematic game, writing about it is
part of my job.Humans possess a healthy appetite
for cognitive dissonance, notes Jim
Taylor, a Bay Area psychologist
specializing in sports and parenting.
By watching football, “you’re gaining
enjoyment from other people’s
suffering,” he says. “There’s no doubt
about that.” We house conflicting
thoughts in our brain: Football is
dangerous; we love football. To ease
this inherent conflict, we can either
quit football cold—or at least cut back
on consumption—or talk ourselves into
minimizing its risks. Maybe, you tell
yourself, better helmet technology or
stiffer penalties for head-first tackling
can actually make for a safer game.
Never mind that violent collisions are
inevitable.
“We tend to be hedonistic beings,”
says Taylor, “and choose the path that
gives us the utmost pleasure.” When
we bring our children into the mix,
we’ll go to greater lengths to block outAs AnoTher super Bowl ApproAches, i keep Thinking
about a clear September afternoon at MetLife Stadium, home
of the New York Giants, and wondering if I’m a crappy dad.
For the second straight year, I was lucky enough to take
my 13-year-old son Will to a Giants game. We started the
day running routes around the tailgaters in the parking
lot. We each attempted a pair of short field goals in the
fan zone outside the stadium. Four in a row! Once the game
began, we explained the nuances of a two-point conversion
to the friendly British fellow to our left, ate too much and
embraced when the home team scored. We wondered if we
were witnessing a bit of history: promising Giants rookie
quarterback Daniel Jones was playing in his first home game.
The Giants cruised to a 24-3 victory.
Sure, Will’s Giants didn’t win a game for another
2�⁄� months. But at least he had September.
As a parent, I try not to take such outings for granted:
I’m positive my son will remember that day forever, just
as I can picture the handful of NFL games my father and
I attended when I was a kid in the 1980s and early 1990s.
But those were more innocent days. Back then, football fans
were unaware of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE),
the neurodegenerative disease associated with football brain
trauma. A 2017 study in the Journal of the American Medical
Association found that 110 of 111 brains of former NFL players
donated for examination showed signs of CTE; several high-
profile former players who have died by suicide were found
to have the disease. The troubling risk of brain damage has
compelled some of today’s players to retire earlier than they
otherwise would have. Carolina Panthers star linebacker Luke
Kuechly announced on Jan. 14 that he was stepping away
from the game at age 28.
As a journalist who’s written a lot about the risks of playing
tackle football, I would not permit Will to play. Luckily, his
paternal genetics have precluded any temptation for now.
But should I be O.K. with his watching the game? Don’t
his eyeballs help support an enterprise that we know can
damage its participants? This is on top of the laundry list of
other reasons to tune out, like the stain of disturbing NFL
domestic-violence incidents. Or the apparent blacklisting of
a player, Colin Kaepernick, for a peaceful act of protest. Or a
sudden dearth of African-American head coaches: three now,
as opposed to seven in 2018. Around 60% of the NFL’s players
are black. There are no African-American majority owners.
Fans say they support things like player safety and free
speech and racial equality. But pro football is still the most
popular sport in America, and TV and digital viewership rose
5% during the regular season. On Super Bowl Sunday, in what
may be America’s foremost annual display of mass hypocrisy,
around 100 million people will tune in. As a sportswriter
who’s relished the opportunity to park myself in multiple
Super Bowl press boxes, I’m even more compromised. Not
Is it unethical to watch
football with my son?
By Sean Gregory
TheView E s s ay