The Flight from Football

I’ve become a freaky outlier in allowing my sons to don pads.

This is starting to turn into a parenting Substack. I promise that will change next week; I’m pinioned right now between my editorial retreat, Back to School, and kids’ sports camps. So I’m again re-upping an essay for today, this time from Law & Liberty, but I’ll say a few things first because it actually pairs quite well with the one I posted Tuesday. It’s about football, boys, and the educated classes’ flight from a time-honored American sport. That really is the right way to put it. Educated Americans are presently fleeing from football.

Here’s a reality, which has become increasingly plain to me over the past five years. Within my own demographic, I’m becoming a freaky outlier simply by allowing my sons to play the sport. American boys in general are still playing in large numbers, which is why my sons can still play for their Catholic school. But beyond a certain level of education, parents increasingly won’t allow it. It’s not so much that the boys themselves are developing different interests. Many of them still want to play, but their moms often put down a foot. And it generally is about moms. Dads may have a range of views on the subject but moms feel growing confidence in insisting, “No, that’s not happening.”

Many of these moms are personal friends. I have to step carefully here. But I think I am stating something true. Moms are striking football from American youth, at least in more educated circles. How should we feel about that?

Often, a mom (or her husband, son etc.) will cite particular reasons for her deep misgivings. Maybe the kid had some major vulnerability as a younger child, causing her to develop especially strong protective instincts. Or perhaps she’s a medical professional of some sort and “has seen things”. Look, I really do understand. There are many worthwhile things to do in this life! And I’m certainly not arguing that any boy who doesn’t play football will become an emasculated weenie. But let me make something clear.

You don’t need a special reason to be shocked and alarmed by the raw physicality of football. That is a normal maternal reaction, especially in the milieu in which educated Americans currently live. As I relate in the piece, it was my reaction to my sons’ first experiences of tackle football, which thoroughly startled me given that I had already watched and loved this sport for many years. Football truly falls a long way outside the civilized-behavior norms for our present culture, and for mothers in particular, sensibilities revolt. Why are all our nice boys throwing one another to the ground? Barbarism!

Given that reality, I think things like the “medical professional” explanation are mostly obscuring the real issue. Obviously I grasp the reasoning: “this person has seen the grim underside of the business.” But this isn’t like mountain camping or days at the beach where it all seems like fun and happiness until you’ve seen that one-in-a-thousand unfortunate who got mauled by a bear. Here, the bear is front and center from the start. These campers came to wrestle the bear. In short, I can’t really think that setting a bone or treating a concussion would awaken any protective instinct that wasn’t already wide awake after watching a normal play.

I actually think, reading the stats, that football is quite a bit safer than the Normal Maternal Reaction would suggest, understanding of course that the players must be kids you know, not distant professionals, who are naturally far less real to us. I’m not denying that it involves risk. But boys are tougher than modern people tend to think, and we need to stop searching for science to convince us otherwise. Most people are quite startled, for instance, to hear that girls’ soccer, in terms of concussion risk, is within spitting distance of football. Of course hardly anyone is raging against that sport, because watching girls kick a ball around a field doesn’t trigger that same sense of alarm and outrage. The feeling that “surely it can’t be right or responsible to let our kids do this.”

On the ground I’ve found that there’s a river of what I think of as “anti-football pseudo-science,” scores of half-baked theories all pointing to the same conclusion: youth football is in fact far more dangerous than the numbers actually suggest. Nowadays, of course, those narratives tend to revolve around subtle, not-immediately-detectable forms of brain damage. “You know, new theories about sub-concussive hits…” Their brains are turning to jelly right there on the field, dontcha know. But you may also hear concerns about the neck, joints, spine, whatever. “Those boys will have injuries that they’ll carry with them their whole lives,” one woman sighed to me sanctimoniously on the sidelines of a cross country meet. She was railing against the barbaric practice of football and how grateful she was that her grandsons had been spared by their loving parents. This comes up sometimes at cross country meets, which are a bit of a magnet for “definitely not football” families. (Though I should note, lest I start a needless war here, that my own son’s cross country coach is also a football dad.)

“Injuries they’ll carry with them for the rest of their lives.” I mean, possibly? Then again, many generations of American boys have played this sport, and most of them made it to productive adulthood. In general, they did that quite a bit more successfully than today’s young men are doing. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but in my own view, it’s not entirely coincidental.

One can’t easily refute a half-baked theory prefaced with “this does need further study but…” Brain science is pretty mysterious. On the other hand, I find the psychological and cultural currents fairly easy to read. Even if they enjoy watching professionals play this game for their entertainment, educated Americans struggle mightily to make peace with their own sons playing a sport as brutally physical as football. They latch very readily onto “more dangerous than you’d think” theories because those give form to the “panic remainder” that lingers even after one has looked at the numbers. Sure, generations of American boys played this game and went on to lead healthy adult lives, and indeed a great many are doing that still. But then you watch a few plays and… hmm. I don’t know. This just doesn’t seem right.

I do not make my sons play football. As it happens, four of them are playing this fall (three tackle, one flag, the fifth is my runner), and they’re all in camp right now, so my car’s pretty stinky. I have always emphasized, however, that football is not mandatory. More than that, I have stressed to all of them, particularly as they get older, that while I am very proud of my eldest teen for sticking with a hard sport across his high school years, there are lots of possible ways to make me proud. Lots of things I would consider worthwhile. Football isn’t the end-all-be-all of manhood.

On the other hand, doing hard things kind of is, and I think a young man is at a serious disadvantage if he isn’t pressed in some way to develop physical courage. It will be much harder, without some such experience, to internalize the importance of perseverance, self-sacrifice, taking risks for things that matter. It doesn’t have to be football, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that your son can get an equivalent experience by, say, studying for a hard test. As I say in the piece:

Football is not the only possible “school of toughness,” but it could be the only one still robustly in business in cities and towns across America. Some days, I honestly think it is.

As I note, we couldn’t possibly invent football today, and it’s actually quite astonishing to reflect that 150 years ago, this game was invented not by miners or soldiers but by posh Ivy League elites. The world has sure changed, eh? In any event, I end up here:

Young men today are lazy, undisciplined, antisocial. They’re incredibly safe by historical standards, and yet they remain anxious and risk-averse, sometimes to the point of pathology. In the dark hallways of the manosphere, it’s clear that young men have an overpowering sense that manhood has been stolen from them, and they’re bitter about it, though they can’t explain with any clarity what has been lost. Surrounded to a historically unprecedented degree by choice and opportunity, they struggle to find the motivation to do even the things that have been considered normal for almost all men everywhere: work, get married, have children. Even sex is a “maybe” for men today.

Yes, football involves some risks. What do we risk by suffocating it, though? It’s not like anyone thinks the boys are doing fine nowadays. Note too what I said a few weeks ago about intellectuals and cowardice, and you’ll begin to grasp why I’m so dogged about defending this sport, even though my kids are not at all the sort one expects to become firemen, marines, or rescue swimmers.

It’s especially hard, I think, for moms to grasp these sorts of connections, because obviously football is not necessary for them. Physical courage is more gendered than most other forms. Women certainly have their own physical challenges and ordeals, as my Tuesday post addressed, but it’s different. For men, learning to use their greater strength, speed, and aggressiveness for others, applying it to goals beyond themselves, is crucial. They do that on the gridiron.

We all have to learn to live in our bodies. It’s not particularly easy for anyone.