LITTLE ROCK — The best thing about this year’s Super Bowl wasn’t how exciting the game was (although it was certainly that) but that there were so few of those ridiculous flags for breathing on the quarterbacks or accidentally touching the receivers that make fans groan and smack their foreheads.
Maybe Commissioner Roger Goodell sent a memo to the officials telling them to put the sissy stuff away and let the players actually play the game, for once.
The powder-puff probably won’t stay put away for long though, as football at all levels is now squarely in the cross-hairs of our self-appointed pleasure police. They don’t much like football for the same reason they don’t like fast food, tobacco, fizzy soft drinks, SUVs, or guns-because the rest of us less-sensitive types in flyover country do.
The personification of the New Age wimpy male, Barack Obama, has even stepped in to question whether he would have allowed a son to play such a primitive sport (as if there could be anything funnier than Obama or any of his hypothetical progeny dressed out in helmet and pads).
Dedicated to a life of pestering their neighbors over their unhealthy habits and unenlightened attitudes, our hand-wringing “girly-men” have, in a moment of sudden revelation, noticed that football is violent and dangerous (imagine that!).
In their search for causes to support that prove their moral superiority, they have finally discovered that the idea of huge, fast men tackling each other might run counter to the concept of safety.
An obvious answer to such moral preening would be to readily admit that football is dangerous, and always has been. And to agree that there might be ways to make it less so that are worth exploring, perhaps in terms of better equipment.
But all that doesn’t change the fact that football is (and should forever remain) a violent sport; that you can’t take the violence out without it becoming something else altogether.
The key part, however, is that football and lots of other risky activities are voluntarily taken up by human beings because they enjoy them, and because they often get paid handsomely for doing them well.
More to the point, how many high school kids actually said “no” when the college scholarship offers rolled in from Alabama or Ohio State? And how many later experienced anything but jubilation when they heard their names called on draft day and became rich overnight (by most people’s standards) by signing those professional contracts with the Cowboys or Packers?
All of which leaves us with the inescapable conclusion that some people choose (and consider themselves lucky for being able to choose) violent professions in which they are more than amply rewarded. And that when such lucky people make those choices, they generally know what they are getting into and what risks they are running, almost certainly to a better extent than football’s vocal critics do.
So who would you rather grow up to be, Troy Aikman or the wimpy journalists who write those smug articles about football and violence in The Atlantic or Sports Illustrated?
The hunch here is that the losers from our high school days-the uncoordinated dorks that the football players gave noogies to and who never got the dates with the prom queen-are now seeking their belated revenge.The guys who always got picked last when choosing players for dodgeball always seem to be the guys who later want to ban dodgeball.
This leaves us with a fundamental question-should we proceed to protect people from themselves, on the assumption that we know what’s in the best interest of Peyton Manning or Tom Brady better than they do?
More to the point, should we not impose our values upon theirs in order to protect them from their foolish decision to participate in (and get ridiculously rich from) a violent profession?
And if we go down such a paternalistic path, how far should we go? How do we recognize when we have gone too far and how do such tendencies not end in absurd efforts to limit risk and thereby take much of the fun out of life?
As is so often the case when it comes to the exposure of shoddy thinking, Vice President Joe Biden has proven helpful on this score, as when he recently based his appeal for more gun-control laws on “if it saves just one life” grounds.
But saving lives by abolishing risk isn’t the sole purpose of life-otherwise we would reduce speed limits to 10 miles per hour and perhaps ban automobiles altogether (given that they kill lots more people every year than football does in a century).
So yes, football is dangerous. But so are lots of other things human beings do and like.
And if football offends your dainty sensibilities, you don’t have to play it or watch it.
But please return the favor by allowing the rest of us to enjoy those gorgeous Saturday afternoons in October at Razorback Stadium. And also forgive us when we express our Neanderthal sensibilities by letting out a roar when the Ole Miss quarterback gets blindsided and fumbles the ball.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 02/18/2013