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Boys will be boys if we let them

Anyone who encourages others to routinely eavesdrop on their internal monologue runs the risk of being misconstrued, so let me state for the record that I am basically a boy.

By that I mean I have always done boy things and been preoccupied by the rowdy thoughts that occupy boys. I am a physically competent person, and in my life I have been hit by pitches and knocked down by linebackers, dunked and been dunked on, played all your major American sports and a few esoteric ones, and been coached in both epee and table tennis.

There's a price to be paid for this sort of life. I don't breathe as well as I might thanks to a nose that has been broken at least three times. I don't walk as well as I should because of knees that have been scraped of cartilage. There is something in my right elbow that prevents locking out my arm. An ankle sometimes throbs in winter. I don't regret any of this; I only wish I'd been a bit better at the games I tried to play. That is just what happens to boys.

Though I limp more than I run these days, I still feel about the same as when I was 17 years old--as though I could still do most of what I used to do, though most of the time I'm not foolish enough to try. Despite the sedentary nature of my profession, I spend a lot of time outside and in motion, and regularly court the wash of lactic acid over muscles. I can still be ridiculously competitive and consumed by the eyesight-minutiae of box scores.

I don't hate jocks. I am one. My father was one. While I have developed a professional detachment, I still follow sports closely and enjoy the games. I believe it is possible to be both a highly skilled and handsomely compensated professional athlete and a decent human being. It may not be unusual to be both.

But America's sports culture is toxic (mostly of men's sports; there is a different, and somewhat healthier, dynamic afoot in women's games).

The problem is not the athletes who commit all sorts of crimes, up to and including murder. It is the society that suborns shortcuts and excuses incivility, that imputes genuine value to synthetic contests. Sports are a diversion, an alternative form of entertainment. It feels good to invest a lot in sporting contests precisely because they mean absolutely nothing in the real world. The National Football League is just a cynical machine for sucking the money from your pockets, folks; it has nothing to do with honor or any other virtue.

It's not necessarily any worse than any other corporate entity or the NCAA or Hollywood or Washington. You shouldn't shun it. I'm just saying that it's a business venture masquerading as a quasi-religion. It asks for our faith, it holds itself out as something bigger than a promoter of spectacle, and it invites its faithful to censure all heretics.

How faithfully you watch, and how loudly you cheer, is up to you. I'm just pointing out the inherent hypocrisy of materialism, the undeniable evidence that football is a dangerously violent and destructive gladiatorial sport that requires its participants to sacrifice their health and maybe their lives in exchange for a few years of glory and riches. If you are a nihilist, if you believe there is no world beyond the accidental one we are presently experiencing, you might consider that a reasonable bargain.

By any other criteria, it is barbarism.

But we are barbarians--we embrace all sorts of atrocity. We beat our kids. We abuse--we murder--those we say we love. We feign outrage when confronted with upsetting video. We accept there will be casual cruelty and disgusting banter in any locker room, that coaches will routinely abuse their players. We construct fairy stories about our sports idols, we buy their jerseys and erect statues in their honor. We pretend that the numbers we jot down in books matter. We project our fantasies onto these figures. We don't know them at all, but we pathetically pretend to intimacy with shortstops and quarterbacks.

The only reason Adrian Peterson is not playing football today is because the Minnesota Vikings and the National Football League were facing tremendous economic and political pressure. It's not about doing the right thing, it's based on a cost-benefit analysis.

And I'm all right with that. I'm all right with people getting second, third and fourth chances. All of us make mistakes, none of us deserve to be judged on our worst moments, and most of us can learn to do better. I don't know Ray Rice or Ray Lewis or Greg Hardy or Derek Jeter, but I imagine all these guys are more complicated and layered than their press clippings suggest. I have grown weary of the Manichean dichotomies so favored by a certain kind of sportswriter, one who needs to hold forth on the righteousness of a given player or the reverence of some ball coach.

Not that they are not nice guys (though most aren't) or reasonably good husbands, fathers and sons. It's just that athletic talent is not a moral signifier, and the specialized skills that lead to on-field success rarely translate well to the world most of us must try to negotiate. The only advantage they have is their residual celebrity which, more often than not, is negligible and purchased at the expense of dignity.

They are men, but we treat them as boys. Promising athletes are a privileged class in our society, they are identified and coddled from a young age and rarely held accountable. We sponsor their immaturity for as long as they can run and jump and throw uncommonly well. Some people say that sports builds characters, that it teaches boys how to be men, but the evidence is that our sports culture infantilizes all of us, that it inspires us to wishfulness and magical thinking, that it instills in us a false sense of competence.

All of us need to grow up.

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Editorial on 09/21/2014

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