I about choked on a breakfast pastry Sunday morning and it’s all Malcolm Gladwell’s fault.
Gladwell is an author, public speaker and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. He was a guest on Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN and told why he thinks college football should be banned.
Normally, I don’t like to watch Sunday talk shows where only one side of an argument is presented and Gladwell had no opposition while speaking on this subject. Secondly, I found it odd that a host who was born in India (Zakaria) and a guest who was born in England (Gladwell) would talk as if they had infinite knowledge about America’s most popular sport. Neither had actually played football and I’m guessing hadn’t played any sport at all beyond youth soccer, perhaps.
That makes about as much sense as asking the bearded boys from “Duck Dynasty” to discuss with great intellect the game of Cricket, which is popular in England and India.
Still, I was willing to listen to Gladwell’s presentation until he compared college football to dogfighting. That was a stunning comparison and I had to hear it again to digest what was said.
“It’s the same thing,” Gladwell insisted. “You take a young, vulnerable dog who was made vulnerable because of his allegiance to the owner and you ask him to engage in serious sustained physical combat with another dog. Well, what’s football? We take young boys, essentially, and we have them repeatedly, over the course of the season, smash each other in the head, with known neurological consequences.
“And why do they do that? Out of an allegiance to their owners and their coaches and a feeling they’re participating in some grand American spectacle.”
Gladwell conveniently left out that humans have the ability to reason and make intelligent decisions for themselves. Animals do not.
Anyone who’s ever stepped on a football field knows there are risks involved. It’s a physical sport and both the NFL and college football should continue its efforts in making the game safer and taking care of those with long-term injuries.
But to suggest banning a sport as popular as college football, and all the jobs it helps create, is ridiculous. People make their own decisions to play football just like they do to fly on a plane, drive a car or get on a roller coaster in Texas where someone was killed the day before.
Gladwell is free to express his opinion, but there should always be someone to argue in opposition wherever he appears. In the meantime, I’m so eager for college football that I’m watching replays of last year’s Arkansas games.
And that, my friends, is painful to watch.