Football, Cheating and the Morality of the Fan

I haven’t watched an NFL game this season. 

I may never watch one again.

That’s a tough thing to say. I was a football fan for as long as I remember, long before I understood any of the finer points of the game. I grew up with football. When I was very small, back in the dark days of Steeler history, my family shared a row house with their punter, Frank Lambert.^* 

I actually have this card. Cool, huh?

I remember the antics of Joe Namath in the late sixties, but my first clear memory of a football game was watching Johnny Unitas and the Colts edge out the Dallas Cowboys 16-13 in Super Bowl V, a game also referred to as the Stupor Bowl. I rooted for Baltimore – after all, Unitas was a Mt. Washington boy, just like my grandfather.

It was perhaps not the most auspicious game with which to start.

A few years later, my dad took me to see the University of Louisville play when he was a graduate student there.

Louisville coach Lee Corso, before he went completely around the bend

and started wearing bizarre costumes on ESPN.

My playing career was mercifully brief: one seemingly endless season as center on a Pop Warner team at the St. Matthews YMCA. I was a preternaturally tall, painfully thin klutz, who was routinely submarined by any and all nose guards who lined up against me. I quickly tired of the repetitive drill, the yelling, the strict regimentation and, in particular, the divots of turf I had to pick out of my face mask with depressing regularity. But I learned some things about the game, and just in time; when we moved back to Pittsburgh, the Steelers were poised to become a citywide obsession, the preeminent team of the 1970s.

I had a Terrible Towel®, too. 

At Bethel Park High School, I played a little basketball, but was really a band geek. The marching band, though, was an integral part of every football game, so I was a Blackhawk.

 

Orange and black, attack - ATTACK!

In my time, I have rooted for Pitt over Penn State, Texas A&M over Texas, Fort Defiance over Harrisonburg, Virginia Tech over Virginia. In turn, I have hated Cleveland. And Dallas. And Oakland. And Houston. And Baltimore. And New England. And refs, who made bad calls against any of 'my' teams.

For some reason, the Vikings only aroused a vague sense of pity.

I loved football, especially football on television, with that evolving combination of commentary, analysis and personality which not only made sense of the action, but drew you into the experience. After more than 30 years, I still remember the disappointment of my first (and to date, only) live, in person Steeler game – the cold, the bad sight lines, and what I can only describe as the lack of a coherent narrative. 

Television, and the media in general, had provided for me a particular narrative: the tale of the kindly owner who paid $2500 for a franchise in 1933, and worked hard to establish the struggling NFL; the decades of humiliation and mediocrity until the trinity of Noll, Green and Bradshaw arrived to transform the Smoky City into the City of Champions; the narrative of a benevolent paterfamilias who embodied all the best of the league he loved, and passed that legacy on to his family, a sacred trust.

Amen. 

Of course as part of that narrative, I believed that Tom Landry was a soulless technocrat, ruining the game with his formulas and charts; Bum Phillips was an ignorant blowhard, and that John Madden was a big old dirty cheat; while Chuck Noll walked on water, even when the Allegheny River wasn’t frozen. 

Sorry, guys.

It turns out, Landry was the consummate gentleman, Bum, the quintessential player’s coach, Madden an entertaining, down to earth expert on the game; and Chuck Noll was a complicated and mercurial man.

Likewise, I grew up believing Joe Green and Jack Lambert were tough competitors, but the Jack Tatum and Conrad Dobler were thugs, who ought to be locked up.

Of course, this didn’t help.

I realize now that being a fan, accepting the narrative, as it were, seems to lead to an awkward level of...well, moral flexibility, at least for me. To wit: 

I was indignant about the plea bargain offered 

to Ravens linebacker and alleged murderer Ray Lewis in 2000.

Yet somehow I managed to compartmentalize 

the various accusations of Rape and sexual assault 

against Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.

I mean, really; I am the father of two daughters.

I had no problem believing this could be an accident: 

While at the same time believing the dastardly Bill Belichick 

had cheated by spying on his opponents’ signals.

Actual incriminating photo.

I grew up understanding that football was a tough sport for tough men; men who do whatever it takes to win; men would rub some dirt on it and get back into the trenches; men who were used to pain – inflicting it, playing through it; reveling in it. That’s what makes it so good, I told myself. 

I never thought those men were killing themselves to entertain me. 

And I certainly didn't think the NFL would put profit above literally everything else, including the well being of everyone who may have a relationship with an NFL player. 

But then my eyes began to open, just a bit, and my mind began to change; I began to see another narrative. On October 9, 2015, The documentary League of Denial, the NFL’s Concussion Crisis was broadcast as part of the PBS series Frontline. 

Based on a book by ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, League of Denial examines the long-term effects of traumatic head injury on NFL players, and the league's response. Exhibit number one is the life and death of Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, whose sixteen year career with the Steelers left him with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative neurological disease. CTE caused amnesia, Dementia and Depression, which exacerbated the crippling bone and muscle pain of the NFL veteran. Webster died homeless in 2002 at age fifty, even as friends, family and former teammates sought to help him. The Fainaru brothers make a persuasive argument that for almost thirty years, the NFL consistently denied there was any connection between head trauma and neurological damage, even when confronted with the evidence.

Rest in Peace, Iron Mike.

And then in the spring of 2014, it was reported that Ray Rice, running back for the Baltimore Ravens had assaulted his fiancée, Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City hotel, knocking her out cold and dragging her inert body out of an elevator.

I had a picture here, but no.

Although charged with Aggravated Assault, Rice would end up married to his victim, in a Pretrial Intervention Program, and an unrestricted Free Agent as of December 1. Finally, in September of last year, Minnesota Vikings Running Back Adrian Peterson was indicted for Reckless or Negligent Injury to a Child, after it was found he had beaten his four year old son with a tree branch. This time, the inconsistency of the league's responses was on public display. A new narrative emerged:

What finally dawned on me was this: despite years of hard work, and millions of dollars spent to craft an image as a noble endeavor, a sport which represents the finest qualities of America the Beautiful, in reality The National Football League is a sordid business, in which greed has trumped both short and long term concerns over the health of its employees, even though they are its only draw; a business that is only too happy to cultivate women and exploit children as consumers, even what it ignores them as potential victims of their own employees, because they are its only draw; a business which is more concerned with how its employees look to their advertisers than how they behave to those closest to them.

And so I stopped watching.

As I write this, the narrative spectacle of the 2015 Super Bowl has been tarnished by reports that 11 of the 12 footballs prepared and used by the Patriots in their playoff rout of the Indianapolis Colts were under inflated, thus making them easier to both throw and catch. 

Under inflated? Are you sure?

This sounds a lot like cheating, being as there is an actual rule specifying how much air each ball should contain. I have been asked for my ‘take’ on this, the latest Patriot cheating scandal so here it is.

Does Bill Belichick cheat? Yeah, probably - just look at the man:

That’s him on the left. I think.

But so what? 

The National Football League has bigger problems.

Like the fact that Ann and I are going to see a movie on Super Bowl Sunday.

*Dr. Franklin T. Lambert. Punter, Pittsburgh Steelers, 1965-1966 seasons; Professor of History at Purdue University; author and fascinating fellow. You can read about him here: https://pittsburghsportsdailybulletin.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/frank-lambert-steelers-punter-1965-1966/)