3 - Graying the Playing Field: SF Sport and Age

Summary

Bruce Sterling's 1988 Islands in the Net, an early cyberpunk novel, forecasts that in a near future ‘The old full-contact version of football had been banned for years now. The game was spectacularly brutal’ (314). While this prediction is certainly not surprising given the long history of denigrating sport noted from Kepler to Bierce to the present, it has become clear that American football holds a special place in the ire, in particular, of the educated elite. This chapter need not start with a vignette as the prior chapters have, therefore, as the issue of concussions in sport has received so much recent press in so many individual cases, and primarily involving elite American football players (professional, college, or younger), that most of the English-speaking world will already be familiar with it. It is a wish fulfilled, a bias confirmed, for all who equate sport and violence. The problem led The New Yorker to wonder in 2011 ‘Does Football have a Future?’ And with an increased focus on the long-term effects of multiple concussions, especially Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), media outlets as diverse as The Atlantic, Huffington Post, and Fox News have led a fear campaign culminating in ‘damning’ films such as Concussion and social media campaigns such as Twitter's #turnofftheNFL, a boycott of professional football. Not surprisingly, academics particularly concerned with social criticism, such as David M. Perry (@lollardfish on Twitter), have also concluded that watching the NFL is tantamount to watching people's brains dying. While it is certainly necessary to protect those who participate in such sports as much as possible and there have admittedly been oversights, one might also suggest that much of this condemnation has been unexamined and even potentially premature. More importantly, as this chapter will examine, this fear and outrage at concussions and CTE in football is intricately tied to the manner in which we engage with what is arguably the most neglected component of intersectional identity: age.

Much of this argument rests on the idea of sport spectatorship as a kind of vicarious substitution. To sport critics it is worth remembering that sport is ‘something in which we invest the deepest parts of ourselves’ (Cocchiarale and Emmert xvii). Likewise, to a critic such as Messenger, the ‘Sporstworld is the American environment: we need look no further for the pattern of our lives, the rhythms, victories, and defeats’ (1).