With the start of the football season, there are many who are questioning whether they should continue to support the sport and the NFL. @mgs had this post on the subject of the upcoming season.
I have very mixed feelings about watching football these days. On one hand, it’s without question the best of the major US sports to watch on television. On the other, it’s an absolutely barbaric sport. Many of the players playing today will suffer injuries playing the game which they will never recover from. And many of the people who are supposed to be in charge of the league are seemingly immoral. It’s perhaps not as bad as watching boxing in decades past. Or actual gladiators in centuries past. But it’s also not entirely different.
Unfortunately, in my view, too many people (my son included) are making the same choice that Siegler ultimately makes, which is to throw out any misgivings and just keep on watching.
I think Augustine would have agreed with the gladiator reference. He writes the following, of his friend Alypius, in the sixth book of his Confessions.
He, not forsaking that secular course which his parents had charmed him to pursue, had gone before me to Rome, to study law, and there he was carried away incredibly with an incredible eagerness after the shows of gladiators. For being utterly averse to and detesting such spectacles, he was one day by chance met by divers of his acquaintance and fellow-students coming from dinner, and they with a familiar violence haled him, vehemently refusing and resisting, into the Amphitheatre, during these cruel and deadly shows, he thus protesting: “Though you hale my body to that place, and there set me, can you force me also to turn my mind or my eyes to those shows? I shall then be absent while present, and so shall overcome both you and them.” They hearing this, led him on nevertheless, desirous perchance to try that very thing, whether he could do as he said. When they were come thither, and had taken their places as they could, the whole place kindled with that savage pastime. But he, closing the passages of his eyes, forbade his mind to range abroad after such evils; and would he had stopped his ears also! For in the fight, when one fell, a mighty cry of the whole people striking him strongly, overcome by curiosity, and as if prepared to despise and be superior to it whatsoever it were, even when seen, he opened his eyes, and was stricken with a deeper wound in his soul than the other, whom he desired to behold, was in his body; and he fell more miserably than he upon whose fall that mighty noise was raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of a soul, bold rather than resolute, and the weaker, in that it had presumed on itself, which ought to have relied on Thee. For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto, yea, a true associate of theirs that brought him thither.
