Quick commentary: The life and the purity of a sport

With the NFL immersed in controversy concerning its handling of Ray Rice's beating of his wife and Adrian Peterson's beating of his kids, we become rightfully anxious about the nature of the sport we're watching.  The same thing goes for the situations in the NBA where Donald Sterling and, more recently, Bruce Levenson spoke inflammatory and racist rhetoric.  But in each of these situations, those concerned about the life of the league go on to make claims that the media is too interested in such negative news. This goes much too far, and becomes quite quickly an attempt to protect some mystical purity of the sport.

William C. Rhoden of the New York Times went to MetLife Stadium last Sunday to check out the Giants game and see what people thought of Ray Rice and Adrian Petersen.  One fan who made it all the way up from Florida for the game “said she was able to separate Rice’s action from the league and from her enjoyment of the game,” as Rhoden put it:

Rice’s actions were “upsetting and disconcerting,” she said, “but you can’t look at it like he’s representing the whole N.F.L. because there are so many wonderful players who are doing amazing things out there.”

This has been a refrain of many NFL fans over the last week.  Steelers defensive end Brett Keisel himself reassured people through ESPN that “It is defensive, but that doesn’t make it necessarily wrong.

Seeing Ray Rice brutalize his wife makes us curious about the connection between violent behavior and football’s feats of athleticism themselves, and this has the effect of pricking at the soft vulnerable parts at the center of the sport—any sport, for that matter.  We approach such an issue from a heated sense of outrage, but it is in truth a cold analytic gaze we direct there, devoid of passion.  It is a natural connection to make, but in doing so, such critics are given to overlook the fact that the one is simple brutishness while the other is more like an art, or at the very least least a form of skilled work.

And this interest is questionable, concerning its motives.  Because if you go that deep into the heart of a sport and try and call it mere violence, it does imply, at least in part, what Rhoden’s interlocutor accuses football’s critics of saying: namely, that everyone in the NFL is pretty much a bad person, that everyone interested in football is a bit perverse.

I’m more skeptical that this is what the media want to convince us of, with its sometimes too fascinated interest in all the gory details in the course of its delivering us some route to reality. This is the thought that often lurks behind the initial worry here about criticizing the nature of football.  It is what Keisel goes on to say directly: “Negative news sells. It's the world we live in.”  And is indeed implied by Rhoden’s interlocutor and picked up more explicitly in what she next claims.  As Rhoden reports it:

She continued: “Why put all our focus on this guy? Don’t give him the publicity he’s getting. It’s disgusting. And it’s pretty sad that she stands by him like that. It’s setting an example for little girls that it’s O.K. to go back to him.”

Now, besides the last bit, which pretty much blames and shames the victim in this situation, there is a troubling thread that runs through this comment.  This is namely, the cynicism.  Reporting bad news—so goes the thought—ultimately begins to give its perpetrators publicity, which they can use to their own advantage.  Looking at the reality of violence too closely, inspecting too carefully incidents where it seems a consequence of athleticism—this not only implies people who enjoy football are screwy, but it actually helps out the perpetrators of this violence.  "Don't give him the publicity he's getting."  If you report on evil, you partake of it.  What he does is disgusting, so we shouldn’t look at it.

It seems to me this is pretty twisted logic, obsessed not with defending the nature of football, but seeking to convince us it is sacred, pure, that we need not worry our little heads about it.  It uses cynicism about the nature of how publicity sometimes works to make it seem as if it is a worldly argument: and yet it ultimately concerns itself with roping off a certain area of this world for otherworldly enjoyment, preventing even curiosity about it.  It is as if the only response one could actually have to football when such incidents occur was an ecstatic joy in the fact that there are "so many wonderful players who are doing amazing things out there!"  That it is a sin to be disappointed when what we enjoy also sometimes produces problems.

It ultimately seeks, in the face of an inquiry into the image of football that we have, to erect another, purer image; it destroys this image for us, saying that no, football isn’t as pure as we think it is, because it is covered by the media—only to say that media members can’t see the “real” football, which lies somewhere outside this beatific region where so much more enjoyment is going on.  It blames us for not taking part in the party, it guilts us for not sharing in an irrational pleasure, it seeks to make us worry whether we are spoilsports.

And as more and more people invoke this argument that negative news sells—both in the NFL’s current situation and in discussions of the inflammatory speech of Bruce Levenson, the former owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, where (as Albert Burneko has pointed out) it has also come up—it becomes more and more essential we discern the tipping point where one argument in defense of a sport becomes another, more insidious argument.  It becomes more and more crucial to notice where a concern for the life of the sport becomes a piece of missionary work to convert us to worshiping a sport that no one really can see.