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" Published in the September 2014 issue I know but one thing about the upcoming football season: I&amp;#039;m going to watch it. And I&amp;#039;m going to feel a little bad about watching it. Not bad enough to stop watching it, but bad, especially when a player goes down and everybody&amp;#039;s hushed and waiting for him to move or when they keep replaying another player&amp;#039;s anatomy being pushed beyond the breaking point. I can hear the announcer now: &amp;quot;Oh. Oh. Folks, I don&amp;#039;t know if you want to watch this\u2026 .&amp;quot; But I&amp;#039;ll watch that, too, with near forensic intensity, and wonder why. And I won&amp;#039;t be the only one. Football, as we all know, is under siege. It&amp;#039;s under siege from former Pro Bowlers who want the NFL to account for their morbidities and their mortalities. It&amp;#039;s under siege from college players who want to get paid. It&amp;#039;s under siege from mothers who don&amp;#039;t want their boys to be offered up as ritual sacrifices. But mostly it&amp;#039;s under siege from the American conscience, which has finally started to ask questions about the human cost of our autumnal weekend entertainment. But not enough to stop watching. At the same time football has endured the endless attack, it has grown bigger than ever and is at the very apotheosis of its power. Like many American institutions, it&amp;#039;s too big to fail yet too big to be morally sustainable, and its decline seems both impossible and inevitable. It can&amp;#039;t go on; it must go on. It must be stopped; it can&amp;#039;t be stopped. And yet we keep watching. Why? There are two books out this season that seek to answer that question: Mark Edmundson&amp;#039;s Why Football Matters: My Education in the Game (Penguin, $27) and Steve Almond&amp;#039;s Against Football: One Fan&amp;#039;s Reluctant Manifesto (Melville House, $23). As their titles indicate, they are very different books, but they start from the same premise: Boys watch football to connect with their fathers. And then, depending on which author you believe, they become either men or unwitting cogs in a horrible industrial machine that feasts on our bodies and our souls. Edmundson believes they become men. Forty-five years ago, he was a soft and nearsighted kid who surprised his friends by going out for his high school football team and surprised himself by making it. Today he is an English professor at the University of Virginia with a bunch of books under his belt. In Why Football Matters, he argues that he wouldn&amp;#039;t be what he is today if he hadn&amp;#039;t made the team then, if football hadn&amp;#039;t built his character and made a man of him. He is not unconvincing in his assertion, because as a writer he is a lot like he describes himself as a player\u2014a little slow, a little soft, but hardworking and achingly sincere. The character that football built is very much on display in his prose\u2014to the point that it seems to prevent him from seeing that football is no longer merely a timeless game but also a symptomatic one. Does football still matter? Of course it does, but you can&amp;#039;t read, say, the Wells Report\u2014the NFL-commissioned investigation of the abuses Jonathan Martin suffered in the Miami Dolphins&amp;#039; locker room\u2014without thinking that it matters in all the wrong ways. And that&amp;#039;s where Almond steps in. He believes that we watch football because we have been told that it matters\u2014because we have been told that it&amp;#039;s turning players into men, when in reality it&amp;#039;s turning them into meat. He believes that we watch football for the same reason we still drive our cars, even as we know of the catastrophic climatic consequences, and eat our hamburgers, even as we know of the horrors of industrial beef production. According to Against Football, we are in the hands of Big Football just as surely as we are in the hands of Big Oil and Big Meat. And though Almond&amp;#039;s short book is essentially a long blog post\u2014it gets more and more echo-chambery as it goes, eventually placing every failure of the progressive ideal, from our militarism to our religiosity, on football&amp;#039;s doorstep\u2014his argument will be hard to shake when it comes time to watch football this fall. But I will watch. I will watch football because I connected with my father through football. I will watch because, like Edmundson, I played high school ball and after years of warming the bench finally succeeded at the end of my senior season, receiving such a boost in confidence that I know I wouldn&amp;#039;t be doing what I&amp;#039;m doing now without it. I will watch because it&amp;#039;s the only game that has ever mattered to me, and, as Nate Jackson wrote in his stellar NFL memoir, Slow Getting Up, &amp;quot;the ball in flight is still the most beautiful sight I know.&amp;quot; I will watch because I manage to wring aesthetic bliss from its armored violence and because I still can gaze upon The Starry Night knowing what it cost van Gogh. But I&amp;#039;ll also watch because it&amp;#039;s in the same untenable position as America itself, too big to fail and yet failing, and I own it even as it owns me. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/sports/news/a29931/why-are-we-still-watching-football-0914/?click=feed>