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"FacebookPinterest\n\n\"Two years ago in the snow in Pittsburgh, he threw two touchdowns in the fourth period to win by a single point. That night he checked into the hospital with a fractured jaw. There wasn't a pass he couldn't throw, a team he couldn't beat, a pain he couldn't endure, or a woman he couldn't fuck, given the right time and combination of pieces.\"\u2014Peter Gent, North Dallas Forty\n\nNear the beginning of the most brutal game of the most overtly violent season in the history of the National Football League, Ben Roethlisberger broke his nose. You could see it happen, because after being sacked by an angry swarm of Baltimore Raven defenders, Roethlisberger tore off his helmet and a rivulet of blood cascaded from his crooked proboscis. Weaving toward the sideline, a towel pressed to his nostrils, Roethlisberger looked a little like DeNiro playing Jake LaMotta, punch drunk and vacant, limping along on a badly injured foot that appeared to have been mummified by the trainers before the game.\n\nRoethlisberger came back into the game, of course, because this is what Ben Roethlisberger does. If Tom Brady is the epitome of quarterbacking grace, and Peyton Manning is the prototype of quarterbacking subtetly and misdirection, Roethlisberger is the quarterback who epitomizes the brutality of his chosen profession. For the rest of the night, as he watched his tight end felled by an egregriously uncalled helmet-to-helmet cheap shot, as he led the Steelers to a 13&amp;amp;#x2013;10 victory last Sunday night in this intermittently frightening war of attrition, Roethsliberger played with splotches of his own blood on his jersey. He eluded charging defenders often by absorbing their contact rather than avoiding it; he spun into traffic and slipped out of arm tackles and fell down repeatedly.\n\nAt one point in the fourth quarter, with his team driving, Roethlisberger did something no quarterback should ever be able to do: He carried one of the league's best defenders, Terrell Suggs, for a yard or two, staggering to his left and out of the pocket, and then freeing his arm long enough to throw the ball away and avoid both a sack and an intentional grounding penalty. On NBC, Cris Collinsworth called it one of the greatest plays he'd seen in quite some time, and it was hard to disagree; at the very least, it was the most exciting throw-away of the season.\n\n\n\nThe finest novel ever written about professional football is Peter Gent's North Dallas Forty. Gent was a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys in the late 1960s, and the main character is a stand-in for him. The words above are uttered in reference to a quarterback named Seth Maxwell, a moderately disguised version of Dandy Don Meredith, the hard-living quarterback who died earlier this week. And yet when I read them again the other day, I could not help but think of Ben Roethlisberger.\n\nI don't mean to directly compare personalities: Meredith, who served as an ideal foil to Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football is generally regarded as a goofy and likeable dude. And there is, of course, no excusing Roethlisberger's behavior as a human being over the past few years. Every time he appears to have been humbled, he's managed to raise the bar on blatant frat-boy recklessness. He even managed to piss off local bar owners for reportedly refusing to pay cover charges. In 2006, he crashed his motorcycle while driving without both a license and a helmet; twice since then, he's faced serious allegations of sexual assault, and was suspended by the NFL for the first four games of this season.\n\nThat suspension may have seemed harsh to you (since Roethlisberger was never charged in his most recent assault case), or it may not seem harsh enough. But let's face it: There was a time when someone like Ben Roethlisberger\u2014a reckless young man who appears to live his life in thematic tandem with how he conducts himself following the snap of a football\u2014would not have faced any sort of penalty at all. I love Gent's book, in the same way I love Dan Jenkins' classic novel Semi-Tough, because in some way they romanticize the way professional football used to be. But part of that ethos was that deviant behavior like Roethlisberger's was merely accepted. If a football player was an extension of their on-field persona\u2014if they were selfish and nihilistic and occasionally violent\u2014well, what did we expect? Case in point: The scene that follows Gent's description of Seth Maxwell, in which a teammate named Jo Bob repeatedly tosses a defenseless woman into a swimming pool.\n\n\"I wonder why we do it?\" the narrator asks, as this plays out in the background.\n\nReplies Maxwell: \"The only way to find that out is stop.\"\n\nIn the midst of this modern re-examination of violence in football, it's not just the physicality that we're appraising. It's the mentality. It is easy to change the rules and revamp the equipment, to ban helmet-to-helmet hits and concussive blows to defenseless receivers. It is not quite so easy to ask Ben Roethlisberger to become someone he is not.\n\nMichael Weinreb is the author of Bigger Than the Game: Bo, Boz, the Punky QB, and How the '80s Created the Modern Athlete."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/ben-roethlisberger-nfl-pittsburgh-steelers>