One of my earliest sporting memories is my dad taking me to RFK stadium to watch the Redskins play the Raiders.  It was the 1983 regular season, and we launched an amazing comeback to win 37-35 in what would be a preview of that year’s Super Bowl.  The stadium was raucous and literally rocking—the stands actually shook when the crowd collectively jumped up and down, such was the quality of the atmosphere and the dubiousness of the architecture.  I can still smell the cigar smoke from the guy in front of us and hear his obnoxious bugle blowing.  My dad and I can still talk football.  And my brothers and I have an annual tradition of watching the Super Bowl with all of our best guy friends.  Many are the friendships that I’ve sealed over a football game, in person or watching on TV.  But the time is quickly approaching when I won’t be able to watch the NFL anymore.  At least not in good conscience.

There is no shortage of evidence regarding what the game of football does to the human body and, perhaps more perniciously, to the human brain.  The bodies of former football players are ravaged by injury, many of them arthritic or permanently crippled.  Worse still is the mental toll, with innumerable former players suffering from CTE: chronic traumatic encephalopathy.  Maybe you’ve seen the movie Concussion or read the numerous reports.  Just this week, a study of the brains of 111 former football players revealed that 110 of them had CTE.  You’ve probably also seen the litany of tragic suicides of former players and cries for help: Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, and many others.  Numerous players, like Chris Borland and D’Brickashaw Ferguson, among several others, retired at a young age due to concerns over CTE.  And who can blame them?

In justifying watching football, we often tell ourselves that people know the risks when they put the pads on.  They also get handsomely rewarded for playing the sport—at least those who have the skill or good fortune to play professionally.  Modern players thankfully have a clearer picture of the many of the associated risk of which their predecessors were tragically unaware.  But to me, the fundamental question is this: would you let your children play contact football, knowing the inherent risks.  If your answer, like mine, is a resounding no, then why should we let other people’s kids assume these same risks for our entertainment?

More and more, upper and middle-class parents will bar their children from playing tackle football.  My guess is that it will happen in more affluent, less traditionally football-mad places first before it ever reaches the true hotbeds of football in places like Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Alabama.  But it will happen there eventually too.  In the meantime, when those among us with the financial means to do so decide that we don’t want our kids playing football because of the health risks, many of us will keep watching football.  Those people playing the game will be those with fewer economic options who are still willing to put their bodies and minds on the line to create a better life for themselves or their families.  This is not to say that poor parents love their kids any less than rich parents do.  By no means.  It is to say that people make different calculations of risk when faced with different economic realities.  People are naturally willing to assume more risk when the rewards are proportionally higher.  The rewards for playing professional football, which are considerable, may for many poorer families, justify the future health risks.  And this smells a bit too much like a classist conflict for me to be comfortable with.

The obvious historical parallel here is with the gladiators of Roman times.  Some of those competitors may have been slaves, forced to fight each other for sport, but others were people of little-to-no means seeking fame and fortune.  Would professional football then be much different if it were almost exclusively the lower class playing a brutal and deadly game for the entertainment of the well-off?

There is an understandable counter-argument that outlawing contact football or dramatically altering the game to make it reasonably safe reeks of a nanny state.  That it impinges upon our basic freedoms to choose our leisure activities as we see fit.  A government that would prevent any risk or potential harm to its people would set before it an impossible task that most of us wouldn’t want anyway.  There is risk inherent in going bungee jumping, skydiving, or even simply driving a car (probably the greatest risk, statistically speaking, from the last one).  No one is clamoring to outlaw these extreme sports, much less driving, you might reasonably contend.[1]  But when an activity is demonstrably dangerous, beyond a reasonable threshold, as we might argue that contact football is becoming, do we not owe it to our society to protect itself?

The government already takes any number of measures to protect citizens from themselves.  It outlaws drinking and driving.  Regulates food, alcohol, and tobacco.  Tells you what drugs you can and can’t consume.  In more extreme instances, it bans trans fats and large sodas in certain locales.  Would banning tackle football or regulating the way it was played be much different?  Especially when it became more harmful to a certain, more economically-vulnerable segment of society?

I’m fairly certain that I’ll be watching the Super Bowl again with my friends this year.  And I’ll probably play fantasy football again with my brothers, cousins, and friends next year.  But there will come a season in the not-too-distant future when I won’t be able to.  When it weighs on my conscience too much.  When that point comes, I’ll content myself with watching basketball, soccer, and baseball, knowing that those sports present a reasonable risk and don’t condemn its participants to future bodily or mental trauma.  I’m not yet certain that I’m ready to give up watching football completely, which is in its own way a copout.  But I’m inching ever closer to that day.

[1] Though self-driving cars will present an interesting legal conundrum when they are safer than human driving.  When will we outlaw human-driven cars because of the safety risks they present?  A question for another day.