Last year, Goodell gave a speech on football safety at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. He cited a recent study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), debunking the notion that NFL players had shorter life spans than the general population. He did not mention a second NIOSH study suggesting that pro football players were four times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease. During an appearance on Face the Nation last February, he was asked to acknowledge the link between football and brain damage—and promptly ducked the question, stating that “we’re going to let the medical individuals make those points.”
About those medical individuals: sports concussion expert Cantu is an adviser to the league’s health and safety committee. He recommends no tackle football for children under age 14. He was not present at a recent NFL-sponsored “Football Safety for Moms” clinic in Chicago. Instead, the league rolled out Chicago Bears neuropsychological consultant Elizabeth Pieroth, who, according to the Associated Press, “presented checklists for recognizing concussion symptoms and recommendations for treatment, but suggested on balance that ‘boys like to hit things’ and without proper channels for their aggression, they might do other things like drive too fast or drink too much.”
None of this should be surprising. In the mid-1990s, then NFL commissioner Tagliabue worried that football was losing cultural cachet. That the game wasn’t cool. The league hired top executives from MTV, who reportedly drew up a marketing plan entitled “Game Plan 1997.” The document addressed Tagliabue’s concerns:
Nothing can be more important than how we manage young people (particularly ages 6–11 . . .) into our fan continuum and begin to migrate them toward becoming avid/committed fans . . . Critical action: Generate early interest and enthusiasm. Transform/convert their casual interest into commitment. Amplify to avidity.
As one of the former MTV executives explained to New Yorker writer John Seabrook, “It’s all about getting a football, this unusual-looking object, into a kid’s hands as soon as you can. Six years old, if possible. You want to get a football in their hands before someone puts a basketball in their hands, or a hockey stick or a tennis racquet or a golf club.”
Between 1998 and 2007, the NFL reportedly spent more than $100 million promoting youth football. Former league director of youth development Scott Lancaster said the league’s strategy was to “take out all the negatives and emphasize the positives” of the sport. At a 2005 youth marketing conference titled “Making Your Brand Cool and Mom Acceptable,” Lancaster also said that children were important to the NFL, because they would someday become adult football fans with discretionary income.
Four years later, Goodell was invited to a congressional hearing on brain trauma. He was scheduled to appear with the father of a Texas high school quarterback who had died after suffering a concussion. According to League of Denial, NFL lobbyist Jeff Miller was apoplectic. He demanded that Goodell be placed on a different panel. Congressional staffers acquiesced.
Today, Miller is the league’s director of health and safety. Meanwhile, Goodell is pushing to increase the NFL’s annual revenue from $10 billion to $25 billion over the next 15 years.
“It’s in the interest of the National Football League to cultivate doubt around this,” Margolis says. “To say, ‘We’re interested in the well-being of kids, college players, and our players—but we need to be certain. Let’s be certain about this brain trauma stuff. Don’t want to jump to conclusions.’ It’s all about creating a sense of doubt and not being willing to address the problem.”
Should your child play football? The choice, Margolis says, isn’t just for parents. It’s for all of us. Society needs to seriously weigh the risks and rewards, the games won and the damage done, the same as it has with lead paint and cigarettes.
He shows me an article. It’s from the Wall Street Journal. The title? “In Defense of Football.” Written by a military historian, it acknowledges that brain damage is a problem, but lauds the sport as a civic religion and argues that society should not “overreact to a handful of tragic injuries and legislate or litigate away a game that means so much to so many Americans.” The author concludes by citing Teddy Roosevelt, who warned that abolishing the game would be “simple nonsense, a mere confession of weakness,” and result in society producing “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”
“It’s the old thing about the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton,” Margolis says. “I don’t disagree with that. My son played sports. My daughter played sports. Sports can produce laudable outcomes.”