Punch, Kick, Repeat
October 1, 2024
Punch, Kick, Repeat
When I was something of a lad and television, while around, was still in its infancy, one of the great thrills was listening to boxing matches on the radio: Muhammed Ali, Sonny Liston, George Foreman – I had a preference for the heavyweights since envisioning two grizzly bears going at it was just more exciting than envisioning a couple of mice in combat. The announcers, too, were simply stunning – every punch, feint, dance, miss, thump described in explicit detail. Sitting in my darkened bedroom and hearing the crowds screaming behind the announcer, I was thrilled. It never occurred to me the mayhem that those folks were inflicting on each other.
Those thoughts came to mind a while ago as I encountered all the brouhaha over the start of the football season. We aren't Texas-crazy as far as high school football goes, but the season is still a big deal around here. A number of the small-town schools that can't marshal a full team are now in a league of eight-man football.
I love football. I still remember when I was a grad student at Purdue walking my son over to Ross-Ade Stadium (we couldn't afford tickets but you could pretty much wander in after half-time). He was thrilled, as was I, by the sheer pageantry and the raucous joy of the crowd.
I love the logic and intricacy of the game. I love it that an offense can have an infinite number of plays to execute while the defense counters with an infinite number of ways to stop those plays. The running back suddenly breaking through the line and heading downfield, the quarterback lofting a fifty-yard pass – 'thrill' needs no definition in those cases.
And yet …
… young men pummeling each other as hard as they can; a runner tackled so hard his helmet flies off, sometimes a shoe; two superbly-conditioned yet overweight linemen crashing into each other again and again; a knee suddenly bent in a way that no knee should ever bend; the grimace of pain on a young man's face as he's taken off the field in a cart, his season, perhaps his career, now over.
Of course no one's is ever going to get rid of those contests where one human batters the crap out of another. We delight in watching those displays much in the same way as we delight in watching NASCAR races just hoping to see a spectacular crash or two.
What's so problematic now, however, is that we are much more advanced and sophisticated in parsing out the consequences of that violence. I still remember an interview with a much older Muhammed Ali where the man was almost incoherent, "punch drunk," we used to say. A recent news article also detailed the story of a high-schooler, a football player, who committed suicide and asked that his brain be studied for CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), an ailment associated with repeated concussions and neurodegenerative events. Young as he was, CTE was evident in the autopsy.
None of this is particularly understandable beyond some wild theory as to the innate savagery of the human species. Certainly, no parent willingly puts their child in danger; yet, they sign their kids up for these things all the time, sometimes when they're only seven or eight years old. No sane person freely wishes brutality on another; yet, we watch these contests with glee and anticipation. Somebody knocked into unconsciousness? How horrible; yet, that's what we paid good dollars to see.
Traveling into the etiology of violence is to go down a rabbit hole of vast complexity, but my own, slightly amusing, theory is a bit biological; namely, that there are some seven billion of us circulating around this planet kind of like cells in an organism. Mostly, we do beneficial things that ensure our survival. But, like a lot of humans individually, our species has an auto-immune disease. We destroy ourselves.
And we like it.
G.K. Wuori ©2024
Photoillustration by the author