NFL, The Crisis of Masculinity, and Violence: Entertaining Patriarchal Gender Relations . . . At What Cost?

The modern institution of organized sport, as we now know it, emerged as a male response to social changes [in the nineteenth century] which undermined many of the bases of men's traditional patriarchal power, authority, and identity. . . . Sport was a male-created homosocial cultural sphere which provided (white, middle-class, and upper-class men) with psychological separation from the perceived "feminization" of society, while also providing dramatic symbolic "proof" of the natural superiority of men over women. . . . the physicality of the activity . . . gives sport its salience in gender relations

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--Michael Messner,

"When Bodies are Weapons: Violence and Masculinity in Sport"

A couple weeks ago my husband and I flipped through the channels and settled into our usual routine of Monday Night Football. It was a relatively normal game of Monday Night Football corporeal spectacle with the Philadelphia Eagles and NY Giants facing off in front of millions of viewers. Then, in a sudden and unexpected ugly turn of events, Eagles corner back and kick returner Ellis Hobbs was blindsided by an unusually violent, yet legal (a point stressed repeatedly by the game commentators) oncoming tackle by NY Giants' Asante Samuel while returning a kickoff in the second half. The multiple instant replays of Hobb's neck compressing in the legal head-head collision was gruesome, provoking a natural reflexive nausea for most football fans watching the game. While one might offer the infamous Cuba Gooding scene in Jerry Maguire to draw an analogy, admittedly the Hollywood simulation pales in comparison to the gruesome corporeal reality of the real violence and its victimized bodies strewn weekly across the pitches of the NFL.

A dead silence fell over the crowd while the commentators awkwardly bumbled their way through irrelevant commentary during the excruciating fifteen minutes it took for medics to move Hobbs off the field in a stretcher. While a resilient Hobbs gave the audience hope of full recovery, flashing the iconic "thumbs up" as he was stretchered off the stadium to let fans know paralysis had been avoided for the time being, spectators couldn't help but note the weight of Hobb's injury overshadowing the next few minutes of play. The very next play, in fact, an Eagle's player dove early to avoid collision, no doubt a residual psychological effect of the physical trauma he just witnessed: man's mortality made manifest by Hobb's just moments earlier crept into the psyches of every player, subduing the physicality of the game if only for a few minutes. Soon enough, however, the game resumed full speed, and the physical phenomenon that is 300+ pound players running full speed into one another, risking life-threatening injury, resumed. Hobbs' potential career-rending, if not season-ending injury, became a commonplace seasonal statistic that faded into the background of the immediate corporeal dynamics of the game as players fought to get their heads back in the game and perform the job they are paid to do every week: risk their bodies for fan's pleasures.

News of Hobbs' injury hit the headlines the following day. This would be his second season-ending neck-disc injury. Second! The NFL has been worried by the unusually high spike in injuries this season. Indeed Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison has caught both NFL officials as well as mass sports media attention as he continues to provoke flag after flag for "unnecessary roughing" and "illegal hits" throughout the 2010 season. Harrison has already been fined somewhere in the ballpark of over $100,000 this season alone, setting an unglamourous record that has provoked widespread discussion about the NFL and the violence that accompanies America's manly game par excellance. While Harrison has come down hard on the NFL, the NFL has responded by continuing to come down hard on him during game time, provoking what many think "questionable calls." Yet attempts by the NFL to clean up the game seem, in light of Hobb's, not only the ethical thing to do, but the imperative thing as well.

Men are losing their careers, and many their physical health and ability at a disturbingly rapid pace in the NFL. In a recent game with historical long-time rivals, Pittsburgh Steeler's QB Ben Roethlisberger stepped up to the plate against Baltimore Ravens, reportedly playing on a broken foot that required extensive taping and a special shoe allegedly a size bigger than his normal cleats in order to accommodate the taped support. As if playing with a broken foot weren't enough, Ben suffered a gruesome blow to the head in the first quarter, breaking his nose in several places. Audiences held their breath as Ben exited the field gushing blood; five minutes later he was stinted, clotted, and back on the field. He would play for the remainder of the game. And he would play the following week with a face guard protecting the reconstructed nose that doctor's reported looked like "corn flakes." Commentators spent the first five minutes thereafter debating the "no foul" rule on the play wondering if Ben's abnormal physical size and strength deterred referees from protecting him with proactive calls.

A little later in the same Steelers-Ravens game, Steeler's running back Heath Miller would get a concussion on what everyone deemed a clearly illegal hit; yet again, a "no foul" call resulted. One couldn't help but wonder what Steeler's James Harrison, this year's highest fined player--currently ringing in to the tune of $125,000 in fines . . . and counting--felt as he watched his own players take hits that didn't seem to merit intervention by the officials. Fines to both players involved in Roethlisberger's and Miller's injuries were later sanctioned by the NFL. With all these dizzying amounts of fines and overwhelming season-ending and game-missing injuries, one can't help but wonder . . . is it worth it? And what is the NFL to do if they want to try to prevent future debacles such as this injury-laden 2010 season?

But it will take more than officiating and rules on the football pitch to correct what's happening weekly on the NFL fields. Aside from the sheer physics of the game with the new body types tapping in at over 300+ lbs, many capable of running 40 yard dashes in around 5 seconds, the NFL is working against a much larger, much darker systemic issue of hegemonic masculinity and the performativity of violence. The NFL, it seems, has become the theatre of masculine spectacle, and the violent contact nature of postmodern, multi-billion dollar organized sports like the NFL means that unless some larger cultural ideological assumptions about what it means to be a man in this world changes, we're likely not going to see any improvement in protecting players and changing the unstable physicality and violence of the NFL anytime soon. And that's not even to mention the many raced, classed, and sexual implications that collude in the spectacle of sporting violence and hegemonic masculinity that further compound the complexities of violence and masculinity in the NFL arena (Messner; Miller; Wenner; Rowe).

While many of us partake in the infamous leisurely spectacting debauchery of sport, the B&Bs--beers and bars-- of sport fan-ship, we often ignore the reality that the players themselves are subject to a mass organized, highly lucrative sporting institution that promotes a corporeal debauchery of violence and excess to drive a patriarchal post-capital economy. Precisely because the NFL is steeped in nationalistic overtones and working class roots, it is all the more popular as a mass culture form of entertainment in America. Yet the NFL remains conflicted by how to proceed with protecting the safety of the players while preserving one of the sacred social spaces of American masculine culture, and many activists and scholars remain torn between loathing and revering sports culture and its concomitant mass medias that perpetuate particular ideologies of masculine sporting violence at the expense of particular raced, classed, and gendered bodies.

I grew up with sports, I was a college athlete, and I continue to read, write, analyze, and even spectate and enjoy sports. I can't help but feel a little weird about the felt tension between inhabiting these multiple sporting personas: athlete, fan, and critic, yet I feel it's important to work through these things as they seem so fundamentally central to the political and ideological economies of American culture. Admittedly, I love the thrill of watching an NFL game with my husband and friends. The cheering and adrenaline rush; the camaraderie and ritual. But I'm not unaware of the fact that many of the bodies contributing to this spectacle for my entertainment and participation in a particular cultural space--million dollar contracts or otherwise--will only play around four to six years in the league, and many may leave the league (permanently) injured.That's, of course, not even to mention the educational gap that often articulates across the NFL: where do these players go, who do they become, and what do they do with their lives after the curtain falls on their professional careers and identifies, as early as their 20s and 30s?

Part of my journey with sport scholarship is a continued need to interrogate and explore why it is that athletes do what they do--what I did--to our bodies for so long. What are the opportunity costs of molding one's self into this identity category of "athlete" in a post-Fordist American political economy? While the media's framing of NFL players as glamorous high-life celebrities is an easy sell to buy into, we can't be fooled into forgetting the high-stakes such cushy contracts come with. Such stakes are often, and quite literally, life threatening, as this NFL 2010 season has demonstrated so corporeally like no season before. While the NFL commission racks their brains to figure out how to protect their players, I want to ask to those of us watching and supporting the masculine violence, and the bodies it victimizes in the process, is it really worth it? Ultimately, what is our responsibility as citizens who partake in and support the cultural project of hegemonic masculinity and violence in the NFL?

Welcome to Sporting Rhetoric

This blog is a space where I can share with the public my academic journey with sports media. As a former NCAA Div 1 athlete, now R1 PhD student, my involvement and interest in sport and sport media has been a life long endeavor. But it wasn't until I came across Jabari Mahiri's Out of Bounds: When Scholarship Athletes Become Academic Scholars that I realized there was an entire space and field of work on sport, education, and media communications that I was missing out on. Lawrence Wenner's MediaSport opened the door further in exciting new ways.

Despite its growing prominence and interest in other academic fields, sport and sport media have yet to really hit the rhet-comp's radar, save for the recent contributions by Barry Brummett, in his edited collection Sporting Rhetoric, and Linda Fuller's recent edited compilations Sport, Rhetoric, Gender, Sexual Sports Rhetoric:Universal and Global Contexts (2010a; 2010b), and Sexual Sports Rhetoric: Historical and Media Contexts of Violence. These four books speak to a growing interest in rhetorical scholarship concerning the political economy and rhetorical effects of sport and serve as important points of departure for my academic journey with the myriad spaces and places of sport in the context of gender relations. For more classical lenses from the field of rhet-comp, I am grateful for Debra Hawhee's Bodily Arts which explores connections between ancient athletics and Sophistic rhetorical pedagogy.

Of pivotal interest to me are rhetorics of the (gendered) body and the rhetorical effects of the mind/body split in certain social subject positions and spaces, particularly the student-athlete and professional and college athletics. Jabari Mahiri's Out of Bounds and Shooting for Excellence, as well as Julie Cheville's Minding the Body: What Student-Athletes Know About Learning all interrogate the rhetoric of Cartesian metaphysics that so many student-athletes struggle to negotiate across and within various institutional spaces. Exploring the classed, raced, and gendered implications of the mind-body split, Mahiriand Cheville provide a powerful impetus for rethinking the predominantly pejorative myth of the "dumb jock" and their social position within higher education; they contextualize, indeed humanize, these students' experiences within the larger institutional webs of power and conflicting ideology of which they are co-constitutive, shaped by and helping to shape.

These works, in addition to my growing interest in feminisms, including technofeminism/ cyberfeminism, American and French postmodern feminisms, and feminist sport sociology and communications scholarship (Hall; Lenskyj; Creedon; Cole, among others), as well as critical discourse analysis (Fairclough; Van Dijk; Mean), are providing exciting new inroads for my academic journey through a PhD in the humanities. As I make my way through the rich intertextual and interdisciplinary conversations about sport, media, and gender, I find myself exhaling; renewed, refreshed, and grateful.

As a scholarship athlete turned academic scholar, I am indeed grateful for the roads paved by these scholars, and for the exciting opportunities I now have, in part because of their work, to connect my lived experiences--which, for so long, seemed so foreign to and unacknowledged by academe--with a richly diverse and expanding field of research on sport, media, and gender. I hope some of the blog snippets that follow in the months are of some interest, if not educational import, for those kind enough to join me in the process.

All best,

-Cassie Wright