I spent my adolescence and early adulthood living in a very left-leaning area of the country in the suburbs of northern New Jersey. In my lifetime I’ve been fortunate enough to have lived and worked in a total of ten different states throughout the midwest, northeast, and southern United States. I’m grateful for that because it’s allowed me to experience the country I live in from multiple perspectives. Exposure to how life is in the tri-state area of NY/NJ/CT versus life in the mountains of southwest Virginia versus life in old, decaying steel towns amongst Ohio and Pennsylvania has helped me see things through different lenses. I can understand where folks who grew up in coal country feel about politics and the world around them, as well as understanding how my more liberal friends see and feel about the same subjects.
A lot of my friends from where I call home, Jersey, have for a few years now been saying the NFL is dying. The scandalous concussion issues, the domestic violence cases, the constant damage control campaigns such as “football is family,” the anthem protests, changes in the rules that evidently appear to change outcomes more and more regularly. It all factors in to the metric that the league’s television ratings are down. Yet despite the apparent dip, revenue is still going up and ESPN just purchased the rights to Monday Night Football on an eight year contract worth $15.2 billion, an annual average of $1.9B. Just for Monday night games which tend to fail by midseason when we start seeing matchups sometimes between two teams with 2-6 records that were determined months in advance when it was then believed to be a good matchup.
I have a friend from high school who came to me not too long ago when I posted an article through social media on doctors possibly having been able to detect early signs of CTE through some form of brain scan. He feels that the league should just do away with helmets altogether. To some extent I agree, I mean I don’t see a world in which we can develop a helmet to be safer without also enhancing its abilities as a weapon. Nonetheless, there have also been cases of CTE found in former rugby players so it seems to me that mild traumatic brain injuries, or MTBIs, are inevitably parts of intense contact sports. That same friend also brought to my attention that there were only 18 players on the freshman football team at Montclair High School (our alma-mater) in 2017. Another friend of mine from high school currently owns and operates a banging ass burger joint in Montclair and told me that a lot of families that come into the restaurant discuss with him how they’ll never allow their children to play football. This all boils down to their beliefs that football is dying.
Well no disrespect meant to them, but I fear they’re neglecting to acknowledge that for every affluent town such as Montclair, there are the entire states of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, West Virginia, parts of California, and Ohio where football is a way of life A religious experience for some in a state like Texas. Shit, there are magazines and websites in Texas that rank and grade the top eighth graders heading into high school each year! Kids in some of those states grow up without many professional sports teams in their areas. They are bred on college ball and for the most part they never have to leave their home states to go to, or play in college.
Jamal Lewis was fairly recently featured in a Bleacher Report article. The article recounted an experience of his that he had had in his final year in the league when he was with the Cleveland Browns. Lewis copped himself a concussion in a game against the Vikings and says he immediately went into survival mode. He would take handoffs, shuffle his feet a little, plow straight forward, and fall down when he felt hits were coming. He got through the game, played the following week, then missed a few games before making the final six starts of his career and retiring at the end of that season (2009).
The article details his upbringing in a not so friendly area in Georgia. Lewis recalls playing football on horrible fields as a kid. Fields that were littered with glass bottles, thus making him do everything in his power to not get tackled and not go down on the ground.
Since retiring in 2009, Lewis has already had one business of his own fail, he filed for bankruptcy in 2012, but is currently the president of Southeast Exhibits and Metro Retail Solutions which is a company that designs, builds, and services trade show booths. He suffers bouts of depression and sadness and although it doesn’t seem like he’s an alcoholic, it does sound like he enjoys alcohol as a way to cope with the pain and said bouts of mental illness. He has the dark suspicion that he is currently living with CTE. Despite this, Lewis claims that if he could do it all over again, he would. His rationale is that as a teenager growing up in his environment, he had three options: sell drugs, join a gang, or play sports. Now we can’t all be seven feet tall and play basketball, and as a stocky 5’11 man, Lewis was primed to be a running back. In his eyes, football was the lesser of those evils and I’m hard-pressed to disagree with Jamal on that one.
For those of you who question his rationale by saying “why were those his only options? Why not study? Why not educate yourself to a point where you can escape the hood and succeed elsewhere?” I don’t think you’re taking into account just how much environment factors into developing us as people. Or that during our younger years our friends tend to be our biggest influences. We must take into account important factors such as socioeconomics, happenstance, environment, and the things that simply make us all human to a fault rather than assume everyone else and their geographical placement is the same as our own.
Reasons like these are why I don’t think football is dying or the NFL will take too great of a hit. It’s possible that it takes a temporary hit similar to that of boxing. Boxing used to be the sport of kings, but corruption within it and the fighters’ abilities to duck one another as often as they want have led to a downfall that the sport has been struggling mightily to get out of pretty much since Mike Tyson went to prison.
But when you see that a company like Disney is willing to pay nearly $2 billion a year to own Monday Nights, it’s hard to say the NFL is really even dying at all…
MattyMouthsOff 