If Football Is Harming Its Players, How Can You Be a Fan?
I’m going to keep watching, but I don’t feel good about it
Growing up, I was the only girl on a block full of boys. Every weekend, we played 3-on-3 touch football in one of my neighbor’s backyards, his dad serving as quarterback (to this day, he says I had the best hands in the neighborhood). But despite our love of the game, that’s the closest any of us — including my brother, who was built like a linebacker by the time he was 12 — got to really playing the sport, because even in the 1990s our parents knew that football was dangerous. Two decades later, our mothers appear to be vindicated as story after story emerges of professional athletes becoming disabled and dying due to the head injuries they sustained from the game.
I love football. As embarrassing as it is to admit, one of the reasons I went to the University of Southern California as an undergrad was because they had a legacy football program. But it’s increasingly difficult to reconcile my affection for the sport with the harm it is causing the men who play it.
In addition to winning multiple national championships, USC is also marked by several tragic deaths of former players, including Junior Seau, who died by suicide in 2012 at the age of 43, and my classmate Kevin Ellison, who was killed under…
