The Super Bowl and The Magic Eye

On Spectacle and Suffering

Photo by Phillip Goldsberry on Unsplash

This Sunday, the National Football League will crown its champion at Super Bowl LVII (that’s 57, for those of us who don’t live in ancient Rome). The Kansas City Chiefs, led by charismatic insurance salesman and generational quarterback talent Patrick Mahomes, will battle Jalen Hurts and the surprising Philadelphia Eagles at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Some 100 million Americans will gather to collectively consume 1.5 billion chicken wings, 11.2 million pounds of potato chips, 12.5 million pizzas, 326 million gallons of beer and, presumably, to watch the game - or at least the commercials. Around 17 million will call off work Monday.

Now, I’ll most likely not call off Monday, but I will watch the game - and consume my fair share. I love football. And I love the Super Bowl. Some of my favorite childhood memories revolve around this uniquely American pastime. I remember wearing my Chicago Bears pajamas and a headband marked “Rozelle” to first grade on the day after Super Bowl XX. I remember the terrible 3D halftime show during the equally terrible Super Bowl XXIII in 1989 (but they both looked great on our new Zenith cabinet TV). I remember the four consecutive Bills losses. My Buffalo-native Grandma Joan never got to see them win one, but we had great parties, great food, and a house full of friends and family for each. I played organized football for five years. I love this game.

But, every so often, we’re reminded of the inherent violence and exploitation of professional football. Just last month, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest during a game after making a tackle and may have survived only by the quick reaction of team trainer Denny Kellington, who administered CPR on the field. It was reported that the league intended to continue the game, allegedly giving players only five minutes to warm up, before being rebuffed by an impromptu wildcat strike by both teams. It called to mind the 1971 on-field death of Detroit’s Chuck Hughes, who also suffered cardiac arrest. His teammates and opponents played out the final minutes of that game as medical personnel futilely attempted to resuscitate Hughes. Several players have been left paralyzed by on-field hits over the years. Each of those games continued, the human emotion of concern for one’s fallen comrade to be suppressed until the league had fulfilled its television obligations to its broadcast partners and sponsors.

And that is just the sudden, jarring, obvious traumatic injuries. Over the last twenty-plus years, researchers have come to understand the link between football, repeated concussions, and a degenerative brain disease known as CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). Just last week, the Boston University CTE Center announced the results of a study showing a whopping 91.7% of the former NFL players’ brains they had examined were diagnosed with the disease. In 2012, a group of 4,500 former players, spouses, and their representatives sued the NFL, alleging the league “knew about the long-term health risks associated with concussions and repeated blows to the head, and deliberately ignored and actively concealed this information in order to protect the economic value of the game.” And in a particularly sordid development, the lawsuit settlement - originally negotiated for one billion dollars in 2013 - was ordered amended last year by a judge after Black NFL retirees filed a civil rights complaint over “race-norming” in dementia testing, which “assumed that Black people have a lower cognitive baseline score, making it harder for them to show mental declines linked to football.”

For those of us not earning millions of dollars per year sacrificing our long-term health, it may be easy to say the reward is worth the risk, to grimace as these speeding behemoths crash into each other at full force, to watch men literally seize up on the gridiron and write it off because they are “well-compensated.” Sure, many are, and many have long, productive careers, but the average NFL career only lasts around three years with career earnings of $2.4 million (adjusted for inflation). That may seems like a large number, but will it cover a full lifetime of medical bills for someone likely to suffer from many nagging injuries, early-onset dementia, or ALS? Furthermore, we aren’t even considering college, high school, or semi-pro footballers who are compensated very little, if at all, for their increased likelihood of developing CTE. Every Sunday we spend in front of the TV, every Saturday at the tailgate, or Friday night under the lights, we actively choose to avoid seeing the exploitation underlying the entire enterprise.

I’m reminded of those cool Magic Eye puzzles from the 1990’s. At first glance, they appear to be a simple two-dimensional image, but hidden within are 3D images one can only see with a trained eye. Similarly, the dazzling presentation of a football game, the camaraderie of good tailgate party, the thrill of a big win for your fantasy team can obscure the hidden suffering upon which the enterprise is built: broken bodies, bruised brains, and even early death. One has to learn how to see the hidden picture, but once seen, it can’t be unseen.

It’s American capitalism in a nutshell: an impressive picture of plenty, of choice, of freedom hiding unseen horrors just below the surface. So many of the things we take for granted and assume are our birthright as Americans are only possible because the exploitation necessary to keep the system functioning is kept from our view. We’ll buy a candy bar at the convenience store without giving thought to the child slavery on the other end of the supply chain, every Halloween a particularly ghoulish affair where our children playfully implore our neighbors for the fruits of other children’s abuse. Coffee, an absolute necessity for the majority of Americans every morning, employs a similarly exploitative labor model. We literally fuel ourselves on the uncompensated toil of others. The clothes on our backs, the phones in our pockets, the cars we drive, virtually every sector of the economy sits on a foundation of cruelty kept out of our sight.

This worked well for a long time in our country. As the progressive reforms of the early 20th century, the rise of labor unions in the 1930’s, and the Great Society programs of the 1960’s brought more and more Americans into the middle class, the suffering that once marked immigrant ghettos, Dust Bowl farms, and the Jim Crow South gave way to a more broad-based prosperity. Much of the exploitation was kept overseas and thus out of view, especially for white Americans.

Then Reagan came along.

Unions were crushed.

Social spending was slashed.

Jobs were offshored.

The Neoliberal era was upon us, and the suffering began to come home to roost. Over the last forty years, $50 TRILLION has been transferred from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. The wealth inequality gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else is worse now than during the Gilded Age. Americans are now deeper in debt than ever before; real wages have remained stagnant; more and more are succumbing to deaths of despair, and life expectancy is dropping. Those on all sides of the political divide are calling for major change. The exploitation is becoming apparent at home and, with the dawn of the internet and the smartphone, impossible to ignore “over there” as well.

The hidden picture is coming into focus. And it cannot be unseen.

This is why I remain hopeful in this time of crisis. Each passing day, more of us awaken to these systems of oppression. And it is our job to rouse our friends and family from their slumber. Maybe at our Super Bowl parties. Maybe we give thanks for that plate of chicken wings by advocating for better working conditions in the meatpacking industry. Maybe we broach the topic of the horrors of rare-earth mining during that electric car commercial. I don’t know. You know your audience better than me, but I do know that it's imperative we keep moving the ball forward, even if slowly, even if our generation doesn't get to spike the ball in the endzone of equality. I’ll be watching with the rest of you, blinders on, hoping the illusion isn’t broken by another life-threatening injury. Then Monday, it’s eyes wide open, helping others to see the schooner.