Against Football by Steve Almond

Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback of her Green Bay Packers.
    McKee told me if she were a boy she would have playedfootball, and that she wanted her son to play. “When he got to high school, his dad didn’t want him to play because it was too dangerous. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ It was horrifying to me!” McKee laughed. “So he played soccer.”
    I asked McKee how she justifies watching the game, knowing its dangers so intimately. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know where I am. I think it’s a really important question. I have, like, these two faces. Right now they’re pretty separate. I do watch a lot of football on Sunday.”
    In the morgue, a small, frigid room thick with the smell of preserving fluid, McKee lifted the lid of a white plastic bucket. Inside was a brain covered with splotches of dark crimson. “That’s a suicide,” explained her colleague, Dr. Victor Alvarez. McKee selected another brain and set it down on her cutting board. It looked like a small, discolored ham. She began slicing it up with a long scalpel.
    Most of the brains McKee examines belong to veterans, not athletes. But the second brain she chose was a young female rugby player who had suffered a concussion, then continued to play. After a second impact, she suffered massive swelling of the brain and died. High school athletes are especially susceptible to so-called “second-impact syndrome.”
    I was there to talk to McKee about CTE, but the conversation between her and Alvarez and a young assistant named Brian quickly turned to the Super Bowl, which had been played a few weeks earlier.
    Brian was a fan of the Denver Broncos, who had been routed. “After the first quarter, I just wanted it to be anentertaining game!” he said, carefully sliding brain slices into small plastic cases.
    â€œAfter the first series!” said Alvarez, a Buffalo Bills fan.
    At a certain point, I outed myself as a Raiders partisan, and we were off to the races.
    It was an odd situation—actually
surreal
is closer to the mark. Even as McKee was dissecting this girl’s hippocampus and amygdala and her delicate spinal cord, we were gabbing about football.
    Before I left, McKee showed me two large color prints that hung in the hallway outside her office. One showed the brain of an eighteen-year-old football player with the brown spotting that signifies the onset of CTE. The other was a photo of a brain with two ghastly gouges in its frontal lobes, a lobotomy as they were conducted in the years after World War I.
    A psychiatrist named Walter Freeman performed nearly 3,500 lobotomies, many of them by pressing an icepick through the corner of the eye socket and into the patient’s brain. The procedure was sometimes used to treat victims of shell shock. The press hailed Freeman as a miracle worker. Only years later were his methods debunked. McKee marveled at the public acceptance of such barbarism, and I said, only half joking, that maybe decades from now the public will recoil at the thought that we ever watched a game that could permanently harm a teenager’s brain.
    â€œI’ve started to think it’s impossible to change the NFL,”McKee said. “People think none of this work will change the NFL.”
    She seemed completely blind to the irony hanging right in front of her. The ultimate agents of social change aren’t researchers like her, but individual fans (like her) who confront the moral meaning of the research, who make the connection between the damaged brains—such as those McKee dissects—and their own behavior.

4
THIS EAGER VIOLENCE OF THE HEART
    No one’s saying it’s easy. I’ve spent years trying to quit football, trying to view the game as a childish retreat from the world’s real crises, a callous endorsement of authoritarian thinking, and so forth. During my post-collegiate Diaspora, I