The Panoptiblog

Malcolm Gladwell’s new article about the NFL and concussions should be interesting. The brain science around concussions has garnered a lot of attention lately. This fall, the NFL Players’ Union formed a committee to address the issue; a week before, the highest-profile college player suffered one. The consequences later in life are serious for those who suffer multiple concussions, and the injury is finally getting recognition as something you don’t mess around with, even if you’re a Tough Guy.

But for me, Gladwell completely undermines all that by using a shock headline and sub head. “Offensive Play,” it reads. “How different are dogfighting and football?”

Um. Really different.

At first, I thought the editors must have come up with it, as happens at Slate and, I’m sure, elsewhere. But Gladwell definitely pushes the comparison, and he does it in a pretty dishonest way.

Vicious hits do not put pro football on par with dogfighting.

On its face, it’s an absurd comparison, and astonishingly insulting to players. The features most closely associated with dogfighting are the cruelty of it, that these are animals in someone’s care, forced into viciousness, nearly always resulting in (at least) one animal’s death. None of these are true of NFL players. NFL players get to decide for themselves whether the reward (over $300K/year minimum starting rookie salary, last I looked) worth the risk (possible life-long physical and/or mental impairments), or not? NFL players are subject to innumerable rules that penalize them for behavior likely to injure another player, sometimes to the point that players, commentators, and fans complain. And despite Carson Palmer’s recent (maybe legit) hand-wringing, NFL players do not die on the clock.

The argument positions NFL players as idiots at best, with no agency (much less agents) of their own. Some might be idiots; but many are millionaires. Malcolm Gladwell may not have been born with the DNA of a potential NFL player, so I’m not sure how he can claim to know how he’d do that cost-benefit analysis if he were twenty years old and was told, “Hey, kid, if you really dedicate yourself to this thing, you could have millions in the bank by the time you’re twenty-five.”

Gladwell must know this, because he really tries to distance himself from making that part of the analogy openly. It actually takes a lot of reading to figure out exactly what he means by the comparison. For most of the essay, he makes it by juxtaposition, without clarification. But late in the essay, he finally does explicitly tie them together:

In a fighting dog, the quality that is prized above all others is the willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain. A dog that will not do that is labelled a “cur,” and abandoned. A dog that keeps charging at its opponent is said to possess “gameness,” and game dogs are revered.In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff—and dogfighting fails this test.

A paragraph later:

Professional football players, too, are selected for gameness. When Kyle Turley was knocked unconscious, in that game against the Packers, he returned to practice four days later because, he said, “I didn’t want to miss a game.” Once, in the years when he was still playing, he woke up and fell into a wall as he got out of bed. “I start puking all over,” he recalled. “So I said to my wife, ‘Take me to practice.’ I didn’t want to miss practice.” The same season that he was knocked unconscious, he began to have pain in his hips. He received three cortisone shots, and kept playing. At the end of the season, he discovered that he had a herniated disk. He underwent surgery, and four months later was back at training camp. “They put me in full-contact practice from day one,” he said. “After the first day, I knew I wasn’t right. They told me, ‘You’ve had the surgery. You’re fine. You should just fight through it.’ It’s like you’re programmed. You’ve got to go without question—I’m a warrior. I can block that out of my mind. I go out, two days later. Full contact. Two-a-days. My back locks up again. I had re-herniated the same disk that got operated on four months ago, and bulged the disk above it.” As one of Turley’s old coaches once said, “He plays the game as it should be played, all out,” which is to say that he put the game above his own well-being.

So this is what Gladwell brought us all this way for? If so, let’s skewer the analogy with this: when Kyle Turley decides he’s had enough of that, he can freaking retire. Like Robert Smith. Or Steve Young. Or other players who technically could’ve played another year or two, and made more money, but decided they’d rather walk away while they could still walk at all. That doesn’t mean it isn’t brutal; it clearly is. But that doesn’t mean the players are dupes, controlled by the far greater power of their coaches, or their egos, or the fans, or whatever. Now if he’d chosen this tack with junior high football players, I could maybe buy more of this analogy. They are under the care of those who should have their health in mind, they do, sometimes, have less of a choice. But that’s not the direction he went.

I don’t want to go the Morgan Meis route and say “Down with Malcolm Gladwell!” only to have to retract it upon finding out he’s a nice guy. And I encourage anyone who’s made it all the way through this post to go read the whole thing, because the facts about football, concussions, and other injuries are very, very compelling. But I do think Gladwell leaves himself open to more criticism by making sensationalized comparisons with flashy headlines than just writing honest, thoughtful analysis, of which he’s so clearly capable.