The Cult Of Football Is Bloodthirsty

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – You can see that the religion plays out on most Sundays during late August all the way up till mid-January or so.  Instead of finding yourself in a church for the actual participation in a religious ceremony, you will find yourself at a ballpark or at someone’s house as a facsimile of a ballpark for the proverbial tailgating and all that stuff.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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The NCAA doesn’t allow those students to profit off their sacrifices, citing archaic rules about purity and amateurism to keep revenue out of their hands. The guys wearing suits—men who risk their bodies for nothing—are the ones reaping fiscal benefits, while players like those on Georgia Tech, who are one hit away from life in a wheelchair, are disallowed from cutting a check. These issues of exploitation [Mike: This is the word I like in the story that drew my attention to the post and to the emerging story.] have been argued for a long time, but in light of the O’Bannon lawsuit, they appear to (finally) be coming to a head. “Players will continue to wear the APU throughout the season and spread the word,” Huma said. “They’re taking the reform effort to television, which has never been done. They’ve been using their bodies to make money for the people who run NCAA sports. [Mike: This is all true.] Now, for the first time, they’re using their bodies to push for basic protections at the very least.”

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Mike:  There are a couple things that are notable that are happening here in the football sports world.  The one thing that I think is the biggest and is going to have the most impact is, whether the NFL and the NCAA and the Riddell helmet corporation like it or not, there is now a tacit admission that playing the sport of football with a resin-based, hard-shell hat on your head that has some foam stuck inside it increases the chances that later in life, if you play the game and play it hard, that you are going to suffer some form of traumatizing brain injury from which you will never recover.  There is no treatment.  You will never recover from it.  You will never be the same person you were.

The NFL has kind of started to take it seriously, but if they’re not going to suspend violent, thug jerks — I can’t think of the player’s name, the guy that basically tried to decapitate and kill Jimmy Graham in the Bucks v. Saints game.  If they’re not going to just kick that guy out for six games, say: You’re not playing, dude.  You tried to hit that guy with your resin-based weapon.  You tried to take him out.  You almost succeeded in taking him out.  You can’t play the game like this anymore, you just can’t do it.  If the NFL isn’t consistent with this, they’re going to have to continue fighting these lawsuits.

What I think is the overriding factor here and the thing that ought to be of concern, I hear a lot of people say, [mocking] “They’re sissifying football.  They’re making it for a bunch of wussies now.”  It’ll never be for wussies.  As long as you can have a shoulder pad hitting you in the midsection, it’s not going to be for wussies.  If somebody can take your legs out — Andrew, I want you to talk about this because you’ve got bad knees.  If you’re playing football, American style and not the English style of rugby football, if you say you can’t hit in the head because you’re going to have brain trauma — and I believe that that case is airtight.  I don’t think there’s any more debate on it.

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I don’t even know why kids are still being told in Pop Warner leagues to use the helmet to hit hard and hit first.  This obviously, as the 4,000-plus cases that are now pursuing lawsuit against the NFL — just wait until former college players get their suit together, which I hear is in the making.  So we’re not going to go for the head.  We’re not going to go head to shoulder or head to head to perform a tackle.  There are going to be an awful lot of players going low.  They’re going to be going for knees.  Guys like you that are tall or like a Jimmy Graham, you’re just one shoulder to outer point of right knee away from what, an ACL that tears?

AG:  You’re going to end up blowing out everything.  It happened in the preseason this year with one of the top ten tight ends.  I think Dustin Keller ended up getting tackled low and blowing out his knee.  He’s in a contract year.  When you’re looking at a nine- to 12- to 18-month recovery to back to normal, his earning potential is nowhere near what it would have been had he just gotten a simple concussion.  The player who ended up tackling him said: I can’t risk a $100,000 fine, which is, as you mentioned earlier —

Mike:  A hit in the head.

AG:  That’s what the Buccaneer player, he was originally suspended for a game.  A lot of these defensive players say as long as these hits below the knee are legal, there is no fine attached with it and that’s what you’re forcing us to do.  A number of the players, I think Tony Gonzalez, the tight end for Atlanta, was one of the noble ones saying: I’d rather have a concussion than have my knees taken out.  You’re at a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation where if you’re just going to give them a sweet spot of six to twelve inches in the midsection for hitting, you’re going to get a very different game than what you see now or what you saw ten years ago.

Mike:  It’s going to have to.  Again, I think the largest problems we have in the United States and in Western civilization as a whole is that we no longer have a cult, and if we do have a cult, it’s not one organized around a religion, other than the religion that is us, that is the affairs and activities of men, sports being one of the affairs and activities of men.  You can see that the religion plays out on most Sundays during late August all the way up till mid-January or so.  Instead of finding yourself in a church for the actual participation in a religious ceremony, you will find yourself at a ballpark or at someone’s house as a facsimile of a ballpark for the proverbial tailgating and all that stuff.  [mocking] “What are you saying, we shouldn’t go to football games?  What’s wrong with you?”  No, just think about this for just a moment.  It’s not to single out any particular activity.

Mike Church Show Transcript – NFL Breeds Culture Of Violence, And The Players Are Paying The Price In Brain Injuries

The point is, the spiritual life has been replaced by the material life.  This isn’t even worth debating.  Are there people that still practice a spiritual life?  Yes, a few.  The numbers are getting smaller.  As we talked about on Friday’s show with Pope Francis’s interview being beamed around the entire known universe now, and with the usual suspects in the press corps taking great liberties with whatever it was that the pope said, it doesn’t really matter now.  The way the press has reported it is the way the press wanted to present it, which was the pope saying: We don’t have any rules around here anymore.  All those old rules and stuff, we don’t use those anymore.  Those are all old and archaic.  They no longer apply.  We’re going to have to adjust all the two-millennia-old things the church has been clinging to as dogma.  We’re going to have to reevaluate these things.

Well, pardon me, but I’d like to know when God sent his second son down to Earth, because I must have missed the event.  Maybe he’s here and I’m just not seeing him.  We’re now adjusting our cult — remember a cult is organized around religion.  We’re now adjusting our cult on the fly, and we’re making it up as we go along.  That cannot possibly, in my estimation, come from a transcendent or a god.  It seems to me that God would have his mind made up and would have handed down this stuff called dogma.  Unless you’re going to say the paraders about of our anti-cult today have been heaven sent and they are the new prophets, those that promote anti-cult activity and not the cultivation of souls, instead the cultivation of material satisfaction, unless you’re going to make that case — as I said Friday, what’s alarming to me is the speed with which these things are picking up.  They’re not slowing down.

The cult of sport is, at least at some point, is built around or tied to the cult of violence.  This is why the admission from the NFL and the admission from football as a whole, the tacit admission we’re getting now, that there is very substantial risk to the human mind and brain from this activity so we’re going to have to adjust the way we play, now they’re going to say — I think Andrew is right in pointing out the Tony Gonzalez story and others.  There’s a chance now of lower body injury.  What ultimately happens nobody can say, but you can say that the game is most certainly involving.  What is intriguing to witness, though, is the public and the consumer of the sport seems not to care for the wellbeing of the player.  They don’t care.  They want the violence.  They want the hits.  They want the crack, boom, bam on ESPN on Sunday nights.  They don’t give a rat’s furry behind as long as they’re being entertained.  The gladiatorial sport is just hunky-dory, A-Okay.  There’s something wrong with that.  There is something that ought to be instinctively wrong for men and women of good conscience and good Judeo-Christian faith to wish harm or see harm being caused to fellow men.  That’s my point about the whole thing.

I don’t know how it’s all going to work out.  I don’t have a plan for fixing it.  I wasn’t appointed to do it anyway.  I’m just simply pointing out that the hissy fits that I hear so many of about the lack and curtailment of violence in what is supposed to be — sport is supposed to be for entertainment.  We elevate athletes beyond regular mortal men because they appear to be able to do things that regular mortal men cannot do, thus that makes them what?  Well, back in the old days you would say that made them more godlike.  They weren’t gods, but they were more godlike because of the way they performed their activities.  We seem to be saying that it’s okay to injure gods or to cause physical injury to gods.  That’s my concern and my cultural point of view about what’s happening in pro football and in college football today.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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