Insurance will plow through pretensions of football

The fate of the sport of football is being determined away from emotions, thank goodness. Emotions shower the sport. The players themselves cater to that, accommodating the media interviewers with the gratuitous, empty comments, ad nauseam, but there's another side.
I wondered recently what was going on the heads of a couple New York Jets players as they were interviewed pre-game, back in a bygone time. So bygone, it's Joe Namath playing quarterback. Namath was interviewed along with linebacker Al Atkinson. Behind their carefree disposition, there was an anxiety lurking, I sensed. It would be unspoken. The masculine sport of football disallows feelings of fear and weakness coming forth. Certainly in Namath's time this was the case. It was long before the clarion call we all began hearing about the sport's dangers.

(image of Joe Namath from pinterest)

I think the players knew full well what awaited them as they began clashing on the field. Problem is, their talents had gotten them so rewarded with glory and opened doors as with college scholarships and pro contracts, it was the goose that laid the golden egg.
We heard about all sorts of injuries in the old days. Jim Otto of the Raiders was put forward as a textbook example. But these were the kind of injuries a reasonable man might be expected to live with. You might seem semi-handicapped with limitations in your post-football life. But guys were encouraged to think this was like a badge of honor. An "old football injury" might be a conversation starter where smiles take over and we hear those gratuitous, empty comments. "How'd the game turn out?" one might ask.

Because the sport had the imprimatur of education institutions and because masses of fans showed interest at such events, it was encouraged to wax positive on such things. It was a cultural expectation. But the players deep in their own minds were conflicted, I think. I sensed it in the facial expressions or body language of the two Jets players. The players gave the usual cliche answers to the interviewer who happened to be Howard Cosell. (I watched this on YouTube.) They followed the expected routine. These guys were doing what they figured society had ordained them to do. A pox on all of us.
Our perspective is indeed different in the year 2018. We are watching a slow conversion of the masses. One can argue it's way too slow, as surely we ought to be hearing the death knell for football itself. Logic commands it. But holy cow, how can we let go of something that over time has grown into an absolute opiate?
I have finally done it. Had I made this claim a couple years ago, it would have seemed a little white lie. Football still commanded too much of my curiosity. I am not misleading anyone now. I hardly have the curiosity to learn the scores, not even for the U of M Gophers. The U is having a hard time getting students to come to the games. Well, congratulations students. Keep up the enlightenment.
 
A white knight, like it or not
Where emotions fail in causing change, we have one very reliable fall-back: insurance! How often do we feel like cheering for this industry? We can't live with it and we can't live without it, to paraphrase an old misogynistic joke. A banker friend of mine shared the following with me in a spirit of levity recently: Insurance is something we spend a lot of money on, with the idea that we don't want to use it!
There is nothing like the insurance industry for peeling away pretension, emotions and lies and simply garnering truth. So, that's why the sport of football could be on the cusp of a rapid descent. Forget the preening high school sports parents with their flippant comments on how the game is fun and exciting etc. These are otherwise intelligent people, n'est-ce pas? Where they fail in seeing the light, where they fail miserably in true caring for their sons - the abomination of it - the insurance industry will come riding in like a white knight.
I gnash teeth a little in complimenting the insurance industry. I'm reminded of a syndicated cartoon I saw once, in which a woman realizes "I've never been so offended in all my life," and this was upon learning that her new boyfriend was a private investigator working for an insurance company!
Accountability is what holds insurance companies, and casinos, together. Remember the woman who claimed her dentist gave her AIDs? An insurance industry lawyer peeled her like a banana, as I recall. Reminds me of Bernard Goldberg's important book "Bias" in which (the windbag) said, precise in this case: "People are notorious for lying about their sex life." After the "Bias" book, Goldberg became an annoying caricature of himself.
Just so you all know what's happening with football and insurance, lest there's any doubt, I'll quote from an ABC News article: "From the NFL to rec leagues, football is facing a stark, new threat: an evaporating insurance market that is fundamentally altering the economics of the sport, squeezing and even killing off programs faced with higher costs and a scarcity of available coverage, an Outside the Lines investigation has found."
Football can only go downhill now. As the process accelerates, you might find there isn't even much general talk about it. Slowly we'll adjust our entertainment consumption habits. We'll begin acting like it's no big deal. We'll find it silly to remember the days when we salivated over those "Super Bowl TV commercials." What idiocy. We will discover life after football. We will raise our sons more responsibly.
If the battered Namath were given a choice to re-live his whole life without football, I think he would.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com