Youth Football Is a Moral Abdication
In the 1890s, the Chicago Tribune began to sound the alarm about a dangerous new sport. Unlike in baseball, cricket, or other popular activities of the day, teams of young athletes repeatedly collided with one another as a key component of the emerging game. The quest for victory resulted in frequent impacts to opposing players that would “strain their hips, break their noses, and concuss their brains.” Should football overtake baseball as America’s national game, the Tribune advised, it would need to be profoundly reformed. Otherwise, the sport would “physically ruin thousands of young men.”
More than 120 years and many thousands of severely injured young men later, football , as the sports economist Michael Leeds once put it, “like a colossus across the landscape of American sports.” Despite both established medical knowledge and commonsense understanding that engaging in repeated collisions poses extraordinary physical hazards, adults promoted football for boys of all ages throughout the 20th century. Football not only overtook baseball as America’s most-viewed televised sport, but it also became by far the sport played by American high-school boys. can begin tackling one another. in television contracts, the very identities of major colleges and universities, and the Friday-night rhythms of communities across the United States are all tied to the gridiron.
