Few of us really think too much about the political implications of sports. HPR writers have touched on it occasionally, but generally we just root for our city; where our money goes doesn’t really register.
The NFL, still, has faced some political problems in the past few years. Charles Pierce’s recent story on retired players’ healthcare is worth a read:
There really are no other questions left. For a long while, the league was able to mask the fact that the destruction of the human body was as central to its fundamental structure as that destruction ever was to, say, boxing. For a long while, the libertarian argument seemed to prevail; yes, the argument went, we concede the savagery and the destruction but, to paraphrase Hyman Roth, this is the business they have chosen. Both of those strategies have run their course. Scientific evidence continues to overwhelm any attempts to spin what happens to a human being over the course of a career playing football. And there comes a point at which the libertarian argument runs headlong into the question of whether it is moral for a society to allow people to commit slow-motion suicide for the purposes of mass entertainment. That leaves us with the question of what we will tolerate as an ethical and moral culture, and why. And that is the question that the NFL must answer in a whole host of areas regarding the safety and health of its employees, lest one day it get an answer that it will not like very much.
A few days ago, Sally Jenkins and Rick Maese of the Washington Post wrote a long, stunning piece about one of the NFL’s most conspicuous failures in this regard — namely, its catastrophic lack of long-term insurance coverage for its retired players. Jenkins and Maese brilliantly limn how NFL owners have arranged to game the players out of coverage that every moral and ethical standard imaginable says they deserve. (In California, the owners are lining up behind a workers’ compensation bill that, if passed, virtually guarantees that coverage for former NFL players will fall on the Social Security system, or on Medicare.) Players are faced with endless litigation; often, it seems, the team doctors who once made sure they could return to the field despite injuries that would have kept the rest of us in bed for a month turn up as witnesses against them, which is going to give those doctors something interesting to discuss with Hippocrates in the Hereafter. It’s systematized obfuscation of the only question that still demands a clear answer.
In doing this, of course, the NFL owners, most of whom ascended to the country’s corporate class during the de-unionization and deregulation of the past 35 years, are behaving the way you would expect the members of that class to behave. For example, when Jenkins and Maese point out that the failure of the NFL to cover its former players adequately for the long term ultimately causes the burden of that coverage to fall on the taxpayers, they might just as well be talking about Walmart as about, say, the Cincinnati Bengals.
There’s a lot of thought that could go both ways on this, but if anything, Pierce reminds us of the age-old adage: everything is political.