Get Herald RSSI was sitting on the couch watching football this past Turkey Day when my four-year-old cousin stumbled into the room. After tumbling onto the couch and staring at the screen for a while, she uttered the following words:
"Why do they play? They run and then" - she clapped her hands as a tackle was made on the screen - "they die."
Those are awfully philosophical thoughts coming from someone who still wears diapers, I thought. She should eat some more turkey. But instead, I decided I'd try to explain my thinking to her.
"Well, they get a lot of money to play. And some of them enjoy it," I said, looking at her to gauge her approval.
She scrunched her nose and shook her head in that spastic way little kids do. "I don't like it," she said. I thought of trying to explain to her the value of money and how these guys on the field got a lot of enjoyment out of what they did. But I couldn't. Maybe she had a point.
What my wise little cousin either didn't approve of or didn't understand was why people would subject themselves to physical agony in exchange for money. It's an interesting question. Think about it: If I asked you to put on a helmet and pads and run into a bunch of 300-plus pound men trying to slam you to the ground, you'd probably take a rain check. But if I told you to do the same thing - only this time I'd give you a couple million dollars to do it for an hour on live television in front of 50,000 people - you'd jump at the opportunity. Well, at least some of you would.
It turns out that the median annual salary of a professional football player is about $720,000. Unless your agent's last name is Boras, that's a good chunk of cash. But now let's compare that to, say, baseball or basketball. In Major League Baseball, the median annual salary is $1.025 million. In the National Basketball Association, it's $2.75 million. Even hockey players make about $1 million a year on average, and you can't even watch their games on standard cable.
While the difference between making a boatload of money and making a larger boatload of money may seem trivial, consider what each sport's participants are required to do. Baseball players have to throw, hit and catch a ball. Basketball players have to throw a ball, throw a ball at a higher angle and bounce a ball moronically on the ground while moving. (To their credit, dribbling is harder than it looks.) Football players have to throw a ball, run with a ball and inflict physical pain upon each other.
In baseball and basketball, great defensive players are defined by how well they can catch the ball or block the opposing team's shots. In football, great defensive players such as the New York Giants' Lawrence Taylor are lauded for their ability to sack - read: pummel - the opposing quarterback.
But Ben, players get injured in every sport, right? Yes. Except for soccer. Nobody has ever gotten injured playing soccer, yet it is the only sport with injury time. But whereas broken fingers, strained hamstrings and torn ACLs happen everywhere in sports, football has exclusive rights to one type of bodily damage: head injuries.
In Major League Baseball, only two players have ever died from head injuries. Both were hit by a pitch in the temple. In the United States last year, five football players died from on-field head injuries - and that number is down from previous years. Even though most players don't die, plenty suffer severe concussions. Unlike damage to a limb, your head contains your brain. You've probably heard of it before - it's that thing that helps you think and breath and live and stuff. Because your brain controls so many vital functions other than just motor skills, damaging your head can lead to chronic disabilities. In fact, so many football players have blamed head trauma for their becoming severely disabled or depressed that a "concussion summit" was held last summer. During the summit, organizations representing former players and the National Football League worked toward creating policies to ensure greater precautions against head injuries.
Now, you can still argue that despite all of that, football players have it just as easy as any professional athletes. After all, most of them go to work only 16 days a year and get paid to play a kid's game. But more than any other athletes, football players risk debilitating physical injuries every time they step on the field. So if you were to offer me a million dollars to put on those pads and a helmet and square off against those 300-plus pound men, I might just scrunch my nose and shake my head.
Ben Singer '09 wants his four-year-old cousin to take his philosophy final.
