After Football

Having recently read The End of Autumn, by Michael Oriard, thoughts of football careers, the physical and mental impact of those careers, have been percolating in my head. Oriard is an English professor at Oregon St. He also had a four-year NFL career with the Kansas City Chiefs in the early '70s. He played professional football more because he could as he followed his true passion for literature and academia in the offseason. His thoughts on football are unique and thoughtful. He has written other books on football that have intrigued me and I now consider must reads. I look forward to them.

It always frustrates me when I hear people complain about the "high-priced athletes." Football players in particular. Mostly because these same people rarely acknowledge the often greater salaries of musicians and actors. They're all entertainers and we pay a hefty price to be entertained. Through our entertainment needs, some football players get rich and all NFL owners get even more wealthy. If we continue to value football as entertainment, those individuals will continue to rake in the money. I've never understood why football players making money is frowned upon when they are only getting what they can while they can. This was especially evident during the lockout last year. The owners are the ones really making the extreme piles of money and they can earn it for the rest of their lives. Unlike musicians and actors and even some other athletes, football players have a very small window to earn what they can. Some musicians and actors earn big money into and through their senior years. With an average career of just over four years, most football players don't even get to that second contract which is usually the first one to really involve big money. Not all of that contract is even guaranteed. If the player is released, he can say goodbye to that big money. Most football players do no get rich playing football. At the time of Oriard's playing days the life expectancy of an NFL player was 54 years. Not only were the careers relatively brief so were their lives. Nearly all of their adult years are spent dealing the health issues of a handful of football years. For all of the perks that fans, non-fans and the media see coming from playing football there are a whole lot of drawbacks. Some career and life threatening. Better nutrition, exercise and weight management awareness over the last forty years has expanded the life expectancy of former football players. Watching the Hall of Fame ceremonies each year shows that. The older former players look mostly fantastic. They may be living longer but most of those extra years are rarely spent in a great deal of comfort. Football thrashes the human body. We were not made for that kind of sustained brutality. Football players should be allowed to get what they can while they can.