Football fever is once again sweeping San Francisco: the red and gold lights illuminating City Hall, the rush of red-shirted people mobbing Lucky's for the last Pacificos on Sunday morning, inexplicable cheering and gasping emanating from apartment buildings as you walk down the streets. I love it all. Having lived through two World Series championships, I will never get tired of feeling the city rally around a team that I’ve cared about since I can remember.
But this year, watching football feels different. Before the season even began, a good buddy told me he was done supporting football. This was a surprising statement from a friend I’d watched many games with. A friend who was so frustrated by the 49ers heartbreaking narrow defeat in the Super Bowl last year, that he left my house without saying goodbye. But anxiety over losing wasn’t the issue.
What decided it for him was a recent admission from the Niners star wide receiver Michael Crabtree about taking a hit late in the Super Bowl and losing his vision temporarily. An occurrence, he admitted to the NFL Network, that “happens all the time in football.”
Well, football is brutal. It’s part of the game, I thought. But as this season ramped up, I started having trouble tuning out the disturbing news and findings surrounding professional football; the $765 million concussion settlement the NFL reached with over 4,500 former players (and their families), tales of severe memory problems from former players only a few years out of football, and of course the disturbing accounts of ex-players taking their own lives. (In 2011, former Bears player Dave Duerson shot himself in the heart at age 50, and requested his brain be studied to determine the impact of a career’s worth of concussions. In 2012, Hall of Fame player Junior Seau also shot himself in the heart, at age 43. )
And yet, I kept watching, though the brutality became hard to ignore. In their week 11 road game versus the Saints, Niners linebacker Ahmad Brooks made a critical hit on quarterback Drew Brees late in the game, forcing him to fumble and putting the Red and Gold in great position to secure a much-needed win. But the play was overturned: officials called Brooks for a personal foul. The broadcasters seemed to think the hit was legal, that Brooks had followed proper form, but there was no denying how devastating it looked. As they showed the quarterback’s neck and head contort in the slow motion replay it conjured images of a crash test dummy hitting the wall, but without the airbag. Though it looked legal to me (a relative rules layman), and it appeared that this call might well lose the game for SF, I had trouble faulting the refs. I was just glad Drew Brees got up.
I do not yet have a defining moment, as my friend did, that turns me away from the TV completely. I continue to watch, trying to reconcile my childhood love for the Niners with the feeling that football might be a terrible thing for those playing, and those hoping to. So I will be watching the game on Sunday, make no mistake. I'll meet friends at a neighborhood bar wearing the Jerry Rice jersey my parents gave me for my 11th birthday (still fits). I have high hopes for a Super Bowl title this year, and while I will cheer for victory after victory, each game gets a little harder to watch.
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