On Football and Men

This is an interesting time for American Football. The various NFL players who have been accused or indicted on charges of violent crimes seems to have given birth to a national dialogue on such important issues as domestic violence, child abuse and rape. The faces of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson are everywhere in the media now, and a dialogue has ensued about whether or not they should even be allowed to play football. Underneath that mundane dialogue is another, far more interesting, one about what kind of behavior we as a society are willing to accept from men.

Thanks to my daughter’s tutelage, I started learning how to use Twitter over the weekend. I had never had an account before, or at least one I used. I started by following some of my favorite funny people like Steve Colbert and Seth Meyers. Pretty soon, I got caught up in the two big football controversies currently raging. It was interesting to see people’s reactions and arguments and how they escalated. A lot of folks come from a place of outrage over these issues and I get that: a man knocking out his fiancee with a punch is disgusting. looking at the bloody welts on a 4 year old boy’s legs is certainly no fun, especially knowing they were put there intentionally by his father.

Trying to understand the motivations of Adrian Peterson isn’t really that hard. Looking at pictures of him on the internet, you can see that he’s a disciplined and committed athlete. He’s also, apparently, a religious man, who quotes Bible verses and has even started a charity. It appears he beat his son with a switch (a branch from a young tree for those of you not from the South). While he admits he may have overdone it a bit in a text to the boy’s mother, the reason had to do with the boy being disrespectful to a sibling and maybe stubborn about apologizing. He states in the text that the mother should be proud, because the boy “didn’t cry. He’s tough as nails.”

It’s fairly obvious why being “tough as nails” would be important to an NFL running back, whose game routine is to take hits from 200-300 pound men while attempting a touchdown. It’s obvious that we as a society value that kind of toughness, on and off the field. Is our tendency to react so strongly to such cases because we don’t want to face our own involvement in the cult of the athlete and other “tough guys”?

We want men who are tough as nails, nearly invulnerable on the field and in the boardroom, maybe even in the bedroom. We want gladiators who risk injury or worse for our entertainment. And we want role models who value right and wrong, God and country. We want this, yet we haven't really had the conversation about what effect it might have on our boys. About whether there's a downside to how we view masculinity. As we change the way in which we expect men to relate to women and children, we may have to change some of the other values associated with sports stars. And we may have to look within ourselves as well as at our celebrities. 

While it’s great that we’re talking about these sensitive issues, let’s dig a little deeper than we have. Let’s look at our own history: the way we raise children, our religious traditions of “spare the rod, spoil the child”, of sending young men (boys, really) off to war at the age of 18, of valuing strength over sensitivity when it comes to men. Let’s forgo the backlash and talk about how we can help a man like Adrian Peterson learn how to discipline his children without violence.