This one’s a beaut. I can’t quote it in full, but I’ll quote a little and you have to promise to go here and read the whole thing.
NFL BULLYING SEES INTELLECTUALS
AS PREY, EX-PATRIOTS TACKLE SAYS
Brian Holloway said he was one week into his National Football League career when he learned that his Stanford University education and academic interests would make him a target.
… Holloway said he was fined about $1,500 during his rookie season with the Patriots for reading a legal textbook that the team said was a distraction. He was also ridiculed by teammates for typing LSAT notes during plane rides.
The offensive tackle, who listened to opera for pregame inspiration, said there is an alliance that forms in locker rooms to ostracize players with elite academic backgrounds or eccentric interests.
“When they sense an intellectual is present, they will see that as prey,” Holloway said…
UD is laughing out loud, and she shouldn’t be, because she’s watching her modernism/postmodernism students do some in-class writing as she types this. But she SO loves this article! She demands more shocking exposés along these lines!!
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UPDATE: An intellectual defends football:
Football tells us that violence can be beautiful when performed for the sake of a greater good. As American society has become more genteel, that premise has become a cultural fault line — the assumption from which all other assumptions flow. You either believe violence can, in fact, be beautiful, or you don’t. More specifically, you either think that football is a relatively harmless, darned entertaining outlet for the human need to compete, or, frankly, you just haven’t been paying attention.
Violence, for good and ill, is the beauty of it.
I thought I was paying attention…
November 6th, 2013 at 12:05PM
You want a professional sports intellectual? Ooh! Ah! Cantona!
“Being French, to me, is first and foremost being a revolutionary.”
“An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pelé to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity.”
November 6th, 2013 at 1:20PM
Football is beautiful? No, Atlantic Monthly, football ain’t beautiful, is a god damn business, one that grosses billions of dollars every year. It needs massive amounts of public subsidies, to build stadiums, infrastructure, etc, and, in the case of college football, the nonprofit cover that the academic side provides. It allows tv networks to make billions as well, while using public airwaves, at no cost for those airwaves, to continue raking in money.
And while all that money making was going on, the NFL lied to its players about the dangers of head trauma and the subsequent diminished mental capacity. None of the oblique sentimentality of athletic beauty explains the need for the massive public funding of a game. And all that blathering about artistic merit papers over the fact that unis are going bankrupt in order to fund football. Moody’s Ratings warned unis that their out of control administrative/athletic costs will force a lowering of debt ratings, which will mean an end to many public unis.
Evidence indicates that fewer people share the Atlantic’s understanding. As you point out UD, colleges are experiencing Empty Stadium Syndrome, as are many pro stadiums as well. Somehow, they don’t find the merit of going to these huge museums of sports art.