The Opportunity of Football

Every Sunday in the 1990s, my father dragged my sister and I to tiny St. James Church in Irondequoit, NY. His mass of choice was the 7:30am service, where Father Bradler didn’t waste time. He gave a two minute homily and the music was provided by a 1950s record of Latin hymns music that he would rip the needle off mid-song when he was ready to move on.

After church, my father, sister and I would drive over to the East Ave. Wegmans and grab apple fritters and a copy of the Sunday Democrat and Chronicle. Dad and I would get home, split up the sports section to read about the Buffalo Bills and eat our fritters.

My father is a very cerebral, Libertarian-leaning and artistic man (when I was a toddler, he was in bands and was a music and science fiction writer), and the older I got, the more I realized that our Sunday morning routine almost ran counter to his core beliefs. He never expressed a solid faith in the Catholic Church, and he often lamented that athletics got more attention than the arts. But he wanted my sister and I to learn everything we could about the NFL and he encouraged us to become alter servers.

One Sunday at the kitchen table eating our fritters, I called him out on it. “Dad, why do we do all of this? Why do you encourage us to watch football and go to church?”

He didn’t miss a beat, which was odd for a man who is known for thoughtful pauses before speaking. “Because we’re poor,” he said. “We can’t relate to the middle or upper class people you go to school with or I work for on much. But we all have to go to church. We all can watch football. No one has to know if we’re struggling if we’re talking about the Bills. It becomes a level playing field for us. It gives us something we can talk to everyone about.”

My father was right. Football provides a lot of us who grew up without money or connections opportunity to even the playing field. My love of football led me to want to become a sports writer, which spurred on my desire to be the first in my family to attend college. (Prior to my sports writer dreams, I wanted to own a dance studio or daycare. College wasn’t in my plan.) My cousins’ abilities to play football led them to college as well. NCAA football, no matter how corrupt and problematic, has allowed thousands of men to earn a college degree they may not have otherwise. The opportunities that this one sport has provided are many.

But like my father’s faith in the Catholic Church, my faith in high level football is now fraying. It reminds me of the first time I questioned my love of football, which was in the as a freshman sports communication major at Ithaca College in the autumn of 2000. The Rae Carruth incident, where the Carolina Panthers’ WR conspired to murder a woman pregnant with his child, combined the first season of the crude and rude XFL, turned me off of football for two years. To idealistic, questioning-authority 18 year old me, it seemed like professional football was glorifying society’s problems instead of using their money and power to fix them.

I eventually came back to football. I loved the game too much, and chose to focus on the positive stories and the unification and spirit the sport gives my home region. It’s hard to turn your back on the one thing that keeps Western New York in the minds of an America that wants to forget it exists.

I’ve kept holding onto that this past week. The cultural definition that the NFL provides Western New York has never been more evident as it has since last Tuesday, when Terry Pegula won the bidding process to own the Bills. Grown men called into sports radio across the region crying tears of joy at the news that the Bills wouldn’t be shuffling off across the lake to Toronto or across the nation to Los Angeles. But this all took place as the rest of the NFL was shown to be enablers of domestic violence and abuse via their inaction and eventual lackluster reaction to the Ray Rice, Ray McDonald, Greg Hardy and Adrian Peterson situations.

I must balance the positivity of the Bills’ story with the fact that the Ray Rice situation – particularly the public discussion of the victim’s thought processes – brought up some of my own past struggles that I thought I had been able to put aside. Particularly, that there are women and men in the world that think that domestic violence and its affiliated pieces – harassment, stalking, etc. – is something that should be handled within the home or the family, and that it’s not anyone else’s place to intervene. Without outing myself, I wrote a brief overview of what it’s like to be a victim and shared it with a few folks I saw questioning Ray Rice’s wife on Twitter. I’m ready to out that that was written from a first-hand knowledge of being a victim of harassment and stalking by someone I thought had my best interests at heart. And as someone who let her circumstance be handled without going to authorities (I was asked to keep it “within the family” as to not to hurt the young man’s future), I have to step out and say that that out-of-date, Old World mentality of that needs to stop. Unless we begin to treat domestic violence, harassment, stalking and abuse like the violence that it is, and stop shielding the abusers from their consequences, this circle will never end.

The NFL isn’t alone in mishandling violent incidents with their players. America has as a whole. As a country, we aren’t sure what to do with domestic violence. We sure can talk a big game about how wrong it is, but we let it happen with limited consequences to the abusers and little help to the abused. We continue to employ people with domestic violence arrests because the victim dropped the charges, but we will sure as heck not employ you if you were stopped once for DUI at a sobriety checkpoint or have bad credit. Why is it ambiguous that hurting someone you supposedly love or care for is unacceptable? Why is it that when a crime has the word domestic as a modifier it suddenly has its consequences open to interpretation?

Football has given opportunity to so many – myself, my cousins, a region and many others. The NFL could provide another host of opportunities this week by how they handle these circumstances of violence. By acting strongly with consequences for the abusers and those within their front office who turned a blind eye, they could present the abused with the knowledge that a powerful entity is finally in their corner, even if they are too deep into the cycle to realize why that’s a positive. What an opportunity the NFL could deliver.