Malcolm Gladwell Fumbles on the Goal line

Posted at October 16, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell’s article about football in the New Yorker is a thought-provoking piece – albeit one that had me throwing a couple orange flags.

The meat of the article is pretty solid – there’s an epidemic of dementia and other brain injuries among professional football players. The research that Gladwell is looking at shows that it isn’t the one-time hard hits that may be the most danger: it’s the constant knocks to the head that players take as part of the game.

But what could be a pretty straightforward article is sidelined by a misplaced hook. Gladwell likes a little sensationalism in his science. He asks that, with the dangers of football possibly inherent to the sport, how different is it from the damage done by dogfighting?

L.G. willingly submitted his dog to a contest that culminated in her suffering and destruction. And why? For the entertainment of an audience and the chance of a payday. In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport. “I was not aware of dogfighting and the terrible things that happen around dogfighting,” Goodell said, explaining why he responded so sternly in the Vick case. One wonders whether, had he spent as much time talking to Kyle Turley as he did to Michael Vick, he’d start to have similar doubts about his own sport.

Consent, Malcolm.

Dogs don’t understand dogfighting. It’s cruel because they are animals – they are maimed and killed for entertainment value while having no ideas of the potential risks, nor do they have any alternative.

Gladwell really weakens his argument by trying to make the sensational connection between a violent and dangerous sport like football with a morally-repugnant one like dogfighting. And, for a very smart man (who I am a big fan of), he seems to miss the pretty obvious point.

When an person joins up as a linebacker in the NFL, they know that there is the chance to get injured. If they aren’t willing to accept that risk, they can say no. They can go off and become car salesmen, or airline pilots or anything else. Dogs don’t know the risks of dogfighting, nor do they have a choice to be fighting dogs or not. They are abused and forced into the ring with their owners.

Choice and consent. By ignoring those two variables, Gladwell might as well be arguing that two teenagers having sex is on par with bestiality.

It’s not. Because we all know that the average human can consent to sex with another human, while an animal can never fully give that consent.

It’s a shame, because other than that ridiculous bit of emotional nonsense, Gladwell brings up some good points. Gladwell argues players may not be sufficiently warned of the risk, or cared for by the league, and that more can be done to minimize those risks – all good points, all of which I strongly agree with.

But they’re overshadowed by this weak connection. Not to mention that he says football may be closer to dogfighting, where injury is inherent in the game, than it is to stock-car races, which are dangerous but can have that danger minimized – and then goes into how football has done the very same thing as racing by making the sport safer over the years.

But the main objection at the time was to a style of play—densely and dangerously packed offensive strategies—that, it turns out, could be largely corrected with rule changes, like the legalization of the forward pass and the doubling of the first-down distance from five yards to ten. Today, when we consider subtler and more insidious forms of injury, it’s far from clear whether the problem is the style of play or the play itself.

But there’s not much to back up that last thought – football equitment is forever being designed to be safer, and rules are always being changed to protect players. (The banning of horse collar tackles in recent years being one.) What makes Gladwell thing we’ve reached the limit of how safe the sport can be while innovations continue?

Gladwell has some good stuff here, stuff that’s worth wading through the dogfighting mess. Next time, he should really just take a timeout before gambling on sensationalism like this.