The Bernstein Brief: Tackling Ban A Troubling Omen
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) We can't keep trying to solve football, lest we ruin it.
This idea that our brutal game needs to somehow be made safer has to stop, replaced instead by honest confrontation of its fundamental danger. To keep pretending otherwise begins an inexorable march to its dissolution into something bland and unrecognizable.
The latest news is the Ivy League banning full-contact tackling in practice, yet another step in the cynical charade that has begun from the NFL on down to neighborhood fields, all to mollify players and parents. Less tackling, phony systems of "heads-up" hitting, fancy-looking equipment and randomly applied rules are all part of a convoluted effort to make something inherently bad for you look not so bad.
Smashing yourself into things at high speed damages your body. Football demands that you do so, bruising and breaking your bones, tearing your muscles and tendons and ligaments and cartilage, endangering your brain and spine. That's what we're watching.
Informed consent is better and smarter than wasting time and money trying to make football into something else. There are safer games people can play if they want, less perilous pastimes for your children.
At its most glorious, football is destructive. Played by its biggest people at its highest speeds it remains grand spectacle worth preserving, not eroding.
This is other people's children killing each other for our amusement on Sundays. It's already completely inhumane, and we simply have to recognize that. Once that intellectual point is reached and acknowledged, this ongoing quest for safety just appears silly.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. You can follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.