In the 20th century, Samoans, native Hawaiians, and Tongans gravitated to the area to seek a different sort of refuge. They soon found direction from a new priestly caste—a cosmopolitan group of football coaches who crafted a micro-culture of football excellence at and around Kahuku High School.

Over the decades, Kahuku has developed hundreds of collegiate and pro players, including winners of several Super Bowl rings. Just since 1999, Kahuku has played in 12 of Hawai‘i’s 19 state championship games, winning eight times.

Along the way, football became the North Shore’s civic cement.

This is a sports story that began with a sugar plantation and a Mormon temple. As the Kahuku Sugar Plantation fired up its boilers in 1890 and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) built a temple in nearby La`ie in 1919, the area attracted an array of proletarian wayfarers, including Samoans, Tongans, and Mormons from Utah’s Great Basin. Driven by different agendas, plantation managers, and Mormon elders saw sport as a way to shape those they recruited to work and worship. These newcomers to the North Shore and their descendants embraced sport and built an ethos of their own.

Today Samoans constitute the most disproportionately overrepresented ethnic group in the NFL. This trend dates to the Samoans who began playing football on the North Shore before World War II, decades before their brethren in American Samoa adopted the game. Many were Mormons who came when the LDS decided to consolidate its La`ie beachhead with the new temple. Thirty-five miles north of Honolulu, the once aboriginal fishing village of La`ie sits between Hau`ula and Kahuku.

Hundreds of Samoan converts came to build the temple, making La`ie a close approximation of a Samoan village. They adapted on their own terms in a church-owned, plantation town, retaining a culture of fa`a Samoa—in the way of Samoa. The temple, the first dedicated outside the continental United States, became a gathering place for the faith’s South Pacific converts. One can hardly overstate its importance—a temple is the only place where the ordinances required for salvation can be conducted and redemption sought for family members who died before completing the sacraments.

The North Shore’s Samoan community expanded after the U.S. Navy closed its base in American Samoa in 1951, sending another wave of migrants to refuge in La`ie. Youth from the town of La`ie came together at Kahuku High with their counterparts from Hau`ula, Kahuku, and the more northern shorelines where the Banzai Pipeline attracts some of the most intrepid surfers in the world.

Football quickly became entrenched at Kahuku High. During the 1940s, coaches Mits Fujishige, a Japanese American, and Art Stranske, a Canadian expat, led the school to its first titles. And, in 1945, Alopati “Al” Loloati, born in Samoa and bred in La`ie, debuted with the Washington Redskins, becoming, with little fanfare, the first Samoan in the NFL.

The Polynesian wave that would reconfigure collegiate and pro ball was still decades away. But back on the North Shore, Kahuku’s teams were becoming more and more successful. In 1956, Kahuku won a state title under coach Harold Silva, a Portuguese American, who infused the program with a tough, principled athletic code and showed the community that its boys could compete with anybody in Hawai‘i.

With the sons and grandsons of earlier Samoan immigrants at its core, Kahuku became the first mostly Samoan squad anywhere in the world. As the sugar industry declined along the northern coast, football gave generations of boys a way to find their place in the world.

A few years after Silva retired, native son Famika Anae returned and became the first Samoan head coach at any level of the game. Famika was the son of a Mormon from Western Samoa who had answered the call to build the temple. Both Famika and his half-brother—that Samoan NFL pioneer Al Lolotai—were the products of La`ie’s tough blend of religion, fa`a Samoa culture, and football discipline.

Famika’s father was initially skeptical of the game’s value. “Can you eat the football?” he asked. Famika eventually would have an answer when the game took him to Brigham Young University, where he played on an athletic scholarship. Famika returned to Kahuku in 1966, believing that excelling at the game was a way for local boys to go to college.

Famika, who led Kahuku until 1972, won two titles and brought Samoan players to the fore. During the summer, he conducted clinics in American Samoa with Lolotai. Famika appreciated how growing up in Samoa readied boys for football. “A Samoan boy starts hard physical labor even before he reaches school age,” Famika explained. “He must climb a coconut tree 100 feet tall, barefoot and carrying a machete, tear the coconuts loose and even cut away the fronds… By the time a boy is ready for high school football, his muscles often are as defined as those of a weightlifter.”

For training and bonding, Famika took his Kahuku players to a nearby island, Lanai, which the Dole Company ran as a plantation. They picked pineapples for six weeks each summer and returned with money in their pockets, in shape to play. He knew how much that money meant to boys whose families lived so humbly.

Upholding fa`a Samoa on the North Shore was demanding. “It is very hard on a Samoan kid who doesn’t do well, or what his father thinks is well,” Famika acknowledged. “He is felt to have disgraced the family.” A tongue-lashing and beating were often his punishment. “A loss,” Famika said, “reflects on the parents, the chiefs, and the race.” As their coach, he channeled his boys’ fear of failure into a relentless attacking style. “Samoans are very physical people,” he underscored. “They simply can’t stand losing—either in sports or in life.”

Sport meant battle and players readied themselves for games by performing the siva tau, a war dance. Their younger fans made Kamehameha Highway, the only way out of town, a gauntlet for opposing teams, pelting buses with gravel and coral stones from the shadows.

In the 1990s, Kahuku often reached the championship but repeatedly lost to Honolulu’s Saint Louis School. To be crowned king of Hawaiian football, the school had to dethrone Saint Louis and its legendary coach Cal Lee, which had dominated state football for two decades.

In 2000, Kahuku was coached by Sivaki Livai, who had played for the school after migrating from Tonga. Thousands traveled to Honolulu for Kahuku’s championship game with Saint Louis. After Kahuku delivered a historic victory, a caravan of buses, cars, and pickups snaked its way northward past cheering crowds gathered along the black-topped road. The buses stopped in each town so that players could perform a siva tau. Arriving home after midnight, they were greeted by supporters basking in a sense of fulfillment.

Since 2000, Kahuku football has maintained an almost unrivaled level of excellence. It’s become the story that many tell about their town to the world, a story about people who work hard and play harder, who lose but persevere, and in the end are heralded for their accomplishments. The flow of boys to college football has not slackened and many use football to gain an education and launch careers in and out of sport.

“I don’t think there’s a high school program in the United States that has benefited more from sport than Kahuku,” Dr. Allen Anae, son of the former Kahuku coach Famika Anae, argues. Eighty percent of its current student body participates in interscholastic sports. “Now we have parents thinking, if I support my kids’ football—and not only football but women’s sports—they can get a college education,” Anae observed. Maybe you can eat that football after all.

The post Why Samoans Are So Overrepresented in the NFL appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No one can know for sure whether any of California’s four National Football League teams—the 49ers, Raiders, Rams, and Chargers—will emerge as big winners in the new season.

But we already know who the losers will be: California cities foolish enough to host NFL teams.

In the rest of America, major cities try to attract the NFL by building costly new stadiums, because they see football franchises as providing a boost to their economies, and especially to their notoriety. But in California, where the economy is nation-sized and our big cities already enjoy global renown, the dynamic is the opposite. Our big cities have been shedding their pro football teams, and thus avoiding the headaches of devoting valuable California land to stadiums within their jurisdictions.

In this contest, the biggest winner has been San Francisco, which, after wasting decades debating a replacement for the 49ers’ former stadium, Candlestick Park, got free of the NFL headache by “losing” the team to the city of Santa Clara. Across the Bay, the newest winner is Oakland, which resisted building a new stadium for the Raiders; its reward will be the team’s departure for Las Vegas in three years.

San Diego also registered a hard-won civic triumph when—after its voters defeated the last of 15 years’ worth of proposals for lavish new Chargers stadiums—the team left town this summer for a temporary home in the small Los Angeles County city of Carson.

In 2020, the Chargers, along with the Rams—who relocated to Southern California in 2016, after more than two decades in St. Louis—will move into a new, shared stadium in the small city of Inglewood.

The destinations of these teams are telling. The only places in California that seem willing to risk hosting an NFL team are smaller, poorer, obscure cities that sit in the shadow of global municipalities. As such, they are so desperate for any high-profile and distinguishing development that they are willing to devote land and money to wealthy NFL owners, and host teams that won’t even use their new cities in their names. The teams remain the San Francisco 49ers, Los Angeles Rams, and Los Angeles Chargers, not the Santa Clara 49ers or the Inglewood Rams or Carson Chargers.

And that represents the least of the indignities that these smaller towns will suffer from their fateful decision to become NFL cities. Economic studies show that sports teams deliver little in the way of a financial boost to their hometowns—they merely siphon dollars from other entertainment-oriented businesses. That’s especially true of pro football teams, since they play just eight regular-season home games a year, as opposed to 81 for major league baseball teams.

And that doesn’t account for the costs of internecine fighting and civic conflict that greedy NFL teams can engender. Just ask the people of Santa Clara.

Just three years after the 49ers relocated to Santa Clara, the city and the team are engaged in a bitter war of rhetoric, investigations, and lawsuits. The heart of the problem is that, as with so many NFL maneuvers, the deal for the 49ers stadium was a bait-and-switch. Local voters approved the stadium after being told that it would be paid for privately, and the city would bear only a few costs relating to a parking garage and an electric sub-station.

Instead, the stadium required a new hotel tax and the creation of a new public entity that is on the hook for more than $600 million in construction loans. It’s an open question whether stadium revenues will be enough to pay back the loans. Then there’s the opportunity costs. The stadium gobbled up valuable land that might have been better used for businesses that produce more economic activity than a stadium (a Costco, for example), or badly needed housing in a region with a crisis-level shortage.

The stadium is a dud—uninspiringly designed, and situated so that it produces epic traffic jams on game days. And the 49ers have proven to be an awful city partner. The Santa Clara-49ers conflict started with the team’s demand to kick kids off soccer fields next to the stadium so the fields could be used for parking. Court fights have erupted over the 49ers’ financial disclosures, the amount the 49ers pay in rent, and whether the city has made false accusations against the 49ers regarding their level of cooperation with a city audit.

The fight has turned political. A mysterious political action committee sponsored attack ads against city council members who were critical of the 49ers last year (the 49ers haven’t said whether they were behind the PAC). This spring, Santa Clara’s mayor, Lisa Gillmor, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “We learned we cannot trust the 49ers. They are our partners, but they have exploited what we’ve tried to do in the city.”

Things aren’t that bad in Inglewood yet. The opening of that stadium—which is part of a larger development involving entertainment, retail and housing—is still three years away. Construction is already a year behind schedule, and community opposition is growing. There’s also the whiff of bait-and-switch. As in Santa Clara, the stadium was sold as a private project that would cost the city next to nothing. But it turns out that the city could end up giving the project an estimated $100 million in tax breaks, as well as reimbursements for certain security and transportation-shuttle costs at stadium events.

None of this should be surprising. Most NFL teams are wildly profitable, so those teams that have to relocate all carry the stink of failure. All four California teams have relocated, and it’s no coincidence that their owners show up on media lists of the worst owners in all sports.

These include the Rams’ owner, Stan Kroenke, who got rich by marrying a Walmart heiress, and who has produced teams with miserable attendance and losing records for more than a decade. The Spanos family, which owns the Chargers, alienated most of San Diego with poor management, self-dealing, and farcical plans for new stadiums. (The final failed proposal—a combination of stadium, convention center, and “diversity-focused start-up incubator and accelerator”—was ridiculed as the “turducken” of stadiums). In their first two pre-season games in Carson, the Chargers haven’t been able to fill even the small 27,000-seat soccer stadium where they are temporarily playing.

Raiders owner Mark Davis inherited the team from his late father, Al Davis, a scoundrel who moved the team from Oakland to L.A. and back while suing everyone he could along the way. He may be the league’s poorest owner—though that could change when he moves to Las Vegas, which has foolishly devoted $750 million in public dollars to building him a stadium there.

And the 49ers? USA Today this year said owner Jed York had turned the team into “the NFL’s biggest joke.”

No wonder cities have been happy to see these owners leave. And life after NFL football looks pretty good.

San Francisco, sans the 49ers, is more prosperous than ever, and is using the land at Candlestick Point for new housing and mixed-use developments that will be more valuable than the stadium was. San Diego is still wrestling with the costs—and multimillion-dollar annual operations losses—of the Chargers’ old stadium, Qualcomm. But it is also starting to imagine the happier development possibilities of what could replace it.

And Oakland should find that the eventual departure of the Raiders from O.co Coliseum, as well as the exit of basketball’s Golden State Warriors from the arena next door to the Coliseum, opens up all kinds of transformational opportunities for a piece of land that sits next to a transit center and a short distance from the city’s airport.

But enough about the winners. NFL football in California is for losers. Pity the home teams.

The post In California, Pro Football Is for Losers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first time I recall watching the ‘boys play, in the 1970s, I was knee high to him, paying more attention to the gun case where he kept his Purple Heart and the loot he’d collected from dead Nazis. As the men in blue and white jerseys and silver helmets with those big blue lone stars on the side would line up on gameday, they reminded me of the helmeted protagonists from the old war movies I’d watch with my grandfather—Dallas quarterback Roger Staubach ever the hero as he launched missile after missile into the end zone. His famous arm led his team to four Super Bowl appearances (winning two), helping the Cowboys earn the moniker “America’s Team.”

And I was in good company. As the nickname suggests, much of the country began rooting for the Cowboys with me that decade. Spectators across America filled stands and fixated on their TV screens, in awe of Staubach, the team’s clean-cut Navy veteran QB, the always-stoic head coach Tom Landry in his fedora and, of course, the Cowboys cheerleaders.

Dallas managed to exude both class and swagger, not to mention exquisite timing: The Cowboys won their first championship in January of 1972, the same year a Gallup survey first crowned pro football America’s most popular sport. The team’s icons became emblematic of the sensation the game was to become, a sensation filling Texas Stadium with fans in blue and white last Sunday afternoon as the Cowboys faced off against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC division playoffs.

Watching the Cowboys with my family felt like going to church on Sunday morning. Prayer always followed third down, or whenever the ref made a bad call. It was a family tradition to follow the Cowboys religiously. Though our fandom rarely was reflected in our dress, like other Cowboys fans, there was no doubt which team we cheered whenever game day arrived.

The Cowboys cheerleaders fascinated me as a teenager in the ‘80s. They looked like Charlie’s Angels in cowboy hats, always smiling and, to my amazement, doing flips like warriors from the American Ninja movie series I obsessively watched on VHS. They were the brainchildren of Texas Earnest “Tex” Schramm. A former sportswriter for the Austin American-Statesman, he served as general manager of the Cowboys from 1960, when they first became an NFL franchise, until their purchase by owner Jerry Jones in 1989. Schramm pioneered several league innovations over the 29 years he served as general manager: the use of instant replay in the officiating of the game, referees’ microphones, shortening the play clock, and developing the wild-card playoff system. He also helped to coordinate the 1970 merger of the National Football League and the American Football League.

That the Cowboys gained such a loyal following wasn’t just about Lone Star pride, it was about Texas showmanship. Schramm understood that professional football was more than just a sport, and transformed the Cowboys cheerleaders into a squad of professional dancers, with the help of Texie Waterman, one of the top dancers in America at the time.

When the NFL decided to offer a second game on Thanksgiving in the mid-1960s, Schramm jumped at the opportunity to host the holiday games that many NFL teams at the time wanted to avoid. He knew the Cowboys playing on a holiday when many around the country gather to celebrate would increase the team’s national exposure and help cement its All-American image.

Though Schramm’s marketing prowess and Landry’s brilliant coaching drew a national following, it was NFL Films that officially anointed the Cowboys “America’s Team.” During the 1978 season, the television studio’s camera crews noticed that the Cowboys could always count on an unusually large contingent of fans on the road. When Bob Ryan, who produced and edited every Cowboys highlight video for the NFL, wrote the opening to the season recap voiced by legendary baritone voice of John Facenda, he penned what amounts to Cowboys marketing scripture:

“No matter where they play, their fans are there to greet them. Their faces are recognized by fans all across this country. The sum total of their stars are a galaxy. They are the Dallas Cowboys … America’s Team.”

The Cowboys not only became a beloved franchise as the NFL was coming into its own, but also as the city of Dallas was in sore need of a boost. A decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Texas metropolis was still best known to many Americans as the “City of Hate.” Schramm himself was mindful of the need to associate the city with something other than the tragedy, having once told the Chicago Tribune that he was well aware that in the aftermath of ’63, Dallas had become a “bad word” across the nation.

The Cowboys helped rebrand the city in the eyes of the nation, and gave our ever-sprawling metropolis a much-needed sense of being on the same team, a shared story and rooting interest. It would be wrong to dismiss a professional football team as just that—more than 40 years after my grandfather introduced me to the Cowboys, I am struck as a journalist working in Dallas by how much the team, and all its ups and downs, helps bind our community together. A narrative thread linking Roger Staubach and Tony Dorsett to Troy Aikman and Emmitt Smith now reappears in the impressive rookie duet of Dak Prescott and Zeke Elliott.

The past two decades have been disappointing to Cowboys fans, and the division playoff loss to the Packers would seem only more disheartening. But the story of last Sunday’s defeat, with the two leading rookies bringing the ‘boys back from a 15-point deficit to tie the game with only minutes left on the play clock, only then to lose to a last-second field goal, will become part of the lore that gets handed down from one generation to another. And that’s especially true if, as I suspect, this generation’s team is on the verge of becoming another dominant dynasty deserving to be called “America’s Team.”

The post When I Say “Dallas” … You Think “Cowboys!” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Surprisingly, his answer was all about a Monday Night Football game played less than two weeks after the election. Namely, the first-ever regular season Monday night game played outside the United States, in Mexico City’s iconic Estadio Azteca. The Oakland Raiders beat the Houston Texans before a sellout crowd of nearly 80,000 fans, but what Guajardo found most telling was the moment before the game when the anthems of both countries were played.

Guajardo explained that the NFL hesitated before playing the U.S. anthem in the Azteca for fear of how the crowd might respond, live on ESPN, but at the end of the day the league went ahead. And with the exception of a few scattered boos, the Mexican crowd’s response was gracious and respectful. Guajardo said this was a hopeful moment—that positive attitudes toward people on the other side of the border, often acquired through first-hand experience, can transcend political differences or efforts by demagogues to distort the essential truth of our mutually beneficial North American partnership.

One can only hope. The stark reality is that Donald Trump won the presidency by running against Mexico. For a candidate with a short attention span and malleable policy stances, his views on Mexico throughout the long presidential campaign were remarkably consistent and sustained. Mexican immigrants are rapists who must be deported; the North American Free Trade Agreement is a disaster that must be torn up; U.S. companies opening plants in that country are treasonous; indeed, Mexico is so dodgy, we need to build a massive wall along the 2,000-mile border. And guess who’s going to pay for it?

He’s so glad you asked.

Forgive Mexicans if they end up taking it all a bit personally. Mexico has become a far more accommodating and friendlier neighbor —more of the middle class, democratic, open-to-the-world country Washington always wanted—in the two decades since NAFTA went into effect. But you hardly ever see this acknowledged in the U.S. media, or politics. Instead, in the Trump campaign narrative, Mexico was portrayed as the leading villain standing in the way of making America great again.

One big question is whether Trump really believes his own anti-Mexico vitriol and is determined to act upon it, or whether he simply peddled it as part of a convincing “enraged populist on campaign trail” TV performance. On the other side of the border, a related big question is whether the damage has already been done, whether the mere act of electing such an anti-Mexican president will tarnish the United States in Mexican eyes for a generation to come. Keep in mind there are plenty of populist Mexicans politicians eager to match Trump’s xenophobic nationalism for their own gain, especially as Mexico gears up for its 2018 presidential election.

In the meantime, I take heart at the outbreak of sports diplomacy like the Monday Night Football game.

On the Friday night of election week, the U.S. and Mexican national soccer teams met in Columbus, Ohio for a World Cup qualifying match. This has become one of the most heated regional rivalries in the world’s leading sport, and a World Cup qualifier doesn’t require a seismic political event to ratchet up the level of intensity.

Still, on this occasion it was for the American sportsmen to worry that politics (and Trumpian-style invective about our southern neighbor) might rear their ugly head in a U.S.-Mexico showdown coming three days after the election. Michael Bradley, the U.S. captain, eloquently said before the game: “I would hope our fans do what they always do, which is support our team in the best, most passionate way possible. I would hope they give every person in that stadium the respect they deserve, whether they are American, Mexican, neutral, men, women, children. I hope every person that comes to the stadium comes ready to enjoy what we all want to be a beautiful game between two sporting rivals that have a lot of respect for each other, and hope that it’s a special night in every way.”

It ended up being a more special night for Mexico, which won 2-1. Politics was a subtext of the match (I know of Mexican-Americans who usually root for the U.S. who couldn’t help but root for Mexico in post-electoral solidarity), but there were no chants about building a wall or mass deportations.

In January, the Phoenix Suns are playing regular-season NBA games against the Dallas Mavericks and San Antonio Spurs in Mexico City. Much like the NFL, with its estimated 20 million avid fans in Mexico and talk of a possible franchise there, the NBA doesn’t see America’s neighbor to the south as the poor, conniving disaster of a country depicted in the recent election. Instead, American pro basketball is treating Mexico as a venue for future growth: a dynamic market with an expanding middle class and an appetite for American goods, culture, and entertainment. As do the U.S. cities these NBA teams represent, all of whom are organizing events alongside the games to try to attract more Mexican investment, trade, and tourism.

Mexico is the second largest buyer of U.S. goods in the world, a market whose importance to most Fortune 500 companies cannot be overstated. These companies increasingly see North America as one integrated manufacturing platform too, a manufacturer that is more competitive with other parts of the world as a cohesive unit. Politicians bash companies like Ford for opening plants in Mexico, but 40 percent of the components of the goods imported from these plants are produced in the U.S., demonstrating how porous the border has become as an economic matter, and just how seamless the back-and-forth is within North American supply chains.

One underappreciated danger for both American and Mexican workers is that companies will be spooked by populist protectionism and take more of their global manufacturing out of North America altogether.

Back in the realm of sports diplomacy, one way for North Americans to transcend the ugliness of politics and assert a shared identity would be by hosting a World Cup together. The 2026 World Cup is the next one to be awarded, and the North American region is a strong contender, given the tournament’s traditional rotation among continents. Both Mexico and the U.S. are expected to submit compelling bids.

There has also been talk throughout the year of a potential joint U.S.-Mexico bid; World Cups are typically played in eight host cities, and there’s the precedent of Japan and South Korea sharing the 2002 Cup. But that talk was followed by speculation that Trump’s election makes a joint bid less likely.

It would be a shame to abandon the idea on account of politics. Quite the contrary: A shared North American World Cup (can we include Toronto too?) is needed, now more than ever.

The post Trump’s Border Wall Sidelined by Major League Sports appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Marquee sporting events are often billed as a great boon for cities and the environment. Chapter 1 of the Olympic Charter tasks the International Olympic Committee with encouraging “a responsible concern for environmental issues.” Cleaning up Rio de Janeiro’s water was a centerpiece of Brazil’s 2009 proposal to host the games, but efforts fell behind or failed to materialize. And this won’t be the first Olympics to struggle to meet environmental promises. As ESPN pointed out, Sydney had its own water problems in 2000, and the smog in Beijing got 2008 dubbed the “most polluted Olympics ever.” We shouldn’t be surprised; environmental cleanup efforts in sprawling metropolises almost always take more time and money than expected, in part because they push against the steady current of environmental degradation that comes with life in the industrialized world.

But Brazil’s rivers are just the tip of the melting iceberg. To paraphrase Naomi Klein, climate change changes everything—including sports. In the sinking island nation of the Maldives, kabaddi players have told my collaborator Adam Flynn that they are adapting their traditional tag game to be played in shallow water. In Alaska, snow was hauled in by train in March to make the Iditarod sled race possible, and even then parts ran over a bone-jarring mixture of ice and dirt. Climate change combines with countless instances of wrecked ecologies—poisoned waters, polluted skies, and dead landscapes—to form a larger environmental megacrisis that will profoundly shape how we spend time outdoors.

Sports, like so many human activities, balance our competing impulses to adapt to and control our environment. We celebrate the endurance required to compete on the “frozen tundra” of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, while underground electric wiring prevents Lambeau’s turf from actually becoming frozen. Golf began as a conversation with the landscape of Scotland; now it is played on designed-from-scratch courses in Arizona that consume more than 80 million gallons of water daily. In a way, these feats of engineering are impressive—just like the Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal. But now we are increasingly forced to adapt to the consequences of our own past attempts to control our environment.

When you’re left gasping during an outdoor run, it’s pedantic to try to draw a crisp line between the harsh effects of a record-breaking heat wave and those of dangerous, choking smog. Both are equally oppressive. (In fact, they compound each other.) The same goes for Rio’s rivers, dying of contamination, and Aspen’s melting snows. Due to the same poor planning that gave us the climate crisis, we’re suffering from a loss of outdoor spaces suited for play.

Winter sports in particular will take a hit. Already the season is becoming shorter, and snowstorms more unpredictable in many favorite ski destinations. Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse told the Senate in 2013:

“Before the end of the century, the number of economically viable ski locations in New Hampshire and Maine will be cut in half; skiing in New York will be cut by three-quarters; and there will be no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts.”

Winter sports have long supplemented the elements with artificial snow and ice, but soon fabricated winter may be the norm. Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Games in Russia, was a subtropical beach town. Dubai and Qatar have built indoor ski slopes in scorching deserts that climate change is making increasingly inhospitable. Qatar also plans to use advanced new cooling technology to keep 2022 World Cup players from passing out from the heat in their open air stadiums. Engineered environments like these—and air-conditioned, covered football stadiums—are the beginning of a costly, high-tech effort required to preserve and adapt our great cultural rituals for a warmer planet.

As adaptation to a harsher climate increasingly requires more sophisticated and costly technologies, the danger is that already-expensive sports like skiing or sailing will become even more rarefied drivers of inequality. The very affluent may be able to pay for the privilege of living like climate change isn’t happening, but many of us will be priced out of certain sports for good.

That’s a shame, because sports have long brought together people from all walks of life. Now, we may go beyond the divide between the cheap seats and the VIP box. We may be headed towards a world with two sets of games: those played in the manicured spaces inhabited by the very affluent and those played on the hot, troubled planet left to the rest of us.

This spring I participated in Arizona State University’s “The Future of Sport 2040” Emerge Festival, along with my colleagues at the Applied History Institute. For our installation—“The Games That Got Us Through”—we imagined an American climate migration and the new sports of its refugee culture. The centerpiece was Cistern, a tag-like game of ritualized water raiding that seeks to minimize violence in the struggle over a scarce resource.

It was a timely thought experiment. The Olympics in Rio will, for the first time, feature a team of refugee athletes. With millions fleeing violence, and millions more likely to flee rising seas and broken ecosystems, we need to start figuring out how displaced people can live lives of dignity in the 21st century. And that means figuring out where and how people can run, jump, and play in an increasingly volatile world.

Games and sports can be a great boon for people in precarious situations. They can help settle conflicts peacefully. They can bring communities together, turn suspicions into friendships. They can give young people an outlet for energies that could otherwise turn disruptive or dangerous. Events like the World Cup and the Olympics can be sources of inspiration, excitement, and shared identity for people in difficult times. Thus it’s a productive exercise to think about the games we might play in the future.

The good news is that we can change the games we play much easier than we can change our agricultural infrastructure, or evacuate the billions who live in the path of rising seawaters. We don’t know what new sports the Olympics might include a century from now. But we should adapt, and celebrate new games even as we memorialize the lost ones. Let’s not forget: Just like Venice was founded by refugees, basketball was invented during a storm.

The post Will Environmental Crises Segregate Sports? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m a sports writer and author, and a longtime admirer of McLarnin’s ring reputation. But by the time I met him for an interview in 2004, not long before he died at 96, age had knocked about six inches off his height, and arthritis had turned his powerful fists into gnarled claws. Age did do him one favor: his “new” claim to fame was that he was the world’s oldest living boxing champ.

Despite an impressive career, McLarnin wasn’t exactly a household name. Which left me to wonder about this mysterious plaque. I’d walked this stretch of the boulevard, through L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood just north of downtown, countless times but I’d never noticed it.

I quickly discovered McLarnin was not alone—his was just one in a series of similar homages to former sports stars. The plaques are easy to miss. Measuring approximately 17 by 16 inches, about the size of a coffee table book, they don’t exactly pop out of the pavement. Many are blemished with graffiti or dirt. But now that I had noticed them, I set about trying to figure out their relevance to each other and Los Angeles.

My first thought was that the plaques must have some connection with Southern California. McLarnin didn’t fight here, but he spent most of his post-ring career in L.A. This was reinforced when I came upon other greats who made their reputations in Southern California, including Dodgers pitching ace Sandy Koufax, Lakers legend Elgin Baylor, and boxer Armando Muniz. Here also were Pasadena’s own Jackie Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and his UCLA teammate, Kenny Washington, the Rams running back who grew up in L.A. and broke the NFL color barrier a year before Robinson integrated baseball.

Olympians seemed to dominate the plaques, which made sense at this local level. L.A.’s dedication to the Olympic Movement runs deep. The city has hosted the Summer Olympics twice, in 1932 and 1984, and is currently bidding for the 2024 Olympics.

Besides track star Jesse Owens—whose triumph at the 1936 Berlin games humiliated Adolf Hitler and his Aryan doctrine—there were plaques for divers Pat McCormick (four gold medals at the 1952 and 1956 Games) and Sammy Lee, the first Asian-American to win Olympic gold (1948, 1952); 1960 decathlete gold medalist Rafer Johnson; 1968 pole vault winner Bob Seagren; swimmer John Naber, a five-time Olympic medalist; Frank Lubin, who helped the U.S. win the first gold medal awarded in basketball in 1936; and sprinter Wyomia Tyus, who won back-to-back gold medals in the 100 meters (1964, 1968).

Bronze plaque on the Avenue of the Athletes in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

But I also noticed several outliers, like Babe Ruth and Joe Louis, icons both, but athletes with little connection to L.A. In search of an organizing principle, some rhyme or reason for this esoteric boulevard of bronze, I turned to Fred Claire, the former general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who immediately knew what I was talking about.

Claire told me that a local entrepreneur by the name of L. Andrew Castle dreamed up the entire endeavor, dubbing it, grandly, the Avenue of the Athletes. Castle originally came to Southern California to work with Charlie Chaplin at Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, one of the pioneering silent-movie studios on the West Coast.

Castle left motion pictures for photography and, beginning in 1944, taught the craft at what was then Loyola University-Marymount College. He served as a team photographer for the Dodgers after the ball club moved to L.A. from Brooklyn in 1958 and worked for the Tournament of Roses and their annual New Year’s Day parade in Pasadena.

Castle owned two camera shops, one in Echo Park and one in Hollywood, back when photographers used film, which had to be processed and developed in darkrooms. He couldn’t help but notice that the Walk of Fame along Hollywood Boulevard, which officially launched in 1960, was attracting tens of thousands of tourists to an area that had little actual connection to movie and TV stars beyond the name “Hollywood.”

Claire told me that Castle envisioned an Echo Park version of the Walk of Fame, but for athletes instead of celebrities. In the mid-1970s, Castle persuaded the city of L.A. to grant him the permits to launch the project. He rallied support from neighborhood merchants, the Echo Park Chamber of Commerce, and the Dodgers, who were now comfortably ensconced in their own stadium in nearby Chavez Ravine.

A selection committee was formed, and the first set of bronze plaques was laid in concrete in 1976. The committee met for organizational lunches at Barragan’s, a now-closed Mexican restaurant located a couple blocks from Castle’s camera store. But when Castle died in 1978, followed almost immediately by his wife, enthusiasm for the project faltered.

In October of 1985, four new bronze plaques were installed, honoring basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, tennis star Billie Jean King, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda and, posthumously, Castle himself, bringing the total number of inductees to 32.

But that was the end of it. This bit of inconspicuous streetscape never found its footing, and is all but forgotten today. “Did the Avenue of the Athletes fulfill Andy Castle’s dream?” Claire asked. “No, but at least he had a dream.”

Today’s Walk of Fame, by contrast, includes more than 2,500 stars along a 15-block stretch of Hollywood Boulevard (and several blocks of Vine Street). In a nation fascinated by fame and celebrity, we want to touch the legends and we want contact with their achievements—even if it’s with the soles of our sneakers.

That accounts for legions of imitators the Walk of Fame has spawned—including, of course, Castle’s Avenue of the Athletes—as well as the hundreds of halls of fame that have opened their doors across the nation. It’s worth noting that Walk of Fame stars, or their representatives, must now pony up $30,000 for the privilege of being included. Call it the price of fame.

Alas, no one emerged to carry Andrew Castle’s torch in Echo Park. Even so, the very reason that Castle thought up the concept—to boost foot traffic in a downtrodden area—happened eventually and somewhat organically, spurred by a housing boom that has brought with it vegan bistros, craft brew pubs, artisanal coffee shops, and the requisite anti-gentrification outcry.

The plaque that honors Andrew Castle still rests outside the former location of his shop on Sunset Boulevard, diagonally across from Jimmy McLarnin. Castle’s marker features a boxy camera of the sort that photojournalists used in the 1950s and 1960s—it resembles an old Rollieflex—which is entirely appropriate given that his contributions to photography may well outlast his quirky, quixotic mission.

Up the street from the Avenue of the Athletes, inside Dodger Stadium, the team has established an annual award in Castle’s name for the best photo of the season by a local professional photographer. The winning pictures are displayed outside the press box.

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In France, at the Euro Cup, the violence of Russian hooligans almost got the national team banned before a humiliating loss to Wales took care of that, sending the Russians home doubly embarrassed. Days later, the International Olympic Committee upheld a ban on Russian track and field athletes at the forthcoming Rio Summer Olympics in response to evidence of a widespread, state-sponsored doping project. Seeing as the legitimacy of the Putin system comes less from the ballot box than from the deliverance of national pride and success, it was likely not the most upbeat of weeks inside the Kremlin.

Dating back to the Cold War, Soviet rulers embraced sports as a vehicle to prove communism’s superiority at whatever the cost. International sporting events are a way of forcing the West’s acceptance—as Putin achieved in hosting the Sochi Winter Olympics two years ago—and of delivering a sense of national pride by winning. The Russians were so desperate to win, we now know they resorted to extensive doping.

These days, it seems like international sports deepen Russians’ sense of grievance and isolation from the world. Sports have become a microcosm of Russians’ conflicted desire to gain the respect and validation of an international world order whose legitimacy they question as well as seek to undermine.

Vladimir Putin attends the celebration marking the one-year countdown to the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.

Successive generations of Kremlin rulers have tried to project the image of the country as a besieged fortress, alone in the world and surrounded by enemies. For Putin and those around him, Russia’s latest tribulations in the world of global sport seem to bear out that worldview. First came the clashes in Marseille, in which Russian soccer fans fought with England supporters during the Euro Cup. Some Russian fans shot flare guns towards the English section of the stands and burst into the section as the match ended. Fights spilled out in the streets as well. More than 30 people were hospitalized, including several with critical brain injuries.

Russian soccer fans are late to international hooliganism, but the Western press and French law enforcement still managed to make it sound like there was something novel and sinister about the Russian version of the problem, calling Russia’s violent fans “well-trained” and organized. Russians, in turn, pointed to the bad press as yet another example of Western institutions’ inherently anti-Russian ideology.

Similar to how Russian officials have responded to, for example, Western sanctions over Ukraine, they hit back on criticism over fan violence, conceding nothing and instead raising the rhetorical temperature. Vladimir Markin, a top Russian law-enforcement official, suggested that Europeans couldn’t handle Russia’s soccer fans because they are more accustomed to gay pride parades than dealing with “real men.” Igor Lebedev, a deputy in Russian parliament and a member of Russia’s football union, said, “Nothing wrong with fighting. Keep it up boys!”

With time, however, the tone changed. The Russian team was fined 150,000 euros and given a suspended disqualification from the tournament—one that proved superfluous after the disastrous 0-3 loss to Wales—which appeared to convince Russian officials that the matter was serious enough not to be laughed away. The ugliness of the violence immediately raised questions about Russia’s ability to host the 2018 World Cup, which will be held in 11 cities across the country. Even before the brutal scenes in France, Russia’s World Cup was already tarnished, marred by the specter of corruption and vote buying. Putin has been a lonely defender of ousted FIFA president Sepp Blatter, the man who presided over the selection of Russia to host in 2018 and who has since been brought down by allegations of corruption. With an event of such national prestige at stake, Russian officials began to display uncharacteristic contrition. The country’s sports minister, Vitaliy Mutko, said that violent fans in masks “brought shame on their country.” For his part, Putin condemned the attacks in Marseille, calling them a “disgrace.” But Putin couldn’t help himself, adding, “I truly don’t understand how 200 of our fans could beat up several thousand English.”

Although some anonymous British officials theorized the Russian hooligans were part of the Kremlin’s strategy of “hybrid war”—using a patchwork of covert, deniable means to undermine the Western security order—that seems an unfounded and paranoid exaggeration. Over the years, nationalists and football hooligans have periodically been convenient allies of the Kremlin, but ultimately the Putin state is wary of uncontrolled violence, which could one day threaten its own power. The young men who came to France from Russia may have been well prepared for a fight—armed with metal bars and fingerless gloves—but in many respects, their inspiration comes more from the English football hooligans of the 1970s and 80s than anything homegrown.

Just days after the soccer hooligan controversy, on June 17, the International Association of Athletics Federations, the governing body for track and field competitions, banned Russian athletes from the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics for sustained and wide-reaching doping violations. The decision was historic, as individual athletes have been barred from international competition for doping but never entire national teams. Investigations into Russian doping suggested an illicit program with alleged support of the country’s security services. To date, Russia’s response to the allegations, which have gathered in strength and damning detail in recent months, has been to try and cauterize the wound, admitting to a certain degree of malfeasance while denying a deeply rooted culture of doping condoned at the top. After the ban was announced, Putin tried this tactic anew, suggesting doping violations were limited to a few individuals, and that banning the whole track and field team amounted to “collective punishment,” saying it was akin to a prison sentence for “an entire family” if one relative committed a crime.

The International Olympic Committee upheld that ban, while keeping open the possibility that individual Russian athletes who go to extraordinary efforts to prove they are clean could be allowed to compete. Either way, the whole affair casts a far more humiliating note on Russian sporting exploits. It’s possible Russia may turn its back on Rio in a huff. A widely circulated tabloid with Kremlin ties asked the question, “Is it worth Russia going to Rio?” After all, the editorial posited, “They want us to crawl to them on our knees, ask forgiveness, and beg to be let in.”

For Putin and those close to him, efforts to exclude or punish Russia, whether for its annexation of Crimea or support for state-sponsored doping programs, are seen sees as pieces of a larger conspiracy. Today’s Russian elite sees plots against its power and authority everywhere it turns. Some of those visions are grounded in actual Western policy, if a distorted understanding of it; others are nothing more than baseless, paranoid fantasy. And, like its poorly performing soccer team or apparently state-run doping program, no small number are problems of Russia’s own making.

After the loss to Wales, a fitting joke started to make the rounds, playing Russia’s sporting woes off the geopolitical tensions it has encountered over the years. Echoing a comment that Putin made in 2014, when he said that unidentified soldiers in Crimea weren’t Russian troops but had purchased their military gear in a shop, the joke has Putin saying, “Those aren’t our soccer players on the field, they just bought their uniforms in a shop.”

The post Russia Goes for Gold in Hooliganism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why Glendale? Serendipity. My relatives were realtors and found a house in Glendale that met our specifications. Glendale was a small, comfortable town. Our children, all under 10 years of age, walked a quarter mile to school. They played in the municipal park and swam in the municipal pool. There was little traffic, and getting to work or shopping in Phoenix took 10 minutes, tops. What is today the upscale area of Arrowhead was then a desert where we took the kids to ride motorbikes and to shoot BB guns. On a spring evening, the air was heavy with the scent of citrus blossoms from local groves.

Fans who attend the Super Bowl will encounter an entirely different city, a place that, as much as any other American municipality, has bet its future on making itself into a playground for professional sports. If some locals look less than happy about the plan, know that it’s the risks involved in that gamble, not the traffic, that’s bothering us.

Glendale has undergone dramatic change. At its incorporation in 1912, it was a Russian-Asian-Hispanic farming community. In the 1960s, when my family moved here, Glendale was a small city with a population of 45,000 covering just 12 of its present 52 square miles. Then, in the 1990s, new subdivisions, including Arrowhead, and new shopping, including Arrowhead Mall, grew up. Downtown reinvented itself as an antique mecca. With my children graduated from college and scattered to build their own families, Glendale adopted a district system of political representation rather than the at-large system that perpetually placed the “good ole boys” from downtown in positions of power. At the urging of friends, I ran for the city council and won a seat, serving from 1992 to 1996.

But Glendale wanted more than to be just another Phoenix suburb with the same chain stores. We were determined to carve our own distinct, national identity. In the early 2000s, as I returned to the council, our attention turned to the possibilities of sports as a catalyst. A strategy took shape: if we built major sports venues, the resulting tourism and sales tax dollars would strengthen city coffers and allow us to make major improvements in the quality of life of our residents. Build it and they will come, so to speak – especially sports fans and tourists.

First, a city-owned venue for professional hockey and for entertainment, the Gila River Arena (formerly known as Jobing.com Arena), and a complementary retail complex, Westgate, were built in partnership with developer Steve Ellman. Then, via another partnership with the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, we created two more sports facilities: the county-owned University of Phoenix football stadium (home to the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals) and a city-owned spring training baseball facility called Camelback Ranch (home-away-from-home to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox). The football stadium put Glendale in the Super Bowl business for the first time; promised windfalls from hosting the big game were supposed to afford us the option of paying off construction debt related to the hockey arena and the baseball facility sooner.

Glendale became the NFL Arizona Cardinals’ home field. At the time of approval of the three new Glendale sports venues, our economy was robust. We saw no hint of the dramatic national recession to come. We learned to manage the crowds of people who descended upon our community for games; the effect is felt only by those who live in close proximity to the stadium, as I do. I cope by not shopping or driving near the stadium on game days, and the city, at my insistence, discouraged fan parking in adjacent neighborhoods. And 350 days a year, when there is no football, Glendale remains very much itself.

The bigger downside proved to be financial. It wasn’t long before optimistic staff projections of increased sales tax receipts and new economic development proved to be wrong. Then came the national recession. As we hosted our first Super Bowl in 2008 – next week’s will be our second–Glendale was in trouble. Nevertheless, expectations were high–a major selling point for building these sports facilities had been that the international publicity of a big Super Bowl game would put Glendale on the map, accelerating business relocations to our city and bringing new development. Those expectations weren’t met. To this day not one company has relocated to Glendale as a direct result of the Super Bowl. New retail development has located as close as possible to our freeway, not the stadium.

Pulling off that Super Bowl in 2008 was an all-hands on deck effort, with all city departments involved in the planning, preparation, and execution of Glendale’s moment in the spotlight. The city spent $3.4 million on the event and recouped a little over $1.2 million in sales tax and fees.

The resulting $2.2 million loss, combined with a national recession, was just one sign that our sports strategy was unsustainable. Debt related to the two sports venues that Glendale itself owned–the hockey arena and the ballpark–had once seemed manageable but soon proved to be a financial albatross. Glendale was bleeding. The regular season football games proved to be a wash financially. While sales tax revenues from Westgate are greater on game days the additional revenue is consumed by increased public safety and transportation costs to manage traffic and safety issues.

Other Super Bowl host cities, Miami Gardens in Florida and the Arlington area in Texas, have mechanisms for state reimbursement of their hosting costs, but we don’t. In recent years, Glendale’s mayor has concluded it doesn’t seem prudent to be in the Super Bowl hosting business if there is no way to recover its costs.

So why is the Super Bowl in Glendale again? The Super Bowl bid process is a long one, and locations are approved many years before the actual event. Tremendous political pressure was placed on the city from the Bidwill family, owners of the Arizona Cardinals, as well as other stakeholders, swaying a majority of the council to approve the bid in 2011. I was not in the majority. Glendale held out hope for a bill introduced in the Arizona state legislature in 2014 that promised to reimburse the city for its $2 million in game-related public safety costs. We got the Super Bowl but not the legislation. Glendale expects to reintroduce the bill this year in hopes of a different outcome.

There are some good things about the Super Bowl. Even though Glendale loses money, the state, the county and the Phoenix Metropolitan area will share in the injection into the economy of a projected $500 million dollars. Direct TV is hosting a major music festival in Glendale across the street from the stadium. The city has scheduled one of its premier events, the Chocolate Affaire, the weekend of the Super Bowl. The confluence of chocolate lovers and football fans will generate revenue for Glendale’s merchants and restaurants.

Costs to host this year’s Super Bowl have gone up since 2008. The city’s loss for this game is sure to be greater than the $2.2 million dollars loss the first time. Despite some additional development during the economic recovery, there are still not enough amenities surrounding the stadium to generate the sales tax needed to cover the hosting costs.

We love Glendale and so will this year’s Super Bowl visitors. Even as our population has grown to nearly 250,000 (we’re the nation’s 87th largest city and Arizona’s fifth largest), the city still retains a hometown feel. My family isn’t going anywhere–we are “nesters” and once we plant ourselves we stay planted. I invested 16 years as a councilmember helping to shape Glendale’s present and future. I choose not to walk away from my investment. So we’ve scrubbed our faces, slicked back our hair and picked up the living room. We are ready to welcome you to our home.

But the lack of financial relief has led many of us to believe that this should be Glendale’s last Super Bowl.

The post Why My Hometown Regrets Hosting the Super Bowl appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My kids and I mostly had fun with those insults—although we were taken aback by a few misogynistic, homophobic comments, like the question above. But now even the president is taking me on. Not me, personally, of course, but in The New Yorker last week, he said that the long-term risks of serious brain injury taken by NFL players—the reason for my boycott—haven’t affected his interest in the game. “There’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he argued. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret.”

But although many folks are expressing serious concern about football’s impact on the brain, opting out of the country’s largest fan base isn’t easy. For me, who watched some part of about five games—and up to six hours—a week of pro football in years past, it was like quitting an addiction. You find yourself having relapses, hanging out with other addicts who are still using, making all kinds of rules to excuse a few hits.

So, how did it go? In a sign of how badly I did, I’ll use the trusty Monday morning sports columnist scorecard:

Offense: B-
On your average Sunday this past fall, I watched zero hours of professional football. Sounds like cold turkey, but read on. I have no NFL fans in my house, so the peer pressure was low. I did seek out the NFL once—for the conference championship games that decided which team would advance to the Super Bowl. While I watched neither game live, I recorded them and watched parts of both the next day while working out. I can report that the high just wasn’t as intense—but man, the stuff was potent: the historic Broncos offense, the Manning-Brady rivalry, Silicon Valley against Seattle. But even all that didn’t produce the unique neural combination of relaxation and excitement that it once did. Then again, part of the reason I stopped watching in the first place was to reduce demand for a damaging product. In that, I failed. I stayed up to get the scores online and, hoping for a contact high, listened every week to The B.S. Report, a podcast during which Bill Simmons, the ESPN columnist and Grantland editor, discusses the week’s action. It’s a funny podcast, but all those clicks to download were telling the NFL, “Keep it going, Fuzz is still a fan.”

Defense: C
Most addicts have an out—a back door that lets them get what they crave without blaming themselves. My out was something I called the “hospitality rule”: I’d watch football if it would be rude not to. I had 36 family members coming to my house for Thanksgiving this year. I couldn’t deny them their tradition, right? As a result of my “hospitality,” I caught a good bit of the Cowboys game and some of the other two games. Of course, plenty of those 36 Hogans never saw a play, because they didn’t go into the TV room. At another family gathering, this clause let me see one of the Coolest Plays of the Year, when an Indianapolis Colts running back in the playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs fumbled on the one-yard line, and the ball bounced off a teammate’s helmet into the hands of his quarterback, whose name is actually Luck. Luck then leapt into the end zone, helping sustain one of the most remarkable comebacks of the year. Not only did I get that same old high: This play brought me back into the community of fans who retell the same amazing play for the rest of the week, brag to those who missed it, and get to feel like they were part of a special moment.

Special Teams: F
I watched a ton of college football. So not only am I supporting kids putting their brains on the line, but also, much like a cocaine addict in America helping ruin a town somewhere in a foreign land, my participation in today’s football economy means some college athlete is putting himself at risk and not being properly compensated. (Some of my fellow Northwestern Wildcats are now asking to join a union, which could change that.)

Sadly, I can’t report that I did anything particularly special with my newfound free time. I now cook dinner on Sunday nights, have been able to help more around the house, and caught all the Oscar contenders on the big screen. But it’s not like I trained for a marathon or re-landscaped the backyard. My tools are still disorganized, and my pile of unread books is just as high.

My scorecard shows obvious room for improvement, but the big questions are: Did my abstention make any sort of difference? And, will I relapse?

If you’re old enough, you remember when boxing matches were on regular TV and dominated both the sports and news pages. At some point, watching retired champs slur their words and lose their memories caught up with the sport, and the cultural spotlight and the fans turned away, reducing boxing to a small but dedicated group of spectators who pay big bucks per fight. If enough people choose, as I did, not to watch football, is that where the NFL is headed? Doubtful.

The difference is that boxing requires so little upfront investment: All a match takes are two boxers, their small team, and some gear at a gym or small arena. Football, however, requires dozens of men to be flown all over the country weekly, equipped from head to toe, and prepared by a huge coaching and training staff that works nearly 24/7.

So, if enough of us stop watching, or if enough moms don’t let their sons play, could the NFL just die? Don’t count on that, either. As a young columnist on my high school paper, I predicted soccer would overtake football (even though I was a bigger fan of football) in the U.S. by the year 2000. That was 32 years ago, and that prediction seems even sillier now than it did then. You could just as soon wish away cocaine.

The NFL has promised to take care of its retired players, and the president is right that the league’s players are grown men who, now at least, know the risks. But, do I have to watch and enjoy them taking those risks? Like any addict, I’ll take it one season—maybe even one week—at a time. As for this Sunday, some friends invited us over, and I don’t think it was just to watch the commercials.

The post Can a Football Addict Quit the NFL? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In this salary-cap era, NFL teams are the result of a transactional opportunism that brings together talented free agents for a few seasons, as if for a gig. The Denver star quarterback, Peyton Manning, and go-to receiver, Wes Welker, are still identified by fans mostly as having played with the Colts and Patriots. Seattle’s star running back, Marshawn Lynch, came in a 2010 trade, and before this season the Seahawks traded for wide receiver Percy Harvin and signed veteran pass rushers Cliff Avril and Michael Bennett as free agents. NFL general managers work their rosters these days like Rubik’s Cubes.

We are unlikely to witness another enduring NFL empire like those 1970s Steelers, who won four Super Bowls in six seasons, launching nine players into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. They were a team in a way that today is no longer possible in the NFL.

Consider this: eight of those Steeler greats—defensive linemen Mean Joe Greene and L.C. Greenwood, quarterback Terry Bradshaw, safety Donnie Shell, receivers Lynn Swann and John Stallworth, and linebackers Jack Lambert and Jack Ham—played a combined 100 seasons in the NFL, and every single one of those seasons was played in a Steeler uniform. In Super Bowl XIV against the Rams in January 1980, not one player on the Steelers’ roster had ever played a down for another NFL team.

The 1970s Steelers knew each other intimately, the women they loved, the cigarettes they smoked, their favorite brands of beer (Lambert: Michelob, always in bottles, never cans).

That closeness created synergy on the field. The Steeler players also shared a love for team owner Art Rooney Sr., aka the Chief. As founder of the Steelers, Rooney had been a lovable loser in the NFL for 40 years. As a horseplayer, though, he rated among the nation’s best, a shrewd gambler with a sixth sense. Rooney was an American archetype, Irish-Catholic and local, up from the streets of Pittsburgh’s north side, his leather-bound prayer book in one hand and the Daily Racing Form in the other.

The players wanted to win one for the old man. The defining hour came in January 1975 in the locker room at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans after the Steelers had defeated Minnesota 16-6 to win Super Bowl IX. Linebacker Andy Russell, a defensive captain, called for Rooney, then 73 years old. With his teammates crowded around, Russell presented him with the game ball. “This one’s for the Chief,” Russell said. “It’s a long time coming.”

***

The Steelers’ brotherhood flourished during the ’70s inside their post-game hide-away: the locker room sauna at Three Rivers Stadium, a stadium that exists now only in memory. It was players only. No coaches, no press. Only about seven or eight big men could fit in the sauna comfortably, though sometimes a few more squeezed in. The equipment man turned off the steam and filled a trash can with ice and beer. Players talked about the game just played, needled each other, laughed, and reveled in their moment.

As Bradshaw told me, “The sauna was our escape, and nobody could get to us. That was the most fun we ever had.”

Pro football has its gifts, and costs. The costs often come later, like a bill past-due. A man sees himself much differently in his 20s than in his 50s or 60s. In his 20s, he is invincible. He looks at 50, his father’s world, like a faraway planet. But once a man reaches his 50s, he sees himself with a wisdom and context that the passing decades have provided. He understands that life is short, and values his special friendships more.

In the quiet of night now, the game calls out for payment, and the 1970s Steelers, grandfathers now in their 60s, feel it in their muscles and bones. They all live with some pain, differing by degrees.

Bradshaw suffered at least seven concussions as a Steelers player. In 2011, he struggled to remember names and statistics on the studio set of FOX NFL Sunday. He went to a Southern California clinic to undergo brain scans and diagnostic testing. He said he began taking multiple pills, including power boost and mood boost pills. He also downloaded brain puzzles from the Internet and to help his hand-eye coordination he bought two Ping-Pong tables.

Running back Franco Harris takes blueberries and fish oil each morning to slow brain damage that he believes he and every other NFL player suffered. Reggie Harrison, the Steelers’ special teams kamikaze now known as Kamaal Ali-Salaam-El, says he takes Oxycontin and other medications for head, back, and leg pain, and whisks though his northern Virginia home on a motorized scooter. Running back John (Frenchy) Fuqua needs latches on the doors at home in Detroit because his surgically repaired wrists can’t turn a knob. Greenwood underwent so many back surgeries he lost count, maybe 14 or 15.

“I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet,” Greenwood told me by phone last fall, several days before his final back surgery. He groaned in pain, put the phone down, shifted in his chair, and upon his return apologized. Two weeks later Greenwood died, at 67, due to complications from that surgery.

Twelve Steelers from the days of empire died before 60. The causes of those deaths varied widely, including cancer, heart attacks, and accidents involving a car and a falling tree. Quarterback Joe Gilliam died at 49 from cocaine overdose.

For a time, Mike Webster lived out of his truck, virtually homeless. A Hall of Fame center, Webster played 17 NFL seasons. He retired at nearly 40 and died at 50, and in between lost his money, his marriage and, ultimately, his mind. In 2002 he became the first NFL player diagnosed posthumously with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative brain disease.

“What has the game given me?” said John Banaszak, a defensive lineman for the ’70s Steelers. “It’s given me my teammates … You want to talk about what the game takes away from you? It takes away your teammates.”

***

The enduring Steeler brotherhood reveals itself in different ways. When they are together, often at Pittsburgh-area charity events such as the annual Mel Blount Youth Home celebrity roast fundraiser, you can sense their closeness in the way they embrace, in the stories they tell.

Decades later, Donnie Shell’s children still call Stallworth “Uncle John,” and Stallworth’s children call Shell “Uncle Donnie.”

Two old veterans from the Super Bowl IX team, Russell and center Ray Mansfield, kept a deep friendship until Mansfield’s heart attack in 1996. After their days as teammates, they hiked mountains together in the West, and traveled across the world together. Today, Fuqua and Salaam-El have each other on speed dial. They talk multiple times each week. “Our friendship,” Salaam-El told me, “will see us into the grave.”

Franco Harris has become the social glue of the team, and is so deeply involved in charitable causes that Greene calls him Mister Pittsburgh. When his son, Dok, ran for mayor of Pittsburgh in 2009, some of the 1970s Steelers campaigned for him. He has hosted private dinners on the 25th, 30th, and 40th anniversaries of the Immaculate Reception, Harris’ famous catch to win a 1972 playoff game against the Raiders. He invited Steeler teammates and their wives, and footed the entire bill himself.

Stallworth, the Hall of Fame receiver, earned his master’s degree in business while still playing for the Steelers, then returned home to Huntsville to build an information technology firm in the aerospace industry that he later sold for a reported $69 million. Today, when Stallworth reminisces about the 1970s Steelers, he doesn’t think of big plays or his four Super Bowl rings. He thinks of his teammates and the brotherhood they share. In his fondest dreams, Stallworth would like to bring back all of them—even those who have died—for one more conversation, and he’d like to have that conversation in the sauna at the vanquished Three Rivers Stadium.

Stallworth imagines that they’ll all be there: Mad Dog and Fats, Bradshaw and Webby, Mean Joe, L.C., Rocky, Lambert, and Franco. They’d ask each other questions that men in their 20s and 30s—today’s Broncos and Seahawks, for instance—typically don’t think to ask. What’s going on in your life? What makes you happy these days? What really endures?

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