Kill 'Em! Crush 'Em! Eat 'Em Raw! JOHN MCMURTRY Born in

Kill 'Em! Crush 'Em! Eat 'Em Raw!

JOHN MCMURTRY

Born in Toronto in 1939, John McMurtry has worked as a professional football player, a print

and television journalist, and an English teacher. He claims he became a philosopher "as

a last resort." His writing on higher education and business criticizes the application of the

global manufacturing model to social institutions. The following essay first appeared in 1971

In Macleons. In it, McMurtry draws on his experience as a football player to argue that society

accepts the brutality of football because it mirrors the competitive economic practices that we

blindly accept. This was originally published in Maclean’s (October 1971), one of Canada’s most

prominent weekly magazines.

A few months ago my neck got a hard crick in it. I couldn't turn my head; to look left or

right I'd have to turn my whole body. But I'd had cricks in my neck since I started playing grade-

school football and hockey, so I just ignored it. Then I began to notice that when I reached

for any sort of large book (which I do pretty often as a philosophy teacher at the University of

Guelph) I had trouble lifting it with one hand. I was losing the strength in my left arm, and I had

such a steady pain in my back I often had to stretch out on the floor of the room I was in to

relieve the pressure.

A few weeks later I mentioned to my brother, an orthopedic surgeon, that I'd lost the

power in my arm since my neck began to hurt. Twenty-four hours later I was in a Toronto

hospital not sure whether I might end up with a wasted upper limb. Apparently the steady

pounding I had received playing college and professional football in the late Fifties and early

Sixties had driven my head into my backbone so that the discs had crumpled together at the

neck — "acute herniation" — and had cut the nerves to my left arm like a pinched telephone

wire (without nerve stimulation, of course, the muscles atrophy, leaving the arm crippled). So

I spent my Christmas holidays in the hospital in heavy traction and much of the next three

months with my neck in a brace. Today most of the pain has gone, and I've recovered most of

the strength in my arm. But from time to time I still have to don the brace, and surgery remains a

possibility.

Not much of this will surprise anyone who knows football. It is a sport in which body

wreckage is one of the leading conventions. A few days after I went into hospital for that crick

in my neck, another brother, an outstanding football player in college, was undergoing spinal

surgery in the same hospital two floors above me. In his case it was a lower, more massive

herniation, which every now and again buckled him so that he was unable to lift himself off his

back for days at a time. By the time he entered the hospital for surgery he had already spent

several months in bed. The operation was successful, but, as in all such cases, it will take him a

year to recover fully.

These aren't isolated experiences. Just about anybody who has ever played football for any

length of time, in high school, college or one of the professional leagues, has suffered for it later

physically.

Indeed, it is arguable that body shattering is the very point of football, as killing

and maiming are of war. (In the United States, for example, the game results in 15 to 20

deaths a year and about 30,000 major operations on knees alone.) To grasp some of

the more conspicuous similarities between football and war, it is instructive to listen to

the imperatives most frequently issued to the play-ers by their coaches, teammates and

fans. "Hurt 'em!" "Level 'em!" "Kill 'em!" "Take 'em apart!" Or watch for the plays that are

most enthusiastically applauded by the fans. Where someone is "smeared," "knocked silly," "

creamed," "nailed," "broken in two," or even "crucified." (One of my coaches when I played

corner linebacker with the Calgary Stampeders in 1961 elaborated, often very inven-tively, on

this language of destruction: admonishing us to "unjoin" the opponent, "make 'im remember

you" and "stomp 'im like a bug. ") Just as in hockey, where a fight will bring fans to their feet

more often than a skillful play, so in football the mouth waters most of all for the really crippling

block or tackle. For the kill. Thus the good teams are "hungry," the best players are "mean,"

and "casualties" are as much a part of the game as they are of a war.

The family resemblance between football and war is, indeed, striking. Their languages

are similar: "field general," "long bomb," "blitz," "take a shot;' "front line," "pursuit," "good

hit," "the draft" and so on. Their principles and practices are alike: mass hysteria, the art of

intimidation,

absolute command and total obedience, territorial aggression, censorship, inflated insignia and

propaganda, blackboard maneuvers and strategies, drills, uniforms, formations, marching bands

and training camps. And the virtues they celebrate are almost identical: hyper- aggressiveness,

coolness under fire and suicidal bravery. All this has been implicitly recognized by such jock-

loving Americans as media stars General [George] Patton and President [Richard] Nixon,

who have talked about war as a football game. Patton wanted to make his Second World War

tank men look like football players. And Nixon, as we know, was fond of comparing attacks

on Viet-nam to football plays and drawing coachly diagrams on a blackboard for TV war fans.

One difference between war and football, though, is that there is little or no protest

against football. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the game is that the systematic

infliction of injuries excites in people not concern, as would be the case if they were sustained

at, say, a rock festival, but a collective rejoicing and euphoria. Players and fans alike revel

in the spectacle of a combatant felled into semiconsciousness, "blindsided," "clothes- lined"

or "decapitated." I can remember, in fact, being chided by a coach in pro ball for not "getting

my hat" injuriously into a player who was already lying helpless on the ground. (On another

occasion, after the Stampeders had traded the celebrated Joe Kapp to BC, we were playing the

Lions in Vancouver and Kapp was forced on one play to run with the ball. He was coming "down

the chute," his bad knee wobbling uncertainly, so I simply dropped on him like a blanket. After I

returned to the bench I was reproved for not exploiting the opportunity to unhinge his bad knee.)

After every game, of course, the papers are full of reports on the day's injuries, a sort of

post-battle "body count," and the respective teams go to work with doctors and trainers, tape,

whirlpool baths, cortisone and morphine to patch and deaden the wounds before the next

game. Then the whole drama is reenacted — injured athletes held together by adhesive, braces

and drugs — and the days following it are filled with even more feverish activity to put on

the show yet again at the end of the next week. (I remember being so taped up in college that

I earned the nickname " [M] ummy.") The team that survives this merry-go-round spectacle

of skilled masochism with the fewest incapacitating injuries usu-ally wins. It is a sort of

victory by ordeal: "We hurt them more than they hurt us."

My own initiation into this brutal circus was typical. I loved the game from the moment

I could run with a ball. Played shoeless on a green open field with no one keeping score and

in a spirit of reckless abandon and laughter, it's a very different sport. Almost no one gets

hurt and it's rugged, open and exciting (it still is for me). But then, like everything else, it

starts to be regulated and institutionalized by adult authorities. And the fun is over.

So it was as I began the long march through organized football. Now there was a coach

and elders to make it clear by their behavior that beating other people was the only thing to

celebrate and that trying to shake someone up every play was the only thing to be really proud

of. Now there were severe rule enforcers, audiences, formally recorded victors and losers, and

heavy equipment to permit crippling bodily moves and collisions (according to one American

survey, more than 80% of all football injuries occur to fully equipped players). And now there

was the official "given" that the only way to keep playing was to wear suffocating armor, to

play to defeat, to follow orders silently and to renounce spontaneity for joyless drill. The game

had been, in short, ruined. But because I loved to play and play skillfully, I stayed. And

progressively and inexorably, as I moved through high school, college and pro leagues, my

body was dismantled. Piece by piece.

I started off with torn ligaments in my knee at 13. Then, as the organization and the

competition increased, the injuries came faster and harder. Broken nose (three times), broken

jaw (fractured in the first half and dismissed as a "bad wis-dom tooth," so I played with it for

the rest of the game), ripped knee ligaments again. Torn ligaments in one ankle and a fracture

in the other (which I remember feeling relieved about because it meant I could honorably stop

drill-blocking a 270-pound defensive end). Repeated rib fractures and cartilage tears (usually

carried, again, through the remainder of the game). More dislocations of the left shoulder than

I can remember (the last one I played with because, as the Calgary Stampedes doctor said, it

"couldn't be damaged any more"). Occasional broken or dislocated fingers and toes. Chronically

hurt lower back (I still can't lift with it or change a tire without worrying about folding). Separated

right shoulder (as with many other injuries, like badly bruised hips and legs, needled with

morphine for the games). And so on. The last pro game I played — against Winnipeg Blue

Bombers in the Western finals in 1961 — I had a recently dislocated left shoulder, a more

recently wrenched right shoulder and a chronic pain center in one leg. I was so tied

up with soreness I couldn't drive my car to the airport. But it never occurred to me or anyone

else that I miss a play as a corner linebacker.

By the end of my football career, I had learned that physical injury — giving it and taking

it — is the real currency of the sport. And that in the final analysis the "winner" is the man who

can hit to kill even if only half his limbs are working. In brief, a warrior game with a warrior ethos

into which (like almost everyone else I played with) my original boyish enthusiasm had been

relentlessly taunted and conditioned.

In thinking back on how all this happened, though, I can pick out no villains. As with the

social system as a whole, the game has a life of its own. Everyone grows up inside it, accepts

it and fulfills its dictates as obediently as helots.' Far from ever questioning the principles of

the activity, people simply concentrate on executing these principles more aggressively than

anybody around them. The result is a group of people who, as the leagues become of a higher

and higher class, are progressively insensitive to the possibility that things could be otherwise.

Thus, in football, anyone who might question the wisdom or enjoyment of putting on heavy

equipment on a hot day and running full speed at someone else with the intention of knocking

him senseless would be regarded simply as not really a devoted athlete and probably "chicken."

The choice is made straightforward. Either you, too, do your very utmost to efficiently smash

and be smashed, or you admit incompetence or cowardice and quit. Since neither of these

admissions is very pleasant, people generally keep any doubts they have to themselves and

carry on.

Of course, it would be a mistake to suppose that there is more blind acceptance of

brutal practices in organized football than elsewhere. On the contrary, a recent Harvard study

has approvingly argued that football's characteristics of "impersonal acceptance of inflicted

injury," an overriding "organization goal," the "ability to turn oneself on and off" and being, above

all, "out to win" are of "inestimable value" to big corporations. Clearly, our sort of football is no

sicker than the rest of our society. Even its organized destruction of physical well-being is not

anomalous. A very large part of our wealth, work and time is, after all, spent in systematically

destroying and harming human life. Manufacturing, selling and using weapons that tear

opponents to pieces. Making ever bigger and faster predator-named cars with which to kill and

injure one another by the million every year. And devoting our very lives to outgunning one

another for power in an ever

more destructive rat race. Yet all these practices are accepted without question by most people,

even zealously defended and honored. Competitive, organized injuring is integral to our way of

life, and football is simply one of the more intelligible mirrors of the whole process: a sort of

colorful morality play showing us how exciting and rewarding it is to Smash Thy Neighbor.

Now it is fashionable to rationalize our collaboration in all this by arguing that, 15 well,

man likes to fight and injure his fellows and such games as football should be encouraged to

discharge this original-sin urge into less harmful channels than, say, war. Public-show football,

this line goes, plays the same sort of cathartic role as Aristotle said stage tragedy does: without

real blood (or not much), it releases players and audience from unhealthy feelings stored up

inside them.

As an ex-player in the seasonal coast-to-coast drama, I see little to recommend such

a view. What organized football did to me was make me suppress my natural urges and re-

express them in an alienating, vicious form. Spontaneous desires for free bodily exuberance

and fraternization with competitors were shamed and forced under ("If it ain't hurtin' it ain't

helpin"') and in their place were demanded armored mechanical moves and cool hatred of

all opposition. Endless authoritarian drill and dressing-room harangues (ever wonder why

competing teams can't prepare for a game in the same dressing room?) were the kinds of

mechanisms employed to reconstruct joyful energies into mean and alien shapes. I am quite

certain that everyone else around me was being similarly forced into this heavily equipped

military precision and angry antagonism, because there was always a mutinous attitude about

full-dress practices, and everybody (the pros included) had to concentrate incredibly hard for

days to whip themselves into just one hour's hostility a week against another club. The players

never speak of these things, of course, because everyone is so anxious to appear tough.

The claim that men like seriously to battle one another to some sort of finish is a myth. It

only endures because it wears one of the oldest and most propagandized of masks — the

romantic combatant. I sometimes wonder whether the violence all around us doesn't depend for

its survival on the existence and preservation of this tough-guy disguise.

As for the effect of organized football on the spectator, the fan is not released from

supposed feelings of violent aggression by watching his athletic heroes per-form it so much

as encouraged in the view that people-smashing is an admirable mode of self-expression.

The most savage attackers, after all, are, by general agreement, the most efficient and worthy

players of all (the biggest applause I ever received as a football player occurred when I ran

over people or slammed them so hard they couldn't get up). Such circumstances can hardly be

said to lessen the spectators' martial tendencies. Indeed it seems likely that the whole show

just further develops and titillates the North American addiction for violent self-assertion....

Perhaps, as well, it helps explain why the greater the zeal of U.S. political leaders as football

fans (Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew), the more enthusiastic the commitment to

hard-line politics. At any rate there seems to be a strong correlation between people who relish

tough football and people who relish intimidating and beating the hell out of commies, hippies,

protest marchers and other opposition groups. Watching well-advertised strong men knock

other people round, make them hurt, is in the end like other tastes. It does not weaken with

feeding and variation in form. It grows.

I got out of football in 1962. I had asked to be traded after Calgary had 20 offered me a

$25-a-week-plus-commissions off-season job as a clothing-store salesman. ("Dear Mr. Finks:" I

wrote. [Jim Finks was then the Stampeders' general manager.] "Somehow I do not think the

dialectical subtleties of Hegel, Marx and Plato would be suitably oriented amidst the

environmental stimuli of jockey shorts and herringbone suits. I hope you make a profitable sale

or trade of my contract to the East.") So the Stampeders traded me to Montreal. In a preseason

intersquad game with the Alouettes I ripped the cartilages in my ribs on the hardest block I'd

ever thrown. I had trouble breathing and I had to shuffle-walk with my torso on a tilt. The doctor

in the local hospital said three weeks' rest, the coach said scrimmage in two days. Three days

later I was back home reading philosophy.

Exploring the Text

1. John McMurtry's essay begins with a personal anecdote about the results of playing sports —

especially football — since childhood. When he can no longer ignore his physical condition, he

seeks treatment and is hospitalized. How does the anecdote lend credibility to his argument?

2. Paragraphs 5-7 compare and contrast football and war. Is this comparison convincing? How

does the comparison appeal to logos?

3. In paragraph 9, the tone shifts. How is the shift achieved? Explain how the shift mirrors a

transition in McMurtry's argument.

4. In paragraph 14, McMurtry cites a Harvard study showing that some of the more brutal

characteristics of football players are valued in the business world. How do the study's findings

support McMurtry's argument against the brutality of football?

5. McMurtry also addresses the argument that games such as football allow us to discharge our

"original-sin urge into less harmful channels than, say, war" (para. 15). Cite passages where

McMurtry counters this argument. Do you agree with him? Why or why not?

6. Consider the language of football, especially the words shared by the military. What sports

other than football have a militaristic side?

7. Who is McMurtry's audience? Is it necessary for the reader to understand or care about

football in order to understand what McMurtry is saying about society? Explain.

8. McMurtry characterizes General George Patton and President Richard Nixon as "jock-

loving ...

media stars" (para. 6). Think of contemporary media stars who associate themselves

with footballor other sports. Does the association enhance or tarnish their image?