Julio wished the bullfight would last forever.
He knew every play by heart, just as a salmon knows its river, or a dancer knows cool-ass dance moves. He’d rooted for the picadores as they stabbed the bull’s neck with lances, as required by the rules. He’d cheered as the banderilleros planted blade after blade into the bull’s shoulders (another thing required by the sport’s rules). And now, in the fight’s final stage, Julio waited for the matador to finish the bull with a stab through the heart.
Julio also knew the matador might fail to stab the bull’s heart, then slice the spinal cord instead. Or miss the heart, screw up the spine-slice, and keep hacking at the bull with more swords until it died a bloody mess. Julio knew that yes, that’s how actual bullfights can end in real life, for real. And Julio fuckin’ loved that shit.
Julio’s father clapped his son on the shoulder. “That is your dream, my son, is it not? To be in the center of that ring? In front of your entire country?”
Julio cried out in super-hard agreement: “Oh yes, Papa! There is nothing I’d rather do than be … A BULL.”
Then Julio played high school bull, got a full bull scholarship to Spain A&M, and bulled in the pros till that killed him.
Okay, Hemingway I ain’t. Point is, I can’t watch the NFL anymore. And you’ll stop watching it too. In your own time. Because that’s the only way society’s relationship with football can go. Let me explain, because it’s not as “touchy, feely hippie bullshit” as you think.
Every society sets its own tolerance for sports brutality. Ancient Romans gave a thumbs-up to (less bloody than you think) sports-murder. Elizabethan England’s “athletes” did terrible things to bears. Millions of Spanish people follow bullfighting to this day, even though bullfighting is like that one Bugs Bunny cartoon if it was torture porn.
What’s American society’s tolerance for sports brutality? Well it’s always been pretty damn high. Boxing is a sports version of guys beating each other to death. It is also literally guys beating each other to death a lot of the time.
Around 50 years ago, football became America’s favorite sport (alongside baseball), even though it put awful injury carnage on national television. Carnage I refuse to even hyperlink. Since football and boxing both erode human brains, writers and players have linked the two ever since we realized that.
The post I Quit Watching The NFL (And Why You Will, Too) appeared first on Cloud Authority.
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