***LANGUAGE/TRIGGERS***(Usually, I don’t include such warnings, but it seems only fair to given what I’m speaking of, which I intend to be a part of my current memoir project). ________________________________________________
“Do it, you fucking pansy.”
“Go hard!”
“You pieces of shit—“
“Have some balls!”
“You fucking pussies–“
“Get it on!”
“Grow a pair!”
“Kill him!”
“Don’t be a pussy!”
“Harder!”
“You’re a bunch of little girls!”
“Man the fuck up.”
“Pussy-ass bitches!”
I have heard statements like these a thousand times in the seventeen years I participated in organized sports, from Kidsports soccer to NCAA Wrestling at Stanford. I cannot say exactly who said what, when; the best coaches I had didn’t resort to the epithets or swearing. But then again, most young men don’t need the obscenity to know what the bellowed tone and imprecations mean: they have heard and internalized the shame that comes from any sort of weakness, just as they have built their sense of manhood on not being vulnerable to such assaults by coming in first, staying ahead of the epithet—being sure it is directed at someone else. Being a man is never quitting, never relenting, tolerating intolerable pain, ignoring warnings, never seeming weak, hitting harder, forcing ourselves faster, landing the first and last bloody blow so that we silence the voices. Perhaps it is time to speak.
***
Maryland freshman offensive lineman Jordan McNair died two weeks after a May 29th workout, during which he collapsed after running ten 110-yard sprints. He died of heatstroke; he had a body temperature of 106 degrees at the hospital hours later. Coach DJ Durkin and his staff have come under fire after an ESPN investigation into the death of Jordan McNair detailed the persistent abuse of players within the program. Multiple sources described the coaches reliance on fear, intimidation, and shame: obscenity-laced mockery of players manhood, including when a player passed out during a workout; coaches slapping meals from player’s hands; the throwing of weights and other objects by a conditioning coach; the strategic humiliation of a player who was thought to be overweight being forced to eat a candy bar while his teammates worked out.
No NFL player has died from heat exertion in the last 17 years; NCAA football coaches have killed 27 players with conditioning drills in that same period. Since 2000, there have been 40 athlete fatalities in conditioning sessions in NCAA sports, yet not a single death on the field. It is not football that is killing young men, but the deranged model of masculinity that thrives in proximity to sports, and which is cultivated not just there, but throughout our culture (though it is present in many cultures: without the sort of men we raise across the globe, there might not be such a thing as war). Men with power, celebrated as leaders and national treasures, are taught the ethos and rituals of toughness as boys and then as young men—and then their wealth and reputation is staked on the public performance of new generations of young men. So it is in sports, and so it is in the world. And the damage is immense.
(posted from Facebook)
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