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I grew up playing several contact sports, and contrary to many articles I’ve read lately, I do not resemble a punch-drunk boxer or have severe head trauma. Also contrary to the suggestions of these articles, I am not a mindless, beer-guzzling womanizer. Most of the time I can put together coherent, grammatically correct sentences as well. My teammates, now lifelong friends as a result of playing sports, are also functional – businessmen, grad school students, teachers.
I’ve read that physical, traditionally male contact sports are good for nothing but brain injuries, and warping young minds by teaching them to drink and chase women. It’s important to note these accusations are often written by people who have never stepped foot into a men’s locker room.
But in either case, I must’ve missed those lessons. My coaches, whose mentorship can be put in a class right under my father, skipped beer drinking 101 and intro to getting laid.
Instead, they put young men ages 14-18 in the advanced classes of self-respect, self-worth, ethics, discipline, and perseverance. As a wrestler, they also taught me how to properly diet. Teaching a 16 year old kid to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to exercise, eat vegetables and grilled chicken all day, and then stay after school for hours of practice is an art.
I learned how to grind through the ups and down of a grueling season with my peers. We would lean on each other and formed a camaraderie that matured into lasting friendships I have to this day. My drinking buddies came and went. The kids I grinded it out with through long, cold winter days are still around. The high of victory, the jokes and laughs, the fights we had with each other – we went through it all together, as a team. That is an experience a kid shouldn’t miss.
Let’s also address the elephant in the room that these scathing articles on contact sports fail to address. Their white, upper-middle class centric point of view. For many kids, sports keep them off of the streets and out of trouble. If those authors watched sports, which I am almost certain they do not, they would hear interviews of players who describe how these “games” literally saved their lives. I have seen countless players choked up with tearful eyes as they describe their coaches as their father figure. Many schools don’t have a chess club or golf club, but every school has a football team.
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For sports like football and wrestling (which has the highest rate of concussions of any sport), the recent advancements in medicine and technology for identifying head trauma is a Godsend. These advancements now allow us to change how we teach our children to play contact sports. They give us the knowledge we need to make these sports safer, and they give us the tools to treat concussions more efficiently.
Opponents of contact sports want to use those medical and technological advancements as battle cry to make people afraid of contact sports – essentially restricting the freedom we have. Since when does advancement result in restriction? That is an absurd contradiction fabricated by people who had an agenda against contact sports to begin with. Advancement of any kind, especially in medicine or technology, is supposed to give us more freedom. In this case, the freedom to revolutionize a sport in such a way that it becomes safer and head injuries decrease. Hundreds of thousands of children who want to play sports like football but whose parents are afraid to let them, now have the freedom to do so.
There is a war on masculinity in America of which many people, myself included, have written about extensively. Contact sports like football are the latest arena this is being played out in. “Locker room culture” is a phrase I never heard of until this past year and it’s a clever phrase that is supposed to falsely conjure up imagery of misogyny, racism, and rape culture. The great irony in this is that the field, court, or mat is the one place many of us who actually play sports, male or female, black or white, find refuge from society’s issues.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
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