“Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you’re fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of…

“Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you’re fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of dehumanizing,” he said during a series of conversations over the spring and summer. “It’s like a spectacle of violence, for entertainment, and you’re the actors in it. You’re complicit in that: You put on the uniform. And it’s a trivial thing at its core. It’s make-believe, really. That’s the truth about it.”

http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13463272/how-former-san-francisco-49ers-chris-borland-retirement-change-nfl-forever

4 thoughts on ““Dehumanizing sounds so extreme, but when you’re fighting for a football at the bottom of the pile, it is kind of…

  1. Fascinating article. Until not so long ago I thought that American football was a slightly softer version of rugby due to all the helmets and padding, but then I realised that if anything, it’s a safety mechanism not to have the helmets and the padding. Much harder to smash at full speed into someone else’s head if it’s just the squishy head there rather than a stout helmet, right?

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