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  • The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives ed. by Thomas P. Oates and Zack Furness
  • Jacob L. Goodson
THE NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives. Edited by Thomas P. Oates and Zack Furness. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. 2014.

The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Thomas P. Oates and Zack Furness, offers readers twelve provocative and well-researched chapters on ethical and social problems found within the National Football League. Section I, entitled “Production, Promotion, and Control,” contains four chapters; section II, entitled “Identities, Social Hierarchies, and Cultural Power,” contains five chapters; and section III, entitled “Gridirons and Battlefields,” contains three chapters.

One of the editors of the collection, Thomas P. Oates, also serves as the author of chapter 4: “New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom.” Oates asserts that professional football players are turned into “commodities to be consumed selectively and self-consciously by sports fans” (80). Oates identifies “three football-related entertainments” that provide emotionally manipulative ways in which the NFL ensures that their fans feel connected to the players-as-commodities: the “media spectacle of the NFL draft, the virtual competition of fantasy football, and the video game Madden NFL” (80). Oates spends the remainder of his chapter developing and explaining each of these “football-related entertainments” and concludes that there is a deeply problematic racial element to the commodification (and objectification) of NFL players: black masculinity is offered to the “neoliberal marketplace” as an item to be consumed without any recognition of the personhood of these players (92–96). To borrow terms from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: the “media spectacle of the NFL draft, the virtual competition of fantasy football, and the video game Madden NFL” construct and maintain a master-slave relationship between the NFL (master) and African-American athletes (slaves).

The sociologist, Katie Rodgers, contributes chapter 7: “‘I was a gladiator’: Pain, Injury, and Masculinity in the NFL.” Rodgers asserts that professional football players are turned into commodities to be consumed by the public, but the direction of her chapter concerns an examination of what it means to “play hurt” and the machismo assumed within the locker rooms of the NFL. Her argument is that this machismo requires a willingness to “play hurt,” during one’s NFL career, but also requires players to “live hurt” after their careers are over. Rodgers’s argument is convincing and persuasive. If a professor chooses to teach this book in the undergraduate classroom, then Rodgers’s chapter ought to be paired with Tara Magdalinski’s “The Nature of Health” (see Sports, Technology, and the Body: The Nature of Performance, [2008] 71–90) because Magdalinski provides a deontological moral framework for why professional athletes, certified training assistants, and team physicians need to avoid the “playing hurt” presumption no matter the consequences for their career or for their team. [End Page 169]

In the third section, “Gridirons and Battlefields,” all three chapters examine the mentalities and metaphors of war often found within the expectations and rhetoric of the NFL. Offensive linemen are described as being “in the trenches” of which they either control or lose (191–203). The production of films and highlights, produced by the NFL, perpetuate military images and rely on war metaphors for narrating the significance of their sport (205–223). In the final chapter of the book, we find a critical analysis of how former NFL player and military soldier Pat Tillman was remembered after his death (226–244).

For NFL fans, this collection will be difficult to read and swallow. While I highly recommend requiring this book in an undergraduate classroom, teaching it will involve an intense amount of prudential judgments and skills of sensitivity on the part of the professor.

Stephen Metcalfe, of Slate’s “Culture Gabfest” and a self-described New York Jets fan, often reflects upon the difficulty concerning how American intellectuals can continue to enjoy and watch NFL games because of the enormous amount of ethical and social problems involved with the institution. Readers of this collection will come away with the same conviction and a similar feeling. Therefore, readers of this collection will be faced with a decision: (a) criticism, cynicism, and despair about the current state...

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