Yeshiva bochrim in Israel who spend all week studying Toras Hashem, middos tovos, davening and working on themselves, go out on Fridays and Motzei Shabbosos and play a quite violent game [so I am told - I have never seen one] of flag football. This is disturbing given the reality that to push and shove another human being flies in the face of the gentle and sweet comportment that the Torah tries to impart to us. There are multiple injuries every week on the playing field [I remember one boy about my age got his nose rammed up into his brain רח"ל].
If this post stops one boy from playing a violent sport or from watching one - והיה זה שכרי. I am not against fun or exercise. I am against intentionally causing pain to another human being....
Clyde Haberman - New York Times
The sweet science. That was the lofty sobriquet assigned to boxing long ago by devoted followers with a romantic flair. But there came a time when the fight game’s hold on the American spirit began to loosen, when it stood widely condemned as plain brutal.
Maybe the transformative moment was in 1982 when a South Korean boxer, Duk-koo Kim, died after taking a pounding from Ray Mancini in a lightweight title match. Or maybe it was back in 1962 when Emile Griffith beat Benny Paret into a fatal coma during a welterweight title fight. Perhaps the moment arrived earlier yet with works like “The Harder They Fall,” a 1947 Budd Schulberg novel and 1956 film that depicted the boxing world as a swamp of crooked managers, mobbed-up promoters and blood-lusting fans. Even Hemingway, who dearly embraced the so-called manly art of self-defense, acknowledged its ruinous potential in “The Battler,” a 1925 short story revolving around a broken-down punch-drunk pug.
Two months later, in January 1983, the Journal of the American Medical Association denounced
boxing as “an obscenity” and said it should be outlawed. “Boxing, as a throwback to uncivilized man, should not be sanctioned by any civilized society,” wrote the journal’s editor, Dr. George Lundberg. Also in the early ’80s, the American Academy of Pediatrics urged that boxing be eliminated from sports programs for children and young adults, and the World Medical Association, based in France, recommended banning the sport everywhere.
At the United States Military Academy, boxing has been an academic requirement and a rite of passage for more than a century. Yet there, too, some have begun to ask if character-building might be promoted through methods other than cadets’ punching one another repeatedly in the head — with some suffering concussions.
Not that the abolitionists have prevailed in this country or almost any other. In fact, some of the few nations that had at one point imposed bans — like Sweden, Cuba and Norway — reversed themselves in the last few years. Defenders of the sport insist that, yes, it is a sweet science, a test of skill, stamina and strategy and not merely a slugfest. A sport akin to boxing, mixed martial arts, has grown in popularity, banned in this country only in New York State.
Even so, the vaunted prizefighting of old is on the ropes. News media attention tends to be scant. Major bouts, such as they are, are consigned to pay-per-view showings. Once in a while, a fighter comes along to stir excitement, a Floyd Mayweather Jr. or a Manny Pacquiao, but that’s the exception. The professional ranks today are mired in a bewildering array of weight divisions — 17, where once there were eight — and in an alphabet soup of multiple sanctioning organizations.
Among the questions is whether football players — well padded and practically faceless under their helmets and visors — are inclined to whack one another hard precisely because they are encased in so much protective gear. Some even have helmets and shoulder pads made with Kevlar, the superstrong fiber used in bullet-resistant vests. In a related rough-and-tumble sport, rugby, players wear no comparable armor. They also do not butt heads as American footballers do. Not surprisingly, degenerative brain disease is not an overriding worry in rugby (though spinal injuries from scrums are). In women’s lacrosse, too, players wear no helmets, except for goaltenders; a consensus has formed that head protection would only encourage rougher play.
The dangers inherent to football are so severe that some professional players say they do not want their own sons to follow in their steps. President Obama has similarly said that if he had a son, he would not let him play pro ball.
At the high school level, player deaths have led some parents and schools to rethink their children’s involvement in the sport. Several schools shut down their programs, if only because they could not round up enough players to take the field. Amid growing awareness of the risks, the number of high school boys playing football has declined by 2.4 percent over the last five years, to 1.08 million, according to a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations.
In theory anyway, a major interruption of the flow of players from high school to college and then on to the pros could disrupt the game. Comparable breaks in the talent pipeline certainly took their toll on boxing. Granted, football’s collapse is on no one’s radar. Still, boxing learned the hard way that it was not invulnerable, just as Ad Francis had to absorb that lesson.
He is the battler in the Hemingway work, a man with a misshapen face and brains scrambled from too many blows. He had been tough in the ring, a champ. “They all bust their hands on me,” he tells the story’s protagonist, Nick Adams. “They couldn’t hurt me.”
Until they did. Hurt him bad.
