Michael Oriard has spent decades exploring football’s place in American culture. A former Kansas City Chiefs lineman who became a professor of English, Oriard has written a series of books examining the game’s history, its portrayal in media and literature, as well as the NFL’s growth as a business. His latest work, Sanctioned Savagery, returns to a theme that has shadowed the sport for years: the concussion crisis, and what it reveals about football’s enduring mix of artistry, violence, and meaning.
How did the book come about?
I’ve been writing what I call the cultural history of football for a long time. My last book on the NFL, Brand NFL, came out before the concussion crisis really took hold. Mike Webster had died, but I finished that book without understanding just how much the issue of brain injuries could change the game’s future.
In the paperback of Brand NFL I flagged two issues for the league’s future: labor unrest, and the possibility that the game was simply too dangerous. Football had always been violent, but the damage we were used to talking about was to players’ bodies. Suddenly, we were confronting the danger to players’ brains.
I’d always thought I would write another book once the science was settled, once we could identify CTE in living tissue, not just through autopsies. But that’s proving incredibly difficult. I’m 77 now, and it won’t be resolved before I’m done writing. So I decided to take it on anyway, even though the issue is still unsettled.
The book makes clear that the concussion crisis isn’t just an NFL problem. How do you see it playing out at other levels?
If I were a parent today with young boys who wanted to play football, I’d be extremely anxious. The NFL is pushing flag football because it gets kids into the game without the same risks, and it keeps them as fans. But we don’t really know how effective the safety measures are.
Where it really matters is high school. There’s a general agreement now that no boy should play tackle before 14. That’s when kids enter high school, but there’s nothing magical about that age in terms of child development. Parents are right to be nervous: this is their kids’ future at risk.
What I discovered in writing the book is that there was never really a single consensus about football. For immigrant kids in the 1920s or for Black kids after integration, football was a way out and a way up. It’s meant different things to different groups. Now, with the threat of brain damage, the stakes are higher. And increasingly, the kids who play are those who still see it as their best chance for a good life.
You write that the long-standing narrative that football builds character through violence hasn’t changed since the sport’s origins. Why do you think that is?
That’s the big question. How much of it is in our biology, and how much of it is cultural? I don’t have a definitive answer. There is something universal about our fascination with violent spectacle – the way people slow down at car accidents, or the way some people love horror films.
What football does is take those tendencies and turn them into drama. At its heart is the tension between artistry and violence. Think of a receiver reaching for a pass just as a defender smashes into him. The artistry makes it beautiful, the violence makes it impressive.
To me, that tension is what keeps football compelling. The NFL has adjusted belatedly to the concussion crisis, but the spectacle, the artistry and the violence together, remains.
Given all that, what’s your relationship with football like now?
When my playing career ended abruptly, I stayed away for a while. I was finishing my PhD, raising kids, and I was very aware of the cliché of fathers pushing their sons to prove themselves. I deliberately didn’t watch games with my boys.
Later, as I began writing more about football, I started watching again. My wife has always enjoyed it, so it became part of our weekends together. Now it’s an escape, and frankly, it’s still the most entertaining thing on television. It’s unscripted drama.
If I were certain that 30 percent of those players were destined for dementia, I couldn’t watch. But I don’t know that, and I like to think the new measures are making it safer. So I suspend judgment in order to keep being a football fan.
You were an English professor. How did that shape your approach to football?
I wrote my dissertation on American sports literature, then taught American literature for most of my career. Eventually I realised I knew as much about football as the best journalists, and that I could bring a literary approach to it.
I treat football texts – newspapers, magazines, fiction – as ways to understand the game’s meaning. Sports journalism creates characters and narratives. The boundary between fiction and nonfiction in sports writing is porous, and both shape how people see the game.
What’s the first football book that you remember reading?
At some point, my older brother and I got our hands on a bunch of boys sports books, so my first football book was probably a Bronc Burnett story by a guy named Wilfred McCormick. He was one of many writers who turned out these sports novels for boys. They were about baseball primarily, but also football and a little bit of basketball or hockey.
What are your favourite football books?
When I was writing my dissertation and seriously looking into this, I read close to everything, but that’s only up to about 1980. There’s a novel from 1968 called A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley. What’s wonderful about it, is that it’s from the perspective of the fan, rather than player. It’s about professional football before it became America’s game. I think that’s a really, really fine novel. And Don DeLillo’s End Zone was a tough novel to teach 19 year olds, because it’s not a conventional narrative, but it’s just a wonderfully inventive book. So those are the two that I would mention.
Is there a football book you’d consider to be an overlooked gem?
I’m going to give you one out of the blue, called The Freshman by James Hopper. It was published in 1911 and I’m currently writing an essay about it. It was originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and then published in a book. Hopper played football at the University of California in the 1890s when the game was really, really young, and then he wrote all of these football stories out of those experiences. And this was back when football was this sort of romantic quest and devotion to Alma Mater was a really powerful force. What’s wonderful about that is that it is so unlike college football today. It’s a time capsule that stands out in sharp contrast to the world that we know today.
If you were stranded on a desert island, what books would you want with you.
That’s a classic party question. You’re talking about books I’ve already read that wouldn’t mind rereading. As an English professor, Faulkner was the great writer, so a handful of his books would be nice. Since retirement in 2013, instead of reading the American novels I was teaching, I’ve been trying to fill in the enormous gaps in my understanding of the world. So the books that I found most astonishing have been things like Jared Diamond’s, Guns, Germs and Steel, and Yuval Noah Harari’s books, these extraordinarily ambitious overviews of the world you know that are just full of stuff I don’t know. Or Robert Sapolsky, a cognitive scientist who has a couple books: Behave is the better one, I think, and Determined, about how our free will is limited by our hardwiring. What I know about the way the human brain works, I could sum up in about 25 words, so these things are really wonderful. I grew up and went through most of my adulthood knowing so little about the entire Islamic world or the great civilizations of Asia, so books on those subjects are fascinating now. Like I say, I’m filling in some of those enormous gaps.
Review: Sanctioned Savagery
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