The King of Sports by Gregg Easterbrook

Author:Gregg Easterbrook
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

The next chapter: in a nation with epidemics of childhood obesity and prescription-drug abuse, the most popular sport celebrates weight gain and allows even healthy players to be injected with painkillers.

When Football Sends the Wrong Messages About Weight, Drugs and Cheating

7

HOW 307 POUNDS BECAME UNDERSIZED

The NFL draft of April 2011 was in progress. Some 42 million Americans watched, more than twice as many as tuned in to that year’s highest-rated episode of Hawaii Five-0. Tens of millions of Americans observed names called, followed by muscular young athletes walking across a stage to give crushing man-hugs to the NFL commissioner. Football was not being played, merely talked about. Watching football merely being talked about would prove the highest-rated US television event of the month.

When in 1981 the fledgling ESPN first broadcast the NFL draft, even sports nuts thought this was crazy—who would sit around staring at the tube as men in team Windbreakers spoke the names of unknown linebackers? By the mid-1980s, large employers such as the Detroit automakers began to puzzle over workers calling in sick on the same weekday in April, eventually realizing they were staying home for the NFL draft, then held during regular business hours. The league would shift the draft to Saturdays to increase viewership, then to prime time.

Perhaps the lure of the draft has to do with collective memories of choosing up sides in gym class. Practically everyone has a humiliating memory of being the last one chosen, or being laughed at when made a captain by some clueless gym teacher. By watching the draft, viewers can experience schadenfreude as others suffer through a high-tech version of gym-class choosing-ups: every year some famous college player is expected to be taken high and must sweat for hours on camera as others are selected instead. Or perhaps Americans are simply so enamored of professional football, they will tune in anything that begins with the NFL shield and chiming bells.

In April 2011, the San Francisco 49ers chose Aldon Smith of Missouri, and the Tennessee Titans picked Jake Locker of the University of Washington. Next the Dallas Cowboys were on the clock. The ’Boys needed an offensive tackle and were expected to select Tyron Smith of USC, which has produced many of the NFL’s best offensive linemen. ESPN host Chris Berman furrowed his brow. Smith, he said, might be undersized. On NFL Network, analyst Mike Mayock worried that Smith was not big enough for the NFL. Dozens of websites fixate on the draft: by consensus, their verdict about Smith was “undersized.”

On draft day, Tyron Smith was six foot five inches tall and weighed 307 pounds. A generation ago, a 307-pound football player was a giant. By Smith’s draft day he was spoken of as if he were a lissome ballerino.

* * *

ONCE, FOOTBALL PLAYERS WERE NOT notably different in physique from their peers. Ben Schwartzwalder, who would coach the great players Jim Brown and Ernie Davis at Syracuse, in the 1930s lined up at center for West Virginia University at 146 pounds.

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