Napoleon Blownapart: Why I Don't Watch Football

I stopped watching football on September 5, 1994. It was a Monday Night Football game, the Oakland Raiders against the San Francisco 49ers, and Raiders running back Napoleon McCallum had just been handed the ball. Then, this happened:

"I got the ball and just tried to run through the middle, and the whole line was stopped up," McCallum recalls. "There was a big pile and I tried to go forward, and (49ers linebacker) Ken Norton had my shoulders and he was trying to pull me back. I'm pushing forward, and he's pulling me back and something gave, and that was my knee."
It was a gruesome sight, and a worldwide audience witnessed it over and over on instant replay: McCallum's left knee had been contorted so badly that his lower leg looked to be dangling by a thread. Blood was quite visible.
McCallum says he didn't feel pain until he was in the ambulance that took him to a hospital. When he arrived, doctors gave the diagnosis: dislocated knee, ruptured artery, three of four ligaments damaged.
(from the Las Vegas Review-Journal)

In a word, it was hideous. McCallum nearly lost his leg. Football, the sport I loved to watch as a kid, became for me like a horror movie: at any moment something stomach-turningly gory could happen. Or worse, it was like watching olympic figure skating, waiting for the inevitable missed an axel or caught edge that would send the skater sprawling to the ice. It jangled my nerves.

I want to be clear that it's not a moral thing: I have nothing against football, any more than I do against boxing or hockey fights. Lots of people like a little violence in their sports, and the professional athletes who play those sports are handsomely compensated for their risks. I just choose, along with three or four other sports fans nationwide, to watch the Australian Open instead of the NFC Championship game, in the same way that I would pick to watch Old School over Halloween.

But I'll watch the Superbowl, of course. I may be a pacifist, but I'm also an American. Though I'm only watching it for the commercials, I swear.