Week 10 Thoughts - The immense smallness of football

The first piece of football news I saw today was that Marshawn Kneeland had died. The second was that he’d died by suicide, having led police in Texas on some kind of pursuit.

I am not interested in the particulars of this case beyond the obvious: this is a tragedy, and it is one that will play out again and again on many small, unnoticed stages even just today. That we know of Kneeland at all is because he was a football player. He was a very good one at Western Michigan, and was still in the process of figuring out how to be one for the Dallas Cowboys.

Football is obviously relevant to Kneeland’s story, but I struggle with that. I struggle with football in an abstract sort of way the more I watch it. I do not have a particularly hard time with many of the other issues connected to this game; I understand that the violence and human cost and commodification of talent and proliferation of gambling all fall at their own places of our cultural good/bad spectrum, and I’ve essentially swallowed the whole lot as a part of the social contract that comes with being a football fan. My struggle is basically this: as exemplified by Kneeland, I know him only as a football player.

I only know Jordan Love as a football player. I only know Josh Jacobs as a football player. I only know Aaron Rodgers as a football player, and that’s kind of a shame, honestly, because he seems to be making a genuine, honest effort at trying to be more than a football player, however misguided that may be or however much people might make fun of him.

But I know these men, to the extent that I know them, because of this game. They are in my home and my thoughts. I know facts about them. My life is shaped by the game they play in meaningful ways. Football is a huge cultural and economic force, and I’ve expended a great deal of time and energy to learn about it and try to explain it to others.

And yet, it’s so small. It’s a game of blocking and tackling, running and throwing. Beyond the benefits of being in great shape, there’s little upside that comes with being a highly skilled football player. There’s little transferable value in being a football player, unless you decide you want to become a professional athletic trainer, or a coach, or are popular and charismatic enough to make a living talking about the sport once you can no longer play it. And that’s just it: this monolith of money and culture is little more than a bunch of people watching other people who happen to be varying degrees of big and fast operate in synchronized ways, and we know Marshawn Kneeland because of it.

Well, we know of him. We don’t know him as a human being. We don’t know why he struggled. We don’t know his hopes or dreams or desires. And more importantly, as far as today’s events are concerned, we don’t know the shape of the hole he leaves in his world. How will he be mourned, and who will mourn him?

All of these things matter more today than anything he could do on the field. But all of them are so easy to forget in the context of things like who will fill Kneeland’s place on the Cowboys’ depth chart and how they’ll fill his roster spot. And unless we refuse to let it, the immense smallness of football will outweigh the small immensities we will never get to see.

To read the rest of this post, support The Power Sweep on Patreon or Substack.