How Is Football Any More Moral Than Cockfighting?

Buzz Killington reporting for duty on Super Bowl Sunday. Here’s your high-level, unapologetic trolling for the day:

The Super Bowl is a neo-pagan celebration of sex and death. In the future our children and grandchildren will look back on our nation’s annual secular holiday with the same incredulity as they will the recent bi-partisan celebration of the new “king” of the Sharia slave state we dignify with the name “Saudi Arabia.” It’ll be just one more sign of our age’s cultural confusion and primitivism.

One of my last memories of my maternal grandfather before he died was a visit where we sat around the table as he recounted various adventures from his cock-fighting days. Grandpa did all kinds of jobs to hustle money and using the roosters from the family hen house for gambling was one of them. Of course we regard such a practice today as barbaric, and cruel — I remember seeing it portrayed in one of my favorite childhood books on medieval castles.

But isn’t that kind of bloodsport less cruel than what we celebrate as a culture today? Grandpa wasn’t doing much worse than KFC — and he wasn’t teaching teenagers how to smash their skulls together and dedicate their lives to a silly sport. Yet what he was doing is now illegal and the NFL today is a billion dollar industry.

And what’s the deal with the annual discussions about whether football players should miss the Super Bowl for their children’s births?

How much more obvious does it need to be that football appreciation in its extreme forms has become an idol in America today? How much life is worth being sacrificed and risked for a game where a pigskin ball is thrown around a field?

And I’m sorry, but I’ll go a step further: can someone explain to me why it’s moral to ever encourage a child to dedicate their lives to playing sports full-time? Isn’t encouraging a boy to aspire to be a professional football player akin to pushing a little girl to be a pole dancer? That they are essentially told to sacrifice themselves as individuals and dedicate their lives to creating and maintaining some body at the supposed pinnacle of masculine or feminine perfection?

I don’t dispute that sports can be fun to play with others and can foster an understanding of teamwork, etc. Games are good — but we don’t make the country’s top dart-throwing, bowling, or even baseball or basketball games the kind of cultural secular holiday we do with the Super Bowl. What’s the difference?

Does it have to be a bloodsport like football where life is actually on the line to really reach into people’s soul and get them to find something that feels meaningful?

Isn’t there something better to do with one’s life? Aren’t there individuals in our culture more worthy of being celebrated than a bunch of millionaires who play sports on TV?