American Football projects a culture of violence on and off the pitch

Anheuser-Busch has made a shocking discovery. The NFL, the company's money heifer over these many years, is a spectacularly violent league.

That violence spills from the field of torn ligaments, broken bones and concussion-forgotten dreams to the personal lives of players, as seemingly each year a few of them knock their wives out cold and beat their children and girlfriends.

And each year, older players forget who they are and fall into depressions at their injury-driven decrepitude.

The revelation that Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings' All-Pro running back, faces child abuse charges for beating his four-year-old son with a tree branch ("switch" is such a polite word), and that the league intends to let him play on Sunday, has pushed a few high-rolling corporate sponsors into a reasonable facsimile of concern.

“We are not yet satisfied with the league’s handling of behaviors that so clearly go against our own company culture and moral code,” noted Anheuser-Busch, which produces the official beer of the NFL. “We have shared our concerns and expectations with the league.”

That’s not quite the sound of the Budweiser Clydesdales trotting away. The NFL, cosseted by its $10 billion (€7,718,699,000) in annual revenue, including $1.07 billion in sponsorship revenue, has tended to take mayhem in manly stride.

As each year several NFL players beat their wives and girlfriends and still play the next Sunday, it’s perhaps not unkind to suggest that Anheuser-Busch is new to its religion.

Nor is it clear whether the moral code of the nation’s leading beer company extends to concerns about the league’s policy on driving under the influence. It is, however, grand that the company required me to type in my age before entering its 21-and-over website. That is an infallible honour system.

Corporate executives with Radisson and Nike also clambered up to the nearest approximation of moral high ground yesterday. Radisson suspended its limited sponsorship of the Vikings, which sounds tough in a limited way.

And Nike announced that it had removed Peterson jerseys from its stores in the Twin Cities. Those jerseys can be found online, and in other cities. So this is not quite Solomon tugging at the pillars of the sporting-goods temple.

We coexist in two cultural moments at once. After years of more or less covering our ears at talk of the broken bodies and minds of football players and the toll taken on their spouses, we now argue about knockout punches and beaten wives and work ourselves into a righteous frenzy from Monday to Saturday.

Then on Sunday - and on Monday and Thursday evenings - we pull on our NFL jerseys and drink beer and scream at the television set, urging our team to commit glorious violence.

The football ratings keep going whack. So NBC sent out its email statement after the Chicago Bears-San Francisco 49ers telecast on Sunday night. It revealed a glorious audience share: “The NFL’s most watched West Coast Sunday Prime Time game ever!”

The 49ers’ 6-foot, 300-pound defensive end, Ray McDonald, played in that one. He is under police investigation after his pregnant fiancee was found with “visible injuries” on her arms and neck at the end of August.

Our choices of condemnation are not always obvious. McDonald has yet to be charged with a crime. Prosecutors declined even to prosecute Ray Rice.

The NFL has instituted the toughest policy on domestic violence in pro sports, even if Commissioner Roger Goodell appears more dazed and confused by the day.

In July, Goodell suspended Rice for two games. Then he apologised and instituted a six-game suspension for players. Then the video of Rice knocking out his then-fianc?e appeared, and Goodell suspended Rice indefinitely. Then he fell into something like silence.

In some ways, the workaday violence of this sport is the most disturbing. I was in Denver a couple of weeks back for the opening game between the Broncos and the Indianapolis Colts.

A glorious full moon rose over a packed-to-the-gills and festive stadium. We had not reached the midway point of the first half before reports began to stream into the press box, informing us of players pulled off the field with shoulders jammed, knees extended, backs, ankles and so on.

It was like having an excellent box at the Roman Colosseum. You no sooner got to cheer that nice gladiator than a lion grabbed him.

Then there's the John Abraham sideshow down in Phoenix. Abraham, a 36-year-old veteran linebacker, suffered a concussion in the season's first game.

Afterward, ESPN reported that he had been struggling with memory loss for more than a year. He spoke of waning desire, and blood lust draining away.

Then he reversed himself and trotted off to the neurologist to get cleared to play. "A lot of it was to do with the headaches," Cardinals coach Bruce Arians assured the news media.

“First real big one he’s ever had. There’s other things that we’re dealing with, and he’s fine with those.” Nothing here worth getting shocked about. This Bud’s for you, John Abraham.

New York Times