I wrote something Saturday night without thinking very long about the words before I hit send: “Celebrating a clearly late hit that knocked someone out who was twitching on the field is the most disgusting thing I have seen in a long time.” It was written while Dante Moore was still on the turf of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, when the football game we had spent an entire week dissecting suddenly seemed remarkably unimportant. Oregon and USC were tied together by decades of history, playoff implications and all the usual things we convince ourselves matter tremendously on a Saturday afternoon. Then a young man was lying on a football field and none of them mattered very much at all.
I wondered later whether the emotion of the moment had made the words too strong. Sunday mornings are useful that way. The noise goes away, the game stops moving so quickly and sometimes the things that seemed obvious in the moment look different after a night’s sleep. This one didn’t. I still believe what I wrote, but I also realized the reason the moment bothered me so deeply had less to do with Oregon, USC or even the penalty itself than something more fundamental about why we are able to love a violent game without believing violence is the point of it.
Football exists on a line we rarely acknowledge because we have become so accustomed to watching people walk right up to it. We celebrate a linebacker running through a blocker. We admire a safety arriving with enough force to separate a receiver from the football. Coaches talk about playing with violence and imposing their will on somebody for four quarters, and nobody around the sport needs a translation. I have written those words myself plenty of times because physicality is part of what makes football football. There is courage involved in willingly stepping into collisions most of us would spend our lives avoiding, and pretending the sport is somehow gentler than that does nobody any favors.
