Don sabo pigskin patriarchy and pain

“Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain” Don Sabo

Sex, Violence and Power in Sports 1994

I am sitting down to write as I’ve done thousands of times over the last decade. But today there’s something very different. I’m not in pain. A half year ago I underwent back surgery. My physician removed two disks from the lumbar region of my spine and fused three vertebrae using bone scrapings from my right hip. The surgery is called a “spinal fusion.” For seventy-two hours I was completely immobilized. On the fifth day, I took a few faltering first steps with one of those aluminum walkers that are usually associated with the elderly in nursing homes. I progressed rapidly and left the hospital after nine days completely free of pain for the first time in years. How did I, a well-intending and reasonably gentle boy from western Pennsylvania, ever get into so much pain? At a simple level, I ended up in pain because I played a sport that brutalizes men’s (and now sometimes women’s) bodies. Why I played football and bit the bullet of pain, however, is more complicated. Like a young child who learns to dance or sing for a piece of candy, I played for rewards and payoffs. Winning at sports meant winning friends and carving a place for myself within the male pecking order. Success at the “game” would make me less like myself and more like the older boys and like all my many professional football heroes. Pictures of NFL greats in their hulking and snarling forms filled my head and hung all over my bedroom walls, beckoning me forward like mythic Sirens. If I could be like those Greats, I told myself, people would adore me as much as I adored them. I might even adore myself. As an adolescent I hoped sports would get me attention from the girls. Later, I became more practical-minded and I worried more about my future. What kind of work would I do for a living? Football became my ticket to a college scholarship which, in western Pennsylvania during the early ‘sixties, meant a career instead of getting stuck in the steel-mills. My bout with pain and spinal “pathology” began with a decision I made in 1955 when I was 8 years old. I “went out” for football. At the time, I felt uncomfortable inside my body—too fat, too short, too weak. Freckles and glasses, too! I wanted to change my image, and I felt that changing my body was one place to begin. My parents bought me a set of weights, and one of the older boys in the neighborhood was solicited to demonstrate their use. I can still remember the ease with which he lifted the barbell, the veins popping through his bulging biceps in the summer sun, and the sated look of strength and accomplishment on his face. This was to be the image of my future. That fall I made a dinner-table announcement that I was going out for football. What followed was a rather inauspicious beginning. First, the initiation rites. Pricking the flesh with thorns until blood was drawn and having hot peppers rubbed into my eyes. Getting punched in the gut again and again. Being forced to wear a jockstrap around my nose and not knowing what was funny. Then came what was to be an endless series of proving myself: calisthenics until my arms ached; hitting hard and fast and knocking the other guy down; getting hit in the groin and not crying. I learned that pain and injury are “part of the game.” I “played” through grade school, co-captained my high school team, and went on to become an inside line-backer and defensive captain at the NCAA Division I level. I learned to be an animal. Coaches took notice of animals. Animals made first team. Animals were fanatically aggressive and ruthlessly competitive. If I saw an arm in front of me, I trampled it. Whenever blood was spilled, I nodded approval. Broken bones (not mine of course) were secretly seen as little victories within the bigger struggle. The coaches taught me to “punish the other man,” but little did I suspect that I was

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devastating my own body at the same time. There were broken noses, ribs, fingers, toes and teeth, torn muscles and ligaments, bruises, bad knees, and busted lips, and the gradual pulverizing of my spinal column that, by the time my jock career was long over at age 30, had resulted in seven years of near-constant pain. It was a long road to the surgeon’s office. Now surgically freed from its grip, my understanding of pain has changed. Pain had gnawed away at my insides. Pain turned my awareness inward. I blamed myself for my predicament; I thought that I was solely responsible for every twinge and sleepless night. But this view was an illusion. My pain, each individual’s pain, is really an expression of a linkage to an outer world of people, events, and forces. The origins of our pain are rooted outside, not inside, our skins. Sport is just one of the many areas in our culture where pain is more important than pleasure. Boys are taught that to endure pain is courageous, to survive pain is manly. The principle that pain is “good” and pleasure is “bad” is crudely evident in the “no pain, no gain” philosophy of so many coaches and athletes. The “pain principle” weaves its way into the lives and psyches of male athletes in two fundamental ways. It stifles men’s awareness of their bodies and limits our emotional expression. We learn to ignore personal hurts and injuries because they interfere with the “efficiency” and “goals” of the “team.” We become adept at taking the feelings that boil up inside us—feelings of insecurity and stress from striving so hard for success—and channeling them into a bundle of rage which is directed at opponents and enemies. This posture toward oneself and the world is not limited to “jocks.” It is evident in the lives of many nonathletic men who, as tough guys, deny their authentic physical or emotional needs and develop health problems as a result. Today, I no longer perceive myself as an individual ripped off by athletic injury. Rather, I see myself as just on more man among many men who got swallowed up by a social system predicated on male domination. Patriarchy has two structural aspects. First, it is a hierarchical system in which men dominate women in crude and debased, slick and subtle ways. Feminists have made great progress exposing and analyzing this dimension of the edifice of sexism. But it is also a system of intermale dominance, in which a minority of men dominates the masses of men. This intermale dominance hierarchy exploits the majority of those it beckons to climb its heights. Patriarchy’s mythos of heroism and its morality of power-worship implant visions of ecstasy and masculine excellence in the minds of the boys who ultimately will defend its inequities and ridicule its victims. It is inside this institutional framework that I have begun to explore the essence and scope of “the pain principle.” Patriarchy is a form of social hierarchy. Hierarchy breeds inequity and inequity breeds pain. To remain stable, the hierarchy must either justify the pain or explain it away. In a patriarchy, women and the masses of men are fed the cultural message that pain is inevitable and that pain enhances one’s character and moral worth. This principle is expressed in Judeo-Christian beliefs. The Judeo- Christian god inflicts or permits pain, yet “the Father” is still revered and loved. Likewise, a chief disciplinarian in the patriarchal family, the father has the right to inflict pain. Most men learned to heed these cultural messages and take their “cues for survival” from the patriarchy. The Willie Lomans of the economy pander to the profit and the American Dream. Soldiers, young and old, salute their neo-Hun generals. Right-wing Christians bow before the idols of righteousness, affluence, and conformity. And male athletes adopt the visions and values that coaches are offering: to take orders, to take pain to “take out” opponents, to take the game seriously, to take women, and to take their place on the team. And if they can’t “take it,” then the rewards of athletic camaraderie, prestige, scholarship, pro contracts, and community recognitions are not forthcoming. Becoming a football player fosters conformity to male-chauvinistic values and self-abusing lifestyles. It contributes to the legitimacy of a social structure based on patriarchal power. Male competition for prestige and status in sports and elsewhere leads to identification with the relatively few males who

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control resources and are able to bestow rewards and inflict punishment. Male supremacists are not born, they are made, and traditional athletic socialization is a fundamental contribution to this complex social-psychological and political process. Through sports, many males, indeed, learn to “take it”— that is, to internalize patriarchal values which, in turn, become part of their gender identity and conception of women and society. My high school coach once evoked the pain principle during a pre-game peptalk. For what seemed like an eternity, he paced frenetically and silently before us with fists clenched and head bowed. He suddenly stopped and faced us with a smile. It was as though he had approached a podium to begin a long-awaited lecture. “Boys,” he began, “people who say that football is a ‘contact sport’ are dead wrong. Dancing is a contact sport. Football is a game of pain and violence! Now get the hell out of here and kick some ass.” We practically ran through the wall of the locker room, surging in unison to fight the coach’s war. I see now that the coach was right but for all the wrong reasons. I should have taken him at his word and never played the game! NAME: DATE: