Mencken on College Football

          College football season is in full bloom again and no doubt H.L. Mencken is fuming in his grave. This is what he said about it in "Minority Report", published in 1956:

           College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played.  There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.


          Obviously Mencken's view of college football was indeed a minority opinion and the excesses of the sport have continued to grow to monstrous proportions since his time.  They have also moved downward into the high schools and even elementary schools, all with the encouragement and support of parents and school administrators. Back in the days when he was a newspaper columnist Uncle Jack got so exercised about this that he devoted an entire column to it, to wit:


                                                            Football Hurts

Uncle Jack read in the paper a while back that a Bishop of the Catholic church up in Virginia wants the schools in his diocese to stop having football teams. The paper said this Bishop was very upset because a student in one of his schools got killed playing football against another high school team. He said he thought a game that kills and injures kids the way football does might not be such a good game for schools to sponsor.
A few days later Uncle Jack started seeing "Letters to the Editor" in that paper from people who thought this Bishop must be some kind of communist or maybe even a liberal for saying that high schools would be better off without football teams.
Some of the people who wrote those letters must have been high school graduates, too, because they used "logic" to prove that the Bishop must have been playing without a helmet or something.
"More people get killed in automobile accidents than in football games", they said, "so why doesn't he tell people to stop driving cars, too?"
When Uncle Jack studied philosophy in high school they called this the reductio ad absurdum and it was guaranteed to knock the wind out of your opponent's sails---especially if he wasn't too bright.
Actually Uncle Jack thinks the Bishop is right that too many kids are getting badly hurt playing football even though only a few get killed or paralyzed for life each season. But he doesn't think that even a Bishop can make football go away just by ordering it to stop any more than he can get rid of drug abuse or prohibition by ordering them to stop.
Uncle Jack knows how important football is because he is a victim of football. In fact it would not be exaggerating to say that his entire life has been scarred by football.
This is true even though Uncle Jack never played football because his mother wouldn't let him.
When Uncle Jack wanted to go out for football in high school she "put her foot down" as they used to say. "After all the money I have spent feeding you twelve times a day for the past fifteen years I'm not about to let you get yourself killed playing football," she said in no uncertain terms. "If you go out for football I will stop baking Swedish rye bread on Saturdays," she  threatened. 
Uncle Jack's mother knew that he had an Achilles stomach.
The humiliation of not being allowed to go out for football was almost more than Uncle Jack could bear throughout his otherwise distinguished high school career. While all his friends hobbled around on twisted knees and showed off their broken noses to the girls, all Uncle Jack could do was hide in the house and play jacks with his sister and eat homemade Swedish rye bread.
He is sure the main reason he has never amounted to anything in life is that he never got to play football in high school. Anyway this is how he found out how important football is and how hard it would be to try to get rid of it even if you were a Bishop.
It might be possible, Uncle Jack thinks, to get kids to stop trying to hurt each other when they play football. That's something most of them don't really want to do anyway, but they think they have to because that's what the college and professional players do on television.
All it would take is a few mothers like Uncle Jack's to go and watch at games and at practices. When they see a coach yelling and screaming at kids and telling them to go out there and hurt somebody they could hit him over the head with their umbrellas.
Maybe that Bishop ought to get an umbrella and do the same thing.