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Tuesday, March 6, 2012

"The Saints, Head-hunting, and (Another) Disaster for the NFL" by Charles Pierce - Grantland.com

Charles Pierce's whole schtick is getting a little tiresome to me. I know I've touted him in the past, and he's a good writer no doubt. But between his undeniably self-righteous politics blog at Esquire and pieces like this one about the Saints bounty scandal, you begin to wonder how his mind got so high while his head stayed buried so low in the sand.

I'm almost insulted by all the 'outrage' about this Saints thing. Like we're supposed to be surprised that football players are trying to hurt each other? And multi-millionaire professional football players are putting down infinitesimal percentages of their salaries on who can hurt who? The horror. I mean no fucking shit this is going on. It's going on with every team in the NFL I'd bet. It was going on at the University of Miami and those guys didn't make an honest cent playing the game. Even Brett Favre, who got slobber-knocked left and right by these very Saints was just sort of like "yeah, that's football" when he was interviewed about 'the scandal.'

So save me the self-righteous blather about saving players' health and whatnot. They're all big boys. They signed on to run into each other at full speed and now they know the ramifications of their actions and you know what? By and large, they still don't seem to care. Because if they didn't play pro football they wouldn't have any money or women or nice cars or or big homes, and a lot of them would be pumping gas, teaching gym, selling insurance, or, in I'd wager more than a few cases, dead or in jail. At least they're honest with themselves about it. I can respect the hell out of that.

Bottom line, football is a violent game played by mean and angry men. As long as that's true there's always going to be imminent risk involved. And if you don't want to watch it, if that violence insults you, that's fine. Go watch soccer. I hear the US beat Italy 1-0.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7647468/the-new-orleans-saints-nfl-concussions

P.S. Realest shit I ever wrote.

P.P.S. Still a decent article to read about this Saints stuff.

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