>> that's this week's list of nonfiction bestsellers according to the washington post. >> next, booktv is live with steve almond, author of "against football," and gregg easter brook, the author of "the king of sports." they discuss the impact of football on american society and why it must change by examining the brutality of the sports. from the use of taxpayer money to fund nfl stadiums to the large amounts of college budgets earmarked for college football programs. this is about an hour.

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> hello, everyone. good afternoon. i'm susan -- [inaudible] on behalf of our owners and our entire staff, i'd like to welcome you to politics & prose. just a reminder to, please, turn off or silence your cell phones. also during our question and answer session, if you could step up to this mic right here, we'd appreciate it because we're

recording this event. and you can leave your chairs, as we have a couple more events this afternoon. if you haven't been to the store before, please, pick up one or our events calendars and take a look at all we have going on here including classes. we've got three international trips this fall, we have -- [inaudible] next month, so lots going on. i'm excited to introduce steve almond and gregg easterbrook this afternoon to discuss two books on the remarkably-timely subject of football reform. i'm not sure we could have picked a better moment to have this discussion given the spate of stories on problems plaguing the league. it's such a hot button topic right now that it's even graced the cover of the new issue of the new yorker which has an illustration of a football player running down the field being chased by police. i'm going to turn the mic over first to steve almond to discuss his new book, "against football." almond is a widely-published

author of both fiction and nonfiction including the best selling book -- [inaudible] he's a former sports reporter and a fan of, and here i'm quoting him directly, direction -- [inaudible] we also have with us gregg easterbrook who's acclaimed "king of sports" is just out in paperback. easterbrook is the author of eight books, and he's a contributing editor of the atlantic, the washington monthly, and he writes the tuesday morning quarterback column for espn.com. they're going to be in conversation, and then we'll have an audience q&a, and i'm going to turn the mic over first to steve almond. [applause] >> thanks. thanks, and thanks for coming out. it's a beautiful day. we would all, we can all agree together we would rather be outside. thank you for being inside for a little bit. i'm going to read just a little bit from the preface of this

book which is called i wasn't out cold, but i was out, and it's an attempt to sort of set up what the book is about. i've had a clipping on my wall for many years which is just a game story that's about a game between the new england patriots and the miami dolphins, and there's a player named kevin falk who gets tackled, and after the game he's asked about it because he's motionless on the ground for quite some time. quote: i wasn't out cold, but i was out, said falk. asked if he remembered lying on the ground, he said, no, i don't, i knew that, like, it wasn't normal. i didn't have that same normal feeling when i got up. i thought it was funny. that would be the simplest way to explain why i brought this story home and cut out the section in question and taped it to my wall. i thought it said something elemental about athletic delusion, the absurd and pitiful way players hide from the truth of their vocation, that they

earn ungodly sums of money and acclaim for demolishing each other. i assumed the posture of ironic distance which is what americans do to avoid the corruption of our spiritual arrangements. ironic distance allows us to separate ourselves from the big, complicated, moral systems around us -- political, religious, familial -- to sit in judgment of others rather than ourselves. it's the reason as we zoom into the twilight years of our imperial reign that reality tv has become a designated guilty pleasure. but here's the thing, you can run from your own subtext for only so long. those spray-tanned lunatics we happily revile are merely turned-out versions of our private selfs, the horrors we hide from public view. what i mean is there's a deeper reason i cut out those paragraphs a dozen years ago and carried that square of news print through three different moves, each time affixing it to a spot right over my desk.

i told myself it was a window into the dissident psyches of famous barbarians. then a few months ago, around the time my own mother suffered an acute injury to her brain, the truth landed. it was about me. it was about the 40 years i'd spent as an ardent football fan, about my refusal to face the complicity of my own joy in seeing men like kevin falk concussed. i knew that something was wrong with me. this little book is a manifesto. its job is to be full of obnoxious opinions. for example, i happen to believe that our allegiance to football fosters within us a tolerance for violence, greed, racism and homophobia. i recognize that voicing these opinions will cause many fans to write off whatever else i might have to say on this subject as a load of horse shit, involved by someone who's probably wearing a french say hour's suit.

before you -- sailor's suit. let me reiterate, i am one of you. so, please, before you set this book down or quietedly remit it to the -- quietly remit it to the poor soul in your life who thought it would make an interesting gift, i happen to believe that football in its exalted moments is a lovely and intricate form of art. mostly this book is a personal attempt to connect the two synapses that fire in my brain when i hear football, the one that calls out who's playing, what channel, and the one that murmurs, shame on you. my hope is to honor the ethical complexities and the allure of the game. i'm trying to see football for what it truly is. what does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in america in 2014 features giant muscled men, mostly african-american, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? what does it mean that our society has transmuted the

intuitive physical joys of childhood -- run, leap, throw, tackle -- into a corporatized form of simulated combat, that a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning and the undisputed champ of our colossal athletic industrial complex? i knew that like it wasn't normal, so what was it? so that's sort of the prospectus of book. >> thanks, steve. i'm gregg easterbrook, and i'll balance off that very high level of literary erudition by telling you a joke. [laughter] this joke requires you to use the r word, but there's no other way. there's a man and woman, couple, who are passionate redskins' fans. they go to every game, they've been to every game for 30 years, good and bad. and one day the new england patriots or some hot team are in town, and the guy shows up

without his wife. he stares glumly into space. the guy who sat next to him sits down and says where's your wife? the man says i regret to say my wife has passed away. the guy looks at the empty seat, and he says this is a big game. wasn't there anybody in your family or your neighbors or your friends who wanted that ticket? and the guy says, oh, they all went to her funeral. [laughter] >> nice. >> okay. [laughter] all right. my book is also about football reform. steve's is impressionistic and literary, mine is packed with facts. and it involves football at the professional, college and high school level. and i suppose my most important contention is that the lower down the chain you go, the more important the issues become. nobody wants an nfl player to get injured. of course not. but there's only 2,000 of them, and they're adults who assume a risk and are paid very well in return for the risk they assume. you step down to the college

level, there are 60,000 players there, and the big shame of college football, to me, is not that players aren't paid. i don't think that's the ideal solution. the big shame of college football is of the division i level only 55% of players graduate. if most -- you'd never have 100% graduation, but if most of them got bachelor's degrees, that would be fair recome peps for their play on the field. you step down to the high school level, high school and youth football, there you have three the three and a half million, almost all boys -- a handful of girls -- but depending on which number you believe, there's at least three million, maybe three and a half million. and you can certainly learn things from high school football. it can be a great experience. i played in high school. one of my sons did, went on to play in college. boys learn self-discipline, teamwork, they can learn important lessons from football, but they take all the neurological risks and in almost all cases in return for nothing at all since one, if you look at

any group of high school varsity players, one in one thousand will eventually play in the nfl. less than one in fifty will get a recruiting boost to college. so if you look at youth and high school football, whatever reward you're going to get from the sport has to come when you're in and high school football, because the chances are you won't go on. and as i say, for many boys and a handful of girls, it is a really great experience. but you balance that great experience with the risk of head injury in a society that's ever more based on education. the idea of having millions of young people smashing each other in the head on a regular basis just cannot be a good idea. and i'll stop at that and say this book ends, the final chapter is a very complicated reform program, maybe too complicated. i go through a lot of possible things that can be done financially, in education, subsidies we could certainly talk about to reduce those, change the structure of education, change the way the game itself is prayed to make it risky -- played to make it

risky. many things could be done to reduce risk. ways that football can be made, my phrase is, just as exciting and popular but no longer notorious. i think it is possible, and i think given all the public attention to football, maybe we're in the early stages of that happening. but that summarizes what i have to say. >> yeah. so we're done. >> we're done, yeah. [laughter] >> we're most interested in taking questions, but we are going to talk a little bit and then, hopefully, if you have questions -- otherwise we're just going to sit in stunned silence, which is what i do at home. one study that -- so i didn't know a lot about football, i was just a big fan, and i was, had done some sports reporting, but i just did not know a lot about it. what i did was, i went when i decided i was going to write this book, i read a bunch of books all of which i try to acknowledge and sort of thank people so that people will find their way to, for instance, gregg's book was incredibly

helpful for me in having a factual basis for understanding how the game functions. but also what's happening in football right now is medical science is catching up with it. there's a lot of things that are happening that are causing a lot of notoriety, but medical science is the main thing. we now understand exactly what's happening inside those helmets which we didn't for many years, and players who are understandably very prideful were reluctant to talk about their brain injuries, their cognitive function. one of the most terrifying studies that's been done was dope at purdue university. they wanted to find out what's the effect of football on high school students? after all, high school students' skeletal and neurological systems aren't fully developed, and the game has gotten more and more violent over the years for simple physics reasons, and so the players are bigger and faster, and so their collisions are more violent, right? the average high school player now at a big program probably weighs more than a pro 20 years

ago. >> yeah, that's true. >> they're much bigger, they train year round, they're faster, they are, essentially, more effective missiles. and so these researchers put sensors inside the helmets of two dozen players, and they wanted to see what's the effect of concussion since we're constantly told football has a concussion problem. okay, so what's the effect? they found a controlled group of kids who had not gotten concussions, and they monitored their brain activity. here's where it gets very dark. what they found is that the kids who had concussions were clearly showing diminished brain function, and the kids in the control group were showing diminished brain function at alarming rates such that by the end of the year, some of these kids had no function in one of their frontal lobes. we need to take a step back right at this moment and remind ourselves that these are high school students at a public high school. taxpayer-funded public high

school. try to imagine what would happen in another context if there was, for instance, a gas leak in the cafeteria that was shown to be causing diminished brain function in high school students. how quickly would that school be shut down, would the media, lawyers, parents, school officials, maybe federal officials descend to shut it down? because it's within the context of football, it's on a field, we sell popcorn, there's clear heeders, it's heroic and in many ways a kind of cohesive event for the community to organize around. but the same thing is happening inside those helmets, and that's what i mean about the medical science catching up with football. when i say that football has a, doesn't have a concussion problem, i think it has a violence problem, and it has a physics and physiology problem. the physics are going to remain the same. the physiology is very simple, the brain is a soft organ, it's encased in a hard shell. when it's jostled around, there is damage.

they're small car accidents, essentially, which happen. and i'm interested to hear gregg's take on all this because i feel i owe, basically, great debt to all the work he's done. i'm even more radical in my outlook. but the fact of the matter is that it's not just big, catastrophic hits that cause this cognitive damage, chronic traumatic enaccept lop think which is this form of dementia they're finding in former players, it is the increase of hits you never see, and it's frightening for players because, after all, you have to realize they're invisible. you could never be diagnose with the a concussion and have received 1500 hits a year that are like small car accidents that are having an appreciable effect on your brain and never know about it. even if we get up to speed and teams get up to speed with having medical personnel who are good at diagnosing concussions and so forth. that's what makes the news from the nfl that just came out a few

weeks ago, their add higgs in federal court -- admission in federal court after years of denying and covering up the link between football and brain damage so terrifying. they're saying, essentially, we anticipate 30% of our players will wind up with brain damage. cognitive problems which you could call brain damage, at a significantly younger age than the rest of the population. i know of no other workplace in america, even the military, where we would find that acceptable morally. but even more than that, that's a legal and financial question that i'm not sure how the league is going to deal with. their previous effort was just to try to deny it, try to make a huge payment in court that would make the issue go away and that would allow fans to continue to consume the game without feeling ethically responsible, right? we consume the violence. that's why there are the parabolick mics on the -- parabolic mics on the sidelines. so part of the point of my book is that we're essentially the

engine of the football industrial complex. it's hard for fans to think of that, but without us there is no roger goodell or ray rice or adrian peterson or anything. we built it. so if it's going to change, it's going to be because individual fans look at what the game is in toto, both how amazing and entertaining and pleasurable it is -- which is a real thing, i know, because i have 40 years as an ardent fan -- but also the moral hazards of it. and the business model for the nfl and the ncaa for years has been to provide a spectacle that's so thrilling that we just don't look at the dark side, right? >> let me make a couple comments about what steve just said because he's right about the size and, of course, the data is all in "king of sports." you look at "the washington post" all met first stringers from last year, so you look at the offensive line, all the offensive linemen were bigger than any offensive linemen for

the miami dolphins' 1972 perfect season team. you say, well, that's 40 years ago. okay. so bring it a little closer. all of the offensive linemen were bigger than any offensive linemen who started in the super bowl ten years ago. so that's how fast the arms race in size has been going on. and we live -- we live in a country with a childhood obesity epidemic. having the national sports celebrate weight gain cannot be the world's greatest idea. but besides the head injury problem that hare f we're all -- that we're all very aware of and the fact there's emerging science on this, i think a lot of people when you talk about concussions in football, they'll say concussions and accumulated neurological damage which looks like it's probably greater in the long run say, yes, of course, that risk has always been there, but you're just noticing it now. it's not getting worse, you're just noticing a risk. there are actually many reasons to think it's getting worse, and

the one i'll give you that all the commentators have missed is the style of play of football has changed. as recently as a generation ago -- especially in high school where most football is played -- never forget the majority of football is played not by well-paid adults, but by people who legally are children. so in high school a generation ago almost every high school had a -- i wish i had a blackboard, i'd give you the xs and os. typical offense was running the ball 50 times a game, the result was the running back never got to full speed, the person who tackled him never got to full speed. they were kind of stumbling into each other. and, certainly, it hurt, and you could get bruised that way, you could break things, but the guys in most cases were not going full speed. what's developed is this new style of zone reads, spread offense, hurry up, four wide receivers on the field, snap,

snap, snap, there are more plays per game, more opportunity to get hurt. but what's really important is a zone in a shotgun spread offense that almost even's using now, most of the receivers are running at full speed. being opposed by defensic backs -- defensive backs, and usually they're crossing over the middle and, and they're going both full speed when they hit each other. it's pretty real. and it's -- nobody sat down and said let's change the sport of football in a way that makes it more violet. this was not -- nobody planned it this way. and shotgun spread offenses are a lot of fun to watch, they're very exciting. so they're great for the crowd, but the effect is more head injuries, and most of those are happening to high school kids. >> i have, we have a first walkout which is exciting. [laughter] oh, you have a question. oh, sorry. [laughter] i was feeling very good about myself, but okay.

>> have either of you studied just the financial effect on colleges? i assume for the big schools the ticket sales far exceed the cost of running the programs, building the stadiums, whatever they do. but are there smaller colleges that still have a football program, and it's actually a strain on the university finances? >> you take that one. >> well, the economics of college football is changing faster than the economics of professional football. there's a huge increase in the amount of money flowing into college football in the last 20 years. and it continues to accelerate in a very impressive way. the schools that are the football factories, they've taken recently to calling themselves the power five schools. there's about 50 of them. they're clearing quite a he hefy profit on football. florida state, obvious example, won the last bcs championship last year. it clears $60 million on football last year. that's after paying all of its

costs, after elaborate, exorbitant contracts to coaches and travel and everything else and all of its scholarships, that's, in fact, florida state -- if the football program had paid every athletic scholarship at the entire university, they still would have cleared about $50 million on football last year. there are several other big -- mainly public universities, although a few private ones, notre dame, stanford, duke, they like their football programs, but at the big public universities they're clearing hefty money on this. as far as that goes, i'm fine with that. if big universities have a money-making venture, what's wrong with that? in almost all cases the money does not go back to the core academic mission of the school. university of florida, for example, the title winner of six years ago, its athletic department which is organized as a separate business, essentially, is leasing the logos from the tax deductions to the university of florida, pays nothing back to the core

academic mission of the school. all the income from the football and men's basketball program stays inside the athletic department. the big public universities are organized like this. now, there's lots -- it's possible to do college football at a human scale level that everybody likes the division iii schools -- williams, amherst, boden, middlebury -- they all play football. nobody makes them play it. they don't make any money on it. they do it because having a football team is part of the life of a college. and if that's all it is, i think it's tremendous. and if you look at the expansion of public education that began in the early postwar era, construction and football popularity went together, and they built on each other. football teams made boys want to go to college, and we want boys to want to go to college. so there's some good involved in it. it's just got cannen out of hand. and -- gotten out of hand. and there's no cross-check at all on money. coaches and athletic directors, the sole thick they're re--

thing they're rewarded for is victory. 55% graduation rate among division i college football players. nobody's penalized for that, nobody's career is harmed by that. when you think about it, really, college football players should graduate at a higher rate than students at a university because they get five years instead of four, nca a a scholarships go five years in most cases and, most importantly, they don't have to pay for tuition. and running out of money is the main reason people fail to complete their degrees. there's no institutional factor within college athletics that will ever address this. it has to be public pressure or congress. >> and i would add to that somewhat more radically, i just don't think -- i think it degrades the educational mission, and it has since the beginning of college football. in the university of chicago back in the 19th century, they had realized that football was a great way to promote their school and generate contributions from their alumni,

and the president of that school set out -- he hired a famous football coach who had been at yale to come be his coach and start to put together a winning football team because he recognized there was gold in those tackles before they even had doorknobs on the buildings on campus. yes, it is a really tremendous economic engine because the game is thrilling. please explain to me what that has to do with the intellectual and academic and moral mission of colleges? i have absolutely no idea, and it seems to me in liberal arts schools it is antinet call to what those -- antithetical to what those schools' mission is. and the arrangement by which kids are recruited for college, i don't believe for one second that they have a real deep and abiding concern for those kids' academic and intellectual development can. i think the number -- gregg can disabuse me of this notion, but i think the number one priority is that they are eligible on

game day. and that is inherently exploitive. they don't have concern about the content of those kids' character or their mind. they want them to be entertainers, and i do not know why there is a huge entertainment industry attached to our higher education system. i'm not saying i don't love football. i love watching it, but i don't understand that. >> right. >> congratulations to both of you. probably did a lot of due diligence and research in putting this together to get your books published, that's a great accomplishment. at two points -- i had two points or two questions. the first is i believe the ivy leagues still have, they have collegiate programs, but they also have sort of a mini program where i think it's weight-based? i don't know if you're aware of that and if there's merit in modeling that around the country. i think 165 in terms of weight might be the, might be the maximum? >> let me sneak in. i've got a limit.

[laughter] >> the second, the second comment or point is -- although it wasn't cover inside the pbs show last week -- i believe a hundred or some odd years ago teddy roosevelt was involved with, at that time i don't know if it was pro football, but semi-pro football -- >> college football. >> college, thank you. the violence -- >> yeah. >> -- and deaths and convened a panel or something to that effect, you both know the story. >> right. >> i'm not suggesting that that's something that should happen at 1600 pennsylvania avenue, but -- >> why not? >> but there seems to be kind of a unanimity of what some of the problems are, and i'll get offstage on this last point. it's a little different. ralph nader recognized 50 years ago cars were unsafe. all right, what do we begin to do? make them safer, seat belts, etc. yet the players don't seem through the players association interested in correcting the

helmets much sooner rather than later. thanks for listening. >> let me take a few of those, and then you take -- so on the issue of weight limits, one of the things i did at the end of "against football" after trying to set out a broad range of concerns about football, the first few chapters are about the experience of being a fan, how beautiful the game is, how it became that way, this american case of incremental innovation where, in fact, the violence of the game led to the legalization of the forward pass and these much more ornate and grace canful, you know, what we now identify as football. but then i go over what i think are sort of the central areas of concern; economics, the health issues and so forth. and at the end, i try to make recommendations of things that i think would start to set good incentives. because the problem is that money is the purest incentive, and it's practically the only incentive at this point. one thing that would immediately incentivize coaches at every level to stop getting kids to bulk up to set a weight limit because kids are playing at an

artificially-inflated weight. if you read the memoirs of any football player, nate jackson has this amazing memoir, and he basically had to gain weight every year to play at 230 or 240. he naturally weighs about 175 or 80. so you could immediately, tomorrow, make the players play at their normal weights rather than bulking them up, and the game would be appreciably safer and probably more graceful, maybe less violent. ..

if you build in the center, coaches would have to say for practical reasons, even if you haven't gotten a concussion you got to put them on the bench. or pull you out of the game for a while. it would be simple to say to young men in high school i think the game should be in high schools all. in europe, privately, the employee if it wanted but shouldn't be mixed up with our public high school and publicly funded high school. if they are going to, 3-.0 and don't let the classes -- say to -- forced the coaches to say, this is the same as a great's suggestion about graduation rate being a quarter of the national ranking of the team, quit messing around with this, create real incentives to allow the coaches to say to these young

men it is important you develop your mind. the average nfl player, if he even makes the nfl, one of five hundred high school seniors play, stay in the nfl for 3-1/2 to four years and his money is going to be gone. then where is he going to be? the real issue is are they going to get an education? if we are going to make the risk their lives, we are going to make them indentured servants. we ought to let these on a commission of not just pretending to care about their intellectual and academic development but actually caring about it by putting in a real incentive. >> great point, steve. the question about fdr, this was a little over a hundred years ago. fdr would have done away with it, probably would have. he was a manly man. he liked that football was a

hundred years ago like it is today at the point of falling apart. before the forward pass, broken limbs were common in games, one game in ten lead to someone dying. their was very little football played then but football deaths were common compared to the small number of games played their widespread calls for the abolition of the sport and teddy brought all the football powers together for a job and learning session in the white house. football players were princeton, yale, harvard, and one that doesn't even play football anymore and got them to agree to a deal that was very forward thinking and progressive by the standards of the time. why don't we have the same thing going on today? the paper bag came out your ago, i have a few modest connections from the white house, tried to twist some arms, i wrote a piece for the new york times --

>> fingers. >> i wrote a piece of the new york times describing what obama could advocate and would be practical and nothing came of it. from a politician's standpoint, we polarize for something or against something. any politician that tries to reform football you would think would be a populist causes. why is it is not a populist cause there's a question mark, obama said want to convene a high-level meeting of pro isil and college coaches to reform this sport. talk radio says the president is against football, the nanny state, obama is against football, wants to take away our football. that is the response you would get. i still think a visionary president could do this but it won't happen in obama's second term. one thing i throw in, espn now exists, and what steve and i

talked about factoring in graduation rates in the college football, i have been twisting arms at espn for five years and in this case a little success, if you go to espn and fight in espn grade, takes you to college football ranking that is adjusted for graduation rates. i am now trying to get the world to notice that. and espn grade bonuses. >> thank you for writing these books, very important and timely and i hope they are widely read especially by roger goodell, hand -- >> his lawyers will read this book. >> washington d.c. we have a professional football team that has been resistant to change probably since they moved here,

became a bad team, george president marshall was a white supremacist big debt. he refused to integrate the team, african-american player for 15 years after the lead integrated. he only did it because he was forced to by the federal government because rfk stadium is on federal lands department of interior. his allies included the american ic party who picketed outside 62 outside d.c. stadium. now we have controversy with a football team, and george preston marshall, dan snyder refuses to change racial slur to the football team. and grow up with the team on the issue and did research as a counselor, the redskin facts that you pay p r. >> what is your question?

>> my question is what is it going to take, i was wondering why you decided to use the r word and what will it take to change the dictionary definition of football -- racial slur in the football team? >> part of the point is you are a fan of the washington team? >> i cannot route for the team until they change the name. i made that decision a couple years ago. >> then you that is what you need to do. the nfl is a $10 billion corporation. and cash register. whether you are conflicted ordeal feet, there are problems in the game but you live in it anyway. they don't care if you choose -- you are part of the $5 billion, even that passive construction,

you are part of the broadcast passage they make every year. fans have a tendency in the media reinforces this in an incredibly insidious way to see themselves as victims, and if you don't like the way rock dance 9 runs his team or if you don't like roger goodell or the generals and football which are the gender rules of the 1550s, women are sexual ornaments and men are by nature aggressive and that is how they are effective. stop watching, you pay their salaries. the reason kids get paid at age 20 or 20 one, they are offered $60 million for five years, because we pay that salary. the reason daniel snyder make some much money is because he has a bunch of fans, consumers who consume the product. >> let me phrase that is a question, should people stop watching football on television? >> here is what my book says.

what we should do is all i am interested in is not making the people's minds for them but let's see football for all that it is, everything that is, not just for a hundred years we have seen football as a thrilling spectacle and in the last few years especially the last few weeks people started to judge football as a moral undertaking which is what it is, one of the biggest businesses in the united states. >> should we launched? >> my book is saying, this is part of that either you are for it or against it. football for me, somebody who loves the game, is completely untenable morally. it is out of wac with my value system and i think it is bad for educational system, bad for this, that or the other, bad for the national conscience but that it not my decision. team of my book is not to say you should do this or that, but let's face what football is in do as your own conscience recommend the don't delude yourself into thinking you are somehow just a fan, just

watching in the bar and it is on so i am not consuming anything and then not buying the beer, the your composite in the media and the media has a way of confounding convenient scapegoats like cable news frankly that makes the fans feel like they're the victims but you are the sponsors and i was for 40 years even if i have my overnight conversion. >> let's ask here. how many people watch football on television? >> don't be shy. >> honest answer. >> really answer my question i think. what will it take to change the r word? >> i was trying to. i think there will be enough people who are consumers saying enough. it is unacceptable. i am out. that is all daniel snyder is going to listen to and all the sponsors are going to listen to. don't think you have some dialogue with them. they are a corporation. >> c-span is alive today.

i have a call in question. nancy, 64 in indiana. she is asking the nature of violence and the act of tackling and looking at i guess sort of refreeze wishy is asking, if a parent was to tackle a child it would be considered abuse where they are putting children and children and consider it part of sports, confections between tackling as a violent action, tackling as part of this game. >> loss of things that happen in a high school football practice if they happened in the classroom would be considered child abuse and would lead the teacher to be arrested. there are relationships that adults said to children, norms of behavior, skipped to the bottom line of that.

courts have passed, it is okay to instruct these children to slam into each other, courts are starting to get very suspicious about things that have to do with heat stroke and concussions, not finding those things okay in the legal sense, some high school football coach will go to jail and that will be the catalytic event that will change the culture. i can tell you there has been some modest progress on this in the last few years. in 2007 i became an assistant football coach at winston churchill high school in potomac. in order to get my position i had to prove to the fbi for a background check that i was not a registered sex offender, the odds with i would be in maryland at that time were one in 2,000, didn't have to pass any sports

first-aid glass or that i knew concussion symptoms or demonstrate that i knew he'd stroke symptoms. not only did nobody in maryland have to do that, nobody in the country did. now almost all states require a high school football, head coaches and assistant coaches past courses in concussion and heatstroke and sports first-aid. there is modest progress there. the second modest progress is the three forms this book advocates have actually happened in the last year. one of them is espn grade and the second one, sanctioning public sports are starting to cut back on contract hours and practice. texas is the leader in this, and it is the most important state in high school football culture and as of this year instead of almost unlimited contact, texas high school are limited to three hours of contact for week before the season at half an hour of contact per week during the season.

that is progressive reform. far more concussions happen in practice than in games, that will reduce the number of concussions. you can change the structure of the game itself and that is coming. eliminate the most concussion kickoffs, kickoffs would be eliminated. you don't need kickoffs. 20 years ago they used to be jump balls in basketball. they were eliminated and nobody remembers them. kickoff will be eliminated from football and no one will remember them, the three point stands for can be eliminated. with that we fall football teams opposing each other. nine to ten line men face each other's heads, then the ball is snapped and air heads,. of the three point stance was banned and its utter with their hands on their knees, head injuries would go down. changes like that are coming. the picture is not as bad as it was a decade ago but a lot of reform is needed. >> two more questions. >> i always enjoy gregg easterbrook's pieces in the

washington monthly. >> thanks for the reminder. >> what is your take on how these high school disputes how helmets should be settled? my niece has a kid who loves to hit people. beam loudon county it sounded like a manufacturer would not sell them the helmet if there was something else attached. how should that be settled? >> longstanding and long legal interpretations of the liability of people who sponsor football teams, the simplest one to understand is that the nfl level. no helmet could eliminate the risk of concussion but some helmets reduce risk compared to what is. virginia tech has studied this and identified elements that reduce your risk of concussion impact so you would think everyone would be wearing these helmets. the nfl doesn't mandate the helmets that are shown to be safer or less dangerous is the best way to say it because they believe if they mandate a helmet

and the player is injured in the helmet they become liable for the injury. if the player chooses the helmet and the player is liable for the injury. i don't think that is right in legal terms. i wish there was a good test case to prove this the high school level, the county referred to is an important case. one thing we can do is exactly what steve proposers, put an accelerometer in every football helmet, they sound high-tech but are not that expensive. the initial exo barometer's some college programs using the record a hit of> -- greater than 80 gs, it happens in football all the time, that is the risk factor number for neurological harm. if you are accelerometer records and 80 g hit it lights up, the doctor's pager with the player's number and you take a player aside evaluate it. you can cut concussion injuries a lot with that simple technology. colleges, high schools and prose seems to think they will become

liable for the injury if it does occur. in loudon county local, in bethesda not far around the corner and entrepreneur came up with a simpler version. annex a barometer you wear on the back of a helmet that has a red light on and it doesn't like a pagers. if it records and 80 g hits the red lights the rest of flash and the coaches for officials see the flashing red light and tellable you got to come out and be evaluated. loudon county would not let one of its high school put those things on helmets because they thought of we have a safety device we can make a more reliable for any injuries. if we don't do anything that we are not liable. that is the primitive state where this thinking is. >> i would add there are two ways to look at if you are a conflicted football fan you can make one of two decisions, you can decide as greg has very nobly and with a lot of integrity to try to figure out how to reform the game and if there are things that can be done in lobbying and taking action and being part of that

movement or you can decide and this is what i personally decide in football, looking good at the totality of the game it is just inherently corrupt. i want to say taking a step back, i think it is a corrupt system that we the fans, what is happening, the reason they are reluctant to look at this stuff, it reminds people over and over again that it is a profile of the violent game we're watching. we want to be able to consume the violence that feel is sanctioned. that is what broadcasters are about. they don't go that guy suffered a brain trauma. they say great hit. there's a whole system in place to keep us insulated from seeing the profound violence that is on the field but it is even more in cities than that for me. those aggressive impulses players are trained to harness are hard to regulate. that is what we are seeing with the recent news about this player or that player, the aggression on the field, the violence we report on the field

suddenly taking place off the field and we are up in arms. the 22-year-old kid has been told all his life to play lights out football, will suddenly become lead gentleman when he steps over a talk line. the most insidious of these myths or false dreams that football sells has to do with economic opportunity and here it is where i really have a bone to pick with obama who has said something like i don't have a son but if i had a son i wouldn't let him play football. what he's really saying is let some other american mother and father have a son who plays for my entertainment who might suffer brain trauma. that is extraordinarily cynical, beneath his dignity or what i took to be his dignity as a human being. i don't think that is the tenable position. if you don't let your kids play, other parents kids are playing

it. obama especially coming from his background for too long football has been held out to economic salvation. and economically vulnerable neighborhoods and of color. only one of 500 of those kids is going to make it and we don't care. what we really need is equality of opportunity, good schools, good support for working families, right, communities that function and that is a larger problem than football reflects. what happens is taxpayers get stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars and in new orleans, billions of dollars in tax revenue, public revenue that goes toward building stadiums rather than towards this thing i think we can all agree is a higher priority.

are we creating equality of opportunity especially in economically vulnerable communities? i know this because i worked in miami and spent a lot of time in liberty city and was a community and that was the ticket out. it was great emphasis placed on that. a false dreams the we are all a part of. we sell the same message that that is the only ticket because we don't have a more humane and equal ticket out for people who happen to be born in circumstances where they don't have a lot of economic opportunities. >> a chapter in king of sports called use the pen for a way. and great athletes. except brain injuries and criminal charges. to mention obama you mention in the new yorker, obama gave a lengthy interview to the editor of the new yorker

year-and-a-half ago. he has his own conflict because he is a big fan of prize fighting which is worse than football in health terms that it involves so few people that it sociological significance is small. they talk about football for a minute and was obama said was when you think i did those guys are adults, they know the risks they are assuming, they're well paid so this isn't a big issue. for the nfl player that is surely true. we don't want them to get hurt but they are adults, well-paid and they know the risks but they are not the issue. high school, college and youth players are the issue and when the president of the united states, a huge sports fan, very sophisticated man doesn't get that the nfl is not the issue, high school is the issue. >> one obama also said, i read that with great interest, maybe they will come up with sports reforms that allow fans to mentioned the game with a conscience or ease our

conscience, and the goal of making football safer is to make the fans feel nullified morally as opposed to protect the players. astonishing cynicism. >> what about other sports? the problem with football -- >> other sports? this is news to me. >> our other sports as dangerous as football? do we have data, ice hockey seems to be just as violent -- >> and diving, have roughly the same concussion rate per hour of practice and participation, the difference is football involves far more people. >> and far more hits because unlike those sports in every other sport than boxing and the crazy mad max versions of

boxing, collisions are incidental. the football player gets 1500 car accidents in his helmet every year, not just the game but the practices. that is not true of any other sport. there's a suitcase of rationalizations, i am familiar with that suitcase because i have carried it around for many years. what about other sports? my response is what about them? football is five times more profitable and popular than the next board and probably more than that if you factor in high school. it is more significant as a social entity than those other sports and it is intrinsically the only collision sport that is a major sport. every single time a ball is snapped on a football field, a big strong guys get their brains knocked around, period. >> it is the same practice?

>> it doesn't. it is not just about getting concussions. what the medical evidence suggests is it is the accretion of concuss of hits that is as dangerous -- it has of violence problem. the violence problem doesn't reside in the game but in american culture. look at our prison system, football is a part of something bigger. not just our favorite game out of some coincidence. it is a game that made us feel ok about the consumption of violence. it is sanctioned violence within the gridiron. >> i don't watch football. i worry the biggest growing sport in the country is soccer. that is what the kids up playing today, not football. >> steve -- some concuss it hits

and accumulation of neurological harm is clearly higher in football. if you just look at diagnosed constructions it is not the same as football and soccer. that is why soccer is starting to think about helmets. you get your head hit more than you would guess in soccer. >> people often ask what if your son wanted to play football and the response would be if he wants to play football, even tackle football at a younger age, i did that. i had my shoulder dislocated a couple times. i wouldn't stop him from doing that. you don't put kids in sort of giant michelin man outfits. they have to incur some risk. managing risk, kids can't be protected from that but it is a few huge industry, has grown up around this beautiful game that is so concerning to me and what i am turning away from.

i still play catch with my neighbor who can throw it 50 yards because i love it. some kids playing pickup ball outside my daughter and swim practice and i was watching them, i totally want to go play with them. the game itself is amazing and wonderful. everything around it that is for me gone too dark. >> thank you. [applause] >> we have books behind the register and we will be signing right here. >> would you assign one of yours for a man that? >> we're dealing with a little bit of this but not much. >> i remember that guy.

[inaudible conversations] >> i read the book. there were the oakland raiders, i don't know if you remember. he took for a football was a silly game, you might want to go -- go to october of 1970, an article was done about it. he was writing about the pro football part of it. all we are doing is entertaining and they don't need to be entertained. they need to do their own creative thing. he got in an argument with somebody and -- he became a vegetarian afterward. and he said that. he put the ball -- he idolized the. he enjoyed football games after he retired.

and then he said there will be a new society. more football than any other sport. >> in my book i mention that. >> do you have this? to you already have this? >> is there a nonfiction author or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send an e-mail to booktv@c-span.org. tweet us at booktv. post on our wall, facebook.com/booktv. >> up next on booktv, mark obama ndesandjo, president barack obama's half brother talks about his relationship with the president and disputes barack obama's take on their family history as it appears in dreams from my father. this is of little over an hour. >> good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to bonds and noble.