Risk Appetite

Yesterday, STAT News published an essay by sports writer Michael Arkush asking whether he’s a hypocrite for loving American football despite knowing what it can do to the people who play it.¹ A recent study of former NFL players found chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE, in at least a quarter of the population studied, and the range may be much wider.² Arkush has known about that danger for almost twenty years. He still cheers when a Giants player »creams« an opponent. The former players he talks to are similarly conflicted. One tells him that even if he’d known the risks, he probably would have played anyway. Another says football is too large a part of who he is to simply walk away from.

»Discovery threatens the conditions of spectatorship«

There is something more interesting here than hypocrisy. We know collision sports like American football can damage the brain. We also know they’re exciting to watch. The two facts do not cancel each other out. Perhaps they’re connected. Humans have always done dangerous things for reasons that seem, from a sufficiently safe distance, completely unnecessary. Nobody needs to climb mountains, and still we do. We cross oceans. We race cars. We jump out of aeroplanes. And sometimes we get hurt in the process.

Do we have poor judgement, underestimate risk, or enjoy the adrenaline? All of these are probably true. But they don’t explain why risk itself can feel valuable. Consider the difference between the first person to climb Mount Everest and the thousandth. The thousandth climber might face more objective danger. The weather can be worse, equipment can fail, altitude sickness can strike. But the first expedition did something the thousandth can’t do. It found out whether the mountain could be climbed.³

An exploratory act can change what counts as a possible outcome. That’s why the first Everest expedition is fundamentally different from the thousandth, and also why there’s value in trying something new even when the outcome reads as a »failure«. A failed experiment can close one door, open another, or reveal whether there was a door at all. The first person to eat an unfamiliar plant might discover food. Or poison. Either way, the result changes what everyone else can do.

Football is different. The player is taking a considerable risk, but inside a possibility space that has already been defined. We know what a tackle is, what counts as a foul, what counts as a score. We don’t know which team will win, or whether someone will break free for a spectacular run – but we know what kind of thing a spectacular run is.

The rules don’t merely make the game fair. They make it legible. This may be one of the great attractions of sport. It gives us uncertainty without demanding that we understand anything genuinely new. We can watch enormous amounts of risk while remaining perfectly sure about what we’re watching.

Discovery threatens the conditions of spectatorship.

If nobody knows what’s going to happen, it becomes difficult to turn the event into a spectacle. The audience needs to recognise the thing it’s watching before it can be impressed by it. The spectacle has to be detached from actual exploration.

The Enhanced Games, which finally staged their first event in Las Vegas this May, are interesting precisely because they might reverse this process. Businessman Aron D’Souza’s multi-sport event lets athletes use performance-enhancing drugs banned from conventional sport.⁴ That sounds like an extreme version of spectacle, but it also raises a genuinely exploratory question: what happens if the competition is no longer between conventional human bodies?

How fast can a human become? How strong? What happens when pharmacology, genetics, training, technology, and physiology are all allowed into the experiment? We’re effectively asking what the athlete is. That’s much closer to exploration, and it’s also much less comfortable than watching somebody win a football game.

Perhaps this is why Arkush’s dilemma feels larger than football. He thinks he’s asking whether it’s ethical to enjoy something that hurts people. But maybe there’s another question underneath: why do we enjoy watching people enter uncertainty when we no longer need them to discover anything?

Maybe the appetite for risk is older than the distinction between sport and exploration. Our ancestors needed somebody to eat the unknown plant, cross the unknown river, climb the unknown mountain. Survival itself was a risky experiment. We have since become very good at removing uncertainty from life. But the appetite didn’t disappear.

We gave it football.

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