A sham of a public debate held on NYU's campus this week shows how far away we are from anything resembling a mature discussion about football.
Source: intelligencesquaredus.org
As people in jackets and dresses, holding glasses of wine, milled around the lobby of New York University's Skirball Center Monday night, I approached a group of four to ask why the hell they'd bought tickets to watch men scream at each other about whether to ban college football.
Turns out they hadn't, not really. They were Tim Green's editor and publicists.
Green was one of the two stiffs Intelligence Squared, a debate series run by the Rosenkranz Foundation, had recruited to debate against the motion of Banning College Football. The other was Jason Whitlock, a noted Internet hack and sportswriter parody who may at one time have been a respectable journalist, but is now more like a walking Twitter account that could be called TheWire_ebooks.
Their opponents were Friday Night Lights author and noted journalist Buzz Bissinger and New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell. Despite Gladwell and Bissinger's definite shortcomings as thinkers — Buzz tends to bully an issue more often than he should; Gladwell intellectualizes to the point of abstraction — both men border on brilliant. Watching the four of them stand awkwardly amid the white-collar audience that had come to watch them do battle, you began to get a sense that everyone just sort of wanted to get this whole thing over with.
Here is Intelligence Squared's pitch for the debate:
"Corruption and a growing concern for head injury have put college football in the spotlight. Are football programs' millions in profits exploitation? Or are they still a celebration of amateur sport? Does football's inherent danger and violence have any place in institutions of higher learning? Or does it provide young men with educational opportunities they would not otherwise have?"
Arguing for the ban were short (Buzz) and waifish (Gladwell) journalists; arguing against were two former college football players. Despite the majority of college attendees nowadays being women, all of the participants were men. The moderator, John Donvan, works as a correspondent for ABC News and would, over the course of the debate, misremember Tim Green's name once and frequently express his confusion at the points being made.
In other words, the debate had been doomed from the start. Hundreds of people had paid to watch an hour and a half's worth of public masturbation, which is certainly nothing out of the ordinary in New York City. We just figured it would be entertaining.
