Is Football a Dying Sport?

Violence, which came up in lecture, is a key part of the game of football and it always has been. When you are growing up and learning to play football, you are taught to be violent and be tough. People love watching big hits too. People would rather see a huge hit sometimes more than anything else when they are watching football. They even have sections on sportscenter called jacked up where they go over all the big hits from the weekend. Its coming to the point though that violence is something that is becoming in issue in football. There is new evidence that having a career in football is like getting into a car crash almost every single game. That kind of impact on the head can lead to a much shorter life and many other problems concerning the brain. Now that we have learned all this information players are now told to hit and play differently than they have ever before. Players are becoming more and more protected, which leads to more flags and fines that players have become very disgruntled over. A helmet to helmet hit can lead to a 25,000 dollar fine. Football is becoming less and less physical and if you take that out of football how can it survive. People watch to see it and if it is turning into something like flag football, no one will watch that. It is a real question whether football in 25 years will look anything like what we have today. As doctors learn more and more about the brain and study football players brains they will see that playing football is dangerous to your health. Its going to come into question whether playing football is something that should be going on in our country because it is leading to shortened lives in many pro athletes.

Olympics through the Years

The olympics have been a way for a country to show its dominance over one another by competing in athletic events. Countries have used it as a way to unite a country or for propaganda purposes like what Hitler did when they olympics were in Germany. Whoever ends up with the most medals can say that they were the better country for the next two years. The implications of winning the olympics goes beyond being able to say that they have the better athletes. It unites the country together because the whole country is rooting for the same people to beat everyone else in the world. Olympics mean a whole lot when there is a war going on between two countries too. For example in when we beat the the soviet union in hockey, that win had a lot more to it than can be said. We had beaten the Soviet Union at there own game. Another example is when Hitler was trying to use the olympics as propoganda for Germany but the United States athlete Jesse Owens, an African American, stuck it to him and beat his prized German athletes.


Another aspect to the olympic games is that they can be used as a way to protest. Many countries will sit out olympics in certain countries because they disagree with what that country represents. It has been an effective way of reaching out to countries because it is a huge thing to do to a country. Olympics have been around forever and are watched by many people everytime they have occured. It gets me excited everytime their on because I really do believe it is a way to show our dominace in the world.

Fighting Racism in Sports

In the class where we watched the movie Salute about Peter Norman standing up with John Carlos and Tommie Harris on the podium after the race between them. This movie is very inspiring because not only did it show black athletes standing up for their rights and demonstrating to the world that they were living in a society that is holding them back, but it also showed Peter Norman, a white Australian man, stand up with those black athletes and help their cause. It shows that not all white people out there at that time felt the same about African American Athletes. This demonstration also came at a time of great importance because Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and African Americans at the time needed something to be inspired by and there was no better way to show their pride than the olympic games, which are seen all over the world. Seeing this movie also had me thinking about how athletes that were black found out a way to show the world how they were being treated and show how the can fight discrimination against by using their athletic fame. While Tommie Harris and John Carlos were expelled from the olympics after making this salute to black power and were treated terribly by the white majority, their bravery and courage to stand up for what they belived was right, paved the way for black athletes in and outside of sports for the many years to come. Their demonstration changed the way people started thinking about black people in general.