As Thanksgiving is a relaxation of violent impulses (not including turkeys, of course), Super Bowl Sunday, that other great American holiday, is an orgy of it. What will become of the game now that parents know that they’re inviting brain injuries on their children if they let them play? There’s no helmet that can protect from concussions since it’s mostly an injury of whiplash, the brain washing around inside the skull. Will the pipeline of talent run dry even as the league is at its financial zenith? Cricket, once a hugely popular game in America, disappeared in just about two decades. Organized football, much wealthier and more powerful, won’t vanish, but will it decline in the coming decades? From the Economist:

The NFL players’ union says that the average length of a professional career is just under three and a half years. Watching a big hit on a player now comes with the same twinge of guilt as watching clips of Muhammad Ali being pummelled. Though high-school players are less likely to suffer brain damage, some school teams were forced to end their seasons early last year because so many children had been injured. Almost half of parents say they would not allow their sons to play the game, a feeling shared by Barack Obama. Nor is it easy to see how the rules could be changed to reduce the risk of brain damage in the professional game to an acceptable level.

Yet the sport will not continue to be both as popular as it is now and as dangerous. Those who dismiss football-bashers like Malcolm Gladwell, who compared the sport to dog-fighting in the New Yorker, as elitist east-coast types should remember that football began as a form of organised riot on the campuses of elitist east-coast colleges. Changes in taste can trickle down as well as bubble up. During the second half of the 20th century boxing went from being a sport watched together by fathers and sons to something that dwells among the hookers and slot machines of Nevada. Hollywood’s output of Westerns peaked in the late 1960s, after which the appeal of spending a couple of hours watching tight-lipped gunslingers in pursuit of an ethnic minority waned. Football will go the same way.•