Jonathan Mahler, Columnist

NFL Collides With Its Own Brutal Nature

The National Football League's biggest enemy may be science.

November 8, 2013 at 8:40 PM UTC

Jonathan Mahler is a sports columnist for Bloomberg View. He is the author of the best-selling "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning," the basis for the eight-part ESPN mini-series. He also wrote "The Challenge," the winner of the 2009 Scribes Book Award, and "Death Comes to Happy Valley." A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine and the Times Book Review, Mahler has written for numerous other publications including the Washington Post, Slate, the New Republic and New York magazine. He lives in New York.

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One secret of the National Football League's success is its ability to make every moment feel epic. What other major sport designates its annual championship with Roman numerals? Or produces highlight films with slow-motion close-ups on a spinning ball over surging orchestral music? This is a league that does not traffic in the trivial.

So how's this for momentous? In the course of a little more than a week, we saw a player quit the Miami Dolphins because he was verbally and physically abused by his teammates. We saw another quit the game altogether, citing the long-term physical and mental damage he feared it would surely inflict on him. Then, as if to underscore the week's running theme of brutality, one of the game's living legends, former Dallas Cowboys running back Tony Dorsett, admitted that he was suffering from memory loss and depression likely brought on by years of playing the game.