About 10 years ago, the Republican Senators from Arizona, Jeff Flake and the former prisoner of war John McCain, called out an unusual $7 million allotment in the National Defense Authorization Act that had nothing to do with munitions or housing or tangible programs such as healthcare for the troops. Instead, it was money being paid mostly to our behemoth $20-billion dollar industrial athletic enterprise, the NFL for patriotic displays that appeared organic: Salute to Service appreciation game days, color guard presentations, reenactments of enlistment ceremonies and celebrations of Wounded Warriors. And, of course, the now routine military flyover, which, in 2012, was included in a quarter-million dollar payment to the Buffalo Bills.
The NFL has not publicly demanded that the Trump administration cease its callous use of game footage to promote its war against Iran.
Given that recent history of promoting the U.S. military, we shouldn’t be surprised that the NFL has not publicly demanded that the Trump administration cease its callous use of game footage to promote its war against Iran. The administration first spliced snippets of Hollywood action movies and violent video games with footage of its bombing of Iran. From there, it wove clips of NFL players making vicious hits on their opponents with scenes of strikes on Iran.
And though some retired NFL stars have complained — for example, Hall of Fame safety Ed Reed objected to the government using footage of him on X by writing, “I do not approve of this message” — we’ve heard nothing from the NFL players’ union or the league itself. The league’s silence is disingenuous at best or hypocritical at worst given the disclaimer we hear at the end of its games: “Any rebroadcast or other use of this telecast without the express written consent of the NFL is prohibited.”
I asked the league by email for a response to the Trump administration’s apparent blatant disregard of the NFL’s copyright. I haven’t received a response.
The NFL and the military have slept in the same bed at least since the second Super Bowl in 1968 when then NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, a World War II Navy veteran turned pitchman, helped orchestrate the first military flyover at an NFL game. Earnie Seiler, the man Rozelle hired to produce the event, told the Chicago Tribune, “Before these two great football teams take to the field, we’ll present a real All-American team, the 11 most decorated flyers in the air force. As they’re being introduced, there’ll be a fly-over by fighters from the Homestead Air Force base. Then, wait until you catch this, the planes will give the signal for the downbeat which will launch that 1,000-piece band into the national anthem.”
In 1968, the country was torn over the Vietnam War, just as it is torn now over the bombing of Iran. Muhammad Ali was being punished for refusing conscription. Flag-burning protesters were portrayed as enemies of the state. But Rozelle married the NFL, already often staged in stadiums named to pay homage to war and veterans, to the military. We in the media mindlessly regurgitated it all with our language: calling long passes bombs and anointing quarterbacks field generals, none of which escaped the great comedian George Carlin, who skewered the game’s militaristic coding.
And ever since, the NFL has promoted itself as an antidote to protest and a promoter of the military.
Cowboys Super Bowl-winning quarterback Roger Staubach, a Naval Academy graduate who served a tour in Vietnam, was a face of the NFL in the 1970s. Pittsburgh running back Rocky Bleier, who was wounded in Vietnam, was lionized by the league upon returning to the Steelers with whom he won Super Bowl rings, too. There would be others, including Pat Tillman, who in 2002 famously surrendered his multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist with the post-9/11 war effort in Afghanistan. He was killed by friendly fire. A statue of Tillman in his football kit was erected outside the Cardinals’ stadium. NFL broadcast partner ESPN now bestows the Pat Tillman Award for Service at its ESPY Awards to those “… who have made a significant impact through service, leadership, and community involvement.”
On the other side is Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who after protesting unchecked police lethality against Black men by refusing to stand for the national anthem, had his NFL employment ended almost at once.
The shield is red, white and blue not by accident, but by purpose.
FORMER nfl players association executive director deMAURICE SMITH
“The shield is red, white and blue not by accident, but by purpose,” former NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith, told me Monday. Smith, who last year wrote “Turf Wars,” a piercing memoir on how the league treats its labor, said, “It’s another level of cobranding.”
And for the players, more co-optation.
The NFL didn’t require players to be on the field for the national anthem for all games until 2009, and it didn’t require players to stand for it until 2018, almost two years after Kaepernick’s protest. Around that same general time, as Flake and McCain exposed, our tax dollars were flowing to the NFL.
But the NFL allowing the Trump administration to use its copyrighted footage as propaganda — and suggest a war that has already killed several thousand people is entertainment — is not patriotism but complicity.
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