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Anti-War Voices Accuse Super Bowl of 'Hijacking the Pat Tillman Story'
One journalist reminded readers that the NFL star and Army Ranger "called the Iraq invasion and occupation 'fucking illegal' and was killed by friendly fire in an incident the military covered up and tried to hide from his family."
Feb 12, 2023
Advocates of peace, truth, and basic human decency on Sunday excoriated the National Football League's "whitewashing" of former Arizona Cardinal and Army Ranger Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan by so-called "friendly fire" and the military's subsequent cover-up—critical details omitted from a glowingly patriotic Super Bowl salute.
As a group of four Pat Tillman Foundation scholars chosen as honorary coin-toss captains at Super Bowl LVII in Glendale, Arizona were introduced via a video segment narrated by actor Kevin Costner, viewers were told how Tillman "gave up his NFL career to join the Army Rangers and ultimately lost his life in the line of duty."
The video did not say how Tillman died, what he thought about the Iraq war, or how the military lied to his family and the nation about his death. This outraged many viewers.
"Obviously the army killing Pat Tillman and covering it up afterwards is the worst thing the U.S. military did to him, but the years they've spent rolling out his portrait backed by some inspirational music as a recruiting tool is a surprisingly close second," tweeted progressive writer Jay Willis.
\u201cI worry that young people may not know,& older folks may have chosen to forget,the true story of Pat Tillman,an NFL player, a soldier, & great man whose disturbing \u201cfriendly fire\u201ddeath was used by our govt to perpetuate the justification for an unjust war. https://t.co/W4C7mWvbpv\u201d— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sherrilyn Ifill) 1676251540
"Pat Tillman called the Iraq invasion and occupation 'fucking illegal' and was killed by friendly fire in an incident the military covered up and tried to hide from his family," tweetedWashington Post investigative reporter Evan Hill.
"I'm writing a book for FIRST GRADERS on Pat Tillman that contains more truth about his life and death than the NFL just provided at the Super Bowl," wrote author Andrew Maraniss.
"Another year of hijacking the Pat Tillman story and not telling that he hated the Iraq War and was killed by the military," said one Twitter user.
"Tell the real story of Pat Tillman or get off the screen," fumed yet another.
Tillman, 25 years old at the time, turned down a $3.6 million contract with the Cardinals to enlist in the U.S. Army in May 2002 after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. He expected to be deployed to Afghanistan. Instead, he was sent to invade Iraq—a country that had no ties to 9/11. Tillman quickly came to deplore the "fucking illegal" war, and even made "loose plans" to meet with anti-war intellectual Noam Chomsky, according toThe Intercept's Ryan Devereaux.
\u201cPat Tillman was a beautiful soul. That he thought the war in Iraq was "illegal as hell" is not something to hide. It is part of what made his soul so beautiful.\u201d— Dave Zirin (@Dave Zirin) 1676245035
As Tillman's brother Kevin sardonically wrote:
Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can't be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.
Pat and Kevin were sent to Afghanistan on April 8, 2004. Stationed at a forward operating base in Khost province, Pat was killed on April 22, 2004 by what the army said was "enemy fire" during a firefight.
However, the army knew in the days immediately following Tillman's death that he had been shot three times in the head from less than 30 feet away by so-called "friendly fire," and that U.S. troops had burned his uniform and body armor in a bid to conceal their fatal error.
"The deception surrounding this case was an insult to the family, but more importantly, its primary purpose was to deceive a whole nation," Kevin Tillman testified before Congress in 2007. "We say these things with disappointment and sadness for our country. Once again, we have been used as props in a Pentagon public relations exercise."
Hearing on Tillman, Lynch Incidents: Kevin Tillman's Openingwww.youtube.com
Tillman's father, Patrick Tillman Sr., told the Washington Post in 2005 that after his son was killed, "all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this. They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up."
"I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out," he contended. "They blew up their poster boy."
The following year, Tillman's mother Mary was interviewed by Sports Illustrated and blamed U.S. military and George W. Bush administration officials all the way up to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for covering up her son's killing.
"They attached themselves to his virtue and then threw him under the bus," she said. "They had no regard for him as a person. He'd hate to be used for a lie. I don't care if they put a bullet through my head in the middle of the night. I'm not stopping."
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Damar Hamlin and the Super Bowl's Big Hit
Tonight's the big game, but can we even watch any longer? I'm not sure that I can.
Feb 12, 2023
The echoes still linger from that national sigh of relief last month when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, slammed into cardiac arrest during a game on January 2nd, was declared out of danger. It was a justified sigh. A vibrant young life had been spared.
But was that really what the nation was relieved about? If football fans had been so invested in the health and safety of the players, why were some 23.8 million of them watching that game in the first place?
By now, everybody should be aware of the incremental deadly damage inflicted on players’ brains in any game, so why will 200 million or more of us be watching the Super Bowl tonight?
That may be one of those unanswerable “Why do fools fall in love?” questions, but just thinking about it seems like a worthwhile exercise in everyday sociology. So here are my questions in response: Is it because we’ve evolved into people indifferent to the pain of others? Or maybe because many of us, as part of an evolutionary survival response, are hardwired to enjoy violence?
And while I’m at it, let me ask you one other question: Should we do something about it — like cancelling football?
Jacked Up
I think most of those who saw the Hamlin hit and heard the news about his recovery were sighing with relief not for him but for themselves, given the guilty pleasure of watching someone “jacked up” — an old ESPN phrase all but banned these days but still descriptive of one of football’s major thrills and horrors. I doubt anyone was rooting for an actual kill shot. Still, I suspect that, however unwittingly, many viewers were longing for the sensation that might accompany one, followed quickly by the usual cathartic release of a player lurching back onto his feet and being helped off the field, while giving his teammates a thumbs-up. (I’m okay, bros, so you’re okay, too!)
But is everyone really okay, especially us spectators? And what, if anything, happens next? A day after the Hamlin hit, a talk-show host asked me what I thought might result from Americans’ viewing the prospect of death in such an up-close-and-personal fashion on their favorite TV show.
Just more talk, I replied, and then added, perhaps a little too quickly and glibly, “Ask me again after the next school shooting.”
I heard a reproving grunt, but there was no time left to unpack that remark. Now, weeks later, it seems obvious to me what I meant. As with mass shootings, whose aftermaths are similarly riveting to TV viewers — by the time you read this, there will have been more than 50 of them since Hamlin went down that day — nothing meaningful is ever proposed to truly diminish the violence.
And I do wonder what erosion of the spirit takes place when nothing is done time after time after time, whether we’re talking about those never-ending all-American slaughters (and the guns that go with them in the most weaponized country on the planet) or football’s endlessly commercialized brutality. I also can’t help wondering what normal has come to mean to us? Little surprise, then, that the war in Ukraine is beginning to seem like a distant geopolitical video game rather than an immense human tragedy.
Whatever righteous chatter went on after the Hamlin hit, it mostly had to do with chastising the sportscasters of that Monday Night Football game between the Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals because they kept wondering aloud whether it would resume or be rescheduled. Granted, they weren’t exactly sensitive to the immediate crisis, but beating up on those particular barkers seems unfair. After all, what message has the National Football League (NFL) ever broadcast other than the game über alles, whether it came to assassinations or brain injuries?
It took NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell an hour even to announce that he was postponing that game (which was, in fact, never resumed). By that time, it seemed obvious that the players and coaches had made their own decisions: they were too gutted to keep playing.
Turning Point?
I’ve also wondered if that specter of sudden death could become a turning point in the history of what’s arguably America’s most popular and perilous pastime. Might it serve as a “wake-up call” that could lead the game toward safer conditions or, as we head into the latest Super Bowl, will it simply confirm three already existing lines of thought: that we accept football as inherently dangerous; that its danger actually enhances its reality as more than a game (and the thrill of it all); and that we need to embrace that danger or risk the loss of football’s importance in a society in which so many men increasingly feel they’re losing ground to women?
The obvious fact that few women play on male high school or college teams and none in the NFL is critically important to its allure. Count on one thing: there will be female Seal team snipers before a woman will be allowed to take a televised Hamlin hit on a football field.
That the Hamlin hit itself was not spectacular only added to the aftershock. In fact, it looked all too routine. The 24-year-old safety had just positioned himself to stop Tee Higgins, the Bengals ball carrier, when Higgins ran into him, ramming his helmet into Hamlin’s chest. That hard hit, doctors have since speculated, triggered commotio cordis, a rare event in which the heartbeat cycle is knocked off rhythm. Oddly enough, such a result would be more likely in baseball or lacrosse if a struck ball directly impacted someone’s chest wall. Commotio cordis can indeed be fatal in rare cases if the blow lands precisely in the vulnerable instant between heartbeats, which is what seems to have happened here.
Hamlin fell backward, got up, then collapsed like a broken toy.
Medical personnel quickly swarmed onto the field and started administering CPR. His Bills teammates and then the Bengals, too, began to close ranks, embrace, hold hands, pray, even cry. They knew it was serious and were undoubtedly reminded that it could have happened to any of them. It surely brought their worst fears to the surface, the ones they normally are in denial about.
As Sally Jenkins of the Washington Postpointed out soon after that hit, such violence is, in fact, baked into the game in a way that’s almost too routine to pay much attention to most of the time. As she vividly described it:
“You want to feel what NFL players do on an average play? Run full speed into a wall mirror.
“And while you’re lying on your back trying to regain your senses, consider the following math problem: Two large NFL players, who cover 40 yards in less than 4.5 seconds, collide, causing each to decelerate to zero. Roughly how much force do they — their skin, their bones, and their organs — endure on just a single such play?”
The college and professional players willing to endure such regular pain and damage for love and/or money, understand that possible injury or even death underpins the very reality of football. In fact, in some gruesome fashion, that’s what makes football seem authentic. It transforms players into valiant avatars of manhood instead of glorified stuntmen or, as in most sports other than the martial arts, merely entertainers who might still get hurt if they didn’t watch out.
Does Football Equal Manhood?
In fact, that very connection of football to manhood, whether you’re talking about the toxic masculinity critics decry after every varsity-related rape allegation or the mythical traditional heroism trumpeted by the sport’s boosters, has been critical to its success. The NFL sells the sport as a symbolic, vicarious version of warfare, something particularly significant for a male population that no longer faces obligatory military service (at a time when that same military has become at least slightly more welcoming to women). And don’t forget the way the sport helps contain the nuclear energy of millions of teenage boys. The image of them running loose through the slums and small towns of America has surely helped facilitate the approval of so many high-school football budgets. In later years, those tamed youths never seem to lose their sentimental attachment to the father figures who taught them obedience to authority and the supposed values of inflicting and absorbing pain on the field.
You’ve quit tobacco and probably should quit alcohol. Now, as the Super Bowl looms, is it time to turn your back on football?
Such feelings were evident among the millions of fans who followed Hamlin into intensive care and thrilled to his first reported words to his doctors when he regained consciousness (written because he was intubated): “Did we win?” And they were no less satisfied when he could again speak to his teammates, even if from his hospital bed. “Love you, boys,” was what he said — the perfect words for the hero of the story. It was a week before he could be moved from Cincinnati back to a hospital in Buffalo, nine days before he could go home with internal damage that will require a long rehab. In the weeks that followed, his popularity became monetized and his personal charity, which reportedly had raised only modest thousands of dollars, soared into the millions in a few weeks.
Too bad that money wasn’t for him. Like many players who get seriously injured in their first years in the NFL, Hamlin’s contract undoubtedly isn’t set up to cover long-term benefits or a pension, which means he may be way underinsured for what could lie ahead.
The Inspirational Narrative
Damar Hamlin had been a fringe second-year player on the Bills who blossomed when he suddenly replaced an injured starter. His emergence coincided with the team’s spectacular season. It ended three weeks after that hit with the spectral presence of Hamlin waving and making a heart with his hands from a snow-dusted luxury box window as the Bengals beat the Bills in the playoffs, sinking their Super Bowl dreams.
Nevertheless, the narrative remained inspirational, focusing on the NFL’s quick medical response and Hamlin’s “miraculous” recovery.
As the Nation‘s Dave Zirin noted in his Edge of Sports column, however, this is anything but
“a feel-good story. It should be an opportunity to discuss how players are often treated as expendable extensions of equipment and not as human beings. It should be an opportunity to debate the sport of football itself and whether it is safe for human beings to participate in it… Instead, they want us to discuss how inspirational Damar Hamlin is for his teammates and for fans across the country. But a near-death experience should never be seen as joyous, and it is a revelation of the NFL’s nihilism that this is the product they are expectorating back at us.”
Okay, so where do we go from here? Has the time finally come to make a choice, as you should have done with your other indulgences? You’ve quit tobacco and probably should quit alcohol. Now, as the Super Bowl looms, is it time to turn your back on football? Or would you prefer to “man up” and leave any qualms about its violence in the dust of (all too recent) history. Will you embrace it as who you are and what you want?
I know which way I’m heading — I’ve been heading there for a long while. In all honesty, I think there’s no middle way, no way to keep watching the game as a witness with reservations or to pretend to be a concerned sociologist rather than one of its enthusiasts. Sorry, it really is time to either get over it or get out.
These will, of course, be individual decisions because there’s simply too much money involved in the sport to expect positive public-health decisions by the government (local, state, or federal). After all, entire cities are held hostage by stadium deals; international media companies are under contract for years to come; and the interlocking business and personal relationships of several dozen billionaire Republican team owners rule the roost. Perhaps the most telling proof of football’s long-term power is the way it’s made its financial peace with the gambling industry. Sixty years ago, several of the league’s biggest stars were suspended simply for betting on games. How quaint that now seems, as the NFL has bedded down with that industry to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
So, calls for the banning of football would be a distinctly quixotic gesture designed to make us feel righteous and nothing more. Skip it. Even demanding radical reform by softening the game through rule tweaking to turn it into the equivalent of flag or touch football is now unimaginable. Besides, the NFL is ahead of you on that. In its support for the no-tackle game of flag football lies the same capitalist foresight that alcohol and tobacco brands showed when investing in the marijuana industry.
But all is not lost. If we’ve learned anything from football, it’s that trying harder, playing hurt, and never giving up is the essence of the sport. The game, they like to say, is never over till it’s over. Beyond turning your back on football, the single most significant thing you can do is to keep your kids from playing the game, not just to protect them but also to pinch off the pipeline of more fungible bodies, even as the far safer alternative of soccer waits on the sidelines. (Forty years ago, I wouldn’t allow my son to play high-school football and he’s still not happy about that. Tough.)
Otherwise, you can just accept the seeming consensus that football reflects American values of aggressive domination as surely as America refracts football into a model of muscular Christianity — and (as indeed I will) without significant shame or guilt enjoy the Super Bowl, sometimes a great game, but never one to die for.
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NFL Embraces Hip-Hop, Despite Its Conflicted History
Super Bowl halftimes have come a long way since Andy Williams and marching bands.
Feb 15, 2022
Sometime in the summer of 2023, the musical genre and lifestyle known as hip-hop will officially hit the half-century mark.
The difference now is that they've made their peace with hip-hop's critique of white privilege, its nonconformity, its own problematic narratives around gender and violence, its uncompromising Black aesthetic, its joy of innovation and its unpredictable irreverence.
It's hard to believe nearly 50 summers have passed since Clive Campbell, then an 18-year-old Jamaican-born American known as DJ Kool Herc, threw a house party in the South Bronx that changed the course of popular music while also challenging the idea of what constitutes American music.
Even as he thrilled party guests with unprecedented turntable artistry, no one, including Kool Herc himself, could have imagined that isolating and elongating beats using two turntables would become the foundation for an art form that would, within a generation, become the biggest and most profitable musical genre in the world.
DJ Kool Herc, now 66, probably watched Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show in amazement as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, Eminem and 50 Cent performed the first all-hip-hop show in NFL history.
If he bothered to watch Super Bowl VII in 1973, the sight of Andy Williams performing "Marmalade, Molasses and Honey" and "Happiness Is" backed by the Citrus College Singers and Woody Herman and the Michigan Marching Band is probably still burned into his memory. That's where the NFL thought America was at the time. It was a billion miles away from a house party in the Bronx.
What was so striking about the halftime performance was that a genre that was once considered antithetical to American order and our collective values was being celebrated on the highest holy day of America's civic calendar.
How did a musical genre that has never disguised its skepticism of American institutions become "safe enough" to program on Super Bowl Sunday?
I suspect that the team owners who collude and exercise monopoly powers within the NFL are probably still as conservative as they've always been. The difference now is that they've made their peace with hip-hop's critique of white privilege, its nonconformity, its own problematic narratives around gender and violence, its uncompromising Black aesthetic, its joy of innovation and its unpredictable irreverence.
A few years ago, the NFL hired the rap icon and music mogul Jay-Z to program its Super Bowl halftime shows for the foreseeable future. The NFL has come a long way since its Andy Williams days, but it decided that tapping someone as widely respected as Jay-Z to help steer them into the future would be a worthwhile investment.
Access to Jay-Z's Rolodex wouldn't come cheap. In exchange for his contacts and good will, the NFL would finally be compelled to bestow its imprimatur on a genre of music it strategically ignored for decades.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the controversies that swirled around Dr. Dre and his band N.W.A. in the late 1980s can't help but be amazed at the deference and respect these same artists are receiving today.
Remember when the FBI sent N.W.A. a letter warning them that they would be subject to arrest if they performed a song from their debut album, "Straight Outta Compton," that was perceived as "anti-cop" by law enforcement?
It was surreal seeing Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, his one time protege, opening halftime with a G-rated performance of "The Next Episode" followed by "California Love" and getting the kind of reception that would've greeted Hall and Oates half a lifetime ago.
Did I dream that period in the early 1990s when Dre and Snoop were harassed by law enforcement for their recording of "Deep Cover," with its promise to do a "1-8-7 on an undercover cop?"
Yet, here they were at SoFi Stadium in broad daylight thrilling a sellout crowd with sanitized versions of songs that used to get them classified as public enemies.
When the spotlight segued to Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson hanging upside-down from a pullup bar in the rafters, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the game had irrevocably changed.
Surrounded by scantily clad dancers, "Fitty" tore into a clean version of his first big hit "In Da Club." Millions who either weren't alive or were very young when he originally recorded it will download the track this week in an attempt to understand what all the fuss was about when he showed up. It's a fitting "happy birthday" for hip-hop, indeed.
There's nothing like the allure of hip-hop nostalgia. Besides being relatable, the music can be endlessly recycled, reconstituted and monetized. Like its older musical siblings soul, country, disco and rock 'n' roll, much of hip-hop is also destined to become grist for elevators once it is rendered anodyne and nonthreatening by corporate ownership and co-option.
The dirty little secret of so much rap and hip-hop is that very few of its practitioners are rebels with--or without--a cause, though there was a time when the music was dominated by MCs and DJs who were so principled it spilled all over their lyrics and music.
Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar is one such rapper. His commitment to saying something worthwhile through the tight but imaginative choreography for "Alright," his anti-police violence anthem, came through even if the line about the "po-po" wasn't audible in the arena or at home.
The best performance of the evening was Mary J. Blige digging deep with uncompromising renditions of "Family Affair" and "No More Drama" that brought down the house with their focused passion and emotional intelligence.
The only avowedly political "statement" of the evening was one I didn't notice until I read about it after the game. When Eminem finished his performance of "Lose Yourself," he took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, according to reports. Eminem just looked tired to me.
There were stories that suggested that Eminem did so in defiance of the NFL's wishes, but that seems doubtful, given that the league realizes how self-defeating the original prohibition was and is no longer enforcing it--especially after the summer of George Floyd protests.
Everything that happened onstage Sunday, including all the acts of lyrical self-censorship and even Eminem's gesture of solidarity protesting police brutality, was choreographed. Wardrobe malfunctions are a thing of the past--and even that was partially staged.
Now, if Dre and his colleagues had managed to bring Mr. Kaepernick out to sing with them during "Still Dre" at the end of the show and kneeled with him as a group, that would have been the single most electrifying event in hip-hop history. It would have been the ultimate usurpation of a once-sacred stage.
Needless to say, that did not happen, and it probably never occurred to anyone involved to make something like that happen. It would have offended the team owners who have agreed to blackball Mr. Kaepernick for speaking out so forcefully against police violence five years ago.
The folks who put together Sunday's halftime show were determined to demonstrate hip-hop's global power and influence. It was not the time to demonstrate its conscience.
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