Brutality In Sports

America loves its pastimes, and sports are some of the best. From Little League baseball to high school basketball, professional football and beyond. Everyone has a favorite and along with it comes the drama of injury. We marvel and gasp, groan and grimace, enduring the pain as if it were our own.

We all remember heavyweight champ Evander Holyfield and his despair when Mike Tyson bit off part of his ear.We sympathized with Evander and excoriated Tyson, but we weren’t that shocked in view of the brutality of the sport. We marveled in disgust when we saw Joe Theismann’s compound fracture on national television. I don’t know a soul that didn’t groan in revulsion watching bone sticking through mangled flesh. Or how about Bryce Florie, the Red Sox pitcher, getting his cheekbone crushed and his retina damaged with a line drive in a game against the Yankees.                                                                                                                                                                                                And everyone loves a good race. When two-time champion, Alex Zanardi, crashed in 2001 he had the entire stands in awe, astonished at the surprising and extraordinary crash. 

We make allowances, we sympathize and empathize with those that are injured, but still, it makes our blood flow and we continue to watch. We justify and make excuses, after all, it’s sports. But what about when it’s something the people consider brutal, gruesome and inhumane? Do we still empathize? Does our sympathy still go out to the player, amateur and pro alike? What about a sport that’s so grisly, so bloody, that the audience is desensitized? A sport that begets insensitivity to violence and takes us to death’s door. Let me show you and you decide.

During the San Isidro Festival, Israel Lancho was gored by a bull. He nearly paid the ultimate price for the glamour of the matador, however, he’s still alive. He went in for an emergency operation for a “deep stomach wound” and, although the bull’s horn missed his heart, was said only to be in “very serious condition”. He remains in the hospital in critical care.

The horror of it all didn’t escape a crowd of thousands, but needless to say, in Spain, they aren’t quite as compassionate as American spectators. The fiesta in San Isidro, patron saint of peasants and laborers, went on at the behest of the dispassionate crowd. Although bullfighting is a popular sport in Spain, recent polls showed less than thirty percent of citizens favor bullfighting. According to the pollsters this reflects an overall trend that people believe animals should be treated more humanely.

Maybe this explains why the bloodied bull had more supporters than Israel, and why the shouts of “let the games continue” rang out loudly. After all, wasn’t the bull just an opponent?