The NFL and my crisis of conscience

I have been a fan of the National Football League for 28 years. My first football memory is watching the 1979 NFC Championship game when the Los Angeles Rams beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 9-0, when I was six years old. For all 28 years, I have been a fan of and had my heart broken by the Philadelphia Eagles, following in the footsteps of my grandfather.

But today, as the Patriot and Chargers battle it out on national television in one of this week's premier matchups, I'm prepared to divorce myself from the NFL. It wasn't Michael Vick and the dog-fighting or Pacman Jones and his audition to join the Cincinnati Bengals or even the revelation that the Patriots cheated last week against the Jets, hitting at the integrity of the game and implying that they may have been cheating for some time and finally got caught.

My end of days with the NFL is a result of the violence and, to be more specific, the incredible harm that the violence of the game inflicts on the players.

The suicide last year of former Eagle Andre Waters has played on my conscious. If you did not hear the story, Waters killed himself at the age of 44. A neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh received permission from Waters' family to study the retired safety's brain, and what he found surely impacted many retired players around the country.

According to the doc, Waters' brain was in the condition of an 85-year-old in early-stage Alzheimer's. The doc concluded that Waters' brain damage was a result of the many hits he took during his career.

Although tragic, that event alone was not enough to pull me away from football. But then the off-season story about shoddy treatment of former players who have health issues hit the news.

The players are starting to demand more help from the multi-billion dollar league for serious injuries that have left many of them in constant pain and unable to work, but also unable to get assistance from the pension and disability fund that is set up to help them.

On June 26, a group of critics, led by former coach and player Mike Ditka, will appear before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee to look into charges that the pension fund, administered by the league and union, is improperly denying benefits to the former stars who sacrificed their long-term health to help make the NFL the nation's most popular and profitable sport.

The NFL is ringing up the cash like they're printing money. There is no reason for former players to be treated this way.

Then I saw a talk at Dickinson College with Jackson Katz, the filmmaker who created Tough Guise, a documentary about gender images in the pop culture.

Then Mike Everett of the Buffalo Bills suffered "catastrophic damage" to his spinal cord in Week 1.

And it all came home.

These young men are killing themselves and creating a future filled with pain and surgery after surgery so that I can be entertained. Granted, they're also doing it for the loot, but the loot would not be there if millions of us weren't watching.

So that's it. I'm done. Will I never watch another game as long as I live? I really can't say that. In fact, tonight when NBC Nightly News promoed Football Night in America, my four-year-old daughter, who has her own Eagles jersey, said excitedly, "It's football night, Daddy!" I'll probably watch another game sometime, probably this season.

But I will say this. I will not go out of my way to watch games, and the NFL is not getting another dime from me. No jerseys, no t-shirts, no tickets. I can no longer in good conscience support the slow destruction of other human beings for my own entertainment.