"Unnecessary" Roughness ??

Dear Tiffani,

When is roughness “unnecessary”?

Dat's Who Dat

Dear Dat,

Right! Here’s a sport constructed around roughness, and we’re going to slice it so fine that some of it is unnecessary? Really, can you believe unnecessary roughness even exists in football? But heck, what football considers necessary roughness doesn’t translate into any other sports. Remember, in tennis, there is no contact (!) between opposing players! And in basketball, while the team members occasionally line up in a lackadaisical fashion, then the most they do is kind of elbow one another. Oooooh, I’m so scared. And in track, if you bump the other guy you are disqualified! What??

But, I suppose that without limiting certain activities, say tackling a player after he’s on the ground, or clobbering the quarterback while a completed pass is being galloped away, etc., things might get out of control. Like in Rollerball—remember after they suspended calling penalties the games got really … oh wait, that’s fiction. But anyway, most every football play ends with a tackle, and everybody, whether or not in on the tackle, is crashing their multi-hundredweight body into opponents, and others not active in roughness are threatening roughness, like rushing the passer.

So I’m thinking that this unnecessary roughness stuff is simply a fig leaf to pretend that our sport is veddy civilized, maybe like polo, even as all the while we get our fix of necessary roughness.