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" Football is in the middle of several distinct crises at the moment. Only days after deciding to put a definite figure on the value of beating a woman, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is faced with 49ers defensive end Ray McDonald allegedly beating up his 10-week pregnant fianc\u00E9e. Then there is the question of Denver wide receiver Wes Welker who has had three concussions in ten months, and who appears ready to return to the field this Sunday. Here is a genuine moral quandary for Goodell. Is it his moral responsibility to stop Welker from playing? Does he have the right to stop him? Football is increasingly turning from a spectator sport into a spectator morality drama.  It is, of course, amazingly easy to shit all over Goodell, but the truth is that all of us, all of us who are spectators of football, are complicit in its moral quandaries. As Tom Junod put it recently, &amp;quot;I know but one thing about the upcoming football season: I&amp;#039;m going to watch it. And I&amp;#039;m going to feel a little bad about watching it.&amp;quot; That tension, between loving football and recognizing that it is increasingly immoral to love it, was the basic theme of a film that is now fifteen years old: Oliver Stone&amp;#039;s weirdly brilliant Any Given Sunday. It has finally, at long last, stumbled into relevance.  Not that Any Given Sunday is a great film, by any means. It starred Al Pacino, right around the period when he became a self-parody, the period that the SNL imitators reach for when they&amp;#039;re doing Al Pacino. The shouty period. And under Stone&amp;#039;s direction, every ounce of that shoutiness is parlayed into one cliched speech right after another: the halftime speech during the regular season, the halftime speech during the playoffs, the I-gave-my-life-to-this-game speech, the this-is-the-wisest-speech-you&amp;#039;ll-ever-hear-kid speech. Any Given Sunday is a football movie that Ronald Reagan would have recognized: the old classic quarterback who&amp;#039;s a team player (played by Dennis Quaid) against the new hotheaded selfish quarterback (Jamie Foxx). A team falling apart as it heads into the playoffs, then redeemed at the last minute. The veteran coach looking for one last big victory, worried that he&amp;#039;s a has-been. The owner who has inherited the franchise looking to prove herself. After you&amp;#039;ve seen the first ten minutes, you could probably write out the plot yourself, beat by beat.   But inside all that cliche is actually a very interesting, and very pertinent, vision of football. The term &amp;quot;gladiator&amp;quot; is often used as a compliment when discussing football players. Stone takes the comparison literally. He intercuts scenes from Ben-Hur with his own drama. And he is clear that these men have sold their bodies and their health in the pursuit of an entirely gratuitous and temporary glory, and money that pours away nearly as quickly as it pours in. The movie&amp;#039;s best scene \u2014 and it is one of the great scenes in all of Oliver Stone&amp;#039;s movies \u2014 involves Cameron Diaz, as the owner, walking into the locker room after a big win. Stone somehow got full-frontal male nudity past the MPAA. And Diaz, tiny and blonde, walks among these huge naked men and shakes their hands utterly professionally. It reminded me of a fact from France before the revolution: The grand dames of that period would happily change naked in front of their man-servants, so removed were they, so distant from their underlings. They didn&amp;#039;t think of their servants as people, so they could easily go nude. When little blonde Diaz shakes hands with these naked men, and they all act as politely as they can manage, the message is utterly clear: This woman owns these men. That&amp;#039;s the reality. All these men suffer, risk death even, at the command and for the profit of a couple of rich and pretty white ladies in a big house.  Stone is particularly good at showing the violence of the field. That is the gift of football: the extreme speed of it, alongside the immense forces it involves. The quarterback&amp;#039;s decisions are made in such fragmentary bits of space that they are really miraculous. The football scenes are the Saving Private Ryan of sports videos.  But his portrait of the lives of football players is unremittingly bleak. They are all dealing with their pain. The doctors are constantly trying to hide their own complete absence of ethics, and everyone is hanging on with their hands out. The men in question go all out on the football field, and then use the money on drugs and whores, both of the expensive varieties. In the final scene, after the old coach and the new star quarterback have reconciled, the quarterback throws a ball and looks back and says that his arm is hurting, but the coach is gone. Nobody wants to hear about the pain. Stone loves the big metaphors of American life. And America has few metaphors bigger than football. Somewhere in the vicinity of forty million Americans watch the NFL draft. Not a game. The draft. The love for football transcends race and class and regions. Football is the ultimate metaphor for the military-industrial complex, a fusion of the battlefield and the factory, a game about strength and organization and generalship and sacrifice. And so the question of how we deal with the suffering and violent men at the heart of the game is a question of more than athletic importance.  Goodell makes bad decisions, granted, but he is also in an impossible position: He is trying to find superficial solutions to fundamental problems, problems that run even deeper than football. Why do we love violence? Why do we reward those who are excellent at violence, train them to be better at violence, and then punish them when the violence they commit is not the kind of violence we admire? Because surely no one who watches football can be surprised that men who do that for a living have problems with hurting other people away from the field. Their whole life revolves around inflicting pain for reward.  To solve the crises in football, Goodell would have to ask himself why getting huge men to beat the shit out of each other for the amusement of crowds is the most popular entertainment in America. And that&amp;#039;s a question that no one has an answer to, not even the most devoted fan. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a29902/any-given-sunday-15-years-later/>