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C2 Sports Boston Sunday Globe SEPTEMBER 21, 2014 Hit hard by brutality of football Bob Ryan the world. What does that say about Us? Football is a brutal, quasi-barbaric game. Its object is to hit. Its byproduct is to hurt. Hockey is a rough game, too, and it does involve hitting and being hit (unless your name was Wayne Gretzky).

But hitting is not the object of the game. Football can likewise maintain that hitting is not the object of the game, either, that the object is to advance the oblong ball into a piece of real estate known as the end zone, or to kick said ball between tall pieces of whatever known as goal posts. We know better. There is hitting, and possible hurting, on every play. That's the reason why most of its participants love it so.

They relish the contact. Oh, there is strategy, and lots of it. Deploying those 11 men on your side, be it on offense or defense, calls for a great deal of planning. Speculating on the next play call is part of the fun of being a spectator. Everyone has an opinion.

But the fact is the result of 60 minutes of high-level football is carnage, both in the short and long run. Mounting evidence paints a grim picture for an astonishing number of the men who choose this activity as a way of making a living. It was bad enough when the expected consequence of playing football was a malfunctioning arm, shoulder or knee as you advanced into your 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond. Now we know the greatest threat is neurological. In the abstract, one might think America would be horrified.

One might wonder how such a debilitating activity was even legal. (This is where we all suppress our laughter.) Full disclosure: I stand before you as an official enabler. Without trying to assert any bragging rights, I can say I go back far enough with this sport to remember when one-platoon football was in vogue. I saw the 1955 Army-Navy game. I was at Army-Notre Dame two years later when their series resumed.

I rooted for the New York Giants and I can still see Mel Triplett dragging three Chicago Bears into the end zone in that glori ous 47-7 triumph in the 1956 championship game. I was riveted to my TV set for the famous Giants-Colts 1958 overtime classic. I was at BC 41, Notre Dame 39. 1 was there for the Tuck Rule. I covered all three Patriots Super Bowl victories and enjoyed them immensely, especially the first one.

I'll stop. I promise. So I have enjoyed football as a fan as far back as I can remember. It's always been on my sports smorgasbord table. But as I've gotten older I find myself troubled by the essential mentality of the game.

It's become harder and harder to accept the callousness of its passionate adherents, who seem to have no problem rationalizing the aforementioned carnage as simply part of the deal. I mean, there's a lot to be said for football as an entertainment spectacle, but it simply does not speak well for American society that this vicious game is our sport of choice. Personally, if it were to go away, I'd be just fine. My sports smorgasbord table will still be groaning with goodies. I'd have my pigskin memories.

I realize this is a minority view. With regard to the current issues, when it's all said and done, yes, Roger Goodell has forfeited all credibility and thus must go. And then what? Football will continue. The moral outrage over the deviant behavior of so many of its participants will subside. Concussions will continue to occur (please, Wes, stop playing immediately).

Arms, shoulders, knees, and necks will continue to sustain permanent damage. Gambling will resume. Fantasy leagues will go on. Most of all, players will play. No one can possibly enter this game unaware of the possible physical consequences, but people still want to play.

If they don't care what happens to themselves, why should we? That's one way of looking at it, I guess. Patriots 41, Raiders 10. 1 told you I was an enabler. Bob Ryan's column appears regularly in the Globe. He can be reached at ryanglobe.com.

OK, America, this is what you wanted. Deal with it. Football is America's unquestioned 21st century national pastime. The evidence is irrefutable. More than just America's most popular sport, football may very well be America's true connective tissue.

In a time of vast entertainment options, the Sunday football ritual (and let's not forget Monday and Thursday evenings) may be America's last great communal event. Think about it. There is no other single activity no specific movie, no specific television show, no specific show business act, and nothing taking place in any specific museum currently commanding the attention of more people, before, during, and after the games themselves than the weekly offering of NFL games. It would be nice if it were politics, but a look at the turnouts for our elections tells you that, sadly, is not the case. Nope.

Football says "America" to They Were Thinking BY STAN GROSSFELD Globe Staff What shaky days just after World War II. The issue Bell had to contend with was betting. Two players on the New York Giants, Frank Filchock and Merle Hapes, were implicated in a betting ploy spearheaded by known gambler Alvin Paris. The day before the Giants and Bears were to play in the NFL championship game, Bell was tipped off to Paris's scheme by New York mayor Bill O'Dwyer and city police commissioner Arthur Wallander. In less than 24 hours, Bell met with each player individually, heard their stories, and then promptly determined their fate.

Filchock, claiming he knew nothing of Paris's scheme to have him influence the outcome of the title game, was allowed to play. Hapes, who acknowledged being aware of Paris's intention, was banned from playing in the championship, his penance for not telling the league of Paris's advances. In very short order, without need of video or witnesses or lawyers, the NFL essentially wiped its hands clean of both players. Filchock, who played a few more seasons in Canada, did play one more NFL game for Baltimore in 1950, some four years after Bell's initial ruling. Hapes played a few more years in the CFL but never again in the NFL.

"Had my father not acted the way he did," Upton Bell mused late last week as the ever-dithering NFL con Former Celtics star ANTOINE WALKER is honored by the Sports Museum at its 13th annual "The Tradition" event at TD Garden, Sept. 17, 2014 "It feels great. Boston is my second home. I look at this place like my family. To be back here with the Celtics organization and see a lot of the old faces and to see my body of work that I did here be appreciated is a great feeling.

It seems like it would be customary to do the "Antoine This is the proper setting for it. I haven't done it in a long time. And it's something that people here appreciated that I did. It was fun. I got a lot of recognition for it but, I don't know, I'm getting a little old now.

I stopped doing it a long time ago. I got mine an NBA championship with the Heat, but I feel like I'm a Celtic. Obviously, I appreciated when Paul and Ray and Kevin did what they did for Boston. Number 17. 1 feel good because I was able to get one.

If I was sitting here and I never got a championship it would probably hurt, but I do feel good about it. Getting honored here in New England makes me feel special about the situation. I'm a Celtic. Definitely." as a bell tional Football League, arguably the most powerful man in pro sports, can't come up with a good answer for the guy from TMZ. Lifeboats, people, lifeboats.

"Goodell is reactionary," said Upton Bell, who lives these days in Cambridge, "and not a visionary. I've lived this, I saw what it was like with my father. The league and the PA have to agree to a set of rules, a hard set of rules around domestic violence, child abuse, drugs, rape whatever. And stop the sliding scale of BS. Make it clear that it's a privilege and not a right to play in the NFL.

Do this, you're gone for a year. Do that, you're gone for good. Stop counting the money and care about the game first." According to Bell, his father was worried about league-wide owner reaction during the weeks that followed his Filchock-Hapes decision. Upon entering his first meeting with them after the incident, he thought he might be fired. He had been on the job less than a year.

Instead, the owners gave Bert Bell a three-year contract extension. Conviction came not with a price, but with an award. Kezrin PaulDupont's "On Second Thought" appears on Page 2 of the Sunday Globe Sports section. He can be reached at dupontglobe.com. Follow him on Twitter GlobeKPD.

For a collection of past pictures, go to bostonglobe.comsports Ex-commissioner's justice was clear in a time when people were reluctant to talk openly about divorce or children born out of wedlock, never mind domestic violence, sexual abuse, or the whipping of a defenseless 4-year-old child with a tree branch. Nonetheless, Goodell has to up his game. Quickly. Or he has to go. If the NFL owners didn't know that prior to Friday, they know it now.

We'll find out soon if his weakness, especially his failure to attack issues forthright-ly and with alacrity, matters to them. Or we will find out if he is simply mirroring a billionaire brotherhood interested solely in making more billions. Goodell said Friday that he wants to see changes in the league's personal conduct policy in place by the Super Bowl. But when the assembled media pressed him for details specific to the policy, he repeatedly deked and dodged, especially so on the matter of Ray Rice and the many questions around the video clip that showed the ex-Ravens running back delivering a KO punch to his then-girlfriend (now wife) in an Atlantic City casino's elevator. Goodell slipped out of that one by noting that Rice's case in now in appeal.

We eventually will hear it all, said Goodell, but by that point in the news conference he engendered little confidence in his words. We live in an era when the commissioner of the Na Kevin Paul Dupont ON SECOND THOUGHT gjfcifc Amid its free fall in- 'uMfm to sports bizarro world, one of the cs 1 -Jb) very few things the 'ixjl NFL could be thank-f iSMj! ful for in recent days was the absence of a flhNi betting scandal. HMiH Which is to say things could have been worse. Admittedly, that's hard to imagine, what with domestic violence, child abuse, and stupefying lack of leadership making up the rancid porridge of The Shield's current state. "Money is all they know," said Upton Bell, a former Patriots general manager, referring to NFL players and owners alike.

"If you want behavior to change and this is for both sides then make the penalties and fines mean something. Bargain it at the table, write it into the CBA, and be done with it. Until you do that, until players lose jobs or owners pay big fines or lose draft picks, all the nonsense will continue." Bell, born in 1937, was a grade schooler in December 1946 when his father, Bert Bell, then new on the job as NFL commissioner, dealt swiftly and strongly with what could have been the league's grand undoing in its tinued to be pilloried in the media, "the New York papers the next day would have read, 'NFL Finished Gambling No question about it." After some 10 days of wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak amid the ongoing turmoil, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell finally surfaced Friday afternoon for a news conference. It was largely anticipated that he would announce sweeping changes. Instead, just more sweeping.

The stoic Goodell said the obvious, that he had erred many times and that many in the league had to do much better, and that the league would bring on more people to help it fix its myriad problems. When in doubt, add more people. Goodell kept a pretty good poker face for most of it, yet it was obvious he didn't know how to play the cards, or didn't have them. He grew increasingly uncomfortable and unconvincing. Like so much of Goodell in recent times, it was long on apology, short on remedy.

The league, like society, is far more complex today than the day Bert Bell sat down Filchock and Hapes and determined their fate as one-man court, jury, justice. We all understand that. Bell wasn't dealing with multibillion-dollar sponsors and lawyers and a Players Association that fights for player rights but often bucks common sense. Bell governed.