Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers. – Merle Kessler
I quickly learned what many Sunday widows already realized — that football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbal, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time. – Arnold J. Mandell, “A Psychiatric Study of Professional Football,” 1974 [An inte