WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

Attorney and writer Hines considers the problems of American football in this nonfiction work.

The author’s father, Glen Ray Hines, was an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers from 1966 to 1970, and later briefly played for the New Orleans Saints and Pittsburgh Steelers. “On every play, he fired off leading with his head into a mass of human bone and flesh,” remembers Hines, who watched him from the stands of the Astrodome. In his later years, his father developed advanced dementia because of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The author played four years of Division I college football himself, but he was happy to leave it behind. In fact, he hasn’t kept up with the sport at all—to the confusion of his sports-loving friends and family. With this book, Hines attempts to diagnose not only his own disillusionment with football—which has much deeper roots than his father’s CTE—and the waning position of the sport in the American imagination. Mixing memoir with cultural analysis, Hines investigates trends from the decline of youth participation in the sport to the National Football League’s responses to football players’ health issues over the years. He looks at the cases of college football con artist Ron Weaver, early retiree George Sauer, high-profile concussion victim Luke Kuechly, and his own father, who died in 2019. Hines writes with precision and a palpable dislike for the things he sees as corrupting the game: “The fact that fans use the term ‘we’ after a victory by their team has been coined in psychology studies as reflected glory, as opposed to using the term ‘they’ when their team loses, a practice called cutting off reflected failure,” he writes. “This psychological condition is not limited to sports alone.” The book reads like a series of essays, and there’s a fair amount of repeated information; it makes most sense to regard the book primarily as a companion to Hines’ podcast of the same title. However, the book does effectively articulate a comprehensive critique of the ethics of modern football.

An often-compelling examination of a sport’s sins from a man with an insider’s view.