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Out of Their League
Dave Meggyesy had been an outside linebacker with the St. Louis Cardinals for seven years when he quit at the height of his career to tell about the dehumanizing side of the game—about the fraud and the payoffs, the racism, drug abuse, and incredible violence. The original publication of Out of Their League shocked readers and provoked the outraged response that rocked the sports world in the 1970s. But his memoir is also a moving description of a man who struggled for social justice and personal liberation. Meggyesy has continued this journey and remains an active champion for players’ rights through his work with the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA). He provides a preface for this Bison Books edition.
255 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1971
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 14, 2023
5 stars because it’s my grandad’s book :P,but also just a really candid reflection on the NFL and the conditions players were forced to endure at the time. I really don’t have much interest in football generally and glanced over the specific plays he talked about, but the social pressures and psyche of american football were fascinating and ring true today.
August 26, 2010
A great, if dated analysis of professional sport as a social phenomenon, and the role of the athlete as commodity. This is exactly the kind of intersection between sports and highbrow analysis that I love, so it's certainly no shock that I liked the book.
Many sports books claim to give an insider's look, but this one truly does so. Rather than devolving into chest-pounding autobiography, this one blithely covers the abuses of sport when such abuses were not realized to be commonplace. The 1950s and 60s are regarded as golden ages of American sport, when gargantuan Mickey Mantles and Jim Browns performed superhuman spectacles, and sports was pure and untrammeled by money. This is, of course, a yearning for a false past, a past that never existed. The best parts of the book are when Meggyesy covers the everyday scandals of college football, bluntly describing payments under the table, academic abuses, and drug use. Indeed, this is Ball Four for football, blowing the lid off of a corrupt institution that portrays itself as infallible and pure.
Unfortunately, not all of Meggyesy's writing has survived the intervening years so well. His railing against Richard Nixon is, although justified at the time, lacking in the perspective that Watergate gave us, and some of his rhetoric of spectator sports becoming obsolete is clearly overblown. And, of course, sports have done a lot of changing since then. The NCAA regulates schools to make sure at least the most obvious violations of rules and ethics are caught. Drug use is harshly punished (when caught), and racism no longer manifests itself with aggressive and sweeping stereotypes.
But many points remain salient, particularly the rights of players as human beings. The athlete is just as much a commodity now as he was then. Coaches are still callous, players are still expected to train their future replacements, and injuries are still looked on with skepticism by coach, player, and fan alike. Players deserve better treatment, and this book can help fans realize it. Well worth a read.
Many sports books claim to give an insider's look, but this one truly does so. Rather than devolving into chest-pounding autobiography, this one blithely covers the abuses of sport when such abuses were not realized to be commonplace. The 1950s and 60s are regarded as golden ages of American sport, when gargantuan Mickey Mantles and Jim Browns performed superhuman spectacles, and sports was pure and untrammeled by money. This is, of course, a yearning for a false past, a past that never existed. The best parts of the book are when Meggyesy covers the everyday scandals of college football, bluntly describing payments under the table, academic abuses, and drug use. Indeed, this is Ball Four for football, blowing the lid off of a corrupt institution that portrays itself as infallible and pure.
Unfortunately, not all of Meggyesy's writing has survived the intervening years so well. His railing against Richard Nixon is, although justified at the time, lacking in the perspective that Watergate gave us, and some of his rhetoric of spectator sports becoming obsolete is clearly overblown. And, of course, sports have done a lot of changing since then. The NCAA regulates schools to make sure at least the most obvious violations of rules and ethics are caught. Drug use is harshly punished (when caught), and racism no longer manifests itself with aggressive and sweeping stereotypes.
But many points remain salient, particularly the rights of players as human beings. The athlete is just as much a commodity now as he was then. Coaches are still callous, players are still expected to train their future replacements, and injuries are still looked on with skepticism by coach, player, and fan alike. Players deserve better treatment, and this book can help fans realize it. Well worth a read.
November 27, 2018
I saw Dave Meggysesy on a 2 am re-run of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show around a year ago, about the same time I was getting into watching football as a weekend activity. A dissonance however emerged between the brutal world of football Dave was describing, and the sanitized, romanticized world the NFL chooses to portray nearly every day of the week. In a similar manner to Disney World losing its magic by seeing the drab behind the scenes infrastructure, Out of Their League removed some of the excitement of watching the Detroit Lions lose by offering a short tour of the NFL Hall of Horrors. While the NFL has begun to work on some of the issues Dave chronicled nearly 50 years ago (improvements to equipment, mandatory concussion protocols, changing the rules to prohibit tackling headfirst) it has been shocking to see how much time the NFL has allowed to go by between their institutional awareness of very real, on-going issues and when the organization began to actually research and implement needed changes to the sport. Dave's intimacy with football shows, the manner in which he recounts his career and kept track of how hungry a beast pro-football really is was similar to reading a beat reporter's work. Players were treated like the NFL was an auctioneer of athletic flesh. You got the sense that players, even the greatest, were just replaceable cogs in a demanding machine.
April 3, 2012
A really groundbreaking book when it was written that could have just as easily been written in 2012 as in 1971. Coaches who are completely out of touch regarding head injuries and unable to comprehend why a player who LOOKS fine might have some issues that mean he should not be playing at that time....sounds like the current NFL. Interesting to hear the side of a player as he struggled with his role in the massive football complex and his complicated feelings regarding his professional and personal lives.
December 21, 2015
Published in 1970, this memoir rings true in the NFL world of 2015. The dehumanization of players, the militarization of the game, and gladiator spectacle were all aspects of the game as they are today. The only difference is the amount of cash involved. There is not much humor in the writing, but the author does a good job detailing what it is like be an average professional football player. His brief tale of getting high and dropping acid was a highlight.
August 8, 2019
This is an excellent book about sports and American culture in the 1960s.
October 15, 2023
Great read about the “hippy of NFL”, a new look pro football
April 20, 2025
Out of Their League is a polemical memoir by then St. Louis (now Arizona) Cardinals linebacker Dave Meggyesy included among Sports Illustrated’s Top 100 Sports Books. Aside from being an NFL player (which Meggyesy wasn’t too famous for even among hardcore NFL fans), Meggyesy became infamous for refusing to salute the American flag during the national anthem before NFL games in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War.
Interestingly enough, Meggyesy’s multi-game protests were not covered by the national media & press at the time so NFL fans outside of Cardinals fans were unaware but that ofcourse does not mean that the Commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, was unaware — he was aware and enraged, not just at Meggyesy’s national anthem & flag protests but his associations with SDS and the anti-war left including collecting signatures for petitions from teammates and scheduling meetings with hundreds of protesters at his house — to the extent Meggyesy was told by the team the FBI had a dossier on him.
However, the national public did not become aware of Meggyesy’s national anthem protests and anti-war views until his book, Out of Their League, was published which he appeared on the Dick Cavett show for which resulted in a national speaking tour with over 600 engagements which resulted in the book selling over 650k copies.
Meggyesy’s protest occurred nearly five decades prior to Colin Kapernick’s similar protest of the national anthem & flag. Both players were protesting America’s repressive regime, with Meggyesy’s protest focusing on his objection to the Vietnam War while Kapernick’s protest focused on police brutality and the murder of unarmed black men dying in the streets.
As similar as Meggyesy’s and Kapernick’s protests were, there was one critical difference — the price each man paid for following his conscience strictly due to the color of their skin.
Whereas Kapernick was a black quarterback protesting racism in an extremely racist league (yes, the NFL is still racist) so Kapernick was literally run out of the league then blackballed and stopped from returning despite bringing the 49ers to an NFC Championship and almost winning them a Super Bowl — alternaltely, Meggyesy as a white linebacker was benched for the remainder of the season as punishment for his protests yet he never lost his job nor was he blacklisted and run out of the league as Kapernick was.
To return to the NFL’s racism, Meggyesy writes about this in much detail during his time in the league in the 1960s and very little has changed over six decades later.
Racism in the NFL is still rampant today given that over 70% of the league is black yet black men only make up of the US population. Additionally, the highest collision positions are dominated by black players (cornerbacks - 99% black, wide receivers - 88% black, linebackers - 74% black) yet the lowest collision positions are dominated by white players (quarterbacks, kickers & punters).
Meggyesy calls attention to how disgustingly rampant racism in the NFL was during his time in the league from stacking, quotas, forced segregation by the coaches, verbal abuse & humiliation of black players, extremely racist team leaders and more.
Importantly, Meggyesy also highlights the complete and total dehumanization of the game of football itself and the extremely high price that it extracts from its very human flesh & blood players.
Meggyesy describes the dehumanization that occurred on kickoff as he was often used in special teams:
“I was playing end on the kickoff return team. I watched the flight of the ball as it went straight down the middle. Then I dropped back a few steps and began the sprint across field. I knew he didn’t see me and I decided to take him low. I gathered all my force and hit him. As I did, I heard his knee explode in my ear, a jagged, tearing sound of muscles and ligaments separating. The next thing I knew, time was called and he was writhing in pain on the field. They carried him off on a stretcher and I felt sorry—but at the same time, I knew it was a tremendous block and that was what I got paid for.
During the rest of my years in the pros, this image would occasionally surface in my mind. This sort of thing happened all the time; it was part of a typical Sunday afternoon in big-time football. But the conditions that made me feel a confused joy at breaking up another man’s body gradually became just one of many reasons why I decided to quit the game. After playing the sport most of my life, I’ve come to see that football is one of the most dehumanizing experiences a person can face, and in this book I’m going to tell you what’s really behind the video glitter of the game—the racism and fraud, the unbelievable brutality that affects mind as much as body.”
As Meggyesy further describes football’s dehumanization:
”We didn’t fully understand the demands and contradictions imposed by the commercial nature of the game, that we were the product and the replaceable parts.”
Meggyesy is also brutally honest about the straight up sadism and violent spectacle inherent in the sport of football itself and, although this was written in 1970, it is still extremely relevant today. Even though we are no longer in the “headbanging” era of football as helmet to helmet hits have been outlawed the fact remains that football players today are bigger, faster, taller & stronger which results in injuries that are still just as catastrophic, gruesome & debilitating. Additionally, since neurodegenerative diseases like CTE are caused by repetitive subconcussive head impacts, today’s players are just as susceptible to suffering from CTE, Parkinson’s disease, dementia & Alzheimer’s disease from the tens of thousands of repetitive head impacts they endure from Pop Warner to high school football to college football to the Pros.
Meggyesy describes the constant pervasive nature of & blind acceptance of violence in football:
”From an early age, I had learned to endure violence and brutality as simply a part of my life. But in football, the brutality became legitimate, a way of being accepted on the football field and off.”
Meggyesy also details the ambivalent, harrowing nature of football violence:
“Like any other sane person, he didnt particularly like to hit or be hit. But as the pro football cliche goes, “A player has got to want to love to hit.”
A lot of Meggyesy’s book deals with the psychological violence that the game of football exacts upon and extracts from its players. Football’s violence requires a detachment bordering on dissociation while also requiring a ramping up and “psyching up” of the self to “go out there and hit somebody”.
Meggyesy examines what this constant psychological damage does to the players who are suffering from not just the physical violence which is explicit and obvious to the viewer but also a psychological violence that is invisible and insidious that is not visible to the viewer:
“For the first time in my life I began to experience fear on the playing field. The fears kept creeping in and for a while I could hardly control them. I began to question the brutality of the game — these guys on the other side of the line were obviously trying to smash the hell out of me.”
Sometimes the psyching up that the players would do that Meggyesy describes appears to rise to the level of brainwashing as described by the author in the haunting passage below:
“I rarely missed a tackle when I was playing pro ball, but when I did it usually was because of a fear of getting my head kicked in. I always tried to psych myself out of this fear but sometimes it refused to get psyched away and I would find myself turning my face away from a ball player’s driving knees.”
Who would TURN their face TOWARDS a player’s driving knees?
Players inculcated with decades of brainwashing in tackle football from the time they were children.
Meggyesy further expounds on the importance of players dehumanizing each other given the levels of brutalistic violence that the game requires them to inflict upon each other:
”I particularly didn’t want to see their faces, because the more anonymous they were the better it was for me — and I’m sure most of the other ball players felt the same way: they were a faceless enemy we had to meet.”
Another account of players rituals of “psyching” themselves up for the physical violence of upcoming games included a teammate of Meggyesy’s whose pre-game ritual included actual physical violence:
“The coaches never seemed to realize that it was not an easy thing for guys to psych themselves up for what they had to go out and do during a game. I would spend a lot of time just trying to get my nervous system together. Other guys had other techniques. Just before we went out on the field, for instance, Ernie Clark, one of our linebackers, would disappear. The rest of us would be in the locker room, down on one knee going through the Lord’s Prayer, and above our mumbling, you could hear this steady pounding noise. It was Ernie with his helmet on, beating his head against the concrete walls of the training room.”
What is clear throughout Meggyesy’s book is that at all times as a football player — in the particular chapter the below quote is from he is playing at Syracuse — you are a football player first and a human being with wants, love, desires, needs, friendships, relationships, intellect, beliefs, values, hobbies & interests second.
In fact, what happens as the novel progresses, is that these positions slowly switch place for Meggyesy where he gradually becomes a football player second and an individual first which creates an existential crisis within the author.
The below quote from the author makes clear how extreme the cultish indoctrination, conditioning & brainwashing inherent in football’s contact drills, training camps, authoritarianism and unthinking obedience really is:
“I’d have sacrificed my life for the team and I think the coaches knew it.”
This is the complete & total dehumanization & reductionism that football players endure to participate in their sport.
Football players arent humans, partners, lovers, students, thinkers, philosophers, friends or activists.
Football players are nothing but football players and machines, commodified money making apparatuses as Meggyesy repeatedly makes clear:
”I also realized, paradoxically, how cut off and removed I was from my body. I knew my body more thoroughly than most men are ever able to, but I had used it and thought of it as a machine, a thing that had to be well-oiled, well-fed, and well-taken-care of, to do a specific job. I had glimpsed a bit of myself and realized that the “me” behind the face guard was alive and well and could feel and think.”
In fact, the last literal lines in the book clearly address this forced split in football players’ psyche and the toll it exacts upon its’ players:
“Now that football and the split personality it forced on me were part of the past, I knew I could get down to the real work — joining forces with those individuals and groups trying to change this society.”
College football is well known for its’ pageantry, spectacle, pomp & circumstance and traditions — but what about the injured players who are quickly removed from the field of play and are usually forgotten about — “out of sight, out of mind”?
Meggyesy gives a harrowing account of a horrific injury he suffered while playing at Syracuse and how crushingly lonely & isolating the agonizing experience was:
“The pain was excruciating for I had also torn up my ankle and it was hemorrhaging. The trainers put me on a table, told me an ambulance was on its way, then went back out to watch the game. It was eerie to hear the fans screaming as I lay alone in the locker room not knowing how badly I was hurt. I felt completely cut off, and I was scared that it might be the end of my career.”
How inhumane is that?
But once the announcers say that we are back to the action, the Dave Meggyesys suffering alone in excruciating, agonizing, terrifying & isolating pain are very quickly forgotten.
Meggyesy also discusses the romanticized coach player “father son” relationship that is so endlessly mythologized in football that coupled with the obligatory authoritarianism and demands for obedience subjects players to being ruthlessly taken advantage of, emotionally exploited & needlessly injured.
Meggyesy describes a teammate at Syracuse who was physically struggling and not at 100% who the team coach decided to put in on punt return anyway.
The resulting injury was as disastrous as it was obvious (not to mention preventable):
“I couldn’t forget seeing Mark’s career end so suddenly and senselessly. The way he was injured made me acutely aware of the incredible brutality of the game and of the power those who control the game have over the players. While I continued to be the hustling, super-aggressive ball player for the rest of college and my seven years in the NFL, I never again played with the intensity and blind commitment that I had my sophomore year.”
Something that also came across very clearly to me in Meggyesy’s book was that the fans’ bloodlust and excitement for football’s brutality and sadism make them very complicit in the violence that occurs on the field. The media complex — play by play & color commentators, analyzers & sideline reporters — are also complicit since they are responsible for presenting football as a dazzling spectacle and for glorifying the violence and making heroes of football’s gladiators for the fans to endlessly worship. Thus, the fans and sports commentators alike take football players’ already reckless nature and “devil may care” attitude and combine to make the players feel literally indestructible which in turn then makes the players play even more recklessly which the fans and commentators then eat up even more.
It is a vicious cycle which to this day leads players to make hits they shouldn’t, initiate contact they shouldn’t, hold on to the ball when they shouldn’t, lower their head for extra yardage when they shouldn’t, refuse to slide when they should, take risks they shouldn’t, and buy into the mythology of the sport that the players are indestructible, immortal, god-like and will never grow old much less ever die but instead will always be the way we see them when they come charging out of the smoke-filled tunnels onto the field full of testosterone, adrenaline, physical courage & moxie. Per football’s endless and self-reinforcing mythology, the players aren’t human like the fans and commentators are. They are our heroes & avatars that we endlessly & vicariously live through.
Meggyesy highlights the complicated reality for football players as the violence in the game exacts a steep price but paradoxically that same violence that is so destructive to the players also provides them with an indescribable high:
“I still felt ambivalent about hitting. At times I didn’t want to touch anyone or be touched. On other occasions I felt great pleasure and release from the sheer physical violence of the game. Sometimes after getting a clean shot at the ball carrier, I would feel this tremendous energy flow and not experience the pain of contact at all. I sometimes could psych myself so high I would feel indestructible.”
The publication and promotion of “Outside of Their League” which so pointedly & honestly spoke out against the “all-American” institution of football led to current players, coaches, some in the media and even politicians labeling Meggyesy as un-American, a hippie, a quitter & a loser.
What comes through in the “headbanging” era of football that Meggyesy played in that still rings true in the sport today is denial.
A “ding” isnt permanent brain damage. “Getting your bell rung” isnt permanent brain damage. That was in Meggyesy’s playing days.
Today, nearly six decades later, linemen banging away on the line 70 to 80 times a game isn’t permanent brain damage.
Today, nearly six decades later, a running back running into a wall of linemen 25 to 30 times a game isn’t permanent brain damage.
In the below excerpt, Meggyesy recounts being so “dingy” that he was throwing up after every game his senior year in college at Syracuse which is before he played seven seasons in the NFL.
It is terrifying to think of the damage this sport has caused to countless unsuspecting men that believe in the lie of this sport that is endlessly peddled to them from the time they are children — that football provides bonds of brotherhood, fidelity, loyalty, friendship, character development & is a crucible that makes them a man instead of football “providing” repetitive head impacts, persistent side effects, permanent & irreversible brain damage that can lead to incurable neurodegenerative diseases like CTE & dementia and the potential destruction of their minds & the loss of their personalities & memories:
“I’d spear him in the legs just above the knees with my helmet. The only problem with spear blocking was that I got kicked in the head a lot. Every time I drove my head into the defensive tackle’s legs, his knee would come driving into my helmet. I’d be pretty dingy by the end of the game and by my senior year I was throwing up after every game.”
What also comes across clearly is the level of compulsion inherent in football — what is presented as incredible physical courage, bravery, bravado, heart & dedication to “the game” is often manipulative exploitation that counts on these young men’s desperate need for their coaches’ approval that they are literally breaking their bodies & minds for:
”Throughout my junior year, I continued to play tough, hard-hitting, fanatical football. The coaches continued to hold me up as a model to other players. Yet, like so many other ball players, my “courageous” behavior was often not voluntary. Although I played time and again with injuries, and told myself I was doing this because it was in the best tradition of the game, it was really to get approval from the coaches. It would have taken real courage to tell the coach I was hurt and wouldn’t play until my injury healed properly.”
As someone who watched the NFL every week for over a decade & attended the Eagles Super Bowl parade in person in 2018 then stopped watching because of the violence, exploitation, racism & deception, I highly recommend Meggyesy’s book as it honestly shows how much the NFL and football have not changed and how in some ways things are actually worse today than they were when Meggyesy played in the 1960s.
“Out of Their League” is an incredibly important novel showing that football has always been inextricably linked to America’s militaristic, nationalistic, racist, misogynistic, hegemonic and colonialist mindset & capitalist exploitation as well as its’ hyper conservative political mindset and how incredibly toxic & corrosive football’s popularity is.
Meggyesy’s voice is one that over 60 years later still absolutely deserves to be and needs to be read and heard.
Interestingly enough, Meggyesy’s multi-game protests were not covered by the national media & press at the time so NFL fans outside of Cardinals fans were unaware but that ofcourse does not mean that the Commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, was unaware — he was aware and enraged, not just at Meggyesy’s national anthem & flag protests but his associations with SDS and the anti-war left including collecting signatures for petitions from teammates and scheduling meetings with hundreds of protesters at his house — to the extent Meggyesy was told by the team the FBI had a dossier on him.
However, the national public did not become aware of Meggyesy’s national anthem protests and anti-war views until his book, Out of Their League, was published which he appeared on the Dick Cavett show for which resulted in a national speaking tour with over 600 engagements which resulted in the book selling over 650k copies.
Meggyesy’s protest occurred nearly five decades prior to Colin Kapernick’s similar protest of the national anthem & flag. Both players were protesting America’s repressive regime, with Meggyesy’s protest focusing on his objection to the Vietnam War while Kapernick’s protest focused on police brutality and the murder of unarmed black men dying in the streets.
As similar as Meggyesy’s and Kapernick’s protests were, there was one critical difference — the price each man paid for following his conscience strictly due to the color of their skin.
Whereas Kapernick was a black quarterback protesting racism in an extremely racist league (yes, the NFL is still racist) so Kapernick was literally run out of the league then blackballed and stopped from returning despite bringing the 49ers to an NFC Championship and almost winning them a Super Bowl — alternaltely, Meggyesy as a white linebacker was benched for the remainder of the season as punishment for his protests yet he never lost his job nor was he blacklisted and run out of the league as Kapernick was.
To return to the NFL’s racism, Meggyesy writes about this in much detail during his time in the league in the 1960s and very little has changed over six decades later.
Racism in the NFL is still rampant today given that over 70% of the league is black yet black men only make up of the US population. Additionally, the highest collision positions are dominated by black players (cornerbacks - 99% black, wide receivers - 88% black, linebackers - 74% black) yet the lowest collision positions are dominated by white players (quarterbacks, kickers & punters).
Meggyesy calls attention to how disgustingly rampant racism in the NFL was during his time in the league from stacking, quotas, forced segregation by the coaches, verbal abuse & humiliation of black players, extremely racist team leaders and more.
Importantly, Meggyesy also highlights the complete and total dehumanization of the game of football itself and the extremely high price that it extracts from its very human flesh & blood players.
Meggyesy describes the dehumanization that occurred on kickoff as he was often used in special teams:
“I was playing end on the kickoff return team. I watched the flight of the ball as it went straight down the middle. Then I dropped back a few steps and began the sprint across field. I knew he didn’t see me and I decided to take him low. I gathered all my force and hit him. As I did, I heard his knee explode in my ear, a jagged, tearing sound of muscles and ligaments separating. The next thing I knew, time was called and he was writhing in pain on the field. They carried him off on a stretcher and I felt sorry—but at the same time, I knew it was a tremendous block and that was what I got paid for.
During the rest of my years in the pros, this image would occasionally surface in my mind. This sort of thing happened all the time; it was part of a typical Sunday afternoon in big-time football. But the conditions that made me feel a confused joy at breaking up another man’s body gradually became just one of many reasons why I decided to quit the game. After playing the sport most of my life, I’ve come to see that football is one of the most dehumanizing experiences a person can face, and in this book I’m going to tell you what’s really behind the video glitter of the game—the racism and fraud, the unbelievable brutality that affects mind as much as body.”
As Meggyesy further describes football’s dehumanization:
”We didn’t fully understand the demands and contradictions imposed by the commercial nature of the game, that we were the product and the replaceable parts.”
Meggyesy is also brutally honest about the straight up sadism and violent spectacle inherent in the sport of football itself and, although this was written in 1970, it is still extremely relevant today. Even though we are no longer in the “headbanging” era of football as helmet to helmet hits have been outlawed the fact remains that football players today are bigger, faster, taller & stronger which results in injuries that are still just as catastrophic, gruesome & debilitating. Additionally, since neurodegenerative diseases like CTE are caused by repetitive subconcussive head impacts, today’s players are just as susceptible to suffering from CTE, Parkinson’s disease, dementia & Alzheimer’s disease from the tens of thousands of repetitive head impacts they endure from Pop Warner to high school football to college football to the Pros.
Meggyesy describes the constant pervasive nature of & blind acceptance of violence in football:
”From an early age, I had learned to endure violence and brutality as simply a part of my life. But in football, the brutality became legitimate, a way of being accepted on the football field and off.”
Meggyesy also details the ambivalent, harrowing nature of football violence:
“Like any other sane person, he didnt particularly like to hit or be hit. But as the pro football cliche goes, “A player has got to want to love to hit.”
A lot of Meggyesy’s book deals with the psychological violence that the game of football exacts upon and extracts from its players. Football’s violence requires a detachment bordering on dissociation while also requiring a ramping up and “psyching up” of the self to “go out there and hit somebody”.
Meggyesy examines what this constant psychological damage does to the players who are suffering from not just the physical violence which is explicit and obvious to the viewer but also a psychological violence that is invisible and insidious that is not visible to the viewer:
“For the first time in my life I began to experience fear on the playing field. The fears kept creeping in and for a while I could hardly control them. I began to question the brutality of the game — these guys on the other side of the line were obviously trying to smash the hell out of me.”
Sometimes the psyching up that the players would do that Meggyesy describes appears to rise to the level of brainwashing as described by the author in the haunting passage below:
“I rarely missed a tackle when I was playing pro ball, but when I did it usually was because of a fear of getting my head kicked in. I always tried to psych myself out of this fear but sometimes it refused to get psyched away and I would find myself turning my face away from a ball player’s driving knees.”
Who would TURN their face TOWARDS a player’s driving knees?
Players inculcated with decades of brainwashing in tackle football from the time they were children.
Meggyesy further expounds on the importance of players dehumanizing each other given the levels of brutalistic violence that the game requires them to inflict upon each other:
”I particularly didn’t want to see their faces, because the more anonymous they were the better it was for me — and I’m sure most of the other ball players felt the same way: they were a faceless enemy we had to meet.”
Another account of players rituals of “psyching” themselves up for the physical violence of upcoming games included a teammate of Meggyesy’s whose pre-game ritual included actual physical violence:
“The coaches never seemed to realize that it was not an easy thing for guys to psych themselves up for what they had to go out and do during a game. I would spend a lot of time just trying to get my nervous system together. Other guys had other techniques. Just before we went out on the field, for instance, Ernie Clark, one of our linebackers, would disappear. The rest of us would be in the locker room, down on one knee going through the Lord’s Prayer, and above our mumbling, you could hear this steady pounding noise. It was Ernie with his helmet on, beating his head against the concrete walls of the training room.”
What is clear throughout Meggyesy’s book is that at all times as a football player — in the particular chapter the below quote is from he is playing at Syracuse — you are a football player first and a human being with wants, love, desires, needs, friendships, relationships, intellect, beliefs, values, hobbies & interests second.
In fact, what happens as the novel progresses, is that these positions slowly switch place for Meggyesy where he gradually becomes a football player second and an individual first which creates an existential crisis within the author.
The below quote from the author makes clear how extreme the cultish indoctrination, conditioning & brainwashing inherent in football’s contact drills, training camps, authoritarianism and unthinking obedience really is:
“I’d have sacrificed my life for the team and I think the coaches knew it.”
This is the complete & total dehumanization & reductionism that football players endure to participate in their sport.
Football players arent humans, partners, lovers, students, thinkers, philosophers, friends or activists.
Football players are nothing but football players and machines, commodified money making apparatuses as Meggyesy repeatedly makes clear:
”I also realized, paradoxically, how cut off and removed I was from my body. I knew my body more thoroughly than most men are ever able to, but I had used it and thought of it as a machine, a thing that had to be well-oiled, well-fed, and well-taken-care of, to do a specific job. I had glimpsed a bit of myself and realized that the “me” behind the face guard was alive and well and could feel and think.”
In fact, the last literal lines in the book clearly address this forced split in football players’ psyche and the toll it exacts upon its’ players:
“Now that football and the split personality it forced on me were part of the past, I knew I could get down to the real work — joining forces with those individuals and groups trying to change this society.”
College football is well known for its’ pageantry, spectacle, pomp & circumstance and traditions — but what about the injured players who are quickly removed from the field of play and are usually forgotten about — “out of sight, out of mind”?
Meggyesy gives a harrowing account of a horrific injury he suffered while playing at Syracuse and how crushingly lonely & isolating the agonizing experience was:
“The pain was excruciating for I had also torn up my ankle and it was hemorrhaging. The trainers put me on a table, told me an ambulance was on its way, then went back out to watch the game. It was eerie to hear the fans screaming as I lay alone in the locker room not knowing how badly I was hurt. I felt completely cut off, and I was scared that it might be the end of my career.”
How inhumane is that?
But once the announcers say that we are back to the action, the Dave Meggyesys suffering alone in excruciating, agonizing, terrifying & isolating pain are very quickly forgotten.
Meggyesy also discusses the romanticized coach player “father son” relationship that is so endlessly mythologized in football that coupled with the obligatory authoritarianism and demands for obedience subjects players to being ruthlessly taken advantage of, emotionally exploited & needlessly injured.
Meggyesy describes a teammate at Syracuse who was physically struggling and not at 100% who the team coach decided to put in on punt return anyway.
The resulting injury was as disastrous as it was obvious (not to mention preventable):
“I couldn’t forget seeing Mark’s career end so suddenly and senselessly. The way he was injured made me acutely aware of the incredible brutality of the game and of the power those who control the game have over the players. While I continued to be the hustling, super-aggressive ball player for the rest of college and my seven years in the NFL, I never again played with the intensity and blind commitment that I had my sophomore year.”
Something that also came across very clearly to me in Meggyesy’s book was that the fans’ bloodlust and excitement for football’s brutality and sadism make them very complicit in the violence that occurs on the field. The media complex — play by play & color commentators, analyzers & sideline reporters — are also complicit since they are responsible for presenting football as a dazzling spectacle and for glorifying the violence and making heroes of football’s gladiators for the fans to endlessly worship. Thus, the fans and sports commentators alike take football players’ already reckless nature and “devil may care” attitude and combine to make the players feel literally indestructible which in turn then makes the players play even more recklessly which the fans and commentators then eat up even more.
It is a vicious cycle which to this day leads players to make hits they shouldn’t, initiate contact they shouldn’t, hold on to the ball when they shouldn’t, lower their head for extra yardage when they shouldn’t, refuse to slide when they should, take risks they shouldn’t, and buy into the mythology of the sport that the players are indestructible, immortal, god-like and will never grow old much less ever die but instead will always be the way we see them when they come charging out of the smoke-filled tunnels onto the field full of testosterone, adrenaline, physical courage & moxie. Per football’s endless and self-reinforcing mythology, the players aren’t human like the fans and commentators are. They are our heroes & avatars that we endlessly & vicariously live through.
Meggyesy highlights the complicated reality for football players as the violence in the game exacts a steep price but paradoxically that same violence that is so destructive to the players also provides them with an indescribable high:
“I still felt ambivalent about hitting. At times I didn’t want to touch anyone or be touched. On other occasions I felt great pleasure and release from the sheer physical violence of the game. Sometimes after getting a clean shot at the ball carrier, I would feel this tremendous energy flow and not experience the pain of contact at all. I sometimes could psych myself so high I would feel indestructible.”
The publication and promotion of “Outside of Their League” which so pointedly & honestly spoke out against the “all-American” institution of football led to current players, coaches, some in the media and even politicians labeling Meggyesy as un-American, a hippie, a quitter & a loser.
What comes through in the “headbanging” era of football that Meggyesy played in that still rings true in the sport today is denial.
A “ding” isnt permanent brain damage. “Getting your bell rung” isnt permanent brain damage. That was in Meggyesy’s playing days.
Today, nearly six decades later, linemen banging away on the line 70 to 80 times a game isn’t permanent brain damage.
Today, nearly six decades later, a running back running into a wall of linemen 25 to 30 times a game isn’t permanent brain damage.
In the below excerpt, Meggyesy recounts being so “dingy” that he was throwing up after every game his senior year in college at Syracuse which is before he played seven seasons in the NFL.
It is terrifying to think of the damage this sport has caused to countless unsuspecting men that believe in the lie of this sport that is endlessly peddled to them from the time they are children — that football provides bonds of brotherhood, fidelity, loyalty, friendship, character development & is a crucible that makes them a man instead of football “providing” repetitive head impacts, persistent side effects, permanent & irreversible brain damage that can lead to incurable neurodegenerative diseases like CTE & dementia and the potential destruction of their minds & the loss of their personalities & memories:
“I’d spear him in the legs just above the knees with my helmet. The only problem with spear blocking was that I got kicked in the head a lot. Every time I drove my head into the defensive tackle’s legs, his knee would come driving into my helmet. I’d be pretty dingy by the end of the game and by my senior year I was throwing up after every game.”
What also comes across clearly is the level of compulsion inherent in football — what is presented as incredible physical courage, bravery, bravado, heart & dedication to “the game” is often manipulative exploitation that counts on these young men’s desperate need for their coaches’ approval that they are literally breaking their bodies & minds for:
”Throughout my junior year, I continued to play tough, hard-hitting, fanatical football. The coaches continued to hold me up as a model to other players. Yet, like so many other ball players, my “courageous” behavior was often not voluntary. Although I played time and again with injuries, and told myself I was doing this because it was in the best tradition of the game, it was really to get approval from the coaches. It would have taken real courage to tell the coach I was hurt and wouldn’t play until my injury healed properly.”
As someone who watched the NFL every week for over a decade & attended the Eagles Super Bowl parade in person in 2018 then stopped watching because of the violence, exploitation, racism & deception, I highly recommend Meggyesy’s book as it honestly shows how much the NFL and football have not changed and how in some ways things are actually worse today than they were when Meggyesy played in the 1960s.
“Out of Their League” is an incredibly important novel showing that football has always been inextricably linked to America’s militaristic, nationalistic, racist, misogynistic, hegemonic and colonialist mindset & capitalist exploitation as well as its’ hyper conservative political mindset and how incredibly toxic & corrosive football’s popularity is.
Meggyesy’s voice is one that over 60 years later still absolutely deserves to be and needs to be read and heard.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 27, 2014
Basically this book is about the shady side of American Football in the 1960s.
I confess, I was drawn by the cover blurbs:
"The Roughest Sports Book Ever Written" and "...exposes the dehumanizing quality of the game - the fraud, payoffs, racism, drug abuse, and violence."
I couldn't help myself after seeing the hyperbolic phrase "ever written".
Meggyesy is truly a passionate bloke, and an entertaining writer to boot. He starts out in life an extremely poor farmer, finds an escape through sport, and finally escapes sport itself after finding that political activism is his true calling. Lots of 1960s racism and anti-Vietnam war protesting included.
I enjoyed the anecdotes in particular.
There's a bit when Meggyesy inhales marijuana when at peak fitness and finds that his increased lung capacity makes him sky high with fewer side effects.
There's a bit when a party crashing Football Player breaks down the door of a Doctor, who is an expert fencer - resulting in a partially slashed player, and a doctor with two broken hands.
And then there are the injuries. I love descriptions of injuries. Novocaine injections, exploding kneecaps, ankle sprains, concussions - not to mention the mental strains. One player psyches himself up before each game by banging his helmet repeatedly against a wall. Meggyesy himself gets so pumped up at one point that he needs tranquilizers to keep playing at a sane level.
This stuff is hardcore. It's refreshing to read about manly men once in a while and come down from tasteful but anemic intellectual crap.
I rated it 3 stars because too much of the book involved detailed accounts of real Football games. I was not really familiar enough with the game to have found these bits interesting.
I confess, I was drawn by the cover blurbs:
"The Roughest Sports Book Ever Written" and "...exposes the dehumanizing quality of the game - the fraud, payoffs, racism, drug abuse, and violence."
I couldn't help myself after seeing the hyperbolic phrase "ever written".
Meggyesy is truly a passionate bloke, and an entertaining writer to boot. He starts out in life an extremely poor farmer, finds an escape through sport, and finally escapes sport itself after finding that political activism is his true calling. Lots of 1960s racism and anti-Vietnam war protesting included.
I enjoyed the anecdotes in particular.
There's a bit when Meggyesy inhales marijuana when at peak fitness and finds that his increased lung capacity makes him sky high with fewer side effects.
There's a bit when a party crashing Football Player breaks down the door of a Doctor, who is an expert fencer - resulting in a partially slashed player, and a doctor with two broken hands.
And then there are the injuries. I love descriptions of injuries. Novocaine injections, exploding kneecaps, ankle sprains, concussions - not to mention the mental strains. One player psyches himself up before each game by banging his helmet repeatedly against a wall. Meggyesy himself gets so pumped up at one point that he needs tranquilizers to keep playing at a sane level.
This stuff is hardcore. It's refreshing to read about manly men once in a while and come down from tasteful but anemic intellectual crap.
I rated it 3 stars because too much of the book involved detailed accounts of real Football games. I was not really familiar enough with the game to have found these bits interesting.
June 12, 2022
Generally speaking the book is interesting and a good read. As an avid football fan, I was surprised that I had never heard of Meggyesy, when I saw him being interviewed by Dick Cavett on his Rock & Roll Icons DVD set. My wife bought me the book as a gift, and I enjoyed reading it. It's a bit dated with regard to the football references, but on the other hand it's startlingly relevant today with regard to societal and social issues. Meggyesy was at once a product of his time and a man way ahead of his time.
It would have benefited from some professional editing, it does have a bit too much detail about specific games, and it ends rather abruptly. The updated version (published in 2005) could have included more biographical information about the subject's life after 1970. All that being said, I would recommend this book.
It would have benefited from some professional editing, it does have a bit too much detail about specific games, and it ends rather abruptly. The updated version (published in 2005) could have included more biographical information about the subject's life after 1970. All that being said, I would recommend this book.
September 8, 2011
This may not count as "reading for fun" since I will certainly use it in my dissertation. But, damn, it's a pretty compelling story and really well written. And, he wrote it immediately upon leaving the NFL in 1969 (or '70). I wouldn't call it a "tell-all" because it's not full of juicy tabloid stuff, but at the same time, he doesn't hold back much either. He talks openly about his drug use. He lobs a tough (but, I'm sure complete legit) criticism at the racism present during his time in the game.
Anyway, I love his very critical stance on the game that he loved. It's nice to see people being self-reflective. Meggyesy is a cool dude.
Anyway, I love his very critical stance on the game that he loved. It's nice to see people being self-reflective. Meggyesy is a cool dude.
August 30, 2010
An intense, interesting early broadside against organized athletics by a well-read former player. Although Meggyesy's commitment to social causes seems misguided in retrospect, his sentiments about the game--the barbarism of coaches, the greed of owners, the phony amateurism of college athletics, rampant and underreported homosexuality and drug abuse--are still relevant today. As memoirs of this sort go, Out of Their League ranks ahead of Jim Bouton's Ball Four and behind Samuel Fussell's Muscle.
May 24, 2024
A harrowing, dark view of the dehumanizing nature of professional sports and the intersection of identity and meaning, the tribalism of sports and the American middle class. Male violence agents and the performative act of faux toughness associated with consuming violence hurt both parties: Dave saw through it and broke through - an infinitely more courageous act than being on special teams. A must read for any of the men or boys in your life.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 16, 2024
I read this book as a teenager. While making a stack of books to donate to the library I decided to reread it. Despite being more than 50 years old, it reads well and the subject is applicable now. It concerns the business side of professional football and the toll it takes on the players. I recommend.
September 21, 2021
This was the first pro football player in the USA-NFL to speak out against "the man". A member of the radical student organization SDS, this anti-Nixon story is the 1960-1970 tune in ,turn on crowd, Decent book written from heart. An old book but a classic. I first read in the mid-1970s.
December 20, 2013
Interesting look at the dark side of college and pro football in the 60's and 70's.
March 15, 2022
Finally read this after it being on my shelf for a few years. Pretty sure this was a Dave Zirin recommendation, with Meggyesy being sort of a precursor, in ways, to Colin Kaepernick. This book was way older than I anticipated (1970, and while I thought I knew of Meggyesy from the late 80's/early 90's, a little research revealed that I was actually thinking of Dave Meggett, and almost certainly due to Tecmo Super Bowl.
It's an entertaining book, mostly serving as strictly an autobiography for Meggyesy. Despite the age of the book, a lot of the mentality of modern football coaches, especially at the college level, is reflected here. Other than the salaries, really, not much seems different from then and now. Towards the end of Meggyesy's career, he is quite vocal in anti-war efforts, he refuses to participate in national anthem ceremonies, and he is vocal in the press about racism in the locker room, as well as about the disregard of players' health. Because of this, he feels he was ostracized by the coaches and stripped of his starting linebacker role.
Meggyesy likely would have been blackballed from the league had he tried to continue playing, much like Kaepernick, for supposedly being a nuisance to the other players in the locker room. Interestingly enough, he had been pursuing a degree in higher education throughout his career, and had planned on walking away from the game anyways. These last 1-2 years of his career were the most fascinating, and I wish they would have been more of a central focus. As soon as he decides to walk away, the book ends quite abruptly. I would have loved to know what he was up to during at least the 1-2 years following his retirement.
It's an entertaining book, mostly serving as strictly an autobiography for Meggyesy. Despite the age of the book, a lot of the mentality of modern football coaches, especially at the college level, is reflected here. Other than the salaries, really, not much seems different from then and now. Towards the end of Meggyesy's career, he is quite vocal in anti-war efforts, he refuses to participate in national anthem ceremonies, and he is vocal in the press about racism in the locker room, as well as about the disregard of players' health. Because of this, he feels he was ostracized by the coaches and stripped of his starting linebacker role.
Meggyesy likely would have been blackballed from the league had he tried to continue playing, much like Kaepernick, for supposedly being a nuisance to the other players in the locker room. Interestingly enough, he had been pursuing a degree in higher education throughout his career, and had planned on walking away from the game anyways. These last 1-2 years of his career were the most fascinating, and I wish they would have been more of a central focus. As soon as he decides to walk away, the book ends quite abruptly. I would have loved to know what he was up to during at least the 1-2 years following his retirement.
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August 17, 2020I didn't read this - found on shelf and gave away. Its from 1971
July 16, 2014
Read this book years ago. I ran into the author once at National Football Hall of Fame. I'm a huge reader of sports themed books. Its probably not in print anymore but if you can find a copy of it at a used book store pick it up.
June 18, 2011
More pro football reality but not as good as "North Dallas Forty". Date read is a guess.
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