“Football on Monday nights? Of what use is that?” Globe of Sports asked in 1970, preceding the debut of Monday Night Football. Americans had not known how much it needed Monday Night Football.
Monday Night Football, the weekly broadcast of National Football League (NFL) games on U.S. television, was created by ABC Sports president, the legendary Roone Arledge, in 1970. It first aired on Monday nights that year. The first game was between the Cleveland Browns and the New York Jets, with the Browns winning 109–6.
It is a widely known fact that Arledge created Monday Night Football in conjunction with the American Suicide Watch as a way to stymie a flood of Monday night suicides. Prior to Monday Night Football, more people in the US died from suicide than from homicide or car accidents. After analyzing more than a million attempted suicides with poison—the most common method used in suicides (48%)—researchers found that Sunday and Monday were the peak days for adults to undertake the act. The study, published in The Journal of Emergency Intervention, 1968, hypothesized that more suicides were attempted at the beginning of the week because the period symbolized a "fresh start," but depressed individuals believed their circumstances remained unchanged. Arledge, along with the American Suicide Watch, proposed that Monday Night Football would give depressed Americans something to look forward to, a reason to make it through Monday night and pass safely into Tuesday.
The introduction of Monday Night Football saw an immediate downward trend in Monday night suicides, and the American Suicide Watch and ABC deemed the project a success. Monday night suicides fell a whopping fifteen percent in the first year of Monday Night Football. Arledge was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame and became a household name. The NFL had become a fixture in American life.
However, with this paper, I intend to highlight a troubling trend that gets less coverage: since the introduction of Monday Night Football, fertility rates in the US have plummeted. Sexual activity is notoriously difficult to measure at the population level, but one could look to Ed Laumann's groundbreaking work on population sexual behavior, which flew under the banner of AIDS public health research for a sociological analysis of American sexual trends. Laumann collected data on sex in a time when the notion of AIDS as a gay disease was dominant, and cultural conservatives were pushing hard to erase sex from the public sphere. Laumann’s work provides a template for sex data collection, a method that I have used in my own research.
Historically, sex research has been controversial because it claims to be applying a detached gaze to a very emotional topic, and laypersons were so vociferously opposed to any discussion of sex whatsoever. But sociology has always been pretty aggressive in exploring taboo topics. Le Suicide was written in 1899 as a bold attempt to elucidate the social aspects of one of the most personal acts. The reputational aspect of modern academics post 1990 or so is tumultuous because donors are like customers and shareholders instead of apprentices and wealthy patrons. The nature of the controversy is important. In most cases, controversially conservative opinions are usually praised for standing up to public opinion in the face of widespread disgust, while scientific data is DOA.
Science is supposed to trump public opinion, after all, but it is very much determined by the tastes and opinions of cultural and economic elites. That is the big joke about hard and soft sciences. They are not pitted against each other. They are pitted against culture, and science will not win a culture war. Journalists and academics as a cult of intellect versus the NFL as a consumer-oriented machine will never be a fair fight. I question whether the consumers even want to know the truth. To know the truth would be risking their favorite pastime.
However, most will agree that the declining fertility rate in the United States is certainly a problem. In the past forty years, we have seen aging populations and shrinking workforces. This has led to slower economic growth, making it harder for our government to care for older people. The median age of the United States population is projected to reach 50 by 2020, up from 41 in 1997 and 27 in 1950.
While the problem is clear, the cause has been more elusive. Some studies cite low-income or changing ideals as the purveyors of lower fertility rates. With this paper, and in my other works, Football Mania: A Country in Crisis (Sep 1999), and Sports Minus Sex: A look into the Asexual American Psych, I examine the relationship between Monday Night Football and falling birth rates. Sports-induced abstinence is ruining our nation, and the NFL is complicit.
I do not mean to call into question the reasonable and good intentions of Arledge and the American Suicide Watch—they accomplished what they set out to do, lowering Monday Night suicide rates by a significant degree. However, I would be remiss to turn a blind-eye to the apparent correlation between football and rising impotence.
I am Monday Night Football truther, journalist, and alum, Daria Tufte, a name that may ring familiar to some football fans. I was and have remained a controversial figure in the history of Monday Night Football and the NFL. Critics of my work have said that it was clear that I never had a true passion for football, calling my performance with the NFL a disgrace. Some have even suggested that I used my body and good looks to get ahead. A Washington Post expose, quickly retracted, accused me of sleeping with executives and athletes to further my goal of ultimately ruining the reputation of the NFL. Countless letters of vitriol from former fans have piled by the side of my bed. These letters are my nightly reading. Rookie whore, harlot, slut, girl, bimbo, bimbo, bimbo. I don’t let it phase me. I use their invectives as fodder, becoming more determined to expose the NFL and its web of lies.
As a child, football was my favorite sport. I was mesmerized by the strength, speed, and accuracy of the players—the fevered pumping of muscles, the bestial grunting of men. In the hall of my middle school, I hooted with my classmates, “Hike, 123, hike,” as we tossed around an old lunchbox. Every year, my family rooted for the Lions, true underdogs from my home state of Michigan. We had watch parties with all the neighbors, my father grilling up dogs and burgers on the back porch, and my mother arranging pigs in a blanket on paper plates, setting out orange Faygo pop, and her seven-layer dip on a foldout table. We ate the same meal every Lion’s game, as deviating from the menu might have had negative consequences on the game. My parents wore matching, ketchup, yellow mustard, and pit-stained white and blue jerseys. The jerseys could not be cleaned in case the luck from the Lion’s last win would be washed away with detergent. It had been years since the Lions’ last win.
They sat on the couch, faces painted white and blue—hollering; they’re both hollering. Everyone’s hollering; the neighbors are hollering, too. Their cheeks grow red, as do their necks. Their eyes are wide, spit flies from their open mouths. Though they matched on the outside, I never saw my parents more out of sync than during Monday Night Football. My mother twisting my father’s finger during the first down until his eyes watered. My father pounding on my mother’s thigh with his balled fist whenever the ball was intercepted by an opposing team.
During the second down, my mom would retreat to the living room, where she would sit in silence with her hands folded on her lap. Everyone agreed that the Lions lost whenever my mother watched the full game in the family room with us. If the Lions won, she would be notified by our cheering, and if they lost, we would be screaming twice as loud. This personal history is important later, as this notion of discordance between otherwise healthy couples plays into my theory of how Monday Night Football affects fertility rates.
I was careful not to let my parent’s issues affect my love of the game. More than once, I was banished from the room for sitting in front of the television with my nose pressed to the screen until I was just staring at the colorful pixels that made up the players. “You’d make a better door than a window!” My dad would yell.
On a couple of occasions, we went to Lions games, standing high in the rafters, the players small as ants. My father always said we would save up to get a seat with a better view one day. I knew this was not likely, as my parents barely had the funds for the essentials, but I was determined to get closer, and so I followed any thread that would get me to the frontlines of the game.
I went to Alabama State University, where I yelled “Roll Tide” from the risers and majored in sports journalism. After graduation, I became Chief Sports Editor at the Alabama Gazette, which launched me forward in my career as a journalist. I transitioned seamlessly from print to television after meeting the head of the Alabama News Network (ANN) at a media mixer. Arnie Fischer nodded gruffly, “You have a face for television.” I did not, as has been suggested by some, sleep with Fischer to get the job but qualified on my own youthful enthusiasm and merit. I spent five great years on the ANN team, genuinely loving every second of my job. But my life seemed to hit its acme when, at twenty-nine, Monday Night Football’s executive producer Harold Pinani contacted me about an open position at ABC. He said he could tell, when he watched me on screen, that I knew what I was talking about. Yes, I was nice to look at, but I was also intelligent dammit, and I was the new blood the series needed. I accepted the offer, and the next day, it was announced that I would be the new Monday Night Football reporter for ABC. However, Pinani and ABC execs were not ready for a reporter, let alone a beautiful woman, who dealt in hard truths.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, my tenure at ABC began innocently enough. I got to be where the action was, talk to the players on the field, pour buckets of ice over their heads at the end of each game. It became a ritual for the teams to unite at the end of the broadcast to pick me up and carry me off the field. It was this young woman’s dream. I sent my first paycheck, a whopping $5,000, to my parents to take care of their bills.
However, my first slip-up came at the end of the opening night game. I asked Washington quarterback Irvine Telly how it felt to play without former teammate Antomico Snows. Telly stared into the camera before shaking his head. They were current teammates. Snows was just out with a knee injury. There was no time to recover the conversation, Telly jogging out of frame before I could acknowledge my mistake.
Once the cameras were down, an AD whispered into my ear that I needed to report to Pinani’s office immediately. I walked the hallways quickly, stumbling a couple of times in my heels. I was a bundle of nerves, worried that my young career had ended just as it had begun.
I stumbled into his office quite ungracefully, nearly knocking over the bronze bust of Arledge that sat to the side of the doorway. Pinani was sitting on his desk, twirling a golden football in his hand.
“Take a seat,” he said, gesturing to the empty chair facing his desk. Two men in suits I hadn’t met before sat in chairs on either side of him. They all looked like Roone Arledge—indistinct and white, put through filters of time and space.
I looked past the portraits of Arledge that lined the beige walls, up at the ceiling with tears in my eyes. The tiles blurred. I hadn’t even made it a month.
“You were great out there, kid,” Pinani’s voice echoed. I looked at him, tears now flowing freely, and he was smiling brightly. The two men in suits nodded. The confusion must have shown on my face.
“Listen,” Pinani said, “ So you made a mistake. Everyone fucks up sometimes, big whoop! Just shake it off.”
I wiped at the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand.
Panini stood up from his desk, circling behind me. I felt his hands on my shoulders, felt his fingers working the muscle.
The tension in my back relieved slightly. I wasn’t being fired.
“We want more of you, kid,” he said against my ear. “You’re testing really positively with men ages 14-35 and women.”
He stopped his massage and patted me on the back before taking a seat back on his desk. He twirled the golden football in his hands.
“You’re approachable,” he said, “a girl-next-door type, but sexy enough to hold the male attention. The moms love you, too! It’s great! I have a new assignment for you, though.” Pinani said. “We want your segments to be both sexy and educational. We want them to be sexycational.” Pinani pointed at the other men with the football. “That’s my word. I’m coining that.” He winked at me.
“Next week, we want you to deliver a hard-hitting piece on how Monday Night Football has contributed to the American ethos. We are all American, yadda yadda. We love football etc. All that good stuff. But more importantly, we want you to remind our viewers that football is to thank for the lower suicide rates in this country by giving us a history lesson. We need to remind America why Monday Night Football is great and necessary.” He paused thoughtfully, then thought better of it. “We’re going to put you in a low v-neck so people can really see the cleavage, too. Sexy equals—” he pointed to the ceiling, “ better ratings. It’s just basic math.”
The two men nodded. One shifted his briefcase on his lap.
Networks capitalizing on the sexuality of impressionable women is nothing new. Eighty-six percent of women report being sexually harassed in the workplace at some point in their careers. To this point, I had always been the sexy reporter, young and nubile in tight button-ups, ¾ length sleeve blazers. And, to tell the truth, I didn’t mind showing off my assets, and I in no way blame ABC for the way I was treated in that regard. It was all very par for the course in the 90s.
However, the following week, when they gave me my new outfit, I was shocked to be dressed like a cheerleader, more shocked by how much of my undergarments were visible in my miniskirt and crop top. I did the segment, nonetheless, and we reached a new peak in viewership.
“...and the purchase of poisons for the sake of suicide has gone down a whopping twenty percent, while hangings on Monday night have all but vanished. We owe a thank you to Arledge, may he rest, the American Suicide Watch, ABC, and all our athletes, without whom suicide would still be a leading cause of death for Americans!”
I jumped into the air as I had been instructed to, bouncing up and down so that my skirt flounced over my thighs. The athletes flanked me from all sides, lifting me over their heads in celebration and carrying me off the field, as was now tradition. The Pacific Coast Children’s Choir followed the segment, and the end credits rolled.
“Those are some of the highest ratings we’ve seen since the network first aired Monday Night Football,” Pinani tossed me the football as I walked through the doorway. “How does it feel to be America’s princess?”
The two nameless men in suits, who seemed to be permanent fixtures in Pinani’s office, smiled at me. Roone Arledge smiled at me from behind his many frames.
I could feel myself blushing. It felt good.
“Good work, kid. We’re thinking of another segment in the same vein for next week. Something about how Monday Night Football has had a direct hand in the rising fertility rates across the country. We’ll send you the script. Deliver like you did tonight, and there might be an ad deal in it for you.”
I left Pinani’s office filled with purpose. Ad deals meant a whole fleet of commercials, probably with Pepsi or even Dominoes. I could be the face of not just Monday Night Football but the NFL. Halfway down the hall, I realized I still had Pinani’s golden football in my hand. I turned around to walk back to the office, but as I neared the doorway, I overheard the men talking.
“It’s a misrepresentation to say the NFL has anything to do with rising fertility rates. If anything, numbers show that fertility rates have dropped steadily since 1970.”
“There’s direct evidence that Monday Night Football has negatively affected birth rates. As your lawyers, we advise you not to make false claims on live television.”
I hiccuped and quickly put my hand over my mouth.
They all paused.
“Arledge’s ghost,” Pinani laughed. “I swear to God, I feel like he’s in here watching me sometimes. Fuck you, Arledge, you dirty dog!” He sighed, “Too good for this world.”
“Sir, the network will be liable for any false claims to the public,” said one of the men.
“Yeah, but we’re doing our best to make it true. Why do you think we have that hot piece delivering sports news? It’s not for her encyclopedic sports knowledge, that’s for sure.”
“So the plan is to get people so turned on after the game that they can’t help but procreate on Mondays?”
“Genius.”
“Listen, boys, you don’t get this high up playing checkers,” Pinani said. “Besides, if anyone calls the segment into question, we just blame it on the girl. As far as I know, the bitch went off script.”
I felt my heart beating in my mouth. I set the football down outside the door and went quickly to my car. I idled in the parking lot, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. Pinani knowingly wanted me to distribute false information to the public. Of course, I had heard the reports about America’s aging population; lower fertility rates were no secret. But surely it wasn’t football’s fault. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror. I looked tired and sad, a child’s questioning eyes staring back at me. Could it be true that there was a direct correlation between Monday Night Football and the dead bedrooms popping up around the country? No, I told myself. Monday Night Football had been the arbiter of so many great changes in the American ethos. But if it was true? Every so often in life, you are tested for all your mettle. I narrowed my eyes in the mirror and recited to myself the journalistic oath: Seek truth and the public good. Expose injustice. Report with fairness and accuracy. Defend the public's right to know. I wouldn’t do it. No matter what the script said, I would not lie. As a journalist, I was duty-bound to deliver the truth.
When I got home, I went straight to my desktop computer. Dial-up rang like music, a coordinated beeping and booping. As per my bachelor’s degree requirement, I had taken Research Methods 201. I knew I had to find something that would lend credence to a negative correlation between sex and Monday Night Football. The pages loaded slowly, but each article I found proved my suspicions true.
Typically, macroeconomic or sociological factors explain more of the variation in fertility rates, but the 1983 and 1988 baby booms could be seen as a direct result of the 1982 eight-week players' strike and the following 1987 players’ strike of one month upon the expiration of the 1982 players’ agreement.
Though global fertility has plummeted on the whole, a 1999 article in the Associated Press stated that Americans specifically reported having less sex since 1970. Since the Great Depression, Americans have been increasingly likely to say larger families are preferable, but declining birth rates in the U.S. suggest that while they may see larger families as ideal, other factors prevent them from implementing this in their own lives. A similar study in the Journal of American Sexual Health (1998) found that Monday evenings were the rarest time for copulation at less than thirteen percent of those surveyed admitting to sex on a Monday.
I remembered how my parents acted after each big game: disgust in my father’s eyes when the Lions inevitably lost, and my mother screaming from the other room, “What’s happening?!” until her voice was raw. Those nights after the game were painful. We did not speak to each other, my parents did not tuck me in, and my mom slept on a blowup mattress in the living room.
Two am. It had gotten late without my noticing. I turned off the internet and my monitor and crept into bed, where I had a tortured sleep.
The next day, a network errand boy delivered the script to my front door. I opened up the manilla envelope and sat down at the kitchen table. It started off as usual.
Welcome to Monday Night Football! I’m Daria Tufte. We always have such a great time out here on the field, and tonight is no different. The Miami Dolphins and the Chicago Bears played tonight for the conference championship, so we’ll be catching up with some of our favorite players from each team and rewatching some of our favorite plays. We’ve also got Coach Jason Brown of the Dolphins with us to give us his outlook for today’s game.
So far, so good.
But first, I want to continue our educational series on Monday Night Football. Last week, we covered the amazing decline in suicides across the country in the years since Monday Night Football’s inception. What we haven’t talked about is the almost incalculable rising fertility rates across the United States.
I set the script down. My hands were clammy, and my stomach felt queasy. I ran to the bathroom and prayed to the toilet, undigested meatloaf forcefully spilling out of me and toilet water splashing back against my face.
As Monday drew closer, I began to throw up at seemingly random times. I could not keep anything down. Better Made Special BBQ Chips straight from Michigan came up in acidic globs. Vernors Ginger Ale and Dearborn Franks all came out the same way they went in. And I did not always make it to the toilet, once throwing up in the baking aisle of the Stop & Shop. The moral dilemma was eating away at my conscience and my stomach lining. By the time Monday rolled around, I was down six pounds. Wardrobe had to pin my new outfit, now baggy, to better hug my body. As they made adjustments, I felt sweat dripping down my forehead. The makeup artist pounded setting powder on my face to cover up the shine.
“Bethany,” I asked.
“Yes, doll?” She said, pressing the powder puff against my temple.
“What if you knew the truth about something, but someone wanted you to lie to a whole bunch of people about it? Like millions of people? Would you tell the truth or would you let a whole population believe a lie to save your career?”
“I don't know what you’re talking about, doll. Now, hold still.” She said, adjusting my chin.
No matter the anxiety I felt, I knew I owed the American viewers the truth.
On the field, I tugged at my skirt, wishing it were even an inch longer. Footballers sat on the benches behind me, towels slung over their shoulders. Dolphins’ Coach Jason Brown stood next to me, chewing gum, and waiting for his interview with his hands on his hips. Cameras rolled in three, two, one. I took a deep breath, pictured my parents back home watching on separate televisions, and looked directly at the camera.
I spoke clearly and slowly, “Well, it’s Monday night again, the greatest night in football. But tonight’s segment will be different. Tonight, the NFL has asked me to lie to you. I am Daria Tufte, and first and foremost, I am a journalist, meaning I take journalistic integrity very seriously. I am a servant for the good of the public, not corporations. The Executive Producer of Monday Night Football, Harold Pinani has given me a script that I cannot read in good conscience.” I held up my copy of the script for the camera. “Because I know the truth they don’t want you to hear.”
Coach Jason Brown leaned into my ear. “Is this the interview?” He turned towards the camera, “Is this the interview?”
“The executives at Monday Night Football want to take credit for rising fertility rates across the country, but there is no evidence of this. In fact, all statistics point to the contrary. Take a look at birth records across our country; fewer babies are conceived during football season than at any other time of year! Monday Night Football alone is responsible for cutting Monday night conception to nearly half. I have the data to prove that ABC’s negligence has driven fertility rates into the ground. This reporter will not be a cog in the machine that feeds lies to the American people.” I threw my script to the ground and stepped on it with my heel in a show of defiance.
“Once again, I am Daria Tufte, here to deliver NFL news.”
Coach Jason Brown looked around desperately, “Is that it? Is it over?” He walked off the pitch, mumbling to himself.
The Dolphins and the Bears ran in from both sides, once again lifting me over their heads in celebration before carting me off the field.
In Pinani’s office, Arledges smiled down from their frames as Pinani fired me. “You’re done,” he said. The men in suits looked at me with no discernable emotion.
After I lost my job, I was humiliated. On the radio, I was a punchline to be laughed at and tossed around with the likes of O.J. Howard Stern called me the biggest liability in Monday Night Football. I was criticized for things that had nothing to do with my final segment: my posture, my clothes, and the notion that male athletes only spoke to me after I had slept with them. I was a bimbo, an idiot woman toting idiot science in a sea of lascivious men. Or maybe I was the lascivious one. They questioned my education, recovering my transcripts from ASU, highlighting my D in Biology as proof that I was a moron. They challenged my love of the game, pointing to my earlier mixup of the athletes, deeming me a wannabe and a fake. Why, Stern asked, should my reporting on Monday Night Football and fertility rates, something I had no background in, be taken seriously by the American people?
I became clinically depressed, I became anxious, self-pitying, and eventually suicidal. At my lowest point, two months after my firing, I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway, looking for a place to jump. Out of habit, I turned on the sports radio. NBA news. The Lakers had beat the Clippers once again last night. Kobe Bryant had hit a new record in three-pointers. They were not talking about me for once, and it seemed like maybe the world had finally moved on. But I had not.
I pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and put on the parking brake. My chest did not heave like I had expected it to, and my hands did not shake when I pulled the key out of the ignition. I stepped out of the car, looking at the water lap the side of the cliff I stood on, water moving inward and outward and inward and outward. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my wool-knit sweater to protect them from the wind. Thirty and starting all over again.
In the end, I couldn’t do it. I got back into the car and drove home.
I spent the next week in a sports-induced fog, opening hate mail from the very people I had aimed to protect. Crazy, they said, loon, unAmerican. But my discouragement was short-lived. Here and there came the odd letter of support. And then they came in waves from academics, sociologists, and die-hard Tufte fans. Others could confirm my findings!
Amateur sleuths did my work for me, scouring census data and pitting their findings against histories of Monday Night Football. Not only had Monday nights taken the blow, but these reports suggested that Sunday nights were suffering, too. One writer, a professor and head of sociology at his college, claimed to have surveyed 3,000 men and women aged 20 to 65 across thirty states. He revealed his findings at a conference of the International Society for Study for Sexual Health, stating that the anticipation for Monday’s big game had played a role on Sunday nights as well. That professor wrote me a second time to say the study had been worth losing his tenure over, that he stood with me in our truth.
Many letters also contained anecdotal evidence of experiences quite like my own—husbands whose wives were too tired after the game. Women whose spouses woke only for football, idling the rest of the days away with sports-related news.
One heartbreaking letter, which I will put forth as a case study, details the disintegration and ultimate demise of a young marriage. The newly widowed newly-wed, whom I will call Renee (22), writes that she and her husband, whom I will call Vincent (24), were married in the winter of 1969. They had what she called a healthy sex life for the first nine months of their marriage. She remembers some news outlets being skeptical about Monday Night Football, but that she and Vincent were excited. On Monday, September 21, 1970, they sat down to watch the Cleveland Browns vs. New York Jets. They made love that night in an adrenaline-induced craze. Never before had they been so passionate. The next week, the Dallas Cowboys played the Cleveland Browns. The Browns lost a devastating 50-2. Vincent grew despondent. The game marked a shift in their relationship. Vincent poured all his attention into Monday Night Football, barely speaking during the games, communicating only in grunts and hollers. He grew superstitious.
He never smoked the last cigarette from the pack he opened the night of the first game. He wore the same socks every Monday, believing consistency was key. And if it were a Monday, he would not allow them to be intimate. He maintained that sex on Mondays would sully his team’s chances of making it to the championships. But Vincent’s superstitions were far-reaching, and Monday’s abstinence leaked into the other days of the week, first Sunday, then Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on and so forth. Vincent had always had an appetite for sex, so the transition to a sexless marriage alarmed Renee. Any time Renee wanted to be intimate, Vincent shirked her advances, demanding Cheetos and pop instead.
Renee all but gave up. One final play on her mind. She smeared on the eyeblack. Stripped. Naked, she steadied the ball of laundry in the crook of her arm, bending over she ran back and forth across the room. Roleplaying as Colorado Buffalos’ running back Denver Staightum was the only way to get Vincent’s attention. And Vincent had loved it, cheering, “Fight CU down the field, CU must win! Fight, fight for victory CU knows no defeat! We'll roll up a mighty score, never give in, shoulder to shoulder, we will fight, fight, fight, fight, fight!” Hollering, “Fight, fight, fight,” as they made love.
But while the season progressed, even Denver Straightum failed to turn Vincent on as he sat limply on their bed every night of the week, listening to sports radio. Field goal, hike, fumble, blitz, interception, endzone, hut hut, Hail Mary, down. If she tried even to touch his arm, he slouched away, shifting slightly out of her reach while uttering the most incomprehensible of murmurs. It was torture, Renee writes, to know that you could live with a person, someone that you love so dearly, and become all but invisible to them.
Out of options, Renee filed for divorce one year and one month into their marriage. She cited Monday Night Football as the reason. Despite their problems, Renee was still convinced Vincent was her one true love. If only she could bring back the old Vincent. Or maybe that’s what it meant to be married. Sticking with the person you made a promise to, no matter the outcome. Renee resolved to give it one more shot at their upcoming document signing. But on his way to the arbitration, Vincent crashed into a tree. Sports news radio was still playing when his body was recovered from the wreck. Scarred by the incident and believing her sexual appetite, turning from her vows, were to blame, Renee committed herself to a life of abstinence.
I keep her letter on the corkboard above my desk as a daily reminder of who I am fighting for—the American people, among them my mother and my father.
Harold and Bunny Tufte were married in 1968 and welcomed me in 1969. They dreamed of creating a large family, both hailing from large broods. Bunny was one of six, while Harold was one of eleven. They were not so unusual for the time. As previously mentioned, most Americans report the desire to have families with four or more children. However, also not unusual in the wake of Monday Night Football, that dream never came true for them, as after I was born, they had no more children. Instead, they divorced.
My parents are not alone in their plight. According to a 1998 study by Better Marriage Journal, 74.2% of sexless marriages end in divorce. However, sociologist Darnell West projects the percentage is probably closer to 50%, and may even be higher. Although there is no set statistic on how many people divorce because of a lack of sex in their marriage, scientists agree that sex or lack thereof is a key factor in the health of a marriage.
So, what can be done to combat Monday Night Football-induced abstinence? For that, I will return to my case study.
My parents are very amicable today. Both are healthy seniors on the edge of retirement with distinct hobbies and goals. Luckily, they both take my work and my word seriously and decided to quit football altogether after my controversial firing. Weaning off of the game was not an easy process. Everywhere, Americans are inundated with images of footballers, the lights and whistles. Football fever is nearly impossible to escape, but not entirely.
Following my failed suicide, this journalist picked herself up. I would go on to coach my parents through a strict no-football diet, and I am happy to report they are both six months clean from Monday Night Football. The real challenge will begin next football season when football is at its height, but for now, my parents are thriving. And, after years of distance and other partners, my parents are giving it one more try. Their reunion is a testament to football abstinence as a solution to Monday Night Football’s damaging effects on American sexual health and the institution of marriage on whole. I have gone on to have a number of clients quit football, and they report that their lives are better for it. When the sports turn off, so do the lights.
Today, I am happy with the trajectory of my life. But it took a while to get here. For a long time after my firing, I thought my life was ending. They say when a woman hits thirty, she loses all value, and that could not have felt more true than when I lost my job with ABC. But it turns out that this is just the beginning for me. I have stopped vomiting, having developed a strong constitution following my firing. I have a fiance now who hates football and loves sex on Mondays. Vigorous love-making has led to becoming parents. There is a child on the way who will not play Peewee League. Several generous donors now fund my research so that I can devote all of my time to creating accessible information for the public. However, more research is needed.
To prove that the correlation between sports and American fertility rates goes beyond Monday Night Football, I will need to study American sports in totality. I will look at players' strikes in basketball, tennis, and soccer and corresponding baby booms. I will also look into the Olympics and global fertility trends to find answers to the global waning population. We are not too far out to reverse these troubling trends, but we need to take action now. I intend to give a voice to all who suffer in the name of American pastimes.
I dedicate all of my research, my time, and my love to my parents, Harold and Bunny Tufte. In my mind, they are hollering and hollering.
