The NFL knows the truth about Pat Tillman. It just doesn't care.
Remembering the real legacy of Pat Tillman.
Dear readers,
Happy Presidents Day weekend! The two of us have both managed to jaunt out of NYC for the holiday to seek refuge from the February Blues, so we hope you’re all enjoying the long weekend wherever you are.
Before we fully shift our attention to the spring sports season (read: all baseball, all the time), we’ve got a few loose ends to wrap up from last weekend’s Super Bowl. Happy reading.
-Ian and Calder
If you watched the Super Bowl last weekend, you may have been tipped off that it took place in Arizona from the lack of parkas in the crowd, the terrible field conditions, or the plentiful shots of fireworks rising above the iconic Glendale landscape.
If you missed all of that, though, there was another telltale sign that the game took place in the Copper State: the looming presence of Pat Tillman.
Tillman was a former NFL player who attended Arizona State University before being drafted into the NFL by the Arizona Cardinals in 1998. He quickly became a fan favorite in Arizona, and the affection was apparently mutual: in 2001, Tillman turned down a multi-million dollar contract from the St. Louis Rams, opting to stay with the Cardinals instead.
But that wasn’t the last dramatic twist that Tillman’s career would take. After 9/11, Tillman left the NFL to enlist in the U.S. Army alongside his brother Kevin. He was eventually deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, but on April 22, 2004, the military reported that he was killed by enemy combatants in Afghanistan.
For the NFL’s purposes, Tillman’s story ends there. Before the Super Bowl kicked off last weekend, the league “honored” Tillman with a pre-game ceremony featuring the recipients of the Pat Tillman Foundation scholarship, complete with an over-produced video segment narrated by Kevin Cosner. In the video, Cosner — speaking on behalf of the NFL — applauded Tillman for “[giving] up his NFL career to join the Army Rangers,” noting that he “ultimately lost his life in the line of duty.”
But that’s not the whole story.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Tillman increasingly turned against America’s wars in the Middle East, reportedly calling the U.S. invasion of Iraq “so fucking illegal” and making plans to meet with leftist anti-war scholar Noam Chomsky. While still in the service, he told a friend in his unit — Spc. Jade Lane — that he worried that if he died, the Pentagon and the NFL would turn his death into propaganda to sell a war that he no longer fully believed in.
“I don’t want them to parade me through the streets,” Lane later recalled Tillman saying.
And then, a full five weeks after his death, the military finally reported that Tillman had in fact been killed by friendly fire, not by the Taliban. Subsequent investigations into the Army’s handling of Tillman’s death have found numerous inconsistencies and irregularities, suggesting that the military tried to cover up the real story. Of course, the NFL’s tribute mentioned none of this.
We’ll likely never know the full story of what happened to Tillman, or what he really believed about the wars he fought in. The truth is probably more complicated than anyone can possibly know. Like many Americans, Tillman likely had complex — and even contradictory — beliefs about the U.S. engagement in the Middle East. He may have thought parts of the wars were justified, even if other elements were unjustifiable. We just don’t know, and we never will.
The NFL, though, doesn’t care about this nuance. To the contrary, they can’t wait to shove a whitewashed story about Tillman down its audience’s throats, painting him as a one-dimensional avatar of the league’s own jingoism. This isn’t the first time the league has appropriated Tillman’s memory to serve its own ends, and we suspect that it won’t be the last.
But what’s so strange about the NFL’s continued insistence on “honoring” Tillman isn’t merely that the NFL’s portrait of Tillman is demonstrably wrong, but that it’s also entirely counterproductive. Every time the league brings up Tillman's memory in public, his name begins to trend on Twitter, the media runs a slew of stories about Tillman, and more people learn the truth: that he opposed the war, that he was killed by friendly fire, and that the Pentagon blatantly misrepresented the circumstances surrounding his death. If the NFL is trying to send a pro-military message, there are plenty of other, less messy ways that they could do it.
So, why do they keep bringing Tillman up?
As fun as it would be to believe that there’s a secret anti-war clique within NFL brass who are purposefully misleading the rest of the league into this sort of misstep, that seems pretty unlikely.
The better explanation is that they simply don’t care about the outrage. The NFL knows that no matter what they do, fans are going to continue to buy what they’re selling. Mere weeks ago, a player almost died on an NFL field, in full view of millions of fans. A week later, the stands were still full; at the Super Bowl, that same player appeared on TV seated next to Roger Goodell in the commissioner’s box, having been seamlessly absorbed into the league’s insatiable propaganda machine.
This sort of power affords the NFL the ability to lie, spin, and otherwise misrepresent any story they want to in whatever way they want to — knowing full well that even when their lie comes to light, their money-making power will not wane. The truth of Tillman’s story is no secret, and the NFL knows that. The purpose of its misappropriation of Tillman’s story is not to say: This is the truth. The point is to say: You know we’re lying — about this and everything else — but try to stop us.
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