We are what we watch.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz

IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO THE 2001 BOOK, "Fast Food Nation, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal," writer Eric Schlosser makes a gentle suggestion: Be an informed cater.

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"People should know what lies behind the shiny, happy surface of every fast food transaction," Schlosser writes. "They should know what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns. As the old saying goes: You are what you eat."

For me, the National Football League's recent concussion saga evokes a similar sentiment. What I've learned from the storyline is that there are two football games being played in the NFL every Thursday evening, Sunday afternoon or Monday night. There is the game I watch on TV--rich with pageantry and color, beautifully captured in dazzling slow-motion replays, scripted to segue gracefully into interludes for advertisements. And there is the game that is played down below, on the field. That game is sweat and muscle and mucous and vomit against a backdrop of repeated violence. It's the smacking of helmets against kneepads, helmets against shoulder pads, helmets against helmets, every down, every drive. An essential and brutal confrontation, synchronized to a play clock.

Young men who have played competitive football probably get this. The rest of us probably don't. And probably, we should.

Because otherwise, it's all a glittering fantasy. The NFL and its business partners--TV networks, especially--are very good at dressing up the game of football as an irresistible, made-for-television spectacle. It's their business imperative to do so. Commissioner Roger Goodell has suggested the NFL can go from being a nearly $10 billion annual business to a $25 billion business by 2027. You don't nearly triple your money without having a pretty good marketing playbook.

Still. The NFL's late-August settlement of a lawsuit brought by 4,500 former players drew attention to the nearly unimaginable trail of brain trauma that has afflicted thousands of men who once played professionally. It is not a shiny or happy story. Watching the once-irrepressible Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon stumble through a television interview, unable to recall what question he's...