Sapp's shot was cold, cruel and just what fans crave

Warren Sapp was doing his job -- a job he does rabidly, savagely and, by extension, better than just about everyone else in the world, past or present. You want to turn down the volume on Sapp's ferocity? You would have more luck trying to smother the sun with your hands.

To criticize Tampa Bay's Sapp for putting Chad Clifton in the hospital is to criticize a violent America for making football its most popular sport. Football is merely cockfighting with a ball, a clock and the occasional suspension for ephedrine.

Sundays are the systematic destruction of the human body for the entertainment and gambling pleasure of the screaming Romans who shake their cash-filled fists with bloodlust at the spectacle. To pretend otherwise is to pretend that what those gyrating cheerleaders on the sidelines are selling is their support.

It is unfortunate that another man would end up wrecked because of Sapp's menace, but that's the wonderful, awful life these wealthy players choose. It is part of the transaction when you win collisions for a living, the risk of horrible injury when you are hit by Sapp or even when you are hit far more benignly. So Green Bay's Clifton is a victim here only in the way the gardener is a victim when his hands get calloused or the garbage man is a victim when he comes home stinking.

You don't like it? Try golf. There are no spinal contusions there. Ballet is an option, too. Nothing hits you back there, either. But football, no matter how slickly packaged and choreographed for our perusal on distinctly American Sundays, is about as violent as humans can get without the use of weapons.

Maybe it made you wince, seeing Sapp blindside Clifton away from the ball and later learning Clifton's season might be over because of ligaments separating from his hip and blood collecting in his pelvis, but Clifton is not an innocent infant here. He is, literally, a big boy who made a grown-up choice to earn a living this way -- a 6-5, 327-pound man who could have been delivering this kind of hit just as easily as he could have been absorbing it.

Was Sapp mean? Hell, yeah. Cruel? As a Siberian winter. But those are the things that helped get him from poverty-ravaged Apopka to the top of sports, his mean justifying the end.

Let's not be Pollyanna about this. A nicer Sapp might not be the same player. Some guys need rage as fuel. Ray Lewis thinks of his murdered roommate on game day. Former linebacker Chris Spielman used to come to the line of scrimmage in tears sometimes, imagining awful things happening to his family. There is a dark undercurrent that carries some of our athletes farther than others with similar skill. Asking Sapp to put away his cruelty when it suits you is like asking a gunslinger to never unbutton his holster.

And every time he breaks that huddle, Clifton knows there is the risk of losing feeling in his extremities and having his family grieving. That risk is about as inherent to this sport as the sweating.

Just Thursday, on a most American holiday that always includes football, Detroit running back James Stewart was concussed and immobile while playing for the same team that has seen Mike Utley and Reggie Brown paralyzed this time of year.

Perhaps we cringe when the arm of Seattle receiver Darrell Jackson goes stiff after a hit and he convulses in the locker room afterward with a seizure, but what we're grieving there is the result, not the action that caused it.

The action that caused it, as a matter of fact, is something we celebrate, in video games, in big-hit videos, in highlights, in Sundays.

The action that caused it might have been something that changed a game's momentum, left the sideline aquiver with delight and had the home fans jumping up and down with did-you-see-that glee if not for pesky things like seizures interrupting the revelry.

We enjoy it right up until we disdain it. And we don't disdain it until our cheering is interrupted by the silence and the players sobbing and the jarring presence of that ambulance, which is always on call in a way it isn't for, say, baseball.

Today's players know they'll be limping through retirement, and they see nobility, not sadness, in it. To a man, they'll tell you with a gladiator's defiance that they'll trade the pain of tomorrow for the rush of today.

Green Bay coach Mike Sherman was more out of line in confronting Sapp after the game than Sapp was for anything he did during it. There is this laughable illusion of intimidation we've created among coaches, when Bill Cowher juts his jaw or an angry Jon Gruden arches an eyebrow, but 300-pound players literally laugh at these things, and the way the media sell it as "fear" and "discipline." Sherman is lucky that Sapp, still soaring from the adrenaline of game day, didn't snap and throw the old coach's head into the stands.

This game, it isn't a polite one.

So we shouldn't be surprised when the players who play it best aren't polite, either.

Dan LeBetard is a sports columnist for The Miami Herald.