NFL players join Super Bowl church service against pornography

SALT LAKE CITY — The NFL is a $7.8 billion business, the megapower of sports leagues, mammoth enough to draw 95 million American viewers Sunday to the Super Bowl, annually the nation's largest TV event by far.

Yet the last good estimate of the U.S. pornography industry showed it dwarfs the NFL, generating $13.3 billion a year, according to a 2006 report by TopTop Ten Reviews.

That alarms Dallas Cowboys quarterback Jon Kitna, who battled a pornography problem of his own and joined Seattle Seahawks star quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, other NFL players and a Dallas pastor to produce an anti-pornography church service today that will be broadcast from Dallas, the site of the Super Bowl, just hours before the game to more than 350 churches around the world.

National Porn Sunday includes a 35-minute video churches can show with messages from six current or former pro football players and Craig Gross, the pastor inspired to fight back against pornography nine years ago when he realized many of the youths he worked with suddenly had access to porn on the Internet. One of the players is Green Bay Packers defensive tackle Ryan Pickett, who will play in Sunday's Super Bowl against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The goals, Gross said, are to help football-loving boys and men realize that pornography is a problem, to prevent potential problems and to help those with addictions recover.

"I've never met anybody who got over this issue themselves," Gross said. "You're not going to get through it yourself. You've got to find somebody else. Some people are going to be in for the fight of their lives."

Kitna experienced it first hand. He might better be characterized as a Christian quarterback, one who was a self-described alcoholic, womanizer and cheater in college until he found Jesus Christ. But his conversion didn't spare him from the snare of pornography, which trapped him, ironically, because of a Super Bowl.

"The issue I started to have with pornography and knowing this was readily available happened in the Super Bowl when Janet Jackson had the wardrobe malfunction," he says in an extended video interview produced by Gross' team. "You go to MSN or CNN or MSNBC and see this and it leads you to a link to this and pretty soon I was into this world I never knew existed. That's when I kinda started to struggle with it."

A year later, Kitna realized his problem was significant.