Yo, I thought I killed Joey in the desert,” Viggo Mortensen told his wife in A History of Violence, referring to his true identity — the Philadelphia mobster, not the Indiana farmer his wife thought she had married — as my friends and I choked back laughter.

(Yes, this is going somewhere. Somewhere sports-related. Just wait.)

We had wanted to see the new Wallace and Gromit movie but were forced to trade in our tickets when we found ourselves in the front row, straining our necks to stare up at the screen. We realized our mistake about 20 minutes into A History of Violence when Viggo’s kid catches a fly ball during gym and subsequently gets into a fight with the kid who had hit it. “You think you’re tough shit, huh?” the kid asks, slamming Viggo’s kid into a locker. Oh boy.

Because my brain knew it wouldn’t have anything else to do for the next hour and 40 minutes, my thoughts wandered. I started thinking about my own history of violence, the extent of which has been two badly broken wrists (actually, just one wrist — my left — two times) sustained during flag football games, from which I still have a noticeable protrusion in the ball of my wrist.

But the history of violence in sports goes back much farther than my own personal history.

I suppose you could argue that the Roman sport of gladiators, which consisted of Russell Crowe killing a lot of animals and Roman slaves, was a form of violence.

Or the Aztecs, who played basketball on 20-foot hoops, after which the losing team would be sacrificed to the gods.

But today’s sports are far more violent than those of the ancients. Basketball has become a full-contact sport. Each year, several football players sustain debilitating injuries; hockey players viciously slam each other into the boards. Last week, a puck fractured the left orbital bone of the Maple Leafs’ captain Mats Sundin; in 2000, his teammate, Brian Berard, sustained a ghastly injury to his eye that left it with almost no vision and derailed his career.

We also have the occasional self-inflicted death by steroid (we hardly knew ye, Ken Caminiti).

The most notorious of our violent sports, however, is boxing. Last month, Leavander Johnson died due to injuries sustained during his lightweight title bout with Jesus Chavez; not in the shady rink of a downtown warehouse, but among the glitter of Las Vegas. He died as businessmen in slick suits sitting ringside checked their Blackberries. He died in a city that glows like a lake full of radioactive waste.

After the fight, an influential Jesuit magazine close to the Vatican, Civita Cattolica (Christian Civilization), called boxing a “legalized form of attempted murder.”

If you have ever watched a boxing match, it’s hard to disagree with that argument.

Which should make us ask ourselves: Have we really progressed, or are we still in the same gladiator arenas, only with better padding and cooler uniforms? Do we have the same need to express our repressed anger in sporting events before we go home to our DVD players and our washing machines? We can cure cancer and deaden the effects of HIV, but we also reward our citizens for participating in modern-day gladiator matches.

Are we not satisfied with the amount of violence all around us, including the terrible movie I was watching? (I think Joey was kicking a mobster’s nose off his face at this point.) Every 16 minutes, someone in the United States dies by a firearm.

Throughout history, the most violent societies have had the bloodiest forms of entertainment, probably as a justification and a reflection of the violence in the larger culture.

To some extent, though, violent sports, movies and video games embed aggression within us. We go back to our daily routines when the house lights come up, or as we wait to get out of the parking lot. But do we submerge the seething passions we experience during the entertainment, allowing them to simmer below the surface, waiting for an opportunity to spring up in real life?

If we want to make our society less violent, perhaps sports are a good place to start.

Instead of drawing fans to hockey games by allowing fighting, forbid it; instead, make the game more exciting by making it faster and allow each team to have only four players on the ice.

Instead of imposing a 15-yard-penalty for a personal foul when 260-pound linemen crash into quarterbacks after a play has ended, double the penalty and kick the player out of the game.

Bar any player who uses steroids.

And for God’s sake, require all boxers to wear headgear, or ban the sport altogether. There’s enough death in real life; we don’t need to add to it.