I don't know that I have anything new to say about this but for fans of North American football -- that includes me, alas -- the sport has become a guilty pleasure. This is a good, accessible and careful resource about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. It can't be definitively diagnosed until after death, and the required examination is very laborious, so we don't know exactly what percentage of players are affected. But we know it's a lot, and we also know that the risk is strongly associated with the number of years a person plays the game.
The NFL and governing associations at all levels have made rule changes in response to the concern about head injury, but they don't really do much. You can no longer intentionally strike a blow to the head but the damage isn't caused by the occasional diagnosable concussion. It's caused by the innumerable small head bumps that are inherent to the game. The problem can't be solved with helmet technology either. The helmet protects the skull and face, but it can't stop the brain from bouncing around inside the skull. The mechanism is unknown, but as they add up over time they start a process which may not manifest until after the player retires. So the miraculously youthful 43 year old Tom Brady, who is now completing what is probably about his 35th year of playing football, just might start showing symptoms when he's 50.
It's questionable whether the sport can survive. If parents stop letting their boys play the game -- and that is already starting to happen -- and the supply of talented athletes dries up, it just won't be much fun to watch. Professional football is exciting precisely because of the astonishing skill, speed, power and courage of the players. Of all the sports, they're the greatest warriors. I don't see how, in good conscience, it can continue. But I'll be watching tomorrow.
4 comments:
Most of my male friends (Cervantes included) watched the Superbum regem noctua. I did not.
I suspect many women I know did not watch it. I'm sure if we took a national poll, we'd find per capita that many more men watched it than women.
I'm sure this has been said "many times, many ways" ... but I think we've sublimated our ancient hunting skills into today's modern sports. Instead of chucking spears at mastodons and other animals, we hurl the puck into the net, the foo ball through the uprights, we swish the ball through the net, the Titleist ProV1 into the hole.
There's obviously the biological imperative as well. The "net," the "hole," the "goal" represents the anima, to us males ... the egg sits there as hundreds of millions of spermatozoa desperately thrash toward it. But only one makes it. As Lewis Thomas noted years ago in "Lives of a Cell," one molecule of bombykol emanated from the female silkworm moth drives males within a half-mile radius to seek her out to mate.
Even with CTE, I suppose a lot less harm comes out of professional and amateur sports than it does out of war.
Disclosure: I didn't watch the game ... but I felt this weird compulsion to check the score.
And even though Patrick Mahomes speaks out more on societal prejudice and equity issues at 25 years of age than Tom Brady does at 43, I could feel this part of me wanting to "go with the winner" (I'm older myself), and being glad that a guy who equates himself with his brand, and golfed with Shitler, was winning. Despicable me!
But it helps me understand how ignorant folks could support people like Shitler and Hitler and Jim Jones. Somebody--even the world's biggest loser--calls himself a winner, blames others, and insecure people jump on the bandwagon.
Viz: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tom-brady/
Eloquent YouTube from Ryan Leaf:
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/vincent-jackson-death-ryan-leaf-plea-to-nfl-000944878.html
See this eloquent YouTube from Ryan Leaf:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bIAV6yMKMk
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