Every time a middle-aged former NFL player takes his own life — with the subsequent autopsy showing a brain scan that looks like something from a nursing home’s palliative-care wing — football comes one step closer to extinction.
After legendary Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, 44, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2007, forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu reported that brain tissue from Waters (who literally lost count of the number of concussions he got during his playing days) resembled that of an 85-year-old man with Alzheimer’s.
Various other former NFL players have followed Waters to the grave under roughly similar circumstances.
What modern forensic science and epidemiology have taught us is that the medical ravages of football are far, far greater than we ever imagined — so great that it is hard for any thinking person to watch the game without feeling a pang of horror and guilt every time two heads smash together: Every “big hit” increases the likelihood that either hitter or hittee will shoot himself in front of wife and children a few decades hence.
The removal of football as a mass-market sport would be especially traumatic to the country, for it is difficult to overstate how existentially important the game is to Americans, especially in the South and Midwest. A United States without high-school football on Friday night, college gridiron on Saturday and NFL on Sunday will be like Canada without any level of hockey — virtually unimaginable.
And yet it will happen. That’s because, however invincible football may be as a cultural force in America, it is smashing up against the immovable object of childhood safety.
Back in October, NPR’s Tom Goldman took in a pee-wee football game in the all-American town of Angleton, Tex. (pop. 18,000), a place where parents tell reporters things like this: “[My 8-year-old son] plays football on Saturday. Sunday morning we’re in church because I told him he needs to be able to give thanks. And we make sure we read the scripture. We pray over him, so that God protects him. You just have to go with God and let him play.”
But even in Texas, Goldman found parents who are increasingly concerned about the dangers that the game presents.
One dad told Goldman that he’s yanking his kid out of tackle football the first time he gets a concussion. Other parents might not wait even till then: A prominent neurosurgeon, Robert Cantu, has published a book urging parents not to let their children play tackle football until they are 14 — by which time, almost all of them will be invested in other, less violent sports.
The result will be a whole generation of children growing up with the knowledge that football is not an ordinary sport like basketball or soccer. Simply put, it exceeds the engineering design limits of the human body. And the carnage comes, not just in the form of broken bones, but also broken brains.
There are ways to make hockey and soccer safer. But there is no helmet technology in the world that can get us around the fact that a human skull decelerating from full sprint to dead stop in a tiny fraction of a second — an event that comprises the very essence of “good,” “hard-hitting” football; and not just a penalized aberration, as in other sports — cannot protect the mushy contents therein.
Read More:
National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com
Source: Head injuries are killing the NFL. Part of America will die with it | Full Comment | National Post
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/12/jonathan-kay-head-injuries-are-killing-football-and-a-big-piece-of-america-will-die-with-it/
No comments:
Post a Comment