Football concussions

Time Magazine's Cover Story this week is entitled 'The Most Dangerous Game'. (I think the title is meant to evoke memories of a 1924 short story by Richard Connell of the same name). The thrust of the article is that over the last few years, science has caught up with the dangers inherent in getting hit in the head, or hitting somebody with one's head. Autopsies routinely show that the brains of football players' actually look different than the average brain. They have a protein called 'tau', which gives rise to 'chronic traumatic encephalopathy', or CTE, and looks like brown 'splotches'. Those brains that have undergone many concussions are as 'brown as the pigskin itself'. Ex-pro players over age 50 are five times as likely as the US national population to receive a memory-related disease. Players 30-49 are 19 times as likely to be debilitated somehow. It is now thought that the thousands of lower-impact blows that most football players receive can be just as damaging as the dramatic head injuries that tend to get more attention. Yikes. We have known for a long time that the crashing of the brain against the inside of the skull cannot be good for it, but the new scientific evidence is particularly damning.

And this is the rub. My boy plays soccer, which although on paper is a 'non-contact' sport, does in fact involve a lot of contact. However, such contact rarely involves the head, and it seems that concussive injuries in soccer tend not to occur through heading the ball, but rather from balls that accidentally hit the head. So far, so good.

However, both he and I love to watch football, particularly the NFL, wherein people hit each other in the head very hard as a matter of course. And so, is it OK to take pleasure in watching these people obtain their goals (first downs, touchdowns, interceptions) while at the same time running a very real risk of battering themselves and others into mental mush?

It may be a bit of a leap, but perhaps we are heading towards a type of entertainment not seen since those raucous days of the Roman Colisseum, where audiences for hundreds of years took such huge pleasure in watching other peoples' pain, misery, and misfortunes.

Perhaps. Presently, however, I feel sick when I see someone lying immobile on the football field after a serious head injury. At the same time, I think I would not find the game of football nearly as appealing if hitting were taken out of it.