Game memories: Dublin 6, Dodge Co. 0

A little something different tonight.

Last fall I used a blog entry to tell the story of how I came to stop watching football. It actually got more clicks than usual on this shouting-into-the-wind forum, but then the transition to a new state, a new vocation, generally a new life derailed my blogging of any sort. After getting established, at least a little, in the new call, I found that I missed the blog, missed the outlet to cry out and lament against this ongoing damage done by a game I used to love.

Yes, it's true. I really did love football growing up. It was never my favorite sport, to be sure; Hank Aaron breaking Babe Ruth's home run record sealed baseball on the throne of my sports-fan kingdom forever and always. Although basketball was actually a sport I played in my teenage years (strictly church league, folks, don't get excited), I never really "got" it until I attended Wake Forest for a year and a half and was thus introduced to ACC basketball. Hockey never took with me, even though I tried really yard for the few years that Tallahassee had a minor-league hockey team while I lived there. Soccer is an extremely recent passion in my life.

But I was like a lot of other people who were raised in small or smallish towns, particularly but not exclusively in the South, whose life actually revolved around football to a far greater degree than I realized at the time or at any time until recently, as I began to dig into the issue of football and brain trauma.

I didn't play. Goodness, no, I've never been an athlete; church-league softball and basketball were the extent of my athletic struggles as a youth, and whenever possible I was the last guy off the bench for good reason. My closest brush with athletic success was as a coach of elementary school kids, where we managed to come in first in a league with all of two teams.

But in some ways my high-school years were governed by football possibly more so than anyone other than a player or maybe a cheerleader. You see, I was in the marching band.

As a result I played four years in the Dublin High School Fighting Irish Band. My instrument was the mellophone (that's what they gave French horn players to march with). As a result, except for the rare open date, my Friday nights from maybe late August into part of November were governed by the football schedule. My Thursday nights became band-practice nights, the one occasion on which the marching band actually got to practice on the actual football field. My mother was involved as well, as the director of the concession stand on the visitor's side of the field (the Band Boosters got to run those to raise money).

I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't).

That four-year stretch of being attached to football also provided one of the most intense experiences of my high school years, at least that did not involve me as more than an observer or spectator. It was perhaps the first time I understood, once I looked back at it, the intensity and total saturation that is possible in being a part, even only a spectator part, of a game, particularly live and in person. It isn't that I remember every detail; I'm not certain even what year it was, and I can only remember that it was a road game against Dodge County High, who was something of a rival at the time.


October 12, 1979 (I think...it might have been October 9, 1981)

The reason I think it was 1979, my freshman year in high school, was that as best as I remember, it was an important game, in a season in which both teams were doing well at that point. Dublin had only one loss at that point and Dodge County was undefeated. (I also seem to feel that the whole marching-band experience was pretty new to me at this point, and this would have been only my third road game. But I could be wrong.)

*It blows my mind that the above website, the Georgia High School Football Historians Association site recording records, results, etc. for all those high school teams in Georgia dating back (in Dublin's case) to 1919 (1919!), exists. But credit to them for supplying what I can't remember.

I won't claim it was the best football game I ever saw; it was in many ways marked more by failures and mistakes than by great plays. By most definitions it was not the most dramatic game ever; the winning (and only) score happened quite early in the game, and was followed by one of those mistakes -- a missed extra point. I can't remember any of the main players' names, even the one who scored the lone touchdown (I only remember that, for some reason, he was apparently wearing another player's jersey).

It was one of those strange plays when the running back, assigned to plunge into the middle of the line on a third-and-short or maybe even fourth-and-short, suddenly found himself all alone on the other side of Dodge County's defensive line, with nobody between him and the end zone but a couple of officials. He did, perhaps after a fleeting instant of shock, run the fifty-plus yards and Dublin had a surprise lead. The excitement was immediately tempered by the missed extra point.

Again, it isn't specific plays or players I remember. What has stayed with me all these years was the sheer intensity of the game and its peaks and valleys. Dodge County had no real reason to despair; there were at least three and a half quarters remaining. And they immediately started their own drive down the field.

It fell short.

Dublin answered with another drive. It got stopped.

And again. And again.

The remarkable part was that for a low-scoring game, I really don't remember a lot of punts. Drives would end on fumbles, or interceptions, or simply on unconverted fourth downs. They also tended to end well into the other team's territory.

Dublin would grind its way down the field. We would get excited, even a little frenzied, and more and more so each time. Finally. We'll score this time for sure. And then the team would fumble or give up an interception or lose the ball on downs.

Dodge County would grind its way down the field. We would get agitated, even a little despairing, and more and more so each time. Oh, no. They're going to score, finally. And then they would fumble or give up an interception or lose the ball on downs.

I remember nothing of what the band did at halftime. We typically had the third quarter off for refreshments or bathroom breaks or whatnot, but I don't remember going myself or seeing anybody else go. I'm sure I probably did, but I don't remember it.

Typically the band would play little punches during the game, the kind of short bursts that accompanied cheers or provided the background for one. I don't remember a whole lot of those either.

I just remember the continuing and compounding exhilaration and anxiety as each drive ground its way down the field only to fall short.  It's not as if I can truly capture it in words; the heart racing and then stopping, the primal release of emotion, of one sort or the other, the clinging to neighbors or section mates or total strangers in the stands as each minute ticked away.

And then it was over, and just the way it had virtually started: Dublin 6, Dodge County 0.

The main emotion I remember at its end, if it counts as emotion, was exhaustion. Yes, celebration; yes, relief; yes, something possibly a little like joy, but mostly sheer emotional draining. And none of us had set foot on the field for any play during the game. (No, marching the halftime show didn't count.) One peak after another, one valley after another, one rise and fall and pinnacle and crash after another.

And then it was over. And finally I understood, at least a little, why people got so involved in this.



So let's be clear; I don't at all underestimate the challenge involved for a football fan in turning away from the game. Every sport has its particular passions, and football's are not easily duplicated by other sports. Yes, there is loss involved.

Still, the person of faith who would live his or her life in any kind of mindful or intentional way cannot escape the ethical dilemma of a game that still consumes its players so, whether it be one or ten or a hundred or a thousand.

Other sports have to face this question too, hockey and possibly soccer in particular. Football is the titan, though. It boasts (and I use that word quite intentionally) the largest fan base, the most money, the most corporate clout in American sports. To whom much is given, much is required.

The corporate leviathan that is the NFL, or the exploitative enterprise that is NCAA football, simply will not respond to anything other than financial pressure. No such organization ever does. The corporate sponsors of those organizations likewise will not respond to anything other than financial pressure.

Only people not watching games, not buying tickets, not buying merchandise, not spending money on the whole enterprise will move the needle. And if Christians can't be out front on this, at least asking the hard questions and not ducking away from the hard answers... .

Really, I've got no pictures from back then. Zip. Zilch. Nada. 

This is the best I can do from web-scrounging.

A teammate's concern

The last entry on this blog took note of the retirement of a member of this past season's Super Bowl championship team, and particularly of the increasingly common note of retiring players getting out with their brains at least perceived to be somewhat whole if not completely intact. It can now be part of the discussion whether the player was relatively a veteran, like Dan Connolly, or someone much younger, like Chris Borland. 

Not every player comes to this calculation, though. Some players, such as Chris Conte of the Chicago Bears, state that they have made the decision, at age 25 in his case, that the health risks associated with playing NFL football are totally worth it and he'll play until he's broken into a million pieces, or something like that (well, okay, not quite that extreme, but...). Although Conte claims that concussions or brain trauma were not specifically part of the equation (he has had two so far), but the general health risks of playing in the NFL. However, since he seems in his account to be willing to sacrifice 10-15 years of his life to have an NFL career, it's hard to imagine how brain trauma isn't part of the calculation.

In the past week, a news story passed across the wires, possibly not noticed by many, that illustrates something of the impact of the ongoing concern about brain trauma among (at least some) NFL players. Cornerback Champ Bailey, once of the Denver Broncos, went public with his concern for former teammate Wes Welker, the wide receiver (who came to fame with the New England Patriots) who is searching for a new team via free agency. Welker was wracked by three diagnosed concussions in a nine-month span from 2013-2014, and his performance seemed to suffer in 2014 as he was unable to play and less productive (a two-game suspension for performance-enhancing drugs didn't help) after a strong season in 2013.

Bailey didn't mince words:

"I don't want Wes to play for my own personal reasons. I've seen him get concussions. It scares me," Bailey told Fox Sports. "I think he can still play, but I don't want him to play because of these concussions.

"This thing is no joke. It's a serious thing when you start talking about your head. And for him to have to worry about that at a young age that he is now, he has to think about that for years to come, and I just hope he hangs it up and not strap it up again."

Not that Bailey doesn't understand why Welker wants to keep playing:

"I understand why he has that desire to play, he wants the ring," Bailey told Fox Sports. "He still has that hunger, I just don't want to see it."

 It isn't entirely surprising that no team has signed Welker so far; the public relations disaster of a well-liked player suffering a catastrophic brain trauma on your watch is something no coach or general manager wants to risk.

I make no claim to any profound theological insight here. There is nothing really profound I have to say. I am simply struck by the inescapable conclusion that if a successful player like Bailey is moved to such concern, knowing what he knows about playing in the NFL and having seen what he's seen in his career, then I don't really see how I, or any would-be mindful faithful fan, can profess not to be concerned, or can avoid seriously examining oneself and one's devotion to a game with such consequences.

Champ Bailey is worried about Wes Welker

Image credit: denverpost.com

The NFL's new normal

It isn't terribly unusual for members of a championship team, particularly those who have been at it for a while, to retire. It's almost expected.

Such is the case with Dan Connolly, an offensive lineman and one of the captains for last year's Super Bowl champions, the New England Patriots. In an interview with ESPN.com, Connolly announced his decision to retire rather than pursue a free-agent deal with another team. As is often the case, Connolly noted several different factors that contributed to his decision. He mentioned not wanting to uproot his family or be away from them for the duration of an NFL season. Having that Super Bowl ring certainly played a part as well, he acknowledged, making it easer to step away with fewer regrets.

And, in what is now the norm for such interviews, Connolly acknowledged that health was the "biggest factor" in his decision, acknowledging the four diagnosed concussions during his NFL career as well as one back in high school in Missouri:

"It's important to me to leave the game healthy," Connolly said. "I'm able to be here for my kids and walk away on my own terms. I feel like I got everything I could out of football in playing 10 years, winning a Super Bowl, and playing alongside some truly great players."

Connolly was 32, not exceedingly young by NFL retirement standards (and certainly not comparable to Chris Borland), but also not as old as many players who squeeze every last year out of the NFL.

Had Connolly not been a member of last year's Patriots (no suggestion that he was involved in "Deflategate" at least), it's quite likely his retirement announcement would have received a lot less attention and probably wouldn't have elicited an interview on ESPN.com. But it did, and even the coverage of this story shows a few things are still askew in media coverage of the story.

For one thing, it's all about the concussions. They're bad enough. They're frankly horrifying when you're in the middle of a bad one. But it isn't just the concussions. More and more studies are pointing the finger at sub-concussive hits as major factors in the long-term brain trauma experienced by football players as well as other athletes from sports such as boxing, hockey, and maybe even soccer. These hits don't cause the same level of disorientation and immediate debilitation as concussive hits. They may not even hurt. But the accumulation of such hits over time increasingly tracks with long-term damage.

Again, focusing on concussions misses potentially the greater problem. The "dings" are doing their damage even if they go unchecked or unremarked until well after the fact.

It is also rather (and I'm being quite restrained here) interesting that retiring after five concussions overall is being portrayed as prudent. It's not bad enough to ignore the ticking time bomb of the sub-concussive hits piling up season after season, but we've decided how many concussions are not too many?

In short, as long as players continue to run into each other at high speeds (and let's face it, NFL players are insanely fast) or throw their 300-lb. bodies at each other repeatedly, we're not going to get any closer to cutting down on these traumatic levels of damage. But increasingly it looks like we're just accepting this as normal. It's troubling that this isn't more troubling.

To close, an exercise for you; go through and read some of those articles linked above, or Google "sub-concussive hits football" or some similar combination. Some of them are heavy on the medical jargon, but push on through.

Then, with those studies fresh on your mind, spend some time meditating on Genesis 1:27.

Is it even truly possible to be "ready for impact"?

The many challenges of soccer followup: It's the collisions, stupid

A little over a week ago, as the US Women's National Team was cruising to a World Cup title over Japan, this blog offered up an overview of some of the potential issues around soccer for the mindful faithful fan. One of them, maybe surprisingly or maybe not, was the potential trouble with concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). At least one fairly serious star in the game from back in the 1950s turned out to show the telltale signs of CTE after his death (which is still the only way to do so for certain), and concussions are not at all unknown in the sport.

As if on cue, the results of a nine-year study of concussions in high-school soccer appeared in the news media beginning yesterday, with possibly surprising findings on how concussions are most often triggered in young persons playing the game.  The result contradicts, at least in part, an emerging wisdom on soccer and concussions, while at the same time being quite compatible with what has been observed about concussions and brain trauma in other sports, particularly football.

Youth soccer has become extremely popular in the past few decades, ironically enough, because it was perceived as a safer alternative to other sports for youth, particularly football. However, concussions have become a notable problem in the sport, on the professional level as well among youth participants. The study focused on high school players, from a relative sample of 100 public and private high schools across the country; thus the study included primarily older teens, with a few kids younger than 14 included if they were advanced enough to be playing for high-school teams.

For some time experts and coaches and players have expressed particular concern over the potential harmful impact on young players of one of the most unique and typifying soccer plays: the header. Soccer is, after all, pretty much the only major sport that not only allows, but even encourages players to move the ball along by using their heads. In American football or basketball, a play in which the ball hits the player in the head probably ends up on a blooper reel; in baseball, such a play typically ends up in serious injury, and caused one death back in 1920. In soccer, on the other hand, a header is a vital part of play. As I write this I'm watching a Gold Cup match between Canada and Costa Rica, and I've already lost count of the number of routine headers in just the few minutes I've seen.

Given the less fully developed brain and skull structure of young people, however, coaches and players and others began to suspect that the act of striking a soccer ball (which is not at all soft) with the head might be particularly damaging to those young brains. In response, some have suggested banning the header in all of youth soccer. This would be pretty radical in terms of soccer development, perhaps equivalent to banning the forward pass for high schoolers in football. Others have proposed banning headers for groups under age 14, which is understood to be a pivotal year in brain development. This study was designed to begin the process of addressing these concerns.

For those concerns with youth soccer headers, the survey's results were a mixed bag. (An abstract of the article itself can be seen here; if you want to subscribe to JAMA Pediatrics you can read the whole thing.) Yes, the largest number of concussions in this survey were incurred when the player was attempting to head the ball; however, a large majority of the heading-related concussions were not caused by the heading action itself; rather, the culprit was the same one that lies at the root of concussion and brain-trauma problems in football and hockey; athlete-to-athlete contact, or collisions -- head-to-head, elbow-to-head, shoulder-to-head.

While some headers take place in the open field, many (and some of the most important) occur in the box in front of the goal. Sometimes these occur during corner kicks or other set plays, in a situation in which multiple players are jockeying for position to head the ball either toward or away from the goal. Players are frequently on the move, and sometimes at high speed, when attempting to get to the ball for a header. Sound familiar? Wide receivers on a crossing pattern colliding with free safeties at full speed, or two hockey players skating and slamming into one another?

The authors of the study acknowledge that eliminating headers would probably reduce concussions, but insist that enforcing the existing rules about contact would reduce concussions more. And here's where this study and its findings takes us, mindful faithful fans, into disconcerting territory. We are, after all, back to square one: the most damaging part of the sport is apparently the same sporting event craved on the primal level by so many fans -- people running into each other at high speed, preferably with loud grunting or screaming added.

The previous post on soccer ended with a picture involving a collision during the Women's World Cup, with the caption "non-contact sport...yeah, right." The trouble is, on some level, it is supposed to be a non-contact sport, or at least a less-contact sport. The rules don't tempt to prevent every kind of contact (that would be impossible), but you're not just supposed to run into your opponents and knock them down; that's called a foul, and if it's egregious or dangerous enough you can get a yellow card (warning) or red card (ejection) for your trouble. Still, collisions are going to happen because when you have twenty players on the field running after the same ball (presuming the goalkeepers are staying put), they will run into each other sometimes.

Still, I think this is going to be challenging for fans when it comes down to the basic, unalterable fact of physics; when people run into each other as fast as possible, something is going to be damaged, and frequently it will be the organ of the body that is most vital to governing our actions, generating thought and emotion and feeling and whole bunches of the stuff that, as we say, makes us human. And as we've observed in too many former players (or sometimes still-active ones such as Chris Henry), the damage is long-term and irreparable.

Such collisions aren't necessarily an integral part of soccer; one might even argue that they aren't an integral part of hockey, probably the second-most-affected sport after football, even if the game in the United States and Canada has placed greater emphasis on hard checking and physical play than perhaps in Europe. Baseball, the most resolutely non-contact sport of all, still endures a few concussions, frequently on collisions at home plate, and is working pretty hard to cut those back. Still, even one baseball player has been found to show evidence of CTE in postmortem examinations.

It is difficult to separate collisions from football, though.

And a finding like this, one that doesn't allow the NFL to point fingers at the speck in another sport's eye in order to distract from the beam in its own, only pushes us a little closer to the ultimate tipping point. Football will have to decide how much those collisions, the stuff of NFL: Moment of Impact and other such video promotions (seriously, read the description on that video), are indeed integral to the game, and whether the hits that lead to all those concussions and the sub-concussive hits that build up into CTE are indispensable after all, and players are just going to have to live with being fodder.

And for us mindful faithful fans? A year and a half ago in the baseball post liked above, I wrote about Matthew 25 (the sheep and goats parable) and the "sorting point" that we humans achieve decisively if not consciously, when we either choose to step away from what is ethically or morally dubious or we don't step away and become numb to the abuse and exploitation:

To which I have to ask, how long?  How long can the two be held apart from one another?  How long can the two go on, coexisting, before the fan sorts himself or herself in among the sheep or goats?  Another scripture, Matthew 6:24, points out that serving two masters doesn't work out so well.  You end up serving one or the other.

Eventually a fan will serve one master or another; his or her attentions (and dollars, the stuff that actually hits sporting leagues or players where it hurts) will turn away from unrepentant exploitation in sports towards other pursuits, or he or she will keep on watching, less and less fazed by the mounting toll in bodies or brains or children in poverty in the shadow of flashy new stadiums.

I can't help but wonder if we -- not just the NFL or MLB or FIFA or whatever league you care to name, but we -- the people who put down the money to buy tickets or subscribe to cable to get ESPN in its various guises, or buy the merchandise or devote eight Sundays or six or seven Saturdays to tailgating, who buy product X because King James endorses it instead of product Y endorsed by Kobe Bryant, we -- are at a sorting point, slowly aligning ourselves with the sheep or the goats when it comes to the excesses and the abuses that are intricately bound up in the sports-fan experience.

I have to wonder if the sorting point is getting any closer, whether the craving for collisions is inseparable from the games that enthrall us, and whether we can or will give it up. The above quote pertained to all of the potential and actual abuses of sport, but when it comes to this most primal and, yes, life-altering ethical dilemma in sport, the sorting point is possibly more vital and inescapable.

Will we ever find out?

This kind of thing. 

Image: blog.teamsnap.com

Stadium subsidy blues

While it may have slipped the notice of many in the rush of historic court decisions and crazy-popular sporting events of the last weeks, a possibly surprising development in the news this week might have long-term ramifications for the relationship of sport and civic life.

In his budget proposal for the forthcoming fiscal year, President Obama floated a proposal to eliminate the use of tax-free government bonds for the financing of sports stadiums or arenas. Given the lumpish behavior of the trolls of Congress over anything proposed by the president, it's pretty unlikely the proposal will ever see the light of day. Nonetheless, it's an interesting proposal to see at a time when public frustration over sports stadia expenditures is closer to boiling than it has been in many years.

It's not hard to find pretty grotesque examples of ludicrous amounts of public money being lavished on the fields in which teams owned by the 0.0001% play. Marlins Park in Miami is probably the gold standard for most recent stadium financial obscenity, a case in which notorious tightwad Jeffrey Loria basically got handed the keys to a crazily expensive monument to a team that has sandwiched a whole bunch of losing seasons around two of the flukiest World Series titles ever won. In forthcoming stadium spending, the impending move of the Atlanta Braves to a new park in Cobb County, leaving behind a former Olympic Stadium that will barely be twenty years old at their departure, has caused a bit of carping from this blog and other sources, although not all the issues in that case (at least for me) are necessarily about public financing of the stadium. Stadium deals for the Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks and other teams resulted in massive transfer of public funds into the pockets of people who already have plenty of money. It doesn't just extend to stadiums proper; the now-convicted-of-corruption former governor of Virginia gave a boatload of public money to the Washington Racist-Mascot-Not-Protected-By-Copyrights to put a summer training facility in Richmond, for example.

As the Slate article linked above notes, this isn't the first time Congress or the executive branch have tried to thwart such money giveaways; perversely, those attempts only seemed to encourage even more stadium giveaways. So perhaps a direct ban is the equivalent of a last-ditch attempt to curb the excesses of public financing for stadiums. Something tells me, though, that states or municipalities won't take kindly to being told by Big Gummint evildoers in Washington how they can and can't give away public money.

For the moment, I am actually withholding an opinion, mostly because I have an active and virulent allergy to even the possibility of agreeing with the Koch brothers on any subject (read down a little ways to see what I mean). I do think there are a couple of points that need to be made in relation to the subject, here on the direct relationship of such spending and civic responsibility on the part of the mindful faithful fan. Specifically, to raise your voice in opposition to public spending on sports facilities, you morally obligate yourself to be equally vociferous on two highly related subjects.

One: if you're going to get agitated on this subject you are morally obligated to get equally agitated on other giveaways of public funds for corporations that don't involve sports teams. Here I am speaking of the gobs of tax breaks and other financial giveaways used to lure things like automobile building facilities or other presumed "jobs deals." There are a couple of reasons for this; (1) the job-bringing capabilities of these deals are more mythological than real. Expecting that the bulk of the jobs in such giveaways to be filled locally is about as wise as expecting the entire lineup of the team playing in your city's stadium to be made up of folks actually from that city; and (2) the giveaways combined with the exaggerated job effect render the newly-lured factor a net revenue loser for your municipality. You've given a rich guy a big gift to very much the same degree that Miami or Minnesota did for the Marlins or Vikings, with virtually nothing coming back to you and/or your city.

Two: you are obligated to be proactive about how those dollars that don't go to the sports owner are spent, up to and including punishing politicians not just for sports giveaways but for all of their financial sins. One of the most often-cited reasons for opposing stadium giveaways has been the claim that such giveaways "took away" money that should have been going to education, or poverty alleviation, or (insert your pet cause here). It sounds very noble, and often gives the person making the argument a sheen of moral superiority. The trouble is it's seldom actually true. In most cases the monies in question never were going to education or poverty or whatever in the first place. In other cases, as with the Wisconsin story above, the funds were going to be cut anyway. Scott Walker didn't cut education funding in Wisconsin to give money away to the Milwaukee Bucks; he cut education funding because he's a hateful jackass who thinks any education beyond high school is an elitist scam. If you haven't already been creating whatever civic unrest is necessary to get that money into education before your governor or mayor wants to redirect it to the NFL or MLB or NBA, that's on you.

And yes, I do mean civic unrest if that's what it takes. These clowns give away such monies because on some level they believe their careers or their futures depend on doing so; if you don't make their lives miserable they'll never believe otherwise.

Got it?

Marlins Park under construction, 2011; crazy amounts of public money involved

The many challenges of soccer

So the Women's World Cup final is approaching halftime at this point, and the main story so far has been the US blitzing out to four goals in the first sixteen minutes, only to have Japan pull one back and slow the US down in the last chunk of the half.

Despite a few oddities (like, how in the world did Germany and France end up playing each other in a quarterfinal -- more on that later -- and was that stadium in Edmonton ever full?), I dare say this will turn out to be a successful WWC. One can hope, with maybe some justification, that the impact will be such that more women and girls get opportunities to play, and maybe play professionally if they've got the stuff to do it, and maybe not go broke doing it. One can hope that maybe the National Women's Soccer League (yes, it does exist) will get some more fans at games.

But it would be dishonest to pass off soccer as the ideal sport for the ethically sensitive fan. There are, as is the case with any sport, reasons for concern -- some of them well-known, some less so. Just to review a few:

1) FIFA. Actually this could be one, two, three, and maybe four, and the general corruption of this world governing body of soccer complicates one's reactions to some of the other issues to be considered below. I'm not even bothering to provide links here; if you haven't heard about the US and Swiss investigations of that body (I mean, really; if the Swiss are investigating you...) and can't find out more with a quick Google search it's very unlikely you could find your way to this highly obscure blog. Just look up Sepp Blatter and prepare to gag a lot.

2) CTE. After football and hockey, it's very possible that soccer is the most susceptible sport to chronic traumatic encephalopathy. At last report two or possibly three soccer players, including a Brazilian World Cup star of the 1950s, have been confirmed as having CTE by the post-mortem exams that are as of yet the only way to confirm that condition with certainty.

Think about it; not just all the headers, but all the collisions. If someone had tried to convince you that soccer was not a contact sport, hopefully the World Cup has disabused you of that naive belief. Recall the particularly frightening collision between Germany's Alexandra Popp and the US's Morgan Brian in last Tuesday's semifinal. It illustrates both just how such violent collisions can happen in the game, and soccer's particular difficulty in dealing with the problem.

One of soccer's particular charms is the utter relentlessness of the clock; it stops for nothing. It is the un-baseball in that respect. But a perpetually running clock doesn't allow for a clear diagnosis of whether a player has suffered a concussion or not. Even in (American) football, the clock can at least be stopped and the injury at least has a chance to be assessed properly (even if it frequently is not). Also complicating matters are the substitution rules in top-level soccer; unlike American football, but like baseball, a player cannot return to the game once removed. Furthermore, in such games, only three substitutions are allowed at all. So you can see the potential trouble; you run the risk of removing a player only for her or him to be o.k. after all, or you play on "a man down," or playing 10-on-11, while the player's condition is evaluated (or for good if you've already used your subs).

So how to address this? Do you stop the clock? (Major League Soccer and some other leagues are already starting to try "hydration breaks" to deal with intense heat; Orlando City may never play a home game without hydration breaks. But the idea isn't as out of bounds as it might have been a few years ago.) Come up with a "concussion substitution" who can then be pulled if the stricken player turns out o.k.? Declare the player automatically out of the game? Any or all of the above may be considered, but before long soccer partisans will be sounding like American football fans complaining about "being soft" or changing the nature of the game.

And of course, looming over all of this is the hopelessly corrupt FIFA. Is an organization that thinks Qatar in August is ideal for the game's showcase event even remotely capable of thinking rationally about the health of its players? And how much do you, the person of faith who enjoys the game, want to invest yourself and potentially your money in that particular hope?

3) Fan -isms. Until the last few decades, if Americans knew much about soccer at all (aside from the heyday of the old NASL and the New York Cosmos with Pelé), it might well have been less about the game and more about the hooliganism of some of its European (mostly English) fans. Fan racism is also a potent poison in the European game; players such as Kevin-Prince Boateng, from Ghana, and Mario Balotelli, an Italian of African ancestry, have at times encountered a horrifying racism, frequently in Italy but potentially anywhere, that might make even the most hardened Southern Neo-Confederate blanch with horror. (Seriously, read that link above only if/when you have a strong stomach.)

So far, the US game seems remarkably free of such plague. I seriously doubt it is totally free, and it's possible the game here benefits from the relative lack of coverage it gets in US media. But by comparison to the Euro game, fan racism in the US seems a lot less, possibly because soccer in the US seems to draw far more diverse crowds than the other major sports. By "diverse" I mean not only drawing fans from different races, but having what might be called un-segregated crowds; whites not always only with whites, Asian not only with Asian, and so forth. Whites hanging out with blacks hanging out with Hispanics hanging out with Asians. Easily the most such diverse sporting event I've ever attended live was my one match at Sporting Park in Kansas City, the first MLS match played there. I don't know if that's the case all over the US -- I seriously doubt it -- but it stood out dramatically to me even in the midst of a rather exciting game in an extremely modern stadium.

Meanwhile, while homophobia also rears its ugly head on occasion in Europe, MLS not only welcomed Robbie Rogers back into the league, but practically begged him to return from his premature retirement in which he dealt with the ramifications of his coming out. While the NBA went into convulsions over Jason Collins's status, and the NFL nearly fell apart over Michael Sam (not to mention baseball's ongoing straight-only facade), Rogers has spent the last couple of years settling in with the LA Galaxy with amazingly little stir after his debut. Again, I would be shocked if he hadn't received a bit of hate mail, and the US media's continuing ignoring of a sport that now regularly puts more butts in seats than the NHL and NBA might again be benefitting the league in this case, but the sport seems to be going about its business with little fuss over the subject. Not to mention that the newly-crowned World Cup champions from the US have relied on Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe for several years now with marginal fuss, and even a certain amount of activism from Rapinoe.

Will an expanding fan base possibly bring more struggle with the -isms of human culture? Will geographical expansion do so? It's something to watch in the future.

This is just a scraping of the surface. I didn't even get around to the potential pitfalls of a sport so reliant on nationalism for much of its appeal and structure; player responsibility and the appearance of making allowances for poor behavior, with troubled goalie Hope Solo as Exhibit A; and the impact of any and all of these things on youth soccer and its continuing popularity.

While the US soccer governing body seems to have its head screwed on more or less cleanly, the overarching structure and its mind-boggling corruption will be incredibly challenging for the sport in its future. It will be virtually impossible for the mindful fan to continue forward without being ever more mindful of how the sport conducts itself in the face of those challenges, and how it adapts in its continuing growth in the United States.

"Non-contact sport"...yeah, right.