Injury of this sort is commonplace in both the NFL and NCAA. That sounds callous to say, but it's nothing but true. Torn ACLs or PCLs are to football players, running backs in particular, what torn rotator cuffs are to baseball pitchers. Every year, somebody, and probably even somebody pretty well-known, is going to suffer one.
That football has been a sport that causes injury is not particularly new. It has been an injurious sport ever since it was invented. There was a time when death on the gridiron was common enough to provoke President Theodore Roosevelt to intervene to have the sport fixed (and not just among high school players, as it seems today -- speaking of which, two more high school players have died since Evan Murray's highly publicized death). Radical steps were taken to make the sport less immediately destructive, including a crazy change to the game that many thought would change the game's essential character; the forward pass. And the game, while still incredibly violent and injurious, at least didn't kill its players, or at least not as often.
The injuries sustained by football players can have lifelong effects. This is not merely true in football; one only needs to think about the stereotype of the hockey player with missing teeth. Baseball pitches who suffer arm injuries can have difficulty using the injured arm for the rest of their lives. One bit of lore about Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell, he of possibly most proficient screwball in MLB history, was that his left arm, for the rest of his life, hung from his shoulder in a permanently twisted position, so that the palm of his hand faced outward instead of inward due to the frequency with which he threw that pitch, one which required violent torque on the arm to achieve the desired break.
As the earliest reports began to surface of suicides of players such as Mike Webster, Justin Strelczyk, Terry Long, and Andre Waters and the subsequent discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in posthumous examinations, reactions among players, coaches, and fans was largely couched in this long history of injury in football. A typical line of response might be "well, they knew what they were getting into; football players get hurt." This reaction obscured the degree to which this type of injury was in fact not widely reported or expected among football players or coaches prior to the diagnosis of Mike Webster in 2002, though players such as wide receiver Al Toon and quarterback Steve Young were forced to give up their NFL careers due to repeated concussions (in 1992 and 1999, respectively).
As the number of reported deaths from CTE conditions has risen, and more former players have come forward with their accounts of illness and debilitation due to brain trauma, the game and its adherents are forced to confront a basic ethical question, one which I pose to you five or ten readers of this blog:
Is there a difference, in degree or in kind, between the physical, bodily injuries long associated with football and the brain injuries that are being more commonly reported in the last two decades? And how should such a difference be weighed by the fan considering his or her continuing participation in football as spectator or consumer?
For now I don't intend to address the question of the ethical coherence of accepting football's long history of bodily injury. I don't necessarily mean to suggest that there was or is nothing problematic about such history and fan acquiescence to it, but it is largely a done deal, for good or ill. My intent here is to question whether that acquiescence, that more or less numb acceptance of the physical toll that many (not all) players paid for their participation in the game, should apply to the emerging toll on many (not all) players in terms of mental debilitation, memory loss, neurological disorders, and suicides related to or triggered by these impairments and brain injuries.
(Here I am forced to repeat a proposition that underlies any of my questioning on this subject: namely, the attitudes of persons involved in the sport is irrelevant to the fan's ethical considerations of their participation in football as spectator or consumer. Just because Chris Conte has declared himself willing to be mentally broken as long as he can continue to hit people doesn't give you the fan to indulge him in his game of Russian roulette with his long-term health.)
For now, the question is: is this kind of long-term mental debilitation worse than the familiar physical debilitation long attributed to football?
One can make a start on such a question by applying such considerations to one's own life, even if you've never played football. For a basic entry into the question, ask yourself: would I rather suffer debilitating bodily injury, such as might impair my ability to walk, or Alzheimer's disease?
The analogy isn't perfect, by any means; one presumes that playing football has its rewards as well as its injuries, otherwise fewer people would do so. Those rewards, though they may seem slight to a non-player when compared to the long-term debilitation some players suffer, are inevitably going to be part of the equation for players. While the player's rewards or pleasures probably do not ultimately factor into the fan's consideration of participation in football, they do matter to the player, and will have to be understood at least to some degree when observing the system and drawing ethical conclusions about it. The fan doesn't experience those pleasures (the fan experiences different pleasures from the game, which will be considered in this blog in the future), but the fan needs to understand them nonetheless in considering the system.
Let's be blunt; either extreme can be horrifying. One thinks of persons stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), whose bodies can be virtually paralyzed or worse while brain function is unimpaired. However, most bodily injuries suffered by football players do not quite approach this level of debilitation. Earl Campbell, the longtime running back of the Houston Oilers, may have to use a walker or wheelchair, but he also still manages to continue in his business interests, whereas CTE victims such as Dave Duerson found their impairments interfering with their post-football careers.
Let that be a starting point in your consideration. I freely confess that I fall into the camp that would say, "do with my body what you will, but do not touch my mind." And that inevitably weighs into how I will view this particular ethical question.
(To be continued...)
Earl Campbell, now 60, requires a wheelchair or walker.
On the other hand, he is still alive.
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