Unwise words

In the NFL it is the players on the field who take, in the course of sixteen or more games per season plus practices, a huge number of physical blows, some of them (quite a lot in some cases) inflicting roughly the same force as a car wreck on their bodies.

So why, at the risk of a "too soon" joke, are the owners increasingly the ones acting as if they've been hit in the head too many times?

First it was Jerry Jones, noted loudmouth, who had to walk back some ill-advised comments calling "absurd" the very idea that getting repeatedly hit in the head over so many years could possibly have anything to do with brain trauma. While John Mara of the New York Giants tried to strike a sane tone in comments suggesting that the NFL really needed to deal with the issue, the balance shifted back this week with leaden words from Jim Irsay of the Baltimore Indianapolis Colts. Irsay, attempting the subtle and difficult craft of analogy, ended up suggesting to a radio audience that playing football somehow carried about the same kind of health risk as ... taking aspirin.

Clank.

Fortunately, there are people capable of calling foolishness foolishness, even at jock-factory ESPN. Actually, this may be a case where the pervasive ex-jock culture of that network is an advantage; people who remember what it was like had no trouble coming up with an appropriate measure of outrage at the cloddish hatefulness of such remarks -- not to mention family members of people who ended up with long-term damage from all that aspirin head-to-head contact. (It really is worth working your way through several of the videos in that sequence.) Louis Riddick and Jerome Bettis have some choice words for NFL ownership, in which Bettis acknowledges some modification of his playing style might have happened if he'd known then what he knows now. Mike Golic of the ESPN "Mike and Mike" radio show practically blows a gasket at Irsay's dumb remarks. Former Colts center Jeff Saturday was more measured in his comments, evidently trying not to throw his former owner under the bus, but also admitting that he had recently undergone an examination to find ... well, whatever can be found at this point and enlisting his wife to monitor his behavior and condition for, presumably, the rest of his life.

Given such sentiments, it's no surprise that current Lions player DeAndre Levy also jumped on Irsay's comments, questioning where Irsay might have gotten such expertise. Others have also noted Irsay's own checkered past, including being caught driving drunk in the past.

For this blog, what such sentiments expressed so carelessly demonstrate is a point I've made often, and one perhaps that needs to be made more. I have expressed the concern that for a sports fan, one's "participation" in chosen sports is not without a kind of ethical liability. It isn't really possible to flip on the game on Sunday, or buy that jersey or spring for tickets, without in effect being party to whatever harms are visited on the physical participants in the game. In that light being ignorant about such harms is an irresponsible and untenable ethical position.

I went to two spring training games in Bradenton, Florida earlier this week. The Pittsburgh Pirates hosted first the Baltimore Orioles and then the Minnesota Twins Sunday and Monday. Thankfully, I didn't see any notable injuries in either game. It could have happened; even in spring training guys can get hurt and hurt badly. Generally, though, players recover from such injuries. Severe arm injuries can put a pitcher out for a year or more, after surgery; nonetheless, it usually doesn't end a career the way it used to do.

Even so, that bum arm generally doesn't irreparably destroy that player's future quality of life.

It's getting harder and harder to say that about football-related brain trauma, where studies keep suggesting that about a third of people who play football (pro or not) are going to come away with some form of debilitating neurotrauma.

But that point has been made, by me and others.

What is becoming clear is that, at least in the case of the NFL (and do you really think the NCAA is doing any better?), the people who profit from this level of physical damage have very little interest in mitigating that damage at all. Irsay's comments, also including the assertion that players know what they're getting into if they play football, have more or less the effect of Pilate washing his hands of what happens to that two-bit Galilean rabbi -- nice dramatic gesture, but the crucifixion still happened on Pilate's watch and with his name on it.

These guys don't give a s--t. And they, even more than the players, are the ones enriched by your ticket purchases and souvenir buys and cable or extra packages. To participate in the enrichment of the NFL power structure is to keep company with some of the sleasiest people in the USA.

As the saying goes, bad company ruins good morals. Or, as it used to be put back where I grew up, if you lay down with the dogs you're gonna get up with fleas.

Getting itchy yet?

He'll spend the rest of his life watching for telltale signs and being monitored.

I'm guessing he won't be the only one.