Beside the basic question of the harm (as opposed to simple injury or risk, "harm" here indicating some form of damage that will not be repairable in the player's lifetime; permanent, life-affecting damage) to those who play and the possible resultant moral harm that "sustainers" thus inflict on theirselves, there are also other questions around the issue such as how much can one trust those who might be regarded as the "guardians" or "stewards" of the game. In previous weeks, particularly among NFL owners, the occasional bout of loose lips has called into question just how much or how little those owners can be trusted when the overall health of their players, including brain health, is at stake. For every John Mara who expresses concern (or at least manages to sound as if he's expressing concern), there appears a Jerry Jones or a Jim Irsay for whom the kindest possible term is "tone-deaf," and for whom "brutalist exploiter" is probably more accurate.
Coaches, though, haven't come into the spotlight quite in the same way. Perhaps more than owners, coaches are generally proficient in the double-talk necessary to get through weekly press conferences and interviews without saying too much (one even hears the term "coach speak" for such), surviving and advancing from week to week by concealing more than they reveal.
Then came Bruce Arians.
Arians, for whom football seems to be his religion based on his behavior, apparently decided that somebody needed to stand up to all those namby-pamby wussy mothers who are hesitating about letting their boys play football. And he decided it might as well be him, so he loudly and angrily branded those moms as "fools." His word. Also, he seemed to be trying to set dads against moms. I'm neither, and I know that was the actual foolish thing to do. Arians had no cause to get dads in that kind of trouble.
Calling any mom a "fool" is not all that wise, particularly when there are millions of them potentially involved. The backlash was as fierce as it was predictable, so Arians had to try to talk himself down from the branch he had already sawed off.
(Rather than actually give Arians the credit of linking directly to stories covering his brutalistic drivel, I'm going to link to this rant on espnW, which administers to Arians the proper and needed bitch-slapping and also challenges him and his fellow Cro-Magnon types some basic instruction on how to deal with the supposed "war" on football such moms were waging. ["War on Christmas," "War on Christianity," "War on Football." So disagreeing is now declaring war?] I do find it interesting that such could only be found on espnW, where nobody on the "regular" ESPN.com had the, er, intestinal fortitude to do so. The Sporting News, on the other hand, did find someone to dissect the particular nature of Arians's foolishness pretty effectively. In short, he's scared.)
Arians's attempt to backtrack partly included the claim that coaches have to get the word out that football is "safe." Never mind the number of players for whom the game apparently was not "safe" over the last who-knows-how-many decades so far; even leaving out large numbers of players who seem to have suffered brain trauma of various kinds, calling football a "safe" sport is bizarre by a long stretch.
To testify to this, I call Bret Bielema to the stand.
Bielema is coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks, a more-or-less professional franchise in the more-or-less professional Southeastern Conference of the NCAA. Kody Walker, one of the team's more proficient running backs, suffered a broken foot in spring football (now there's a topic for further discussion in some future blog) a few days ago.
In discussing the injury in a statement to the press, Bielema said the following (I'm just gonna quote it all as well as link to it):
“Unfortunately Kody suffered a broken foot during yesterday’s practice. It required surgery that went well today and doctors expect a full recovery. It’s a pretty standard foot injury that we’ve dealt with in the past and we expect him to be full-go by June. If anyone knows how to battle adversity it’s Kody Walker.”
Wow. A broken foot is a 'standard' injury. Am I the only person who finds that a ... fascinating statement?
Kids break bones (although I never did, and still never have, despite playing about as much as a normal kid). Even so, I still have to insist that a sport that accepts a broken foot as "standard" is not really a sport that has a lot of leeway to call itself "safe." The two don't go together.
And again, we're not even getting into what happens to at least some of the brains of those guys on the field.
Please spare me your self-righteous chastising about your brother-in-law or some other person you or someone you know knows who is the ultimate saint of a coach and molder of men and all that pseudo-religious crap. A game that frankly acknowledges, and sometimes even brags about, breaking the Temple (remember 1 Corinthians 6:19, kids?) or wreaking irreparable harm on the bearer of the Imago Dei doesn't really qualify as "safe" by any sane definition. Are we so far gone as to be unable to see this? And any coach, no matter how much a Builder of Men or whatever, who is participating in this system is at least as much a Breaker of Men as a Builder of Men. At the absolute minimum, suddenly trying to apply the word "safe" to a game that has for decades gloated in not being a "safe" game is pretty hypocritical, yes?
At minimum, players clearly aren't buying it from coaches any more than from NFL owners. Another round of early or early-ish retirements kicked in over the last couple of weeks (more on that next time), including one player who was all of 23 years old.
Panic isn't pretty, especially when it expresses itself in what can only be called lashing out. We're seeing an awful lot of such lashing out from football types of late. It looks an awful lot like the kind of lashing out we saw in previous decades from people involved in the tobacco industry, and more recently from those dependent upon the fossil-fuel industry. It's the kind of thing you see when the disinformation campaigns show signs of not working.
Like NFL owners, if NFL or NCAA coaches can't do better than this, and if they can't at least pretend to give a damn about those players in their charge, they really should shut up. They're doing no one any good, and doing many people (not least themselves) lots of harm. And harm is the reason we're even having this conversation in the first place.
Kody Walker suffered a standard injury in Arkansas spring football...it involved something breaking.
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