Weekly Reader: Hockey takes its hits

A way to touch on multiple stories before they go cold: the Weekly Reader (or am I the only one who remembers that from elementary school?)

Two stories from the world of hockey came to my attention this week. One was inescapable if you follow the sports world much, the other less so, but both serve as reminders that there are other sports besides football that face a reckoning over how they damage their participants beyond repair.

One such story: the death of Gordie Howe.

The stories flew fast and think about Howe, a legendary figure in the sport who played professional hockey (at least once) in six decades, a feat normally the province of baseball players like Minnie Miñoso. Unlike Miñoso, Howe was an active, full-time player for most of those decades. Howe played into the 1979-80 season as a Hartford Whaler, alongside his sons, after having made his NHL debut in 1946. A one-shift stint with a minor-league team in 1997, when Howe was freakin' 69 years old, completed the six-decade trifecta.

Of course, one can't talk about such a long career, one marked by Howe's willingness to duke it out on the ice, without acknowedging that Howe had been diagnosed with dementia four years before his death.

The obvious, if disturbing, question is whether Howe's brain will be given for research to determine if he possibly had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); given how determinedly his sons pushed back against reports of Howe's dementia at the time, I'm not optimistic -- not only because of the loss of understanding of the condition, but also because the supposition, or even the assumption that Howe actually had that disease will be a cloud both lingering and being ignored in hockey, which has plenty of trouble dealing with its own brain-trauma crisis.

Stephen Peat's story made it into the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, offering up a reminder that this sport has its own walking wounded. It still remains true that CTE can only be diagnosed after death, but if you were going to draw up a list of symptoms and conditions you would look for in a living person with CTE, based on accounts of those persons who lived with the condition, you would basically end up describing Peat's current life.

[Here is where I could use some help from someone who follows hockey much more than I ever have. Peat, like a number of those former players felled by CTE, was an "enforcer," one whose job (at the risk of oversimplifying) was to get in fights on the ice. Was this in part to "protect" star players, the likes of Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby (who, given his concussion history, evidently wasn't protected very well if that was the case)? I'm seriously asking. Unlike football, with which I grew up and can still remember very well even without actually watching games any more, I have never spent much time being exposed to hockey and don't pretend to get the culture at all, even as it seems to be trying to change at least on the NHL level. So anyone who can explain: were the likes of Stephen Peat getting into fights so the likes of Gretzky wouldn't get caught up in them? If that's the case, then the NHL is really going to have hell to pay where the likes of Peat are concerned. Sacrificial lambs indeed. That would be a serious abdication of stewardship, particularly if it really does turn out that NHL higher-ups were more aware of concussion risks than they let on for years.]

And just in case you missed it in that link, Peat is 36.

Other sports stories of concern and note:

*Another former women's soccer national-team stalwart announced that she would be donating her brain for CTE research. As noted before, very little of the CTE research out there has included women, even though they've played games with contact involved for some time now. Unlike Brandi Chastain, Briana Scurry has had a noted and non-minor history of concussions that ended her career. At the same time, a family history of Alzheimer's is also present. Scurry also devotes a part of her website to such issues and has testified before congressional committees on the subject (and was scheduled to do so again today).

*The sudden death of a once-popular MMA fighter may well spark its own set of rumors about whether brain trauma was involved, but good grief, in that sport there are so many other possibilities...

*At least for now, the only way for a Cuban ballplayer to get into MLB is by defection. Another defector was cleared by MLB today to sign with a team.

In football:

*CTE research marches on, NFL support or not.

*From the "waiting on science our savior" department: while helmet development continues, this article explains why pretty much no helmet ever (at least one in which one could practically play football) will ever be able to prevent concussions.

*More "science our savior": a new research project based in Pittsburgh (the unfortunate "birthplace" of CTE) aimed at seeking actual therapeutic options.

Not sports-related, but sort of:

*As brain trauma was becoming a concern in sports, much of the early research involved both sports leagues and the military, under the observation that similar symptoms could be observed between, say, football players and soldiers who had been injured in action in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Now new research suggests that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as found in soldiers may well be a physical injury, not just a psychological one -- and not quite the same as CTE.

And this is just potentially deeply disturbing:

*Is Russia trying to disrupt Euro 2016? Their team is on a "suspended disqualification" in the tournament after fracases between fans of England and Russia, both inside the stands and outside. Yes, it's England's fans that have the reputation for hooliganism, but that was years ago, and Russia looks much more like the aggressor in this case. And apparently it happened again today, with fans of Wales also getting drawn into the action this time.

While English courts have acted quickly to punish their offenders, the same cannot be said for Russian authorities. If this Reuters report is even the tiniest bit accurate, these incidents are not merely sports-related; they come little short of acts of war. I mean, trained hooligans? Is this how far Vladimir Putin has sunk?

And oh, yeah, guess who hosts the World Cup in two years?

Stephen Peat in his enforcer days

Irresponsible

Note: Once-a-week blogging for the time being. Need to do more organizational work now.

Another note: The rumination on fun has to go on hold, since the NFL has behaved badly again, or perhaps more accurately, gotten called out for it.



When Congress -- Congress!! -- calls you out, you've messed up.

A congressional study released this week found that the NFL attempted to throw its weight around, using its much-ballyhooed contributions to brain trauma research to control which scientists would be supported by the National Institutes of Health, the intended recipient of those funds. What had been touted as an "unrestricted gift" apparently had strings attached after all.

I don't think anyone is particularly surprised by this revelation. If anything, it merely confirms what has been increasingly clear for some time: the NFL is going to play by the tobacco playbook of the 1950s and 60s, doing everything in its power to muddy the science so it can go on making staggering sums of money. A researcher like Dr. Robert Stern, who previously had the temerity to follow the science in his work at Boston University, whose CTE Center has been at the forefront of such science as has been going on so far on the subject, was unacceptable to the NFL. So, they tried to keep the money from going to BU, and when they failed, they pulled their money.

This is the behavior of an organization with something, a lot of something, to hide.

Side note: I find it fascinating that BU continues to field a football team.

I suppose what is impressive about this congressional report is that part of the NFL strategy for making the concussion issue go away (not so much actual concussions, mind you, not to mention all the other hits that actually add up to CTE for too many players) involves political donations. Evidently they didn't manage to target the right members of Congress yet.

Ethical takeaway: this is the organization you are funding when you buy a ticket or a replica jersey or other bit of NFL merchandise, and probably even when you subscribe to that whole NFL Sunday Ticket deal.

You know this, right? Whatever your old childhood loyalties may have been, do they obligate you to continue to participate in this kind of blatant BSing and irresponsible stewardship of the players in the league's employ, past, present, and future? You might as well have been contributing to Philip Morris or Reynolds back in the day.

Other bits of news around the subject, possibly to be revisited:

1. Bubba Smith had stage 3 CTE when he died five years ago. Some remember him as a fearsome defensive star. Others remember him from the Police Academy movies or other film or TV roles, or maybe even the old Miller Lite "tastes great/less filling" ads. (Current research identifies four stages of CTE.) He would not even be the first NFL-star-turned-actor to be so identified; Alex Karras, of Blazing Saddles and Webster, also was found to have CTE at his death.

2. Thurman Thomas is still living. Last month he gave an account of the toll football took on his brain.

3. Meanwhile, the guys just coming into the NFL from last month's football meat market-palooza are still largely convinced they're invincible.

4. A (probably soon-to-be-former) NFL general manager, Doug Whaley of the Buffalo Bills, suggested that people probably really should not be playing football.

And from other sports:

5. Action sports has its first CTE diagnosis. I confess I had not even considered that sport, though it's certainly believable that its participants suffer plenty of blows to the head.

6. Another sport you don't necessarily think about: auto racing. A few weeks ago one of its bigger stars, Dale Earnhardt Jr., announced he would be donating his brain for CTE research after his death.

7. So will Brandi Chastain, former Women's World Cup champion (the one who scored the winning goal and gave the sportsbra its day in the sun, remember?). This is particularly noteworthy, as very little research on brain trauma and sports so far has involved female athletes.

8. Also from soccer: an MLS player has had to change his game after five documented concussions, cutting down on leading with his head.

9. The National Hockey League's brass was caught in newly released emails speculating about the possible connections between the deaths of three of its players and their primary on-ice occupation: fighting.

10. The NHL won't get off the hook; a class-action lawsuit by former players was allowed to go forward.

ESPN heard you say it, Mr. Whaley; too late to walk it back...

Spectacle and harm

You might have heard that Prince Rogers Nelson, or the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, died today.

The iconic and iconoclastic singer/guitarist/songwriter/cultural lightning rod was found dead today in an elevator (wasn't that somehow part of "Let's Go Crazy"?) at his home/recording studio/complex in Minnesota. In a year with entirely too many musicians slipping off this mortal coil, this one was a cannon shot to the solar plexus for those of us of a particular age.

Prince wasn't without his affections for sports, especially for his Minnesota-based teams. He once wrote a song for the NFL's Minnesota Vikings, took in the NBA's Timberwolves, and threw was has been called an epic concert for the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx after they won their league championship.

But perhaps his most indelible mark in the sporting world was his performance for the halftime show of Super Bowl XLI, in Miami in 2007.* This was the Super Bowl that was unique for more than its particular combination of Roman numerals; it was the one Super Bowl that got rained on, pretty much for the whole game.

*Corrected; originally "2012" -- apparently I can't do Roman numerals anymore.

In this story (from The Weather Channel...well, he did sing about purple rain) the story is told of Prince's reaction when NFL foofs checked the weather that morning and folks in charge of the halftime show reported the rain to Prince. His epic reaction: "Can you make it rain harder?"

He of course proceeded to go out and blow the Super Bowl away, rain-slickened stage and all.

What is interesting, in watching the event all these years later, is how little Prince particularly cares to be part of the NFL's spectacle; Prince was a spectacle all by himself, and that year the NFL was fortunate to tag along with a performer for whom a downpour was just an interesting stage effect.

But Prince at the Super Bowl does raise some interesting points about the spectacle that attaches itself to the Super Bowl and other major sporting events (and indeed, to almost all professional and major-college sporting events to some degree). The very idea of a halftime show at a football game points to the degree to which some kind of spectacle has attached itself to that particular game for a very long time. (It might be worth the recollection that, throughout high school and my first two years of college, I was part of that spectacle -- a band geek.)

If you think about it, that's a little bit different from other sports. Most sporting events anymore begin with the national anthem -- a bit of patriotic spectacle, if you will -- but, unless you're in the playoffs, that's about it for a baseball game (unless you count "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" as a kind of spectacle; I could see it, but I think of it as something different.) Basketball games, on the major-college level at least, are increasingly offering some sort of halftime entertainment, which might vary from some sort of musical performer to a juggler or tumbling act or aerial acrobatics -- what might have been called "sideshow entertainment" in the past. Having not been to an NBA game I can't comment on what happens there.

The longstanding tradition of halftime spectacle, though, seems fairly unique to football. This I suppose is fairly sensible, since of the most popular sports going today football has the most in common with the kind of sporting event that used to be called "spectacle."

Yes, kids, it's time to bring in the good ol' Roman Empire and its "spectacles."

I have remarked in previous blog entries on the relative lack of sustained development of theological consideration of the ongoing saga of brain trauma and football; one partial exception is discussed here, and Dr. Hoffman's book is among a rather larger (though still not huge) body of literature that takes on the subject of Christianity and sports more generally. One of the inevitable tropes that appear in such literature is the games and sports of the Roman Empire, events to which are frequently attached the term "spectacle." This emphasizes, beyond the simple physical brutality of the contests (includiating gladiatorial combats and chariot races), the degree to which extra-sporting events accrued around the sporting contests. Of course, in the case of Rome, it might in some cases be that the sporting contests wormed their way into the specacle.

At times the spectacle was overtly religious, in the context of the Roman Empire and its pantheon of deities. Multiple such deities might have been appeased or honored in the ceremonies surrounding the contests, and of course the emperor or any representative of the emperor could expect his own share of adulation as well. (Looking slightly further back in history, much the same would have held true of the Athenian spectacles surrounding the original Olympic Games.)

Of course, the contests themselves were much more immediately harmful to their competitors, and in some cases much more immediately fatal, depending on the whim of the emperor or crowd. Though there are exceptions, we do not expect our competitors to die in front of us at sporting events we attend, and when it does happen the sporting entity in question goes through all manner of soul-searching and procedural review. Even an organization like NASCAR erupts in a paroxysm of new safety measures and guidelines in the wake of a death or major injury on the track (although, with the sometimes highly personal affection for the competitors in that more individual sport, perhaps that's not so surprising).

Nowadays, the adulation of "idols" surrounding our sporting events is rather more discreet as well. While a great deal of adulation seems to be directed at God by some athletes on or immediately off the field, it's not always certain how much that adulation is actually directed at the God revealed in the crucified Christ, the Man of Sorrows, the Prince of Peace. (But that's a discussion for another book, some of which have already been written -- but that's another blog post.) There are plenty of other idols surrounding our sporting events, though, if you look hard enough.

One might think of the corporate sponsors, who now generally have their names spashed on everythign from the stadium itself to the timeouts, not to mention in signs all over the place. (I once went to a minor-league baseball game where the strikeouts were "sponsored by Circle K"; funny, but if Circle K didn't pony up the dough were the pitchers not allowed to strike anybody out?) Perhaps the cheerleaders on the sidelines become objects of, uh, we'll call it "worship" for now although we know darn well it's anything but. The coaches increasingly become figures of a particular kind of adulation. Celebrities who appear in the stands (particularly in Fox baseball broadcasts) might fall in here.

Perhaps even the players themselves, or more specifically the bodies of the players themselves, become these objects of devotion. This is of course particularly ironic in the case of football or other sports in which intense physical damage or harm is the frequent (or possibly inevitable -- yes, that entry again) consequence of the action on the field.

One of the questions that is inevitable is: how much does the spectacle surrounding the game a cover for the destructiveness of the game itself on the bodies of those who play, or how much does the game seek cover in spectacle? Or does the spectacle seek to draw attention to itself by attaching itself to the game?

In this context it's interesting to go back to Prince's halftime show, and to remember why such shows became the norm. In case you don't remember, or you're a little too young to remember, you kinda have to blame Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans for that.

In 1992 Fox (not yet privileged to broadcast the Super Bowl, I guess?) went after the NFL's halftime activities (at that point the most frequent performer for SB halftimes was still the Grambling University marching band, I think, and Up With People was another common guest performer), counterprogramming a strange little halftime called "Winter Magic" with an episode of their sketch-comedy program "In Living Color," starring Carrey and Wayans and others. The counterpunch was effective enough to draw more viewers than the Super Bowl halftime show. (This after the previous year's halftime show had been pre-empted, at least on the air, by ABC News coverage of Operation Desert Storm.) The NFL was going to have none of that; the following year's halftime show featured no less than Michael Jackson, and such major acts has been the trend ever since (with a brief detour into former major acts after sister Janet's exposed nipple).

Clearly in that case spectacle became a means of propping up the game. Or is it that clear? After all, the audience that flipped the channel for "In Living Color" did seem to return to the game right afterwards. But incomplete or distracted adulation of idols apparently doesn't cut it; it seems you are required to stay for the whole worship service.

This is far from a complete survey of the relationship of sport and spectacle, and football is far from the only sport to indulge in it to some degree. (At some point we really need an examination or dissection of the crazy ceremonies that precede soccer matches, especially FIFA-sponsored contests.)  We're not far from another round of the modern Olympics, where sport and spectacle are joined at the hip. But the relationship of sport and spectacle in a sport still grappling with its frequently destructive tendencies towards its players can't be neglected in seeking to sort out the allegiances of those who continue to participate (as fans or supporters) in the game, or the spectacle, or in some combination of both.

RIP Prince. Regrettably, the rain was not purple that night.

A little life

No ethical discussions today. Just some sports-fan joy.

This was me Friday:

Orioles vs. Blue Jays, 3/4/16, Dunedin, Florida

That's Florida Auto Exchange Stadium in Dunedin, Florida, where the Toronto Blue Jays hold spring training. On Friday the Baltimore Orioles made their way up from Sarasota to play a little ball. With Friday being my day off, the timing seemed opportune.

It was a pretty typical spring training game, won by Toronto 4-3. The highlight was a three-homer inning in which Toronto built the lead that Baltimore would never overcome. 

My seat was actually much closer to home plate; this just seemed to be a good spot to get a picture of a baseball crowd on a sunny (but not too hot) March afternoon.

As this was Toronto's spring training site, you might wonder about the national makeup of the crowd. I'm sure there were plenty of Floridians around, but I was surrounded by Canadians. As a result, in odd moments between action I learned more about Ontario than I had learned in any one occasion since the last time I was there (2011, I think, when I attended one of my last academic conferences that happened to be meeting in Ottawa). 

And thankfully, no political talk. Just as well, I can't say I know that much about Justin Trudeau.

Being in front of live professional baseball game was all sorts of good for my psyche and my soul and all those good things. On the other hand, getting into and out of Dunedin, and the Tampa/Clearwater/St. Petersburg area in general, mostly managed to evaporate all that psychological healing before I even got back to I-75. Still, some residual effects (good ones) do linger.

Not nearly on the same scale, but still a pleasure, the Major League Soccer season started today, and I got to see Sporting Kansas City get an ugly win against Seattle Sounders. It's still not on the same level as baseball, and it was televised instead of live, but hey, small pleasures count. 

And of course my #3 sport preference, college basketball, is approaching its peak season. (I dare not use that phrase -- you know, the M-alliterative one -- for fear of copyright infringement.) The Kansas Jayhawks head into their conference tournament as the top seed, with their twelfth consecutive Big XII title wrapped up. They won the national championship in 2008, during my first year teaching at that university, and have been breaking hearts ever since. Still, this is "hope springs eternal" time. 

On occasion it's good to remember the pleasures of "participating" in sports. So no heavy ethical contesting tonight, just some enjoyment of such pleasures as sports can bring, and enjoying the way they can bring a little life to the everyday.

Clint Dempsey, you shall not pass!

Hallowed ground

As has been alluded in early posts, the title of this blog alludes to a saying that was heard in precincts where I was born and raised (south Georgia, remember), typically spoken about football but applicable to other sports in other parts of the country. It would serve as a response to charges that folks in those parts treated football like a religion. "Football ain't a religion," would come the response. "It's way more important than that."

The saying itself belies the degree to which many of the rituals that accrue around sports have a quasi-religious nature, and are certainly performed with a fervor that surpasses the religious devotion of many if not most of the faithful. This does in fact hold true for many sports beyond football; I'd even suggest that soccer, with its supporter groups and elaborate pre-game ceremonies, might be even closer to religious ritual in its practice. Having been a couple of different times to matches as part of a visiting supporter's group for Sporting Kansas City I noticed at least two different ways in which the experience paralleled that of attending a new church for the first time: strangers bonded quickly around a common passion, and I didn't know all the songs.

It may be that the most intriguing or disturbing manifestation of this particular devotion is in the request, or occasionally the attempt, to dispose of the remains of a devoted fan on the team's playing field.

The impetus for this reflection is this feature piece from the Washington Post, reflecting on the phenomenon as it attaches to college football fields, particularly in but not limited to the Southeastern Conference. A recent example of the phenomenon is featured in the article, in which the infamous 2013 Iron Bowl, the one in which Auburn defeated Alabama on a miracle-like final play (again with the quasi-religious stuff!). In the crush after the game an unknown fan surreptitiously deposited the cremains of another (presumed) fan on the turf, near the sideline. A tweeted picture of the discolored turf can be found in the article.

And there's the rub; cremated remains aren't particularly good for athletic turf.

College football teams as a rule have rules against such a thing, for that very reason. As a turf expert at Auburn notes, the cremains burn pretty much any plant, including that lovely green turf your athletic heroes tread upon.  Obviously this doesn't stop these particularly single-minded fans, who don't seem to mind doing damage to the field they so revere.

My preacher-mind goes a few different directions here: (1) to see such devotion directed towards a very human and very flawed (to the point of corrupt, far too often) institution (as opposed to the One we are charged to proclaim, the only One truly worthy of such devotion) only points out just how far the church has fallen, and how little impression it evidently makes upon a segment of the population that is frequently presumed to be quite religious (but then, we knew that already); (2) the author of this book probably has nightmares about this sort of thing; and (3) we've all known church members like that, the type whose seeming outward devotion masked a near-maniacal urge to control or to impose their will upon the church/program. At minimum, after all, this is a kind of trespassing and (one could argue) vandalism. Why do you want to do that to your favorite team?

This article also appeared in the local paper, with an interesting super-headline: "SEC: Where Sports and Religion Meet." Now I hate to break it to you SEC partisans, but this phenomenon hardly began with you. The aforementioned sport of soccer also has enough of an issue with this practice that English clubs actually have established guidelines for the practice (if you're a fan of Blackburn Rovers you're in luck; Chelsea, not so much), and fans of the Argentinian club Boca Juniors can actually buy burial plots in a cemetery dedicated for players and fans of the team; you can be buried among your club heroes.

In the States baseball has also inspired such acts of devotion, with Wrigley Field in Chicago a particular object of such passion. It's not hard to guess why, in a way; the team is notorious for its extended championship drought and the long-suffering fans who have waited literally all their lives for a Cubs World Series win, so you can imagine those fans wanting to "be there" when it finally happens. Not surprisingly, more than a few Cubs fans have copped to scattering remains on the warning track or somewhere else in the park, occasionally without particularly trying to be sneaky about it. At least one former player was also supposedly meant to have his cremains scattered there, and a dispute has arisen over the intention of another Cubs great to be similarly scattered there (there was a quote from him many years ago, but no official documentation of such wishes in his case).

You can probably guess I find the practice a little distressing. At least in the case of Wrigley Field, though (or most of those hallowed SEC and other gridirons), there's the logic of scattering those ashes on, well, grass or dirt. I can't quite understand the thought of one devoted fan of his local team who got somebody to dump his ashes on the field of his local team, the Toronto Blue Jays, last year.

The Blue Jays play in the Rogers Centre. It used to be known as the SkyDome.

As most old domes do, that field has artificial turf.

Think about that one.

Addendum: a more detailed post on the subject and the compelling power of stadiums and such places for many devoted fans. 

The official Auburn Turf Team image of the 2013 Iron Bowl ashes (@AuburnTurf)

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

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.

Land of opportunity?

If you like baseball, it's hard not to like Andrew McCutcheon.

McCutcheon (or "Cutch") was the National League Most Valuable Player in 2013. His performance last year was perfectly worthy of another MVP award, but Clayton Kershaw had an insane season for the Dodgers and won both MVP and Cy Young awards.

It's hard not to like McCutcheon because, unlike some players, he does everything. Dude can hit, field, throw, and do all of them really well. To top that off, by all accounts he seems like a thoroughly decent human being. He's the type who, earlier this year, let his trademark dreadlocks be shorn off for charity. He's the face of one of the good stories of major league baseball the last couple of seasons, a Pittsburgh Pirates team that hadn't won diddly since 1992 (the infamous Sid Bream slide, for those with such memories) before breaking into the playoffs year before last (in other words, the Kansas City Royals of 2013) and followed it up with a return trip last season. He is a thoughtful and articulate man, not given to the shoot-from-the-lip blather of so many athletes. His mom is a pretty proficient singer who belts a mean national anthem, for pete's sake. How do you not like?

So when Andrew McCutcheon threw up some red flags about the Chicago Little League team that got stripped of its titles after their much-publicized run, I guess I was a little more inclined to listen than if the words had come from a more average, hotheaded type. McCutcheon poses these questions not by charging bias, but by pointing to his own story.

It's sad and scary to think that one of the most successful, accessible, and popular players in baseball right now (and one of its most marketable players, if MLB could ever get its act together) would have been playing football if he hadn't torn his ACL in high school. But you have to wonder if his story is all that unique, except that those potential stars do end up lost to the game.

McCutcheon recognizes the tremendous hand-ups he got in being picked up and largely funded through the system of "travel teams" that increasingly rule the roost as far as those kids with baseball talent who get drafted or make it on to prime college teams. For McCutcheon, as he notes, college baseball was really not an option; with even the best baseball scholarships only covering 70% of tuition and costs, and McCutcheon not coming from a family that could even pay 30%, it was pro ball or bust.

A similar story with a different track belongs to Giancarlo Stanton, the man-mountain power hitter of the Florida Marlins. While McCutcheon got lucky coming from a poor part of a small town in Florida, Stanton flew under the radar in another baseball hotbed, southern California, where he was overlooked by the travel teams abounding in that region. (You need to get fairly deep into the story to get to Stanton's high-school experience.) Old-fashioned high-school success, and one scout who saw what nobody else saw, were his ticket to pro ball, and even he allowed that if he weren't well on his way by his third year he might well have turned around and tried for college football.

As it happens, both Stanton and McCutcheon are black. And, to be honest, most of the kids whose parents can afford to pony up the costs of those exclusive travel teams are white. On one level, this looks a bit like yet another example of the unspoken, systematic exclusion of blacks from equal opportunity, in this case opportunity in the chosen sport of Jackie Robinson, of all things.

There are, though, other cases that cut against this particular grain. McCutcheon's teammate, shortstop Jordy Mercer, came out of a rural Oklahoma background, one in which if you played sports, you played all of them; his high school no longer fields a baseball team.

I'm not a parent. I can't claim to understand the motivations of parents who direct their children towards whatever sport as an extracurricular activity. (I was a band geek myself.) One presumes that part of the encouragement has to do with physical activity, with learning to play with others well, teamwork and camaraderie and all that. One also suspects, though I can't know this, that if you play a sport or sports (much like playing an instrument or painting or acting or other such endeavors), if you apply yourself and develop your talent, you can go as far as that talent and desire takes you. Basically, this sounds like what we tell our children about what endeavor they choose, be it high school activities or choice of major in college.

To the degree that sports turns out to be another venue for disappointment in that respect, I guess it simply starts to reflect the larger society in which it is situated. To the degree that a sport like baseball increasingly draws its players from a pool determined even in part by who can afford it as opposed to who is good enough; and to the degree that a sport more generally accessible -- like, say, football -- comes with the caveat that it might well destroy your brain; what, then, are these games teaching the young people that play them?

In this regard I'm extremely curious to see how this proposal plays out.  Sporting Kansas City, one of the more successful franchises in Major League Soccer, is seeking to develop what's called an "academy team" in the far west Kansas town of Garden City, as a part of its ever-expanding academy system.

Unlike other sports franchises, soccer clubs tend to develop extensive youth programs, including affiliated academy teams as well as youth teams more directly connected to the team. (Several of SKC's direct youth teams were big winners in one of the more recent tournaments for the different age brackets.) These teams and affiliated academies are very nakedly all about developing players for the major-league franchise; any other benefits are decidedly secondary. Still, it might lead to a college scholarship here or there, and even if your team eventually doesn't put you on its pro roster you're in a decent spot to catch on elsewhere. (SKC has several such "homegrown" players on its current roster, including Erik Palmer-Brown, who skipped his high-school graduation to play on the US under-20 World Cup team.)

The interesting thing about the Garden City potential academy is its very deliberate targeting of a demographic that would not fit into the profile of privilege suggested above. Garden City, and other nearby towns like Liberal and Dodge City have very large Hispanic populations, attracted in previous decades by opportunities in the meat-packing industry. SKC coach Peter Vermes alludes obliquely to the same kind of privilege tending to dominate soccer in the US in a way that perhaps it did not in his native Hungary, while directly wanting to work against that with the Garden City academy.

Let's be clear here; SKC is looking for players for SKC. Their principal hope is that some streetwise soccer kid from Garden City or Liberal will make SKC better in five or ten years. And yet, if this project comes off, that naked ploy to grab better players might just take some kid places he might never have dreamed of going. I have no idea what kind of life that becomes, or if there's even a sliver of education that is even possible in such a context.

What we ask of sports for our young people, or of our young people for our sports, is deeply due for examination. As a pastor you might be expecting me to complain about traveling teams taking kids away from Sunday morning worship services, but frankly my interests and concerns go a lot deeper than that. It's a huge topic, and one that could be a blog all to itself. But nothing is beyond questioning here, so questions will get asked when the need arises. Hopefully I'm not the only one asking.