Only Nixon could go to China

It is one of those stories where, well, you just have to wonder.

About a week ago, the University Interscholastic League, which is the governing body for high school sports in the state of Texas, announced a major effort to track brain injuries among athletes who compete in high school sports in that state. Twenty-four sports will be covered. While I assume some  boys' youth soccer does exist in Texas (girls' soccer is named in the article, you'll note), as a number of professional players have come from the state, the sport most likely to be up for closest scrutiny (by those observing and reporting on the study, if not in the study itself) is football, perhaps the most sacred of idols in that state (or perhaps only second to oil).

Note: while I am intensely curious about how the University Interscholastic League governs high school sports in Texas, I'll leave that discussion aside for now.

The study is inherently significant, as noted in the article, if for no other reason than the sheer number of youth who participate in sports in the Texas system. More than 800,000 athletes participate in sports in Texas public high schools (one assumes there are plenty of private schools with sports as well; whether they are covered in the study or not is not noted). That's the beginnings of a very large database tracking brain injury in young athletes.

The League is partnering with the O'Donnell Brain Institute at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center for the study. Its purported aim is to provide a more scientific means to judge whether rules changes, new equipment, or other measures are in fact having any impact in preventing or mitigating brain injury in young athletes, and whether new measures are warranted or needed.

This isn't the first case of a state organization trying to track youth sports on a large scale -- Michigan is noted as having been tracking such injury for some time now. In the 2015-16 academic year football produced the most reports of brain injury, with girls' basketball coming in second, trailing by a mere 1,453 reports.

One would like to be encouraged, wouldn't one?

It all seems very serious. The University Interscholastic League's spokesman acknowledges the lack of scientific usefulness in the current system, which only requires schools to report on a rotating basis. Whatever you may think of UT, its medical program is generally well-regarded. It all sounds like it should be a good thing.

But it's Texas.

It's freakin' Texas.

The book Friday Night Lights (or the movie or the TV series) wasn't set in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan, or even California or Georgia or Florida. All of those states have strong, successful traditions in high school football, as do others. But this is Texas. "Worshipful" is not too strong a word for how that state views football, not by a long shot. The saying that gives this blog its name might as well have been invented there.

Can a state with such a reverence for, such an identity with a sport like football really pull off such a study, no matter where the results may lead?

Do they really want to?

Can the UIL really keep reporting numbers of they get large and out of hand, and nothing seems to help?

Can Texas high schools really be trusted to be scrupulous about reporting all such incidents of brain injury? Can coaches, assistant coaches, trainers, doctors really stick to the rules when the pressure is on and the star quarterback might have to be held out of the big game?

It all has the potential (as it might in any state to some degree) to become a big whitewash.

Or it has the potential to be, to use an overused sports cliché, a game changer.

A genuine and disciplined study can potentially point to what works, whether it be practice limitations, more scrupulous rule enforcement, rule changes or anything else. It could also, in the extreme, point to the conclusion that nothing really works, that football is just going to do this to some percentage of the people who play it when so much size and speed are in play.

On the other hand, a large study such as this could also become little more than a stall tactic, a cover for cries of "we don't have enough data" ad nauseam.

It may be that if a breakthrough of whatever kind is going to happen, it's only right that it comes out of Texas, the epitome of a state where the game really is "way more important than that." Rather like the historical event referenced in the title of this entry, maybe it has to be a state that so zealously embraces the game that has to the one that pushes forth the true nature of the game, or unveils whatever steps are necessary to keep it from enacting a macabre form of Russian roulette on the brains of those young athletes who play it.

It could be big, or it could be just a big sham.

Rant: What is a problem, and what is not

One of the greater but understated challenges in tackling attitudes about the ongoing trouble with football and its brain-trauma tendencies is in tackling attitudes about sports more broadly, attitudes that are even less consciously vocalized but nonetheless powerful and almost impossible to overcome. One of those is the attitude that, somehow, sports is a necessity.

If you pressed a sports fan on the subject they would likely either: (1) deny that such a statement is true, but continue to live their lives as if sports is in fact a necessity, or: (2) say that, yes, sports is a necessity, but be unable to answer "why" with anything beyond vacuous platitudes or myths.

Case in point: this article, a seemingly innocuous piece by one Julianna W. Miner on why kids tend to drop out of youth sports by around age 13.

Now it would be possible to report such a study, commissioned by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, in a pretty blase manner, putting the statistics out there and not much else. But that's not what his afoot here; it's not a straight-up news report, but closer to an opinion piece, written by a mother of youth, one of whom is about to hit that age, fretting about All The Things The Child Will Miss By Not Playing Sports.

Now if you've read this blog much you know something is up when I go all Hunter S. Thompson on you with the capitalization. Let's pull out the sticky lines and expose them to the light:

“It’s not fun anymore” isn’t the problem; it’s a consequence of a number of cultural, economic and systemic issues that result in our kids turning away from organized sports at a time when they could benefit from them the most. Playing sports offers everything from physical activity, experiencing success and bouncing back from failure to taking calculated risks and dealing with the consequences to working as a team and getting away from the ubiquitous presence of screens. Our middle-schoolers need sports now more than ever.

The "it's not fun anymore" quote, first of all, shouldn't be dismissed quite so easily; she doesn't seem to think her children are particularly intelligent, because the natural thing to do would be to ask "well, why isn't it fun anymore?" and get some more specifics out of it. But apparently the author is just bursting with the systemic problems she's just gushing to get out and can't be bothered with details.

The real slippery logic comes thereafter, with the recited list of positive attributes of playing sports. There are two particular kinds of slippery logic at play here; one I'll call the "lone savior" fallacy, and the other the "illusion of flawlessness."

Note the sleight of hand at play above: first, the claim is that kids are turning away from organized sports "at a time when they could benefit from them the most." Then the next sentence begins "Playing sports..." and goes on to recite the usual list of mandatory benefits of sports, as if somehow one absolutely cannot learn how to bounce back from failure if one never plays football or something (oh, and there is the ubiquitous complaint about excessive time in front of computers or phones for good measure).

But where did the word "organized" go?

Have we actually made it impossible for kids to engage in physical activity outside of organized sports? The only way to do so is to sign up for a league?

(Of all the bizarre things, I'm reminded of an episode of The Flintstones. Fred and the other parents are starting to put too much pressure on the kids in the kiddie baseball league. Barney, the only adult with sense in this case, eventually spirits the kids away to an undisclosed location where they can play for fun. I wanna be Barney Rubble.)

The conflation of "play" or "playing games" with "organized sports" is a deeply problematic mindset that is so deeply entrenched in culture as to be inseparable from any discussion about kids and physical activity. There are a boatload of problems with such a conflation, but to pick on just one for now: the moment that "organized" sports becomes the dominant or even exclusive paradigm you end up with an industry of sorts initially intended (I'll be generous here) to support kids and their physical activity, but eventually ending up demanding kids to be fed into the system in order for it to survive..and you get opinion pieces in the Washington Post trying to shame kids into continuing to play (or their parents into forcing them to play). Go look at that NAYS website linked above. It's just desperate to convince you that organized sports is the only way your child will ever be saved (from what I have no idea, but as a pastor/public theologian my BS antennae are naturally sensitive to such things).

Now let's check out the flip side of this assumption; organized sports, it is very much assumed here, is the only hope for producing children who learn such things as persistence in the face of failure, resilience, dealing with consequences, working in concert with others, and even cutting down screen time.

[WARNING: I am about to swear, loudly.]

BULLSHIT.

You want your child to learn resilience, persistence, bouncing back from failure, and all that stuff? Start them in music when young. Start them on one of those ubiquitous recorders when they hit fourth or fifth grade.

Or get them in drama club. Or dance (now there's some major physical activity for ya).

You can't stop and stew over your failure, because there's no break. You got to get your next line spoken. The music or the dance don't stop for you to have a pity party.

And even better, you can do those things literally the rest of your life. You can't play football forever, but there are church choirs out there dying for singers, and community theatre is everywhere.

So yes, I absolutely question the necessity of organized sports for learning all those virtues.

One blog post isn't enough to unpack that question, but the other bit of slippery logic must be addressed. Not surprisingly, the author isn't all that interested in getting into the possible drawbacks or harms attached to organized sports for you.

I, as it happens, have no such reluctance.

Perhaps most obvious these days in injury risks we never imagined before. Even without getting into the usual subject of the blog, and the degree to which even people who don't play football beyond youth-sports level or a little high school can end up with some degree of CTE discernible in their brains upon death, you have to be a blithering idiot not to be very circumspect about starting your child on such a sport. (Fortunately there are other options; in fact, we recently had an Olympics full of games that don't involve brain-rattling.) But there are other horror stories -- teenage pitchers getting Tommy John surgery, ghastly injuries from basketball or hockey or gymnastics (???), all can be found if you look hard enough.

But I want to pick on something else. I question the notion that all the impacts of playing organized sports are positive.

Do you learn independent thought playing youth football? Or do you learn "do what coach says or you're benched"?

Do you learn creativity?

Do you learn social discernment?

Do you ever actually learn that discretion really is the better part of valor? In other words, when quitting really is the right thing to do?

Or do you learn mindless obedience?

Or do you learn that physical prowess trumps all?

Or do you learn that your success is dependent on someone else's failure?

Let us not buy the assumption that all of the lessons of organized sports are good ones. To borrow words from Frederick Buechner,

Maybe it's not competition but cooperation and comradeship that build the only character worth building. If it's by playing games together that we learn to win battles, maybe it's by playing, say, music together that we learn to avoid them.

The original column that precipitated this rant ends with the sentence: "And, perhaps more importantly, until we dismantle the parenting culture that emphasizes achievement and success over happy, healthy kids, we don't stand a chance of solving this problem." Ms. Miner, you haven't earned the status to critique parenting cultures, because you have failed to convince us that kids leaving organized sports is an actual problem. Come back when you're not blowing smoke and throwing shade.

You know, this might just teach your kids teamwork, resilience, etc. too.

Trust

The NFL would like you to believe you can trust it on the subject of concussions and head trauma among its players. To that end (among other things), the league, in concert with the NFL Players Association, announced today that stricter guidelines and harsher punishments would be applied to teams that failed to follow the league's and NFLPA's agreed concussion protocols on game day. The case of Case Keenum, referenced here, was apparently the impetus for this toughening. Additionally commissioner Roger Goodell announced the NFL would be appointing a new chief medical officer.

The latter announcement, ironically enough, points to one of the most significant reasons why the NFL hasn't been and can't be trusted on the subject. The new officer will be in effect replacing Elliott Pellman, a rheumatologist who became for all practical purposes the face of the NFL's denial on brain trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and as much of a villain in the process as anybody connected to the NFL. Indeed Pellman's stony-faced "no" in the face of questions that threatened to cause the NFL trouble is as much a representation of how the NFL became something of a modern moral equivalent to the tobacco industry.

Pellman, however, is not the only doctor associated with the NFL to come under scrutiny for his professional conduct in that role. Dr. Richard Ellenboegen, a member of the NFL's health committee, is under investigation by his own school (the University of Washington). Ellenboegen, co-chair of the league's Head, Neck, and Spine Committee, is also chair of U-Dub's Department of Neurological Surgery. UW is investigating Ellenboegen over his alleged attempts to influence the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pull CTE research funding away from Boston University's program (one which has carried out some of the foremost research in the field so far) towards doctors who were more sympathetic to the NFL's position, including possibly some funded by the NFL.
In the meantime, the more new information comes out, the less the NFL looks like anything you want holding your life in its hands, and those who have been associated with the NFL are starting to feel the effects of that taint. Green Bay Packers great Paul Hornung has sued the league's primary helmet manufacturer, Riddell, over the ineffectualness of their helmets (Hornung now suffers from dementia). Also, another former NFL player, Haruki Nakamura, is now suing Lloyd's of London for failing to honor a policy he purchased from them. The policy was independent of the NFL in this case, but the NFL has declared Nakamura physically unfit to play in the league, which Lloyd's is contesting. Nakamura's wife describes how her husband changed after the injury, in a litany becoming all too familiar.

In the meantime, Calvin Johnson has talked about the many concussins of his career, none of which ever made it to an NFL injury report (not to mention the proliferation of painkillers dispensed to deal with them and other injuries); the player who has emerged as the primary advocate of marijuana use to deal with such injuries (and cut back on the painkillers) has decided to retire; a new NFL coach has apparently decided to have players hit in practice like it's 1999 (i.e. the age before brain trauma awareness);  and, in probably the most SMH development of all, a former NCAA and NFL running back avoided prison time for a drug offense by claiming he was being treated for CTE. You can't be "treated for CTE," since CTE can't be diagnosed until after death, and cadavers (as far as I know) don't receive medical treatment. Oh, and it's really looking like 30 is the new 40 where NFL retirement is concerned.

Perhaps the saddest or strangest part of the story is that the degree to which the NFL has managed to lose the public's trust, the NFL itself is not the entity most likely to suffer from that lack of trust. Instead, that "honor" probably falls to youth sports organizations (Pop Warner football and the like, but not just in football), ill-prepared for the scrutiny, which are now seeing folks conclude that tackle football (or, for example, heading the ball in soccer) just isn't appropriate anymore for children or even younger teenagers. Now in theory, this could eventually have an effect on the "pipeline" of talent into the NFL, but probably not soon and not as much as you might expect; the NFL (and the NCAA for that matter) will simply find different sources of talent, and there will always be plenty of young men who are convinced they are invulnerable. It's a macho thing, you know, even if they don't call it that anymore.

As NFL training camps and NCAA practices gear up in the coming weeks, I'm guessing more such stories will start to flow freely through the media. Summer vacation is over for Big Football, and scrutiny is only going to re-intensify. How much that matters? I'm not optimistic. There are actual fan groups that do seek to shine a spotlight on these abuses, but I fear they're a drop in the bucket compared to the literally obscene amounts of money the league rakes in. Popularity has never equalled ethical legitimacy, though, so the question of how we can justify an entertainment that sure as Hell looks like it irreparably damages about a third of its participants must and will continue to be asked, at least in this blog anyway.

At least Case Keenum's inglorious moment wasn't totally blown off, I guess...

Weekly Reader: Exclusive/Elite/Premiere

And the Weekly Reader returns...

Do did you hear what Giancarlo Stanton did last night?

In Major League Baseball's pre-All Star Game slugfest, the Home Run Derby, Stanton muscled out sixty-one (yes, 61) home runs across the event's three rounds, crushing the event's previous record by forty or so. Yes, he won, and caused his team some marketing headaches along the way.

Stanton is an interesting case. He's mostly noted as a power hitter, although he's become a pretty decent fielder and outfield arm along the way. He plays for a franchise, the Miami (formerly Florida) Marlins, that has only existed since 1993 (I remember watching on TV as Charlie Hough, the ancient knuckleballer, pitch their first game), yet has two World Series titles and the honor of benefitting from the Chicago Cubs' epic collapse in the 2003 NLCS (seriously, if you're still blaming Steve Bartman at this point you are epically stupid. Bartman didn't give up eight runs and drop everything on the field. Just stop). They are mostly remembered for almost immediately dismantling both of their championship teams in economically-driven "fire sales," having a tightwad owner and his massively jerky son-in-law as a leading team official, having fired Joe Girardi as manager after one season (a season for which he won Manager of the Year, mind you) and thus freeing him to be scooped up by the New York Yankees, seriously bilking Miami-Dade County into building a wildly expensive but admittedly beautiful new stadium, and generally being ill-supported by the nominally "home" fans who turn out to cheer the other team at least as often as the Marlins.

Stanton is also an example of what threatens to become a vanishing breed in Major League Baseball; the scouting find. He wasn't a product of the paid-coaching, travel-team, tournament system that is increasingly becoming the prime conduit for baseball talent, teams with words like "elite" and "premiere" bandied about playing in tournaments that are "exclusive" and "elite" themselves. He, uh, played for his high-school team. How passé.

Andrew McCutcheon of the Pittsburgh Pirates has, at least somewhat by choice, become the current poster boy for the potential loss of access to major league-worthy talent that arises from such a system. If an area AAU coach hadn't wandered over to a field where a skinny 12-year-old kid from a nowhere town in Florida was playing in a youth league game, it's not at all clear whether McCutcheon would ever have been in a position for his evident skills to be seen by people that matter. And let's just say that Major League Baseball would be a lot poorer without the likes of McCutcheon and Stanton, who was found in a rather fluky scouting story himself.

Only so many versions of The Blind Side can play themselves out to find talent. There is a real risk, as the travel-team system becomes more and more entrenched, that access to pro ball becomes a matter of who can pay up and who can't. And that would be deeply troubling, ethically and (dare I say?) theologically.

Other things worth reading this week:

*More on Brianna Scurry, former star goalkeeper for the USWNT, and her chosen role as brain-health advocate for women athletes.

*Syracuse University hires an ESPN executive as its new athletic director, more or less admitting that its athletic program is a content provider for TV. And this relates to the purposes of a university ... uh, well ... I'll get back to you on that one.

*Tim Duncan retired. I feel old. My time at Wake Forest was before his, but not by too much. His team took care of him, which helped him to play as long as he did. Radical concept, that. And if you thought Duncan was all stoic and humorless, think again.

*Speaking of sports that rely on travel and "elite" teams, US Soccer has a spanking new training ground for its elites under construction, in KCK.

*At least one writer is ready for "God Bless America" to be gone from the seventh-inning stretch.

*Jordan Spieth won't play golf in Rio. I hate to be alarmist and all, but really, I can't blame him.

Back in football:

*Roger Goodell shows his tobacco-industry learnin'.

*More college football players are joining in head-trauma lawsuits against the NCAA. At some point somebody's going to have to figure out that they really will need to sue the "university" for whom they played.

*The Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky story is just getting uglier.

*Since retiring, Calvin Johnson, aka Megatron, has been talkative. Concussions and painkillers and not coming back. Oh, my.

*And at least one NFL player has an idea of what players might be able to use instead of those painkillers.

Have at it, folks.

He hits baseballs far. Very far. It would be sad if he were getting broken down in football instead.

32%

Most people have heard of the Mayo Clinic. Between its locations in Minneapolis and Jacksonville it has acquired a reputation for being one of the premier hospitals in the nation.

As many such premier hospitals do, Mayo Clinic has an active research arm, with research ongoing in many areas of medicine and health.

It turns out that includes CTE. And people are not going to be happy about the results of this one.

In their study of 1,721 brains in their own brain bank, 66 turned out to belong to young men who had reported playing contact sports in their youth or young adult years -- i.e. through high school, maybe some college, but no pro sports. No former NFL players here.

The Mayo researchers were operating with a pretty broad definition of "contact sports" -- football, of course, but also boxing, wrestling, rugby, baseball (!), basketball (!!) and others played while in high school.

Two surprises: No mention of soccer, although that might be included among the "others," and no mention of hockey. It might also be among the "others," or it might be that the fact that the study was conducted at Mayo's Jacksonville campus might have steered fewer high school hockey players to the brain bank. 

Of those 66 young men (apparently no young women were found; again, wondering about the absence of soccer, but you would have thought basketball might have showed up), 21 were found to have the telltale tau deposits that mark CTE. That represents about 32% of the brains attached to a record of contact sports during youth.

As a control group, 198 brains (three times the number of brains from the contact-sports group) were selected, age-matched to brains from the contact-sports group, but with no participation in youth contact sports indicated. (This group included both men and women). Of this group, however, 33 (half the size of the contact-sports group) did record incidents of single-incident traumatic brain injury (TBI), with falls, assaults, domestic violence, and car accidents. Of this sample of 198 brains, including the 33 TBI cases, the total number of brains showing CTE was zero.

Not the percentage, 0.1% or anything like that. No brains from that group showed CTE. None. Zeeeee-ro.

Of the contact-sports group, some of those brains were attached to diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease or similar disorders, but none of these brains had been identified with any claim or suggestion of CTE. Not all of that group had reported any symptoms of any such disease before death. We're not talking about persons for whom any CTE-based red flags had been raised, in other words.

Another note: maybe the most useful part of the Mayo Clinic's own report of this research is possibly the inclusion of an illustration that shows how the tau deposits associated with CTE differ from such deposits associated with Alzheimer's disease. There is a difference, and it is identifiable. Doctors have not been confusing the two when analyzing all these football-player brains posthumously.

This is new research in this area, based on brain bank-archived tissue rather than self-reported or self-selected cases, more typical of the research program at Boston University that seems to drop a new former NFL player with CTE on us every few months. What is perhaps startling is that the percentage of CTE-affected cases -- 32% -- is pretty strikingly similar to the percentage of cases of brain trauma the NFL expects to be found among players after their careers (this was before Monday's admission of a link between football and CTE by the league's chief safety officer, so only diseases like Alzheimer's or ALS are counted there).

It's hard to imagine this will be the last such study. This is of course is an ethical problem of sorts, in that it relies on continuing brain trauma in order to make such studies possible or viable. But scientists need verification and duplication of research results in order to make any confident claims about their results.

Question: do we non-scientists have to adhere to the same standard?

This study was published and reported this past fall. It got a bit of new notoriety this week in the wake of the roundtable in which the NFL's safety guy let slip an admission I don't really think he meant to make. The NFL, in the days since, has gone back and forth over whether that claim was going to be accepted for real or not. But perhaps the most striking part of that event, other than the NFL's loose lips, was in remarks from another source.

Dr. Walter Koroshetz is the director of the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke. In the wake of the Mayo Clinic research and other such reports, Koroshetz expressed concern for what seemed like a greater incidence of CTE in non-professional athletes than had previously been expected.

"That's what keeps me up at night," Dr. Koroshetz said in an interview, expressing concern about research seeming to indicate a greater prevalence of CTE among the amateur athletes of the country. Acknowledging that this expanded research is still at an early stage (one wonders why it took so long?), he noted that to see such results at such an early stage was cause for concern, and makes it all the more urgent to get answers on how the disease develops and why it develops in some and not others.

Dr. Koroshetz is a highly placed individual in the world of neuroscience, perhaps the most high-ranking such official to weigh in on the subject. For every Koroshetz, though, there is still some (willfully?) misinformed individual (such as the VCU chair quoted in this article, who gets refuted by Koroshetz) who somehow wants to claim that we must force kids to play football or else they'll all get obese (yes, I'm exaggerating, but my statement has about as much relevance to and coherence with the current state of the research as his does) -- seriously, has he never heard of running or swimming or tennis? When actual physicians are consistently being so inaccurate in their public statements (people who actually do the research are well beyond the idea that CTE is the result strictly of concussions, and even simpletons like myself can grasp this one) it's little wonder that fewer people grasp the potential trouble indicated by these new rounds of research.

And that's why I'll have to keep shouting into the void. The ethical grotesqueries cannot be limited to the NFL for long, folks. Being caught unawares is no excuse.

Image credit: Mayo Clinic. At left, tau deposits (brown) in a brain with CTE. Right: tau in an Alzheimer's brain. The deposits seem more widespread in the Alzheimer's brain, but are located more deeply in the CTE brain and affect the "white matter" of the brain as opposed to only the "gray matter" in the Alzheimer's brain.

Pay attention!

1.

Apparently Ricardo Lockette of the Seattle Seahawks came awfully close to becoming the first on-field casualty of the NFL in, well, ever.

Back in November Lockette's head was nearly removed on a hit by Jeff Heath of the Dallas Cowboys. That phrase is normally used as hyperbole, but it is apparently uncomfortably close to truthful in this case.

Scary moment, maybe more so than anyone realized at the time.

Lockette discussed this injury on a visit to the paramedics who responded to his injury, properly handling him so that his neck didn't fail completely.

This blog mostly concerns itself with the issue of brain trauma in football, though we're on a slight break at the moment. It's worth the occasional reminder that one doesn't have to suffer concussions or end up with a CTE-riddled brain for football to mess you up whether you hit each other in practice or not.

And on that subject, one has to wonder if the same kind of care always comes into play when head injuries and potential concussions are involved. Those usually don't draw paramedics onto the field.

2.

So a kid attending a spring training game at Disney World wasn't far from having his head removed either.

As the Pittsburgh Pirates were playing against the Atlanta Braves (who for now still have spring training at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex), Pirates batter Danny Ortiz lost his grip on his bat after a swing, with the bat spinning crazily towards the stands. In the stands, Shawn Cunningham barely had time to stick out his arm to deflect the bat away from the head of his eight-year-old son Landon.

Frighteningly close.

The money quote is at the bottom of the article, by a representative of a company that supplies netting to MLB teams to keep this kind of stuff from happening. 

Huff added that it is important for fans to be aware of what's happening on the field and avoid distractions such as cellphones. 

“Fans have to actively watch the game,” Huff said. “It is just like crossing the street — you need to look up from your phone to do so safely.”

Man, oh man, is that a great quote. "Fans have to actively watch the game." I may just make it the motto of this blog.

3.

Of course, what you see when you do so is sometimes downright ugly. At least the team being threatened won, to the degree that counts for anything.

That guy does have a history in sports, for what it's worth. He actually managed to destroy a league (almost) all by himself.

Now he seems set on destroying other things.

Sports fans are capable of enough ugliness, without intentionally divisive and race-baiting politics being thrown in. 

I'm trying to think of a time when the mixture of sports and politics has ever been good for sports.

Can't think of one. 

But pulling this crap on high school kids? Evil. Pure evil.

4. 

Wrapping back to a previous blog entry, and to bullet point #1, Calvin Johnson, a.k.a. Megatron, has confirmed he will retire from the NFL.

The rumors had been pretty well-established out there since the end of the regular season, and now it's done. Johnson retires after nine seasons. 

As noted in the earlier blog post, that used to seem like a short career. Not any more, perhaps.

Football doesn't have to screw up your brain to mess you up real good. 

You have to actively watch the game, even when you're not actually at the game. It is showing us ourselves, good and bad. Ignoring the bad is self-destructive. 

Pay attention! This stuff matters more than it should.

Waiting on science our savior, cont'd.; the Ivies take notice

Remember the Dartmouth MVP?

The MVP, or Mobile Virtual Player, became the means by which Dartmouth football coach Buddy Teevens moved to eliminate tackling from practices during football season -- tackling of other players at least. The MVP is a robot programmed to move like a football player -- not just with speed, but making cuts and other elusive maneuvers. While the move had immediate benefits for team health, Teevens was concerned about his team lest its skills get rusty. When Dartmouth engineering students (including a former Dartmouth football player) came up with the device, Teevens jumped at it.

It turns out Dartmouth won a piece of the Ivy League championship this past season (after third- and second-place finishes in previous seasons), and the rest of the league took notice that they did so while only tackling that Mobile Virtual Player device instead of each other during in-season practices. Possibly as a result, the league has voted -- unanimously, at that -- to eliminate tackling drills during the season throughout the league.

There are things to be excited about here, and things not quite worth jumping up and down about. The latter first, so one blog entry can end on an upbeat note:

1. This is the Ivy League. There are a few players from the Ivies in the NFL; New York Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick of Harvard might be the most prominent right now. The Ivy League schools have some of the longest and most storied histories in college football, but one can't deny that the Ivies fall rather far outside the current power structure in the NCAA. In short, this move by itself is unlikely to be the start of a trend in the NCAA.

2. This is the Ivy League. Only a very limited number of high school players are going to be able to make the cut academically to play in that league, and many of those players will not be interested in doing so because of point #1 above -- they don't represent a likely springboard to the NFL. The number of players who will be affected by this move is pretty small.

3. This is the Ivy League. For a large part of the culture surrounding college football or football generally, the league's adoption of these standards will merely be proof that they don't play "real football" in that league.

4. This is the Ivy League. Probably every school in the league can afford a squadron of MVPs if they so desire. And while no doubt the Ohio States and Alabamas of the world could corner the market on the devices were they to try, that's less true of the Division II and III schools in the world or even the Tulsas and San Diego States and Marshalls out there. Should such technologically aided practices start to sweep through the college game, the division between the haves and have-nots will only become more stark. Then make the leap down to high schools and youth football programs and the divisions become even deeper, even as restrictions on tackling in practices have had dramatically positive results in reducing head injury (keep reading, you'll get to it). Technology as a leveler of the field isn't typically that accessible.

5. We are still acting under the assumption that technology can fix everything and save football as the country knows it (football as the world knows it is what we call soccer, to be clear). The evidence of this just isn't all that persuasive. There's a real desperation about it sometimes as well. From the next great helmet to the MVP to sensors designed to warn coaches or trainers that a player might be on the verge of brain injury, the technological hits keep on coming. Only the real hits also keep on coming.

OK, let's be positive:

1. There are coaches out there who actually care about the health and well-being of their athletes (one can't always be sure about this). It's good to be reminded of this amidst the jaw-droppingly bad headlines these days, not just on head trauma.

2. At least some coaches can cut through the macho jargon and see not only a way to improve player health, but apparently also performance on the field. Whether Dartmouth's improvement really correlates to reducing hitting in practice or is simply a function of Teevens being a good recruiter, or goes to randomness somehow, at least this success might persuade a few coaches elsewhere to ease up on the full-contact drills during the week.

3. While the NFL still seems to see most of its brain injuries take place during games, at lower levels practice seems to be the more perilous time for players. If this move helps persuade youth football or high school programs to think about cutting back on contact and those injuries drop as well, so much the better.

I've made it clear in this blog that I can't stomach watching football any more. That doesn't mean I'm particularly eager to see more and more players suffering concussions at whatever level of the sport they play; I've also made it clear that I don't consider it my place to tell people they can't play football, although I won't shy from speaking my mind on the subject here in this blog and elsewhere, and I continue to believe that there are serious theological and/or ethical problems with participating in the economic system of football. Anything that might offer a small amount of hope for cutting back on concussions or subconcussive hits is a positive by me.

It doesn't mean I'll be watching again any time soon, though.

Dartmouth's MVP might really be Dartmouth's MVP after all...

p.s. for those who don't recognize the title phrase, it comes from this little musical ditty...

Defining "risk"

We need to talk about what "risk" means in this context.

Every sport entails risk.

This is a basic fact. It is also, however, a lame defense.

It is a basic fact that participation in any sport entails the risk of physical injury or harm. Two people have actually died as a result of injuries sustained on the field in professional baseball. One, Ray Chapman, died as a result of being hit in the head by a pitch in 1920. The other, Mike Coolbaugh, died after being hit in the head by a line drive while working as a first-base coach in a minor league game in 2007. Concussions have shortened the careers of a number of players, perhaps most notably Mike Matheny, a longtime catcher for four major league teams who retired in 2006 due to persistent concussion-related symptoms, but who now manages the St. Louis Cardinals. Ryan Freel, a former utility player for several teams, committed suicide in 2012; a postumous examination revealed the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in his brain.

Basketball has seen some rather gruesome leg injuries, the one suffered by Louisville's Kevin Ware in the 2013 NCAA tournament in particular. After an extended recovery, Ware eventually transferred to Georgia State to conclude his collegiate career, where he helped that team make an improbable tournament run in 2015. A devastating injury, but he did play again. To my knowledge no former basketball players have been found to have CTE.

Soccer can have some pretty nasty injuries, and concussions are a concern in the sport. As I write this I'm watching a USMNT match against Iceland, for which one of the commentators is Taylor Twellman, a former USMNT member whose own career was cut short by concussion symptoms and who, like Matheny, has become a voice for concussion awareness and prevention in his sport. He has also agreed to donate his own brain for CTE research after his death. Two soccer players, an American semi-pro player and a Brazilian star, have been found to have CTE after their deaths.

After football, hockey is probably the most notable sport to face the issue of concussions and CTE in recent times.*  The sport has lost a number of well-known names who were diagnosed with CTE after their deaths, including Bob Probert, Reggie Fleming, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, and Derek Boogaard. As a sport with a very distinct history of fighting on the ice as somehow part of the game (at least in its North American manifestation), one might argue that once CTE was identified as a peril of contact sports, hockey was inevitably going to have its crisis. I'm not familiar enough with sports outside of the United States to comment much on rugby or Australian football, but one might guess that they would possibly face some future cases of CTE, or perhaps some past cases yet to come to light.

*(For the purposes of this discussion, boxing is not included. Its ability to cause brain trauma has been known for years, although the term invented for such boxing injury is "pugilistica dementia" rather than CTE. Frankly, if you're watching boxing, I'm assuming you don't give a damn.)

So yes, it is a basic fact that every sport has risk.

It is also a lame defense of football.

First, let's take a quick moment to acknowledge that brain trauma isn't the only harm associated with football. The whole body gets beaten. That much we have known for a very long time. We don't necessarily like to think about Earl Campbell in a wheelchair, but we know it happens.

We also know that sometimes really gruesome things happen on a football field. All I have to do, if you're of a particular generation, is say "Joe Theismann."

Although we don't much care to think about it, we know those things happen.

And then, there's this rather incomplete list.

What we're not really coming to grips with very well, and which tends to lead to lame defenses like "there's a risk to every sport," is that for every player we see go down with an obvious or identifiable injury, even a concussion, there is somebody else taking a blow on the field that is going to come back to haunt them years later.

The NFL admits it, in a legally binding way. In a year in which concussions spiked noticeably over last season,  there isn't much likelihood of making that 33% number go away any time soon. Players on the field are taking hits they're going to pay for much later. We just don't know who.

We'll presume that for college players who don't go pro, that number will be somewhat less, although even college-only players aren't immune to severe damage and premature death. And on the high-school level, less still (although sometimes the deadly blows are horrifyingly obvious). Nonetheless, somebody is taking a hit that will come garishly close to fulfilling one of The Onion's too-true-to-be-funny headlines.

In short, here is why talking about risk and football as if it were the same as in all other sports is fatuous at best, potentially evil at worst.

A player can get hurt, and even get a concussion, playing sports.

In baseball, for example, there's a risk that a batter might get hit in the head by a pitched ball.

Might.

In football, on the other hand, someone will suffer a damaging or even destructive blow to the head, whether we know it at the time or only many years later.

Will.

The element of risk, such as it is, is just a matter of who.

A young man's trauma

Well, another deceased former football player has been diagnosed.

Tyler Sash, a defensive back who played for the University of Iowa and the New York Giants, had advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at the time of his death back in September. He was 27.

I hesitated to provide the link or even mention the story, simply because it's starting to sound familiar. Sash had played football since around age 9. He had started, in the time since being cut by the Giants in 2013, been experiencing episodes of memory loss, inability to focus or pay sustained attention (to the degree that he was unable to hold or keep a job), uncharacteristic bouts with temper, and erratic behavior (including leading police on a high-speed scooter chase from which he fled on foot, and public intoxication).

He had experienced at least five known concussions over the course of his time in football, and of course many, many other hits that may have fallen into the category of those "subconcussive hits" that do as much, if not more, of the damage in many CTE victims.

His death was caused by an overdose of pain medications, with a "history of painful injuries" a contributing factor, as ESPN.com put it. Family members had attributed the aforementioned difficulties to that pain medication history. Nonetheless, his family decided to donate his brain to the Boston University's program, the one that had found close to 90 cases of CTE in former players. BU's program and the Concussion Legacy Foundation advised the family of the results last week, a disclosure that has brought some clarity, if not closure, to Sash's family.

As noted above, Sash played 16 years of football, from childhood through the NFL. Junior Seau played for 20 years in the NFL alone. Nonetheless, BU researcher Dr. Ann McKee, who performed both examinations, found the level of CTE in Sash's brain to be similar to the level in Seau's. McKee also acknowledged that Sash's brain was affected in a way she had only seen in one other former player so young. While the Times report did not name that player, it did describe that victim as a 25-year-old former college player; that sounds a lot like Michael Keck, whose severely traumatized brain was the subject of a recently released article in a major medical journal. Keck, interestingly, had also played football for 16 years.

Antwaan Randle El is a grizzled old guy by comparison. With 9 NFL seasons under his belt, plus four at Indiana, presumably four in high school, and who knows how much before that, he probably tops twenty seasons total, at least.

We need to come away from this with a lesson that shoulld have sunk in some time ago, apparently. The Frank Giffords or Mike Websters of the world are not necessarily the norm. For those who are diagnosed with CTE, the clock started ticking pretty early.

These late results are not inconsistent with this study, elaborated here, that suggests those players who start young and play a long time are at greater risk. Of course, those were former NFL players being tested, who had lived into their forties, fifties, or even sixties. Sash and Keck were 27 and 25, respectively, and Keck never played a down in the NFL and only a year-plus in college (but those ten years of youth football...). So, these are cases that go rather beyond the scope of that study.

The famous NFL stars get the headlines, not surprisingly. But it's becoming a young man's trauma (pace Paul Oliver, Chris Henry, Adrian Robinson, Owen Thomas), and not always (or not entirely) to be laid at the feet of the NFL.

We need to talk about what "risk" means in this context.

(To be continued...)

Tyler Sash

Soft

Because it is such a crucial issue to address in a presidential campaign before the Iowa caucuses, a certain candidate felt compelled to address a burning issue: the softness of football.

While his ire was directed against the NFL, I am going to presume that his complaint would apply across levels of the sport. (On the other hand, I suppose he might conclude that college football was "for losers" or something like that. I don't know. I don't really plan to ask.) And while it is far too early to be making projections about who will win anything, this particular candidate has managed to maintain a consistent base of support in the various polls that have pockmarked this presidential race so far. So at this point I think it's fair to say he has a constituency, and that this constituency or some chunk of it might well agree with his assessments. Given that, I fear that the views expressed by this candidate need to be taken into account when thinking, as I do, about the tension between living in faith and choosing whether or not football is part of one's activity.

So, here's a sample:

What I just said about a game — so I’m watching a game yesterday. What used to be considered a great tackle, a violent head-on [tackle], a violent — if that was done by Dick Butkus, they’d say he’s the greatest player. If that were done by Lawrence Taylor — it was done by Lawrence Taylor and Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke, right? Ray Nitschke — you used to see these tackles and it was incredible to watch, right?

Now they tackle. ‘Oh, head-on-head collision, 15 yards.’ The whole game is all screwed up. You say, ‘Wow, what a tackle.’ Bing. Flag. Football has become soft. Football has become soft. Now, I’ll be criticized for that. They’ll say, ‘Oh, isn’t that terrible.’ But football has become soft like our country has become soft. [Applause]

So there you have it. I am less interested in the particular speaker in this case than in the degree to which this represents a strain of thought that is at play in America concerning football.

I have to believe that players like Michael Keck would disagree.

No one who saw Keck play would allow you to call him "soft," it seems. He once tackled an opponent so hard that pieces of his helmet flew off. He was (pardon my French) badass enough to take down Cam Newton one-on-one in a high-school all-star game. He played through injuries the way football players are supposed to do. By one account he was the top player in Missouri his senior year in high school.

I'm pretty sure Keck would object to the label "soft," if he could. But he can't. He couldn't get through more than a season of college football, and never played in the NFL.  And he died two years ago, or a little more. And his brain showed as much CTE as the brain of Junior Seau, who was almost two decades his senior and had a lot more football under his belt. It was the worst brain trauma the autopsy doctor had seen in a football player so young.

(Read those articles, please. Also watch the video embedded in the Kansas City Star article. Just do it.)

It isn't just that Michael Keck was so young. Despite the tone taken in both articles, there have been young football players who have shown CTE in postmortem examination. Paul Oliver was 29 when he killed himself, showing advanced CTE in his brain. Chris Henry was only 26 when the bizarre accident took his life, also living with CTE. Adrian Robinson, who committed suicide last year after a brief NFL career, was only 25. And no, Keck is not the youngest football player to show the telltale posthumous signs of CTE; remember Owen Thomas, the University of Pennsylvania player who committed suicide at age 21?

But Robinson, Oliver and Henry played in the NFL, after much more substantial college careers. Keck played one season and one game of college ball, and no more. Even Thomas played more football in college.

There have been high school players who have died as a result of playing football, true, and some of those were due to more immediate traumatic brain injuries, including a 17-year-old who died in Missouri the same year as Michael Keck. And its not as if there hasn't been research documenting that younger players are at greater concussion risk (and remember, it's not all about concussions). Still, there is something different, and chilling, about living with the kind of brain trauma Junior Seau accumulated when you're almost twenty years younger than Seau was.

This stuff shouldn't surprise us. It really doesn't take much of a bump to cause serious brain injury, without getting near a football field or a battle zone in Afghanistan. That the brain should be susceptible to damage after multiple and repeated blows and "sloshing" in the skull upon receiving those blows is not the kind of thing that should come as a shock to us. And yet we still, faithful people or not, don't seem to be having much success at coming to grips with this basic reality and its consequences. Maybe we just don't want to.

Ethicists have been circling around this question for a while now. Some parents also find themselves asking such questions, whether in terms of their own habits or in transmitting habits to their children. Even a few faith leaders are starting to ask questions about supporting football with their time and dollars.

If these young men (emphasis on "young") have anything to tell us, it must be that we can't segregate the suffering and damage of CTE to a select few pro players. Being a fan of college football but not the NFL is no help. Anybody who watches football at any level is caught up in the inevitable moral questions and ethical struggles, whether they (or you) want to be or not.

On the other hand, maybe these young men, and I, are just soft.

Michael Keck, 1988-2013

Quickie: I have a question...

I'm just going to leave this right here.

It isn't exactly accurate to say, as some have said, that the research isn't out there to suggest the degree to which football can do damage to young brains, at least of high school age.

It's one study, and others are going to be needed, to be sure. But it is not anything to be ignored.

And hosanna gloria, the study is focusing on subconcussive brain trauma. At least somebody out there seems to be getting it.

But do read the whole thing through, and you'll get why I have a little question.

OK, so the research here seems to be designed for the purpose of developing better headgear. I presume that this better headgear will be intended for all sports (since the report seems to indicate that women's high school soccer produces about as much of this damaging effect as football).

But, then, this quote:

"You're not going to change the game. You are not going to get rid of the game, at least. So how can you make changes that keep the spirit of the game there, keep players enjoying, keep fans enjoying the game but at the same time be safe," 

Really?

This brings up a rather disturbing tendency that seems to be jumping out at me so far: even those medical professionals who are drawn into this concern seem to be acting out of an impulse that doesn't make sense for a medical professional.

To put it bluntly: should a doctor's first concern be for the health of those who are trusting them with their health, or to preserve the game of football?

Am I the only one who is deeply bothered by this?

You know, football has changed fundamentally before in order to keep from being banned. Remember Teddy Roosevelt? All of a sudden it was o.k. to throw the football forward, across the line of scrimmage, which was about as drastic and fundamental a change as possible. And in retrospect, the game seems to have coped with that drastic change just fine.

So why is it today that the game must not be changed? Is football really this unalterable edifice that must not be altered or refined, but that must be paid obesiance by all others? Is it truly necessary that players, fans, coaches, and all others -- even those who don't follow or watch the game -- must pay homage to the game, or The Game, as unmovable and fixed object of reverence?

Is football really what this describes it (in the most theological sense of the word) to be?

And if it really is this, what the Hell (in the most theological sense of the word) are we doing bowing down to it?

And how many are at the shrine right now?

Overreaction?

I'm not a parent. At this stage of my life it's not going to happen. So, I don't ever have to answer the question of whether I'd allow or encourage a son of mine to play football, at any age. (Frankly, if we'd ever had kids we'd be far more likely to nudge them towards music, which has its own character-building virtues.)

That doesn't stop me from wondering at the thought processes of those who either do have to make such decisions, or those who are in the professional medical position to do so. The former number has occasionally included some famous individuals, even football players, who have chosen to encourage their male children towards other pursuits.

I can only imagine that's a hard position to be in. One might think of, say, coal miners or factory workers who imagined themselves to be working in those fields so that their sons didn't have to do so (although I imagine there were also plenty who expected their sons to follow in their footsteps), but that's not quite the same thing. Playing Pop Warner football or even high school ball doesn't necessarily lead to an NFL career. I suppose there's a greater chance that playing Pop Warner or high school might be more likely to produce a desire to play in the NFL, but the Rolling Stones have the answer to that.

I have to imagine that it's a particularly challenging time to be a medical professional where this subject is concerned, though. By this time it's hard to imagine doctors being completely blind to CTE and its effects on individuals long-term. Even most NFL players don't stay in the game for twenty years, a la Mike Webster, but not all former NFL players who manifested the disease were that old -- think of Paul Oliver, who was only 29 at death, with advanced CTE. Chris Henry was only 26 when he died, also with CTE manifest in his brain; Adrian Robinson was only 25 when he committed suicide this past April, also showing the telltale markers of CTE. Advanced age isn't mandatory.

Of course, even younger players can manifest signs of potentially debilitating brain trauma, without having concussions, as this study among others reminds us. That study focuses on players in college, and not exactly football factories at that.

Fine. Just walk away after high school, right? Hmm...that might not even work out for the best. Even as that study insists that science can save us all, it also reminds that these things do start to show up in young players, and that concussions aren't required to do the damage. The particularly chilling part is that even an offseason doesn't always provide enough time for the traumatized brains to recover. And yes, even a few who didn't play beyond high school have ended up severely traumatized, apparently.

Even at the youngest levels these kinds of brain injury really can occur, in many different sports. One neurosurgeon/Pop Warner parent puts his opinion in writing here.

In "walking down the stairs" through these various age brackets and their potential for harm, I have to admit that I'd have a hard time with the idea of a child of mine playing football. If anything I'd be concerned that (despite the obvious genetic handicaps he'd bring to the game) he might be good at it. Do I then have the nerve to be vigilant about monitoring his brain health? Do I have the nerve to say "that's it, no more" if a young boy of mine suffers a concussion, as Dr. Powers says he will do above?

But as noted, I'm not a parent, so I'll never have that decision to make.

Anyway, it turns out that one of the doctors depicted in the movie Concussion (not a major character in terms of screen time, but an important one to the plot), discussed in the previous post on this blog, is now at work at the large state university in the town where I now live, and the local paper took note of that in today's edition. It's an interesting interview, in which he recalls the initial results and the pressure applied by the NFL (he was a co-author on the study the NFL demanded to have retracted).

And yet, at the end of that article, this physician pronounces those parents who decide to steer their children from football to be guilty of overreaction.

"Understandable overreaction," to be sure, but overreaction. Geez, how charitable of you.

It's pretty unlikely I'll ever meet the man (I am nobody, after all), but if it ever were to happen I'm not really sure I'd be interested in any long conversation with him. My contribution to the conversation would likely be kept to a question:

What would it take for you to decide that such a choice wasn't an "overreaction"? Dead children?

Standards

While much of the virtual ink spilled in this blog is directed against American football, there are plenty of other physically violent sports out there in the world. Hockey has been implicated in a number of posthumously diagnosed cases of CTE, particularly among some well-known "enforcers" such as Bob Probert, and the overdose death of Derek Boogaard (an active player at the time). International soccer, though not necessarily considered a violent sport, was shocked by the diagnosis of CTE after the death of Bellini, a star of the Brazilian team of the late 1950s and early 60s.  The thoroughly insane sport of Australian football (called "Australian rules football" back when ESPN used to air it in its early days), was drawn into the discussion when preliminary experiments in diagnosing CTE before death pointed to a possible diagnosis for one of its more notorious players.

And then there's rugby. Talk about insane sports.

It shows up on college campuses as a club sport in some cases. I have memories of one of my suitemates, during my freshman year at college, coming back from those club contests looking as if he had been assaulted; bruises everywhere, walking with a pronounced limp, and at least once missing a tooth. Only his maniacal grin suggested he had taken the beating voluntarily.

While it hasn't hit the big time in the US, it is one of the most popular sports in other parts of the world, particularly some of the nations once part of the British Empire. New Zealand recently won its second consecutive Rugby World Cup, and parts of it were broadcast on one of those lower-tier sports networks that show up on some US cable systems, to pretty decent ratings in some quarters. I actually tried to watch a semifinal match, between New Zealand and South Africa, to try and get a grasp on just how much violence to the head was aparent (the game wasn't terribly revealing, as New Zealand was clearly dominant).

But in the British Isles, a death in rugby has rocked youth sports and led to a push for unified standards for concussion diagnosis, nationwide and across sports.

Benjamin Robinson, 14, died in January 2011 after a match in his native Northern Ireland, in which he suffered multiple severe blows to the head due to collisions and ground impact. The failure of officials and coaches (and teammates) to recognize and respond to the young man's increasingly dire condition would likely have gone unnoticed except that his parents refused to let it go. A second inquest revealed that at least three blows, as opposed to one as suggested in the initial report. They began to seek answers, despite lack of police interest and school resistance. Finally, with lawyers involved, a video surfaced showing Benjamin Robinson suffering at least three severe blows, not just the final blow to which the death had been initially attributed.

Because Benjamin's parents, Peter Robinson and Karen Walton, pursued answers about their son's death, and with the support of Scotland's foremost medical expert on sports and brain trauma, Scotland adopted nationwide standards to be used across all sports for determining removal from a game or time required to recover. This is a significant step in any part of the United Kingdom, which has in some ways been much slower than American sports to react to the ongoing brain-trauma issue, partly due to sadly misguided attitudes that rugby, a less "armored" sport than American football, was less prone to head trauma. Unlike in the US, though, Scotland has adopted the aforementioned across-the-board standards, while American sports are regulated, if at all, by individual leagues or conferences or associations. As a result, concussion or head-trauma protocols vary widely.

The application of such standards hasn't prevented problems; earlier this month a rugby player in England died after a head injury suffered in a match, the second female rugby player to die in England in a little over a year. Lily Partridge had suffered two concussions previously, but had stayed out of action the required period of time before returning to action after the second, according to coaches and teammates. This came after a tournament in February, in which a Welsh player was not removed from a match despite two major head blows, and was not even assessed after the second blow.

I am left with two observations:

1. Try as we might, we really aren't capable of doing anything to prevent these head injuries in these violent sports. Even with standards in place, on-field officials and coaches are not capable of seeing every play clearly enough to identify head blows that call for assessment, apparently.

2. Robinson and Walton didn't quietly acquiesce in the initial official report on their son's death. I truly, sadly doubt that American parents have the nerve or perseverance to be so tenacious when their sons are claimed by the games they play. Maybe I'm wrong, but I've seen very little evidence of this so far.

Benjamin Robinson