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?

Brief film commentary: Concussion

At a little over two hours long, the new film Concussion is primarily a story of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist/medical examiner whose findings blew up the NFL's careful efforts to conceal what it new about the effects of concussions and brain trauma on its players.

The two-hour length, intentionally or not, almost results in two different movies. The first hour, once it establishes Dr. Omalu's credentials and personality, walks the viewer through the initial cases that landed in Dr. Omalu's lap, leading him (at his own expense in most cases) into the revealing of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brains of deceased former NFL players. The second hour becomes the story of the NFL's efforts to squash Dr. Omalu's research and Dr. Omalu personally. By necessity, the second hour is the more melodramatic of the two, but in many ways the first hour is the harder to watch.

(What follows is spoiler-ish, so if you need to be preserved from all information about the film, stop reading now. As the basic facts of the story are pretty much public record now, I don't feel I'm giving away too much below, but you've been warned at any rate.)

(Seriously, stop if you want no spoilers.)

(Stop now.)







OK, moving on then.

Second hour first. If the film's implications are to be believed, the degree to which the NFL did everything in its power to destroy Dr. Omalu is beyond the pale in every possible way. That they attacked his professional credibility is established -- attempting to bully him into retracting his research, for example? That really did happen. Trying to thwart Dr. Omalu by attacking his boss Cyril Wecht, the coroner? That I did not know, and the film is opaque in its suggestion (apparently, once Dr. Omalu departed from his job, all charges against Wecht were dropped, in a suspiciously convenient coincidence). Still, there were other things the NFL did in their ongoing smear campaign against Dr. Omalu that are not included in the film (essentially commandeering a medical journal for the purpose of attacking his research, for example) that are especially damning, but probably don't translate into film drama terribly well.

A certain amount of dramatic license is not surprisingly employed, in which actions by multiple characters are condensed to one or two characters in the film. For example, as mentioned in the previous post, former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson is portrayed in a confrontation with Dr. Omalu that by all evidence did not happen in real life. As well, it's not clear to me that the specific confrontation between Duerson and former Philadelphia Eagle Andre Watters portrayed in the film actually happened, but Duerson did have contentious encounters with a number of players who sought help from the NFL's pension fund for dealing with their brain trauma-related maladies.

A good bit of this half of the movie portrays the effect of this siege on Dr. Omalu's personal life, which for some will be a distraction from the "main point" of the movie and for some will be the "main point" of the movie. From a dramatic point of view, Dr. Omalu's wife is used as little more than plot device in the film, which is a tremendous waste of Gugu Mbatha-Raw. This film will by no means pass the "Bechdel test" in its portrayal of its female characters. On the other hand, the NFL itself doesn't really pass the "Bechdel test" either.

Back to the first half. This portion of the film is more engaging as film than the second, which starts to look like any number of other movies pretty quickly. Dr. Omalu's credentials are established in winning fashion, as well as his quirky personality and driven nature. You end up with the impression that he's perhaps an odd duck, but he's all right.

The film is not afraid to portray Dr. Omalu's Catholicism as an essential part of his character without necessarily bashing you over the head with it. I doubt that anyone who makes such lists will ever count Concussion as a "faith-based" film, but to leave out that aspect of the film's portrayal of its main character would be to assess the film incorrectly.

Some of the most striking work in the first half of the film is done by actors playing two of the first former players to be (posthumously) diagnosed by Dr. Omalu with CTE. If David Morse's screen time as Mike Webster was any longer he'd be getting awards talk tossed in his direction; he is unrecognizable, and unflinching in portraying the agonizing decline of the longtime Pittsburgh Steelers center, and the horrifying lengths to which he went trying to ease his symptoms (it's shocking enough, but the description of Webster's decline in the book League of Denial is frankly more explicit and more horrifying, although this film does portray one instance of perhaps Webster's most horrifying self-treatment). Another former Steeler, Justin Strzelczyk, is portrayed by Matthew Willig; his time on screen is even less, but effective, and his death in a fiery automotive crash is one of the more gasp-inducing moments in the film. (Interestingly, Willig is a former NFL player; his thoughts on the role are noted in this video clip.) Some dramatic telescoping is evident in this half of the film as well, but perhaps not as much as in the second half.

Short conclusions:

Filmmaking observations and opinions: I have no problem if Will Smith rides this film to an Oscar nomination. He probably hasn't disappeared into a role this effectively since, I don't know, Six Degrees of Separation? Let the man be rewarded. Albert Brooks as Wecht is of course Albert Brooks.  Alec Baldwin, aside from occasional bad attempts at what I gather is supposed to be a Louisiana accent or dialect or something, is reasonably effective in one of his more understated turns, playing Dr. Julian Bailes. Casting Luke Wilson as Roger Goodell is way too generous to Goodell, but Wilson does bring an appropriately smarmy touch to the role. Some of the villains seem a bit overplayed (Mike O'Malley as another medical examiner in the Pittsburgh office, Arliss Howard as Joseph Maroon), while some of the most serious villains in the NFL's response seem underplayed or ignored. Dr. Elliot Pellman (played by Paul Reiser), a rheumatologist and sometime team doctor for the New York Jets, doesn't get much air time at all, yet he was the most belligerent (and bald-faced lying) mouthpiece for the NFL in its Big Tobacco-style full denial phase, in his role as chair of the league's laughably named Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MBTI) Committee.

As to the film's subject: it is about Dr. Bennet Omalu first and foremost. See the film? Yes. Should it be the last word in informing yourself on the subject? No. The aforementioned book is still probably the most informative starting point, and the PBS Frontline episode derived from it (which you can watch here) is also worth the time. Other possible sources for getting more informed will be explored in a future blog entry.

David Morse as Mike Webster in Concussion

Hollywood jumps in!

With the absolute and unyielding avalanche of publicity and unbridled geekery heralding the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens this past weekend, you might not be aware that other movies are being released this holiday season. (I think in this case "holiday season" is the best term. I mean, really, do we really want Sisters or The Big Short somehow tied to the child in the manger? I didn't think so.) But there are, and one of them is of great interest to this blog, and not because it represents Will Smith's first serious bid for an Oscar nomination in years.

Indeed, this Friday marks the release of Concussion, a movie based on the experience of Dr. Bennet Omalu, the Nigerian-born medical examiner whose examination of the brain of former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster set off the ill-labeled "concussion crisis" that now haunts not only the NFL, but every level at which football is played, and other sports as well.

I have no advance knowledge of the film itself that anybody else can't obtain. (No, this blog has not earned me admittance to a Hollywood premiere or any advance screening. Shame, I know.) It's not hard to guess the basic outlines of the movie, however, if you've either read the book League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, which features Omalu's work prominently as part of its narrative. If books aren't your thing, you could also watch the PBS Frontline episode based on the book and featuring interviews with many of its principals, including Omalu. If you are dubious about ordering DVDs, the doc airs again this month, with part 2 of an expanded version airing tonight on many PBS stations. (It does air on the local station tonight ... at 3:00 a.m. I wonder if this is a pattern in other football-besotted towns.) Or after tonight you could probably stream it from PBS.org.

The Fainaru brothers are good at what they do, and the book and/or documentary are worth your time independent of the coming Hollywood treatment. But it's the Hollywood story that confronts us this weekend. Hopefully I'll see it some time this weekend, when family and/or church obligations allow, and have some hopefully useful comments on it. But trying to guess or anticipate what happens allows for a comment or two

1) It is Hollywood, folks. There is a documentary on concussions in the NFL, and it's noted above. This will not be a documentary. Some amount of representational storytelling will happen. Based on some commentary I've heard, some of that "representational storytelling" will involve Dave Duerson, the former Chicago Bears linebacker whose suicide, shooting himself in the chest apparently in order to preserve his brain for examination, marked perhaps the most publicly striking moment in the ongoing crisis before the suicide of Junior Seau. The movie appears to include a scene in which Duerson attempts to prevent Omalu from reporting his findings at a medical conference. This didn't happen. However, Duerson was an early key figure in debunking any connection between football and CTE, even testifying to a senate subcommittee in defense of an NFL committee's denial of disability benefits to former players, a stance which still angers a number of former players affected by that denial. (For now I'm leaving aside the columnist's apparent eagerness to be judge and jury of how affected former players really were or weren't by CTE when committing suicide.) Players like Brent Boyd take no particular pleasure in Duerson's being claimed by the malady whose existence he denied (not unlike a climate change denier being drowned when his home washes away due to rising seas, I suppose). At any rate, while the particular incident between Duerson and Omalu didn't happen, Duerson's bitter denial of these effects is not inaccurate, and any attempt to defend him against being "smeared" by the movie rings hollow.

2). It is Hollywood, folks. While the movie can't get away with too much Hollywooding, it has several aims besides toppling the NFL or sounding the alarm over concussions. It wants to make money. It wants to win awards. Will Smith definitely wants that Oscar. These are basic cautions any moviegoer should exercise when watching a "fact-based" movie. That said, expect pushback from the NFL and organizations allied with it.

Also in the run-up to the film's release, some of its principal charaters are emerging in the media. Omalu himself showed up with an opinion peace in the New York Times with the radical suggestion that kids shouldn't play tackle football, period. Reaction, ranging from panicked to outraged, followed. Dr. Julian Bailes, a doctor who was an early guide to Omalu (and is played by Alec Baldwin in the film), showed up on the ESPN Radio program Mike & Mike in the Morning. Bailes's principal motivation seemed to be to defend football as a sport, particularly football for children and adults. The very same platitudes the NFL always repeats ("football has never been safer" for example) come right out of Bailes's mouth, as well as the extremely deceptive claim that "they knew the risks" in reference to children and youth in football, including his own sons. (To be fair, the Mikes -- Greenberg and Golic -- don't really let up on their questions in the face of his mindless platitudes, doing a reasonably good job of playing the role of concerned parents.) Perhaps the most horrifying thing to comes out of his mouth is the suggestion that high-school players who die as a result of on-field brain injury would probably have died of something else or other anyway. At any rate, his own compromised nature is at least admitted up front when he acknowledges serving as a volunteer adviser to the national Pop Warner football program for kids.

That looks really bad now, in light of a court ruling allowing a lawsuit against Pop Warner football by the family of a youth who was paralyzed as a result of a head-on hit they allege was instructed by his coaches. Paralysis isn't concussion, but the charge that a coach was directing players to hit head-first demonstrates the degree to which no football organization has the ability (or, frankly, willingness) to monitor its coaches and their teaching of proper techniques. That kind of thing is left up to you, the parent of a would-be youth football player, who is expected to know these things (even though they're not always being very forthcoming about those things).

What is striking is the difference between Bailes, who played himself and has two sons who played, and Omalu, who had about as little knowledge of football as it is possible to have when Mike Webster showed up on his examination table. Omalu, who I'm assuming will be portrayed as more saintly than he is in the movie, said what he saw. Bailes, suddenly seeing his sport threatened, begins to distance himself from what he has already seen.

This kind of thing doesn't augur a lot of hope for non-medical professionals who grew up with fierce attachment to football, whether they played or not, and are now faced with the moral quandry of justifying the game that probably holds primary allegiance in their lives (and no, I am not exaggerating; even if I've only been a pastor less than a year I have no illusions about how the church does in comparison. If you've seen one of the movie trailers you've heard the line about how the NFL owns the day of the week the church used to own; the only thing remarkable about the line is its utterly non-controversial nature) in the face of its obvious life-debilitatig damage to a major portion of its players.

How do you react to a condition that you can't see happening, that is (even the NFL expects) likely to tear down the lives of about a third of its players?

At any rate I'll go see the film as soon as I can, and I hope you will too, and be motivated to dig deeper.

Will Smith bids for a statue and hopefully pushes the discussion along in the process.

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

The occasional voice

It's kind of sweet. People are now sending me links to feed the blog. Just my wife for a while, but now others too.

One link that arrived in such fashion is from the online site of the journal Sojourners, in which the author, pointing towards the release of the movie Concussion this week, lays out why his family does not participate in the NFL. (Now don't be obtuse, folks..."participate" is the term of choice in this blog for any kind of involvement in the NFL, including as a fan who watches games, buys tickets or merchandise, plays fantasy games, etc.) Unfortunately I could only get a free preview, and haven't wanted to spend the bucks to subscribe (I too often find their environmental writing naive at best), I can't quite read it all. It did, however lead me to other articles in that site, older ones not requiring subscription to read, by one Ernesto Tinajero. The first, in 2009, relates his choice to stop watching football; the second, approximately a year later, reasserting the choice and noting some of the events that had occurred over the year since.

I actually noticed some of my own experience in what Tinajero wrote; on those occasions when a football game would be, say, on a TV in a restaurant where I was eating, I would be more jolted than ever before when some particularly violent collision flashed across the screen, even if I wasn't trying to watch (or trying not to watch). I can't say as I'm quite as surprised by this as he is; nonetheless, it's more of a shock to witness than it ever used to be.

In the meantime, another voice appeared recently, with a much quirkier take on the question than I've even attempted; is it at all possible to avoid football altogether? Not just refrain from watching, but have no contact with it at all?

You can catch Matt Crossman's interview with the NPR program Only A Game, in which he describes his futile efforts to avoid the NFL for six weeks, or read his longform story on SB Nation about not only the effort, but the motivation as well. ("Longform" is a key word, but it's worth the read.)

It's kind of sad that Crossman, who doesn't explicitly name any faith motivations for his experiment, nonetheless gets thwarted at least once because his minister uses a football story in his sermon. Or because somebody in his Bible study group hands him a commemorative McDonald's cup for the forthcoming Super Bowl. When he has to wonder "if Christianity is the official religion of football," yeah, it's relevant here.

Living in Charlotte, he's beseiged by the Carolina Panthers' success. Finally, the experiment collapses, well short of its original goal; getting through the Super Bowl without even knowing who makes it.

There is something disturbing about how difficult it was to avoid what I'm calling participation in football. Admittedly Crossman's definition is even stricter than mine; he at least made an effort to pull back from corporations that sponsor the NFL, and I don't have anything like enough time even to research that subject. But still, how does twenty-two people running around on the grass (or a concrete floor, for all practical purposes) hitting each other become so pervasive and unavoidable, even as it becomes more and more apparent that it destroys a large number of those who play it?

It's impossible for it to get to that point without a great deal of desensitization among us, the folks who inhabit the NFL- or NCAA-saturated world without protest. To see harm or trauma or even death happen, not just once but multiple times, without reacting or raising up in some kind of protest, leads each harm to register less and less with us. We get numb. And when we get numb to actual death as a result of the games we watch, we have entered the realm of moral harm.

We experience moral harm when we become numb to injustice, to politicians and wannabe politicians demonizing Muslims for political gain, stirring up the beginnings of Brownshirts, and we don't raise up a protest.

We experience moral harm when young black boys get gunned down for playing with toy guns while rabidly armed white men actually shoot police officers and end up unharmed, and we don't raise up a protest.

And hell yes, we experience moral harm, harm to our own moral capability, when another current or former player finds himself on the middle of the freeway with no idea where he's going, or ends up on an autopsy table with his brain showing the telltale tau markers of CTE, or a high school player dies on the field or in the ambulance or in the hospital after a game, and we don't raise up a protest.

The harm runs pretty deep these days.

If you look at it right, it almost looks like an altar...

Quickie: Culture change doesn't come easily

My schedule keeps conspiring against my ability to blog lately, but I certainly didn't want this one to get overlooked: an NFL player actually self-reported concussion symptoms in the course of a game. And the player was a fairly big name to boot.

The culture of football has demanded, pretty much as long as football has existed, that players play hurt, and more specifically they play hurt without saying anything about it. Back in Teddy Roosevelt's day it was literally better to die than to fess up to being hurt. While I doubt that most modern players truly feel that way, In the course of a game a football player really doesn't care about his future. I'm not trying to be cruel; ask one. The only thing that matters is staying on the field for the next play, and the next, and so on. If something is broken or your bell is rung, hide it. That's the code.

So, when a pretty big-name quarterback came to the sideline and reported feeling concussion-like symptoms on Nov. 29, it was a bit of a jolt. Ben Roethlisberger did exactly that, though, in the Pittsburgh Steelers' game against the Seattle Seahawks. Accordingly, he was put into the NFL's concussion protocol, and ended up missing the rest of the game. The Steelers lost.

Roethlisberger continued in the concussion protocol for part of that following week. (This article has a quick-and-dirty summary of the requirements a player in that protocol must meet in order to return to the field.) He was found not to have a concussion, and returned to action the following game.

There will be troglodytes who will see nothing but Roethlisberger missing the end of that game and blame him for being soft. He's been accused of exaggerating injuries before, so that is a fairly easy leap for such a trog to make. So far, most of the public reaction has been restrained and even somewhat supportive, as in the initial link above. But the troglodytes tend to lurk in comment sections.

Seeing a big-name athlete watch out for his own health is not a thing to be dismissed or taken lightly. Even so, though, it's hard to assume that some high-school kid who gets his head slammed into the ground and suddenly can't remember his name is going to think, "I need to get to the sideline, that's what Ben Roethlisberger did." The culture change has to be built in from the bottom as well, which is presumably the purpose of this site.

Tied into the forthcoming movie Concussion (and quite unafraid to pitch the Will Smith film, as you can see at the bottom), this site, also tied to this educationally oriented site, appears to be aimed at making the avoidance of head trauma part of the early levels of football. How much effect it can have I don't know (young boys aren't always noted for having a lick of good sense, and are often allergic to looking or seeming uncool), but at least somebody's trying, I guess. When paired with news like this out of Florida some weeks back, one might be excused for feeling vaguely hopeful.

For a better view go visit that website.

Gifford and Mathis

Two stories that hit the media this week illustrate with frustrating effectiveness the difficulties of grappling with the ongoing struggle with chronic debilitating head trauma in football: one, revealing new information about a legend in the sport, and the other pointing to the sheer bafflement that can still arise when attempting to detect those damned concussions.

Frank Gifford died this past August. For my generation he was the guy tasked with keeping Howard Cosell and Don Meredith at bay for years on ABC's Monday Night Football broadcasts, later pairing for another long run with the smoothly professional Al Michaels. If you were like me, you might have vaguely known he had been a player in his younger days, but not necessarily a lot more, unless one of your elders showed you this picture:

Gifford, then of the New York Giants, is the one laid out on the ground. The one standing above him, gesticulating wildly, is Chuck Bednarik, a linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles, who had just put Gifford in that position, as well as knocking him out cold, in a game in 1960.

What you probably didn't learn at the time is that Gifford was out after that ht for a total of eighteen months. First he was hospitalized for ten days, and then decided to retire, sitting out the 1961 season, before deciding to return in 1962.

That picture (for which some use the word "iconic") flashed back into public memory at Gifford's death (the man had a Hall of Fame career, and yet that career is mostly remembered for this one thing that was done to him...what?), and again this week, when Gifford's family released a statement acknowledging that Gifford's brain showed signs of the disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) upon postmortem examination. (The statement was released on Wednesday, the day after the NFL held a damage-control conference call in the wake of the Case Keenum fiasco last Sunday.)

This both is not and is surprising. It is not because Gifford played a lot of football for a long time, took more hits than just that famous one, and played both offense and defense for part of his career. The man both took and delivered a lot of hits.

It feels surprising, though, because for a lot of us Gifford was that sober voice in the broadcast booth, not a player first and foremost. He was the voice of reason and sanity between Cosell and Dandy Don. It's hard to reconcile that with the litany of symptoms associated with CTE.

Gifford brings a different generation of players into the CTE discussion. As per usual, the NFL recited its predigested litany of how the game has never been safer and how the league is not waiting for the science to be settled (shades of climate denialists) before taking action. I don't have video of Roger Goodell making such a statement, but I can't help but guess he looked a bit pale and sickly in making it.

Until now it was possible to conceive of the wave of CTE diagnoses as somehow being a curse of a more recent generation of players. Mike Webster, the first deceased player to be associated with the condition, played primarily across the 1970s and 1980s. Other players who have been posthumously diagnosed -- Ray Easterling, for example -- also played in that generation, while many of the most famous victims -- Dave Duerson, Junior Seau -- played later, in the late 1980s or into the 1990s. And of course, some were current players into the 2000 -- Chris Henry, Jovan Belcher.

If followers of the sport are now going to be confronted by the specter of an older generation having been afflicted with CTE, it will force the league's authorities and followers to consider the crisis (to the degree that they consider it at all) from a different perspective. It's not clear just how many players of Gifford's generation are still potentially to be diagnosed with CTE. It wouldn't be hard for a man in his 80s to assume that his condition was one that comes with old age, as opposed to a player in his 50s suffering symptoms more closely associated with persons in their 80s. So there's really no way to project how many of Gifford's contemporaries may yet join him on this roll of suffering. But Gifford is now there, an iconic NFL figure at least on a par with Seau, disturbing us all with a new problem to consider.

Rashean Mathis is not such an iconic figure. He's a solid veteran, age 35, who had not been diagnosed with a concussion in his pro career until early this November. The disconcerting part of this story was that the concussion was apparently actually suffered on October 25 but not diagnosed for a week and a half. "Finally," indeed.

This is not a Case Keenum story or a Shane Morris story. Mathis suffered the hit while playing for the Detroit Lions against the Minnesota Vikings on the aforementioned October 25. This piece from a Lions fan site lays out the sequence of events in detail. Mathis left the game after the hit (some accounts say he was holding his head as he came up from the hit; I can't find any video to confirm this). He was treated on the sideline, through the NFL's concussion protocol, apparently without interruption or interference in this case. He was determined not to have a concussion and returned to the game.

Later in the game Mathis suffered another hit, and this time was taken to the locker room for examination. Again, and under even more thorough examination this time, he was determined not to have a concussion. The game being out of hand, however, Mathis did not return to the game.

Mathis flew with his team to London for a game against the Kansas City Chiefs. That thursday Mathis reported headaches, but the Lions medical staff didn't think those headaches were related to the hits that had required examination on Sunday. The headaches didn't get better and Mathis was not active for the Sunday game. Finally, that following Wednesday, November 4, Mathis was diagnosed with a concussion.

This week Mathis gave an interview about his situation. He's not naive about his situation; he's undecided about continuing his career next season (the Lions placed him in injured reserve, ending his season this year), and even before this incident Mathis was enlisted in the ranks of "football players who don't want their sons to play football." As the linked interview shows, Mathis has actually been getting informed on the concussion/brain trauma issue for a few years now, and his thoughts and observations on the subject are worthy of your attention.

Mathis, one of the more thoughtful guys on the subject, has now unwittingly become an object lesson in just how difficult it is to get a grasp on the problem. In the meantine, I can only wish Mathis the best in introducing his son to golf this off-season.

Rashean Mathis, slow getting up

Is there even a "last straw"?

First, before you read anything else, watch this video.

I'll wait.

It's not a pretty sight. I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable (well, maybe a little) (OK, maybe more than a little). But if you're into NFL football, all up on the TV every Sunday, you need to watch it.

It is a pretty sickening sight to see. As Case Keenum, playing at quarterback for the St. Louis Rams, tries to escape a tackle, he gets wrapped up and slung down by an onrushing Baltimore Ravens defender, his head being slammed against the turf in the process. The slightly-slo-mo replay ... it hurts just to watch.

Keep in mind that this game is being played in Baltimore. The Ravens play in something that is currently called M&T Bank Stadium. Some years ago the stadium had a natural-grass playing field. Even so, having your body slung against it was going to be painful and damaging. However, the Ravens (presumably) switched to an artificial surface in 2003, and changed to a different artificial surface in 2010. There may be some who will try to tell you that artificial surfaces aren't that hard any more. They probably have a vested interest in your believing that. Harry Frankfurt has a word for that kind of thing.

So Case Keenum's head makes very hard contact with a hard surface. Next, Keenum tries to get up, but it doesn't go very well. Somehow a teammate thinks the best thing to do for his fallen quarterback is to drag him up from the ground by his arm. A trainer comes on the field to check him out.

This was apparently a pivotal moment. Because this trainer took the field, apparently the ATC spotter for the game -- a certified trainer designated by the NFL with the authority to stop the game -- didn't do so, or at least that's what Rams coach Jeff Fisher thought. The trainer, in turn, was eventually waived off the field by an official (again, according to Fisher), leaving the quarterback in because, supposedly, he said he felt o.k. Keenum ended up staying in the game for two more ineffective plays, the second of which resulted in a fumble that gave the Ravens the ball and the chance to win the game, which they did.

OK. So if the ATC spotter and the trainer somehow got prevented from doing their work, what of the head man? Sorry, but Fisher was in "game management mode." The game was tied and late, and Fisher was apparently already on to the next play. Somehow none of the other coaches on the field managed to take note of Keenum's wobbliness. It didn't occur to any of his teammates on the field that maybe, if at the most base level, a wobbly and unsteady and possibly concussed quarterback (who was the backup QB at the start of the season, at that) might not ought to be on the field. The trainer apparently thought that a guy whose head was just slammed into the concrete was somehow capable of answering for himself coherently.

At least one person on the Rams sideline suspected something bad was up: backup quarterback Nick Foles. While probably not completely devoid of self-interest in getting up and starting to take warmup tosses, even an opportunistic Foles was aware that Keenum was not right in the head, in the most literal sense of the word.

I was in the midst of a long drive on Sunday, so my first exposure to this story was on Monday, with a few hits on ESPN and other sports media outlets and a brief "trending" moment on social media. Keenum was entered into the NFL's "concussion protocol," meaning he has to pass cognitive tests before he can return to football activities. A handful of stories and editorials popped up, expressing various levels of scorn or outrage, particularly in the St. Louis media, not surprisingly. Yesterday, you might have thought that this would be, maybe, the incident that would provoke enough outrage or scorn or some kind of emotion to force some kind of reckoning. You might have thought this would be the last straw, or something close to it.

Today? All you can hear about the NFL is about Johnny Manziel's party habits.

Seriously, go look at that page. Notice all the NFL stories queued up to the left: you have to scroll down an awfully long way to find anything about Keenum's injury and the fallout from the procedural failure.

In essence, the story has already blown over.

We may hear a little more when the NFL concludes its "investigation" (no, I don't really expect much from it, hence the scare quotes). Maybe the trainer or the ATC spotter will get some kind of  It's possible that Fisher might lose his job, although that was already a pretty strong possibility before the game. The mediocre Rams might face some sort of fine or other punishment. It's possible that local outcry in St. Louis might be more pronounced.

But really, I despair of anything changing signficantly.

Maybe if the affected quarterback was somebody more famous than Case Keenum. Would there be more reaction if it were Tom Brady's head being slammed into the concrete, or Peyton Manning's or even Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco's.

I'm beginning to wonder if even an NFL player dying right there on the field, in front of God and all the cameras, would even provoke the needed outrage any more.

So, a few points to review:

1. A player who has just taken that blow to the head is the last person who is credible to determine his own condition. Let this be clear: EVERY ATHLETE WILL LIE in that position. These people do not care about their own health and well-being at this point. I know that makes no sense. It's still true. There are sheep herders in remote Mongolia who would have been more qualified to determine Keenum's fitness for play than Keenum himself.

2. Coaches really are not going to be paying attention to the quarterback's or anybody else's immediate health when the game is on the line. To be blunt, we pay them not to pay attention to anything but getting the next play called. So they're not going to pay attention to anything but getting the next play called. Coaches simply have too much stuff in their faces in that situation. These calls cannot be left up to them.

3. If a designated spotter is going to be given authority in these situations, that authority cannot be conditional. The spotter has to be able to call the medical timeout even if a trainer is on the field. This business can't be preempted by turf wars over authority.

4. Officials need to be disciplined as well in these situations.

5. Anybody who's going to be intimidated by fans in such a situation cannot be trusted with the job. A similarly ugly situation occured in an MLS playoff match a couple of weeks ago, in which a concussed goalie was left out to dry for about five more minutes of play before finally being removed from the match when he more or less belly-flopped after a shot on goal. The goalie was on the visiting team, and the home fans did not allow for the league's protocol on head injuries to be carried out properly. That can't happen. If some means of disciplining fans becomes necessary, do it.

6. It bears repeating: EVERY ATHLETE WILL LIE in that situation. Keenum was no different than any other athlete in any other sport in that respect.

At this point, how do you, followers of Christ and fans of football, trust the NFL any more?

If you don't, what are you doing about it?

(If I sound angry...well, I am. Why aren't you?)

He's good to go.

The void

So, as you might have noticed if you have ever spent a lot of any time on this blog, there are some concerns about the long-term health effects of all those hits football players take.  And a significant part of this blog's concern is to try to determine just what the role of the fan, particularly the fan who also professes to be a follower of Christ, in responding to this sensitive issue and possibly forcing leagues or teams or programs to be accountable for how the athletes under their charge are treated. One hopes not everyone has to come to the conclusion I have reached, but the one thing on which I will insist is that, to confront this issue with anything like integrity, no options can be off the table. To presume that football must continue in basically the same form in which it currently exists -- or even that it must continue to exist at all -- is to abdicate responsibility.

With that in mind, it is challenging and a bit depressing to look into the literature in the fields of theology, Christian ethics, or pretty much anything vaguely related, and discover that ... there's not a lot out there. Not on the specific question of football brain trauma; I can of course acknowledge that it's still somewhat early in the process of understanding the issue. No, to be honest, there's not a lot out there on the general ethics of sports and injury, period, that might provide a foundation for addressing the contemporary issue.

Football, of course, has its history of fatalities in the game, well before the modern concussion-brain trauma wave with the attendant premature deaths and suicides. Things were bad enough in Teddy Roosevelt's day that he more or less called a summit to demand changes in the game to make it less fatal. Of course, at the time the fatal consequences of these injuries were much less separated from the immediate injury; players died on the field or soon afterwards from those injuries.  While that still happens even today, it is mostly restricted to high school players. Occasional debilitating injuries can happen in the NFL or NCAA, the type that result in paralysis, for example, and the occasional death resulting from practice in extreme heat (see Stringer, Korey) also occurs, although teams are at least a little quicker to recognize those hazards and act accordingly, although it doesn't necessarily happen until after a player like Stringer dies.

No, part of the challenge here is that the fatal consequences can be years separated from the immediate blow or blows that led to the brain deterioration. This opens up a more challenging ethical front to consider. However, there isn't necessarily a very strong foundation of dealing with injury and its long-term consequences from an ethical point of view.

Players in many sports have experienced injury that had adverse effect on their future health. Sometimes it was almost comical, unless you were the one suffering the effects. Legend has it (emphasis on "legend") that pitcher Carl Hubbell, one of the aces of the game back in the 1930s, had his arm so affected by his use of the screwball that in his later life his left arm hung by his side with palm facing outward, instead of inward like most folks. (No, there's no photographic evidence out there.) Football players like Earl Campbell end up in wheelchairs or walkers with raging arthritis or other physical decimation. Hall of Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas, in the years before his death in 2002, had to have both knees replaced and ended up with his once-strong right arm virtually unusable. Other such stories abound. 

You would think this might draw ethical or theological notice. Apparently not.

Leland Ryken, in his 1987 monograph Work & Leisure in Christian Perspective, wrote: 

            The criterion of physical and emotional health also sets boundaries for legitimate leisure pursuits. Some physical recreations simply have a bad track record for injuries. Boxing, professional wrestling, football, and perhaps skiing fall into this category. Devotees of such sports will not like my negative comments but the relative likelihood of injury in such sports is a moral issue.

Note that date: 1987. That's well before the broader world even began to have a clue about CTE. Give the man some credit for speaking out on the subject early, and speaking on the more general tendency for football to maim its players.

I don't know if Ryken's personal popularity or friendships took a hit after that publication, but there were not a whole lot of other authors taking up his concerns in the intervening years. Some general ethical or philosophical writing did examine sports injury generally, but mostly in the sense of its psychological impacts on the injured athletes. Some writing on pain as a component in physical training for athletes also pops up here and there, frequently in response to the kind of ecstatic embrace of pain one finds in pop-cultural consideration of athletics ("no pain, no gain") or the pain embracing biographies or autobiographies of athletes such as Lance Armstrong (although one may have to read that one a bit differently in retrospect). These ethical considerations focus on the athlete and his or her relation to pain, and largely do not deal with the fan's response or responsibility in the face of such injury.

Now, with a more insidious long-term threat having come to the fore, Christian thinkers seem to be having trouble coming to grips with it. Shirl James Hoffman, a kinesiologist who has of late in his career turned to the questions of Christian faith and sport, has touched on the issue slightly in his Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports, and Tom Krattenmaker does also in Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks Into Pulpits and Players Into Preachers. However, as you might guess from the respective titles, their primary interests are elsewhere; namely, in examining the uncomfortably close embrace of the church (its more evangelical precincts, primarily) and sports (most often football). That theologically suspect union is probably a factor in reluctance to look too closely at the brain-trauma issue, to be sure, but it is still a different subject.

On a more popular level, I can point you to two articles in The Christian Century. In one, Rodney Clapp desperately tries to reconcile his zeal for football with its more destructive contemporary results, and resorts to the hoary cliche that it's not the violence that he loves (notwithstanding the impossibility of separating whatever it is he loves about football from the violence). In the other, almost a year later, Benjamin Dueholm is somewhat more direct in facing up to what his article's subhead calls "the moral hazards of football." Even here, though, Dueholm is not strictly focused on the concussion-brain trauma issue -- he also casts a net over the then-current "bounty" scandal of the New Orleans Saints  -- but to his credit, he does cast at least some glance into the comments of early Christian writers such as Tertullian and Augustine, thus opening to a consideration of the moral hazards of entertainments not just on the on-field participants, but those in the stands as well.

So at minimum it seems safe to say there is some space for trying to look at this issue from the theological/ethical/philosophical point of view, and with the fan's particular place in the economy of injury at the forefront. In other words, I can't find a good reason to give this up.

Direct head-to-head contact. It doesn't seem to be going away, so neither can ethical inquiry...

Follow-up: That was quick...

I did not expect that.

I barely got a blog entry off on the ongoing racial tensions at the University of Missouri, and the unexpected response of many members of the football team, when dominoes started falling in shockingly quick fashion.

Monday morning, the president of the university system in Missouri -- four universities, not just the one in Columbia -- resigned. Later that same day, the chancellor of the Columbia campus announced he would be stepping down later in the year.

Also on Monday, the Mizzou graduate student who had gone on a hunger strike in protest of the administration's laggard response announced he would end that hunger strike, and the football players and team announced their return to regular practice and game schedules, which means Saturday's game at Arrowhead against BYU is no longer under threat.

Some thoughts:

1. If there was any doubt about the untapped potential for student-athletes taking action (and frankly I had plenty of doubt), this incident should put a significant dent in it. Mizzou's governing body was set for one of those lovely executive-session meetings on Monday, only to have their principal reason for it be eliminated almost at the beginning.

Even now I'm still surprised that things happened so quickly. I can't quite figure out why they did. Was it the apparent unanimity of the team (even though to the very last ESPN was desperately flogging the interview with the one anonymous white guy on the team who insisted it wasn't so)? Was it coach Gary Pinkel's public support of those players and their stand, and the possibility that any move against the players would risk a backlash? Pinkel's team hasn't had the best season this year, but (as much as it pains me to say it) he's had a good measure of success at Mizzou and probably retains enough support in the university to hold a degree of leverage.

2. In the end, was it really all (or at least significantly) about the $$$? A cancellation of that game at Arrowhead would have required Mizzou to pay a cool $1M to BYU, a little more than twice the salary of the university president. Was it simply not worth the risk?

3. It's really, really disturbing that it took the action of football players to produce any movement on such a troublesome campus situation. For one thing, not every football team on every campus is going to react in such a way. Ordinary students evidently have no recourse in such a situation.

4. There is a legitimate ethical problem with ESPN's role in such situations. That network is, across its multiple networks, probably the most prolific broadcaster of college football games. And guess what network was scheduled to televise the BYU-Mizzou game this Saturday? The SEC Network, a subsidiary of ... ESPN. You'll never be able to draw a line between that fact and, say, ESPN.com's insistence on flogging that anonymous interview. You (or ESPN) will also will never be able to disprove the existence of such a connection, and the smell of such conflict of interest is going to linger.

5. This situation seems to have gone much more successfully for the Mizzou players than for those NFL players -- members of the St. Louis Rams, for example -- who used their moments on entering the field to show support for the community of Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the violence erupting in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown.

At any rate, I'm relieved of the need to watch a football game, at least, and especially a Mizzou game. But the ramifications of this event are going to be interesting to see in the future.

What next?

Watch Mizzou

One of my varied sports tribalisms got highly stimulated a week ago tonight. The Kansas City Royals won the World Series. I didn't even realize I was of that tribe (despite having lived in Kansas for four years up to 2011) until last season's playoffs, and particularly the heartbreaking end to that season. All props to the team for simply bouncing back and finishing the job this season.

Another of my sports tribalisms also dating to that period of my life, and more particularly my employment while there, is to root for any Kansas Jayhawks team. I don't watch football, as I've made painfully clear, but any other team -- baseball, soccer, volleyball, and of course basketball -- I'll get all up for, even against teams I'd otherwise like. And with sporting tribalisms comes not only being aligned with your team, but also being aligned against their rivals, or "enemies" if you want to push things.

Therefore, I have a great deal of antipathy towards the University of Missouri Tigers. Kansas and Missouri hold the bitterest (and that really is the best word, if possibly a little weak, to describe the relationship) rivalry between schools whose teams really don't play each other any more. (That's a whole other story, too long to relate here.)

That said, I really have to watch Missouri's football team this week. Possibly even literally, despite the afore-linked practice of not watching football.

At least thirty-two members of Missouri's football team have gone on strike. This has nothing to do with the effort to unionize college athletes that flared up at Northwestern recently; in this case, the players are on strike until, according to some reports, the university's president resigns.

You can read any of the linked articles for more on the background of racist incidents at the university that have led up to this decision. At this point the situation is such that one Mizzou student, Jonathan Butler, has gone on a hunger strike towards the same ends.

This has the potential to be a fascinating situation.

After all, thirty-two players does not a football team make, but it does make up a pretty good chunk of a college roster. How does the team react?

As a result, it is of particular interest to see this report, on ESPN.com, in which Mizzou's coach Gary Pinkel is quoted prominently. Earlier versions of the story were ambiguous as to Pinkel's intent in stating that:

Later versions of the ESPN story, as linked above, elaborate. The team did not practice today, and is unlikely to practice again, until Butler's hunger strike is over. Pinkel and Mizzou's athletic director Mack Rhoades issued that statement, although in this case the players are described as unlikely to return to practice before Butler resumes taking food. Pinkel never came off as a particularly enlightened individual (but that could just be my Jayhawk tribalism talking), but at least for the moment he seems to be behind his players, even if they are potentially creating an explosive situation for the team and university.

Of course, that unity is apparently not as solid as Pinkel might suggest, and even his apparent support for those players is being undermined -- anonymously, of course.

All sorts of questions come to the fore, then. Even if Pinkel continues to support his striking players publicly, how are Mizzou fans (not to mention those disunited players) going to react? Even the most enlightened of college football fans tend to be a little bit bonkers where the interruption of their sacred Saturday rituals is concerned. How do they react if or when their team shows up for Saturday with a reduced roster, or doesn't show up at all? This Saturday the team is scheduled to play against BYU in Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium, a game probably intended to make up for the old Kansas-Mizzou game that used to be played there; it's meant to be a big-numbers money game and to try to keep Mizzou a toehold in KC, which somewhat leans towards KU in its affections. University officials are gonna be ticked if this game goes down in flames (of course the university's top official is the one at the center of the controversy), and the folks who run Arrowhead probably won't be thrilled either. 

Though playing out-of-conference this weekend, Missouri is a member of the Southeastern Conference. It's a relatively new member, only having bolted from the Big 12 in 2011 or so. How likely is its new home conference to be happy with this situation? This is a conference that has its own race issues in some of its schools, and even the most stalwart self-described progressives can be made to look supremely silly and dependent when it comes to their college football passions. How will a conference -- and yes, this conference in particular (deal with it, people) -- respond if the players' stand ends up disrupting the conference's sacred Saturday rituals?

Hopefully the situation is resolved, with Butler able to take meals, the players able to play, some measure of justice done, and me able to avoid watching as usual. The issues boiling at Missouri are far more important than a football game, but I wonder how many people who plan to be at Arrowhead Saturday actually get that. 

For me, of course, there's another angle at play. If blatant racial bigotry isn't enough to convince otherwise intelligent and justice-loving folk that a football game isn't the end-all and be-all of their weekend, then I have very little hope of ever making headway in getting such intelligent and life-loving folk to consider that their sacred Saturday rituals may need some modification to keep from causing the brain trauma that keeps showing up posthumously in football players, even those who never get near the NFL. 

But damn, that tribalism is fierce. And to be crass, it's quite capable of making otherwise intelligent and learned and thoughtful people act very stupid, or at least quite against their declared interests. We anoint ourselves "(fill-in-the-blank) Nation." We say things like "we won," when we never got anywhere the field or court or rink, and would quite likely be dead or maimed if we did. And once we get swept up in or even addicted to that sensation, that powerful or even primitive tribal bond, how much chance do we have of stepping back and assessing and acting on our allegiance logically, or (more to the point) transcending that allegiance if need be when justice or lives or real life are at stake?  Can we? Will we?

Mind you, Mizzou is hardly alone in this...

As long as that is so, I wonder if Missouri's striking football players have any chance at all. Or any university's unknowing brain-trauma victims, for that matter.

Do a city's sports franchises troll each other?

So vacations and other travel have disrupted the accustomed writing schedule for this blog. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. 

In this case, one part of this most recent vacation travel offered me an opportunity to follow up on something that received comment in this blog some time ago. Yes, I got to take a peek at the site where the Atlanta Braves' new stadium (already named SunTrust Park, which I suppose means the bank is ponying up the dough for naming rights at first at least) is being built.

It is in Cobb County, outside (by its own fierce declaration) of Atlanta, wedged into a parcel near where I-75 and I-285 meet. It's not too hard to find, although it's not exactly a direct shot from either freeway.

I even took a few pictures:

A few off-the-cuff observations:

Some of the features suggest the new park will have a lot in common with the team's current home, Turner Field (p.k.a. Olympic Stadium, remember?). Still plenty of time for the look to turn out quite differently, of course. And I have no idea where they're going to put parking. You can see that's not exactly a major thoroughfare running by the site either.

Just for funsies, a few pictures from the decrepit stadium, and the interminable walk thereunto from MARTA:

So anyway, nothing about the views above did much of anything to change the opinions expressed in the earlier blog. The location is going to be a logistical nightmare of vehicles, probably lacking sufficient parking (and of course nobody is going to be taking MARTA to the game, not if Cobb County has anything to do with it). It will be a plague environmentally, not only because of all those cars but also because a spot that actually managed to have some green space to it isn't going to have any green space anymore. Those two freeways are going to be pretty severe before and after games, as if they aren't -- ahem -- challenging already. Some of the secondary roads in the immediate area are either going to have to be expanded dramatically or get overwhelmed dramatically.

What was interesting, though, was a series of billboards seen around Atlanta, including very near the Braves' stadium site. They were promoting one of the other sports franchises in the city, the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks have already appeared in this space before, first a little more than a year ago in the wake of a racially-charged scandal in the team's front office, and more recently (and more briefly) in the wake of Thabo Sefolosha's acquittal in New York City. In between the team had an interesting and surprising season, by far their most successful ever, before falling in the playoffs (at least to some small degree affected by Sefolosha's absence due to that broken leg). 

Their season is just underway, of course, and they're off to a decent start. What I found interesting, though, was the slogan they chose to promote themselves in and around Atlanta, including even that billboard near the new Braves' stadium:

TRUE TO ATLANTA

OK, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but are the Hawks throwing shade at the Braves?

I mean, is somebody not being true to Atlanta?

So this slogan apparently dates to last year, in the midst of the scandal and renaissance season, and appears to be continuing into this year (or at minimum nobody's taking down the billboards). As the letter notes, the franchise also endeavored to get into bridge-building and greater community involvement, as well as, you know, being a good team. Given the long-term mediocrity in which the Hawks had been mired, one doesn't necessarily have to read the slogan as shading others. But to brand yourself as being "True to Atlanta" is hard not to read as suggesting that somebody else is being untrue to Atlanta, particularly when nestled up next to the suburban stadium one of the other franchises is building in their re-enactment of 70's-era white flight. 

Perhaps my sensitivites are more acute on such a subject in the wake of the announcement of the team seeking to become Atlanta's fourth major-league franchise, in Major League Soccer. 

MLS franchises have taken to being extremely responsive to their fan bases, regarded as a necessity in building a franchise in a far less extravagantly funded league than the longtime four major sports leagues in this country. In the case of the Atlanta MLS franchise that included actually leaving the naming of the franchise up to that fan base (via surveys and focus groups). The name chosen by the fans was...

Atlanta United FC.

In case you don't follow soccer all that closely, this is a bit like an NCAA athletic program choosing the name Bulldogs, Eagles, Tigers, or Wildcats. It's rather common. It's a formula used by a lot of programs around the world, from the lofty Manchester United Football Club to any number of other lower-level clubs. Even in MLS this will be the third team to use the "United" label, after currently-existing DC United and fellow expansion club Minnesota United FC (which is currently playing in the second division NASL and due to move up at the same time as Atlanta United FC or soon after). Across the four divisions of US soccer, Atlanta will be the twentieth team to use "United" as the predominant element in its name.

So, why so formulaic a name?

At least some fans responded with a fairly literal read of the name; Atlanta as a city that needs uniting. And at least one fan cited the aforementioned "True to Atlanta" slogan as an example. (The team itself puts forth its explanation here.)

Uniting a city is a pretty tall order for a sports franchise, even if is a lofty and noble idea. Sports fandom, though, is by its nature tribal, and tribal things have a pretty strong tendency to be at least as exclusive as inclusive. Since in most cases there's only one franchise per city for each sport (cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago being exceptions sometimes), that isn't necessarily as prominent a problem (collegiate affinities, on the other hand...). But it can still touch off some identity politics among fan bases that may or may not overlap. 

If the Braves weren't decamping to the 'burbs (and to those particular 'burbs) none of this would be remotely noteworthy. But they are. And that two of the city's other franchises are at the same time seeking to tie themselves ever more closely to the city that the Braves have evacuated feels like something is going on. I don't live in Atlanta and don't plan to anytime soon or ever, and aside from occasional interest in the Hawks I don't follow the city's teams (and no, I won't be jumping ship to Atlanta United FC; Sporting KC is still my team, even from half a country away). But I can't help but  wish that the baseball team would have to call itself the Cobb County Braves (but that's just me being contrary; I hate the Angels using the city name of Los Angeles too), and I can't help but wonder how this stew of loyalties and identities is going to play out, and just how much some of these franchises are going to be able to keep their promises.