Rant: once more, with feeling, it's not just concussions!

I promise this one isn't from The Onion, although I couldn't blame you if you doubted me.

One Michael Turner, medical director of the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation, is going to get a nice piece of change to fund his research on concussions across four sports prone to them: American football, ice hockey, Australian rules football, and horse racing (the latter being Turner's own principal field).

This is actually a pretty sound idea. Comparison across different sports makes plenty of sense, if you do it right.

So why am invoking a notorious satire site as a lead-in to this blog entry?

Turner, you see, has some pretty ... ah, interesting ideas about What's Really Going On.

Based on his experience with those jockeys, he's pretty sure all the "media hype" on the subject is out of line, because:

I don't think my jockeys end up all dribbling and demented, and we have good reason to suspect that.

Nice.

Turner is also quite willing to offer up another theory on how the post-football-career issues with mental health happen:

Also when athletes retire they are at a very critical period in their lives. Prior to that they were well-known they might have been famous and earning quite a lot of money and suddenly, they have very little status, nobody knows who they are, they don't have somewhere to go to work and I think that transition can be badly handled by lots of sports.

 Yeah, we never remember sports heroes of the past.

Oh, and:

You never hear that discussion among professional athletes or student athletes when they have finished competing and what we find out is that people who have pre-injury had mood disorders or depression do worse than those who don't...

So the likes of Junior Seau or Dave Duerson had mood disorders before they ever got their bells rung on the football field, most likely. Or something like that.

In short, the NFL is throwing a chunk of money (minuscule, in comparison to its profits, but still) at some classic denialism "research." The kind of stuff the tobacco industry threw out there for decades, and that the fossil fuel industry has been funding for decades even as they knew damn well what was going to happen if we kept burning their product.

In short, the NFL wants to keep you from thinking clearly on the subject. Even as they make public pronouncements about how much they care about the health of those who play in the league, they will do their damnedest to distract you from the very idea that playing the game might be even the least bit dangerous. And as you remain sufficiently distracted, they can keep on pursuing pet projects like expanding their schedule to eighteen games per season, playing games on Thursday nights, and ohter measures that are completely at odds with any kind of concern for player health (concussions or otherwise).

And, as long as you continue to watch and spend money on NFL products, they will be quite happy to pursue obfuscation rather than genuine research.

For example: they would rather you keep thinking about concussions, damaging as they are, without ever comprehending the degree to which repeated subconcussive hits are implicated in the long-term brain traumas that have galvanized public attention. Concussions, bad as they are, sound like a solvable problem. When you start considering the degree to which any hit you see at the line of scrimmage or downfield, the type from which the player hit hops up and shows no sign of undue injury, actually may well be contributing to a raging case of CTE down the road...then that becomes a problem with the fundamental nature of the game and the way it's played. The NFL would rather you not think about that. So they're quite happy to throw money at a jockey doctor who will say what they want you to hear, such as:

Whether you're knocked out or you have a concussion from falling off a horse or being a linebacker or whether you're playing Aussie rules football -- it's all the same.

Interesting. I was unaware that jockeys were getting hit that frequently between falls.

Meanwhile, don't think I'm giving the NCAA a pass. They're even happier to let the NFL take all the public scrutiny and pay for the research, as long as you still pony up for season tickets to see your Dear Old Alma Mater serve as the NFL's farm system, any ethical concerns that you might see in any other situation overwhelmed by your tribal loyalties.

 Have a nice weekend. Enjoy the games.

Poor Tom Crabtree (@itsCrab, formerly of the Packers)

An aside: how do we care about athletes?

Having started to put together some of the more basic questions about watching football in the previous two posts, this moment might be useful for an aside on a subject that is pretty important to this whole enterprise, but which is asked amazingly seldom.

What do we actually think of athletes?

To be more precise, do we, in the theological, agape sense of the word, love athletes?

Do they get to be full-fledged people, children of God, in our eyes?

Some qualifications:

I am limiting, for now, this discussion to professional athletes in team sports. Of course this is not to suggest somehow that college athletes are unimportant (leaving aside the question of collegiate athletes in certain sports as 'amateur'), or that Serena Williams or Usain Bolt are undeserving of Christian love. Rather, I suspect that the dynamics of fan relationships with those classes of athletes are different. One's affection for Serena is a lot less guided by the clothes she wears while on the court (it's possible to have an opinion about them but that's another issue). But as Jerry Seinfeld notes, our opinion of or affection for a baseball player, for example, is highly conditioned by what he's wearing on the field. College athletes, particularly in the high-revenue sports such as football or basketball, come closer to having the same issues as the pro team-sports players, but for now I'm going to hold that the professional/amateur divide still matters. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future.

I am also aware that in most cases we don't know the athletes personally. We are, however, called to live in Christian love towards people we don't know personally on a regular basis. To be precise, we can't use that as an excuse to withhold love from anybody; presumably that includes athletes.

I ask the question because it's inescapable, when deciding whether a Christian ethical case for watching football as it stands is currently possible. We are charged with approaching all persons, near or far, from a viewpoint of basic Christian relationship. A minimum requirement of this is recognizing a full measure of human worth in each person.

Do we really do with this with athletes? Or does the way we watch games hinder our ability or willingness to see the athletes we watch as fully human?

I dare say most of us would not willingly claim to see the players on the field as anything less than full human beings. I question, though, whether the particular nature of fandom or rooting for teams diminishes that capacity in us more than we realize. Seinfeld's comedic riff above (made famous in another setting as "rooting for laundry") isn't completely off-target here. The same player we root for passionately as long as he's wearing the home team's jersey becomes an object of derision when he gets traded or -- especially -- if he leaves as a free agent.

But our affection for the players who wear our laundry is also changeable, violently so at times. The player who makes a critical error and has 50,000 people suddenly booing him relentlessly probably isn't feeling his full human worth at that moment. The more excessive, depraved fan might continue to hound that player well beyond the rational sell-by date for such rage, but even the fan who has the more sane position of moving on from such moments probably doesn't quite completely get over that moment of anguished fanhood.

This is important to note: the question here is not about the deranged lunatics who hound athletes on Twitter or poison the comment sections of online articles with their poisonous bile. This is about us. Are we capable, short of some sort of tragic off-field circumstance, to see those gladiators of the gridiron or mid-court magicians humanly? Or does the apparatus of fandom prevent us from doing so?

Being able to step away from the passions of the game, to turn away from the cheering and booing and highs and lows of the game and to regard these athletes as human beings first and foremost is an essential and unavoidable step in deciding whether or not to participate in a game system that is, at least for some number of those players, causing irreparable damage that will impede their future lives, if not cut them short altogether.

But sometimes I fear we don't manage to see these players as human beings even off the field or court or rink or pitch. It sure doesn't seem as if sports fans were prepared to see the Atlanta Hawks' Thabo Sefolosha as a person stopping to give money to a homeless man instead of a thug who got what he deserved from New York City police (although a jury evidently decided that they could see him this way after all), much less as a person who deserved his day in court to speak in his own defense. Were people not properly guided by the sports media that so dictates our view of athletes? Or did such an athlete, a depth player on a less-heralded team (albeit one that had its own experience with racial insensitivity barely twelve months ago), simply not matter enough to draw the attention of the sports-fan masses?

Fans haven't seem inclined to cut Matt Harvey a break either, and all he did was care about whether he'd be able to pitch again in the future. He was judged insufficiently loyal to his jersey for being uncertain about how to proceed, when caught between two parties -- the New York Mets and his agent, Scott Boras -- neither of whom has his interests principally at heart. Some of the things written about Harvey (who is pitching after all, and won the first game of the National League Championship Series last night), by supposedly respectable national sports columnists, would make the most vicious political commentators blush with shame. They were vile, as if Harvey were some sort of subhuman beast of burden to be abused as necessary for the unthinking satisfaction of Mets fans. Playoff success has probably bought Harvey a repreive, but he most likely gets thrown under the bus again as soon as he gets knocked around in a key game, or gets pulled early only to have the team lose.

Our heated rooting for our preferred laundry does not allow for complexity; the player must serve our interests at all costs, and failure to do so is cause for condemnation or personal destruction. Even successfully serving those fans, however, doesn't always cause those fans to embrace those athletes as fully human. Idolization is no less a form of dehumanization than abuse or personal destruction.

Can we see the athlete as a human being? Or does our zealotry for the games they play blind us to seeing and embracing them as human beings and exercising fully human concern for their well-being and health?

A former seminary classmate and (I hope) good friend of mine wrote in a sermon recently that:

First Corinthians 13 ought to encourage us to step back from even our most cherished and fiery opinions, rants, ways of being, and ask "Why am I doing this?" If I cannot honestly say, "I am doing this for love and in love," then the legitimacy of my whole enterprise must come under serious doubt.

How much of what we do and say in the thrall of sports fandom would actually pass such a rubric is probably chillingly small. When participation in a game becomes a far more literal matter of life and death than we are accustomed to acknowledging, even if the life-and-death result plays out only years later, our normal ways of relating to athletes cannot stand. They must be human beings first and foremost. We cannot ethically or faithfully do any less.

Thabo Sefolosha and Matt Harvey: human beings

Brain and body, continued: invisible costs

The previous post on this blog opened up the issue of the differing kinds of injuries in football and the degree to which one (physical, bodily injuries long common to football) or the other (concussions and sub-concussive trauma to the brain) could be deemed worse from an ethical or experiential perspective.

There is another perspective to this question, one which can complicate the fan's ability to make sense of this issue in weighing participation in football as a fan or consumer.*

*I'm trying to address two different dimensions of the experience of following football (or any sport): the emotional allegiance one pays to team or player, and the economic contribution to that team or player via purchasing tickets or souvenirs associated with them.

Bodily injuries, like those suffered by Jamaal Charles of the Kansas City Chiefs or Nick Chubb of the Georgia Bulldogs this weekend, can usually be spotted in real time. A player gets hit. Possibly the player doesn't get up, or does so gingerly, or is perhaps holding leg or arm or whatever part has been hurt. Or possibly the player continues in the game, but is noticeably impaired in doing so -- can't plant on that foot, or arm can't make the throws anymore. It isn't always that obvious, but that injury to some body part is likely to be noticeable in some way. The severity of the injury may not be clear until later, beyond "he's not coming back," but that there is an injury is usually noticeable to any fan paying more than minimal attention.

Some kinds of injuries to the head are also immediately noticeable. A whole bunch of Michigan Wolverines fans, and a decent-sized television audience, picked up pretty quickly that Michigan quarterback Shane Morris was not right in the head after a helmet-first hit against Minnesota last fall. Both the NFL and NCAA have instituted concussion protocols in an attempt to avoid compounding one damaging hit with another, but as the video included in the Morris story demonstrates, a player who is bound and determined to re-enter the game despite "having his bell rung," i.e. the least qualified persion in the entire stadium to determine his fitness to play, can get away from distracted coaches and medical personnel who carry little authority as far as players (and sometimes coaches) are concerned. Nonetheless, at least there are now procedures in place to address blows to the head and their immediate impact, which has not been the case for most of the game's history. (For what it's worth, multiple sports now employ some version of these protocols, with soccer, interestingly enough, being the laggard in this regard.)

However, concussions are not the end of the story.

It is clear from the research that is starting to accumulate on the subject, hits that directly cause concussions are not the only hits that contribute to long-term brain debilitation such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Note here a study pointing to evidence of blood-brain barrier disruption (BBBD), leading to an autoimmune response potentially associated with brain damage (this link offers slightly more accessible language, and this one a somewhat more detailed description of the research), in college football players who did not suffer concussions.

In short, an awful lot of hits that are causing this accumulation of brain trauma can't be identified in real time. They look like normal hits, because they are normal hits. You are probably seeing them happen in any game you watch and have no idea. It's this kind of thing that has caused the NFL to admit in court documents that they project that one in three NFL players to suffer some kind of long-term debilitating brain trauma. Rounding down, that's seven of the twenty-two players on the field at any given time, more or less (punters and kickers are probably not among the high-risk members of the population, granted).

Adding to the insidous nature of this ethical question is that no two players seem to be affected the same way. Obviously some players have managed to have substantial college and pro football careers and not end up on a morgue for brain analysis. Why? And will we ever be able to know why?

The point is: the injuries that lead to these cases of long-term brain trauma aren't necessarily obvious or even visible to you, the fan, over the course of a game. And the game itself very much depends on exactly those hits for its appeal and its very substance.

It's impossible to avoid quoting Paul Stone, author of the article linked from traumaticbraininjury.net above, to frame one of the most disturbing elements of this situation:

The injuries are practically invisible, egos and career stability often keep players from reporting their own injuries, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy is being found in more and more players. How is the sport supposed to fight hits that are fundamental to the sport?

How, indeed?

In short, it is not possbile to walk away from a football game, on the collegiate or professional levels at minimum, knowing that you didn't see any hits or plays that contributed to some player's potential future CTE-induced suicide. You can't know.

At least at this stage of football, such realization must be part of the equation in considering your participation in football as fan or consumer.

Image: stopCTE.org

Difference of degree, difference of kind

There have apparently been some gruesome injuries on the gridiron this weekend. Nick Chubb, running back for the Georgia Bulldogs, suffered a severe knee injury in yesterday's game against the Tennessee Volunteers. Today, Kansas City Chiefs running back Jamaal Charles suffered a similarly severe injury in their game against the Chicago Bears.

Injury of this sort is commonplace in both the NFL and NCAA. That sounds callous to say, but it's nothing but true. Torn ACLs or PCLs are to football players, running backs in particular, what torn rotator cuffs are to baseball pitchers. Every year, somebody, and probably even somebody pretty well-known, is going to suffer one.

That football has been a sport that causes injury is not particularly new. It has been an injurious sport ever since it was invented. There was a time when death on the gridiron was common enough to provoke President Theodore Roosevelt to intervene to have the sport fixed (and not just among high school players, as it seems today -- speaking of which, two more high school players have died since Evan Murray's highly publicized death). Radical steps were taken to make the sport less immediately destructive, including a crazy change to the game that many thought would change the game's essential character; the forward pass. And the game, while still incredibly violent and injurious, at least didn't kill its players, or at least not as often.

The injuries sustained by football players can have lifelong effects. This is not merely true in football; one only needs to think about the stereotype of the hockey player with missing teeth. Baseball pitches who suffer arm injuries can have difficulty using the injured arm for the rest of their lives. One bit of lore about Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell, he of possibly most proficient screwball in MLB history, was that his left arm, for the rest of his life, hung from his shoulder in a permanently twisted position, so that the palm of his hand faced outward instead of inward due to the frequency with which he threw that pitch, one which required violent torque on the arm to achieve the desired break.

As the earliest reports began to surface of suicides of players such as Mike Webster, Justin Strelczyk, Terry Long, and Andre Waters and the subsequent discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in posthumous examinations, reactions among players, coaches, and fans was largely couched in this long history of injury in football. A typical line of response might be "well, they knew what they were getting into; football players get hurt." This reaction obscured the degree to which this type of injury was in fact not widely reported or expected among football players or coaches prior to the diagnosis of Mike Webster in 2002, though players such as wide receiver Al Toon and quarterback Steve Young were forced to give up their NFL careers due to repeated concussions (in 1992 and 1999, respectively).

As the number of reported deaths from CTE conditions has risen, and more former players have come forward with their accounts of illness and debilitation due to brain trauma, the game and its adherents are forced to confront a basic ethical question, one which I pose to you five or ten readers of this blog:

Is there a difference, in degree or in kind, between the physical, bodily injuries long associated with football and the brain injuries that are being more commonly reported in the last two decades? And how should such a difference be weighed by the fan considering his or her continuing participation in football as spectator or consumer?

For now I don't intend to address the question of the ethical coherence of accepting football's long history of bodily injury. I don't necessarily mean to suggest that there was or is nothing problematic about such history and fan acquiescence to it, but it is largely a done deal, for good or ill. My intent here is to question whether that acquiescence, that more or less numb acceptance of the physical toll that many (not all) players paid for their participation in the game, should apply to the emerging toll on many (not all) players in terms of mental debilitation, memory loss, neurological disorders, and suicides related to or triggered by these impairments and brain injuries.

(Here I am forced to repeat a proposition that underlies any of my questioning on this subject: namely, the attitudes of persons involved in the sport is irrelevant to the fan's ethical considerations of their participation in football as spectator or consumer. Just because Chris Conte has declared himself willing to be mentally broken as long as he can continue to hit people doesn't give you the fan to indulge him in his game of Russian roulette with his long-term health.)

For now, the question is: is this kind of long-term mental debilitation worse than the familiar physical debilitation long attributed to football?

One can make a start on such a question by applying such considerations to one's own life, even if you've never played football. For a basic entry into the question, ask yourself: would I rather suffer debilitating bodily injury, such as might impair my ability to walk, or Alzheimer's disease?

The analogy isn't perfect, by any means; one presumes that playing football has its rewards as well as its injuries, otherwise fewer people would do so. Those rewards, though they may seem slight to a non-player when compared to the long-term debilitation some players suffer, are inevitably going to be part of the equation for players. While the player's rewards or pleasures probably do not ultimately factor into the fan's consideration of participation in football, they do matter to the player, and will have to be understood at least to some degree when observing the system and drawing ethical conclusions about it. The fan doesn't experience those pleasures (the fan experiences different pleasures from the game, which will be considered in this blog in the future), but the fan needs to understand them nonetheless in considering the system.

Let's be blunt; either extreme can be horrifying. One thinks of persons stricken with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), whose bodies can be virtually paralyzed or worse while brain function is unimpaired. However, most bodily injuries suffered by football players do not quite approach this level of debilitation. Earl Campbell, the longtime running back of the Houston Oilers, may have to use a walker or wheelchair, but he also still manages to continue in his business interests, whereas CTE victims such as Dave Duerson found their impairments interfering with their post-football careers.

Let that be a starting point in your consideration. I freely confess that I fall into the camp that would say, "do with my body what you will, but do not touch my mind." And that inevitably weighs into how I will view this particular ethical question.

(To be continued...)

Earl Campbell, now 60, requires a wheelchair or walker. 

On the other hand, he is still alive.

Sending a message, changing a culture?

Question: aside from football, what team sport with a significant fan following in North America is most characterized by violence as a regular component of play?

Unless you're obsessed with the occasional beanbrawl on the baseball diamond, your most likely answer is hockey. (Remember, soccer's violence mostly takes place in the stands or outside the stadium.)

The news from the National Hockey League this week points to something about that league, a league which seems to be trying to clean up its image for on-ice violence.

Full disclosure: this is the observation of a non-follower of the sport. Aside from a brief period while living in Tallahassee while it had a minor-league hockey team, I've never watched or followed the sport closely, so all I really have to go on is news and reputation.

And aside from football, hockey has been the sport most directly affected by the elevated awareness of the destructive long-term effects of concussions and subconcussive head trauma. It has its own lawsuit by former players against the league. Major stars in the league, such as Eric Lindros, Sidney Crosby, and others, have missed substantial time due to the effects of concussions. A handful of high-profile former players, such as Bob Probert, Reggie Fleming, Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, and Rick Martin, were found to show evidence of CTE or other degenerative brain disorders upon posthumous examination. While Probert, Fleming, Boogaard, Rypien, and Belak were known "enforcers," players whose main role on their team was to get in on-ice fights, Martin was not a fighter.

That role, the "enforcer," seems to be on the wane in the NHL, possibly in part due to these results but also because of teams' reluctance to devote a roster spot to a player with very limited skills. This makes the news of a 41-game suspension for San Jose Sharks player Raffi Torres stand out in sharper relief.

Torres's most recent suspension was issued for an illegal hit during an exhibition game Saturday night against the Anaheim Mighty Ducks. In the first period of that contest, Torres delivered a blow to the head of Anaheim's Jakob Silfverberg. The hit was deemed illegal for being targeted at the head, as well as being late (after Silfverberg had given up control of the puck). Silverberg had to be removed from the game, and Torres was ejected.

You will notice the words "most recent" in that previous paragraph. In his career Torres has been suspended at least four times, with the longest being a 21-game suspension issued for a hit during the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2012. This most recent suspension means (unless successfully appealed) that Torres will miss half of the 2015 regular season.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this story is the largely one-sided reaction in the hockey world, in support of the suspension. (I'm sure there are plenty of troglodytes suggesting that players should wear skirts on the ice or some other such subhuman drivel, but for the most part they're not getting a lot of ink, or at least not enough to reach outside the diehard hockey world.) Fairly typical are these reactions from ESPN.com and The Hockey News, arguing (with differing degrees of sympathy for Torres) tha the long suspension was absolutely necessary. While in the former article Scott Burnside more or less hopes Torres never returns to the ice, Matt Baker suggests in the latter piece that Torres's coaches and the members of the leagues Department of Player Safety believe that Torres genuinely wants to stop delivering such illegal hits. Having played the game since youth, however, and having been taught over many years how to deliver a check, Torres (who apparently has legitimate hockey skills and is a capable goal-scorer) is facing a struggle to overcome years and years of muscle memory.

Aye, there's the rub. Unlearning, or relearning, how to play the game is a root issue, is it not? If Torres is struggling to learn how to check his opponent without drilling him in the head, how many football linemen or linebackers have faced the challenge of learning not to lead with the helmet, to "stick your head in there" to dislodge the ball or make the tackle? How many hits still end up leading with the helmet? And how many such hits go unpunished?

I also find it noteworthy that the director of that department that issued Torres's suspension is a former player, and a good one at that. Brendan Shanahan also identifies himself as someone who doesn't have to be told that hits to the head do damage, even if that puts him at odds with others in his sport.

Hockey actually seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence of popularity in recent years, with some popular stars and a series of outdoor contests that have proven highly popular and even capable of solid television ratings--always a struggle in this sport. While it is currently struggling with an ongoing investigation into assault charges against Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks, the sport overall seems to be doing better than it has in a while. If it can address these particularly damaging hits as it seems to be doing in the case of Torres, and do so without jeopardizing its resurgence, it seems that the NFL, more popular and successful by several orders of magnitude, should be able to address the on-field behaviors that are most tied to concussions and subconcussive brain trauma. The same would seem to apply for the NCAA in college football.

If this turns out not to be the case, one wonders what that says about the culture of football, or the culture of America for that matter.

Torres is, as you might suspect, the one still standing.

Walking away or self-justification?

For some reason, Charles Pierce decided to take a shot at Ta-Neishi Coates last week. It was a stupid thing to do.

About three years ago, in the wake of the death of Junior Seau, Coates, in one of his contributions to The Atlantic, allowed himself to reel from the news in print. After immediate reactions to the news and to some of the reactions to the suicide (as it was eventually ruled), he put forth a startling declaration:

I know now that I have to go. I have known it for a while now. But I have yet to walk away. For me, the hardest portion is living apart -- destroying something that binds me to friends and family. With people with whom I would not pass another words [sic], I could discuss the greatest running back of all time. It's like losing a language.

Coates also disavowed any intention to "force his morality" on anyone else:

I'm not here to dictate other people's morality. I'm certainly not here to call for banning of the risky activities of consenting adults.  And my moral calculus is my own. Surely it is a man's right to endanger his body, and just as it is my right to decline to watch. The actions of everyone in between are not my consideration.

One brief followup on the Seau story followed in 2012, and a larger consideration of the broader issue appeared last fall, prompted at least in part by the case of John Abraham, lineman for the Arizona Cardinals who ended up missing all but one game last season due to concussion symptoms, including memory loss. At the time there were reports that Abraham might return to the team, prompting Coates's reaction. (Abraham did not play again in 2014 and so far does not appear to have played this season, though I've found no formal announcement of his retirement, or indeed any further news of his condition.)

Coates, reflecting his own "mix of spirituality and atheism," moves further to reflect on the body more generally, not specifically on the brain and football's damage to it -- given the acknowledged history of injury in football as a consistent, if not deliberate, part of the game.

I've not seen any indication of Coates returning to the issue in print since that last column in The Atlantic. I could, of course, be wrong. Pierce, however, seems to have a long memory, and maybe hold a grudge a little.

Even at his best Pierce is an ass, a little bit at least. Beyond his more general commentary, Pierce also writes about sports with some regularity, in recent years for the ESPN-affiliated site Grantland, Bill Simmons's last legacy with that media empire. At times his sports commentary seems even more inflated with his signature mix of rapier-sharp rhetoric and self-righteous dudgeon than his general commentary. That mix was at full boil in Pierce's Grantland commentary on the death of Evan Murray. (Murray, you'll remember, is the New Jersey high school quarterback who died of a lacerated spleen after a hit in a game on September 25, the fourth such death related to football this season.)

Unlike Coates, Pierce is quite ready to legislate against football, at least for anybody (or any body) under the age of 21. (Yes, he actually says that nobody under age 21 should be allowed to play football.) He manages to invoke both Teddy Roosevelt's "cleaning up" football back in the early twentieth century and the old gladiatorial games.

But then he just gets stupid.

Let us be plain. For the moment, anyone who writes about American sports who chooses to boycott American football [note: that last phrase carries a hyperlink to Coates's most recent column in Pierce's entry] because of the inherent and inevitable damage to the individuals who play the game is doing only half their job. 

Say what?

Later:

To cover American sports while boycotting football is to make a conscious choice to ignore the most garish form of the basic commodification of human beings that is fundamental to all of the games.

Really? How in the hell do you get to that conclusion, Mr. Pierce?

Coates, for his part, acknowledges that he continues to follow the issues around football. I'm not sure that his comments (sporadic that they are) are any less on point for not actually watching the gladiatorial spectacle, which Pierce seems to think is a sine qua non for being able to bear witness to the crisis. At this point Pierce (pardon my French, coming up) is engaging in the kind of self-justifying bullshit that briefly got Harry Frankfurt on the late-night talk-show circuit a few years ago.

Unlike Coates, for whom sports comment is a minor part of his output, Pierce is deeply invested in writing about sports, and was before his current Grantland gig. Were Pierce to follow through on what I can only assume are his genuine and deeply felt opinions about football in its current state, he'd have to give up a significant and presumably lucrative part of his career. And football, for all its moral conundrums at this point in its history, is still by far the most lucrative thing for even an occasional writer on sports to cover. After all, more people watch it than any other sport in this country, and those who watch it tend to consume it voraciously. Anything about football -- particularly such juicy bits as Deflategate and Spygate (both of which conveniently sit within Pierce's New England/Northeast orbit) will get eyeballs galore.

From here, Pierce looks like a man in a severe crisis of conscience, looking for any way to justify ogling the deadly spectacle even as he knows he is complicit in it by doing so. By zooming on the youthful Murray and his fellow high-school fatalities, he believes he has his out: the sport kills children, so don't let children play it -- but we must continue to watch the adults beat themselves literally senseless.

Of course, Ta-Neishi Coates doesn't really need a nobody like me to defend him. And Charles Pierce doesn't really care what a nobody like me says. And of course, the real reason I had to write about this tonight, even way too late, is because the person being attacked here, even if unintentionally or in ignorance, is me.

I am, after all, a person who presumes to write about sports, even if all of about twenty people ever read it. And I do so, by my own admission, while no longer watching football on any level. The oddity is, of course, that in order to do so, I probably follow football more closely, in a backwards way, than a lot of people who actually watch the game. In the process of casting my nets wide to gather as much information as possible, I end up knowing way more about football than I would normally choose.

Part of the difference between myself and Coates or Pierce (about whose religious beliefs I have no clue) is that I write about football, or sports more generally, specifically out of my faith. One might even call it a calling, of a non-professional sort at this point. Unlike Coates, I can't quite make the claim that my decision is exclusively personal; otherwise this blog wouldn't exist.

Christianity, when done right, is not an individual endeavor. If I truly claim to be somehow a part of the body of Christ (now there's a metaphor that's going to have to be addressed in this context sometime soon!) I can't pretend that my choices can possibly be enacted in isolation. They affect my place in the body. I am required to bear witness to that choice and why I have the gall to believe it is faithfully motivated, and why I actually have the audacity to claim that a Christian can't ignore the questions, even if others come to different conclusions than I do.

Another example: Pierce singles out the deaths of teenagers as somehow more awful than the deaths of older men, such as Junior Seau. The death of a seventeen-year-old kid might provoke all sorts of emotional reactions of horror or sorrow or grief, but I don't think it's a tenable position within a Christian ethical framework to suggest it is worse than the death of Junior Seau or Dave Duerson or Mike Webster, or the murder-suicide to which Jovan Belcher was driven. Pierce seems to be somehow unwilling to acknowledge that players of those generations were not rightfully informed or aware of the damage they were experiencing and its long-term consequences. You knew your body was going to be broken forever, but you didn't know your mind might be destroyed in the process.

No, Charles Pierce isn't going to shame me into watching next week's NFL games as some kind of noble suffering. And nor am I going to stop writing about football, and sometimes other sports, in the process. And there is nothing at all ethically compatible about those positions; in fact, I will claim that they are quite compatible, and even necessary components of one another.

So deal with it.

Let's get really blunt here; was his life worth less than Evan Murray's?