Defining "risk"

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

Every sport entails risk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is also a lame defense of football.

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

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

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

And then, there's this rather incomplete list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Might.

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

Will.

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

A young man's trauma

Well, another deceased former football player has been diagnosed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(To be continued...)

Tyler Sash

Some basic principles

So a couple of days ago another major newspaper, the Washington Post, weighed in on the matter of concussions, brain trauma, and football. Surprisingly, the Post struck a pretty rational and ethically justifiable position.

This blog entry won't be as enormous a linkfest as it can be, simply because the Post did my work for me. It will link you to Antwaan Randle El's regrets from last week and the infuriatingly sad story of Michael Keck. It offers up a number of other links, even one tying the brutality of football to the brutality of the Civil War.

And the editorial comes to a striking conclusion: football has to change.

Not that football has to go away.

Not that football has to be preserved at all costs.

But that football has to change.

It's a striking statement, beyond what has been offered by much of the mainstream media. But it's out there now where it can be safely ignored.

But from this viewpoint, and even within the confines of this blog, it strikes the right chord.

I find it most useful at this point to lay out three basic principles for consideration. They are hardly all-encompassing, but I hope that they offer a useful starting point for consideration in deciding how to approach football, in its current damaging state, and deciding whether to watch or not.

1. Any consideration of the Christian ethical concerns about watching football in the age of CTE, knowing the deleterious effects of repeated subconcussive blows, cannot begin with the unchallengeable premise that the game of football must be preserved or “saved.” 

Football is not a necessity. 

No sport is a necessity. Not football, not hockey, not soccer, not baseball, not lacrosse or boxing or basketball or any sport.

No sport can be labeled as indispensible in the formation of character. There is no game that cannot be corrupted and become as destructive to human character as it might be constructive. 

To be frank, football has at least one major detriment to its character-forming qualities, as the most gender-exclusive sport out there. Baseball and softball aren't exactly the same, but at least the opportunity for a diamond sport exists for both genders. With extremely rare exceptions, football is pretty much an all-guy affair, with "girls" relegated to the sidelines in a supporting role. That is a character detriment right there.

There is nothing football (or any other sport) supplies that cannot be formed elsewhere. And maybe other pursuits might be better at forming character. 

Football is not a necessity, and it is not a necessity that football be "saved."

1a. Furthermore, complaints about potential changes to the game of football – complaints about “turning the game into flag football” or other similar rants – cannot be a factor in a Christian ethical contemplation of football and brain trauma. Again, football is not a necessity, nor is it mandatory that it remain unchanged by this current controversy.
 
Here the reasoning is pretty simple: football has changed before, and not only survived but ultimately thrived. Remember the flying wedge, or forward passes being illegal? No, you don't, but those were the rules backintheday, before Teddy Roosevelt laid down the law. I don't think football has suffered for it.

There are, even now, some pretty basic changes that could do a great deal to reduce the amount of head contact in football. It's a little extreme to use language like "save pro football," and his second point still smacks of "waiting on science our savior," but is the three-point stance really that inextricable to the nature of football? And it's worth noting that baseball's economic status hasn't really been dimished by the requirement of guaranteed contracts in that sport (the kind of thing that fuels Antwaan Randle El's regrets very strongly these days). 

Football has a pretty strong reserve of popularity to draw upon, even with the swirl of scandal and damage around it. The sport can withstand change, as the Post suggests.

1b. At the same time, any presumption that football must be eliminated or destroyed is also not a viable starting point for contemplation. The point of the discussion is not about football surviving or not surviving; the point is to work out a faithful response to what we now know about football and its destructive effects on a non-minimal number of those who play the game.

Guess what, folks? The Chris Contes of the world absolutely have the right to bash their brains to a useless, tangled pulp. 

If he wants to end up in the condition of so many who have died ugly and premature deaths, that is his prerogative. 

The goal of this contemplation is not to eliminate football. That would potentially be as unethical or even as unchristlike as continuing to fawn after the idol that is football. 

The world is a deeply ugly place when Christians try to wield power over it. Wielding power is not our job. Our job is to bear witness.

And it is my contention, at this point, that the business of financial or other participation in the football industry is no longer compatible to that witness. So I don't participate, and I hope to have some influence on others. I'm not alone, but I have no illusions that it's a popular position I've staked out.

But banning football? Not going to happen, and not my place. 

If football dies off because people quit watching or quit letting their children play, that's a different kettle of fish. 

If football dies off because it becomes uninsurable, that's a different issue as well. 

Boxing still exists, and we've known for decades that boxing does this to its participants. Football isn't going anywhere, and I have no doubt it will get along fine without me.

Chris Conte can kill himself if he so chooses, but he won't get my support in doing so.

NFL game? Why, yes, I will pass on that.

Regret

It's the kind of story we're probably going to see more often.

Antwaan Randle El is 36. He is probably the most successful football player to come out of the Indiana University in my lifetime, at least. He played nine seasons in the NFL, five for the Pittsburgh Steelers sandwiched around four in Washington. Ten years ago, in Super Bowl XL, Randle El pulled off a unique play in Super Bowl history, tossing a 43-yard touchdown pass to Hines Ward on an end-around play (though a QB at IU, he was mostly a receiver in the pros). His final season was in 2010.

He has trouble coming down the stairs these days. He sometimes has to ask his wife the same question three times because he keeps forgetting the answer.

These are not uncommon stories, as you know if you follow the story or even just read this blog on occasion. But the unusual part Antwaan Randle El offered the world today was this:

Asked if he would play football if he knew then what he knows now, his answer was "If I could go back, I wouldn't."

This isn't the kind of thing you hear fromer players in this situation say. Usually it's all about how much they LOVE FOOTBALL and how much they value their teammates and the Life Lessons they learned and that kind of dialogue. If nothing else, Randle El is being unusually frank.

Randle El's regret may be amplified by the realization that he had another option. He was drafted in the 14th round by MLB's Chicago Cubs out of high school, but chose to play football because his parents insisted he go to college. While 14th-round draftees aren't necessarily likely to have flourishing major league careers, Randle El voices the opinion that he could still be playing baseball at his age, instead of struggling with staircases.

To that end it's worth considering another player who had options and chose differently. Jeff Samardzija was a receiver at Notre Dame who (unlike Randle El, apparently) continued to play baseball while in college. Even though his football career blossomed enough to make him a coveted NFL prospect, Samardzija chose to go pro in baseball. He has been a major-league starter since 2012, with some relief pitching before that. His career record is 47-61, and yet this offseason he just signed a 5-year, $90M contract to pitch for the San Francisco Giants, which will take him up to age 36. I assume his arm hurts on occasion, but Samardzija has a pretty good chance of being able to come downstairs in the morning, not to mention being able to afford a house with no staircases. That contract far outstrips what Randle El would have earned in his career even if he had finished his final contract.

I can only imagine the reaction in Pittsburgh to Randle El's interview, which appeared in that city's Post-Gazette. You will recall that the Steelers were the team for whom Mike Webster, Justin Strelczyk, and Terry Long -- three of the first players to be diagnosed posthumously with CTE -- played. I would also imagine the comment trolls of Pittsburgh and other cities are already vomiting their bile upon Randle El for being soft.

Randle El also expressed an eye-catching opinion that football wouldn't be around in 25 years or so. I don't know if that counts as optimism or pessimism.

In truth I don't know how a story like this affects me. Randle El's first year in the NFL was 2002, the year Mike Webster died. His college career was largely against the backdrop of the NFL being in full Big Tobacco mode, and the NCAA being mute and clueless. You could legitimately argue that Randle El had to be aware that his body was likely to take a beating if he had an extended career, although I'm not sure he had a reason to expect the effect to come so soon. He probably was not aware of the amount of brain trauma he might have a reason to expect. Broken body, yes. Broken mind, though?

Ultimately I'm not sure the story tells us anything new. That football breaks bodies we knew. That football breaks brains, we do know now. Why some and not others, we don't know.

Because of the timing of his career I can still feel some sympathy for Randle El. There's a cutoff point to that sympathy, though. I don't know where, but there is. Maybe it come with the NFL's admission that anywhere from 28-33% of its players can be expected to end up with some kind of long-term brain trauma in their lifetime. It's hard for me to be sympathetic from here on out.

And there really isn't anything in Randle El's story that changes my basic point of view here. I don't watch football, and I'm not going to do so. His age does point to the degree that more and more verified or apparent or possible victims of CTE are relatively young, by comparison to the mostly-over-40 victims who first came to public awareness. His expression of regret is somewhat unique, but I don't think that adds anything to my case for not watching. And it doesn't help me find any kind of ethical "out" to the question of Christian witness and non-playing participation in the football machine. Not that I particularly want one at this point anyway.

Randle El's big NFL moment

Lawrence Phillips

It may have escaped notice in the broader culture this week, what with the deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman, among what seems to be too many others (even in the sports world the passing of one of the greats who straddled the Negro Leagues and MLB, Monte Irvin, made headlines), but Lawrence Phillips died this week. In prison. Apparently by suicide.

It would be hard to avoid wondering, almost by reflex, if his life had any chance of ending any other way.

Phillips came to fame as a powerful running back at the University of Nebraska, you might recall. He starred for the Cornhuskers in 1994 as they won a national championship (such as it was at the time), but only played two games in 1995 before being suspended from the team due to an assault against girlfriend Kate McEwen, a Nebraska basketball player at the time. Coach Tom Osborne went against his straight-arrow reputation by reinstating Phillips later that season on the premise that without football, Phillips would never be able to conquer his personal demons. More on that later.

After his junior year Phillips entered the NFL draft and was taken by the St. Louis Rams (as they were then), who gave up Jerome Bettis to make room to take him (think they might like that move back?). Phillips played only four years in the NFL, plus some time in Europe and Canada, punctuated by more run-ins with the law, before washing out of professional football.

At the time of his death Phillips was serving a thirty-one-year prison term for assault with a deadly weapon (a car) as well as domestic violence. He had recently been labeled a suspect in the murder of his cellmate and charged with murder in September. A number of other violent episodes were scattered across his lifetime.

It seems that Phillips -- Ray Rice without video -- should not pass from the scene unremarked, but it's almost impossible to know where to start.

1. As football coach (and also assistant athletic director), Osborne made the choice to reinstate Phillips only a short time after he had been suspended. As assistant athletic director, one wonders how Osborne considered his responsibility for the athlete who was dragged down a flight of stairs.

2. ESPN columnist Ivan Maisel reconsiders the Phillips incident at Nebraska and the fired-up reaction (his own included) to Osborne's reinstatement at the time. (Here's one example of that fired-up reaction.) I don't quite understand Maisel's current rationalization of now understanding why Osborne didn't "take the easy way out". Exactly what signs were there that football was of any aid in reining Phillips's demons? And how appropriate is it to sacrifice one athlete to redeem another? In retrospect it seems that Osborne did take the easy way out.

3. This points towards something that needs to be said about not just football, but any sport. Sports are not magic. Phillips's demons were not going to be controlled by playing football, or by any other sport. The impulse to "rescue" a troubled young athlete is understandable and even laudable, but the degree to which others are damaged by that rescue attempt is deeply problematic. Phillips didn't commit a victimless crime. Very few people seemed to remember that at the time, and it's not always clear that we're any better about that today when an athlete is implicated in a crime.

4. If you're interested in what it's like to be in one of the severely overcrowded prisons in the USA, or California in particular, Phillips wrote a series of letters to former coaches which provide some insight.

5. Phillips's brain will be donated for study at Boston University's Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy  Program. This is the program that has reported findings of CTE in 88 of 92 brains of former football players (most recently this unfortunate soul). You might be shocked to hear that this actually concerns me. If Phillips was suffering from CTE it does need to be established. And one of the acknowledged potential effects of CTE is the kind of violent mood swings that may have led to violence in some other former players who were later found to have CTE (Paul Oliver and Jovan Belcher come to mind, but they are hardly the only examples). It's going to be a challenge to make a definitive link between CTE and violent behavior, but it won't be for lack of potential case studies. Still, where is the dividing line between Lawrence Phillips, man who made a whole heap of horrible choices, and Lawrence Phillips, (potential) CTE victim (if that diagnosis should eventually be made)? Does this further complicate evaluating how Phillips's behavior was handled over the course of his career?

Regrettably, a sad and ugly story still has the potential to get sadder and uglier.

Soft

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

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

So, here's a sample:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Keck, 1988-2013

Damage unseen

My sports fandom sometimes comes with a serious dark side.

Interestingly, it shows itself most often in connection with college basketball. I still consider myself a baseball fan first and foremost, and baseball can leave me heartbroken and frustrated and even angry sometimes, but not really dark in the way of which I speak.

I've become more of a soccer fan of late, and flopping drives me nuts. Fan behavior can get me angry (no, Portland Timbers fans, it is not acceptable to cheer for Sporting KC's goalie to be concussed and to interfere with the trainer trying to examine him by thowing stuff on the field -- I was watching, I saw), and I can be heartbroken over a bad result (the shot hit both posts, really?), but again, not quite the dark side.

But college basketball? Serious dark side.

It showed up last night. The Kansas Jayhawks (KU was my last teaching stop) found themselves in a heated and extended battle with their conference rivals, the Oklahoma Sooners. First Kansas built a big lead; then Oklahoma came back and built up their own big lead. Regulation time ended in a tie. So did the first overtime. So did the second overtime. Finally, in the third overtime, Kansas outlasted Oklahoma 109-106, a score more suggestive of the NBA than the NCAA.

So, plenty of opportunity for frustration, particularly with one Buddy Hield.

Hield is the Sooners' best player. And he's really good. This isn't new, but the performance he turned in last night was next-level stuff. Hield dropped 46 points on the Jayhawks, and did so with some ridiculous shots. And at least after some of those shots I caught myself wondering why one of the Jayhawks didn't body-check Hield into the upper seats of Allen Fieldhouse. Dark side. Not really an acceptable way to think, particularly for a pastor. At least I wasn't with anybody at the time.

This opens up a question about how we relate to sports as "participants" (fans, consumers, whatever you choose to call it) and how that participation affects us. There are many who can watch a game and be largely unaffected by it aside from a basic happiness if their team wins or unhappiness if they lose. I kinda envy them sometimes. But then sometimes I don't. There is really very little like the sheer sense of exhausted exhilaration that comes after a game like last night's contest.

But not all reactions are so joyous. There are those whose dark side goes much further than thinking about hard fouls. Bryan Stow could tell you about that if he were physically able, after being beaten within an inch of his life by two Los Angeles Dodgers fans, apparently for the "crime" of being a San Francisco Giants fan. That represents an extreme that, thankfully, is rarely enacted. Riots at matches or games would fall into the same category, thankfully. (Outright hooliganism, on the other hand, seems more of a case of violence using sports as an excuse, but that is a thought that would take much longer to unpack, on a subject that seems to be much less frequently enacted than in the past.)

There is, as has been alluded to in this blog in the past, nowadays the question of how much responsibility fans of football bear for the ongoing prevalence of traumatic brain injury and CTE in the game. Fans, after all, spend the money that is the lifeblood of the football empire. If the money dries up, there's a real good chance the game dries up. This is a real and challenging question.

But there's another question, related but different, that also has to be faced:

Are we harmed by watching?

Do we get numbed by seeing so many hits, so many concussions, so many subconcussve hits, so many injuries?

Do we damage ourselves by seeking out rationalizations or reasons to absolve ourselves when we watch? "I don't watch for the violence, I watch for the beauty ... " "It's their responsibility if they choose to play, not mine ... " "It doesn't make any difference if I don't watch, I'm just one person ... " "Watching my alma mater is different than watching the NFL ... " "People get hurt playing other sports, are we going to ban them too? ... " "Football is too important a part of our culture, it can't be changed ... " "A lot of players don't end up with this damage so it must be o.k. ..." "Technology will fix everything, they'll come up with the perfect helmet soon ... " and you can probably supply others.

How much do we damage our own ethical framework, our own moral centers, with such rationalizations in the face of undeniable damage to the bodies and brains of more than enough players to fill a team?

Does it do harm to us? Do we at least have the basic fortitude to pursue the question without hesitation?

(to be continued)

In this case, not the specific "brain trauma" I'm worried about...

Quickie: I have a question...

I'm just going to leave this right here.

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

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

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

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

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

But, then, this quote:

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

Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And how many are at the shrine right now?