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.