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