Two stories from the world of hockey came to my attention this week. One was inescapable if you follow the sports world much, the other less so, but both serve as reminders that there are other sports besides football that face a reckoning over how they damage their participants beyond repair.
One such story: the death of Gordie Howe.
The stories flew fast and think about Howe, a legendary figure in the sport who played professional hockey (at least once) in six decades, a feat normally the province of baseball players like Minnie Miñoso. Unlike Miñoso, Howe was an active, full-time player for most of those decades. Howe played into the 1979-80 season as a Hartford Whaler, alongside his sons, after having made his NHL debut in 1946. A one-shift stint with a minor-league team in 1997, when Howe was freakin' 69 years old, completed the six-decade trifecta.
Of course, one can't talk about such a long career, one marked by Howe's willingness to duke it out on the ice, without acknowedging that Howe had been diagnosed with dementia four years before his death.
The obvious, if disturbing, question is whether Howe's brain will be given for research to determine if he possibly had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); given how determinedly his sons pushed back against reports of Howe's dementia at the time, I'm not optimistic -- not only because of the loss of understanding of the condition, but also because the supposition, or even the assumption that Howe actually had that disease will be a cloud both lingering and being ignored in hockey, which has plenty of trouble dealing with its own brain-trauma crisis.
Stephen Peat's story made it into the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, offering up a reminder that this sport has its own walking wounded. It still remains true that CTE can only be diagnosed after death, but if you were going to draw up a list of symptoms and conditions you would look for in a living person with CTE, based on accounts of those persons who lived with the condition, you would basically end up describing Peat's current life.
[Here is where I could use some help from someone who follows hockey much more than I ever have. Peat, like a number of those former players felled by CTE, was an "enforcer," one whose job (at the risk of oversimplifying) was to get in fights on the ice. Was this in part to "protect" star players, the likes of Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby (who, given his concussion history, evidently wasn't protected very well if that was the case)? I'm seriously asking. Unlike football, with which I grew up and can still remember very well even without actually watching games any more, I have never spent much time being exposed to hockey and don't pretend to get the culture at all, even as it seems to be trying to change at least on the NHL level. So anyone who can explain: were the likes of Stephen Peat getting into fights so the likes of Gretzky wouldn't get caught up in them? If that's the case, then the NHL is really going to have hell to pay where the likes of Peat are concerned. Sacrificial lambs indeed. That would be a serious abdication of stewardship, particularly if it really does turn out that NHL higher-ups were more aware of concussion risks than they let on for years.]
And just in case you missed it in that link, Peat is 36.
Other sports stories of concern and note:
*Another former women's soccer national-team stalwart announced that she would be donating her brain for CTE research. As noted before, very little of the CTE research out there has included women, even though they've played games with contact involved for some time now. Unlike Brandi Chastain, Briana Scurry has had a noted and non-minor history of concussions that ended her career. At the same time, a family history of Alzheimer's is also present. Scurry also devotes a part of her website to such issues and has testified before congressional committees on the subject (and was scheduled to do so again today).
*The sudden death of a once-popular MMA fighter may well spark its own set of rumors about whether brain trauma was involved, but good grief, in that sport there are so many other possibilities...
*At least for now, the only way for a Cuban ballplayer to get into MLB is by defection. Another defector was cleared by MLB today to sign with a team.
In football:
*CTE research marches on, NFL support or not.
*From the "waiting on science our savior" department: while helmet development continues, this article explains why pretty much no helmet ever (at least one in which one could practically play football) will ever be able to prevent concussions.
*More "science our savior": a new research project based in Pittsburgh (the unfortunate "birthplace" of CTE) aimed at seeking actual therapeutic options.
Not sports-related, but sort of:
*As brain trauma was becoming a concern in sports, much of the early research involved both sports leagues and the military, under the observation that similar symptoms could be observed between, say, football players and soldiers who had been injured in action in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Now new research suggests that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as found in soldiers may well be a physical injury, not just a psychological one -- and not quite the same as CTE.
And this is just potentially deeply disturbing:
*Is Russia trying to disrupt Euro 2016? Their team is on a "suspended disqualification" in the tournament after fracases between fans of England and Russia, both inside the stands and outside. Yes, it's England's fans that have the reputation for hooliganism, but that was years ago, and Russia looks much more like the aggressor in this case. And apparently it happened again today, with fans of Wales also getting drawn into the action this time.
While English courts have acted quickly to punish their offenders, the same cannot be said for Russian authorities. If this Reuters report is even the tiniest bit accurate, these incidents are not merely sports-related; they come little short of acts of war. I mean, trained hooligans? Is this how far Vladimir Putin has sunk?
And oh, yeah, guess who hosts the World Cup in two years?
Stephen Peat in his enforcer days
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