Weekly Reader: Headlines and reflections

Last week's post on this blog was a public regrouping in order to put forward a small part of the Christian ethical foundation underlying this ongoing project. Today's post will be similar, except framed in a reading of some of the recent headlines directly or indirectly pertaining to the subject and seeking to tease out where these ethical concerns may intersect. It is an excercise in developing a methodology, or trying to do so anyway. So, on with it.

ITEM: The NFL is considering dropping or severly curtailing its schedule of Thursday night games in future seasons.
REFLECTION: I see two particular concerns that are revealed by this piece of news.
The NFL is considering this move for one reason, and one reason only: poor ratings. Others connected to the game have certainly raised other concerns about the package -- bad games, over-saturation, and even player safety on occasion. However, these have been the case for a while -- really, is it not clear that playing a game on Sunday and turning around and playing another game four days later could make it difficult to get every body, or everybody, healed even to a minimal degree? Nonetheless, only the middling ratings for the games seems to have gotten the NFL's attention. So...
1. Why are we so confident that a league that has ignored safety concerns so far in inflating the NFL's Thursday presence, from Thanksgiving Day to a few late season weeks to half a season and, this year, to a full season, can truly be trusted to give enough of a damn about player safety in any other context, absent the pressure of losing not making enough money? To presume that a non-ethical actor is suddenly going to act ethically is, well, not very ethical, is it?
2. The flip side of this realization is that FANS DO HAVE POWER to cause the NFL to change its ways. Withhold your money, or even your attention, and look what can happen! This realization makes it a lot more difficult to cling to the notion that an individual's turning away from the game, for example, "won't make a difference." It apparently can effect the league when people don't watch. So fan responsiblity really does matter.
Sidebar: Some of the same concern will need to be directed at college football as well, in which some teams and leagues play some truly bizarre schedules -- Tuesday and Wednesday nights, even -- and Thursday games have been in place for some schools for as much as twenty years.

ITEM: A study from Harvard University recommends, among other things, substantial changes to the structure by which medical personnel are deployed in the league; the league responded with predictable staged outrage (predictable if you've been paying attention to the league for a while).
REFLECTION: Aside from yet another case of academia being out of touch with the real world, this story points to the mania for control that also contributes to the NFL's untrustworthy nature where player health is concerned.
The study proposes that doctors monitoring health not be employed by the league. The logic is simple; doctors who answer to the league or to an individual team are inherently in a position in which the interests of the team or league (i.e. get the star back on the field as quickly as possible) and the interests of the player (don't die, or don't hasten your own death unnecessarily) do not align, despite the NFL's vapid denials of conflict of interest. (The incredibly fatuous statements attributed to NFL spokespeople in the article suggest that the NFL is either unbelievably ignorant of what "conflict of interest" means, or desperately trying to muddy the waters on the subject.)
And as to claims that the proposed system is unworkable? Then are you serious about the health and safety of your players? It really is that simple.

ITEM: Zander Diamont, a backup quarterback for the University of Indiana Hoosiers, has decided to forego his final season of eligibility after "a lot" of concussions in his career (dating back to high school), summing up his decision with the pithy and on-point comment "I need my brain."
REFLECTION: As has been noted in previous blogs, not everybody would necessarily agree with that last comment.
Of course, as Diamont openly admits, he didn't have an NFL career ahead of him, and he is set to graduate from IU this spring. The lure of a pro career does often interfere with good judgment, it seems. (He's also the son of a soap-opera star, and perhaps that lessens the financial pressures that may cause some to press on in the game and hope against hope for that pro career.)
Also noteworthy is Diamont's acknowledgment that his particular playing style was such that he was more prone to head shots, and that his relatively small size made it hard to have any success without putting himself at greater risk. What is rare here is Diamont's apparent ability to see through it all and come to a decision to step away from the risk before it becomes harm. Hopefully.
What becomes a concern is the degree to which young men, who have been playing football since elementary school in many cases, are terribly good candidates to come to such conclusions more often than not. And this comes back to the root concern of this blog: just because young men are free to put themselves at such risk and to choose the harm, are we Christians ethically or morally free to participate in it with our dollars or our presence or our adulation? And if you've read much of this blog, you'll know where this blog stands.

ITEM: A lawsuit filed on behalf of 142 former NFL players calls on the league to acknowledge CTE as an occupational hazard that should be covered by worker's compensation.
REFLECTION: As much as I would typically be sympathetic to the plaintiffs, some shifty stuff is going on here.
The article states that the lead plaintiff was "diagnosed with CTE in 2015." Um, what? Since the article also seems to indicate that said plaintiff is also still alive, something is wrong here. If some doctor is "diagnosing" former players with CTE (and naturally, this is in South Florida, or Flori-duh), then either some amazing breakthrough has been made in complete and utter isolation and with absolutely zero publicity, or somebody's scamming somebody. Considering that, despite some progress, CTE cannot be definitively identified except posthumously...yeah, ethical dubiousness isn't acceptable on either side of this struggle.

ITEM: Liberty University has hired Ian McCaw as its athletic director.
REFLECTION: While there are about a million things that can be said about this subject, for this case (sticking with the football/CTE issue) we are again forced to consider the issue of trustworthiness, but this time from an explicitly Christian (or nominally so) perspective.
McCaw, of course, was previously the athletic director at Baylor University, at a time when the institution failed spectacularly at dealing with revelations of sexual assault among its athletes. Apparently Liberty's desire to become the Notre Dame of evangelicalism is not about to be sidetracked by mere concerns about the safety of women on campus.
The Washington Post's headline on the article places the stakes pretty high, but not inaccurately so, I'd say. If the term "evangelicalism" hasn't taken enough abuse as a result of the presidential campaign, items like this should help push that over the top.
Of course, one of the principal evangelical leaders involved in that campaign was none other than Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University. The juxtaposition of those two tidbits is juicy enough to warrant a larger concern about just what evangelicalism means anymore. Can an evangelicalism that wants to portray itself primarily through athletic success -- at any cost, apparently -- be trusted with the health of the players who are supposed to bring that athletic success? And a school that is so little concerned with what happened on McCaw's watch at Baylor is not that likely to care for the long-term health of its athletes, either.
The win-at-all-costs mentality of college football is sad enough among the largely secular universities who enjoy most of the success in it these days. Seeing schools who shout loudly about their "Christian character" be so cavalier about such costs, and prioritizing athletic success to the degree that it calls that character into question, is profoundly hard to swallow. It's hard not to wonder if grappling with football and the harm it does to some percentage of its players is going to have to go forward without much participation from the evangelical wing of Christianity, or whether that wing is capable of forming a Christian ethical response to the harms (as opposed to risks) of football.

Zander Diamont says "a lot" of concussions is enough.

Weekly Reader: Well, what do you expect?

So on Sunday afternoon, before heading off for a couple of meetings, I was busy watching football (or futbol, to be more precise) when my Twitter feed apparently felt compelled to alert me that a football (American style) player had gotten hurt.

In this case New Orleans Saints defensive back P.J. Williams had to be carted off the field after sustaining not one, but two hits to the head on one play. Due to the uncertainty about Williams's injuries and their extent he was immobilized on a backboard and his head/helmet was strapped down to prevent any further injury. In the end, though, the diagnosis was a concussion, and while Williams stayed overnight at a hospital for precautionary reasons, he was expected to be discharged on Monday and enter the NFL's concussion protocol.

Quite a Sunday for your second-ever game in the NFL. He was even a hashtag for a little while.

Now time for this blog to get callous.

There are injuries by which you are allowed to be shocked. When Kevin Ware's leg snapped like a cheap pencil in the NCAA Final Four, shock was appropriate. It was horrifying, grotesque, and completely not typical for a basketball game.

Then there are injuries you really have no business being shocked by.

You really have no business being shocked when your favorite baseball team's best pitcher goes down with a torn rotator cuff. It's pretty much an epidemic, and while it generally isn't life-threatening, it still happens way more than it should.

It's a bit silly to be shocked when a hockey player loses a tooth. It's a stereotype, for pete's sake.

On the more farcical end of things, there's no point in being shocked when a soccer player acts as if he's in the throes of mortal agony after a non-contact play (I say "he" here because this really doesn't seem to happen so often in the women's game).

And football? I'm not sure there's any kind of injury on a football field that should really be shocking anymore. We've seen too many. And frankly, at this point it might be that those who suffer obvious injuries that require them to be removed from the game are fortunate, in that they don't stick around for two or three or a dozen more hits to their stunned cranial matter.

This is what the sport does to its players. And you know that going in, if you're a rational adult.

So spare me the hashtags. You've made the bargain; live with it.


Other things to read and think about:

*If you wondered why the NFL had become such a prolific contributor to select members of Congress, now you know why.

*From the "Waiting on Science Our Savior" department: The NFL is gonna throw gobs of cash at the pursuit of a "magic helmet," and some for concussion research too.

*Former NFL placekicker Cary Blanchard died earlier this month. He was one of the 4,500 former players who was a plaintiff in that settlement reached a couple of years ago. Yes, placekicker. Even I didn't think that was terribly possible. Shows what I know.

*From earlier this year: you might remember an experiemental study from a few years ago, when a number of former players like Tony Dorsett were judged to show signs of CTE while still alive? The first former player to be a part of that study, Fred McNeill, has died, and...he has been posthumously confirmed to have had CTE. This could be a very big deal in the effort to diagnose the disease in the living and try to find some way to combat it. The bad part, of course, is that more players will have to die to confirm this -- the great ethical conundrum of CTE research.

*A former NFL great suffering from possibly football-related dementia has become the subject of an ugly custody battle.  He's regrettably unlikely to be the last such story.

Outside concussionball:

*A group of NHL players hit Capitol Hill (figuratively) to lobby for tigher rules for younger players.

*Political activism among athletes is not limited to NFL players during national anthems.

Scary, but not shocking.

Weekly Reader: Another page from the tobacco playbook

Q: Which sports organization spent $1.2M on lobbyists and congressional lobbying in 2014, and has a political action committee that raised $900,000 in the last election cycle?

A: (Say it in Chris Berman's voice) The NAtional. FOOTball. League.

This one slipped by me. The NFL is becoming a fairly serious player in DC.

One might suspect the ongoing storm over brain trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy as the principal motivator for this increasing flexing of political mu$scle, and you'd be right to a large degree. Roger Goodell's halting and embarrassing turn on Capitol Hill in 2009 (seven years ago, if you can believe that) prompted the league to pour increased effort into, er, persuading members of Congress (the House Judiciary Committee in particular) to look more kindly on the NFL where concussions and trauma were concerned. You'll notice said committee has said bupkis on the subject since. (The bombshell admission of a link between football and such head trauma earlier this year happened before the House's Energy and Commerce Committee.)

But the final straw, so to speak, was actually Ray Rice's assault on his wife. As members of Congress got agitated and began to poke around the league's exposed nerves, the league finally concluded it needed a full-time point person on The Hill, and appointed a former Joe Biden aide to the task (some critics, you'll read in the link above, likened her move to that of a former lobbyist for MADD taking up a new job lobbying for the spirits industry, and they're probably not wrong). The most recent issue to come under NFL influence-spreading is the lucrative gambling rings-in-all-but-name known as daily fantasy sports, which has required a particularly blatant form of double-talk.

So what's the complaint? Corporations (which are people, my friend) have the legal right to lobby politicians. And if you want to assert that such lobbying takes place in every and all circumstances in a completely ethically pure and above-board manner, you have the right to do so.

I'll laugh in your face, but you do have the right to do so.

For comparison, the NFL's political spending noted above is about double that of MLB, NHL, and NBA combined, and the NHL and NBA don't even have PACs (the NFL's PAC about doubles MLB's in funds raised as well, even collecting almost exclusively from NFL owners and their family members).

Of course, those with a nose for history will remember that lobbying is reminiscent of how other ethically challenged businesses have preserved themselves over the years. One such industry that might come to mind? Oh, I don't know, maybe...the tobacco industry, already known to be tied to the NFL in spirit?

Is it legal? Yup. Does it smell? Oh, Hell, yes. (And I do use that word theologically.)


More stuff worth reading about that game:

*Ken Stabler was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Of course, he wasn't around to enjoy it, sadly.

*Speaking of the HoF induction, the game that typically goes with it had to be canceled, apparently because the paint used for the on-field logos turned hard and impenetrable. Wait, since when have rock-hard surfaces been a problem for football?

*The Tampa Bay Buccaneers franchise is trying a different kind of deep-freeze to rehabilitate its players.

*Sort-of football story: Um...o.k. 


From the Lords of the (Olympic) Rings:

*Is it bad sportsmanship to be vocal about cheating (which would seemingly be a pretty serious offense against sportsmanship)?

*When you've committed so many failures in preparing for the events of the Olympics, a pool that is suddenly and unexpectedly green is going to raise questions.


Other sporting realms:

*The NBA's Adam Silver has sounded almost progressive at times, and MLB's Rob Manfred has brought a degree of transparency to his office. MLS's Don Garber can be a little opaque at times but that league isn't quite there yet enough to cause great concern. So, if any commissioner was going to make the NFL's Goodell look like a morally upright and forward-thinking person, it had to be the NHL's Gary Bettman. And on cue... .

*Sometimes it's good to tip the hat to achievements without getting ethically worried, and so here's to Ichiro... .

*But then, some folks make that impossible.

Ichiro!

Weekly Reader: Dale Jr.'s troubles

Even if he were a mediocre racer, Dale Earnhardt Jr. would be a big deal because of his name.

As it is, he's a pretty good racer, and is definitely a big name.

So having Dale Jr. sidelined by concussion-like symptoms is a big deal in NASCAR.

He missed last weekend's race in New Hampshire, and won't be racing again for a while. He hadn't felt well in the circuit's previous race in Kentucky, but thought he was suffering from allergies. When medication didn't help, Dale Jr., recalling previous concussion history, got himself checked and got the bad news. Having had two wrecks over a three-week span, such symptoms and diagnosis were not necessarily surprising.

Auto racing is one of those sports, unlike football or baseball (for the most part) or other team sports, where its competitors are at risk of being killed during competition, as Dale Earnhardt Jr. knows all to well. Mind you, if a racer dies on the track it is definitely not normal, and it is entirely correct to say that something went horribly and tragically wrong. But it can and does happen.

Not surprisingly, given that known and pronounced risk, Earnhardt Jr.'s condition raises questions for some observers about how many other drivers might be zipping around the track at crazy fast speeds with "concussion-like symptoms" (as he was in the Kentucky race, apparently). It's dangerous enough when everybody out there is mentally sharp; who wants to risk having the guy in the car next to you being a step slow and a second behind?

Dale Jr. is not the first NASCAR driver to face these symptoms. One of the more sensitive pieces to come forth in this interval was from Ricky Craven, a former NASCAR driver who went through a three-month interruption late in his career due to such symptoms. Craven admits that one of Earnhardt Jr.'s great temptations will be the urge to return as soon as possible, even though he might not be ready -- Craven admits that succuming to that urge set his return back, ultimately.

For NASCAR, it's entirely possible that Earnhardt Jr.'s struggles amplify the sport's difficulty with potential brain trauma more than might be the case with any NFL player. For one thing, while some active players have struggled with concussions, those players most associated with the NFL's head-trauma crisis are former players, for the most part, and deceased (since only after death can CTE be diagnosed). The "fan-player" relationship in NASCAR is felt particularly strongly and personally, as well; at its peak a few years back NASCAR did a particularly good job of marketing its racers and their personalities, so that even though they're quite strapped down and concealed in those cars their fans claim a particularly personal connection to Dale Jr. or JJ or any of the others. As a result, the death of a racer like Dale Jr.'s dad is keenly experienced by people who never met the man.

It also seems that NASCAR tends to court a particularly religous demographic in some cases. Naturally I'm curious as to whehter race fans will be affected by any particular faith concerns as they watch Earnhardt Jr.'s ongoing battle and (hopefully) recovery.

Perhaps as a result of NASCAR racers "having a face" (so to speak), the system will be a little less reluctant to respond in Dale Jr.'s case. On the other hand, NASCAR racers do race for teams, and the owner of Dale Jr.'s car is already expressing opinions about his viability for future races.

We shall see.

UPDATE: Jeff Gordon has been announced to sub for Earnhardt Jr. for the next two NASCAR races, presumably including the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In other things relating to games and head trauma:

*Perhaps in response to Dale Jr.'s situation, the family of a former NASCAR great now suffering dementia announced that his brain would be donated for study after his death. This piece also offers a little background for Earnhardt Jr.'s decision to donate his own brain.

*Maybe this one doesn't belong on a blog about sports *coughNotRealcough*, but a number of former WWE participants are suing the organization over brain damage, and it's going about like you'd expect a WWE event to go.

*Speaking of personal reactions, Tommy Joseph hit a home run tonight for the Philadelphia Phillies agains the Miami Marlins. He now has thirteen homers this season, in only about fifty games since being called up from the minors. Joseph was a catcher for the Richmond Flying Squirrels while I was living there, and was traded from the San Francisco Giants organization to the Phillies for Hunter Pence, while the Squirrels were hosting the Phillies' AA team in a double-header. However, his prospect status had been derailed for the better part of two years due to concussions. Two years. Now playing first base, he does offer both hope and warning: it is possible to recover from concussions, but boy, does it take time.

In football:

*The column itself is actually from about a month and a half ago, but it is offered as an interesting perspective on informed risk and the NFL. Also, it seems to suggest that media voices may no longer be as easily swayed by the NFL's rhetoric as they used to be. That would be useful.

*From the Waiting on Science Our Savior Dept.: remember the MVPs, Dartmouth's robotic tackling dummies, developed to cut down on hits in practice? They're going pro.

Vaguely related:

*These two stories are not brain trauma-related, except in the sense that they may illustrate part of the challenge in dealing with the problem. In one story, a team of retired major leaguers is gearing up for a competition mostly against college players. In another, Ichiro Suzuki keeps churning away at age 42; he grounded out in a pinch-hitting turn in tonight's game reference above, leaving him six hits away from 3,000 for his MLB career (leaving aside all the hits he had in Japan). Sometimes the competitive urge is not easily conquered. Sometimes, as with Ichiro, that can be a good thing or at least a good story. (I'm not sure what it is with Clemens et al, although I can't stop myself wondering about the National Baseball Congress's drug-testing policies). Sometimes, though, that competitive urge keeps players going long after their bodies have told them it's time to walk away, which only increases the risk of injuries of all kinds.

Exactly what do we root for in that situation?

Dale Jr. and his ride, which he's not riding in right now...

Weekly Reader: Exclusive/Elite/Premiere

And the Weekly Reader returns...

Do did you hear what Giancarlo Stanton did last night?

In Major League Baseball's pre-All Star Game slugfest, the Home Run Derby, Stanton muscled out sixty-one (yes, 61) home runs across the event's three rounds, crushing the event's previous record by forty or so. Yes, he won, and caused his team some marketing headaches along the way.

Stanton is an interesting case. He's mostly noted as a power hitter, although he's become a pretty decent fielder and outfield arm along the way. He plays for a franchise, the Miami (formerly Florida) Marlins, that has only existed since 1993 (I remember watching on TV as Charlie Hough, the ancient knuckleballer, pitch their first game), yet has two World Series titles and the honor of benefitting from the Chicago Cubs' epic collapse in the 2003 NLCS (seriously, if you're still blaming Steve Bartman at this point you are epically stupid. Bartman didn't give up eight runs and drop everything on the field. Just stop). They are mostly remembered for almost immediately dismantling both of their championship teams in economically-driven "fire sales," having a tightwad owner and his massively jerky son-in-law as a leading team official, having fired Joe Girardi as manager after one season (a season for which he won Manager of the Year, mind you) and thus freeing him to be scooped up by the New York Yankees, seriously bilking Miami-Dade County into building a wildly expensive but admittedly beautiful new stadium, and generally being ill-supported by the nominally "home" fans who turn out to cheer the other team at least as often as the Marlins.

Stanton is also an example of what threatens to become a vanishing breed in Major League Baseball; the scouting find. He wasn't a product of the paid-coaching, travel-team, tournament system that is increasingly becoming the prime conduit for baseball talent, teams with words like "elite" and "premiere" bandied about playing in tournaments that are "exclusive" and "elite" themselves. He, uh, played for his high-school team. How passé.

Andrew McCutcheon of the Pittsburgh Pirates has, at least somewhat by choice, become the current poster boy for the potential loss of access to major league-worthy talent that arises from such a system. If an area AAU coach hadn't wandered over to a field where a skinny 12-year-old kid from a nowhere town in Florida was playing in a youth league game, it's not at all clear whether McCutcheon would ever have been in a position for his evident skills to be seen by people that matter. And let's just say that Major League Baseball would be a lot poorer without the likes of McCutcheon and Stanton, who was found in a rather fluky scouting story himself.

Only so many versions of The Blind Side can play themselves out to find talent. There is a real risk, as the travel-team system becomes more and more entrenched, that access to pro ball becomes a matter of who can pay up and who can't. And that would be deeply troubling, ethically and (dare I say?) theologically.

Other things worth reading this week:

*More on Brianna Scurry, former star goalkeeper for the USWNT, and her chosen role as brain-health advocate for women athletes.

*Syracuse University hires an ESPN executive as its new athletic director, more or less admitting that its athletic program is a content provider for TV. And this relates to the purposes of a university ... uh, well ... I'll get back to you on that one.

*Tim Duncan retired. I feel old. My time at Wake Forest was before his, but not by too much. His team took care of him, which helped him to play as long as he did. Radical concept, that. And if you thought Duncan was all stoic and humorless, think again.

*Speaking of sports that rely on travel and "elite" teams, US Soccer has a spanking new training ground for its elites under construction, in KCK.

*At least one writer is ready for "God Bless America" to be gone from the seventh-inning stretch.

*Jordan Spieth won't play golf in Rio. I hate to be alarmist and all, but really, I can't blame him.

Back in football:

*Roger Goodell shows his tobacco-industry learnin'.

*More college football players are joining in head-trauma lawsuits against the NCAA. At some point somebody's going to have to figure out that they really will need to sue the "university" for whom they played.

*The Joe Paterno/Jerry Sandusky story is just getting uglier.

*Since retiring, Calvin Johnson, aka Megatron, has been talkative. Concussions and painkillers and not coming back. Oh, my.

*And at least one NFL player has an idea of what players might be able to use instead of those painkillers.

Have at it, folks.

He hits baseballs far. Very far. It would be sad if he were getting broken down in football instead.

Weekly Reader: Hockey takes its hits

A way to touch on multiple stories before they go cold: the Weekly Reader (or am I the only one who remembers that from elementary school?)

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