Once more, with feeling...it's not just concussions

Well, for whatever amount of time I can retain my sanity and not be overwhelmed by despair, the blog is back. Conveniently, it returns on the day the NFL is staging its conference championship games.

If you want, blame my wife for sharing this article with me.

A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Brain drives home the point that has long been burbling under the surface of the ongoing attempt to sort out the link between brain injury and sport (mostly football, but some others too). This blog has made efforts to drive home this point before.

What is helpful here is a particularly strong effort at distinguishing between three terms that are sometimes thrown about rather loosely in the discussion and drawing a much clearer distinction than is usually the case. Evidently the article's author, Cindy Boren, felt it necessary (and got editorial consent) to draw out that discussion in detail, rather than hoping folks would click on the link in the online post (or go find the journal Brain and read it).

Many studies in the past have suggested that chronic traumatic encephalopathy, hereafter CTE, was not necessarily as connected to concussions as the common wisdom tended to assume, but those studies had not been set up to control for those factors and separate concussive hits from subconcussive hits (which are just what the name suggests, hits not hard or forceful or direct enough to provoke a concussion). This study deliberately set out to control for exactly those conditions.

Note the subject of the study: teenagers, specifically teenagers with head injuries. It shouldn't be a shock by now that early stages of CTE can show up in young athletes, not just grizzled veterans, so the choice of subject isn't out of reason at all.

The key is, not surprisingly, the repetitive nature of such hits. If you play one game of football and get banged up a few times, you could end up with a concussion. You are incredibly unlikely, barring other head injuries off the field, to end up with CTE. Conversely, you can play football through two or three years of middle school, four years of high school, and never get diagnosed with a concussion, and still end up showing signs of CTE. It's not necessarily the most common thing to happen, but it does happen.

The confusion of concussions, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and CTE has tended to hinder the public discussion about all of these subjects. Dr. Lee Goldstein, one of the study's authors, spells out those differences effectively enough that it's best just to let him do it, as quoted in the article:

When it comes to head injuries and CTE, Goldstein spoke of three categories that are being jumbled: concussions, TBI and CTE. Concussion, he says, is a syndrome defined “by consensus really every couple of years, based on the signs and symptoms of neurological syndrome, what happens after you get hit in the head. It’s nothing more than that, a syndrome. You take one [symptom] from column A, one from column B.”

A TBI is different. “it is an injury, an event,” he said. “It’s not a syndrome. It’s an event and it involves damage to tissue. If you don’t have a concussion, you can absolutely have brain injury and the converse is true.”

CTE is “a bona fide neurodegenerative disease. It will progress independently of whether you have future hits and a lot of people think that the injury is the disease and it’s not. There is an injury and then it goes on to spread in the brain, like other neurodegenerative diseases.”

And that being the case, eliminating the concussions (whether by "magic helmet" or some other technological marvel) doesn't necessarily eradicate CTE.

Presumably you can see where the problem lies: it's pretty hard to play football without getting hit, probably getting hit a lot. It's kinda baked into the nature of the game. It's what gets celebrated. It's basic. Other sports also have their issues with violent contact, but few of them (maybe rugby?) are quite so intrinsically based on large and fast men hitting one another as hard as possible as football is. (Soccer fans would probably celebrate enforcing rules enough to cut down on contact if only because it would cut down on the awful injury fakery that plagues that sport.)

But yeah, it's not going to be easy to do much about repetitive hits in a sport that is all about repetitive hits.

So, as the medical evidence continues to escalate, expect more distraction. Quite frankly the NFL and maybe even the NCAA will point to concussions more and more and hope you fall for it. High school athletic associations will frankly just hope you don't notice. After all, there's really not a lot of options otherwise.

Whether such distraction will work is up to you.

One other note: the authors of this study and this article do well to point out that football players are not the only sufferers of CTE affected by this information. Outside of athletics the most commonly afflicted are soldiers, particularly in those combat zones where improvided explosive devices come with the territory. Even beyond those, though, sufferers of repetitive hits include the incarcerated, the homeless, and victims of domestic abuse.

Yes, abused spouses and children can end up with CTE. Let that sink in.

In case you've forgotten...

Conflicts of interest

Indiana University has a history of powerhouse basketball teams. Football, not so much.

For their basketball team, anything less than contention for the Final Four is disappointment. For the football team, a 6-6 record and a bowl of any kind is a noteworthy accomplishment.

On the other hand, a Final Four run at the University of Alabama would be impressive, if not particularly noticed or appreciated there. A 6-6 record for the football team, on the other hand, would likely provoke an armed uprising in the state. Different standards at different schools.

Nonetheless, even at a school like Indiana, the pressure for football success can cause things to go off the rails.

A week ago in this blog, two seemingly unrelated stories -- one of a Harvard University study recommending changes to the hiring and oversight of team doctors, another of Indiana's backup quarterback deciding to leave football -- sat nestled next to each other as items two and three. It turns out that the two items, while not necessarily being related, were in fact going to intersect obliquely over the course of the week.

On Thursday, IU announced that football coach Kevin Wilson was no longer going to be football coach. Initial reports spoke of IU firing Wilson (and that's still how my browser bookmarks read), but eventually the departure was reported instead as a resignation. The team's defensive coordinator was immediately promoted to the position of head coach.

This was sudden. There had been no rumors or hints about Wilson's job security; indeed IU is on its way to a bowl game for the second year in a row, which is roughly tantamount to a national championship for the basketball team. If anything it seemed that all was well.

The press conference announcing the firing resignation did nothing to dispel the strangeness. The departed coach was not present, which is not completely surprising. The newly appointed coach talked, as he was supposed to do, of being honored to take the job and of continuing the team's relative success. As for the athletic director who either fired Wilson or accepted his resignation, Fred Glass gave a master class in not answering the questions asked of him. Even the ESPN writer who penned the above story found his answers revealingly unrevealing, in true lawyerly style, as below:

Glass mentioned the term "philosophical differences" so many times I began to envision him and Wilson in robes, arguing over the soul's immortality.

Glass repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, which seemed very strange. For his part, Wilson had accepted a fairly meager buyout despite being owed an average of $2.5 million over the next five seasons. That's not normal coach behavior. Something strange seemed afoot.

A couple of days later, more information started to come out. Despite Glass's protestations, there were some, shall we say, darker episodes sprinkled across Wilson's tenure at IU, episodes which (due to Wilson's departure and the evident confidentiality agreement bridling the tongues of both coach and AD) will probably never be fully interrogated and understood. (A more local view of the whole affair is here.)

At least two investigations into Wilson's treatment of players, particularly injured players, were initiated by Glass, one in April 2015 and another in the past four to six weeks. A number of former players also spoke out in the past week about Wilson's treatment of injured players during his time at IU.

Here's where we must begin to ask questions about coaching responsibility.

There isn't any likelihood of these allegations ever being settled one way or the other. With Wilson gone (and likely not to talk) and Glass having already demonstrate he won't say anything, IU will be unlikely to pursue the issue any further. Still, if even a few of the allegations reported in the last-linked article are true, there was a disturbing tendency towards belittling injured players or dismissing the severity of those injuries in the IU program.

Here's where the idea of conflicts of interest comes in.

Wilson (or any head coach) had the responsibility not to put players at unacceptable risk. That's standard for any coach in any sport.

Wilson also, as any coach in any sport, was responsible to win games.

Those are obvious and universal responsibilities. In addition, in college football, a coach has other concerns beyond those -- seeing that the players are not wiping out in the classroom. Whether or not the coach personally gives a whit about the academic progress of the players, such progress gets measured, and the team actually can suffer consequences if, for example, a certain percentage of the team's players fail to graduate in a timely manner over the course of years. (You might recall that the University of Connecticut basketball team got banned from the NCAA tournament in 2013, at a time when that team was carrying a graduation rate of 8% among its basketball players.) Even if a head coach doesn't directly oversee the academic progress of the team's players, a poor rate comes back on the head coach.

Again, if the stories told about Wilson are true (and the "if" is not insubstantial here), even such a concern as that last one about academics can become an impediment to proper regard for a player's health. The more prevalent concern here in this blog is a kind of emotional manipulation; ridiculing or demeaning injured players as a means to induce them to come back from their injuries too soon.

It's pretty insidious, if you think about it; you get deniability ("hey, he said he could play...") and the player back in action. Eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds, wildly competitive athletes at that, are not noted for sober judgment or careful balancing of risk. They're frankly easy to manipulate. And it looks possible that Wilson did exactly that.

Let's try to be understanding here; it's hard to keep so many things in balance. While Wilson might have had a nasty streak in his personality (according to some accounts), even a well-intentioned coach of good character can find it challenging to keep up success on the field and in the classroom and still keeping a proper eye on the health of the team's players.

If I'm ever going to start getting hate mail over this blog, it might finally happen because of this topic. Coaches are gods (at least as long as they succeed). It's not just in football; think of how long Bob Knight took to wear out his welcome at IU (in basketball, of course). But there's a media apparatus dedicated to their ongoing deification of coaches across many sports, but particularly so in football (college even more than pro). Nick Saban at the University of Alabama could probably kill and eat a cheerleader at the fifty-yard line at halftime during a game and keep his job. College football coaches always get the benefit of the doubt. Always. Unless they lose, or people get arrested, or overwhelming national attention of a bad kind comes to your program. Ask Art Briles, even as plenty of Baylor folk insist he should have been retained.

Players, on the other hand, are tools (particularly football players). Useful, and even beloved to a degree, as long as they "do their job." Academic failure only matters so far as it causes the player to be unable to play -- not remotely in terms of their education or development as human beings. Personal problems? Get that out of your system before game time, boy (racial coding very deliberate). And don't you dare have an opinion that your coach doesn't give you.

It's hard to challenge a coach who is having even a little bit of success. So if a coach who has the team succeeding even a little gets accused of pressuring injured players to play too soon, who in the administration or -- God help us -- the fanbase is going to hold that coach accountable? Aside from the affected player's parents, perhaps?

It's an unpleasant question to ask, but it had better be asked: are football coaches the best ones to be trusted with making decisions about the health of players (or having authority over those who do), particularly in an age where we have a lot more clue just how much damage football can do to bodies and/or brains?

Fred Glass (right, with new coach Tom Allen) at his lawyerly best.

Christian ethics, the human body, and football

Part of my responsibility in purusing this project is to put forth a coherent ethical response to the ongoing concern of football and the traumatic brain injury associated with it. Amidst the gathering of new stories and accounts of the experiences of former and now deceased players, the inability or unwillingness of football leagues or collegiate conferences to take the issue seriously beyond a basic CYA instinct, and possible changing attitudes among fans or players, I occasionally need to drop back and gather up some of the ethical foundation and procedure behind the project, to try to keep myself from getting too far off track.

So bear with me, please.

I have been reminded of two basic concerns underlying an ethical approach to this question; one concerning the possible audience for such concern, and another pointing to a basic reason why Christian ethics must (in my opinion, humble or otherwise) address the issue.

Note the choice of the term "Christian ethics." That is a significant limitation on whatever comes out of this pursuit. In trying to sort out what kind of Christian ethical position I'm coming from I've come to conclude that based on what I hope to be the outcome of such a project, my target audience is limited to what is theologically called the "body of Christ."

It isn't because I think the opinions and actions of those of other faiths are irrelevant or unimportant -- quite the opposite. It is simply that, in my role as a Christian (specifically Presbyterian) pastor, my most basic concern is to in some way provide spiritual guidance and direction so that the members of the body of Christ (we usually call them "Christians" though I am growing less and less fond of that word in its current state every day) are formed and matured into people who live rightly, more so than trying to direct individual actions so that individuals act rightly.* This might not sound like what you've perceived as the role of Christian ethics (or ethics in general), and there are certainly others who will disagree.

*Here one might look into Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), especially his introductory chapters.

Christian ethical thought has at different times emphasized very different outcomes for the body of Christ -- sometimes emphasizing loyalty to the State as a means of guaranteeing the influence of the Church (and yes, quite a few nominally Christian leaders are clearly taking this approach today); sometimes propagating a canon of law or rules, adherence to which demonstrated one's faith; sometimes emphasizing the rationality of the faith, or its suitability to the improvement of the individual vs. the larger body. By staking out the position I have, I am certianly "showing my bias" -- the importance of community and "body of Christ" over individual supremacy, a preference for formation of habits and even "instincts" to respond ethically to situations that haven't necessarily existed before, rather than prescribing a rulebook and then trying to bend current situations to that rulebook (football is, after all, a relatively recent thing in history, though there are other activities that the Christian ethical response to which will be informative), and others I'm sure I'll hear about.

For the moment, though, the big concern that arises from this is that if my primary concern is with the body of Christ, then what I say should not be considered authoritative over those who do not claim membership in said body. It ain't because I don't care. And if a book or some other product eventually does hit the market, my Jewish or Muslim or agnostic friends (or anybody else) should certainly feel free to buy a copy. <grin> But all of this really does come out of a pastoral and theological foundation, and those who do not partake of such a foundation cannot be bound by my arguments from it.

So the language of this project is likely to get more and more faith-specific -- not with intent to offend, but simply trying to do the only job I can do here.


The second reminder to myself comes in a sideways fashion from the first -- specifically from my job being directed toward the "body of Christ," i.e. the Christian (there's that word again) church. Part of the reason is that I don't believe that followers of Christ, professors of an incarnational faith, can be indifferent to those activities in human existence that regularly and routinely cause harm to the physical body.

We are, after all, followers of a victim of torture. The scourging, whipping, imposition of a crown of thorns, and other abuses visited upon Jesus wouldn't even remotely pass muster under the Geneva conventions today, and I'm pretty sure crucifixion would fall under the ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" even for the most zealous defenders of capital punishment (on second thought, maybe not all such defenders). One of the key events in the narrative of Christianity is an act of physical destruction.

Not surprisingly, Christian ethics and doctrine have not typically looked kindly on activities that visit lasting harm on the body (leaving aside for the moment those who hold to soul/body dualisms of some sort, except to say that I'm not one of them). Capital punishment (usually) comes under criticism; abortion is sanctioned; harm to the body through drugs or alcohol or other foreign substances is decried; sports such as boxing have, eventually, fallen out of favor in many Christian circles. It certainly remains possible that football will similarly fall out of favor, although with such virulent attachments to it still in place in some corners of the church that doesn't seem likely any time soon, no matter how much nobodies like me might protest. But it's becoming harder and harder to ignore the degree to which the game produces an awful lot of broken bodies, even if the damage takes five or ten or twenty years to show. That can't be acceptable in an ethic that takes seriously the idea of human beings created in the image of God.  

Here's a case where our ancestors in the faith have provided some thought that can be applied to the modern case, albeit indirectly at best. The criticisms of Tertullian, Augustine, and the like against the gladiatorial combats and contests of the ancient world don't necessarily transfer directly to modern critiques of football (the spectacle of death is not immediate in the NFL, at least for now), but the concerns both about the aforementioned imago Dei and the impact such spectacles had on those who viewed them should not be dismissed. Augustine's account of his unfortunate friend Alypius at the spectacles sounds pretty mild compared to the total besotted intoxication fans display at the modern spectacles on Saturday afternoons (or nights, or now Thursdays or Fridays), or Sundays (or Mondays, or now Thursdays). That infatuation and saturation with the spectacle becomes an unavoidable part of teasing out a Christian ethical response to the seemingly intractable destructiveness of the game on some sizeable number of its players, and has inevitably to be answered and critiqued as part of the process of ethical inquiry.

In short; the destructive quality of football (which seems more intractable and less fixable than in sports like hockey) has to be addressed, but we're going to have to untangle some seriously dubious entwinement of football and religionesque ritual and worship while doing so. And yes, the "i" word (idolatry) is probably going to have to be invoked at some point.

I...I can't even...

Book Commentary: Unintended Impact

Prebstle, Jim. Unintended Impact: One Athlete's Journey from Concussions in Amateur Football to CTE Dementia. Edina: Beaver's Pond Press, 2015. 265pp. ISBN 978-1-59298-883-9.

I have previously in this blog raised the unsettling spectre that, aside from those former NFL players, known and yet to be known, suffering the lingering effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), there might well be numerous players (thousands? tens of thousands?) whose career arc never approached the NFL but yet suffer from the same debilitating effects of their shorter football careers.

This book tells one such story.

Dick Prebstle grew up in the football-crazed precincts of Canton and Massilon, Ohio. Born in 1942, he progressed through what was already a familiar path for a young athlete; beginning to play tackle football at age ten, getting onto the high school team (in his case skipping the "freshman team" that was more common in the 1950s), and as a successful high-school star (and also an excellent student), being recruited to a successful collegiate program, in his case at Michigan State. Prebstle was mostly a backup quarterback at MSU, and a succession of severe injuries, including a now-shocking number of concussions, ultimately ended his career prematurely. (His younger brother, the author of this book, would last longer in football, and was a member of MSU's 1965 national championship team, but neither brother would play in the NFL.)

Dick Prebstle's post-football life seemed destined for success, despite an unsuccessful attempt at law school. He ultimately made his way into business; getting a foothold in the insurance business before  maneuvering his way to the acquisition of a construction equipment company.

Jim Prebstle's story of his big brother's rise and decline has been dropping hints along the way -- frequent migraines, unexpected illnesses suggested as stress-related at the time -- that all was not to be well, but the decline is marked sharply at this point. Without giving away too many details (you are supposed to read the book after all), Jim Prebstle reads Dick's decline in retrospect, armed (as he and Dick's other family members were not at the time) with the understanding of CTE's effect on the afflicted brain. While a CTE diagnosis, which can only be confirmed posthumously, cannot change the suffering its victim and family go through, it can be a means to understand how a seemingly healthy and successful man like Dick Prebstle could be laid low so suddenly. The most marked changes in behavior and cognitive function began to manifest themselves in Dick Prebstle in the early 1980s, according to Jim Prebstle's account.

Dick Prebstle lived until 2012, aged 69.

Think of thirty years in fearsome mental decline, kicking in before age 40.

Jim Prebstle's account is straightforwardly retrospective, reading Dick's life in light of his posthumous diagnosis. Having learned how CTE works, through their experience with the Boston University study that has announced so many such diagnoses, Jim and other relatives of Dick, including wife and children, are calling up painful and baffling memories, and beginning to re-interpret those memories through new information and understanding that was simply not out there in the 1980s. (The book's Forward is by Dr. Robert A. Stern, a member of the BU study group, and is particularly useful to read and digest.)

As Jim Prebstle's account unfolds, a plethora of related issues float, sometimes unintentionally, to the surface -- the relationship between brothers, particularly the overachieving older brother and the younger brother constantly judged by his elder's accomplishments; the "warrior codes" and implicit assumptions about manhood attached to football; the sheer lack of understanding of brain injury and the harrowingly outdated and ultimately deadly way young football players were taught to hit head-first; the sheer idolatry (my word, not Prebstle's) of football in certain parts of American culture; the "steel mill mentality" of the upper Midwest; the bitterness and rancor that result from disputes over care of dementia patients; the staggering physical deterioration of a CTE-afflicted brain; and many more.

The one significant disappointment of the book is the Epilogue, in which football idolatry still demands an Affirmation of Faith in the sport despite its destruction of some percentage of those who play it. The insistence that there has to be a way to make the sport safer still rings out, despite the lack of any evidence that this is so. Preserving football still comes first.

Nonetheless, read the book as a kind of personal counterbalance to a more broad-based account such as that in League of Denial. I suspect more such stories are going to begin to appear, as more former players or their family members try to understand what they or their loved ones have suffered, and how it could all be a result of the game they loved.

The gamut of player reaction

The subject of sports "curses" and belief systems is a fertile one, and one I hope to follow up on in the future (even if the most notorious of those curses went out the window last week). But there is a primary topic to this blog, and the past week-plus offered some interesting takes on the subject of football and its concussive effects on its players, against the backdrop of a startling, but not surprising, revelation about a deceased former player.

1) It turns out Cam Newton might actually care about his head after all.

It's amazing what having a concussion can do to your opinion on concussions. After a blindside hit that knocked him out of one game and kept him from starting the next, Newton was inclined to be a bit more cautious about exposing himself to unnecessary hits in the future.

Not that Newton is likely to change his style of play. To be blunt, without his mobility and running ability, Newton's just another big-armed quarterback, and being in the pocket isn't always that much safer than being on the run. No, by "unnecessary" hits he refers to, in the case of the hit that knocked him loopy, not doing foolish things like slowing down on the way to the end zone for no good reason.

I suppose such counts as a tiny measure of progress. Newton isn't stupid, and he might actually have the potential to be the kind of athlete who can have an impact after his career is over if he doesn't end up too scrambled to remember his name. But that's just not guaranteed, no matter how big Newton is. And given the (apparently statistically verifiable) tendency of NFL refs not to call illegal hits on him, he really is going to have to take care of himself.

2) You know that sentence above, "It's amazing what having a concussion can do to your opinion on concussions."? Well, maybe not.

At least one NFL player, Nat Berhe of the New York FOOTball GIants, missed four weeks with a concussion, and yet announced to the world that he will do exactly the same things he did that got him that concussion in the first place.

Among the money quotes in the article: "Nobody wants to live forever" (his own quote directly; has he not watched sci-fi movies?), and a description of his opinion stating that Berhe "said it's not his prerogative to think about the consequences." Um, Mr. Berhe, if it's not your prerogative, then whose is it? Player non-responsibility, thy name is Nat Berhe.

I really, really can't help but wonder what his family thinks, and if he's married and has any children.

3) And then there are those who are struggling with two thoughts, both true. Meet Alex Smith.

He's the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs. Once upon a time he used to be the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers.

He lost that job because of a concussion.

By the time he recovered from that concussion, his job had been taken by a guy named Colin Kaepernick, who is now famous for different reasons. Smith ended up being shipped off to KC, where things have actually worked out pretty well for him.

But now he's about to miss a start with what might have been a concussion, and the backup who will be getting the start is a guy who Kansas City acquired because their coach liked him so much back in Philadelphia. On a competitive level, yeah, that would be enough to provoke concern. Oh, no, here we go again...

But Smith has a wife and three kids. He has a reason to want to live forever, to use Berhe's crude formulation. And he's not stupid about head trauma and its effects; at minimum he can read headlines.

So he's torn.

If all that wasn't enough to weigh on him...

4) Kevin Turner's post-mortem brain examination came back revealing as bad a case of CTE as there is.

You might remember this story from the New York Times featuring Turner, then a lead plaintiff in the ongoing legal action against the NFL. Turner died back in March, having already been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. The postmortem in this case did not replace that diagnosis with CTE, but verified the presence of both in Turner's brain, and suggests that in this case the CTE may have been the cause of the Alzheimer's. Such a link had been speculated in the past, but Turner's exam was the most concrete evidence yet for such a link.

Turner really didn't know what he was getting into at the time of his playing career, which was over by the time of Mike Webster's death and the subsequent publicity and understanding of CTE.

Newton, Berhe, and Smith can't say that.

Neither can we, which I can only hope affects how we participate in football, or don't.

Kevin Turner in 2014 (from NY Times)

Sports and belief systems

You might recall the basis for the name of this blog. Imagine the scene as a befuddled outsider (a yankee, probably) observes how southerners lose their minds over college football and comments on the passions being (for good or ill, quite possibly) like religion, only to have a native respond (a grizzled veteran, preferably) with something along the lines of "son, down here football ain't a religion, it's way more important than that."

Leaving aside the evident truth of the statement (more often than I as a pastor like to think about), and a previous and somewhat jocular blog entry to the contrary, I wouldn't necessarily argue that football, or any other sport for that matter, is a religion. I would easily and quickly argue, though, that sports share many things with religion. Possibly one of the chief similarities is that partisanship to most sports, or to individual teams in particular, seems to involve something like a belief system.

I'm thinking of more than the obvious "my team > your team" sentiment expressed with varying degrees of passion and/or vulgarity by fans, or sometimes with humor as by the t-shirt below, or in the song from Weird Al Yankovic's most recent album (your tolerance for which may be determined by your tolerance for an s-word that rhymes with "ducks").

Nota bene: I do acknowledge that there are plenty of fans who in fact know that such a claim is absolutely untrue for their team, and that in fact theirs is the team Weird Al is making fun of. They're the ones who are absoluely floored by a 6-6 season and a trip to the Independence Bowl, or not actually being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs before Labor Day. Those teams are not that common, and their fans tend to be looked down on by fans whose belief system is governed by one of the few close-to-universal claims, "if you're not a winner, you're a loser." But they do exist, and they are perhaps less verging on literal insanity than most.

No, I'm suggesting that there are somewhat more subtle, and usually unconscious, attitudes or assumptions or beliefs that underlie the fanship of an awful lot of sports followers.

I have no intention of trying to claim these beliefs as universal across sports, aside from the above winner/loser dictum. I'd say that many of the beliefs are particular to their sports, possibly to individual teams or the cities in which they play, and in a few cases to the league (or conference, in college) in which a fan's team plays. So instead I'll point out a few specific cases as best as possible.

Since I'm watching a baseball playoff game right now, its particular character as a very organized belief system jumps out at me, with the particular distinguishing characteristic that much of the game's belief system seems to originate with not fans or coaches, but the players themselves. This claim derives mostly from the particular canon of law, practically Talmudic in its scope, usually known as The Right Way to Play the Game (or in some cases The Unwritten Rules). 

This usually ends up being boiled down to "don't show me up." Anything that the offended party takes as embarrassing to the offended party comes under the ban here -- watching your home run ball leave the yard, flipping your bat after hitting it, any kind of gesture by a pitcher after striking out a hitter, a particularly showboat-ish catch in the outfield, you name it and it can be considered offensive by somebody, and you get condemned as not knowing The Right Way to Play the Game. And then somebody throws at your head, which is somehow construed as The Right Way to Play the Game.

Baseball also seems more prone to particular beliefs about curses than other sports. The lodestar example of this curse obsession is in this postseason, currently tied with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series. The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908, and rather than chalking it up to having a lot of bad teams and then having good teams not play well when they did get to the playoffs, a curse about a billy goat became the (ha!) scapegoat. Varying events such as a collapse in the NLCS agains the San Diego Padres in 1984 and the so-called "Bartman game" in 2003 (seriously, people, Bartman didn't choke away eight freaking runs to the Florida Marlins -- who, bitterly to Cubs fans, went on to win the World Series that season), are of course blamed on the Curse of the Billy Goat. I'm guessing that lots of Cubs fans are invoking that curse after being beaten last night by Clayton Kershaw, who is only one of the best pitchers in baseball.

Meanwhile, tonight there are probably Cleveland fans who are wondering about the Curse of Rocky Colavito after tonight's starting pitcher, Trevor Bauer, lasted only 2/3 of an inning after suffering a cut on a finger a few days ago. Since Mike Napoli just hit a home run to give his team the lead against the Toronto Blue Jays, perhaps they're calming down for a moment.

You can read about a whole bunch of other sports-related "curses" here. Other sports do get invoked, and in some cases cities are somehow regarded as being "cursed" across all sports teams.With the Cleveland Cavaliers' NBA championship, the supposed "Cleveland curse" would seem to be gone, with Buffalo and/or San Diego (which has never experienced a major-sport championship for any of its teams) most likely to be regarded as "cursed" even if no specific cause of a curse can be noted.

Most such sports beliefs aren't that elaborate or overtly stated, though. So much of the "belief system" around a sport or team is much more likely to go unspoken, and perhaps to claim much more power for its unspokenness. 

Sometimes that belief is tied up with beliefs outside of sports, such as nationalism. Here football is most prominent, though baseball certainly tries with its "national pastime" nickname. Football has certianly wrapped itself in the flag, both on the pro and college levels, and particularly since 9/11. It has also shown a propensity for direct military display, sometimes funded by the Department of Defense (although NASCAR and MLB also score heavily there).

But perhaps the most insidious unspoken belief in sports, and likely the most unspoken and most powerful, is simple but sinister, and one shared with nationalism at its most base.

My team, right or wrong.

It may have adaptations; my conference, right or wrong (fans of the Southeastern Conference, particularly in football, are Exhibit A here); my league, right or wrong; maybe my sport, right or wrong?

It's the impulse that turns Baylor University and its fans into particularly horrid victim-blamers in the face of accusations of sexual assault against its football players (and Baylor is hardly the only example here, though probably the most egregious of late). My school, right or wrong.

It's the impulse that (along with gobs of cash) makes FIFA one of the most corrupt organizations on earth. My sport, right or wrong. 

It's what allows Atlanta or Cleveland baseball fans, or fans of a whole heap of college teams (Florida State, for example), or Chicago hockey fans, to ignore the inherent insult in making mascots out of fellow human beings (even those who have enough ethical understanding to know better). My team, my school, right or wrong.

And (you knew I was going here) it makes football fans, teams, collegiate conferences, and the NFL unwilling to face just what playing the game has most likely been doing to players for more than a century, even if we only noticed it when Mike Webster died.

And this is why it will be virtually impossible to "fix" football. 

Because my game, right or wrong. 

It has to be the players' fault. Something must be wrong with them. Or the coaches are doing it wrong. Or the helmets are wrong, or the artificial turf is wrong, or anything other than the basic and hard-to-escape observation that when very large and very strong men run into each other at very high speeds and over and over and over and over and over again, the miracle is that such brain trauma doesn't happen to more players. 

It can't be that. My game, right or wrong. 

And thus the game will go on, and people will keep on getting damaged beyond repair, and nobody in the stands will be able to tell. 

And, I guess, nobody will care.

The giving and receiving of hits

Two highly prominent athletes in their respective sports are currently sidelined due to suffering concussions in competition. (That would actually be three if you count Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who is trying to rehabilitate while missing the end of the NASCAR season due to concussion effects from much earlier this year.) One of last year's Super Bowl quarterbacks, Cam Newton of the Carolina Panthers, missed the team's most recent game due to a concussion. For Newton, the season started on a rugged note when he received multiple hits to the head in the season opener against their Super Bowl opponents, the Denver Broncos, and the pattern has continued through the season so far. While the initial reaction after game one was mostly about the dubious hits he has received, of late the conversation has turned to suggestions that Newton will have to change his style of play, relying more on pocket play and getting rid of the ball quickly instead of keeping plays alive with his feet. While this smacks a bit of "blaming the victim," it also seems pretty lame; the notion that any of this will guarantee that further harm does not find Newton is pretty untenable given that concussions don't happen just to running quarterbacks (ask Case Keenum).

Meantime, in the National Hockey League, possibly its best player is sidelined again. Sidney Crosby, center for the Pittsburgh Penguins, is day-to-day (such a thoroughly existential phrase) after a collision in practice on Friday. Any such concern for Crosby is magnified by his previous experience. Crosby missed nearly two seasons after suffering a concussion in 2011 (though he was hardly the first NHL player to have significant time lost due to concussion), leaving his sport missing one of its brightest lights and amplifying the concern about concussions in hockey during a time when a number of its former players were being revealed to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The end of that period also marked the start of legal action against the NHL over head trauma. It may be coincidental that the NHL just announced new policies adding "spotters" at matches -- certified athletic trainers with hockey experience -- who can call for players to be removed from the game when a concussion is suspected.

In the current climate around both sports, such losses draw heightened attention from fans of these sports, or even sports fans generally. This is, of course, a far cry from past years in which the word "concussion" might not have entered the discussion at all, and neither Newton nor Crosbly would have missed any action until neither one of them was able to walk. That only began to change after a number of deaths, mostly of football players at first, who were found to have suffered from CTE. This is of course well-established now, but I find it worthwhile and even needful to reach back in memory and try to remember how it was when we didn't know or understand what was going on, and to try to figure out how I came to the position I currentled y occupy, one in which watching football at all just isn't something I can stomach anymore.

In doing so, I find that the turn started many years ago, with the death of Andre Waters.


Andre Waters played twelve seasons in the NFL, mostly with the Philadelphia Eagles. His reputation, and it was a pervasive one, was as one of the hardest hitters in the league among its defensive backs, or frankly from any position. On occasion Waters would draw fines for the severity of his hits, and that in an age when the league was cranking out videos like "NFL's Greatest Hits" and other such similarly themed titles.

After his playing career ended Waters began to get into collegiate coaching, working at Morgan State University, the University of South Florida, and Alabama State University before ending up at Fort Valley State College, an HBCU in central Georgia not far from my hometown. Between that and the fact that Waters was a native of Belle Glade, Florida (not far from West Palm Beach, where I was living in 2006), the story caught my attention. It's not as though Waters was a favorite player, by any means -- he was usually causing harm to whatever team I was following. But his was a familiar name, and the report of suicide was naturally shocking.

And he wasn't a Pittsburgh Steeler.

Mike Webster had died in 2002. He had been diagnosed with brain damage during his life, but his diagnosis of CTE was not of course known until after his death. Another former Steeler, Justin Strzelczyk, died in an automotive accident in 2004, and the following year onetime teammate Terry Long committed suicide by drinking antifreeze. Both were also found to have CTE in postmortem examination.

As bizarre as it sounds, one could at that point rationalize such stories by wondering damn, what are the Steelers doing to their players? After all, the three had all played for them. Maybe they were just too abusive in practice or something. Also, all three of these players had been offensive linemen. They were in position to get hit a lot, and on every play. If you don't want to think there's a real problem, you look for anything that can be used to limit the scope of that problem. So no, it wasn't crazy-sounding to posit that the Steelers somehow abused their offensive linemen in some way.

Andre Waters's death and diagnosis messed with that.

For one thing, obviously Waters didn't play for the Steelers. He spent the last couple of years of his career with the Arizona Cardinals after his time with the Eagles.

Also, Waters wasn't an offensive lineman. He was a defensive back.

He wasn't the one being hit. He was the hitter.

He was famous for delivering punishing hits. One might even say he was notorious, though such terms are usually reserved for the likes of Jack Tatum (the one who paralyzed Daryl Stingley) or Lester Hayes. To learn that Waters had suffered from this condition messed with a lot of the mythology about football, perhaps the most pervasive of such being a gratuitous perversion of a well-known scripture: when it comes to hits in football, it is better to get than to receive.

If a ferocious hitter like Andre Waters could end up dead at age 44, with a brain likened to that of an 85-year-old Alzheimer's sufferer, clearly hitting was not a lot better than being hit.

I would actually go so far as to say that the death of Andre Waters was the first one to cause me to pay attention to football and CTE and the deaths of players -- not in any systematic way, and not nearly to the point of even thinking about giving up watching football (though I had lost a lot of interest in the NFL by this time), but enough to wonder about what effect the game might have on some number of its players.

At that point it was hard to imagine the numbers of former players who would be found to have suffered from CTE, or that such big names as Junior Seau or Ken Stabler would be among their number. It was certainly not imaginable that a movie would be made on the subject or that a book like League of Denial would come along.

In short, it was not imaginable that we'd end up where we are now, where football -- not just the NFL but football at every age -- would have to think about change, would have to face the possibility that people might decide it wasn't worth the risk for their kids. It was hard to imagine that players who never played beyond college would be diagnosed with this condition.

And yet here we are.

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.

What we may never know

One of the largely unspoken dimensions of our understanding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football players is that while we have a certain amount of understanding generated by currently diagnosed cases, we'll never truly know the whole story.

We will know when former players or their families choose to have their brains given for examination after their deaths. Given the ever-increasing awareness of the effects of football and the thousands of hits its players sustain over the course of their participation on the youth, high school, college and pro ball (for those who get that far), that number is fairly likely to increase. Even that won't necessarily be a complete picture, since most of those who choose to donate are those who experienced symptoms of brain decline during their lifetimes.

(Side note: you could possibly do science a great favor, as a former player, by submitting your brain for study especially if you do not experience such symptoms in your lifetime. Understanding why some are afflicted by CTE and some are not would be an important advance in understanding this trauma.)

However, even that picture won't necessarily reflect the whole story.

That Mike Webster's condition became known to the public has as much to do with the fluke of what Pittsburgh medical examiner was called in to examine the body when it arrived at the morgue. There's not any guarantee that a different examiner would have chosen to perform the more extensive examination that Dr. Bennet Omalu did on that occasion. If that had not been the case, who knows if anyone would have chosen to probe further into the deaths of Justin Strzelzczyk or Terry Long.

Before that awareness in the medical community, we will never know how many former players wer afflicted by the condition in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, or '80s, or even earlier. They might have gone down as simple cases of dementia, or something other like Alzheimer's, or simply unexplained illnesses.

Or unexplained suicides.

In researching on this subject, I came across the story of Jim Duncan. Duncan played briefly in the NFL in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with its pinnacle in the 1970 Super Bowl season of the Baltimore Colts, for whom he started as a defensive back in that championship game. He also featured as a kick returner that season.

The next year he began the season with the Colts as a starter. Injuries derailed his season, though, culminating in a head injury that November. Though no concussion was diagnosed, his season ws more or less off the rails at that point.

Perhaps more interestingly, both team and family members noticed changes in Duncan after the injury; team officials spoke of changes in his personality, while his mother recalled that Duncan began to experience memory loss.

Duncan's life went downhill quickly from there. He was traded the next season to the New Orleans Saints, but was waived by them, and after a failed tryout with the Miami Dolphins (then coached by his former Colts coach Don Shula), he was out of football. A side business went south, treatment for mental illness was required, and his marriage came apart. Finally, in October 1972, according to an official police report, Duncan committed suicide by entering a courthouse, grabbing a police officer's gun, and shooting himself.

The questionable circumstances of his death carry unpleasant resonances with modern headlines about young black men and shootings at the hands of police officers. The other circumstances of his last two years, though, sound awfully familiar to those who have followed the story of CTE:

Football? Check.

Head injury (whether diagnosed as concussion or not)? Check.

Memory loss? Check.

Personality changes? Check.

Business troubles? Check.

Insinuations of drug use/abuse? Check.

Suicide (possibly)? Check.

There will never be any way, at this point, to conclude or demonstrate that Jim Duncan suffered from CTE. His relatively young age, only 26, would not be a disqualifying factor, as the likes of Michael Keck and Tyler Sash demonstrate. But Duncan died forty-four years ago. Analysis or study isn't going to be possible. And there are enough questions about the circumstances of Duncan's death that should not be dismissed that CTE cannot be assumed. But it doesn't seem as though it can be ruled out either.

But we will never know.

And it's very hard to believe he's the only such case.

(Side note: normally I'd have put in a whole bumch of links on Jim Duncan, but most of them are in Google News and Google Books which don't always link well. Google "Jim Duncan suicide" to see reports in The Afro American, Jet, and other sources that discuss aspects of Duncan's life and death.)

Jim Duncan returning a kick in the AFC Championship game of the 1970 season (played Jan. 3, 1971), at the height of his brief career.

Waiting on Science our Savior: How cells die from concussions

As has been insisted before on this blog, long and loud, the damage done to football players' brains -- what we call chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE -- is not -- I repeat, not -- strictly a matter of repeated concussions. Concussions still matter, though, and new research that hit print a couple of weeks ago offers a fairly chilling assessment of just how concussions do their dark anti-magic on the brain.

The research appeared in the journal Scientific Reports on August 2. It contains at least two striking and somewhat worrying findings in relation to the kinds of brain blows football players and other athletes receive, findings that can be informally correlated to the experiences of some such athletes with concussions.

Finding 1, demonstrated with a nifty time-lapse video in the CNN report linked above, suggests that how the individual cells that are damaged by concussive blows might be different than one might expect. As shown in the video, the damaged cell doesn't necessarily show a lot of damage on the outside, for as much as six hours. From that point forward, though, the damage becomes clearer, and as soon as another six hours the cell is dead.

What this seems to indicate, chillingly, is that the damage doesn't show up at first because it happening within the cell, an internal chemical process that only begins to show up in external observation once the affected neuron is mostly deteriorated inside. As a result, once the damage begins to show up on the cell's exterior, it's probably too late for that cell; the damage is irreparable.

I should hope it doesn't require explanation to consider this happening to multiple cells, neuron upon neuron, in the course of one concussion, a horrifying thought. So much brain damage -- what else is there to call it? -- in one moment.

It also makes some intuitive sense when one considers how many concussions reported among NFL players weren't immediately detected or the degree to which concussion symptoms don't always show up immediately. If the deterioration of a single cell can take up to twelve hours, it "sounds right" that it might take that long (or sometimes longer?) for a victim of a concussion to feel its effects.

On the flip side of that chilling thought, comes a thought about chilling. This bit of information offers some hope for researchers, who hope to build upon previous research suggesting a kind of hypothermia -- a "brain freeze," or at least a brain cooling, if you will -- may offer hope for heading off the damage before it becomes irreversible. Those studies aren't conclusive yet, though more are on the way. The researcher presenting the current research, Christian Frank of Brown University, is working with the concept of an inhaler-type device that would deliver a shot of cold air through the blood vessels to the brain and arrest the deterioration at the cellular level.

So in the future, if your favorite quarterback or safety comes off the field looking concussed, you might just see the medical staff hitting him with what looks like an asthma inhaler, but the medic might just be applying a brain freeze.

But back to the downsides. The research also suggested more strongly than before that there might be more than one type of brain injury going on in cells when concussive blows are received. Beyond the obvious blows (leaving the signs you might have seen if you saw the movie Concussion), researchers also found a second, less obvious type of damage, in which cells essentially "pull back" their connections from the surrounding neural networks and, in essence, quit.

This isn't a kind of injury that shows up readily in any kind of examination, pre- or post-mortem. So in other words, all those horrible stories of brains that were examined by the likes of Dr. Bennet Omalu or Dr. Ann McKee, reported to be so grisly and horrible ... might just have been understated.

At the risk of overusing a word, there is something particularly chilling in seeing such neuron deterioration playing out. Then doing the math; how many cells affected by a given blow? how many such blows a game? do all the blows really have to be concussion force to affect some of this kind of damage?, and the heart sinks, or hopefully it does, if you have one.

Concussions happen outside the NFL, of course. One might see the military, in the age of roadside bombs, standing to gain greatly from such research as this and any possible treatments that derive from it. Depending on the level of your pacifism one might see such injuries among soldiers as sad but inevitable or just sad and criminal, but at minimum one would hope no one would begrudge any such affected veteran whatever hope this research might produce.

One hopefully would not begrudge such hope to football players or other athletes, either, but to concede that point should not forestall the question of whether we have any business indulging in the behavior that produces such damage. Does our need for entertainment or our thirst for cathartic violence really justify this?

Concussions happen in other sports besides football, of course. So far, though (aside from certain elements in the NHL), no other sport seems inclined to treat such damage as necessary and inevitable.  Other sports don't talk about the violence that produces these injuries as intrinsic or necessary to the game, or have fans who make asinine sexist remarks about putting skirts on the players when any mitigation of such blows is suggested.

So even as a study like this one offers some beacon of hope, it points ever more deeply to the troubling and powerfully problematic nature of the whole enterprise, one that has been going on for decades. No person should feel even the tiniest compunction against deciding that she or he can't or won't watch it happen anymore.

Watch a neuron die. Now imagine a whole bunch at one blow. 

(As seen in Scientific Reports)

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!

Trust

The NFL would like you to believe you can trust it on the subject of concussions and head trauma among its players. To that end (among other things), the league, in concert with the NFL Players Association, announced today that stricter guidelines and harsher punishments would be applied to teams that failed to follow the league's and NFLPA's agreed concussion protocols on game day. The case of Case Keenum, referenced here, was apparently the impetus for this toughening. Additionally commissioner Roger Goodell announced the NFL would be appointing a new chief medical officer.

The latter announcement, ironically enough, points to one of the most significant reasons why the NFL hasn't been and can't be trusted on the subject. The new officer will be in effect replacing Elliott Pellman, a rheumatologist who became for all practical purposes the face of the NFL's denial on brain trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and as much of a villain in the process as anybody connected to the NFL. Indeed Pellman's stony-faced "no" in the face of questions that threatened to cause the NFL trouble is as much a representation of how the NFL became something of a modern moral equivalent to the tobacco industry.

Pellman, however, is not the only doctor associated with the NFL to come under scrutiny for his professional conduct in that role. Dr. Richard Ellenboegen, a member of the NFL's health committee, is under investigation by his own school (the University of Washington). Ellenboegen, co-chair of the league's Head, Neck, and Spine Committee, is also chair of U-Dub's Department of Neurological Surgery. UW is investigating Ellenboegen over his alleged attempts to influence the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pull CTE research funding away from Boston University's program (one which has carried out some of the foremost research in the field so far) towards doctors who were more sympathetic to the NFL's position, including possibly some funded by the NFL.
In the meantime, the more new information comes out, the less the NFL looks like anything you want holding your life in its hands, and those who have been associated with the NFL are starting to feel the effects of that taint. Green Bay Packers great Paul Hornung has sued the league's primary helmet manufacturer, Riddell, over the ineffectualness of their helmets (Hornung now suffers from dementia). Also, another former NFL player, Haruki Nakamura, is now suing Lloyd's of London for failing to honor a policy he purchased from them. The policy was independent of the NFL in this case, but the NFL has declared Nakamura physically unfit to play in the league, which Lloyd's is contesting. Nakamura's wife describes how her husband changed after the injury, in a litany becoming all too familiar.

In the meantime, Calvin Johnson has talked about the many concussins of his career, none of which ever made it to an NFL injury report (not to mention the proliferation of painkillers dispensed to deal with them and other injuries); the player who has emerged as the primary advocate of marijuana use to deal with such injuries (and cut back on the painkillers) has decided to retire; a new NFL coach has apparently decided to have players hit in practice like it's 1999 (i.e. the age before brain trauma awareness);  and, in probably the most SMH development of all, a former NCAA and NFL running back avoided prison time for a drug offense by claiming he was being treated for CTE. You can't be "treated for CTE," since CTE can't be diagnosed until after death, and cadavers (as far as I know) don't receive medical treatment. Oh, and it's really looking like 30 is the new 40 where NFL retirement is concerned.

Perhaps the saddest or strangest part of the story is that the degree to which the NFL has managed to lose the public's trust, the NFL itself is not the entity most likely to suffer from that lack of trust. Instead, that "honor" probably falls to youth sports organizations (Pop Warner football and the like, but not just in football), ill-prepared for the scrutiny, which are now seeing folks conclude that tackle football (or, for example, heading the ball in soccer) just isn't appropriate anymore for children or even younger teenagers. Now in theory, this could eventually have an effect on the "pipeline" of talent into the NFL, but probably not soon and not as much as you might expect; the NFL (and the NCAA for that matter) will simply find different sources of talent, and there will always be plenty of young men who are convinced they are invulnerable. It's a macho thing, you know, even if they don't call it that anymore.

As NFL training camps and NCAA practices gear up in the coming weeks, I'm guessing more such stories will start to flow freely through the media. Summer vacation is over for Big Football, and scrutiny is only going to re-intensify. How much that matters? I'm not optimistic. There are actual fan groups that do seek to shine a spotlight on these abuses, but I fear they're a drop in the bucket compared to the literally obscene amounts of money the league rakes in. Popularity has never equalled ethical legitimacy, though, so the question of how we can justify an entertainment that sure as Hell looks like it irreparably damages about a third of its participants must and will continue to be asked, at least in this blog anyway.

At least Case Keenum's inglorious moment wasn't totally blown off, I guess...