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...

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.

The Band Geek: college version

I have in a previous entry explored the degree to which my young life, in ways I didn't see at the time, was governed by the rhythms and schedules of football, at least during the fall, due to my membership in the marching band. Another past blog post explored one early if not quite informed introduction to the spectre of catastrophic injury even at the high school level, again as part of that marching band experience. However, it is needful for me to admit that this was not the full extent of my band-geekery.

I also marched in the band those two falls I spent at Wake Forest, and that provided some interesting experiences as well. Wake Forest wasn't a football school, though, and the sense of urgency that surrounded the football team in high school was reserved for basketball there (if I had stayed beyond that year and a half I'd have been in the pep band that played at basketball games, which might have meant television time! But I didn't). There was good reason for this besides the football team's ineptitude; Wake's basketball team was actually pretty good in those days (and this was pre-Tim Duncan), and had a sort of moment in the spotlight when an upset win over DePaul (they used to be good, too) prematurely ended the career of their longtime coach Ray Meyer, a sentimental favorite to win it all or at least get to the Final Four in his final season. Delaney Rudd, Anthony Teachey, Danny Green (not that one), and the next year Muggsy Bogues showed up. Good times.

The college marching band experience was a little different, mostly because (1) the games were on Saturdays instead of Fridays, which gave the experience a slightly different vibe, and (2) Wake Forest simply wasn’t that good. Dublin High’s teams were not necessarily perennial playoff winners, but they usually won more than they lost. Wake’s teams didn’t. (This was in 1983 and 1984, long before the Demon Deacons’ inexplicable run to the 2006 ACC championship and Orange Bowl appearance on January 2, 2007.) When the most ardently cheered player on the team is the punter, you know the team isn’t that successful. (To be clear, the punter deserved the cheers: Harry Newsome was an All-American in 1983, and went on to an NFL career with, I think, the Steelers and the Vikings.)

The university’s athletic department recognized the general lack of appeal of a poor team with a small alumni base, and during the two seasons I was in the marching band the games tended to be followed by some kind of entertainment show or concert. Because of these I got to see Bob Hope live (clearly Wake’s students were not the intended targets of these shows), as well as the Four Tops and Temptations, so the effort was worthwhile for me at least, and I was not so young and stupid as to be unable to enjoy such legendary acts. Some of the acts were less familiar to me, which got annoying as the band absolutely was not allowed to leave early in those cases. This also provided me an introduction to the mingling of sport and entertainment that would become another piece of the puzzle in these later years, sorting out the ways in which football generates and keeps its hold on its acolytes with spectacle and distraction.

Road trips could be a different affair as well. Back then, some combination of North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Duke was certain to be on the schedule, and those were pretty quick trips. Others could be longer and a bit more involved. As well, sometimes the road trips only involved a pep band, with no time spent on the field (I remember a game at Richmond -- yes, Wake Forest traveled to a game against a 1-AA team -- that was pep band only. Back then they were still playing at the stadium that now houses the Richmond Kickers soccer team.) 

Maybe the most notable road trip was to Georgia Tech, if only because several of my high-school classmates had chosen to attend that school. I snuck off for the third quarter and spent it among them, in a Georgia Tech student section, in my Wake Forest band uniform (this was a real marching trip, no pep band). The other memorable (and much less pleasant) part of that trip was a girl I was interested in making it clear she was dating a rich sophomore instead. As you can note, very few of my marching band memories from my Wake Forest time really involved the actual game of football at all, aside from cheering for the punter. (Wake Forest also hosted a high-school marching band competition, for which we band members were assigned various tasks. That was more fun than any game I ever attended.)

After transferring away from Wake Forest in the middle of my sophomore year (to major in music, ironically), my exposure to live football became much less frequent. My new school didn’t field a football team, and aside from one trip the next fall to see Wake Forest at Georgia Tech and catch up with my old band mates, I saw very few games live, mostly during my time in graduate school at Florida State; my fellow grad students in my degree program generally got together to get tickets for one game per season. Otherwise, I frequently spent football Saturdays across the campus, working in the music library. Most of the time, though, the game was on our television at home.

While there were no major on-field injuries during the games I saw at Wake Forest (at least not that I remember), I did get an early introduction to the signature malady of the current age of CTE: the concussion. In my first semester at the university one of my classmates in an introductory theatre class was a walk-on football player, whose hopes to play for the Deacs had been derailed by a concussion suffered during pre-season training. Or at least it was supposedly a concussion. At least a few folks suggested he had suffered more than one, and you couldn't really be certain that wasn't the case.

He was as nice a guy as you could hope, but clearly not all was right with him. On more than one occasion he would be found in class zoned out, completely having lost track of all going on around him, noticing nothing but the headache. The professor didn't really know what to do with him in those situations. Part of the responsibility for this class was to work as off-stage personnel for the theatre division's fall production (Shakespeare, but I don't remember what). This fellow and I were both assigned to the costume shop. There was enough of a challenge for him and his enormous hands trying to manipulate sewing needles and replace small buttons. On the bad days, it was impossible.  He made it to most of the classes, occasionally missing because, as he would later explain, he just couldn’t get around the pain. By the end of the semester his symptoms had abated somewhat (and I do emphasize somewhat), but while he tried again, to my recollection he never made Wake’s active football roster. But since I was only there for one more year, how would I know? He might just have gotten on the roster later, as messed up as his brain clearly was.

I wish I could say I was enough of a prophet to see from his difficulties that it was all going to end badly, and that football was a sport with a serious head trauma problem even at that time. No, I didn't see that coming, being in a way still too close to it, I guess. Though my direct experience of the game was going to wane in the intervening years, I certainly wasn’t ready to walk away from it yet. That was still years in the future.

If a punter was ever going to look like an All-American, this was it. Harry Newsome at Wake Forest.

Spectacle and harm

You might have heard that Prince Rogers Nelson, or the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, died today.

The iconic and iconoclastic singer/guitarist/songwriter/cultural lightning rod was found dead today in an elevator (wasn't that somehow part of "Let's Go Crazy"?) at his home/recording studio/complex in Minnesota. In a year with entirely too many musicians slipping off this mortal coil, this one was a cannon shot to the solar plexus for those of us of a particular age.

Prince wasn't without his affections for sports, especially for his Minnesota-based teams. He once wrote a song for the NFL's Minnesota Vikings, took in the NBA's Timberwolves, and threw was has been called an epic concert for the WNBA's Minnesota Lynx after they won their league championship.

But perhaps his most indelible mark in the sporting world was his performance for the halftime show of Super Bowl XLI, in Miami in 2007.* This was the Super Bowl that was unique for more than its particular combination of Roman numerals; it was the one Super Bowl that got rained on, pretty much for the whole game.

*Corrected; originally "2012" -- apparently I can't do Roman numerals anymore.

In this story (from The Weather Channel...well, he did sing about purple rain) the story is told of Prince's reaction when NFL foofs checked the weather that morning and folks in charge of the halftime show reported the rain to Prince. His epic reaction: "Can you make it rain harder?"

He of course proceeded to go out and blow the Super Bowl away, rain-slickened stage and all.

What is interesting, in watching the event all these years later, is how little Prince particularly cares to be part of the NFL's spectacle; Prince was a spectacle all by himself, and that year the NFL was fortunate to tag along with a performer for whom a downpour was just an interesting stage effect.

But Prince at the Super Bowl does raise some interesting points about the spectacle that attaches itself to the Super Bowl and other major sporting events (and indeed, to almost all professional and major-college sporting events to some degree). The very idea of a halftime show at a football game points to the degree to which some kind of spectacle has attached itself to that particular game for a very long time. (It might be worth the recollection that, throughout high school and my first two years of college, I was part of that spectacle -- a band geek.)

If you think about it, that's a little bit different from other sports. Most sporting events anymore begin with the national anthem -- a bit of patriotic spectacle, if you will -- but, unless you're in the playoffs, that's about it for a baseball game (unless you count "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" as a kind of spectacle; I could see it, but I think of it as something different.) Basketball games, on the major-college level at least, are increasingly offering some sort of halftime entertainment, which might vary from some sort of musical performer to a juggler or tumbling act or aerial acrobatics -- what might have been called "sideshow entertainment" in the past. Having not been to an NBA game I can't comment on what happens there.

The longstanding tradition of halftime spectacle, though, seems fairly unique to football. This I suppose is fairly sensible, since of the most popular sports going today football has the most in common with the kind of sporting event that used to be called "spectacle."

Yes, kids, it's time to bring in the good ol' Roman Empire and its "spectacles."

I have remarked in previous blog entries on the relative lack of sustained development of theological consideration of the ongoing saga of brain trauma and football; one partial exception is discussed here, and Dr. Hoffman's book is among a rather larger (though still not huge) body of literature that takes on the subject of Christianity and sports more generally. One of the inevitable tropes that appear in such literature is the games and sports of the Roman Empire, events to which are frequently attached the term "spectacle." This emphasizes, beyond the simple physical brutality of the contests (includiating gladiatorial combats and chariot races), the degree to which extra-sporting events accrued around the sporting contests. Of course, in the case of Rome, it might in some cases be that the sporting contests wormed their way into the specacle.

At times the spectacle was overtly religious, in the context of the Roman Empire and its pantheon of deities. Multiple such deities might have been appeased or honored in the ceremonies surrounding the contests, and of course the emperor or any representative of the emperor could expect his own share of adulation as well. (Looking slightly further back in history, much the same would have held true of the Athenian spectacles surrounding the original Olympic Games.)

Of course, the contests themselves were much more immediately harmful to their competitors, and in some cases much more immediately fatal, depending on the whim of the emperor or crowd. Though there are exceptions, we do not expect our competitors to die in front of us at sporting events we attend, and when it does happen the sporting entity in question goes through all manner of soul-searching and procedural review. Even an organization like NASCAR erupts in a paroxysm of new safety measures and guidelines in the wake of a death or major injury on the track (although, with the sometimes highly personal affection for the competitors in that more individual sport, perhaps that's not so surprising).

Nowadays, the adulation of "idols" surrounding our sporting events is rather more discreet as well. While a great deal of adulation seems to be directed at God by some athletes on or immediately off the field, it's not always certain how much that adulation is actually directed at the God revealed in the crucified Christ, the Man of Sorrows, the Prince of Peace. (But that's a discussion for another book, some of which have already been written -- but that's another blog post.) There are plenty of other idols surrounding our sporting events, though, if you look hard enough.

One might think of the corporate sponsors, who now generally have their names spashed on everythign from the stadium itself to the timeouts, not to mention in signs all over the place. (I once went to a minor-league baseball game where the strikeouts were "sponsored by Circle K"; funny, but if Circle K didn't pony up the dough were the pitchers not allowed to strike anybody out?) Perhaps the cheerleaders on the sidelines become objects of, uh, we'll call it "worship" for now although we know darn well it's anything but. The coaches increasingly become figures of a particular kind of adulation. Celebrities who appear in the stands (particularly in Fox baseball broadcasts) might fall in here.

Perhaps even the players themselves, or more specifically the bodies of the players themselves, become these objects of devotion. This is of course particularly ironic in the case of football or other sports in which intense physical damage or harm is the frequent (or possibly inevitable -- yes, that entry again) consequence of the action on the field.

One of the questions that is inevitable is: how much does the spectacle surrounding the game a cover for the destructiveness of the game itself on the bodies of those who play, or how much does the game seek cover in spectacle? Or does the spectacle seek to draw attention to itself by attaching itself to the game?

In this context it's interesting to go back to Prince's halftime show, and to remember why such shows became the norm. In case you don't remember, or you're a little too young to remember, you kinda have to blame Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans for that.

In 1992 Fox (not yet privileged to broadcast the Super Bowl, I guess?) went after the NFL's halftime activities (at that point the most frequent performer for SB halftimes was still the Grambling University marching band, I think, and Up With People was another common guest performer), counterprogramming a strange little halftime called "Winter Magic" with an episode of their sketch-comedy program "In Living Color," starring Carrey and Wayans and others. The counterpunch was effective enough to draw more viewers than the Super Bowl halftime show. (This after the previous year's halftime show had been pre-empted, at least on the air, by ABC News coverage of Operation Desert Storm.) The NFL was going to have none of that; the following year's halftime show featured no less than Michael Jackson, and such major acts has been the trend ever since (with a brief detour into former major acts after sister Janet's exposed nipple).

Clearly in that case spectacle became a means of propping up the game. Or is it that clear? After all, the audience that flipped the channel for "In Living Color" did seem to return to the game right afterwards. But incomplete or distracted adulation of idols apparently doesn't cut it; it seems you are required to stay for the whole worship service.

This is far from a complete survey of the relationship of sport and spectacle, and football is far from the only sport to indulge in it to some degree. (At some point we really need an examination or dissection of the crazy ceremonies that precede soccer matches, especially FIFA-sponsored contests.)  We're not far from another round of the modern Olympics, where sport and spectacle are joined at the hip. But the relationship of sport and spectacle in a sport still grappling with its frequently destructive tendencies towards its players can't be neglected in seeking to sort out the allegiances of those who continue to participate (as fans or supporters) in the game, or the spectacle, or in some combination of both.

RIP Prince. Regrettably, the rain was not purple that night.

The latest early retirements and alarming studies

I guess it's not really news any more when a player retires after only one year in the NFL, or I suppose it's less of a shock when the player has a history of four concussions instead of one or two, or if he's a Buffalo Bill instead of a San Francisco 49er, or a special teamer instead of a semi-regular to regular player. At any rate, the retirement of A.J. Tarpley was a more under-the-radar event than that of Chris Borland last year (the event that prodded me into more regular blogging after a bit of a lag).

Tarpley played in 14 of 16 games last season, including starts at linebacker in the season's two final games. In the Instagram post in which Tarpley announced his retirement, he is seen holding up the ball after picking an interception on what would be the last play of his career.

Tarpley is a Stanford grad, which might lead some to argue that his education puts him in a position to have a pretty good career outside of football, even after only one year in the league. Here he might bear some similarly to Borland, with a degree and means to forge ahead without the NFL.

Tarpley was frank about the role his four concussions played in his choice to retire. While Mike DeVito, a defensive end for the Kansas City chiefs, spoke of a more general injury history after nine years in the NFL, the two concussions he suffered this past season were also prominent in his decision to retire. DeVito weighed that injury history in light of being a family man; he spoke openly of the need to be there for his wife and children in future years (echoing a thought already expressed by Hussain Abdullah, another Chief who announced his retirement in March).

For D'Brickashaw Ferguson, the issue was less concussions than Concussion.

Ferguson also weighed his own perception of his lessened effectiveness last season, and also recalled a pretty sorry treatment of a former teammate who was strung along through an offseason only to be cut during the NFL draft -- yes, during the draft -- as soon as the Jets had drafted his replacement. There were certainly other issues at play for him. Nonetheless, Ferguson had also spoken out about the concerns the Will Smith movie raised for him after seeing it last fall. Ferguson's a thoughtful man, and showed enough intelligence not to be fooled by the movie's eye-catching title (more catching than Subconcussive Hit would have been, although to be fair the movie does acknowledge the role those play in CTE), expressing concern for the possibility that his future might be affected even though concussions were not a part (or at least an acknowledged part) of his career. He didn't miss a game and never even showed up on an injury report.

DeVito and Ferguson are less unlikely retirement candidates than Tarpley; each could have played a few more years, even if in lesser roles (though it seems clear that Ferguson wasn't interested in doing so), but it isn't completely unprecedented for players around age thirty (especially this offseason -- we see you, Calvin Johnson) or a little younger (you too, Marshawn Lynch) to retire.

The other striking news in the last couple of weeks involves another couple of new studies, focusing on the thing the NFL absolutely doesn't want to hear and more than absolutely doesn't want you to hear. A study out of Boston University specifically took as its focus the role not of concussions, but repeated hits over years of playing football. You can be certain that the NFL will do everything it can to distort whatever result it eventually comes out with (and the initial results, while not yet conclusive, don't look good). The study also doesn't specifically address CTE, the hot-button that the NFL doesn't want to talk about; rather, the study focuses more broadly on brain trauma of many kinds. (Reminder: CTE can only be diagnosed after death.)

Another study was released last week, prior to its presentation at a medical conference this week, concerning former NFL players and traumatic brain injury (TBI) -- again, living retired players, so CTE not a subject of discussion). The study, from Francis X. Conidi of the Florida Center for Headache and Sports Neurology and the Florida State University College of Medicine, tested forty retired NFL players both through sensitive MRI exams and tests of thinking and memory. (Full disclosure: I have a graduate degree from FSU, though obviously not in medicine.)

The results are fairly troubling; in those scans and tests, a full 40% of those players tested showed significant evidence of TBI, by a rate with less than one percent margin of error. That's a rate well beyond that in the general population. The article goes into more specifics on the rates of difficulty in the different mental functions measured by the memory, reasoning, and other tests; take a look for yourself.

That's disturbing enough. But here's the sentence I find most chilling. I'm just gonna quote it directly:

The more years a player spent in the NFL, the more likely he was to have the signs of traumatic brain injury on the advanced MRI. However, there was no relationship between the number of concussions a player had and whether he had traumatic brain injury based on the advanced MRI. 

No correlation to the number of concussions.

Again, this is going to be truly disturbing. Even if one assumes that one can do something about the number of concussions connected to playing football at whatever age or for however many years, it's going to be rather difficult to take hits out of football. Even the very idea is going to prompt the spewing forth of lame blather about putting players in skirts and other derogatory (and misogynistic, if you think about it) remarks from the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers (hint: if you make such remarks, or even think about making such remarks, you are by definition a mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger even if you have a damn Ph.D).

And yet, as much as the media keeps not noticing, again and again things keep reminding us of something I've been saying for a while now (even about other sports).

It's not just concussions.

Repeat:

It's not just concussions.

Way to go out on a high note, A.J. Tarpley.

Sacking the Temple (A book chapter commentary)

You think I'm extreme? Let me introduce you to Shirl J. Hoffman.

Hoffman (that's a "he," right there with renowned sportswriter Shirley Povich and renowned theologian Shirley Guthrie) is Professor Emeritus of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina - Greensboro. He has served as the Executive Director of the American Kinesiology Association, and the editor of a notable text in that field, as well as the author of Sport and Religion and the particular object of interest for today's blog, Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sport. Prior to his entry into academia he worked as a basketball coach. Hoffman also describes himself as an evangelical of long standing, son of a Baptist minister in western Pennsylvania,

Between all of these elements, Hoffman has become a man with major questions about the current state of sport, and evangelical enmeshment in it.

Good Game is a pretty thick volume, so I'm not going to try to discuss it all in one fell swoop. I will, however, offer up some description and commentary on Chapter 7 of that book, one which (although Hoffman doesn't draw it out as explicitly as possible) has great relevance to the frequent subject of this blog, the destructiveness of football to, in particular, the brains of several people who play it.

Chapter title: "Building and Sacking the Temple."

The chapter, as does the book in general, touches on and reaches across many different fields of encounter between sport culture and evangelical culture (Hoffman is quite specific about his own experience and his audience as a result). Among the topics in the chapter are the fad for "Christian" workout videos and proliferation of elaborate gymnasia in certain large churches; the tendency towards glorification of six-pack abs and such as somehow especially "Christian" as a reversal of long-standing suspicion of the body in Christian culture across the centuries; and the meat of the chapter, the proffering of sport as a way of building the body in such a "Christian" fashion flying in the face of prolific demonstration of sport (particularly highly competitive sports, including on the pro level) as having instead a destructive effect on the body, i.e. "sacking" the temple (the body) instead of building it up.

Those who have followed sports for some time will recognize some of Hoffman's examples; a fourteen-year-old Little Leaguer whose arm broke in two places in delivering a pitch (shades of major leaguer Dave Dravecky, whose own arm-snap was a lot more public when it happened and who also gets a mention in the chapter); the damage of boxing; Mike Webster, Terry Long, and Andre Waters; a litany of bodily injuries as described by former major-league catcher Bob Brenly, not atypical of what many ex-catchers describe; the romanticism of injury (both receiving and inflicting) by former pro footballers like Don Meredith, Michael Strahan (yes, the guy next to Kelly Ripa each weekday morning), and Lawrence Taylor (the guy who broke Joe Theismann); the frequent concussions of the likes of Al Toon, Steve Young and Troy Aikman (who is quoted as incredulously wondering "How in the world could anybody endure this for 10 years?") and former athletes, especially devout evangelicals like Orel Hershiser and Kevin Seitzer (as well as Dravecky) citing their faith as the explicit reason they were eager to push themselves to return from injury (multiple beanings in Seitzer's case).

Football, perhaps the most exalted sport in the evangelical culture Hoffman addresses, doesn't come in for particular exaltation in Hoffman's view. To Hoffman, in particular because of its far more widespread participation and its hold on American culture, football is a "greater threat to health than boxing" (178). Hoffman cites the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research and its implication of football in the greatest number of catastrophic injuries, notes football's responsibility for 68% of the 62,000 high school sports injuries reported annually, and also cites former San Diego Chargers staff psychiatrist Arnold Mandell's experience with the "carnage" up-close.

In short, in Hoffman's words, "[I]t is impossible to overstate football's assault on the dignity of the human body" (179).

This is a serious charge to come from Hoffman, who is quite interested in a theology of the body as a cite of the Imago Dei. The Incarnation, that mystery in which the Divine took on human flesh not as a cheap suit but as a real and concrete identity, is a major source of Hoffman's distress at the destructive nature of modern sport. Frankly, it's hard to argue against the thought. One doesn't need to slip into undue body adulation to find it hard to stomach how much modern sports (not just football, but certainly it stands out) wreaks harm and not help on the human bodies that throw themselves into it.

Though Hoffman does not expand on his concerns about football greatly here (his net is wide enough to cover all sports), his concerns are highly informative when considering the ethical implications of participation in football as a fan/supporter/consumer of sports. He has plenty to say about that too, but that will wait for another time.

Hoffman, Shirl James. Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010.

A young man's trauma

Well, another deceased former football player has been diagnosed.

Tyler Sash, a defensive back who played for the University of Iowa and the New York Giants, had advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) at the time of his death back in September. He was 27.

I hesitated to provide the link or even mention the story, simply because it's starting to sound familiar. Sash had played football since around age 9. He had started, in the time since being cut by the Giants in 2013, been experiencing episodes of memory loss, inability to focus or pay sustained attention (to the degree that he was unable to hold or keep a job), uncharacteristic bouts with temper, and erratic behavior (including leading police on a high-speed scooter chase from which he fled on foot, and public intoxication).

He had experienced at least five known concussions over the course of his time in football, and of course many, many other hits that may have fallen into the category of those "subconcussive hits" that do as much, if not more, of the damage in many CTE victims.

His death was caused by an overdose of pain medications, with a "history of painful injuries" a contributing factor, as ESPN.com put it. Family members had attributed the aforementioned difficulties to that pain medication history. Nonetheless, his family decided to donate his brain to the Boston University's program, the one that had found close to 90 cases of CTE in former players. BU's program and the Concussion Legacy Foundation advised the family of the results last week, a disclosure that has brought some clarity, if not closure, to Sash's family.

As noted above, Sash played 16 years of football, from childhood through the NFL. Junior Seau played for 20 years in the NFL alone. Nonetheless, BU researcher Dr. Ann McKee, who performed both examinations, found the level of CTE in Sash's brain to be similar to the level in Seau's. McKee also acknowledged that Sash's brain was affected in a way she had only seen in one other former player so young. While the Times report did not name that player, it did describe that victim as a 25-year-old former college player; that sounds a lot like Michael Keck, whose severely traumatized brain was the subject of a recently released article in a major medical journal. Keck, interestingly, had also played football for 16 years.

Antwaan Randle El is a grizzled old guy by comparison. With 9 NFL seasons under his belt, plus four at Indiana, presumably four in high school, and who knows how much before that, he probably tops twenty seasons total, at least.

We need to come away from this with a lesson that shoulld have sunk in some time ago, apparently. The Frank Giffords or Mike Websters of the world are not necessarily the norm. For those who are diagnosed with CTE, the clock started ticking pretty early.

These late results are not inconsistent with this study, elaborated here, that suggests those players who start young and play a long time are at greater risk. Of course, those were former NFL players being tested, who had lived into their forties, fifties, or even sixties. Sash and Keck were 27 and 25, respectively, and Keck never played a down in the NFL and only a year-plus in college (but those ten years of youth football...). So, these are cases that go rather beyond the scope of that study.

The famous NFL stars get the headlines, not surprisingly. But it's becoming a young man's trauma (pace Paul Oliver, Chris Henry, Adrian Robinson, Owen Thomas), and not always (or not entirely) to be laid at the feet of the NFL.

We need to talk about what "risk" means in this context.

(To be continued...)

Tyler Sash

Quickie: Culture change doesn't come easily

My schedule keeps conspiring against my ability to blog lately, but I certainly didn't want this one to get overlooked: an NFL player actually self-reported concussion symptoms in the course of a game. And the player was a fairly big name to boot.

The culture of football has demanded, pretty much as long as football has existed, that players play hurt, and more specifically they play hurt without saying anything about it. Back in Teddy Roosevelt's day it was literally better to die than to fess up to being hurt. While I doubt that most modern players truly feel that way, In the course of a game a football player really doesn't care about his future. I'm not trying to be cruel; ask one. The only thing that matters is staying on the field for the next play, and the next, and so on. If something is broken or your bell is rung, hide it. That's the code.

So, when a pretty big-name quarterback came to the sideline and reported feeling concussion-like symptoms on Nov. 29, it was a bit of a jolt. Ben Roethlisberger did exactly that, though, in the Pittsburgh Steelers' game against the Seattle Seahawks. Accordingly, he was put into the NFL's concussion protocol, and ended up missing the rest of the game. The Steelers lost.

Roethlisberger continued in the concussion protocol for part of that following week. (This article has a quick-and-dirty summary of the requirements a player in that protocol must meet in order to return to the field.) He was found not to have a concussion, and returned to action the following game.

There will be troglodytes who will see nothing but Roethlisberger missing the end of that game and blame him for being soft. He's been accused of exaggerating injuries before, so that is a fairly easy leap for such a trog to make. So far, most of the public reaction has been restrained and even somewhat supportive, as in the initial link above. But the troglodytes tend to lurk in comment sections.

Seeing a big-name athlete watch out for his own health is not a thing to be dismissed or taken lightly. Even so, though, it's hard to assume that some high-school kid who gets his head slammed into the ground and suddenly can't remember his name is going to think, "I need to get to the sideline, that's what Ben Roethlisberger did." The culture change has to be built in from the bottom as well, which is presumably the purpose of this site.

Tied into the forthcoming movie Concussion (and quite unafraid to pitch the Will Smith film, as you can see at the bottom), this site, also tied to this educationally oriented site, appears to be aimed at making the avoidance of head trauma part of the early levels of football. How much effect it can have I don't know (young boys aren't always noted for having a lick of good sense, and are often allergic to looking or seeming uncool), but at least somebody's trying, I guess. When paired with news like this out of Florida some weeks back, one might be excused for feeling vaguely hopeful.

For a better view go visit that website.

Rant: once more, with feeling, it's not just concussions!

I promise this one isn't from The Onion, although I couldn't blame you if you doubted me.

One Michael Turner, medical director of the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation, is going to get a nice piece of change to fund his research on concussions across four sports prone to them: American football, ice hockey, Australian rules football, and horse racing (the latter being Turner's own principal field).

This is actually a pretty sound idea. Comparison across different sports makes plenty of sense, if you do it right.

So why am invoking a notorious satire site as a lead-in to this blog entry?

Turner, you see, has some pretty ... ah, interesting ideas about What's Really Going On.

Based on his experience with those jockeys, he's pretty sure all the "media hype" on the subject is out of line, because:

I don't think my jockeys end up all dribbling and demented, and we have good reason to suspect that.

Nice.

Turner is also quite willing to offer up another theory on how the post-football-career issues with mental health happen:

Also when athletes retire they are at a very critical period in their lives. Prior to that they were well-known they might have been famous and earning quite a lot of money and suddenly, they have very little status, nobody knows who they are, they don't have somewhere to go to work and I think that transition can be badly handled by lots of sports.

 Yeah, we never remember sports heroes of the past.

Oh, and:

You never hear that discussion among professional athletes or student athletes when they have finished competing and what we find out is that people who have pre-injury had mood disorders or depression do worse than those who don't...

So the likes of Junior Seau or Dave Duerson had mood disorders before they ever got their bells rung on the football field, most likely. Or something like that.

In short, the NFL is throwing a chunk of money (minuscule, in comparison to its profits, but still) at some classic denialism "research." The kind of stuff the tobacco industry threw out there for decades, and that the fossil fuel industry has been funding for decades even as they knew damn well what was going to happen if we kept burning their product.

In short, the NFL wants to keep you from thinking clearly on the subject. Even as they make public pronouncements about how much they care about the health of those who play in the league, they will do their damnedest to distract you from the very idea that playing the game might be even the least bit dangerous. And as you remain sufficiently distracted, they can keep on pursuing pet projects like expanding their schedule to eighteen games per season, playing games on Thursday nights, and ohter measures that are completely at odds with any kind of concern for player health (concussions or otherwise).

And, as long as you continue to watch and spend money on NFL products, they will be quite happy to pursue obfuscation rather than genuine research.

For example: they would rather you keep thinking about concussions, damaging as they are, without ever comprehending the degree to which repeated subconcussive hits are implicated in the long-term brain traumas that have galvanized public attention. Concussions, bad as they are, sound like a solvable problem. When you start considering the degree to which any hit you see at the line of scrimmage or downfield, the type from which the player hit hops up and shows no sign of undue injury, actually may well be contributing to a raging case of CTE down the road...then that becomes a problem with the fundamental nature of the game and the way it's played. The NFL would rather you not think about that. So they're quite happy to throw money at a jockey doctor who will say what they want you to hear, such as:

Whether you're knocked out or you have a concussion from falling off a horse or being a linebacker or whether you're playing Aussie rules football -- it's all the same.

Interesting. I was unaware that jockeys were getting hit that frequently between falls.

Meanwhile, don't think I'm giving the NCAA a pass. They're even happier to let the NFL take all the public scrutiny and pay for the research, as long as you still pony up for season tickets to see your Dear Old Alma Mater serve as the NFL's farm system, any ethical concerns that you might see in any other situation overwhelmed by your tribal loyalties.

 Have a nice weekend. Enjoy the games.

Poor Tom Crabtree (@itsCrab, formerly of the Packers)

An aside: how do we care about athletes?

Having started to put together some of the more basic questions about watching football in the previous two posts, this moment might be useful for an aside on a subject that is pretty important to this whole enterprise, but which is asked amazingly seldom.

What do we actually think of athletes?

To be more precise, do we, in the theological, agape sense of the word, love athletes?

Do they get to be full-fledged people, children of God, in our eyes?

Some qualifications:

I am limiting, for now, this discussion to professional athletes in team sports. Of course this is not to suggest somehow that college athletes are unimportant (leaving aside the question of collegiate athletes in certain sports as 'amateur'), or that Serena Williams or Usain Bolt are undeserving of Christian love. Rather, I suspect that the dynamics of fan relationships with those classes of athletes are different. One's affection for Serena is a lot less guided by the clothes she wears while on the court (it's possible to have an opinion about them but that's another issue). But as Jerry Seinfeld notes, our opinion of or affection for a baseball player, for example, is highly conditioned by what he's wearing on the field. College athletes, particularly in the high-revenue sports such as football or basketball, come closer to having the same issues as the pro team-sports players, but for now I'm going to hold that the professional/amateur divide still matters. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future.

I am also aware that in most cases we don't know the athletes personally. We are, however, called to live in Christian love towards people we don't know personally on a regular basis. To be precise, we can't use that as an excuse to withhold love from anybody; presumably that includes athletes.

I ask the question because it's inescapable, when deciding whether a Christian ethical case for watching football as it stands is currently possible. We are charged with approaching all persons, near or far, from a viewpoint of basic Christian relationship. A minimum requirement of this is recognizing a full measure of human worth in each person.

Do we really do with this with athletes? Or does the way we watch games hinder our ability or willingness to see the athletes we watch as fully human?

I dare say most of us would not willingly claim to see the players on the field as anything less than full human beings. I question, though, whether the particular nature of fandom or rooting for teams diminishes that capacity in us more than we realize. Seinfeld's comedic riff above (made famous in another setting as "rooting for laundry") isn't completely off-target here. The same player we root for passionately as long as he's wearing the home team's jersey becomes an object of derision when he gets traded or -- especially -- if he leaves as a free agent.

But our affection for the players who wear our laundry is also changeable, violently so at times. The player who makes a critical error and has 50,000 people suddenly booing him relentlessly probably isn't feeling his full human worth at that moment. The more excessive, depraved fan might continue to hound that player well beyond the rational sell-by date for such rage, but even the fan who has the more sane position of moving on from such moments probably doesn't quite completely get over that moment of anguished fanhood.

This is important to note: the question here is not about the deranged lunatics who hound athletes on Twitter or poison the comment sections of online articles with their poisonous bile. This is about us. Are we capable, short of some sort of tragic off-field circumstance, to see those gladiators of the gridiron or mid-court magicians humanly? Or does the apparatus of fandom prevent us from doing so?

Being able to step away from the passions of the game, to turn away from the cheering and booing and highs and lows of the game and to regard these athletes as human beings first and foremost is an essential and unavoidable step in deciding whether or not to participate in a game system that is, at least for some number of those players, causing irreparable damage that will impede their future lives, if not cut them short altogether.

But sometimes I fear we don't manage to see these players as human beings even off the field or court or rink or pitch. It sure doesn't seem as if sports fans were prepared to see the Atlanta Hawks' Thabo Sefolosha as a person stopping to give money to a homeless man instead of a thug who got what he deserved from New York City police (although a jury evidently decided that they could see him this way after all), much less as a person who deserved his day in court to speak in his own defense. Were people not properly guided by the sports media that so dictates our view of athletes? Or did such an athlete, a depth player on a less-heralded team (albeit one that had its own experience with racial insensitivity barely twelve months ago), simply not matter enough to draw the attention of the sports-fan masses?

Fans haven't seem inclined to cut Matt Harvey a break either, and all he did was care about whether he'd be able to pitch again in the future. He was judged insufficiently loyal to his jersey for being uncertain about how to proceed, when caught between two parties -- the New York Mets and his agent, Scott Boras -- neither of whom has his interests principally at heart. Some of the things written about Harvey (who is pitching after all, and won the first game of the National League Championship Series last night), by supposedly respectable national sports columnists, would make the most vicious political commentators blush with shame. They were vile, as if Harvey were some sort of subhuman beast of burden to be abused as necessary for the unthinking satisfaction of Mets fans. Playoff success has probably bought Harvey a repreive, but he most likely gets thrown under the bus again as soon as he gets knocked around in a key game, or gets pulled early only to have the team lose.

Our heated rooting for our preferred laundry does not allow for complexity; the player must serve our interests at all costs, and failure to do so is cause for condemnation or personal destruction. Even successfully serving those fans, however, doesn't always cause those fans to embrace those athletes as fully human. Idolization is no less a form of dehumanization than abuse or personal destruction.

Can we see the athlete as a human being? Or does our zealotry for the games they play blind us to seeing and embracing them as human beings and exercising fully human concern for their well-being and health?

A former seminary classmate and (I hope) good friend of mine wrote in a sermon recently that:

First Corinthians 13 ought to encourage us to step back from even our most cherished and fiery opinions, rants, ways of being, and ask "Why am I doing this?" If I cannot honestly say, "I am doing this for love and in love," then the legitimacy of my whole enterprise must come under serious doubt.

How much of what we do and say in the thrall of sports fandom would actually pass such a rubric is probably chillingly small. When participation in a game becomes a far more literal matter of life and death than we are accustomed to acknowledging, even if the life-and-death result plays out only years later, our normal ways of relating to athletes cannot stand. They must be human beings first and foremost. We cannot ethically or faithfully do any less.

Thabo Sefolosha and Matt Harvey: human beings

Brain and body, continued: invisible costs

The previous post on this blog opened up the issue of the differing kinds of injuries in football and the degree to which one (physical, bodily injuries long common to football) or the other (concussions and sub-concussive trauma to the brain) could be deemed worse from an ethical or experiential perspective.

There is another perspective to this question, one which can complicate the fan's ability to make sense of this issue in weighing participation in football as a fan or consumer.*

*I'm trying to address two different dimensions of the experience of following football (or any sport): the emotional allegiance one pays to team or player, and the economic contribution to that team or player via purchasing tickets or souvenirs associated with them.

Bodily injuries, like those suffered by Jamaal Charles of the Kansas City Chiefs or Nick Chubb of the Georgia Bulldogs this weekend, can usually be spotted in real time. A player gets hit. Possibly the player doesn't get up, or does so gingerly, or is perhaps holding leg or arm or whatever part has been hurt. Or possibly the player continues in the game, but is noticeably impaired in doing so -- can't plant on that foot, or arm can't make the throws anymore. It isn't always that obvious, but that injury to some body part is likely to be noticeable in some way. The severity of the injury may not be clear until later, beyond "he's not coming back," but that there is an injury is usually noticeable to any fan paying more than minimal attention.

Some kinds of injuries to the head are also immediately noticeable. A whole bunch of Michigan Wolverines fans, and a decent-sized television audience, picked up pretty quickly that Michigan quarterback Shane Morris was not right in the head after a helmet-first hit against Minnesota last fall. Both the NFL and NCAA have instituted concussion protocols in an attempt to avoid compounding one damaging hit with another, but as the video included in the Morris story demonstrates, a player who is bound and determined to re-enter the game despite "having his bell rung," i.e. the least qualified persion in the entire stadium to determine his fitness to play, can get away from distracted coaches and medical personnel who carry little authority as far as players (and sometimes coaches) are concerned. Nonetheless, at least there are now procedures in place to address blows to the head and their immediate impact, which has not been the case for most of the game's history. (For what it's worth, multiple sports now employ some version of these protocols, with soccer, interestingly enough, being the laggard in this regard.)

However, concussions are not the end of the story.

It is clear from the research that is starting to accumulate on the subject, hits that directly cause concussions are not the only hits that contribute to long-term brain debilitation such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Note here a study pointing to evidence of blood-brain barrier disruption (BBBD), leading to an autoimmune response potentially associated with brain damage (this link offers slightly more accessible language, and this one a somewhat more detailed description of the research), in college football players who did not suffer concussions.

In short, an awful lot of hits that are causing this accumulation of brain trauma can't be identified in real time. They look like normal hits, because they are normal hits. You are probably seeing them happen in any game you watch and have no idea. It's this kind of thing that has caused the NFL to admit in court documents that they project that one in three NFL players to suffer some kind of long-term debilitating brain trauma. Rounding down, that's seven of the twenty-two players on the field at any given time, more or less (punters and kickers are probably not among the high-risk members of the population, granted).

Adding to the insidous nature of this ethical question is that no two players seem to be affected the same way. Obviously some players have managed to have substantial college and pro football careers and not end up on a morgue for brain analysis. Why? And will we ever be able to know why?

The point is: the injuries that lead to these cases of long-term brain trauma aren't necessarily obvious or even visible to you, the fan, over the course of a game. And the game itself very much depends on exactly those hits for its appeal and its very substance.

It's impossible to avoid quoting Paul Stone, author of the article linked from traumaticbraininjury.net above, to frame one of the most disturbing elements of this situation:

The injuries are practically invisible, egos and career stability often keep players from reporting their own injuries, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy is being found in more and more players. How is the sport supposed to fight hits that are fundamental to the sport?

How, indeed?

In short, it is not possbile to walk away from a football game, on the collegiate or professional levels at minimum, knowing that you didn't see any hits or plays that contributed to some player's potential future CTE-induced suicide. You can't know.

At least at this stage of football, such realization must be part of the equation in considering your participation in football as fan or consumer.

Image: stopCTE.org