When there was crying in baseball...

...or, how a MLB team taught the world (and the church?) a lesson in grieving...

Tom Hanks has never been more wrong.

More precisely, Jimmy Dugan -- the character Hanks played in A League of Their Own -- has never been more wrong than the past two days, particularly in Miami.

Since the bitterly shocking news of the death of José Fernández in a boating accident near South Beach early Sunday morning, his team, the Miami Marlins, has become an unwitting portrait in collective grief. And surprisingly, for a team that hasn't always had a good reputation for its ownership or management, the franchise has (so far) been up to the task.

Fernández was not the only athlete to die on Sunday; in fact he was far from the most famous, with Arnold Palmer's passing later on Sunday. For all the surprise at his death (Jack Nicklaus reported Palmer sounding "great" in a phone conversation just a few days before Palmer's death), the world knows how to cope with the passing of a legend, more or less. (And earlier deaths in the sports world this year -- Muhammad Ali and Pat Summit in particular -- came with a back story of long-standing disease that almost made their deaths equal part sadness and relief.) The encomiums for Palmer's spectacular achievements and particular stature in his sport and the larger culture came about as easily as anything in a time of grief.

Or, to put it another way, the New York Times probably had a draft of Palmer's obituary ready for finishing at the time of his death. It's pretty unlikely that was the case for the 24-year-old Fernández.

It's not as if baseball hasn't had its share of dying-too-young (and the death of any active player falls into that category). Only two years ago the St. Louis Cardinals were jolted by the death of outfielder Oscar Taveras, a player even younger than Fernández, shortly after their elimination from the playoffs. Seven years ago Nick Adenhart, a pitcher for the Angels who had made all of four major-league appearances, was killed in a car accident in early April. I could go on quite a while but it's probably easier to refer you to this list, of baseball players who died while still playing ball (and as is the way of Wikipedia, Fernández is already on the list).

Each such case is unique, and Fernández's is not an exception. Many media outlets have made reference to the deaths of Roberto Clemente and Thurman Munson, which speaks highly of Fernández's stature in the game, but Clemente and Munson were established veterans or even in the later stages of their career. Fernández was only 24, completing his fourth season in MLB (two of which were shortened by injury). A Rookie of the Year season in 2013 and an award-worthy season this year, along with an effusive and typically joyful personality, elevated Fernández and the impact of his passing beyond those of many of the players noted earlier.

Ken Hubbs, a young second baseman for the Chicago Cubs who had been named Rookie of the Year in 1962, died in a plane crash before the 1964 season. His story offers both similarities and differences; he had known success early in his career, but not on the level of Fernández. Further, Hubbs was a completely different personality, quiet and restrained. Fernández was a one-man celebration of baseball, with a dramatic backstory of escape from Cuba to boot.

In short, the Marlins were confronted with a particular and unique case; a dynamic young player, a huge part of not only their present but especially their future, and a charismatic personality in the clubhouse and even a kind of hero in a city that really had never seen such a player on their MLB team, dead in a horrible accident, at the climax of their season, while the team was technically if not practically still in the hunt for a playoff berth, with achievement that already suggested a potential Hall of Fame career ahead.

Sunday's game, not surprisingly, was cancelled. If the Marlins were only on the fringe of playoff contention, that day's opponent, the Atlanta Braves, was thoroughly eliminated. However, the New York Mets came to town on Monday, and they were (and are) still in the heat of the wild-card race. A game had to be played by then.

On Sunday, the team gathered for a press conference at what would have been game time. The team's president, director of baseball operations, and manager were joined by third baseman Martín Prado in speaking for the team. In the realm of sports being tough is paramount, but not a one of these representatives veered anywhere near that posture. Their grief was real and unabashed. Tears flowed. President of Baseball Operations Michael Hill broke down and was unable to continue.

Jimmy Dugan would have lost his mind, I'm sure. And if Sunday hadn't driven him crazy, Monday would certainly have done so.

The game was played, with less of the usual boisterous atmosphere of a major-league sporting event. It was part ballgame, part catharsis, part memorial service, part wake. Markers throughout the park reminded of Fernández, including his number (16) painted onto the back of the pitcher's mound and every player in the Marlins' lineup wearing Fernández's name and number. Dee Gordon, the team's slap-hitting second baseman, came to the plate with his own tribute; a natural lefty, he took his first pitch from the right-hand batter's box, wearing a helmet with Fernández's name on it. After that pitch, Gordon took his usual place in the left-hand batter's box ... and drove a long home run to right field. You have never seen so many tears after a home run.

Both team president David Samson and manager Don Mattingly even acknowledged something that had gone unspoken until then, and allowed that it was on their minds. Fernández had originally been scheduled to pitch on Sunday, but the team decided to bring back injured starter Adam Conley for his first start after rehab on Sunday against the weaker Braves and reserve Fernández for Monday night against the stronger Mets. If Fernández had been scheduled to start Sunday, would he have taken that boat trip late Saturday night? Both Samson and Mattingly were frank about their own wonderings about that very fact.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the two days has been a slight insight into the counseling being received by players and staff. One key statement, paraphrased here: if you're in shock, be in shock. If you're in denial, be in denial. If you need to cry, cry. Don't hide. Don't mask. Don't pretend to be something you're not.

That, from a pastor's point of view, is spectacular.

And yet it's very often the opposite message that is sent in time of grief.

And sometimes the church is the worst messenger in the time of grief.

Have you ever heard any of the following?

This happened for a reason.

You have to be strong.

All things work together for good ... (a poor translation of the Apostle Paul).

They needed another angel in heaven/singer in the heavenly choir (just horrible theology).

Buck up, sissy.

You have to be an example for your family/friends/church/teammates (in this case).

I'm guessing you have. And if you're like me you cringed. Or worse.

The Marlins' season ends Sunday. That might begin the hardest part of this grieving process. They no longer will have each other to lean on.

But so far, credit the team with both being up front with their grief and still doing their jobs. After all, they beat the Mets on Monday night, 7-3.

After the game, the Marlins gathered again at the mound, and left their caps there -- one last final tribute for the evening.

Rant: What is a problem, and what is not

One of the greater but understated challenges in tackling attitudes about the ongoing trouble with football and its brain-trauma tendencies is in tackling attitudes about sports more broadly, attitudes that are even less consciously vocalized but nonetheless powerful and almost impossible to overcome. One of those is the attitude that, somehow, sports is a necessity.

If you pressed a sports fan on the subject they would likely either: (1) deny that such a statement is true, but continue to live their lives as if sports is in fact a necessity, or: (2) say that, yes, sports is a necessity, but be unable to answer "why" with anything beyond vacuous platitudes or myths.

Case in point: this article, a seemingly innocuous piece by one Julianna W. Miner on why kids tend to drop out of youth sports by around age 13.

Now it would be possible to report such a study, commissioned by the National Alliance for Youth Sports, in a pretty blase manner, putting the statistics out there and not much else. But that's not what his afoot here; it's not a straight-up news report, but closer to an opinion piece, written by a mother of youth, one of whom is about to hit that age, fretting about All The Things The Child Will Miss By Not Playing Sports.

Now if you've read this blog much you know something is up when I go all Hunter S. Thompson on you with the capitalization. Let's pull out the sticky lines and expose them to the light:

“It’s not fun anymore” isn’t the problem; it’s a consequence of a number of cultural, economic and systemic issues that result in our kids turning away from organized sports at a time when they could benefit from them the most. Playing sports offers everything from physical activity, experiencing success and bouncing back from failure to taking calculated risks and dealing with the consequences to working as a team and getting away from the ubiquitous presence of screens. Our middle-schoolers need sports now more than ever.

The "it's not fun anymore" quote, first of all, shouldn't be dismissed quite so easily; she doesn't seem to think her children are particularly intelligent, because the natural thing to do would be to ask "well, why isn't it fun anymore?" and get some more specifics out of it. But apparently the author is just bursting with the systemic problems she's just gushing to get out and can't be bothered with details.

The real slippery logic comes thereafter, with the recited list of positive attributes of playing sports. There are two particular kinds of slippery logic at play here; one I'll call the "lone savior" fallacy, and the other the "illusion of flawlessness."

Note the sleight of hand at play above: first, the claim is that kids are turning away from organized sports "at a time when they could benefit from them the most." Then the next sentence begins "Playing sports..." and goes on to recite the usual list of mandatory benefits of sports, as if somehow one absolutely cannot learn how to bounce back from failure if one never plays football or something (oh, and there is the ubiquitous complaint about excessive time in front of computers or phones for good measure).

But where did the word "organized" go?

Have we actually made it impossible for kids to engage in physical activity outside of organized sports? The only way to do so is to sign up for a league?

(Of all the bizarre things, I'm reminded of an episode of The Flintstones. Fred and the other parents are starting to put too much pressure on the kids in the kiddie baseball league. Barney, the only adult with sense in this case, eventually spirits the kids away to an undisclosed location where they can play for fun. I wanna be Barney Rubble.)

The conflation of "play" or "playing games" with "organized sports" is a deeply problematic mindset that is so deeply entrenched in culture as to be inseparable from any discussion about kids and physical activity. There are a boatload of problems with such a conflation, but to pick on just one for now: the moment that "organized" sports becomes the dominant or even exclusive paradigm you end up with an industry of sorts initially intended (I'll be generous here) to support kids and their physical activity, but eventually ending up demanding kids to be fed into the system in order for it to survive..and you get opinion pieces in the Washington Post trying to shame kids into continuing to play (or their parents into forcing them to play). Go look at that NAYS website linked above. It's just desperate to convince you that organized sports is the only way your child will ever be saved (from what I have no idea, but as a pastor/public theologian my BS antennae are naturally sensitive to such things).

Now let's check out the flip side of this assumption; organized sports, it is very much assumed here, is the only hope for producing children who learn such things as persistence in the face of failure, resilience, dealing with consequences, working in concert with others, and even cutting down screen time.

[WARNING: I am about to swear, loudly.]

BULLSHIT.

You want your child to learn resilience, persistence, bouncing back from failure, and all that stuff? Start them in music when young. Start them on one of those ubiquitous recorders when they hit fourth or fifth grade.

Or get them in drama club. Or dance (now there's some major physical activity for ya).

You can't stop and stew over your failure, because there's no break. You got to get your next line spoken. The music or the dance don't stop for you to have a pity party.

And even better, you can do those things literally the rest of your life. You can't play football forever, but there are church choirs out there dying for singers, and community theatre is everywhere.

So yes, I absolutely question the necessity of organized sports for learning all those virtues.

One blog post isn't enough to unpack that question, but the other bit of slippery logic must be addressed. Not surprisingly, the author isn't all that interested in getting into the possible drawbacks or harms attached to organized sports for you.

I, as it happens, have no such reluctance.

Perhaps most obvious these days in injury risks we never imagined before. Even without getting into the usual subject of the blog, and the degree to which even people who don't play football beyond youth-sports level or a little high school can end up with some degree of CTE discernible in their brains upon death, you have to be a blithering idiot not to be very circumspect about starting your child on such a sport. (Fortunately there are other options; in fact, we recently had an Olympics full of games that don't involve brain-rattling.) But there are other horror stories -- teenage pitchers getting Tommy John surgery, ghastly injuries from basketball or hockey or gymnastics (???), all can be found if you look hard enough.

But I want to pick on something else. I question the notion that all the impacts of playing organized sports are positive.

Do you learn independent thought playing youth football? Or do you learn "do what coach says or you're benched"?

Do you learn creativity?

Do you learn social discernment?

Do you ever actually learn that discretion really is the better part of valor? In other words, when quitting really is the right thing to do?

Or do you learn mindless obedience?

Or do you learn that physical prowess trumps all?

Or do you learn that your success is dependent on someone else's failure?

Let us not buy the assumption that all of the lessons of organized sports are good ones. To borrow words from Frederick Buechner,

Maybe it's not competition but cooperation and comradeship that build the only character worth building. If it's by playing games together that we learn to win battles, maybe it's by playing, say, music together that we learn to avoid them.

The original column that precipitated this rant ends with the sentence: "And, perhaps more importantly, until we dismantle the parenting culture that emphasizes achievement and success over happy, healthy kids, we don't stand a chance of solving this problem." Ms. Miner, you haven't earned the status to critique parenting cultures, because you have failed to convince us that kids leaving organized sports is an actual problem. Come back when you're not blowing smoke and throwing shade.

You know, this might just teach your kids teamwork, resilience, etc. too.

Shining a light

Media attention to the ongoing brain-trauma struggle in football has come from various sources. In terms of media presentations, the movie Concussion and the PBS Frontline documentary League of Denial (based on the book of the same name) are probably the most high-profile projects, although others have been produced on the subject. A number of books and articles have also been produced, although these are often more general treatments of the violence and physical toll of football.

A couple of new productions are making their way into the public consciousness this month. A documentary with the heart-tugging title Requiem for a Running Back appeared at the Carter Center in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago (see no. 5); in it the director Rebecca Carpenter chronicles the decline of her father Lew, a former back for the Detroit Lions, Green Bay Packers, and Cleveland Browns and also a coach in the NFL, in his later years. Unbeknownst to Carpenter, in those years her father was likely suffering the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which was found in his brain after his death. (The Carter Center screening was arranged in part by an intern at the Center, by the name of Chris Borland; you might remember him...)

Carpenter's reflection on her father's life and decline contains some familiar elements from the stories of others; sudden mood swings, forgetfulness, becoming withdrawn and distant, and more. Lew Carpenter died at a relatively early phase of CTE research, though well after the early names like Mike Webster or Andre Waters. He became the 18th former NFL player to be diagnosed with CTE after his death in 2010 (keep in mind that number is pushing close to 100 now).

Rebecca Carpenter's experience is refreshingly informed by what might be called NFL privilege. As a result of her father's career, she was able to access an education and social status she would never have been able to access otherwise, and that such status allows her the privilege to make sure her son never gets near a football field "unless he's dating a cheerleader." It is a complicated situation, and at times her words carry the weight of survivor's guilt.

A different take on the subject of football airs tonight on something called truTV, a channel I know of only because it carries some early-round games in the NCAA basketball tournament. A comedic/informational show called "Adam Ruins Everything" promises to perform its title act on football in an episode airing tonight at 10:00 p.m.

Adam Conover is a stand-up comedian who developed the original version of the show for the website College Humor. Like the annoying friend who won't let you off the hook for believing those commonplace things that turn out to be untrue, Conniver takes a topic per show and takes down two or three myths associated with that subject. Tonight's subject is football, and Conover will sound the alarm about the health problems and myths associated with sports drinks as a principal means of hydration for young athletes; the degree to which the playoffs are thoroughly unsuited for determining the best player in the league; and ... the degree to which head injuries are far less avoidable than people think, it sounds like. (Oh, and the guy sources his information online.)

I don't know that you'll necessarily learn anything from Conover that you haven't already seen in this blog, but I have no doubt that Conover will have more eyeballs on his show tonight than this blog ever gets. So I won't complain if somebody else is out there banging the drum on how concussions are not the only culprit in football brain trauma.

So you have former players, and their family members, out there trying to make an impact; researchers like Dr. Ann McKee and Dr. Bennet Omalu; occasional journalists like Alan Schwartz of the New York Times; the Fainaru brothers, authors of League of Denial and occasoinal ESPN contributors, and a smattering of other journalists and authors.

From the precincts of the church, you get a few articles in Sojourners; a downloadable study from The Thoughtful Christian, which aims more generally at football than strictly brain trauma (and that seems to be the extent of my denomination's efforts in the area); a little bit of content from the Christian Century; and a few scattered efforts elsewhere. Not much, for a people whose ethic claims (often very loudly and rudely) to be about the preservation of life.

I don't know what will happen to Rebecca Carpenter's documentary; maybe it will get to HBO (although as invested in football as they are, probably not) or some other distribution. And a few people will see "Adam Ruins Everything" tonight as well.

That's something, I guess.

Airing in a little less than an hour...

Maybe it *is* a religion...

This one was too much to pass up...

You may have noticed in different news outlets (or on my social media feeds if you follow those) an amusing-looking story about a course offering at Presbyterian College, a small (yes, Presbyterian) school in a small South Carolina town, on a timely subject: The Religion of SEC Football.

It's an elective course, team-taught by professors in history and English who both identify as intense fans of schools in the Southeastern Conference. The course description is fairly descriptive:

Woo Pig Sooie!? Roll Tide!? Go Cocks!? What is it about college football that turns otherwise sane people into raving lunatics? Why is it that each fall millions of people schedule their lives around SEC football, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for RV’s and tailgating for days prior to a game? Why do fans often hate another school — such as the ‘Bama fan who poisoned 130-year old trees at Auburn? This class will attempt to answer these sorts of questions by exploring the ‘religion’ of Southeastern Conference football and how each of us fit into that faith.

Sounds like fun, I guess.

In truth, the course is not new. It was first offered back in 2003, and has been offered "periodically" ever since. For whatever reason, this was the year that nationwide publicity came upon the class. It's a fairly interesting coincidence of timing, as Presbyterian's football team is making its biannual pilgrimage to serve as a sacrificial lamb for an SEC school, in this case the University of Florida, later this season. (Tickets are available.)

Of course, PC (as it's sometimes called) has a bit of experience as a sacrificial lamb. The school's athletic programs moved into NCAA Division I in 2007. The football team plays in the Football Championship Subdivision (what used to be called I-AA), in the Big South conference, but like many schools on that level it sells itself out to big-time programs as, in essence, cannon fodder. The gain in such a sacrifice, of course, is a paycheck, one that provides a substantial chunk of the athletic budget for a school of PC's size. (Please divest yourself of any fantasy you might hold about athletic revenue having any beneficial impact on the school's academic programs. Boosters essentially have to be bribed into supporting anything academic.)

I can only wonder what the benefit is beyond the paycheck. Partly as a result of their paycheck pursuits (they also travel to play Central Michigan of the Mid-American Conference), PC only has four home football games this year. If the point of such a move in the athletic department has anything to do with the enhancement of campus life, four home games seems a pretty meager return. For what it's worth, the Blue Hose (yep, that's the nickname) basketball program has known some bumps along the way in its Division I journey (with no subdivision to cover itself in that sport) but at least they got to play half their regular-season games at home last season.

In short, it might be worth some professor's time to develop a course on PC's own athletic journey and what, if any, benefit it has brought to the university as a whole. But for now, back to the class subject at hand, the "religion" of SEC football.

You might be expecting this blog to jump in feet-first. And yes, this blog would normally not pass up a chance to do so. But honestly, I can't quite get that excited by it.

Yes, there's a ton of excess in SEC fanship. The anecdotes related in the larger article above are all sufficient evidence of that -- the parents who blew off their daughter's wedding because it conflicted with a 'Bama game, the 'Bama guy who poisoned the Auburn trees, the PC professor who floated to his wife the idea of naming their child Zorback (as in Ra-Zorback) (I'm guessing he was at least joking somewhat, but it really did happen to someone...). It's comical, or it would be if it weren't so sad.

But such idolatry (and that's what is, well beyond mere "zealotry" as called in one of the articles) is hardly restricted to the SEC, is it?

The conference has its own network, sure, but in this they followed the lead of the Big Ten Eleven Fourteen Whatever.

Despite the antics of certain church-attendance-enforcing head coaches/violators of the Constitution, the SEC doesn't actually engage in the direct mixing of their athletic programs with religious missions (looking at you, Notre Dame, BYU; please sit down, Baylor).

Is the SEC egregiously bad about worshiping its teams, or even its own conference reputation? Yes. But you don't have to be in the SEC to have a cultish following.

Are they that much worse than, say, the Big Whatever, the Other Big Twelve Ten Whatever, the ACC, or the Pac-10 Whatever? I don't know that they are. And does it even compare to the idolatry of the NFL, the league which (as one of the better lines from Concussion puts it) now owns the day of the week that used to belong to the church?

And that probably isn't the worst part. The worst part, beyond the idolatry of any individual team or conference, is the inherent, but much less questioned, idolatry of the sport itself -- an idolatry that, as regular readers of this blog will guess I believe, claims its own physical sacrifices regularly.

When somebody develops an academic course that tackles that particular worship, then I'll pay more attention.

Circle Nov. 19 on your calendar...

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...

Playing games after Orlando

One "game memory" that is still pretty strong me is a memory of the absence of games.

This was, as some of you might remember, the week following September 11, 2001, and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania). Major League Baseball was most affected, with a week's worth of games having to be postponed and rescheduled, resulting in baseball's first World Series to stretch into November. College football and the NFL ended up missing a week of games themselves, but that only amounted to one game in those sports. This was of course necessitated by the grounding of air travel in the US; indeed many of those MLB teams had a challenge getting home from the road trips on which they were engaged at the time.

I have the distinct memory, by about Friday of that week, deeply regretting that there was no game to which to go. Mind you, I was living in Tallahassee at the time, and the closest team, the Tampa Bay (Devil, at the time) Rays, were more than five hours away (and they were closer than the Atlanta Braves; I had actually measured this in the only way that made sense to me, by going to games in both places and comparing the distances). Nonetheless, that Friday night, even as I knew it was a practical impossibility, I ached for it. I ached for it, even as I was somewhat ashamed for doing so.

There was, as best as I could comprehend it, a desperate need to be among other people in a way that had even the tiniest tinge of normal to it. The week of course was filled with many different types of gatherings at churches and city halls and capitals and courthouses and all manner of other public places. But the very point of such gatherings was their not-normal-ness. The very point was the abnormality and the mind-numbing and mind-blowing horror of what had happened.

Games did resume, eventually, and while there were memorials and ceremonies at the "first game back" at minimum (and particularly pronounced ones at the first games back for the New York teams, the Mets first and then the Yankees), there was still baseball. The rules of the game were still the same. The interruption of baseball ritual by the displacement of the seventh-inning stretch with "God Bless America" (a disruption that seems to be receding somewhat but has long overstayed its appropriateness) marred the longed-for normality of a ballgame, but it was still baseball, gosh darn it.

There aren't many kinds of disruptions that can get games called off. (Whether or not this is a good thing is a discussion that is needed at some point, but this isn't the night.) A riot in a city can get that city's teams to postpone or move games, and natural disasters can sometimes cause cancellations or relocations (the Florida teams can get put off by hurricanes, as can teams in Houston, and earthquakes have been known to cause cancellations and postponements in California).

Our current situation is one in which a crime or tragedy with nationwide repercussions has no effect on the scheduling of games, but has a major effect on how said event is carried out, locally for certain and nationally in some cases. The latest instance of this is the set of responses to the murders at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an event with definite national repercussions and reverberations but one most intensely felt in central Florida.

Though I don't know for certain (I really cannot watch every game, after all), the standard response that I would guess happened pretty much everywhere was the traditional moment of silence. That could be done, and I'd guess was done at baseball games on that Sunday, probably at the next game of the NBA Finals (that I did not get to see), and probably at a number of minor-league baseball games as well. The Orlando Magic, the city's NBA franchise, was no longer playing; that left local commemorations to Orlando City SC, the city's MLS club; Orlando Pride, their new team in the Women's Professional Soccer League; and to a secondary degree the Tampa Bay Rays; obviously they're not in Orlando, but they are the closest MLB team and it's not a crazy drive. (The Pride were away last weekend; their next home game is Thursday night.)

The Rays, to a degree, had the first chance, and coincidentally Friday night's game had already been planned as a "Pride Night"; thus the team had a ready-made vehicle for recognizing and honoring the families of the victims, and stepped up their efforts pretty effectively, it would seem; Friday night's game was a sellout. Do not underestimate the significance of this; the Rays do not get sellouts, outside of Opening Day, and sometimes not even then. Orlando City followed the next night with their own effective commemorations (another thing that just doesn't happen: a game stoppage at the 49th minute as a moment of silence was observed). The city's franchises in the Arena Football League and the East Coast Hockey League also held commemorations at their immediate next games.

On the national level perhaps the most effective commemoration, subtle but unmistakable, occurred last Thursday night, during the US Men's national team's match against Ecuador; team captain Michael Bradley took the field with his more typical captain's armband replaced with a rainbow-colored armband with the logo #OneNation emblazoned on it. The USMNT and MLS (which had been on a break for the Copa America Centenario tournament in which the USMNT was playing) had hit the airwaves with video messages of support for Orlando and the victims' families (at least one prominently featuring among its voices Sporting Kansas City's and USMNT's Graham Zusi, an Orlando native).

These commemorations are, sadly, in line with a pattern that has had the tragic opportunity to become well-established.

I really don't make any claim that any of this is wrong in any way. Sadly, with such tragedies allowed to be routine, it's only going to become an even more well-established pattern. And particularly on the local level, I really don't think a team can do any less, nor should they do so.

There is one thing I still have to caution against, though. It is a caution similar to the one expressed here, against thinking that sports can fix us. Sports might be a tool to do so, but can't do the job.

As sports can't fix us, neither can sports heal us.

Earlier today Richard Lapchick contributed this column to ESPN.com. Lapchick is no ordinary ESPN foof; he has a rather formidable title and role as the chair of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program in the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida, and the director of UCF's Institute For Diversity and Ethics in Sport. (For the Florida geography-impaired, UCF is in Orlando.) You might have heard of that Institute for its reports on such things as graduation rates and Academic Progress Rates for teams in the NCAA basketball tournament, or its "report cards" on racial and gender hiring in Major League Baseball and other big-time sports programs. Being able to be critical of big-time sports and its ethical shortfalls is part of his job.

Side note: I can't think of many things that would entice me to leave my current vocation, but if a Christian-affiliated college, university, seminary, or divinity school were ever to create that kind of institute ... I'd at least have to think about it.

Being based in Orlando, Lapchick has had a front-row seat to the city's response to the Pulse attack and to the reactions of its sports franchises in particular (he acknowledges being at both the Rays game and the Orlando City match in the article, and even speaking to Orlando City's squad last Friday). Most of what Lapchick has to say in the article I have no problem with, but there is one sentence that just can't go unchallenged:

Sports can heal and unite and can change society forever.

Forever? Really?

If you followed that link earlier you know I already have a problem with the notion that Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color barrier didn't heal anything. It changed the US forever, yes. It opened eyes, sure. It changed many Americans, no doubt. But let us be blunt: does the United States look like a healed country to you in terms of racial relations?

Similarly, while Billie Jean King made an undeniable difference for women in sports, it would be a major stretch to suggest that women in sports have anything like equality with their male counterparts (for one example, the US Women's National Team in soccer is now embroiled in multiple legal proceedings against the US Soccer Federation over unequal pay, even though the women are vastly more successful than their male counterparts). For that matter, the United States doesn't look all that much like a healed country in terms of gender relations either.

Sporting events can be moments of respite or relief, which can be a part of a healing process. You can't grieve 24/7, and if a communal experience of catharsis in a sporting event can provide that brief period of relief or respite, all to the good.

But healing, people of faith or no faith should know, doesn't happen like that. It doesn't happen instantaneously. It is a process that takes time, and deep engagement with the source of the grief. It isn't about "getting back to normal," because that "normal" is never coming back. Some new place becomes "normal," but it's a "normal" that will never forget the attack in this case.

The survivors of the Pulse attack, or the family members and loved ones of the victims, did not wake up "healed" on Sunday because the Rays and Orlando City played games on Friday and Saturday, and they were invited. They may have awakened to the realization that many more people cared for them and empathized with them and maybe even grieved for them, felt their pain or shared their sorrow to some small degree. They may have even been able to sleep for the first time in days, who knows? But the process of healing is still only just beginning for them. And if those games and the outpouring of care and affection they showed provided even just a little bit of that relief and respite, all to the good.

But let's not put the words "heal" and "forever" together here. There are just as many homophobic people around as there were before the Pulse murders. That particular hatred is not going to end because of a couple of sporting events, any more than racism was eradicated by sporting events in the wake of the Charleston church shooting last year, or by Jackie Robinson or Hank Aaron. Sport simply isn't that powerful.

What it can do is still pretty amazing in the face of such shock and grief. Sporting events are still places where people who wouldn't even give each other the time of day elsewhere are united in common purpose. That's almost church in some ways (or a more successful example of what church would hope to do, maybe?).

Christian faith acknowledges one healer, called a Gentle Healer by some, a Wounded Healer by others, both accurate enough. Again, though, I don't think that in this case any particular religious affiliation is required to get that healing is too deep and too long a process to be accomplished by any sport, or certainly by any one game. It can be a step or a part, but it can't do it on its own, and evidently not forever.

Note the armband.

Weekly Reader: Hockey takes its hits

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

Two stories from the world of hockey came to my attention this week. One was inescapable if you follow the sports world much, the other less so, but both serve as reminders that there are other sports besides football that face a reckoning over how they damage their participants beyond repair.

One such story: the death of Gordie Howe.

The stories flew fast and think about Howe, a legendary figure in the sport who played professional hockey (at least once) in six decades, a feat normally the province of baseball players like Minnie Miñoso. Unlike Miñoso, Howe was an active, full-time player for most of those decades. Howe played into the 1979-80 season as a Hartford Whaler, alongside his sons, after having made his NHL debut in 1946. A one-shift stint with a minor-league team in 1997, when Howe was freakin' 69 years old, completed the six-decade trifecta.

Of course, one can't talk about such a long career, one marked by Howe's willingness to duke it out on the ice, without acknowedging that Howe had been diagnosed with dementia four years before his death.

The obvious, if disturbing, question is whether Howe's brain will be given for research to determine if he possibly had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE); given how determinedly his sons pushed back against reports of Howe's dementia at the time, I'm not optimistic -- not only because of the loss of understanding of the condition, but also because the supposition, or even the assumption that Howe actually had that disease will be a cloud both lingering and being ignored in hockey, which has plenty of trouble dealing with its own brain-trauma crisis.

Stephen Peat's story made it into the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, offering up a reminder that this sport has its own walking wounded. It still remains true that CTE can only be diagnosed after death, but if you were going to draw up a list of symptoms and conditions you would look for in a living person with CTE, based on accounts of those persons who lived with the condition, you would basically end up describing Peat's current life.

[Here is where I could use some help from someone who follows hockey much more than I ever have. Peat, like a number of those former players felled by CTE, was an "enforcer," one whose job (at the risk of oversimplifying) was to get in fights on the ice. Was this in part to "protect" star players, the likes of Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby (who, given his concussion history, evidently wasn't protected very well if that was the case)? I'm seriously asking. Unlike football, with which I grew up and can still remember very well even without actually watching games any more, I have never spent much time being exposed to hockey and don't pretend to get the culture at all, even as it seems to be trying to change at least on the NHL level. So anyone who can explain: were the likes of Stephen Peat getting into fights so the likes of Gretzky wouldn't get caught up in them? If that's the case, then the NHL is really going to have hell to pay where the likes of Peat are concerned. Sacrificial lambs indeed. That would be a serious abdication of stewardship, particularly if it really does turn out that NHL higher-ups were more aware of concussion risks than they let on for years.]

And just in case you missed it in that link, Peat is 36.

Other sports stories of concern and note:

*Another former women's soccer national-team stalwart announced that she would be donating her brain for CTE research. As noted before, very little of the CTE research out there has included women, even though they've played games with contact involved for some time now. Unlike Brandi Chastain, Briana Scurry has had a noted and non-minor history of concussions that ended her career. At the same time, a family history of Alzheimer's is also present. Scurry also devotes a part of her website to such issues and has testified before congressional committees on the subject (and was scheduled to do so again today).

*The sudden death of a once-popular MMA fighter may well spark its own set of rumors about whether brain trauma was involved, but good grief, in that sport there are so many other possibilities...

*At least for now, the only way for a Cuban ballplayer to get into MLB is by defection. Another defector was cleared by MLB today to sign with a team.

In football:

*CTE research marches on, NFL support or not.

*From the "waiting on science our savior" department: while helmet development continues, this article explains why pretty much no helmet ever (at least one in which one could practically play football) will ever be able to prevent concussions.

*More "science our savior": a new research project based in Pittsburgh (the unfortunate "birthplace" of CTE) aimed at seeking actual therapeutic options.

Not sports-related, but sort of:

*As brain trauma was becoming a concern in sports, much of the early research involved both sports leagues and the military, under the observation that similar symptoms could be observed between, say, football players and soldiers who had been injured in action in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. Now new research suggests that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as found in soldiers may well be a physical injury, not just a psychological one -- and not quite the same as CTE.

And this is just potentially deeply disturbing:

*Is Russia trying to disrupt Euro 2016? Their team is on a "suspended disqualification" in the tournament after fracases between fans of England and Russia, both inside the stands and outside. Yes, it's England's fans that have the reputation for hooliganism, but that was years ago, and Russia looks much more like the aggressor in this case. And apparently it happened again today, with fans of Wales also getting drawn into the action this time.

While English courts have acted quickly to punish their offenders, the same cannot be said for Russian authorities. If this Reuters report is even the tiniest bit accurate, these incidents are not merely sports-related; they come little short of acts of war. I mean, trained hooligans? Is this how far Vladimir Putin has sunk?

And oh, yeah, guess who hosts the World Cup in two years?

Stephen Peat in his enforcer days

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.

A burden sports can't always bear

Stepping away from football and its damage for one evening (even though there's plenty to talk about there) is solely an opportunity for reflection on Jackie Robinson, the Ken Burns mini-series that has aired on PBS the past two nights. It's a sobering reflection, of necessity, on how little we get history right, and how difficult it is for sports to bear the burdens society sometimes places upon it.

We don't always remember the history as well as we claim to. Burns has always done better in my opinion with shorter series like this one; having to focus seems to be beneficial for his narrative style, while the longer series can get pretty windy and repetitive at times. Here Burns has done, if nothing else, the great service of disabusing us of the myth that once Jackie Robinson made it to the majors and made it through a year without fighting back, all was well.

That kind of myth was pretty well established for a long time. The movie 42 exemplifies how the myth works, mostly by dint of the story ending after Robinson's rookie season in 1947. The virulent hate Robinson faced in 1947 might have been very slightly lessened in 1948 or 1949 or other later years, but it never went away. One could argue that, while it has probably softened somewhat (freely tossing around the "n-word" isn't acceptable in MLB any more), that racism never has gone away. Hank Aaron certainly felt it in the barrage of hate mail and death threats he received in his progress towards the all-time home run record in 1973 and 1974. Is it still out there, lurking in more coded language? Quite likely.

One can argue that such a burden as Robinson faced, prepared somewhat by Branch Rickey, was in some ways more than an athlete can bear. It's entirely possible, even likely, that the experience broke Robinson in ways even he probably didn't understand or realize. Not in spirit, mind you; if anything, Robinson only became more steadfast in his refusal to accept second-class citizenship merely over his skin color both during and especially after his playing career. But physically? Robinson had a pretty short career and health problems not always characteristic of baseball. I hate to speculate but it's hard not to wonder. The man was only 53 when he died.

At the same time, it's virtually impossible to imagine such a breakthrough happening in any other sport, then or now. Basketball might have established itself as the most racially progressive of current professional leagues, and the coming-out of Jason Collins was absorbed reasonably well, but it's still an uncertain league on some issues. The NFL, naturally, shows no signs of being capable of making progress on social issues as long as it's irreparably damaging some substantial number of its players.

The problem, though, is more accurately located in our fanciful hope that somehow any sport can be a vehicle for solving the hatreds and conflicts of society. Sports isn't cut out for that. It's a game. Whether it's the expectation of baseball fixing racism or sporting events being a megaphone for hyper-patriotism, it's not up to the task. There aren't that many Jackie Robinsons out there in any sport, or in most of life for that matter, who can handle the burdens that come with being an object or a cultural icon more than a human being. The degree to which we wish for sports to "fix" society is the degree to which we admit our failure to be a civilized society, to do, in the most basic sense, the right thing.

No sport can fix us. Don't ask it to try. Maybe it can be a piece of the puzzle (see: Tampa Bay Rays 4, Cuba 1), but it's never going to be a solution.

Meanwhile, baseball continues to cling to Robinson even as the sport seems to lose more and more traction among black athletes and fans, in a way the following picture seems to capture oddly well:

Robinson's jersey number 42 is retired in all of Major League Baseball, and on one day of the season every player in the league wears the number, in tribute or desperation I'm not sure. Among those who made the recent trip to Cuba with President Obama (and the Tampa Bay Rays) was Robinson's widow Rachel. 

Baseball is still placing a large burden on Jackie Robinson.

Pay attention!

1.

Apparently Ricardo Lockette of the Seattle Seahawks came awfully close to becoming the first on-field casualty of the NFL in, well, ever.

Back in November Lockette's head was nearly removed on a hit by Jeff Heath of the Dallas Cowboys. That phrase is normally used as hyperbole, but it is apparently uncomfortably close to truthful in this case.

Scary moment, maybe more so than anyone realized at the time.

Lockette discussed this injury on a visit to the paramedics who responded to his injury, properly handling him so that his neck didn't fail completely.

This blog mostly concerns itself with the issue of brain trauma in football, though we're on a slight break at the moment. It's worth the occasional reminder that one doesn't have to suffer concussions or end up with a CTE-riddled brain for football to mess you up whether you hit each other in practice or not.

And on that subject, one has to wonder if the same kind of care always comes into play when head injuries and potential concussions are involved. Those usually don't draw paramedics onto the field.

2.

So a kid attending a spring training game at Disney World wasn't far from having his head removed either.

As the Pittsburgh Pirates were playing against the Atlanta Braves (who for now still have spring training at Disney's Wide World of Sports complex), Pirates batter Danny Ortiz lost his grip on his bat after a swing, with the bat spinning crazily towards the stands. In the stands, Shawn Cunningham barely had time to stick out his arm to deflect the bat away from the head of his eight-year-old son Landon.

Frighteningly close.

The money quote is at the bottom of the article, by a representative of a company that supplies netting to MLB teams to keep this kind of stuff from happening. 

Huff added that it is important for fans to be aware of what's happening on the field and avoid distractions such as cellphones. 

“Fans have to actively watch the game,” Huff said. “It is just like crossing the street — you need to look up from your phone to do so safely.”

Man, oh man, is that a great quote. "Fans have to actively watch the game." I may just make it the motto of this blog.

3.

Of course, what you see when you do so is sometimes downright ugly. At least the team being threatened won, to the degree that counts for anything.

That guy does have a history in sports, for what it's worth. He actually managed to destroy a league (almost) all by himself.

Now he seems set on destroying other things.

Sports fans are capable of enough ugliness, without intentionally divisive and race-baiting politics being thrown in. 

I'm trying to think of a time when the mixture of sports and politics has ever been good for sports.

Can't think of one. 

But pulling this crap on high school kids? Evil. Pure evil.

4. 

Wrapping back to a previous blog entry, and to bullet point #1, Calvin Johnson, a.k.a. Megatron, has confirmed he will retire from the NFL.

The rumors had been pretty well-established out there since the end of the regular season, and now it's done. Johnson retires after nine seasons. 

As noted in the earlier blog post, that used to seem like a short career. Not any more, perhaps.

Football doesn't have to screw up your brain to mess you up real good. 

You have to actively watch the game, even when you're not actually at the game. It is showing us ourselves, good and bad. Ignoring the bad is self-destructive. 

Pay attention! This stuff matters more than it should.