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and decline contains some familiar elements from the stories of others; sudden mood swings, forgetfulness, becoming withdrawn and distant, and more.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...

Waiting on Science our Savior: How cells die from concussions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(As seen in Scientific Reports)

Weekly Reader: Another page from the tobacco playbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


More stuff worth reading about that game:

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

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

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

*Sort-of football story: Um...o.k. 


From the Lords of the (Olympic) Rings:

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

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


Other sporting realms:

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

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

*But then, some folks make that impossible.

Ichiro!

Trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly Reader: Dale Jr.'s troubles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We shall see.

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

In other things relating to games and head trauma:

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

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

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

In football:

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

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

Vaguely related:

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

Exactly what do we root for in that situation?

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

Weekly Reader: Exclusive/Elite/Premiere

And the Weekly Reader returns...

Do did you hear what Giancarlo Stanton did last night?

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

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

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

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

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

Other things worth reading this week:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in football:

*Roger Goodell shows his tobacco-industry learnin'.

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

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

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

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

Have at it, folks.

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