Thinking Beyond the $6 Million Man...

Bob Herbert, speaking words of wisdom:

I am an enormous fan of football, but I get a queasy feeling when I see one of those tremendous hits that leaves the opposing player lying as if lifeless on the turf. Or when I read about players like Andre Waters, formerly of the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Cardinals, who shot himself to death in 2006 at the age of 44. A forensic pathologist said Waters’s brain tissue looked like that of an 85-year-old man. It turned out that he had been suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the disease that Duerson may have feared.

This is an enormous tragedy. So many players are suffering in the shadows. They need much more help from the N.F.L., the players’ union and the myriad others cashing in on a sport that has become a multibillion-dollar phenomenon. And big changes are needed in the rules, equipment and culture of the sport to cut down on the carnage inflicted on current and future players.

I once was a big fan of boxing. I marveled at the breathless, elaborately detailed stories my parents’ generation told about Joe Louis and the unparalleled Sugar Ray Robinson. I followed Muhammad Ali’s career from beginning to end. I read biographies of the great boxers of the 20th century.

But I also saw the televised fight in March 1962 in which Emile Griffith beat Benny (Kid) Paret so savagely that Paret died 10 days later. Robinson also killed a man in the ring, Jimmy Doyle, in a fight in 1947. And it’s no secret that even the greatest fighters tended to end up in bad shape, demented or enfeebled from the punishment of their trade — Louis, Robinson, Ali, so many others. I haven’t been able to watch the sport in years.

It’s a very bad sign that chronic traumatic encephalopathy, long associated with boxing, is now linked to football. With the carnage increasingly emerging from the shadows, there is no guarantee that football’s magical hold on the public will last. Players are not just suffering, some are dying. The sport needs to change.

ADDED: A previously published post on Subsumed:

Safe as Rugby ?
David Post over at Volokh has an interesting way of thinking about risk aversion* in football: less padding = less injuries?

So I raised my hand and asked the stupid question: instead of trying to design the perfect helmet and armor for the players to wear, is anyone seriously thinking about going in the opposite direction, i.e., taking away some of the padding that the players are wearing, as a way to reduce the frequency of severe injury?

My model for that is rugby — it’s a damned violent sport, played at the highest professional level in dozens of countries around the world with world-class athletes, and yet the frequency of serious injury is much, much lower than in American football. A large part of the reason is that the players wear virtually no padding at all — you can’t run into someone a full tilt, head down, throwing the full weight of your body into the blow (the way you can in football) if you don’t have the full panoply of helmet and shoulder pads and all the rest.

It seems, to me, like it’s at least worth considering (though the reaction was mostly nervous laughter at the conference when I raised the question — the general feeling being that the public would never stand for it).

-------------------

* It's somewhat similar to the way many treat insurance: the more you have, the more you (might think you) can afford to risk...

posted by Mary at 10:23 AM