American Football, Dogfights, And Malcolm Gladwell
I do not like American football[1]. For a long time I have considered it a shameful waste–a waste of young men, a waste of tax revenue for the stadiums, a waste of energy and enthusiasm. I realize not many people share my views. That’s OK. I’m used to that.
When I was running at the track over at the middle school, I would always dread this time of year. Because American football tryouts and practices would be going on in the field inside the track. I hated the aura of effort and misery over the young kids. I hated how the parents would yell from the sidelines, looking to live vicariously through their poor kids instead of working to live as adults. I absolutely loathed how the “coaches” would yell abuse at the kids. If someone talked to my kid that way, there would be consequences. Someone would lose their job and I’d make a lot of trouble for the school. I realize I am an administrator’s worst nightmare. So be it. Nobody verbally abuses my children, thank you.
Sometimes, when the wind is right this time of year, I can hear the whistle blowing and yelling from the middle school. I’m glad I have the treadmill and I do my running in the morning now. My heart would ache for the poor kids every time I went running over there during American football season.
This little trip down Memory Lane was spurred by this Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker, titled Football, Dogfighting, and Brain Damage. Go read it. (Seriously, go. I’ll wait here.)
Catchy title, isn’t it? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The first brain McKee received was from a man in his mid-forties who had played as a linebacker in the N.F.L. for ten years. He accidentally shot himself while cleaning a gun. He had at least three concussions in college, and eight in the pros. In the years before his death, he’d had memory lapses, and had become more volatile. McKee immunostained samples of his brain tissue, and saw big splotches of tau all over the frontal and temporal lobes. If he hadn’t had the accident, he would almost certainly have ended up in a dementia ward. (Malcolm Gladwell)
Ten years, okay. But surely if a kid stops early they don’t get as damaged. Right? You think it’s okay for a kid to play this “sport”? Really?
McKee got up and walked across the corridor, back to her office. “There’s one last thing,” she said. She pulled out a large photographic blowup of a brain-tissue sample. “This is a kid. I’m not allowed to talk about how he died. He was a good student. This is his brain. He’s eighteen years old. He played football. He’d been playing football for a couple of years.” She pointed to a series of dark spots on the image, where the stain had marked the presence of something abnormal. “He’s got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular. Very close to insular. Those same vulnerable regions.” This was a teen-ager, and already his brain showed the kind of decay that is usually associated with old age. “This is completely inappropriate,” she said. “You don’t see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty-year-old.” (Malcolm Gladwell)
Yeah. Harmless, aggressive fun. Well, what about those super helmets that are supposed to be coming out now, that are supposed to cut down on brain trauma?
“People love technological solutions,” Nowinski went on. “When I give speeches, the first question is always: ‘What about these new helmets I hear about?’ What most people don’t realize is that we are decades, if not forever, from having a helmet that would fix the problem. I mean, you have two men running into each other at full speed and you think a little bit of plastic and padding could absorb that 150 gs of force?” (Malcolm Gladwell)
The most maddening part of the Gladwell article comes when he’s interviewing Ira Casson, who “co-chairs an N.F.L. committee on brain injury.” Casson is careful to engage in lawyerly doublespeak, and avoid all real responsibility.
“We certainly know from boxers that the incidence of C.T.E. is related to the length of your career,” he went on. “So if you want to apply that to football—and I’m not saying it does apply—then you’d have to let people play six years and then stop. If it comes to that, maybe we’ll have to think about that. On the other hand, nobody’s willing to do this in boxing. Why would a boxer at the height of his career, six or seven years in, stop fighting, just when he’s making million-dollar paydays?” He shrugged. “It’s a violent game. I suppose if you want to you could play touch football or flag football. For me, as a Jewish kid from Long Island, I’d be just as happy if we did that. But I don’t know if the fans would be happy with that. So what else do you do?” (Malcolm Gladwell)
In other words, as long as there’s money to be squeezed out of the public’s hunger to see men beat the shit out of each other, people like Casson will be all too willing to profit. The fact that it’s killing people, driving them to dementia and scarring their brains, doesn’t matter. There’s cash to be had. As long as people will pay, hey, people will play. And that’s it.
The problem is that this breaks the implicit contract between players of American football and the “managers” and “coaches” who push them to give their all. If you are going to push a dog, a child, or a man to give you their best effort, their everything, it is incumbent upon you, as Gladwell points out, not to march them off the end of a cliff. It is not enough to “lead.” One must lead responsibly. Why is this simple fact not taken into account? Oh, yeah. That little thing called profit.
Now, when I hear the whistles floating over from the middle school and the sound of kids flinging themselves at each other, I am going to be even more disgusted. If I’m ever over at the track while “practice” is going on, Jesus, I don’t know. It’s going to be difficult to watch. There are those kids, thinking that their parents and coaches know best. They wouldn’t ask us to do this, or let us do this, if it was dangerous, right?
Right?
Right?
[1] To me, real football is what Yanks call soccer. American football is something different. YMMV
Related posts:
Tags: Oh Holy No..., questions from the edge, we are not amused
October 28th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Do NOT get me going. I went to high school in a tiny inbred shithole in North Texas called Lewisville, and the whole area was football crazy. You had pro ball in the form of the Dallas Cowboys. You had a half-dozen colleges and universities in the vicinity with their own over-financed college teams: the University of North Texas football team was so bad that Don Henley named The Eagles after them as a joke, and Southern Methodist University is still notorious for the pay-for-play scandal in 1986 that nearly caused the NCAA to shut down the team. (That was the stunt where returning Governor Bill Clements, who was head of the SMU board before he won the ‘86 gubernatorial election, admitted that he lied to the NCAA about knowing about paying Mustang players because, and I quote, “there wasn’t a Bible in the room.”) Every last high school has a football team, and so do all of the middle schools. Even the goddamn elementary schools have their own football teams, thereby starting everyone early on the idea that jocks should be coddled and entitled to special privileges just because they’re playing. Ever read the book Friday Night Lights? The author actually softpedaled how bad it is throughout the state, and he still received death threats for writing that book.
And yes, I’ve seen the results. I graduated from that hellhole in 1984, at a time where the head of the English department was having to work two jobs to pay the bills while the head football coach was making $60k per year to do nothing but coach football. This dingus was a firm believer in winning at any cost, so he encouraged his players to go as far as they could, and don’t worry about the consequences because they’d all be playing pro ball. If that included turning his back when his field house became an unregistered anabolic steroid and human growth hormone testing facility…well, by the time anybody died, they’d have been out of high school for at least a couple of years. (One of my classmates died last month from issues with anti-rejection drugs used with his heart transplant. He got the heart transplant nearly twenty years ago after having a serious heart attack after nearly six years of extensive steroid use. For years, I didn’t know he was suffering from ‘roid rage: I just thought he was about as bad as every other player.)
Some of the aftermath has been interesting, especially when these darlings discover that nobody gives a shit about them once they stop playing. You know that old King of the Hill joke “I don’t want you going to Dallas at all: that place is crawlin’ with crackheads and debutantes, and half of ‘em play for the Cowboys?” Considering the number of Cowboys and former Cowboys who’d received jail time or probation from everything from crack use to sexual assault, it wasn’t far from the truth.
My high school produced a sadly typical case: this guy went for eight years through the Lewisville school system assured that his shit smelled like lilac, and he could literally do no wrong as far as the administration and faculty were concerned. Show up to class drunk? Regularly fuck a PE teacher on school grounds? Assault fellow students for no reason other than “I don’t like him”? Not a problem. He played football so well that he got a scholarship to Baylor, where he discovered rapidly that Baylor actually expected him to show up sober to class, that he had to show up on time, and that a school run by Southern Baptists kinda frowned upon the noise his latest sexual conquests made in his dorm room. In less than a semester, he was kicked out, and he came back to Lewisville to discover that there’s nothing more worthless than a former high school football star. A few drunk-and-disorderly, assault, and arson charges later, he was finally threatened with enough jail time that he woke up and paid attention, and he’s now selling used cars and telling everyone, and I wish I were kidding, “As you know, I used to play high school football.” 44 years old right now, and he peaked as an Al Bundy wannabe when he was 17.
The only bright side to the mess is that worship of the great god Fuh-boh is finally starting to wane in Texas. Experts blame scandals, alternative entertainment, and corporate greed for its decline. Me, I submit that it was the influx of immigrants from the rest of the US thirty years ago, during the beginnings of the oil boom. Increase the size of the available gene pool, and sooner or later you’re going to get individuals whose idea of a Friday night doesn’t consist of watching the home game next to their pregnant sister/girlfriend.
(I may escape, but I never really escape. My brother-in-law lives not too far away from there, and he invited us last year to a family and family friend party at his house. One of the guests was a teacher with my old high school, and she got the job only because she went to school there in the mid-Eighties. As soon as she discovered that I’d gone there, too, she kept nagging me about why I wasn’t living in Lewisville, and simply wouldn’t let up about how important it was to have school pride. I left 25 years ago: didn’t I suffer enough by the end of 1984?)
October 28th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
I love soccer as much as the next guy. Almost certainly more depending on what ‘next guy’ you pick. However, there are issues with that sport and head injuries as well. Just looking at the local MLS team, DC United, I can think of two instances in the last few years where players suffered career threatening (Alecko Eskandarian) or career ending (Josh Gros) head injuries. There seemed to be a lot of concern about head injuries a few years back, but it seems to have sort of gone away. Maybe the research doesn’t support it. Most unusual is that nobody seems to be wearing the protective headgear. Alecko wore it for a while, but I think he stopped (not positive because he switched teams) and one or two female players at the pro level were wearing them, but I never see them at the youth level where presumably the chance of injury would be greater.
October 28th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I didn’t used to be against football, until I started a new job doing medical transcription, typing up reports and letters for doctors. One of my doctors is a sports medicine doctor and I have to say about 75% of his patients come in for concussion/postconcussion syndrome from football. I believe the youngest one was about 7 years old, which is really sad. I just finished a report for an 18-year-old who had a helmet to helmet injury and suffers from chronic headaches and dizziness. It takes weeks to months for these kids to get back to normal and then it seems like they just get back into the sport and then it happens yet again.
October 28th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Once football went from a friendly game to a sport where winning was everything… sigh. Where being on The Team was the height of ambtion. I played sports in High School and we had to wear our gym uniforms and scramble for rides to away games, because the boys needed the funds for their football team. I adored the legislation that made it a law that boys and girls needed the same money spent on them for sports.
The cult of the athalete as above the rest of the mortals is wrong, it gives them a sense of entitlement that they havent honestly earned.
I wont buy products endorsed by overpaid sports professionals.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
I’m so glad I’m not the only person that thinks that football is stupid. At my school, even though we’ve got a theatre that is sponsored by the city, and a band room that’s been said to be the best in our province, all glory is for the football team. It annoys the hell out of me that people with acutal talent get less praise than guys who tackle each other and have the gall to call it an entertaining sport.
October 30th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
As a south african, when i hear football i think of soccer, the closest i can relate american “football” , (which have you noticed has little to do with feet?) is rugby and even then, u guys have a whole helluva lot more padding than our version. Right now our local soccer and rugby tourneys are at 2 really huuuge matches and while it’s great for national spirit n stuff the personal damage to players really troubles, ‘coz thinkin about it after readin that and takin into account rugby is sorta more brutal one really has to wonder. Thankfully bein a jock isn’t the be all and end all in S.A schools…