Category: Sports Takes

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Polluted, Diluted History of Denial

The National Football League’s piss poor handling of the ongoing concussion/CTE* discussion is starting to make my brain hurt.

Yesterday, we added another chapter to the polluted and diluted history of the NFL’s reaction to the men’s health epidemic that football helped create; because yesterday, the NFL revoked its $30M pledge to the National Institute on Health (NIH),** the independent group who was supposed to study and track the brain disease causally linked to playing football. ***

The NFL’s historic denial of the relationship between football and the degenerative brain disease called CTE spans more than 20 years, as documented in “League of Denial,” (PBS/FrontLine, 2013) and ended only as recently as March of this year when Jeff Miller (NFL Sr. VP for Health and Safety), spoke to the US House of Representatives and said, “There is a link between football and degenerative brain diseases like CTE…certainly, yes.”

Now here’s what you haven’t heard on ESPN or from Alan Schwarz in the New York Times. In a small, uncannily-timed periodical released this spring (around the same time Miller was hanging with the House of Reps), a qualified consensus of national clinicians and engineers, acting quite apart from the tangled interests of the NFL and NIH, published evidence proving what the NFL has, for decades, denied: that concussion management and the incidence of CTE has become a serious fucking problem. 

Small Publication, Big Facts

“The Bridge,” is a quarterly periodical published by engineers who belong to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Probably about about .0003% of people in America receive and read this publication because the demographic of humans “linking engineering and society” (the rag’s self-stated mission) does not reach far and wide. These are the people who create solutions around renewable energy, who manage nuclear waste, reform education, and manufacture biointegrated electronics.

So, look: the geeks shut up about nuclear and petro-chemical technologies in this new issue. The nerds nixed their interest in nanotechnologies. They even shelved big data for a second–in order to release an entire issue about concussions.  To dedicate an entire quarterly journal to this problem says (as loudly as a group of engineers can, anyway) that the national discussion we have avoided for so long, thanks to Roger Goodell and the billionaire owners, is not only critically important but long overdue.

NFL’s History of Denying Science Gets Expensive 

Every time they denied the relationship between football and this brain disease, the NFL owners and Roger Goodell reminded me of those Congress members who vote for war, but whose children will never enlist; they reminded me of those religious fanatics who say global warming isn’t real. They reminded me of every history textbook edited to ignore slavery or the Haulocost, and every science book that mentions God.

We’ve known for a long time that the NFL operates above the legal and financial structures that apply to you and me; but curating a consistent history, one which denies science–now that is a whole different level of power and ignorance. The NFL’s choosing to be ignorant for so long caused the current legal quagmire of CTE-related lawsuits which now involve roughly 5000 players.

“These goddamn lawsuits are beginning to eat into the revenue! And revenue is king!” cry the owners.

If that’s true, why wouldn’t the NFL save itself millions of dollars in CTE-related lawsuits by doing something, anything, preemptively about the brain disease? With its resources and wealth, the NFL could very reasonably create a health or research institution so well managed, so well-funded and so comprehensive that it might teach the Veteran’s Administration a thing or two. They could create an iron-clad disclosure contract about CTE; current lawsuits might be mitigated by applying proper medical care. The right things to do seem so obvious. Unless the NFL did something yet worse then denying science all these years, why is it so hard to do the right thing?

The fact that NFL owners have not mobilized around the CTE issue only seems to highlight the wealth and resources they horde, and suggests something insidiously worse: that they do not give two fucks about the players or their families once they have expired as viable commodities.

Brain Damage Won’t Change Our Love for the Game: Funny, True, or Both?

There is no question that the NFL markets violence, and there is no question that violence is what we love about the game. There is no question that the violence of the game can result in brain damage, and yet! The possibility of getting this brain disease seems to make no difference to the kids that have football in their hearts; they’re still going to play. The possibility of getting CTE makes no difference to the guys getting drafted when the lure of million dollar contracts looms before them. It makes no difference to the generations of football fans who spend their hard-earned dollars on a shirt with another person’s name on it. Fans will still buy merch and overpriced beers and they will still pay for impossible-to-get tickets. It makes no difference to anyone, except the families of the men who watch their husbands and dads slowly lose their minds, their mobility, their lives.

This is Your Brain; And This is Your Brain on NFL. Any Questions?

I reiterate: There is no question the NFL markets violence and that violence is what we love about the game. But how bad does it have to get? CTE is not an isolated problem within the NFL. Look at the NHL: Bob Probert, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, The Boogeyman. What happened there? What about everybody that won’t even get diagnosed because the current technology  can only detect the disease after these guys are dead?

When I see the trajectory of someone like Johnny Manziel— despite what we know about his background–I do wonder if his brain is scrambled from football, or if he just suffers from what we call affluenza. If there was any evidence that Manziel’s problems were clinical rather than just social, how would fans and the media treat him differently?  Would we treat him differently? Or would we be just as overt as the owners, trained to determine the exact moment a commodity is no longer viable?

I’m afraid we already are.

* Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative disease of the brain—found most often in soldiers and athletes or anyone with a history of repetitive head trauma—caused by concussions, regardless of whether those concussions demonstrate symptoms.

**Remember that the NIH is the very same institution who received Junior Seau’s brain back in 2012 for study. After Seau’s death, the NFL (as the story goes according to the PBS/FrontLine documentary, “League of Denial“) used Seau’s son as a pawn to cockblock (or in this case, “to crackback”) not only the doctor who discovered the first case of CTE in”Iron Mike” Webster (Dr. Bennet Omalu), but also the doctor who had already diagnosed 45 cases of CTS from NFLers (Dr. Ann C McKee). So Seau’s brain went to the NIH, whose 5 doctors all concluded that, yes, Seau did have CTE. Now, today, the NFL revokes the funds dogeared to study the disease through that same institution.

***Note: Hours (if not minutes) within receipt of this news, ESPN and the NYT report that Bubba Smith was diagnosed with CTE. He died back in 2011, but for some reason, the news posted today.