I enjoy football, MMA, boxing, and gladiator sports in general. No one at this point - parents, players, fans - should have any illusions about the consequences of playing these games. These are blood sports with huge toll on the human body. Since ancient times humans have watched and cheered on brave people who enter the ring and battle. It speaks to our competitive spirit.
Many things in life can have severe, life-destroying consequences including smoking, drinking, and eating fast food, but none of those can pay you tens of millions of dollars and the praise of millions of people like sports can.
So let everyone make their own decisions. It's sad that some people's brains are scrambled while playing football. Not everyone dies of smoking cigarettes. Not everyone dies from brain injuries related to football. So all of these articles and hand wringing - so what? Don't watch. Don't pay money. Let those who like it continue to. It's everyone's right to make their own decisions.
You must be referring to professional sports and not college sports. If not, college kids make their own decisions when they are recruited at under the age of 18?
In the case of kids getting recruited at <=18 years, I think the question isn't necessarily about letting them make their own decisions, but whether this is a decision they should be presented with at that age. It sucks that physical maturity comes well before mental maturity.
At least in California, they can't make the choice to purchase alcohol or cigarettes until 21. The more the science links football to permanent health effect, the harder it is to sustain the logic to let them play as "consenting adults". Say nothing of the lengths to cover up some of these effects by the NFL and probably the NCAA.
Live and let live for most things, but the talent pipeline hardly starts with adults. You get parents pushing kids through peewee league and the pressure just ramps up from there. High school and college football is basically a religion in some parts of the country.
Speaking of MMA, it's no secret the rules favor striking. From the fat gloves, the aggressive stand-ups, the lack of clothing which makes explosive escapes much easier...
Do you oppose tests for performance (perhaps) enhancing drugs as well? Seems like they should also fall under the "So let everyone make their own decisions."
Seems like even without them, the intense training for even non-contact sports can be destructive, and for some (e.g. bikes) differences in equipment can exceed differences in human performance, so excluding drugs seems arbitrary to me.
The rules against PEDs in sports are arbitrary, but that's fine. Most other sports rules are also arbitrary. The intent is to ensure some level of equality and keep the competition interesting. We don't allow cyclists to show up for a race riding motorcycles.
My home state and city (at the time) spent half a billion dollars on a blood sport stadium. I could vote but i didn’t really have the option to not pay for it.
Go to texas where football is nearly a religion and ask yourself really how much those kids are opting in for brain damage well informed and without illusions.
You’re right though, I don’t care if MMA fighters beat each other to death, they’ve got the freedom to make those choices, but keep your blood sports out of high schools and universities.
>I don’t care if MMA fighters beat each other to death, they’ve got the freedom to make those choices, but keep your blood sports out of high schools and universities.
Not necessarily disagreeing, but I'm curious if your issue is with the age or with being part of "high schools and universities". Most MMA athletes nowadays started as adolescents but not part of a sanctioned school program.
My issue is that high schools and universities serve a purpose to move society forward, and I don't see how an activity that causes brain damage for entertainment qualifies.
>an activity that causes brain damage for entertainment qualifies.
To be fair, I think it's more about character development than entertainment at the lower levels. But if you reframed your argument that there's no need for athletic activities with high levels of brain damage risk for the sake of character development, I'd be inclined to agree.
> My issue is that high schools and universities serve a purpose to move society forward, and I don't see how an activity that causes brain damage for entertainment qualifies.
Well hasn't society moved forward while college football and the NFL have existed? Your argument is provably incorrect.
>Well hasn't society moved forward while college football and the NFL have existed? Your argument is provably incorrect.
That argument is invalid because it would be true up and until football had a negative impact large enough to cancel out everything else an institution accomplished, which is ridiculous.
As a high school teacher, this is my issue too. Often, athletics takes priority over academics, with our high school basketball and football teams being required to take a class during school with their coach that basically amounts to extra practice. And this instead of being free to pursue whatever elective they want; it's frustrating as hell. Not to mention that according to the HSAA of my state, they can literally be failing three classes and still play. Which is just utter bullshit! And that's on top of the fact that sometimes the players don't get home until after 10 on a weeknight, and then still have homework, or have to wake up early the next morning and such on top of all that.
Not to mention that schools rushed kids back into classrooms this year partially to help justify them keeping their sports programs running, which just turns me off all the more from (school) sports.
> As somebody who has lost a family member to suspected CTE, fuck off.
Please don't do this on HN, regardless of how wrong or insensitive another comment is or you feel they are. Perhaps you don't owe them better, but the community is fragile and we need you not to put this kind of pressure on it if you're posting here.
Given your comment, everyone can understand why you'd feel that way. But it's still against the site guidelines.
That's true that it's everyone's right to make their own decisions, but it's a little grayer when that decision-making process is as exploitative as it can be.
I'm happy to watch pro football, because the players there (at this point) are grown adults who know the risks and are getting compensated for their part in my entertainment. I find that more difficult to justify for college football, where (in the most generous interpretation) many students are playing unpaid as their only route to getting a (in-name-only) college education.
I can't see a justification at all for high school or youth football, where it's not at all clear that the participants are in a position to consent to the damage they're risking on themselves.
The question is whether our institutions of higher learning (high school and college) should be sponsoring a sport where the vast majority of players are getting brain damage. They've shown CTE in people that never played past high school football, and they didn't get a dime for playing the sport. We don't let kids in that age group buy cigarettes or alcohol, why do we let them play a sport that has a pretty high possibility of causing long term health effects?
> Many things in life can have severe, life-destroying consequences including smoking, drinking, and eating fast food, but none of those can pay you tens of millions of dollars and the praise of millions of people like sports can.
This article is about USC linebackers, meaning NCAA sports athletes, which means no millions of dollars. They are unpaid student athletes.
> So all of these articles and hand wringing - so what? Don't watch. Don't pay money. Let those who like it continue to. It's everyone's right to make their own decisions.
Many students are encouraged to play football throughout the US. Critiquing social norms is important and shouldn't be minimized as "hand wringing." It's important to surface the dangers of sports like these to help folks make better decisions for their lives. Society can come together and be like "hey kids are losing their dads over these sports, either to death or horrible symptoms e.g CTE-induced violence" -- maybe the value of these sports doesn't exceed the damage they do to the folks involved, even if equitable compensation was possible.
Personally I don't think it's worth it. You can have sports that don't cause these problems (e.g basketball, baseball), and you can make sports safer if they do cause harm (e.g fouls in basketball in the 80s vs today).
> No one at this point - parents, players, fans - should have any illusions about the consequences of playing these games.
I have a friend who is a high school football coach. In his words: "Only people playing at a really high level are at risk" even though we know for a fact this isn't true, and high school level players CAN and DO get CTE[0].
People do not take the risk seriously, and they DO NOT understand what they are getting into. Nobody is sending consultants to schools, or having school assemblies about "the dangers of CTE" like they do with drugs and alcohol. No, they are burying their heads in the sand and having pep rallies and dangling the glory of becoming a college football star to attract people.
> Many things in life can have severe, life-destroying consequences including smoking, drinking, and eating fast food, but none of those can pay you tens of millions of dollars and the praise of millions of people like sports can.
The percent of people who become professional athletes is absolutely tiny. So because a tiny fraction of athletes will make millions of dollars, the topic is unworthy of discussion?
I think you just trying to convince yourself there are no victims in your athletic meat grinder.
Keep in mind this entire article is based on players from the 1980s, before CTE was even named, let alone well-known.
A think a big part of the ethical issue is whether organizations like the NFL/NCAA 1) knowingly covered up information, shrouding the risk (presumably to protect their profit) and 2) whether they have a responsibility to the players whose health is sacrificed for those profits
* I realize both organizations are technically not-for-profit. IMO, it's a bit of an absurd classification and a big can-of-worms to open in the discussion
I think a huge ethical issue is the continued existence of American football, especially for children, but also at colleges. Which means a huge cash cow for the NCAA disappearing.
> I think a huge ethical issue is the continued existence of American football
I'm always curious why foreigners are so invested in anything american related, especially when they really don't even understand it.
> especially for children
Children really don't play football in a way that would cause these health issues. It's mostly two hand touch or flag. Even tackle football ( with or without equipment ) is mostly just grabbing and dragging down the qb, rb, wr, etc.
> but also at colleges.
College football ain't going anywhere. It's so entrenched in the culture.
> Which means a huge cash cow for the NCAA disappearing.
That has nothing to do with the "ethical issues" via health. It's another issue altogether and it affects NCAA basketball more than football.
Why are you assuming the poster is a foreigner? On a multinational message board like HN, I think referring to it as American Football is entirely appropriate.
High school football is far more than just "dragging down" the opposition. There are tons of hits, big and small. For linemen, the smaller hits appear to be cumulative in damage, so the concern about concussions isn't the only major effect.
> Even tackle football ( with or without equipment ) is mostly just grabbing and dragging down the qb, rb, wr, etc
You obviously have no idea what youth competitive football looks like these days. Check out Snoop Dogg's West Coast Steelers getting crushed by Fort Lauderdale's Hurricanes.[0]. BTW, these are elite level kids in middle school.
That hit at 3:28 is very close to targeting. Not that an 8th grader should know to not do that. I mean, he's what, 13? But the refs and coaches aren't watching and guiding the kids well enough.
That said, good on Snoop for sponsoring these activities.
The organizations are not non-profits in the sense that any reasonable person ignorant of the particular tax laws would expect.
The type of "non-profit" status the NFL has is as a pass-through organization. It takes money in, then redistributes it to its for-profit stakeholders, which then pay taxes. The "non-profit" status is merely to avoid double-taxation of the very much for-profit teams.
They don't get any of the benefits you would expect of a real "non-profit", like tax-deductible charitable contributions.
It wasn't named yet, and wasn't described using all the diagnostic tools we have at our disposal today, but it was very well-known.
They were calling it "punch drunk". The phrase appears in the article. It's been widely known for a long time that repeated head traumas are really really bad for you and can come back to haunt you later in life.
Just because they weren't calling it CTE doesn't absolve them of knowingly sending these kids into repeated harm.
You’re right and I should’ve been more specific. I don’t, however, think it was widely known outside the medical community. “Getting your bell rung” and wandering to the wrong huddle was something laughed about. I doubt people do that now because we’ve come to understand the deleterious effects.
“Punch drunk” (and associated pugilistic dementia) was well known but I suspect most people did not think the long term effects extended beyond boxing (hence the names), where it’s literally one of the aims to cause head trauma (outside of Olympic point-style)
Many universities have separate athletics departments which are legally separate entities. The financial benefit goes to the department, not to the university.
That's a good point, and I see now where you were coming from, since you also didn't mention NFL teams.
That said, from an ethical perspective, any lawsuits for CTE in football players should also include the universities would benefitted immensely from the program, particularly in the case of mega-programs like USC.
I read this article yesterday. This year I've started reading more sports writing and even though I'm not a big sports fan, I often find the stories very well written. I wish I had realized this decades ago.
Consider reading John McPhee’s ‘Levels of the Game,’ about tennis. Or ‘A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton,’ about basketball. Both are about so many other things too.
As far as sportswriters go, if you're interested in the sentimental, I always used to flip to Rick Reilly's column in Sports Illustrated before reading any other part of the magazine (back when I was in school and could snag my dad's SI before he got home from work). He moved on to ESPN at some point but he has a few anthologies out.
In general, if you know what kind of articles to look for, there are some good stories out there by the major players. I really enjoyed the relatively recent (in the grand scheme of things; "totally old" as far as news goes) articles about the rise of wine's popularity among NBA players ([1]) and a look into NHL dentists ([2]) on ESPN.
If you're interested in writers who happen to be writing about sports, this year I got sidetracked from my original to-read list exploring the oeuvre of the late great David Foster Wallace, who has a handful of tennis essays that I thought were fantastic. He's such a talented writer that I must recommend you seek out his essay collections individually (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, and Both Flesh and Not) but if you're strictly interested in his tennis essays, they were taken from those three and reprinted in a collection called String Theory. As a taste, the title essay of Both Flesh and Not is readable online (as "Roger Federer as Religious Experience", [3]).
EDIT: this was more directed at the grandparent comment than the parent, but well, hey, all of HN is free to take my recommendations (or not!)
You may enjoy Mike Pesca's podcast 'The Gist' - among other things he talks a lot about sports which I don't care for, but he has such passion and talks in such a compelling way that I can't help but be engaged.
(It's a daily podcast, so don't feel bad about skipping episodes)
Also, the very popular ESPN 30 for 30 series was a surprise to me. There's so much storytelling in sports I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the subject attracts creative people.
Wow, this really hits home because I have a friend who was, well, a USC linebacker and then a professional linebacker. Further, he's deeply conspiratorial and not in dialog with the medical system or much of mainstream anything. He's also quite forgetful in areas that are alarming for someone his age (early 30's). Anyone have ideas on how they would approach a friend or act as appropriate council to try to make sure he can continue to age appropriately? No one else in his immediate circle is really as health aware or conscious as I, so I feel like the onus falls particularly on me to try to be proactive if there are any steps that can be taken. Further, surprisingly to me, former football players are in little if any dialog with the teams they played on so I don't expect great advice to come from those organizations either.
Seems like you can't do anything medically for your friend, but if he brought his condition to light, it would help the statistics and research, which could then help politically in preventing it from happening to other people.
Yeah, it seems doubtful that there are any medical interventions that may help from what I have read. It just seems strange to do, well, nothing at all. It's a similarly hopeless situation to my parents who are worried about developing Alzheimer's. There's a lot of speculation on potential treatments, but nothing concrete. I'm typically proactive as possible around these types of issues, and it's sad to think that I will just have to let life run its course. I think I could even get any of these parties involved in experimental therapies, but, I yet to find one that has been hailed as potentially very promising.
The care you receive during a clinical trial is, of course, top notch.
Speaking more anecdotally, I have a few close friends that also received a lot of brain injuries in their youth due to sports. Their progress, as you say, is spotty and individual. Personally, the ones that have made an effort to improve themselves mentally have been the most successful to any degree. When it comes to memory, saying that you just have a bad one will likely let it remain as such. Working on memory will help, if slowly or at all. Things like notepads, journaling, meeting notes, and a 'no excuses' attitude were key methods to friends that made progress.
But, as you say, the brain is awfully murky and nature kinda has to take her course. Nothing is likely to stitch back together the neurons that were lost. However, the brain is awfully murky, and there seems to be nothing stopping it from rewiring the neurons that are left.
I used to watch one or more NFL games per week, but after reading up on traumatic brain injuries, I decided to stop supporting football.
I still think it’s the most intricate and exciting team sport, but the long term impact on players (especially the ones who never even get a big payday) is too negative to ignore.
I wonder how the data looks on soccer and the long term effects of headers. It seems any activity that causes the brain to rapidly and repeatedly impact the skull is up for review.
Malcolm Gladwell's "Revisionist History" podcast featured a very compelling and revealing episode titled "Burden of Proof" that dealt with college sports and CTE. [0].
I played football for 9 years (1 in college). I made my best friends playing football, gained confidence, learned countless life lessons...but I still wouldn't let my future children play the game because of the risk of brain injury. A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a former teammate where we wondered if there have been long-term effects on our brains. And we played at nowhere near the level of the athletes here.
I'm convinced we're going to see football go the way of boxing. Boxing still exists, but it doesn't have nearly the appeal that it did 40-50 years ago, when a quarter of the planet watched The Rumble in the Jungle. [0] Boxing (competitive boxing, not workout classes) isn't a sport that upper-middle class kids get involved in. Youth football is headed in the same direction; participation rates are down as parents don't let their kids play (and other sports increase in popularity).
Every activity we choose to engage in comes with some degree of risk. The ethical issue here is twofold:
1) Do we adequately understand the risks, and are the people playing the game (children) equipped to make the decision of whether or not to play?
2) As a society, what degree of risk are we willing to tolerate? How many suicides is too many? [1]
[1] I have mixed feelings about Malcolm Gladwell, but his podcast on the ethics of football (especially as it relates to higher education institutions, whose missions run counter to the idea of bashing one's brain in) was thought-provoking: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/22-burden-of-proof
> Youth football is headed in the same direction; participation rates are down as parents don't let their kids play (and other sports increase in popularity).
I agree that football will eventually die out mainly for the injury concern, and that perhaps it is a matter of when not if soccer manages to replace it.
But on the other hand, MMA is immensely popular and replacing boxing and/or attracting new fans that boxing no longer was appealing to.
But there's no shame in tapping out of an MMA elbow lock because fighters (rightly) want to retain the use of both arms. I have never seen a boxer tap out. Refs will sometimes end a match when they want to save a boxer from getting beaten to death in the ring, but the boxers are usually reluctant to leave the fight.
Boxers certainly take a knee or quit in the corner, but it is frowned upon. MMA is just a completely different dynamic. There is no standing count and the trend of refs stopping fights early on flurries of arm punches is undeniable.
> isn't a sport that upper-middle class kids get involved in.
This brings up a really interesting point I haven't seen addressed before - sports can be seen in some communities as a way to "get out". As more science gets out about the long-term effects about these sports, upper-middle class families whose children have more certain white-collar futures ahead of them won't do it, leaving the poorer kids to take on the risk.
America's always been happy to throw the poorest of us in the meat grinder, why not football?
The trick is that these sports then don't have as long of a life if the money isn't in it. Upper/middle class adults are less likely to want to spend money watching sports they never played in their youth. Maybe more so if they see the sport as barbaric.
a. If you search the NY Times, you can find a piece by a Black football coach talking about the tradeoffs for kids looking for a way up and out.
b. Back in probably the 1940s, Joe DiMaggio said that no kid from a rich family every made it in the big leagues. Baseball, at least since helmets, is not that dangerous a sport.
I agree, I think football is going to go away. The now apparent risk of brain injury is one reason. But another major factor is political, starting with the kneeling protests. This caused football, like so many other things to split along political lines. Basketball is turning out to be blue, football red. That's an oversimplification, but I think there is some truth to it, especially with respect to the politics of the football team owners that have been made plain for everyone to see. And let's face it, ignoring health because your red tribe demands it, is very much on brand, as we now see with coronavirus.
I don't think football is going to go away soon, but I can easily see it becoming an entertainment primarily for the red part of America.
I am shocked that the nfl hasn't started a "my life depends on it" type of project to develop safety gear that will protect players better or test out major changes in rules that will make players less prone to injury.
When I was younger I used to feel the risk was worth it- yeah you risk your body but you make a million dollars a year- you are set! Now I realize that little of that money is guaranteed, 1.6% of college players get drafted, and most of those wash out in a year or two after making the league minimum or practice squad minimum. After taxes, agents and the like, it's a horrible expected return for even the best of the best.
I’ve always wondered, is this an issue with rugby as well, and if not, why not get rid of the pads and helmets. FWIW, I see people talk about TBI but seldom see mention of other injuries, skeletal and muscular/soft tissue. Do these happen at higher rates in football too? I’ve got a messed up ankle from years of soccer, so no sport is immune. Except maybe chess :-)
It is less of an issue. The pads give a false sense of security. They do a lot of stupid tackles in football, leading with the head, using it like a battering ram. Nobody would do that in rugby. You go for the legs and wrap them up. You don't get the constant stops in play you do with football, so you need to tackle efficiently and keep going.
I see a ton of high-risk tackles in football that just aren't done in rugby. But I'm not sure if that is enough of a difference.
This is just my opinion, I'm no expert. I just played some rugby in high school and briefly in an adult league. I don't keep up with any sports, really.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadMany things in life can have severe, life-destroying consequences including smoking, drinking, and eating fast food, but none of those can pay you tens of millions of dollars and the praise of millions of people like sports can.
So let everyone make their own decisions. It's sad that some people's brains are scrambled while playing football. Not everyone dies of smoking cigarettes. Not everyone dies from brain injuries related to football. So all of these articles and hand wringing - so what? Don't watch. Don't pay money. Let those who like it continue to. It's everyone's right to make their own decisions.
Speaking of MMA, it's no secret the rules favor striking. From the fat gloves, the aggressive stand-ups, the lack of clothing which makes explosive escapes much easier...
Seems like even without them, the intense training for even non-contact sports can be destructive, and for some (e.g. bikes) differences in equipment can exceed differences in human performance, so excluding drugs seems arbitrary to me.
Go to texas where football is nearly a religion and ask yourself really how much those kids are opting in for brain damage well informed and without illusions.
You’re right though, I don’t care if MMA fighters beat each other to death, they’ve got the freedom to make those choices, but keep your blood sports out of high schools and universities.
Not necessarily disagreeing, but I'm curious if your issue is with the age or with being part of "high schools and universities". Most MMA athletes nowadays started as adolescents but not part of a sanctioned school program.
To be fair, I think it's more about character development than entertainment at the lower levels. But if you reframed your argument that there's no need for athletic activities with high levels of brain damage risk for the sake of character development, I'd be inclined to agree.
Well hasn't society moved forward while college football and the NFL have existed? Your argument is provably incorrect.
That argument is invalid because it would be true up and until football had a negative impact large enough to cancel out everything else an institution accomplished, which is ridiculous.
Not to mention that schools rushed kids back into classrooms this year partially to help justify them keeping their sports programs running, which just turns me off all the more from (school) sports.
Please don't do this on HN, regardless of how wrong or insensitive another comment is or you feel they are. Perhaps you don't owe them better, but the community is fragile and we need you not to put this kind of pressure on it if you're posting here.
Given your comment, everyone can understand why you'd feel that way. But it's still against the site guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm happy to watch pro football, because the players there (at this point) are grown adults who know the risks and are getting compensated for their part in my entertainment. I find that more difficult to justify for college football, where (in the most generous interpretation) many students are playing unpaid as their only route to getting a (in-name-only) college education.
I can't see a justification at all for high school or youth football, where it's not at all clear that the participants are in a position to consent to the damage they're risking on themselves.
This article is about USC linebackers, meaning NCAA sports athletes, which means no millions of dollars. They are unpaid student athletes.
> So all of these articles and hand wringing - so what? Don't watch. Don't pay money. Let those who like it continue to. It's everyone's right to make their own decisions.
Many students are encouraged to play football throughout the US. Critiquing social norms is important and shouldn't be minimized as "hand wringing." It's important to surface the dangers of sports like these to help folks make better decisions for their lives. Society can come together and be like "hey kids are losing their dads over these sports, either to death or horrible symptoms e.g CTE-induced violence" -- maybe the value of these sports doesn't exceed the damage they do to the folks involved, even if equitable compensation was possible.
Personally I don't think it's worth it. You can have sports that don't cause these problems (e.g basketball, baseball), and you can make sports safer if they do cause harm (e.g fouls in basketball in the 80s vs today).
I have a friend who is a high school football coach. In his words: "Only people playing at a really high level are at risk" even though we know for a fact this isn't true, and high school level players CAN and DO get CTE[0].
People do not take the risk seriously, and they DO NOT understand what they are getting into. Nobody is sending consultants to schools, or having school assemblies about "the dangers of CTE" like they do with drugs and alcohol. No, they are burying their heads in the sand and having pep rallies and dangling the glory of becoming a college football star to attract people.
> Many things in life can have severe, life-destroying consequences including smoking, drinking, and eating fast food, but none of those can pay you tens of millions of dollars and the praise of millions of people like sports can.
The percent of people who become professional athletes is absolutely tiny. So because a tiny fraction of athletes will make millions of dollars, the topic is unworthy of discussion?
I think you just trying to convince yourself there are no victims in your athletic meat grinder.
0: https://consumer.healthday.com/kids-health-information-23/ch...
A think a big part of the ethical issue is whether organizations like the NFL/NCAA 1) knowingly covered up information, shrouding the risk (presumably to protect their profit) and 2) whether they have a responsibility to the players whose health is sacrificed for those profits
* I realize both organizations are technically not-for-profit. IMO, it's a bit of an absurd classification and a big can-of-worms to open in the discussion
I'm always curious why foreigners are so invested in anything american related, especially when they really don't even understand it.
> especially for children
Children really don't play football in a way that would cause these health issues. It's mostly two hand touch or flag. Even tackle football ( with or without equipment ) is mostly just grabbing and dragging down the qb, rb, wr, etc.
> but also at colleges.
College football ain't going anywhere. It's so entrenched in the culture.
> Which means a huge cash cow for the NCAA disappearing.
That has nothing to do with the "ethical issues" via health. It's another issue altogether and it affects NCAA basketball more than football.
High school football is far more than just "dragging down" the opposition. There are tons of hits, big and small. For linemen, the smaller hits appear to be cumulative in damage, so the concern about concussions isn't the only major effect.
"american football".
> On a multinational message board like HN, I think referring to it as American Football is entirely appropriate.
HN is not a multinational forum. It's an american forum where anyone can participate. Also, the article is about USC linebackers.
> High school football is far more than just "dragging down" the opposition.
I don't really consider varsity/jv football players to be "children".
You obviously have no idea what youth competitive football looks like these days. Check out Snoop Dogg's West Coast Steelers getting crushed by Fort Lauderdale's Hurricanes.[0]. BTW, these are elite level kids in middle school.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPKmg3eGc3w
That said, good on Snoop for sponsoring these activities.
The type of "non-profit" status the NFL has is as a pass-through organization. It takes money in, then redistributes it to its for-profit stakeholders, which then pay taxes. The "non-profit" status is merely to avoid double-taxation of the very much for-profit teams.
They don't get any of the benefits you would expect of a real "non-profit", like tax-deductible charitable contributions.
It wasn't named yet, and wasn't described using all the diagnostic tools we have at our disposal today, but it was very well-known.
They were calling it "punch drunk". The phrase appears in the article. It's been widely known for a long time that repeated head traumas are really really bad for you and can come back to haunt you later in life.
Just because they weren't calling it CTE doesn't absolve them of knowingly sending these kids into repeated harm.
“Punch drunk” (and associated pugilistic dementia) was well known but I suspect most people did not think the long term effects extended beyond boxing (hence the names), where it’s literally one of the aims to cause head trauma (outside of Olympic point-style)
That said, from an ethical perspective, any lawsuits for CTE in football players should also include the universities would benefitted immensely from the program, particularly in the case of mega-programs like USC.
In general, if you know what kind of articles to look for, there are some good stories out there by the major players. I really enjoyed the relatively recent (in the grand scheme of things; "totally old" as far as news goes) articles about the rise of wine's popularity among NBA players ([1]) and a look into NHL dentists ([2]) on ESPN.
If you're interested in writers who happen to be writing about sports, this year I got sidetracked from my original to-read list exploring the oeuvre of the late great David Foster Wallace, who has a handful of tennis essays that I thought were fantastic. He's such a talented writer that I must recommend you seek out his essay collections individually (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, and Both Flesh and Not) but if you're strictly interested in his tennis essays, they were taken from those three and reprinted in a collection called String Theory. As a taste, the title essay of Both Flesh and Not is readable online (as "Roger Federer as Religious Experience", [3]).
EDIT: this was more directed at the grandparent comment than the parent, but well, hey, all of HN is free to take my recommendations (or not!)
[1] https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29517070/inside-nba-secr...
[2] https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/27851359/the-ugly-gory-b...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fed...
(It's a daily podcast, so don't feel bad about skipping episodes)
Unfortunately it’s an ugly idea. But it may work.
Seems like you can't do anything medically for your friend, but if he brought his condition to light, it would help the statistics and research, which could then help politically in preventing it from happening to other people.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/search/index
The care you receive during a clinical trial is, of course, top notch.
Speaking more anecdotally, I have a few close friends that also received a lot of brain injuries in their youth due to sports. Their progress, as you say, is spotty and individual. Personally, the ones that have made an effort to improve themselves mentally have been the most successful to any degree. When it comes to memory, saying that you just have a bad one will likely let it remain as such. Working on memory will help, if slowly or at all. Things like notepads, journaling, meeting notes, and a 'no excuses' attitude were key methods to friends that made progress.
But, as you say, the brain is awfully murky and nature kinda has to take her course. Nothing is likely to stitch back together the neurons that were lost. However, the brain is awfully murky, and there seems to be nothing stopping it from rewiring the neurons that are left.
Best of luck!
I still think it’s the most intricate and exciting team sport, but the long term impact on players (especially the ones who never even get a big payday) is too negative to ignore.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2019/11/07/the-conc...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3750422/
Although I bet it would be easier to outlaw headers in soccer (aka football :) than somehow avoid concussions in American/gridiron football.
[0] http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/22-burden-of-proof
I played football for 9 years (1 in college). I made my best friends playing football, gained confidence, learned countless life lessons...but I still wouldn't let my future children play the game because of the risk of brain injury. A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a former teammate where we wondered if there have been long-term effects on our brains. And we played at nowhere near the level of the athletes here.
I'm convinced we're going to see football go the way of boxing. Boxing still exists, but it doesn't have nearly the appeal that it did 40-50 years ago, when a quarter of the planet watched The Rumble in the Jungle. [0] Boxing (competitive boxing, not workout classes) isn't a sport that upper-middle class kids get involved in. Youth football is headed in the same direction; participation rates are down as parents don't let their kids play (and other sports increase in popularity).
Every activity we choose to engage in comes with some degree of risk. The ethical issue here is twofold:
1) Do we adequately understand the risks, and are the people playing the game (children) equipped to make the decision of whether or not to play?
2) As a society, what degree of risk are we willing to tolerate? How many suicides is too many? [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rumble_in_the_Jungle
[1] I have mixed feelings about Malcolm Gladwell, but his podcast on the ethics of football (especially as it relates to higher education institutions, whose missions run counter to the idea of bashing one's brain in) was thought-provoking: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/22-burden-of-proof
Source on this?
But on the other hand, MMA is immensely popular and replacing boxing and/or attracting new fans that boxing no longer was appealing to.
This brings up a really interesting point I haven't seen addressed before - sports can be seen in some communities as a way to "get out". As more science gets out about the long-term effects about these sports, upper-middle class families whose children have more certain white-collar futures ahead of them won't do it, leaving the poorer kids to take on the risk.
America's always been happy to throw the poorest of us in the meat grinder, why not football?
Exceptions abound, of course.
I don't think football is going to go away soon, but I can easily see it becoming an entertainment primarily for the red part of America.
When I was younger I used to feel the risk was worth it- yeah you risk your body but you make a million dollars a year- you are set! Now I realize that little of that money is guaranteed, 1.6% of college players get drafted, and most of those wash out in a year or two after making the league minimum or practice squad minimum. After taxes, agents and the like, it's a horrible expected return for even the best of the best.
I see a ton of high-risk tackles in football that just aren't done in rugby. But I'm not sure if that is enough of a difference.
This is just my opinion, I'm no expert. I just played some rugby in high school and briefly in an adult league. I don't keep up with any sports, really.