CSotD: Blood and sand
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My sons and I have talked football since they were old enough to talk about anything at all, but my younger and I found a new subject area the other day, and Drew Sheneman's cartoon pretty much captures it.
I love football. People who think it's just a bunch of really big guys knocking hell out of each other probably also think that chess is just checkers played with fancier pieces.
Football requires several levels of strategy. Not only is it an engaging and fast-paced tactical exercise, but it's well-suited to television, since the action for each play begins with a static moment in a relatively limited area that can (if the director knows his job) be covered in a single shot, unlike sports in which you have to be in the stadium to really know what's going on.
It's a great sport, in the course of which really big guys knock the hell out of each other, and there's the rub.
There is emerging, damning and conclusive evidence of significant brain damage, damage that has led to the suicides of Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, and the descent into dementia of several other players, including Alex Karras, known to football fans for his relentless defense, colorful personal life and irreverent wit and outside the sport as "Mongo" in "Blazing Saddles" and for his marriage to actress Susan Clark and his portrayal of the stepfather on the long-running sitcom "Webster."
Duerson and Seau were also known as bright, articulate, thoughtful men who were involved in their communities far beyond the gridiron. That is, until they quietly withdrew from the public eye as their damaged brains made them unable to carry on a normal life.
And the problem is not limited to players in the backfield like Seau and Duerson, likely to be involved in jarring open-field hits. Karras was a lineman, and, while he was known as a hard-hitter, the damage for lineman is not in singular, spectacular hits but in the repeated jolts that come on every play, even when the ball is not even coming to their side of the field.
The damage is not theoretical. Nor has anyone been able to figure out who is most vulnerable to it so that individuals could be tested and evaluated and then advised against playing the sport if they had some particular structure that suggested a potential risk.
ESPN in particular has taken a step back from celebrating the kinds of collisions that clearly heighten the likelihood of permanent damage: On their Monday Night pregame coverage, they used to have a segment in which they celebrated the biggest hits of the Sunday games, with the on-camera team joyfully crying "Jacked Up!" on each one.
For the past couple of years, they have instead shown the most egregious errors of the past day, with everyone happily moaning, "Come on, man!" at the blunderers.
And yet game promos continue to feature the hits, and, as Sheneman's cartoon suggests, the success of the NFL is based on the excitement of those massive collisions.
My son was saying that football, to him, has taken on some of the taint associated with boxing, where it becomes difficult to enjoy because you know what is happening to the participants.
As it happens, I had just watched a boxing match on TV a few weeks before, the first boxing I'd watched in a decade or so. And, yes, I didn't enjoy it, because I could not divorce myself from knowing the massive damage they were inflicting on each other.
I felt like I was watching the start of Rod Serling's "Requiem for a Heavyweight," where they carry Mountain into the locker room, or the scene in Cagney's "City for Conquest" in which a brain-addled ring veteran, having been given a charity job sweeping up the gym, tries to describe his biggest fight but can't speak clearly and is barely able to remember it anyway.
My son said he's not sure he can watch football anymore.
And I wish he hadn't said it, because I've been trying not to think it.
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