CSotD: Te morituri
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Drew Litton on the decision facing Indianapolis Colts Quarterback Peyton Manning, who is near, or perhaps at, the end of a brilliant 14-year career.
Well, brilliant 13-year career. He sat out this past season after neck surgery described as "cervical neck fusion," but it's not clear whether the second operation was a follow-up on the first or a totally separate thing.
Mox nix. He may have a year or two left to play, but he's got his Super Bowl ring and he certainly has made enough money that he doesn't need to go out and get hit anymore, and that's the point of Litton's cartoon: Will his competitive nature override what most people would see as common sense?
Sport at the highest level is becoming gladitorial. Players are bigger, stronger and faster, some naturally, some through chemical enhancement. But the impact is more than it ever has been, and the risk of injury has increased significantly even as sports medicine has grown as a speciality.
And perhaps the growth in sports medicine is making us more aware of the risks. Terms like "punch drunk" aren't thrown around as casually, and we don't speak of someone "getting his bell rung" as if it were a bloody nose.
Those who don't like sports anyway will say that it always has been based on blood thirst, but that's a reflexive putdown of something they don't get. For them, the analogy might be a concern for the mangled feet and disordered eating that is endemic among ballerinas.
Can you watch a line of women cross the stage en pointe without wondering if they'll be able to walk when they are 50? Or how often they purged to maintain the acceptable body type for the role?
Once you know the price they pay, can you stop knowing, or caring, long enough to enjoy a production of Swan Lake?
Same deal.
Sports, particularly boxing, football and hockey, have come to a point where it's getting difficult to not know what you are watching, as Scott Simon pointed out in his most recent commentary on Weekend Edition Saturday.
What Peyton Manning risks is permanent neck injury, specific to whatever required this surgery. As Simon notes, some players have walked away after a diagnosis of potential danger in that regard.
The more generalized concern is brain damage, as most heartbreakingly seen in Muhammed Ali, an elder statesman whose importance and influence have surprisingly little to do with the sport that brought him to prominence, but whose speech and motor skills have been so robbed by the repeated impacts of boxing that left him vulnerable to Parkinsons.
Given the presence of Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center here, there is a lot of research going on in the area. A few years ago, I was at a presentation on brain injury at a local middle school, given by a man who researches the biomechanics of helmet design, and when, a few weeks later, Natasha Richardson died after hitting her head on a ski hill, I went to his office and interviewed him.
There's no "debate" about helmets and skiing, he said. Helmets reduce the likelihood of serious injury. Any discussion is about how much that matters to you, though he noted that designers have overcome early objections based on not being able to hear or having limited peripheral vision while wearing a helmet.
He noted that it's ironic that people will use those objections as a reason not to wear a helmet, and then put on a floppy hat and insert ear buds before pushing off downhill.
But he also said that his company's research into biomechanics in skiing and snowboarding is more difficult than their work in football and hockey because head injuries in skiing, while severe when they occur, are rare. In football and hockey, you can wire the helmets and then sit on the sideline and just watch the statistics roll in.
As a sports fan, the question is where to draw the line?
I can't watch boxing anymore, because the sport calls for repeated head shots in an attempt to render your opponent unconscious, and winning on points is not prized as much as a win by knockout. When I watch boxing, I just see two kids from poor neighborhoods beating each other into an early grave for money.
And freestyle skiing, a sport in which a head injury recently claimed the life of Canadian skier Sarah Burke, while thrilling to watch, seems a bit like motor sports in which you have to ask if the audience is there to see the successful attempts or to watch the crashes. I'm not a fan because, as in boxing, it seems the highest plaudits are for those who risk the most damage.
But head injuries can occur in any sport. Heading a soccer ball can cause damage, but the risk is not particularly great, while running into the goal posts is, as with skiing injuries, in the "severe but rare" category.
Football seems to be the most troublesome sport in this regard, because, while the point of the game is not blows to the head (in fact, they are penalized), the high impact nature of the game makes concussions inevitable.
I love the game. But, then, I wouldn't mind seeing Swan Lake again sometime.
Despite what I'd be thinking as those mutilated, bulimic women danced across the stage.
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