Occupational hazard (even when you play with your helmet)

In last week's New Yorker, Malcome Gladwell had an interesting piece entitled  Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football.

The article started out profiling Kyle Turley, a former professional football player, who - at age 34 - is suffering from brain damage associated with his playing days. Turley didn't play a glam position like quarterback or receiver. He was an offensive linesman - a big, head-banging, helmet butter. (Remember when we used to say of a not so bright ex-football player: 'he played without his helmet.' Apparently the helmet doesn't exactly protect your noggin. In fact, having a new and improved helmet - so much better than those laughable leather jobs of the Bronko Nagurski era - may lull players into a false sense of protection.)

Turley is just one of many ex-football players (and boxers - who also run a high risk of dementia and other brain-related injuries) suffering  from problems associated with their sporting days. Many of these problems can only be diagnosed posthumously, and there are a couple of programs soliciting brain donations from players.

In the article, Turley spoke of the many times he'd been hit so hard he went cross-eyed, how he played dazed with "literally, these white explosions - boom, boom, boom" going off in his head. About rushing back to active play after sustaining a concussion.

Despite it all, he says that, if he had to do it all over again, he would.

I was surprised that the article didn't mention Ted Johnson, an ex-Patriots lineman who made news around here a couple of years ago when he accused the Pats' coach of forcing him to take part in full contact practices while he was still getting over a concussion. This made him something of a persona non grata, his (legitimate, it sure seems) complaints dismissed as wussy whining.

As more information comes out on just how traumatic playing football can be, it will be interesting to see if some of the luster wears off "America's sport."

After all, boxing enjoys nowhere near the popularity it did in its heyday, when my father asked my mother - in labor with my brother Tom - whether she could hang on for a few minutes in the hospital parking lot while he listened to the end of a Kid Gavilan fight. (My mother'd been through the baby thing a few times already. She hung on.) But boxing hangs on, too, and boxers are willing to box, because there are still enough people willing to pay money to watch a couple of guys step into the ring and try to bash each other's brains out (quite literally).

I don't see football fading fast any time soon - especially if players would do it all again, even knowing that they stand a good chance of something really dreadful happening to them a few years down the road. (By the way, while the job of offensive lineman doesn't pay a stratospheric amount, it's not exactly minimum wage. Answer.com came back with an average salary of $850K.)

Because I've never been an athlete, it's hard for me to imagine anyone not weighing the dementia odds and taking a pass on playing football (or becoming a boxer). I don't have the 'love of the game,' the drive, the competitiveness, the heft, the sheer animal intensity, the desire for locker room camaraderie that would suggest for a NY Jets or Giants minute that it would be fun to butt heads with someone weighing 250 pounds in the furtherance of moving a football a few yards downfield.

But if someone told me that, if I didn't stop reading I would go blind in 10 years, what would I do?

I don't know, but an odds-on favorite might be keep reading in hopes that "they" were wrong, or a cure would be found.

Because life without reading wouldn't be worth it to me.

I suppose these football players feel the same way.

No one (yet) has an answer for how to make the game safer for the players. Getting rid of contact certainly won't do: After all, it seems clear that one of the reasons Americans prefer football to soccer is the blood and guts aspect of it.

Personally, I'm not the world's biggest football fan - especially the pros. Yes, I enjoy watching a game - especially (band-waggoner that I am) when the Patriots are doing well. But if I think about it at all - football's authoritarian, militaristic, violent overlay - I'm completely turned off. (And should probably turn it off while I'm at it.) And if I factor in the likelihood that a lot of these guys are going to end up with brain damage - something I never have to worry about with my bestie, baseball - well, let's just say I like football a bit less now that I've read Gladwell's article.

A few years ago, Michael Vick, a star quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, was imprisoned because of his involvement in dogfighting. It's certainly hard to imagine a "sport" that's much more disgusting than that. And, obviously, the dogs aren't killing each other voluntarily there. So when Vick was arrested, the NFL was all over it, holding up the integrity and purity of the game and the league, and coming down hard on Vick. And Vick - once out of prison - had to grovel his way back into the game.

I'll borrow from Gladwell on football and dogfighting as the coda to this piece:

In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport. “I was not aware of dogfighting and the terrible things that happen around dogfighting,” [NFL Commissioner Roger] Goodell said, explaining why he responded so sternly in the Vick case. One wonders whether, had he spent as much time talking to Kyle Turley as he did to Michael Vick, he’d start to have similar doubts about his own sport.