Josh Marshall reads the news that the NFL has finally admitted that about a third of retired players will have problems with cognition and asks:
But I say this all simply to ask, have we all really known this all along?
I used to follow sports a lot more than I do now, and when I was a kid I listened to Howard Cosell’s daily sports commentary show. For a while in the early 1980s, Cosell, who was certainly the most influential sports broadcaster of his era, focused his considerable eloquence and intelligence on boxing. This short entry in Wikipedia doesn’t capture the full flavor of what Cosell said in his show, but his critique was devastating, and it resulted in some changes like shortening the length of championship fights. Still, I don’t know how anyone who listened to Cosell, or just took a clear-eyed look at ex-fighters, could miss that boxing causes brain damage. And yet we still have boxing. So, whether the news about football is really news or just a confirmation of what we all suspected for years, we’ll still have football. Perhaps a few rules will change and we’ll get the brain injury rate down to 25% instead of 33%, but I doubt that anything else will happen. I think that’s obvious but, again, I don’t follow sports anymore, so perhaps those of you who do have a different opinion.
brent
We still have boxing but its been in decline for awhile now. I suspect the same will be true for football as we learn more about the extent and pervasiveness of brain injuries. Anecdotally, I have had a lot more conversations with parents who have no intention of ever allowing their child to play football than I can ever recall having say, 10 years ago.
Betty Cracker
My guess is the powers that be in football will continue to change the rules and require additional equipment to try to make the game safer. Whether from genuine concern about player health or profit protection motives, they’ll evolve. The question is, can it be made safe enough so serious injuries are rare.
Yes, boxing is still with us, but its popularity has dropped precipitously. I’m old enough to remember when a championship boxing match was a huge event that even non-sports fans were at least dimly aware of if not actually watching. That is no longer the case, is it?
Boxing is more overtly violent than football in that the objective of boxing is to beat the snot out of the opponent, whereas in football, violence is a means rather than the end itself.
Tiny Tim
Plenty of people think less padding is actually the answer. You aren’t going to use your head as a battering ram without that helmet to protect it.
Probably would mean more visible injuries and more players sitting out games, but would cut down on the slow burn injuries like brain injuries.
different-church-lady
If you’ll allow me some dark humor: when taking Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson into account, one could say the problems with cognition among active players is significant. Not to mention the commissioner.
different-church-lady
@Tiny Tim:
Obviously it’s not that simple, but I think there’s something to it. I see it in hockey. When I was a kid and there were no helmets, the game was played below the shoulders. You didn’t see players exploding into each other by driving their bodies upward.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
HBO did a special on the lives of ex-NFL players way back in the early 80s. There was a whole piece on Jim Otto who had retired on 5-6 years earlier. He was walking with 2 canes and seeing surgeons to have his knees replaced. He had 34+ operations just on his knees over his career. THe last scene in the segment was him teaching his teenaged son how to play! Another segment was on a kid who was paralyzed on his very first play in the NFL. He received no compensation & was confined to a wheel chair. He was playfully teaching his toddle son to play football.
But there was not segment on brain damage, I honestly don’t think they knew about that yet or maybe the head was not viewed as the weapon it became in the last 30 years.
That show was the beginning of the end of my love affair with a game I played & loved. noting in the last 30 years has made it better, only more shocking that we cheer this on.
Suffern ACE
Boxing may be in decline, but it’s being replaced by MMA.
Mr. Prosser
Like boxing, basketball and futbol and other popular pro sports, football is a way up and out for many players. I think it will still be there but there will be fewer affluent amateur players thus it will probably fade out long term because it is expensive to field the little league teams that feed the high schools.
Hawes
Yes, boxing is declining and MMA is taking its place, but 30 years ago, everyone knew who the heavyweight champion of the world was.
Name the current heavyweight boxing champion.
Hell if I know.
Schlemazel [was Schlemizel till NotMax taught me proper yiddish!]
@different-church-lady:
Thats true. I think there was a big drop in head injuries from hitting the ice or pucks but then the ugly grew from the players. I wonder how long before the NHL is bankrupted by a CTE lawsuit.
shelley
“Punch Drunk’ seems to have been around forever. In the movie, ‘Woman of the Year (1942) ” there’s a character called, what else, Punchy. An ex boxer who lives to tell the story of his greatest bout.
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
This. I’m old enough that I can just barely remember when a boxing card was a regular thing on network TV: “Friday Night Fights.” Now boxing has a tiny audience except for the occasional big-money bout.
It’s hard to see how football could lose that much popularity, but I think there is something to the argument that the sport will decline from the bottom up as more and more parents refuse to let their kids participate at the lower levels.
different-church-lady
@Hawes:
Not really an improvement, in my book.
Amir Khalid
Maybe pro boxing should have the same rules as amateur boxing: protective headgear, three-round bouts. Maybe punches to the head should be outlawed, on pain of instant disqualification. And maybe, as with rule changes in the gridiron sport, the likes of Rush Limbaugh will then denounce the feminisation of a manly sport.
Bobby B.
I watched that 1982 fight while I was visiting friends in Minnesota. Cosell really sounded like a killjoy but Cobb had a decent career as a Tonight show guest.
SatanicPanic
@Hawes: I don’t know who the heavyweight champion is, but Floyd Mayweather Jr is one of the richest athletes in the world, and by most accounts is as awful as Ray Rice in terms of how he treats women.
Deadspin has been on the beat occasionally, but I think there are several action sports, especially skateboarding, that are probably doing serious longterm damage to athletes but the handful of sanctioning bodies there aren’t doing shit. X Games doesn’t even make skaters wear helmets, for instance and I don’t want to be a square, but people falling on their head repeatedly has got to be doing some damage. Someone already died at Winter X Games.
JR in WV
When I was a kid, there was a young man who attended the U-U fellowship meetings. He was good looking, flattop haircut, funny ears, witty, smoked a pipe. Cotton White was his name, and he was a former boxer, in a lightweight class. I suspect in the beginning he was much quicker than a snake.
He had a tremor in his hands, sometimes had a little trouble getting his pipe just so. He almost always wore a sport coat and tie, I think to differentiate himself from the attitude of many that boxers were bully types.
One day I was stopped at a red light, waiting for it to turn, and as it did, I let out of the clutch in the Toyota Land Cruiser (1971 FJ-40), and there was a funny thud on the other side of the truck. Cotton had walked into the side of the truck, just as I began to move.
The truck was straight up and down, and while startled, Cotton wasn’t hurt at all. But I was stunned. I think now that it was obvious then that he had bad brain injury troubles. He was a really smart guy, but hesitated in his speech, and there was that tremble.
He was often at the YMCA, and enjoyed watching the Judo/Karate classes, but always said that a trained talented boxer could take any martial artist ever hatched. I dunno, but most of the martial artist trained kids I have known wound up doctors or some other profession, highly skilled, highly paid, totes successful.
Cotton, on the other hand, walked into the side of my truck….
I don’t go back to Hometown any more much, I have one HS friend left, and no relatives, every one else moved on away from the little gritty mining town. Along with much of the mining.
The Thin Black Duke
Only when the NFL gets rid of “Thursday Night Football” will I believe that the league is serious about the safety of players.
JimV
Maybe I’m misremembering, but as I recall it there used to be much more tackling (grabbing runners with your arms) than hitting (ramming into people at full speed to try to hurt them). In Jim Brown’s autobiography, he mentions that there was one defensive player (just one) who never tried to tackle him, but ran at him with a forearm up to hit him. At MSU in the 1960’s, we had one safety (Jesse Phillips) who made a name for himself by saying he had decided in his second year that he was never going to tackle anyone again, and ran into them as hard as he could instead. Now that seems to be the way all defensive players operate.
Remember the hit on Roethlisberger Thursday night? The one that got called a penalty and the next morning all the ESPN commentators complained that it was a “great hit” and a legal one. Suppose he had just grabbed Roethlisberger and held onto him until the whistle blew – wouldn’t that have resulted in the same (sans penalty) loss on the play? Would people stop watching football if they couldn’t see “great hits” anymore? Not me, and good riddance to those who would.
Steeplejack
@Tiny Tim:
I have been wondering about this for a while. When you look at game footage from the ’60s and ’70s, you see how much the tackling style has changed since then, when there was much more grappling/wrestling/arm-tackling. Now there’s a lot more launching/driving/ramming. (And, yes, you can find “awesome hits” in any era; I’m talking about the general run of play.)
As an experiment, I diligently tried to watch the Steelers-Ravens game the other night, because my interest in watching football has been declining steeply over the last 10 years. What struck me in the replays is that the advances in padding and helmets seem to have led to an asymmetric advantage for the tackler. There seems to be much less (physical) risk in launching today’s high-impact tackle than being on the receiving end.
(This is a little half-baked. Will be interested to see what the football fanatics think.)
big ole hound
Football and boxing are money driven sports via the massive amounts bet on outcomes. Many many fans are not the rah rah people the media plays to but the bettors of all types who could care less about dementia, wife or child beating or drug use. This is the culture that the NFL or WBC plays to and makes a ton of money from no matter how hard they try to hide it. I’m just a $10 bettor but take that away and I would watch only my home team game every week. The fantasy football leagues have drawn millions more into a format that has no true fans but stat freaks who bet on everything. Believe it folks.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
From the bottom up. If parents start encouraging their kids to focus on something other than football, it will reduce the number of potential players and of the hardest-core fans. If that takes away some of the most promising young players, it will cause quality to drop, and that will make it less exciting to fans.
pamelabrown53
@big ole hound: Funny you should mention fantasy football. My partner has always been a football fanatic. Last year, she joined a family fantasy football team. This year she’s on 3. Just yesterday during our walk I broached an observation that it seemed to me that fantasy football was undermining her love for the game. She pooh poohed me but wasn’t very convincing.
Sasha
I think football may be in serious trouble. It is going to be increasingly difficult for high schools to field football teams if football is known to cause brain injuries in 1/3 of the players. Ditto for college. Maybe they will transition to a minor league system like baseball but I don’t see how the schools keep playing a sport that causes brain damage in 1 out of every three players.
And I agree that more padding is not the answer. I am not a doctor etc… but I believe the primary cause of brain injury stems from movement of the brain within the skull when two huge men slam into each other.
Ruckus
Two things.
I used to have a kid working for me who boxed amateur at the Olympic in south central LA. He wasn’t very good, I could out shadow box him easily and I was at best average. But he loved it, it gave him an idea of power in a world where he had none and probably never would. And as pointed out above, a possibility of an out of where he lived and the poverty all around him.
When I was younger I participated in motorcycle road racing. It was and still is a very dangerous sport. But today the death rate (it was rare but it still happened, I lost 2 friends and know of more as well as those in wheelchairs) is down considerably, mostly due to track design and safety gear, helmets, protective suits, back protectors, and bikes and riding equipment that are dramatically improved. In other words the entire sport. Speeds are faster and crashes happen but the outcomes are generally much better.
People like risk. Not everyone and not in every situation, but people like risk. It can be a perceived risk rather than a real one but people like risk. Most of them like that risk has a reward, sometimes however small or meaningless to anyone but themselves. I’d hate to live in a world where there was no risk to be taken but I’d love to live in one where just existing wasn’t nearly as big of one.
JoyceH
@Sasha:
This. It seems to me that boxing is less dependent on schools training up the participants, that it can more likely be self-selected young men in gyms working their way up from amateur. Football starts training players as CHILDREN and that requires parental permission. A young man might be willing to accept brain damage down the road for some elusive lucrative championship, but parents would be a lot less likely to accept that as a possibility for their children.
trollhattan
@different-church-lady:
Yup, and it’s hard to grasp the popularly other than sheer bloodlust. At least pro rasslin’ has a script.
big ole hound
@Ruckus: Totally agree. Risk v reward recognition is in our make-up. Look at all the really stupid and dangerous stuff that U-Tube has spawned. “Look Ma No Hands” is the mantra of us all.
khead
@big ole hound:
This.
drkrick
Tony Kornheiser shared newsrooms with old-time sportswrites Red Smith (NYT) and Shirley Povich (WaPo) in his day. In the early years of their primes, the big sports were baseball, boxing and horse racing. Nothing else came close. Both lived to see two of three drop entirely out of the top tier (maybe even second tier) of interest. It’s hard to imagine the NFL experiencing something similar from here, but at late as the ’50’s it was hard for them to see what was coming too.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Tiny Tim:
I’m not buying it. There’s just not a lot of evidence to back this up and three pieces that at least suggest that it’s wrong:
1) Rugby hasn’t been studied as heavily, yet, as American football but it is becoming clear that it has a problem, too. The lack of plastic shell helmets doesn’t seem to prevent players from knocking their heads together.
2) The studies actually done about ice hockey don’t really support the anecdotal memories of a couple of posters. Trying to sort out what the effects of mandating helmets are is difficult because their introduction coincided with several other changes in the game. The players have become much bigger and much faster than they were 40 years and so the hits would produce higher injury rates now than they used to, helmets or no. Fighting is up dramatically in today’s NHL relative to most of the league’s history barring the 1970s and a lot of brain damage is caused in those. And the nature of checking has changed a lot over the decades, going from a tactic designed to separate the puck from the player to one meant to intimidate and produce highlights; that is true of all checks, not just ones that aim high.
Trying to study it is tough because it’s really difficult to identify a control group, i.e. players that play without helmets, to compare injury rates to. I can’t find the studies right now, but to the extent that they can measure it, it appears that helmets do reduce concussions relative to playing in the same conditions without them.
3) In the NFL. there are very high rates of brain damage that date from long before helmets became anything like as sophisticated as they are now. And a lot of this is because it’s looking as if a lot of the damage is not caused by the high impact hits that draw most of the attention. Impairment rates are highest among linemen and it looks as if the biggest culprit are the subconcussive injuries they sustain on almost every play as they knock their heads together at lower velocities. (This is probably true of rugby as well.)
So, without a lot more data to back it up, I think that the, “More padding equals more concussions,” argument is probably wrong.
Geeno
I remember my Pop Warner days back in the very early 70’s. “See what you hit” – mostly so you don’t get fooled by a last second move, “Wrap him up” – trying to knock him into next week is a low payoff strategy, and “Let your teammates help you” – gang tackling was the order of the day back then; those were the diktats of the defensive coaches, that’s how you were taught to play back then.
But strength and conditioning is so much better these days that “knock him into next week” IS a high percentage play for many defensive players; they’re so fast that putting your head down to spear him just before the tackle won’t give him time to make a move. Plays that would have impossible back in the 60’s and 70’s are almost every week occurrences now. It’s not just the equipment that makes this level danger possible.
Just to note: Anyone who talks about any team from that era (or even as late as the mid-80’s) as the “Greatest Team Ever” is deluded. Play and players have changed so much that this year’s Arizona {feel free to use your own bad team example} squad would crush those ’73 Dolphins, especially under the laxer 70’s rules.
flounder
I see serious problems at the school/college level, as having kids get permanent brain damage through sports is really hard to justify, but I look around and see all sorts of occupations that pay a lot less where people destroy their bodies.
For example, coal mining sucks even with measures to prevent black lung disease, etc, and there is a reason people retire from it at age 50. Ditto heavy diesel mechanics, firefighters, etc. And while I support having strong OSHA, I just think for grown people there is a risk reward for any number of occupations, and I feel that is the case for pro sports.
Mark S.
@Hawes:
Wladimir Klitschko
He’s not well known here because a) he fights almost exclusively in Germany, and b) he hasn’t been remotely challenged in a fight in a decade.
trollhattan
@flounder:
Risk/reward only “works” when the controlling parties aren’t corrupting the data and cheating on the safety protocols. In both coal mining and pro sports, both conditions exist so the workers are not making informed decisions.
JoyceH
@flounder:
Here’s the difference. What you don’t have, for every coal miner risking black lung to make a living, is a thousand kids getting head-bashed throughout their childhood for a chance to be one of those coal miners. That is the situation with pro sports. Professional football would not exist without this enormous feeder system of schools training and playing kids, many of them participating and taking the risks with the thought that one day they’ll be the one in a thousand (and the odds are probably worse than that) making a lucrative living playing the game.
Chet
Football is more a religion than a sport in this country. And, as with all religions, all the evidence in the world regarding the objective harm it causes both individually and societally isn’t going to make a dent with the true believers (either on the field or in the stands).
Robert Sneddon
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Rugby is a different game to American football. There’s no body-checking, no head-to-head collisions other than very occasional accidents. Only the player in possession of the ball can be legally tackled by the opposition in rugby unlike the line clash setpieces of American football.
There was a problem with scrum collapses causing neck and spinal injuries and deaths but that was targetted by changes to the rules making a deliberate collapse a penalty. It’s still a hard game but it has nothing like the sorts of long-term effects on the professional players that American football suffers from.
Xantar
@different-church-lady:
Actually, MMA is a considerable improvement over boxing. In boxing, the only way to win is to either bludgeon your opponent into unconsciousness or go the whole match with all the attendant damage that implies. In MMA, many victories are won by submission which leaves little if any lasting damage. It may not be to your taste (I don’t watch it myself), but it’s actually much safer than boxing.
Dog On Porch
@Bobby B.: Cossell was a walking caricature by ’82, a guy whose ego was monstrously inflated by the success of MNF. By the end, I don’t think he had many friends left. But he loudly and uncomprimisingly defended Ali circa ’68 when the chips were down (“No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger”), and when most others in his profession either dissed Ali or kept silent for fear of losing their jobs. It was his finest professional moment.
The NFL owners are all greedy, wily coyote caliber dumb bastards that consider themselves the smartest people on the planet. If anyone can drive the game into the ground, its them.
Kevin
Boxing is in decline, but I don’t think it’s because the public has anything against it due to brain damaged ex champs. I think its more that young black men had better opportunities to make money and escape poverty through other sports, namely basketball, and that siphoned away pretty much all the best potential talent in America.
With that, the heavyweight division basically died (seriously, has anyone watched a heavyweight fight since Lennox Lewis left the sport? And he was only marginally popular, mostly due to fighting the last generation of great heavyweights at the end of their careers, Tyson, Hollyfield). Now you watch and you see nobodies with obvious physical and talent shortcomings, and people just aren’t interested.
I tell you, if Lebron was born Lebron Mayweather, and trained his youth to be a boxer, he’d have been unstoppable, and boxing would be healthier today. Lebron wouldn’t be healthier, but the sport would. I’m a boxing fan…but I’m glad these athletic kids were able to make their money in less damaging ways.
kindness
Not only do we still have boxing but now we have Ultimate fights where it’s bare knuckled and anything is legal & it’s done in a cage.
Modern citizens aren’t much different than the Romans at the Coliseum.
MaryRC
@shelley: The punch-drunk boxer, played for laughs, was a stock type in 30s and 40s comedies … see Nothing Sacred, Pat and Mike, Designing Woman among many others. He was usually a sidekick for the hard-boiled reporter hero, or a goon for the equally comic bad guy. One ex-boxer, Max Rosenbloom, specialized in playing these characters and he really was brain-damaged from too many hits to the head.
It’s hard to see now what was so funny about this character but I guess audiences felt comfortable enough about it at the time, especially since the poor guy always had some sort of sinecure as a gofer or a goon.
But it’s particularly uncomfortable to watch the character in Pat and Mike. When the punch-drunk boxer shows up in other movies of the era, he’s usually retired. But in Pat and Mike, he’s still getting in the ring.
low-tech cyclist
1. I grew up when fights like Clay (yes, still Clay then) v. Liston were a big deal that everybody talked about. Nowadays, boxing is down in the white noise; it really had its last gasp in the spotlight when George Foreman was making his comeback in the 1990s. You could shut it down entirely in the U.S., like cockfighting, and hardly anyone would notice. That would be all for the best.
2. We’ve known for decades that football could, and often did, totally trash a player’s body. But until such time as there are no blue-collar occupations that do the same to their workers’ bodies, it’s hard to say it’s wrong to trade one’s body for a six-figure income rather than $15/hour.
3. Knowing that football trashes the brains of a significant proportion of those who play the game competitively is a whole ‘nother deal. And once people in general become aware of this, there will be a combination bottom-up, top-down gradual squeeze on football. That is, the parents of the kids who will matriculate at Brown or Dartmouth or Amherst ten years from now are probably withholding permission for their kids to play tackle football right now.
I don’t think the Ivy League will have football teams in 2025. And it will gradually work its way down from there. I don’t expect to see football become a third-tier sport by the time I depart this life, probably in the 2045-2050 neighborhood, but the kids playing tackle football in high school and above will largely be those with no other viable options in life. The question is, how large or small a pool will that be?
Geeno
There will always be a certain group of people who want to watch other people abuse each other. Thus, boxing is “replaced” by MMA, but notice that MMA has not, and will never, achieve the place that boxing once held. When heavy-weight championship bouts were broadcast on one of the three major networks? When most people could name at least two of the title holders at different weight classes? No, MMA has not recovered what boxing lost; they’re simply draining off the last of boxing’s fan appeal, though, as others have noted, there’s still way more money in boxing gambling than MMA gambling. Eventually the gambling money will find other outlets,and when it does, boxing will die. Fans have gone off to MMA; money has gone off wherever, the circus tent will fold.
Eventually football will come to be seen as boxing – formalized brutality – and why go with the cleansed version when there’s …. whatever X-games type violence replaces it. Then football will live at the boxing/MMA level of sports.
Geeno
@MaryRC: Like the Foster Brooks drunk character or Otis in the Andy Griffith Show, these people were just a part of the tapestry of life. No one really thought that there was anything to be done about them. People forget how accepting our society was of these self-destructive behaviors until anti-drunk driving groups actually started making head way in the late 70’s. Then, it seemed, so many social ills could be addressed in the same manner.
Kevin
@Geeno:
And if you follow MMA, you will see that it’s even losing viewership. They are getting record low PPV’s every month. They haven’t been able to replace their stars from 5 or 6 years ago, and it’s now probably in as bad a position as boxing. The last UFC PPV may not have gotten 200K buys. That is a sad number.
Dog On Porch
@low-tech cyclist: I turned my back on boxing after shelling out $35 to watch the “no mas” fight. At the moment Duran folded, I remember wondering “what the hell is going on”? Then some guys a few rows over began shouting “FIX”, at which point I thought, “of course”. I wrote off the fight game for good at that very moment.
Arclite
Boxing used to be the premier American sport 50 years ago. Now it’s an also-ran. I expect the same to happen to football. Like the first poster said, no sane parents put their kids in football these days. No kids, no HS teams, no college teams, no pro players. Done.