If previous news stories about CTE — or the Colin Kaepernick protests — hadn’t already convinced a lot of middle-class parents to keep their high-school-and-younger kids away from the gridiron, well… From the Washington Post:
Aaron Hernandez suffered the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever discovered in a person his age, damage that would have significantly affected his decision-making, judgment and cognition, researchers at Boston University revealed at a medical conference Thursday.
Ann McKee, the head of BU’s CTE Center, which has studied the disease caused by repetitive brain trauma for more than a decade, called Hernandez’s brain “one of the most significant contributions to our work” because of the brain’s pristine condition and the rare opportunity to study the disease in a 27-year-old.
Hernandez, a former New England Patriots tight end, hanged himself with a bedsheet in April in a Massachusetts prison while serving a life sentence for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013…
Because the center has received few brains from people Hernandez’s age, McKee could not say whether his brain was representative of a 27-year-old who had played as much football. But she found the advanced stage of CTE alarming.
“In this age group, he’s clearly at the severe end of the spectrum,” McKee said. “There is a concern that we’re seeing accelerated disease in young athletes. Whether or not that’s because they’re playing more aggressively or if they’re starting at younger ages, we don’t know. But we are seeing ravages of this disease, in this specific example, of a young person.”
At Thursday’s conference, McKee flipped through slides comparing sections of Hernandez’s brain with a sample without CTE. Hernandez’s brain had dark spots associated with tau protein and shrunken, withered areas, compared with immaculate white of the sample. His brain had significant damage to the frontal lobe, which impacts a person’s ability to make decisions and moderate behavior. As some new slides appeared on the projectors, some physicians and conference attendees gasped.
“We can’t take the pathology and explain the behavior,” McKee said. “But we can say collectively, in our collective experience, that individuals with CTE — and CTE of this severity — have difficulty with impulse control, decision-making, inhibition of impulses for aggression, emotional volatility, rage behaviors. We know that collectively.”
McKee said Hernandez had a genetic marker that makes people vulnerable to certain brain diseases and could have contributed to how aggressively he developed CTE.
“We know that that’s a risk factor for neurogenerative disease,” McKee said. “Whether or not that contributed in this case is speculative. It may explain some of his susceptibility to this disease.” …
More detail at the link. I suspect the sports-radio eugenics experts are gonna leap for that ‘genetic marker of vulnerability’ like a dog for a thrown frisbee, but I also get the feeling they aren’t the people with kids young enough to be Pee-Wee recruits, are they?
And if I were the NFL owners, I would give Hernandez’s fiancee Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez whatever it took to make her happy, up to and including Bob Kraft’s less favorite testicle, because more publicity is absolutely the last thing they need right now. But then, I don’t claim to understand sports, especially football!
Baud
I haven’t watched a game this season, even though my team is doing well and I want to support the players against Trump. Can’t say that’ll stick, but I am losing interest in the sport.
ThresherK
Open thread: Saskatchewan won the crossover Eastern semifinal in Ottawa today, 31-20.
We green and white rooters are happy. (Our wives are happy that the football season is over before the Thanksgiving leftovers are finished.)
smintheus
Long before I was a kid 50 years ago, I think everyone knew how dangerous football is. Never would have occurred to anyone in my family to play football.
Just like boxing, it was created to be dangerous to your health. Doing something reckless was meant to seem manly. And just like boxing, it had a cachet for a long time that persuaded a lot of people who knew better to ignore how dangerous it is for nearly everybody who participates in the sport. But that cachet disappeared a while ago for boxing and when it’s gone for football, people will wonder how anybody could ever have pretended to be shocked that football players routinely end up with brain injuries.
Major Major Major Major
We should just switch to rugby already.
raven
I’d like to se post after post about the toll alcohol takes on this country. It all so fucking cute and fun.
Lee
Of course I live in the center of the universe for youth soccer (not really joking) so I’m sure there is a bit of bias going on but I’ve got friends that are involved with youth football and they are already talking about how each year there are fewer kids playing.
I don’t think there is much bias going on as you can find several articles like this that details the decline nationally
Mike G
If they do an autopsy on OJ when he dies, I’ll bet they find advanced CTE.
The way he talks about the murders has always been very strange. It’s not a complete denial or admittance, sometimes it’s like “I don’t know what happened”, or from the title of his book, “If I did it, here’s how it happened”. Like he really was out of his mind that night and has no memory of it.
I’ve never seen much discussion of this, probably because no-one wants to offer anything that sounds like an excuse for murder, but I’m betting OJ has substantial brain damage from his football days.
raven
Conservative estimates of sexual assault prevalence suggest that 25 percent of American women have experienced sexual assault, including rape. Approximately one-half of those cases involve alcohol consumption by the perpetrator, victim, or both. Alcohol contributes to sexual assault through multiple pathways, often exacerbating existing risk factors. Beliefs about alcohol’s effects on sexual and aggressive behavior, stereotypes about drinking women, and alcohol’s effects on cognitive and motor skills contribute to alcohol-involved sexual assault. Despite advances in researchers’ understanding of the relationships between alcohol consumption and sexual assault, many questions still need to be addressed in future studies.
Mike J
germy
@Mike G: Is it true they want to revoke his parole? Something happened in Vegas; I think he was kicked out of a casino or something.
I think you’re right though, an autopsy would probably be illuminating.
germy
@Mike J: Any predictions?
Steeplejack (phone)
@raven:
How about a link, or even just a mention of the source, for those who might like to read more?
raven
@germy: O.J. Simpson is out of jail, but isn’t staying out of trouble. The star was reportedly booted from his Las Vegas hotel on Wednesday after allegedly causing a drunken disturbance.
According to TMZ, the 70-year-old reportedly got drunk and hotel staff claim he was being disruptive to other customers at the Clique bar located inside the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas.
germy
@Lee: If the trend continues, there’ll be battle bots taking the field. Just as entertaining.
raven
@Steeplejack (phone): Uh, the second post is one big link.
rk
@Mike J:
I’m probably being completely ignorant, but I have no idea who Spenser Ackerman is. Also I wish people would just let us know directly instead of dropping scary hints.
germy
@raven: I’m more nervous around a crowd of belligerent drunks than I am around a crowd of pot heads. Why can’t these violent drunks just suck on a thc lozenge?
smintheus
@Mike J: Will that be about the human sacrifice the Chinese performed in a ceremony honoring Trump a few days ago?
raven
@germy: Don’t you realize that drinking is fun and glamorous?
different-church-lady
@rk: Trump gave Putin security clearance at The Pentagon.
MattF
OT, I guess. I was having unproductive negotiations with my phone carrier– who shall remain nameless, but it’s three letters two of which are ‘T’. They claim I didn’t pay last month’s bill– which is true– but I ‘went paperless’ a couple of months ago and they claim that at the same time I cancelled all means of communication with them. Doesn’t that seem unlikely?
Anyhow, it seemed a good time to do something else for a while. I picked up the Sunday paper and found this little essay about the non-meaning of history, which notes:
Just thought I’d share that.
Hungry Joe
The roots of American football are unimaginably violent. In the early 1900s an average of almost one college player (there was no pro football yet, or none to speak of) was dying every week of the season — and there weren’t nearly as many teams as there are now. Brutality was championed; one of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons proudly wrote to his dad — from Harvard, I think — about how badly he’d been injured in the most recent game. Teddy finally demanded that the game be made safer, and it was … on the surface, at least.
Major Major Major Major
@rk: right??
Baud
@raven: Especially when accompanied with Lucky Strike cigarettes.
PsiFighter37
I haven’t watched the NFL regularly in years, and the only game I make an effort to watch is the Super Bowl (which isn’t always something I am around for). I am not sure it will disappear overnight, but if I had to guess where the state of sports sits 50 years from now (assuming we aren’t underwater or have blown ourselves to smithereens), football will be the equivalent of boxing today.
raven
@Hungry Joe: It’s only unimaginable if you don’r know anything about it.
germy
@raven:
The culture around alcohol use; the way it’s normalized and celebrated and romanticized… it reminds me somewhat of republicanism.
Reagan: Morning in America, optimism (south american death squads, support for apartheid)
Alcohol: Cocktails, craft brews, fine wine (cancer, strokes, heart disease, drunk driving deaths)
A shiny thing that’s held up as being unifying and healthy and even manly, while directly underneath are unspoken horrors.
Baud
@rk: Same. If it’s important, I’ll find out on BJ tomorrow morning.
Mike J
@rk: Attackerman is a pretty well respected natsec reporter. He doesn’t control when the story runs, but he can tell people it’s going to run. WHy would he scoop himself?
Baud
@Mike J: Maybe not his fault, but the hype-to-content ratio is off the charts these days, so I’m a bit cynical.
Schlemazel
@rk:
Spencer Ackerman is an American security reporter. He was at The New Republic and wrote for Wired’s national security blog, Danger Room. He is currently the national security editor for The Guardian. But that tweet is bullshit – FILM AT 11:00
germy
@PsiFighter37:
I wasn’t joking about battle bots in my above comment. Fifty or one hundred years from now, if they can’t find enough men willing to sacrifice their brains, it’ll be fully automated.
Shana
I predict that in 20 years professional football will be a shell of what it is now.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF: That piece is missing the Vonnegut quote where he called World War 2 “Western Civilization’s second unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.”
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@raven:
Look, alcohol abuse is a serious problem. But so is brain injury and it’s relationship with organized sports like football. Thousands of young people play these sports at the pee-wee level all the way up to college. If you don’t like us talking about that because you like football, too bad. People’s health is more important than you being entertained every Sunday.
raven
@germy: I don’t think pre-adolescents should play organized sports PERIOD. I spent 20 years trying to make kids sports programs safer and to educate parents and coaches but it was like pushing the boulder up the hill.
raven
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Fuck you, talk about what you want to and I’ll talk about what I want to.
trollhattan
@Lee:
Suspect within a generation or so we’ll see a significant decline in yoot football. They’re fiddling with the rules already, such as no kickoff after a score, but I can’t see how that affects play in the trenches where linemen are playing 50-60 snaps/game.
Since my kid is well down the soccer path I’m fixated on the brutal toll it takes on girls, being the leading cause of sports-related concussions and shredded knees. Sorta related, she’s decided since her HS football team doesn’t have a decent place kicker she wants to try out for the position. Got her a ball and Friday we went to the school field and (dad-brag ahead) not only did she progress from bouncing it across the turf to nailing a 30-yarder, she didn’t manage to break my hand. Winning!
Major Major Major Major
I think the reason we’re talking about football and opioids and everything else instead of alcohol is because everybody already knows that alcohol abuse is rampant and super bad for you.
raven
@Major Major Major Major: Yea right. And you are telling me you didn’t know football was high risk?
germy
@Schlemazel: I thought it was the DailyBeast he writes for.
Kyle
@germy:
It will still be going strong in Texas where they seem to celebrate stupidity, aggression and ignorance, as expressed in their choice of politicians.
Major Major Major Major
@raven: Are you telling me the American public has been fully aware for hundreds of years that football can cause irreparable brain damage and make you insane, like with alcohol?
raven
@trollhattan: Kids shouldn’t play tackle period. 30 years ago when I ran the intramural sports program here we went to “screen blocking”.
germy
@Kyle: Maybe they’ll evolve antlers.
MobiusKlein
@trollhattan: Daughter just concussed yesterday in soccer. Someone fell on her, on the Turf.
I am beginning to think artificial turf is a bad thing. Too hard, to durable, lets them play year round in competitive leagues.
jharp
I used to be an avid fan but have lost almost all interest.
It’s just I find the NFL boring.
And a good friend of mine who was a bulldog of a high school football player (lead with his head at fullback and linebacker) recently killed himself and I suspect he suffered from CTE though we will never know. He shot himself in the head.
And another friend who played college football is now suffering from Parkinson’s.
Both men in their mid fifties.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Baud: It was years of piss-poor performance of my team that finally cooled my passions for the NFL, I still like the college game, especially Miami beating ESPN’s team last night. I do believe in a few decades I think American football will either a version of flag football or Rugby which I believe is in middle of World championships now.
raven
@MobiusKlein: It’s awful, so are composite floors in gyms. There is no slide and the foot tends to stop dead while the knee keeps going until it snaps.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@raven:
The only reason I replied was you seemed to be having a problem that people were criticizing all-mighty football. We all know alcohol abuse is a problem. And we all should have known how dangerous football and other related sports are. But you know the old saw: money and entertainment is what blinded a lot of owners and fans alike. I think it’s important to have this conversation.
Another Scott
@Schlemazel: Attackerman is a good guy.
And OLD, also too!:
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Schlemazel
@germy:
He might do that also, thats the way the modern world works.
@Another Scott:
Also true, but that is still a sleezy tweet
sharl
It’s a minor thing, but Spencer Ackerman is now at The Daily Beast; he made that move a few months ago, if I recall correctly. Normally I wouldn’t care, but there is – or at least used to be – a very pro-neocon bent in The Daily Beast’s natsec writing.
I’ve long liked/respected Ackerman’s writing, but I do not like neocons, no I do not.
ETA: Or what Germy said at #41…
raven
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: And I had too listen to that fucking RGB troll bitch and moan about football all day yesterday which is why I said I’d like to see a constant stream of threads about a problem that is way more serious.
germy
I wonder if OJ wouldn’t be such a mean drunk if he didn’t already have brain damage from his football days.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@raven:
How have we had “constant streams of” about TBI and football? I must have missed that.
aimai
@Major Major Major Major: My daughter just started playing rugby and got a concussion within the first two weeks of playing.
Petorado
The local middle school was trying to field an 8th grade tackle football team, as per usual, but didn’t find enough willing kids to play. So they teamed up with another middle school to field a joint team with a larger pool of candidates. Even then they didn’t find enough interest. They dropped the football team.
Every Sunday when I see a hit like the one Joe Flacco took, knocking him out of the game and the season, I think there’s another kid/ set of parents saying, “Screw that sport.” The games themselves are the worst possible advertising for recruiting new players to the sport.
Doug R
@ThresherK: Those flatlanders love their ‘riders. Not much else to cheer for I guess with 10 months winter and 2 months bad sledding.
raven
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: see # 37.
Repatriated
Another reason football-related CTE has become more visible is that some of the other causes of brain damage have been somewhat reduced — leaded gasoline, lead paint, war-related PTSD (smaller conflicts, fewer troops), and so forth. Less noise, more signal.
jharp
@Shana:
“I predict that in 20 years professional football will be a shell of what it is now.”
Does that mean us taxpayers get our money back from the stadiums we built for them.
Major Major Major Major
@aimai: It’s my understanding that rugby is far less bad. But no sport is totally safe, see #46 here for a comment about a concussion from soccer.
beth
@aimai: Wow, are you me? The same thing happened to my daughter who just started playing this year. One game I watched had two women taken out due to concussions. I’m very unhappy with her choice of sports.
Doug R
Looks like Canadian actor Kim Coates is a Rider fan. I was an extra in a tv movie he did with Christopher Reeve btw.
WereBear
@jharp: Rollerball, instead.
germy
@jharp:
We can use them for classical concerts and interpretive dance.
Or we can use them for trials of members of the republican congress.
germy
@WereBear: Supervised outdoor exercise for our cats.
Repatriated
@germy: Tumbrel parking.
John Fremont
@Shana: So what happens to all of those stadiums these cities built for these NFL franchises? Will they be like abandoned shopping malls?
I see Jharp at comment 62, you beat me to it. We’re on the same wavelength
Repatriated
@germy: imagine the kitty condos you could build!
germy
@John Fremont: Some abandoned shopping malls are being converted to low-income housing.
PsiFighter37
@John Fremont: Money down the drain. We really don’t have any need for the insane amount of structures built around the country.
different-church-lady
@MattF:
NEVER go paperless. NEVER.
John Fremont
@germy: Yeah, I’ve seen that on some sustainable living blogs. Wonder what will we do with stadiums? I bet some of those Solarpunk bloggers have some ideas. Who knows maybe they’ll transition to being soccer stadiums. I can hear it now, conservatives will be ranting about those *@/#’! millenials ruined NFL stadiums with soccer games!
different-church-lady
Why are we worried about pro sports 20 years from now? After nuclear winter we won’t have any.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: I don’t get any paper bills at all.
MoxieM
@germy: Wasn’t it Barb Bush Sr. who said the stadium that Katrina refugees were huddled in was the best housing they’d had, or something equally odious and similar?
Doug R
@different-church-lady: We went paperless with our power company. WHO threatens to cut you off when you owe them forty three dollars?
jharp
@Doug R:
Around here (Indiana) they don’t even threaten. They just do it.
Twice we’ve had our gas shut off and we were paid in full. It was their fuckup.
Amaranthine RBG
@smintheus:
I agree that everyone knew that football could be dangerous in the sense that there could, on very rare occasions, be broken bones. But even 25 years ago in youth football people would talk about players “getting their bell rung” or “the wind knocked out of them” after a big hit. Sit out a series if you must, then get back in there was the solution.
If you are saying that people knew about CTE as a hazard for football players, you are full of shit.
Dr. Bennett Omalu didn’t publish he first paper on it until 2006 and, since then, the NFL has lifted a page out of the tobacco may not cancer and global warming is disputed playbook. When you say crap like people knew football was dangerous 50 years ago you are acting as their tool. And in this thread we have another idiot saying “But what about the al-kee-hol??? It kills people too” Tools, in more than one way.
MomSense
This is why I’m a cross country/track and field Mom.
MomSense
@Repatriated:
Big stadiums call for something more dramatic, like hungry lions.
WereBear
@germy: i like!
different-church-lady
@raven:
Does that actually prevent helmeted heads from colliding?
low-tech cyclist
@raven:
OK, we’ll talk CTE in your precious football threads. It’s all good.
different-church-lady
You know what’s going to replace the NFL?
Mixed Martial Arts.
Then, eventually, “Ow, My Balls!”
different-church-lady
Brains are overrated anyway.
smintheus
@Amaranthine RBG: You’re the one who’s full of it. We knew all about the danger of repeated concussions and lesser brain traumas when I was young. “Punch drunk” is a very old phrase. We knew that ex-football players tended to get pretty stupid at a pretty young age…thus all the jokes about Gerald Ford. We knew that football players also nursed major joint and back/neck injuries for life, even if they got out of their playing days without any disastrous injuries. As a pre-teen I even understood the long-term danger of heading soccer balls and avoided it at all costs though I was an avid player.
We knew just as we knew that boxing led almost inevitably to debilitation. We didn’t need brain scans to tell us what we could witness in former players.
You’re the tool.
different-church-lady
@smintheus: You know what probably changed the most?
The NFL making an obscene amount of money.
As a society we were willing to put up with it when it was just minor entertainment played by rugged men. Now it’s an colossus that strides the earth and eats human beings.
jharp
@Amaranthine RBG:
I played high school football 40 years ago and two things I still find remarkable.
I remember the coaches telling us to only drink a little bit of water or just rinse your mouth out. Too much water caused cramps was the reasoning.
And they gave us salt tablets at practice.
What the fuck that was for I do not recall.
Amaranthine RBG
Bullshit – nobody in 1967 was talking about CTE in football players – by any name. You’re a liar.
Look, the only reason we are having this conversation now is the brave and pioneering work that Dr. Omalu did and that came out only 10 years ago. Since then there has been an avalanche of news.
Sure, you keep telling yourself that.
It really is the fault of those 11 and 12 year olds – they all knew what they were getting into – is that your point here?
Amaranthine RBG
@jharp:
Heh. Same thing with my cross-country coach many years ago. I think the theory was that you wouldn’t be able to be hydrated during the race, so you got to practice being dehydrated.
Makes sense if you don’t think about it.
Gin & Tonic
I knew this thread would suck. See you later, I’m off to see Casablanca.
Amaranthine RBG
@Gin & Tonic:
Maybe you could stick around and tell us the cheerful and funny parts os CTE!
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: I didn’t even know the topic was being trolled until now since I haven’t read a thing ARBG has written for months.
Betty Cracker
@low-tech cyclist: Respectfully, that’s a shitty tactic. I say “respectfully” because you’ve earned respect; you generally don’t show up to troll and revel in your own self-righteousness like some do. Might not want to throw that away.
I love football. Love the family aspect of it. Love tailgating. Love the strategy of the game. My little brother played, and my mom, sister and I never missed a game.
There’s a lot that’s troubling about the game as it’s played now. The things we’re learning about CTE are horrific. The shitty owners. The gratuitous jingoism. The way pro teams shake down municipalities. The way colleges exploit players. All disturbing, all legit topics for debate.
I’m for addressing these issues, making the game safer, addressing the exploitation where possible. Ultimately, maybe football can’t be saved. Maybe no sport can, but I don’t believe that. Not yet.
Anyhoo, troll away if you think that’ll help. I don’t think it will, though.
Kirk
@jharp:
In fairness, the “don’t drink too much” was because kids tended (tend?) to wait till they’re thirsty then drink till something forces them to stop. The consequence of that is a LOT of impact-driven nausea. There are things I can compare to being in the middle of a pile in which at least two fellow high schoolers are heaving, but they’re all even nastier.
Salt’s explainable too. Today the word is “electrolytes” but that’s because we’ve learned enough studying exertion to know that not all salts are equal.
As a small addendum, if you were in certain areas in the late 60’s through mid-70s (graduated HS in 1978) your more enlightened coaches had you sipping a watered cider vinegar. Which turns out to have been a really good thing based on things we know now, but got a lot of scoffing back then.
Amaranthine RBG
@Betty Cracker:
It isn’t trolling to talk about CTE in football threads. It is directly on point. CTE kills people. It destroys their minds. It does that because of repeated head injuries which are an integral part of the game.
Getting pissy about someone talking about CTE in a football thread is a bit like getting mad about people talking about racism in a thread celebrating the musical genius of Al Jolson. “Why can’t you people just let us talk about the music? Wahh”
smintheus
@Amaranthine RBG: You don’t read very well. The point is that the knowledge was so widespread that it had even filtered down to kids. I knew damn well not to play football or box. I knew enough to stop playing hockey when it became clear that a lot of high-school age kids were into throwing head hits. And I knew to minimize my exposure to head injuries in soccer as well, all at a very young age.
If you didn’t think getting hit in the head repeatedly was dangerous, that was on you.
Acknowledging the reality of the situation does not in any way excuse the adults who actively promoted dangerous sports or tried to cover up the evidence of injuries.
Amaranthine RBG
@smintheus:
You’re a liar. Nobody was talking about the dangers of repetitive head injuries in football 50 years ago.
Betty Cracker
@Amaranthine RBG: If you actually gave a shit about the issue, you’d approach it in a different way, i.e., seeking to persuade instead of being a self-righteous, dishonest dick. You consistently choose the latter on every single issue, not just this one.
That’s okay — you’re allowed to be a preening shit-goblin here; we’re a pretty freewheeling forum. Just don’t pretend you’re part of the solution. You’re not.
smintheus
@Amaranthine RBG: Nobody except my high-school dropout father over the dinner table.
low-tech cyclist
@Betty Cracker:
Don’t worry, it was an empty threat. I was just trying to drive home to raven the potential consequences of his attitude.
Being a grownup and all, I’m aware that there’s other people here besides raven and me, and whatever my opinion of raven might be, I’ve got no right to mess things up for everyone else here just because I’ve got a grudge against him.
(Also, I’m really lousy at holding grudges. If someone pisses me off on Monday, by Wednesday I can’t bring myself to care.)
mozzerb
As a Brit I’ve no idea whether people in the US were talking about head trauma injuries 50 years ago, but they sure weren’t taking them seriously in the soccer world until recently. So if smintheus was worried about them, he was well ahead of the curve.
Betty Cracker
@low-tech cyclist: I aspire to your level of chill!
Gretchen
There’s zero chance my 4 year old grandson will ever play football.
Lyrebird
@smintheus: At least one high school in NJ required parental signature for football tryouts that were not required for the other sports… in the 1950s. I only found this out (from the then-kid) now that CTE is in the news and his grandkids are getting interested in sports, but I can certaibly believe you.
Amaranthine RBG
@Betty Cracker:
You’re funny.
Thousands of posts here about how democrats need to stop even thinking about the WWC since they are all idiots and can’t be reached and should die in a fire and ha ha opioids will take care of that and now you are talking up the virtues of honey over vinegar.
Funny.
There are still people in these threads saying idiotic, false shit like everybody knew about the dangers of CTE 50 years ago. You let shit like that pass with nary a word.
How do you persuade people actively lie? Who enable active liars?
smintheus
@mozzerb: People who promote and benefit from the continued existence of the most dangerous sports have never drawn attention to the dangers or treated them seriously, so why would it surprise anybody that soccer authorities would not stress the one dangerous aspect of a relatively safe sport?
I wasn’t the only person in my circle of friends to avoid heading balls out of concern for the brain impact. We joked about it being mostly the dumber players who went in for heading.
Back in the ’60s and ’70s you wouldn’t hear anybody associated with boxing talking about the punishment that boxers were taking, but the boxing bout in Homer’s Iliad shows that 2000+ years ago people already knew it messed with your brain.
Ruckus
@germy:
Because then they wouldn’t be belligerent drunks. Which might be their goal in the first place.
low-tech cyclist
@Betty Cracker: I wish I could say it was because I was such a virtuous person. But really it’s just a sort of blind spot. I’ve got one like that about gambling, just a deep level of ‘why would I want to bother?’ Same thing here.
I have a hard time even considering dumping on people who are still watching football. I was a football fan for 45 years or so, because it’s a tremendously fascinating game. I’m not sure any other game combines athleticism and strategy anywhere near the way football does. Fortunately, back in 2012 when I first heard about CTE, the Redskins sucked and when your 5 year old son comes up and says, “daddy, can you play with me?” it’s easy to say, “yeah, actually, I’d rather play with my kid than watch this shit.” So that was how I quit watching football. It’s not that easy for everyone.
Ruckus
@jharp:
I’ve personally known 2 men who played in the NFL, one for I believe 8 yrs and the other I know for 9. I know the second a lot better than the first. Both have major health issues that came to them far earlier than they normally would have or are symptoms from other diseases. The one that played for 9 yrs has epileptic type seizures and has had to have 2 major joints replaced and heart surgery. They both could have CTE, but neither has the type of personality changes that can come along with that.
Ruckus
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
No one has to play football and no one has to drink alcohol. But people get paid a lot to play and for many that may be the highest paid career they will ever have. OTOH anyone old enough can drink alcohol, get in their car and kill someone or pick up a gun and kill themselves or others. Yes DD deaths have fallen but there are a lot more drinkers/drunks than football players. Sports with extreme physical demands and danger are played voluntarily, drinking is an addictive past time that only requires the money to purchase the alcohol.
They are different, if in no other way, than in scope of the issues.
burnspbesq
@Amaranthine RBG:
Is the greatest football player of all time “nobody?” Or are you denying the obvious import of Jim Brown’s famous remark about never playing football if he could have made a living playing lacrosse?
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
They must be, at least to a segment of the population, look at all the people who voted for drumpf.
Ruckus
@smintheus:
Maybe too many hits in the head had rendered the organ useless in this case?
Another Scott
@Amaranthine RBG: Harvard Health Publishing:
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
@MobiusKlein:
FIFA and the sport in general (the big clubs, particularly) have never been keen on synthetic playing surfaces. They’re very expensive to install, look very artificial (fans hate that), the ball doesn’t bounce right (unlike the American code, association football is played almost entirely on the surface of the pitch), and players get injured from the strain of running and stopping on them.
Amaranthine RBG
@burnspbesq:
Because he was concerned about the possibility that repeated head trauma would cause profound personality changes and suicidal tendencies?
Was that the rest of the quote?
mainmata
@Major Major Major Major: Having lived much of my adult life overseas< I've said this to friends for years. Rugby is a much more dynamic and interesting game. It's like a cross between soccer and American football as strange as that may seem. Rugby players get banged up not usually through concussions.
MobiusKlein
@Amir Khalid: Synthetic fields are expensive to install, but withstand much more use. And are immune to gophers.
The fields in San Francisco can be used from dawn to dusk, and longer with the lights. The grass fields can’t take that abuse. Compare these fields side by side: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.713682,-122.4293004,326m/data=!3m1!1e3