Just How Harmful is Playing Football?

Dementia-symptom causing, and worse:

“There is something wrong with this group as a cohort,” Omalu says. “They forget things. They have slurred speech. I have had an N.F.L. player come up to me at a funeral and tell me he can’t find his way home. I have wives who call me and say, ‘My husband was a very good man. Now he drinks all the time. I don’t know why his behavior changed.’ I have wives call me and say, ‘My husband was a nice guy. Now he’s getting abusive.’ I had someone call me and say, ‘My husband went back to law school after football and became a lawyer. Now he can’t do his job. People are suing him.’ ”...When we think about football, we worry about the dangers posed by the heat and the fury of competition. Yet the hits data suggest that practice—the routine part of the sport—can be as dangerous as the games themselves. We also tend to focus on the dramatic helmet-to-helmet hits that signal an aggressive and reckless style of play. Those kinds of hits can be policed. But what sidelined the U.N.C. player, the first time around, was an accidental and seemingly innocuous elbow, and none of the blows he suffered that day would have been flagged by a referee as illegal. Most important, though, is what Guskiewicz found when he reviewed all the data for the lineman on that first day in training camp. He didn’t just suffer those four big blows. He was hit in the head thirty-one times that day. What seems to have caused his concussion, in other words, was his cumulative exposure. And why was the second concussion—in the game at Utah—so much more serious than the first? It’s not because that hit to the side of the head was especially dramatic; it was that it came after the 76-g blow in warmup, which, in turn, followed the concussion in August, which was itself the consequence of the thirty prior hits that day, and the hits the day before that, and the day before that, and on and on, perhaps back to his high-school playing days.

I had never been able to put a finger on the reason I could never become greatly interested in football, but I think Malcolm Gladwell's article comes damn close. Football is war writ small. And like war, it can be sometimes justified, but the goal is what justifies it. Subjecting yourself to serious and repetitive concussions for the sake of a ball isn't worth it. The game is just never ending (mostly because of the speed) violence. I've seen the effect that dementia can have, and trust me, earning a few million for a few years in your twenties is not worth the cost of forgetting your children. George Carlin was, as always, right in his preference for baseball.