Slouching Toward Senility

            In 1954, the Gallup polling organization asked Americans if there was a link between smoking and the development of lung cancer.  Only forty-one percent said that there was.  Nine in ten respondents had heard reports of the science linking smoking and lung cancer, but fewer than half had decided to believe them. 

            This is just one example—but a particularly useful one—of people’s willingness to disregard evidence that they don’t want to believe.  Fifty percent of adults in the 1950’s  smoked; nearly everyone knew and admired a smoker.  Believing that smokers were slow suicides was an unpleasant reality, and so millions of people simply decided not to believe it.

Of course, huge amounts of money were spent covering up the terrible consequences of smoking; by the time the damning facts began trickling out, the revolting and deadly addiction permeated the culture so thoroughly that took decades—and millions of dollars—to counteract the damage Big Tobacco had wrought.

            Thankfully, decades of efforts by lucid and courageous thinkers have marginalized the impact smoking has on our civilization.  Sensible restrictions exist to minimize the harm smoking does to society.  While far too many people still suffer terrible health consequences for their poor decisions, those who opt to addict themselves do so with full cognizance of the fact that they are prioritizing a moment of pleasure over a lifetime of emphysema, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, and social stigma.

            Football, despite similar long-term health detriments, is still rationalized not only into acceptability, but into desirability.  Legion are the fathers who aspire to sire star quarterbacks or wide receivers.  Participation numbers in Pop Warner leagues are staggering and rising.  Over a million boys play high school football in America each year. 

The tide, however, is turning.  As more evidence comes out about the disastrous health effects of football, more credence is lent to critiques of its psychological, cultural, and moral effects.  In forty years, I hope society is able to look back on the father who pushes his son into football with the same disgusted sneer of contempt we might give a father who shares a pack with his seven-year-old. 

This blog aims to encourage and accelerate that development in our civilization.  Sports and entertainment do not have to be revels in and revelations of our vices; we are a better nation than that, and I hope we soon will prove it.

Suicide is an Ugly Thing

            Suicide is an ugly thing. 

            When a man points a gun at his chest, thinks his final thoughts, and pulls the trigger, some unlucky soul is the first person on the scene.  This is quite often a spouse or a family member—someone who knew and loved the victim, someone with a lifetime of memories of the human being whose guts are now smeared all over the upholstery. 

            This might seem an overly grisly description, but to make a choice wisely you must understand the consequences clearly.  One ordinary Thursday, February 17^th, former National Football League (NFL) player Dave Duerson took a shotgun, pointed it at his chest, and pulled the trigger.  According to autopsy reports, he suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma—the type of trauma incurred during a game of football.  Because of his CTE, he had trouble thinking clearly and suffered from depression.

            Dave Duerson was a real man, a human being with friends and family.  While there are certainly complex causes to any suicide, it’s virtually certain that football caused Duerson’s CTE, and that CTE contributed monstrously to his suicide. 

In 1979, Duerson was given the chance to play professional baseball.  Had he chosen that path, it’s likely that the man would be alive today.  He’d wake up every morning, relishing the chance to watch his three sons and his daughter grow into young adults.  He’d spend quiet hours enjoying good books and good music, and playing with his grandchildren.

I cheered for Duerson when I was a five-year-old fan of the Chicago Bears.  Was the vicarious thrill I got from watching him chase an oddly-shaped bladder worth the pain his loved ones felt on February 17—and every day after?

We might argue that Duerson chose his own path, that he could have opted to steer clear of what he should have known was a dangerous profession.  Aside from being callous, this line of reasoning is specious; Duerson was shielded from knowing the full risks of his chosen profession by NFL suits interested capitalizing on his life and youth.  He, and many millions of young men, were sold a dream based on a lie.  Even if he had made a choice fully-informed, could you justify building your own frivolous enjoyment on the back of his suffering—and the suffering of his children?

Litany of Disease and Death

Sadly, Duerson’s case is far from isolated; as of this writing the Bedford VA CTSE Brain Bank has studied the brains of fifteen former NFL players.

Fourteen of them suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.  That’s 93%.

Worse, the majority of these players played in an age when players were smaller and slower, and collisions less violent.  Lew Carpenter retired in 1959, prior to the Green Bay Packers win in the first Super Bowl.  That team did not have a single player who weighed 260 pounds—roughly the average weight for current NFL players.  The speed of the game has also increased; the fastest fifteen times for the forty-yard dash have all been recorded since 1999, and twelve of those times have come since 2005.  Higher weights and higher speeds mean higher-intensity collisions. 

Photograph of a diseased brain.

If Lew Carpenter, victim of a slower and less dangerous game, died with an advanced case of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, what is coming?  What will happen to the tens of thousands of young men who participate on a regular basis in this game?

Are the following cases the tip of the iceberg?

On January 21^st, 2009, former NFL player Shane Dronett threatened his wife with a gun.  For three years he had been suffering from increasing paranoia and anger.  At first, they thought it was caused by a brain tumor, but its removal did nothing to change his behavior.  As his wife fled for safety, Dronett turned the gun on himself. 

Autopsies revealed Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.  He left behind two daughters.  He was thirty-eight years old.

For 30 years, Lou Creekmur’s thinking slowly clouded; after his death he was found to have advanced CTE. 

On December 16^th, 2009, Chris Henry died after a domestic dispute; although he was never diagnosed with a concussion during his playing career, he was found to suffer from CTE.  He was only twenty-six.

On July 7^th, 2005, Terry Long committed suicide by drinking antifreeze.  He was found to suffer from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. 

The list goes on: on May 25^th, Tom McHale died of a drug overdose.  He had CTE.

Justin Strzelczyk fled from police against the flow of traffic on September 30^th, 2004.  His actions were so bizarre that he was assumed to be under the influence of drugs or alchohol.  He wasn’t.  He suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. 

On February 6^th, 2008, John Glenn Grimsley was shot and killed while at his home in Texas; although the shot was later ruled accidental, he too was found to be suffering from CTE. 

November 20^th, 2006: Andre Waters committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.  Analysis of his brain tissue reveals signs of brain damage caused by football. 

All these men unwittingly sacrificed to play a child’s game.  Every day spent in dementia, every suicide, every funeral procession: football caused them all.

Joe Perry died on April 25^th, 2011, from complications relating to dementia.  After his death, Donna Perry, Joe’s widow, stated, “We have to look at what [football] is doing to our children.”

Football great “Iron” Mike Webster retired with amnesia, dementia, and depression.  His thinking was so clouded that he chose to live out of a pickup truck.  In 2002, Iron Mike lost his battle with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and died at the age of fifty, a shell of what he was and what he could have been. 

Webster’s estate sued the NFL and won $1,180,000 in damages.  The NFL fought the ruling, but eventually was held liable.  Could your school be responsible for disabilities its football players incur?  

Real Lives

      An old and wise saying states that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of a million is just a statistic.  Our minds are simply incapable of processing a multitude of tragedies, so we gloss over them. 

      It’s telling that the old saying is most commonly attributed to Joseph Stalin.  It’s all too easy for evil men and women to manipulate our intellectual laziness.  In response, we ought always to recognize that a million deaths are a million separate tragedies.

      And, in this case, a dozen deaths are a dozen separate tragedies.  We ought to weigh carefully the lives of each of these dozen men against our own weekend pleasures and ask ourselves whether our enjoyment is worth their lives. 

      Furthermore, we need to remind ourselves that the cases of former NFL players are only the beginning.  There are roughly 42 times more athletes playing in college—roughly 42 times more collisions, and roughly 42 more times as many athletes exposed to potential brain injuries.  They are far more likely to suffer in anonymity, but they will die just as ignominiously and just as senselessly. 

      There are almost 500 times as many athletes who play football in high school as in the NFL; although collisions are less forceful in the pros, they are still significant enough to cause an awful lot of concussions: 2011 study in the Journal of Athletic Training found that there are approximately 67,000 diagnosed concussions in high school football every year—and it would be naive to think that there aren’t a great number of concussions that go undiagnosed: surveys suggest that nearly 50% of all high school football players report symptoms of concussions during any given season.  Additionally, even sub-concussive impacts can cause Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, as demonstrated by the case of Chris Henry, the 26-year-old football player who died with CTE.

      It is no stretch to say that our nation has chosen to give our young men a hundred thousand concussions every year. 

      That, of course, is just a statistic, but we need to remember that each and every one of these concussions is a step down the road toward that man, sitting in his living room and thinking confused and unhappy thoughts, pointing a gun at his chest, with his hand trembling on the trigger.

Risks and Rewards

Of course, we do dangerous things everyday.  I can hear the specious analogies already:

“Yeah, but thousands of people die in car accidents every year!  So why don’t you just ban cars while you’re at it!”

It’s true that we do things with risk every day.  The CDC estimates that a hundred and thirty people are killed each year by falling out of bed; even sleeping in a bed entails some risk.  The real issue is whether an activity can be justified with a risk-reward analysis.

A risk-reward analysis is an incredibly useful framework for helping to make decisions; in its simplest form, it’s remembering to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”  Do the risks outweigh the rewards, or vice versa?

Intelligent, rational, common-sense decision making is so closely related to risk-reward analysis that it’s practically defined by it.  A smart decision is one with more expected reward than risk.  A stupid decision is one that entails more expected risk than reward.

Going to bed obviously entails more reward than risk.  If you do, you take an infintessimally small risk of dying, or having your cat attack you in your sleep, or any of the other myriad of unlikely events that might befall you.  If you don’t go to bed, you run a nearly certain chance of going insane and dying.  Ergo, smart people go to bed.

Driving is a little more complicated.  It is certainly more risky than going to bed:  Approximately 20,000 people will die while driving this year.  It certainly offers less reward; after all, for most of human history, people survived just fine without cars.

Of course, they didn’t survive nearly as well as they do now.  Driving is an incredibly important component to modern civilization; without it, we would likely live in a far less advanced society with far shorter life spans. 

Furthermore—and this is an incredibly important point—there are very few alternatives to driving.  Biking and horseback riding are certainly healthy, viable ways to get around, but they can only take civilization so far.  In order for us to get the world we live in, with the marvels of modern medicine and agriculture, we need a quicker method of transportation.

Smart people, then, drive.

But how does football stack up in a risk-reward analysis?  Any reasonable person would agree that it entails significant risk.  Perhaps the risk is less than that of driving, but it is certainly far more than the risk of going to bed.  What is the reward?

Essentially, the reward is knowing with some degree of certainty which group of young men is more capable of manipulating an oddly-shaped inflated bladder in such a way that the sum of six times the number of times in which they were able to hold the ball on a colorful patch of grass, the number of times they were able to kick the ball though two posts after holding the ball on the colorful patch of grass, and three times the number of times they were able to kick the ball through the posts without first holding it on a colorful patch of grass (as well as twice the number of times they were able to cause the other team to fall on another colorful patch of grass, a hundred yards distant) is greater than the identical sum for another group of young men—providing, of course, that the manipulation of the bladder causes possession of the bladder to move forward by ten yards with no more than three incidents where a player is holding the ball while a knee is touching the ground, or while crossing over two lines perpendicular to the colorful patches of grass, and that following each such incident the team line up in such a fashion that…

Essentially, the reward is knowing who is better at the most convoluted and arcane set of objectives outside of “Calvinball”.  Essentially, football proves nothing.

Fallacy

I recently read an article about parents might want to rethink their use of “sippy cups” because children have to visit the emergency room each year with sippy-cup-related injuries.

These articles appear from time to time.  The author identifies some common household item and informs us that the item actually hurts a certain number of people each year.  Usually, the item is as innocuous was possible: teddy bears, toilet paper, sippy cups, etc.  Quite often, the statistics are misleading: “Since, 1970, 40,000 people have been injured by using Cuddly-Soft Moist Towelettes.”  Of course, over the course of forty years, that works out to a thousand a year.  Ten million people might use Cuddly-Soft Moist Towellets each year, which means that only one in ten-thousand of them get injured.  However, saying that CSMT’s have a one-in-ten-thousand chance of injuring you doesn’t make for nearly as interesting of a story. 

This kind of story does two things.  First, it makes us feel like America is becoming sissified.  It makes it seem like our society views everything, no matter how harmless, as potentially dangerous.  Second, it makes us suspicious of statistics used to demonstrate harm. 

Both of these things make it very difficult to argue that something is actually harmful.  Conditioned by a barrage of silly, scare-tactic stories, people automatically conclude that any scary story must be silly, and that the numbers used must be fudge or—at the very least—misleading.

Football apologists are already using both of those arguments, either in their heads as they read this book, or to others as they discuss it. 

However, this is not one of those instances.  Intuitively, most of us realize that using a sippy cup and playing football cause unbelievably different degrees of risk.  The numbers would certainly support that intuition: sippy cups are NOT the number one cause of emergency-room visits for young children.  Football IS the number-one cause of brain injuries for young men. 

Don’t be tempted into dismissing a ridiculous and irresponsible risk just because people are afraid of stupid things; weigh the risk with sober judgment and decide whether its benefits warrant the dangers.

Opportunity Cost

Perhaps, then, there is sufficient reward in playing football.  Perhaps the reward is the physical fitness gained through participation in the sport (the entire set of posts on football and obesity is, right now, laughing at that assertion—along with the section on football and illegal drugs).  The teamwork?  The discipline and dedication required to perform well?

Here is where it is essential to recognize the idea of opportunity cost.  Are there alternatives to football that provide those same rewards, without as many risks?

Certainly so.  Most sports build fitness as well as or better than football.  Any team sport requires teamwork and can teach it at least as well, and quite often better, given the less regimented and more free-flowing nature of many team sports.  Any sport at all requires discipline and dedication to perfect.  Very, very few sports are as damaging to the individual and to society as football.  There are better alternatives.

Ergo, smart people don’t play football.

Urgency

Cassandra, insane, before a burning Troy.

In ancient Greek mythology, the god Apollo became infatuated with a beautiful mortal named Cassandra.  He bestowed upon her the gift of prophecy; however, when she spurned his advances he twisted the gift he had given her.  She was doomed to prophecy truth, but never to be believed.

On May 2^nd, the newspaper headlines sent a chill down my spine.  I had been toying with the idea of creating this blog for some time; I was becoming more and more convinced that lives were in at stake.  Then, I opened the news.  Junior Seau, formerly a hard-hitting linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, was dead of a gunshot wound to his chest. 

I had known, intellectually, that football players were going to kill themselves while I was writing this blog.  In fact, given the total number of athletes involved in football each year, the scenario was almost certainly doomed to come true.  However, Seau’s suicide gave me a jolt of urgency.  Although swifter creation of God Hates Football would in no way have prevented Seau’s suicide, there are parents right now signing their children up for football who might be dissuaded.  It sounds overly dramatic to say that the lives of those children hang in the balance—but it’s true.  If a million children decided to take up some other sport, some number of them would be spared the addled brains the football can cause.  Their lives do indeed hang in the balance.

It is an awful thing for a truth to be disregarded; it is just as senseless if that truth is never heard.  If you agree that the risks of football far outweigh its rewards, tell somebody.  Tell your neighbor.  Share this book.

And for goodness sake, if you have been considering signing your son up for football—don’t!