WARNING: The opinions in this post are inconsistent and stupid...unlike most of the rest of the blog which is consistently stupid. The author is aware he has no business in telling folks how to be a fan and/or what activities are advisable to participate in, allow children to participate in or watch - he once bet his cousin that he could jump to the ground from a higher tree branch and won that bet...uh, he thinks. The author is also aware that he has gone third person and hates that most of all.
Friday September 9 - Are You Ready for Some...Brain Trauma?
Tonight our town renews the bank-sponsored, literally mind-numbing rivalry on the gridiron. One of my coworkers who knows the boy and I love the DK/Sycamore basketball game saw me this morning and asked, "Where are your colors?"
Honestly, the thought of watching a high school football game makes me want to throw up. Any enjoyment of football beneath the professional/mercenary level is tainted for me after reading Malcolm Gladwell's piece on football, CTE and dog-fighting from the New Yorker (2009 I think? google "Malcolm Gladwell - football", this work is on line). The dog-fighting stuff was the least frightening part of the article, and still as of this writing I find that the most frightening thing. Huh? Consider:
"Take the experience of a young defensive lineman for the University of North Carolina football team, who suffered two concussions during the 2004 season. His case is one of a number studied by Kevin Guskiewicz, who runs the university’s Sports Concussion Research Program. For the past five seasons, Guskiewicz and his team have tracked every one of the football team’s practices and games using a system called HITS, in which six sensors are placed inside the helmet of every player on the field, measuring the force and location of every blow he receives to the head. Using the HITS data, Guskiewicz was able to reconstruct precisely what happened each time the player was injured.
“The first concussion was during preseason. The team was doing two-a-days,” he said, referring to the habit of practicing in both the morning and the evening in the preseason. “It was August 9th, 9:55 A.M. He has an 80-g hit to the front of his head. About ten minutes later, he has a 98-g acceleration to the front of his head.” To put those numbers in perspective, Guskiewicz explained, if you drove your car into a wall at twenty-five miles per hour and you weren’t wearing your seat belt, the force of your head hitting the windshield would be around 100 gs: in effect, the player had two car accidents that morning. He survived both without incident. “In the evening session, he experiences this 64-g hit to the same spot, the front of the head. Still not reporting anything. And then this happens.” On his laptop, Guskiewicz ran the video from the practice session. It was a simple drill: the lineman squaring off against an offensive player who wore the number 76. The other player ran toward the lineman and brushed past him, while delivering a glancing blow to the defender’s helmet. “Seventy-six does a little quick elbow. It’s 63 gs, the lowest of the four, but he sustains a concussion.”
The injury or events that led to what became a cycle of injuries for the young man came from practice, an ordinary part of practice, maybe the mot ordinary part of practice and the game. This is not the result of one spectacular injury or unlucky event. It seems that it is part of the day-to-day business of being a defensive lineman, and since the d-line hits the o-line...it's a necessary part of any offensive lineman's life. Further in the piece:
"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."
"Perhaps back to his high school playing days" is the chilling part and the part I can't get out of my head.
"This is a crucial point. Much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.
That’s why, Cantu says, so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits. The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage. People with C.T.E., Cantu says, “aren’t necessarily people with a high, recognized concussion history. But they are individuals who collided heads on every play—repetitively doing this, year after year, under levels that were tolerable for them to continue to play.”
And it seems there is little that the helmet can do to mute the long term effects of these impacts. Maybe, if the fucking Toyota commercials are to be believed, there is a safer version of the helmet coming down the line as the mom driving the Rav4 suggests. I know it's my car, and I still love football on some level, I admitted right at the onset I am an inconsistent boob. Here's the last part I want to add from Gladwell's essay:
"But if C.T.E. is really about lots of little hits, what can be done about it? Turley says that it’s impossible for an offensive lineman to do his job without “using his head.” The position calls for the player to begin in a crouch and then collide with the opposing lineman when the ball is snapped. Helmet-to-helmet contact is inevitable. Nowinski, who played football for Harvard, says that “proper” tackling technique is supposed to involve a player driving into his opponent with his shoulder. “The problem,” he says, “is that, if you’re a defender and you’re trying to tackle someone and you decide to pick a side, you’re giving the other guy a way to go—and people will start running around you.” Would better helmets help? Perhaps. And there have been better models introduced that absorb more of the shock from a hit. But, Nowinski says, the better helmets have become—and the more invulnerable they have made the player seem—the more athletes have been inclined to play recklessly.
“People love technological solutions,” Nowinski went on. “When I give speeches, the first question is always: ‘What about these new helmets I hear about?’ What most people don’t realize is that we are decades, if not forever, from having a helmet that would fix the problem. I mean, you have two men running into each other at full speed and you think a little bit of plastic and padding could absorb that 150 gs of force?”
At one point, while he was discussing his research, Guskiewicz showed a videotape from a 1997 college football game between Arizona and Oregon. In one sequence, a player from Oregon viciously tackles an Arizona player, bringing his head up onto the opposing player’s chin and sending his helmet flying with the force of the blow. To look at it, you’d think that the Arizona player would be knocked unconscious. Instead, he bounces back up. “This guy does not sustain a concussion,” Guskiewicz said. “He has a lip laceration. Lower lip, that’s it. Now, same game, twenty minutes later.” He showed a clip of an Arizona defensive back making a dramatic tackle. He jumps up, and, as he does so, a teammate of his chest-bumps him in celebration. The defensive back falls and hits his head on the ground. “That’s a Grade 2 concussion,” Guskiewicz said. “It’s the fall to the ground, combined with the bounce off the turf.”
The force of the first hit was infinitely greater than the second. But the difference is that the first player saw that he was about to be hit and tensed his neck, which limited the sharp back-and-forth jolt of the head that sends the brain crashing against the sides of the skull. In essence, he was being hit not in the head but in the head, neck, and torso—an area with an effective mass three times greater. In the second case, the player didn’t see the hit coming. His head took the full force of the blow all by itself. That’s why he suffered a concussion. But how do you insure, in a game like football, that a player is never taken by surprise?
Guskiewicz and his colleagues have come up with what they believe is a much better method of understanding concussion. They have done a full cognitive workup of the players on the U.N.C. team, so that they can track whatever effect might arise from the hits each player accumulates during his four years. U.N.C.’s new coach, Butch Davis, has sharply cut back on full-contact practices, reducing the toll on the players’ heads. Guskiewicz says his data show that a disproportionate number of serious head impacts happen on kickoffs, so he wonders whether it might make sense, in theory, anyway, to dispense with them altogether. But, like everyone else who’s worried about football, he still has no idea what the inherent risks of the game are. What if you did everything you could, and banned kickoffs and full-contact practices and used the most state-of-the-art techniques for diagnosing and treating concussion, and behaved as responsibly as Nascar has in the past several years—and players were still getting too many dangerous little hits to the head?"
And after digesting that I decided I would never watch a non-professional game again. Feel free to say "ed's a mamby pamby, can't watch young men take on a little risk to learn valuable life lessons that will serve them well as they enter the world of men" I say, football more than any other sport forces individuals to sacrifice for the sake of and the glory of the whole, and if the whole (led by coaches and school leaders) doesn't consider the best information on CTE and present that information to players, parents and fans on the first day or practice or the season, I say it's a whole that ain't worth a damn and certainly not worth sacrificing a sprained ankle for let alone a young man's head.
I do not pretend that reading this piece or a few related articles has made me an expert on head trauma. I'm no brain surgeon. Hell, I'm not even a rocket surgeon but if even some of this stuff is true, I can't watch. It sounds stupid but I never thought of football as predicated on a series of consistent blows to the head. But that's exactly what it is. Line play dictates the course of the game and line play begins with blow after blow to the old melon. It's like boxing. As much as I have enjoyed watching boxing, I can't imagine watching children do it. This is now the feeling I get when I think of kids playing football.
Alex and I watch the Bears and I have a long term cheering interest in the Bears. I can say I still follow them without hesitation because at the professional level these guys are well-paid smashing machines, they are men who know what they are doing and except the risk. But these men come from somewhere, from colleges, from high school and from youth football on some level. I know this sport which I will continue to follow, enjoy and joke about comes from these things I have questioned and criticized above...I'm no different or better than anyone else who watches and partakes in this sort of violent endeavor.
Like everyone, I will have to come to terms with it in my head.
Sat Sept 10
Shot hoops with the boy and worked on bills (Bill's what?) got some cash for a Trader Joe's run and did some writing. Family Movie Night last night was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and tonight we watched the Man Who Knew too Much. The two films are not related.
Sunday
The Bears are NOT who I thought they were. They looked like they could actually block their fancy-schmanzy offense. It's only one game, so we'll see.
On the morning when the planes crashed into the buildings I was feeding my son Alex. He was less than six months old. I remember thinking at the time, 'I hope we haven't brought this beautiful person into a world where one horrific event will hang over his entire life making terror and conflict a part of everything he knows'
At some point after the Bear game I looked out the window. My ten year old was bouncing on the trampoline, laughing with some of the neighborhood kids. Things are going just fine, so far.
