Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle deserves high praise for her courageous column in her paper’s Sept. 2 edition entitled, “The Uncomfortable Truth About Watching Football.” Standing up to the massive tidal wave of social mania over the opening of another football season, she dared to call into serious question the entire enterprise because of its devastating physical effect on players, most importantly in terms of inducing dementia through brain damage known as “chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” or CTE.
What a downer, the people cry. Boo! The entire nation is fixated on the start of the professional National Football League (NFL) with sales of favorite team jerseys, face paint, chips, dips, beer and pizza through the roof with billion dollar TV ad campaigns, and TV news swamped by hyped-up newsmen and weathermen (not just sports reporters) touting “our” obvious keen interest in the minutiae of “our” local team’s doings. But what they are crazed about is a national ritual that is destroying lives in the cruelest of ways, as science proves..
How many mammoth stadiums, sole lasting monuments to our current culture, are filled to the brim with fanatics (“fans” for short) every Saturday for college games and Sundays for pro games, screaming and chanting for their favorites as players on the field, now at record levels of weight and speed, plow into each other down after down, as they do every day of the week during practices, too. Millions are spending their entire weekends engaged in these rituals, between travel times to and from stadiums and pre-game tailgating, long post-game rides out of crammed parking lots and to home, only then to watch on TV what they saw, over and over, as talking heads gab incessantly with endless so-called “analysis.”
All this happens as our cities are being illegally occupied by a domestic military and stories mount of grievous and cruel arrests and deportations, news of our president cavorting with pedophiles, presidential appointees in mass firings or the equivalent of our nation’s top foreign intelligence officers or ending vital public health protections against us all, and tariff policies that amount to a massive new tax on every one of us. Meanwhile, The Post is making key editorial decisions to relegate local news coverage of this at the back of its paper, behind the sports section, while penning editorials praising the occupation of D.C. and (in the same edition as McArdle’s column, no less) singing the praises of the new football season. Meanwhile, Republicans are running campaigns this fall based on one issue, transgenders in restrooms and, of course, sports.
Though coming 12 years after this writer began speaking out about CTE and football, McArdle’s column constitutes a so, so sorely needed bucket of cold water on the nation’s football-intoxicated faces, but with no guarantees it will sober anyone up. A subhead in her column highlights that “While six percent of men around age 62 report serious difficulty concentrating,.remembering or making decisions, 47 percent of the former NFL players do.”
The big-money NFL is getting away with this due to heavy influence on the media, such as The Post, but also because currently CTE can only be diagnosed in persons after they are dead, although symptoms abound earlier.
The center of the study of CTE is at Boston University, and scientists there think that it will be only a few more years before ways are found to diagnose CTE in living persons.Then, there will be enormous pressure to subject active players to be tested for it, and the results could be truly shocking.
There is no other sport, except for boxing or its more extreme versions now proliferating, where the fundamental purpose of the game is for participants to slam into each other. While there are unintentional collisions in any competitive sport, they are relatively rare.
The result of living tests will not prove different than what we already know from post-mortem examinations, including that there is a high prevalence of it even among high school players. It is lower than for pro or college football, but appears on average in three of 20 high school players, doomed to futures of pain, confusion and early death due to playing football.
