The Dark Side of Football

     The second essay for Topics of Advanced Comp was on a critical issue. The Super Bowl was that weekend, so I figured, "Concussions and safety in general in football is certainly a critical issue!" So that's what I wrote about. It scored an 85, which I thought was acceptable, though disappointing.

     The fiftieth edition of the Super Bowl was won by the Denver Broncos on Sunday night, and an estimated 94 million Americans watched the contest, according to CinemaBlend’s Conner Schwerdtfeger. For this reason, an appropriate and timely topic seemed to be focusing on the health risks which can come from football. We draw comparisons between the players on the field and the gladiators of Roman times, forgetting one very important detail: Those gladiators usually died. And even though it is a much slower process for football players, they are getting killed, too.

     Much of the storyline from the early seasons of the high school TV drama Friday Night Lights deals with the aftermath of quarterback Jason Street’s paralysis in the middle of a game closing the first episode.  As head coach Eric Taylor prays in a closing voiceover, “Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile….It is these times, and this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves” (“Pilot”). Over the last several years, the mainstream sports media have turned a much more critical eye on this issue of safety, which has caused many fans to carefully reconsider their positions on the game in general, as well as how to discuss game action. An example of this can be seen in the differences between the introductory videos of the Electronic Arts video games Madden NFL 2000 and Madden NFL 12, both of which are easily found multiple places on YouTube. Almost in its entirety, the opening highlight reel in Madden 2000 was composed of vicious, violent and frightening tackles – thirty-five shots out of the montage’s forty-five total images were of near-decapitations. By Madden ’12, though, many of the shots were of the pageantry surrounding the kickoff(airplane flyover, cheerleaders, etc), and then the editing of the onfield action was extremely stylized, only vaguely resembling a depiction of a game.

     In Brian M. Ingrassia’s history The Rise of Gridiron University, he writes that social scientists of the early twentieth century such as Edward A. Ross and Francis A. Walker helped popularize football by claiming it developed “moral as well as physical tone” as it created young men with “courage, coolness, steadiness of nerve, quickness of apprehension, resourcefulness, self-knowledge and self-reliance” as players subverted their individual wills to achieve a common goal (93, 95). John Sayle Watterson’s book College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy relates in detail how the game we know as football came to be what we recognize today. Originally it was a corrupted version of rugby played by eastern colleges, mainly those that we now call part of the Ivy League. Games were more or less organized mob scenes, and occasionally massacres. Due to so many players dying either on the field itself or in relation to injuries suffered while playing, the rules of the game were drastically rewritten, thanks to the considerable influence of President Theodore Roosevelt. Some of these rule changes created for safety purposes were the forward pass, a system of penalties, and the notion of having to earn ten yards for a first down. It took a while for all of these changes to have their intended effect, but eventually serious injury or death became the rare and horrible exception (64-69, 118-119).

     One of the modern issues our society worries about concerning football is concussions, or more specifically, chronic traumatic encephalopathy(CTE), which is a degenerative brain disease likely caused by excessive repeated trauma to the neural regions; it was found in a Boson University study that 87 of 91 subjects showed symptoms of CTE, according to Ian O’Connor’s ESPN.com editorial lamenting the death of flamboyant former Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler.  O’Connor also states that Dr. Bennet Omalu, the pioneer of CTE research, estimates that 90% of all NFL players have CTE, while a Fox Sports article quotes him as suspecting that O.J. Simpson also suffers from the condition. Omalu was recently in the spotlight thanks to the film Concussion, starring Will Smith as Omalu. But what exactly is a concussion? According to the Sports Injuries Sourcebook, “any change in mental status or function qualifies as a concussion” (218). This is typically caused by a sudden sharp blow to the head, as it comes from the Latin word concutere, meaning “to shake violently.” The result is that the sufferer gets confused about his/her environment (WebMD). Since children’s brains are still developing, they jostle around more, which puts them at great risk for receiving concussions. Some, though not all, symptoms of this could be dizziness, nausea, vomiting, blurred vision or altered emotional behavior (Sports Injuries 218). They may be classified as either Grade 1(mildest; patient remains conscious at all times and is merely dazed), Grade 2(worse; patient still remains conscious, but remains out of it and has difficulty answering simple questions correctly), or Grade 3(by far the worst; patient is knocked out) (Sports Injuries Sourcebook 219-20).

     In an editorial for the American Heart Association’s publication Circulation, Gary J. Balady and Jonathan A. Drezner report that 83% percent of linemen are susceptible to developing either hypertension or prehypertension, which could result in a premature death due to cardiovascular disease.

     While the highest-profile levels of anxiety about the health risks that come with playing football will naturally be towards the professionals, they represent only a miniscule fraction of those playing football in America. There are thousands of college teams, high school squads and youth football teams. This gambling away of present health for the slender chance at cashing in on a fortune can be devastating if the player loses. Kathleen E. Bachynski and Daniel S. Goldberg report in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics that two-thirds of Washington State high school players stayed in games after an occurrence of a mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion (“Youth Sports” 329). This Russian roulette with one’s health is well-chronicled in H.G. Bissinger’s book Friday Night Lights(which was the inspiration for the TV show) in the case of Boobie Miles, who was primed to be the star running back of the 1988 Odessa Permian Panthers. Instead, he shredded his knee in a preseason scrimmage, which dashed his dreams of attending a Division I school (53-57, 66-69). He is now an overweight diabetic with a prison record living in a trailer with his girlfriend and a lot of child-support payments to his ex-wife, according to Bissinger’s follow-up article for the ESPN-affiliated Atlantic-esque pop-culture-oriented Grantland website, entitled “Where Is Boobie Miles?”, which was actually an excerpt of his sequel After Friday Night Lights.  

     Which takes us back to wondering, is it ethical to allow young men to throw away their health in order to satisfy the public’s need for a spectacle in order to avoid doing household chores? There are many other reasons for fans to follow football, of course, perhaps keeping track of their alma mater, or sportwriters and broadcasters following their assigned beats. The Romans were skilled warriors; which is why they left such a mark on Western civilization. There is a football stadium in California known as the Coliseum; which is an obvious tribute to the earlier Roman Colosseum. We stage our fights in this arena, replacing the sand with painted grass, and we may call players “gladiators”; which comes from the Latin word gladius, meaning “sword.” There’s something we forget often, though: most of the time, those gladiators in the Colosseum were killed. And so are football players; it’s just a slower process. CTE is just one of many swords ending their run. Bachynski and Goldberg write that “the most affected population when it comes to brain injuries is also the most vulnerable,” as developing adolescents have weaker neck muscles and still-developing brains, together with the possibility of not being able to fully recognize and understand the responsibilities which come from playing sports like football (“Youth Sports” 324). Think of Boobie Miles or Jason Street. Can we condone this slow slaughter of future generations by tolerating it now? These are tough, introspective questions, which must be answered on a personal case-by-case basis.

     In our state, the shorthand way the rest of the country remembers where we are is because of the crimson and cream of the University of Oklahoma Sooners. Football is taken extremely seriously at a local level; just look at rivalries such as Jenks-Tulsa Union, Checotah-Eufaula or Henryetta-Morris. But as much energy is invested in the Sooner State, down south in Texas it’s even bigger, with the Dallas Cowboys, Texas Longhorns, TCU Horned Frogs, Baylor Bears, Texas A&M Aggies, and many other high-profile squads. On a high school level, the competition is even fiercer; due to the sheer size of Texas, there are 704 public schools that currently make the playoffs, according to Tuesday Morning Quarterback columnist Gregg Easterbrook (“Friday Night Bloat”). That represents a lot of the competitive tension which kept the TV version of FNL humming, as audiences followed the Dillon Panthers’ quests for that gold ball trophy. But as Easterbrook points out, that also results in that many more chances for injury. To win a title, a Texas high school squad must play through 16 games – the equivalent of a full NFL season. Again, these are high school students. They are still developing physically, mentally and emotionally, and must do ordinary things like schoolwork as well. They are not professionals; it isn’t their sole job to win football games. This seems troubling. But at the end of the day, as FNL’s Coach Taylor said to close the pilot, “We all are vulnerable, and we will all, at some point in our lives, fall. We will all fall. But we must carry this in our hearts: That what we have is special, that it can be taken from us, and that when it is taken from us, we will be tested.” Is it hard to imagine the landscape of the Midwest, Texas and the South without football? Yes. But that might perhaps serve a greater good, if it prevents injuries such as these from occurring. However this story of football’s place in modern society turns out, it should be interesting to watch from the bleachers.  

Works Cited

Bachynski, Kathleen E. and Daniel S. Goldberg. “Youth Sports & Public Health: Framing Risks of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in American Football and Ice Hockey.” Journal of Law, Medicie & Ethics 42.3 (2014) 323-33. CINAHL with Full Text. Web. 8 February 2016.

Balady, Gary J. and Jonathan A. Drezner. Circulation. 128.5 (July 2013) American College of Cardiology Foundation and American Heart Association. 477-80. MEDLINE. Web. 8 February 2016.

Bissinger, H.G. Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1990. Print.

------------------. “Where is Boobie Miles Now?” Grantland. ESPN. 30 April 2012. Web. 4 February 2016.

“Concussion (Traumatic Brain Injury).” WebMD. WebMD. N.d. Web. 4 February 2016.

DR_C. “Madden 2000 Intro.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 12 August 2009. Web. 4 February 2016.

Easterbrook, Gregg. “High School Football’s Friday Night Bloat.” Tuesday Morning Quarterback. New York Times. 24 November 2015. Web. 4 February 2016.

Ingrassia, Brian M. The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2012. Print.

O’Connor, Ian. “Another CTE case, another reason football needs dramatic change.” ESPN.com. ESPN. 4 February 2016. Web. 4 February 2016.

“Pilot.” Friday Night Lights. (1.01) Writ. Peter Berg. Dir. Peter Berg. Netflix.

Saraf, Sid. “OJ Simpson likely suffers from CTE, says Concussion doctor.” FoxSports.com. Fox Sports. 29 January 2016. Web. 4 February 2016.

Schwerdtfeger, Conner. “The Super Bowl Ratings Were Apparently Huge, Of Course.” CinemaBlend. Gateway Media. 8 February 2016. Web. 9 February 2016.

Sports Injuries Sourcebook: Basic Consumer Health Information about Sprains and Strains, Fractures, Growth Plate Injuries, Overtraining Injuries, and Injuries to the Head, Face, Shoulders, Elbows, Hands, Spinal Column, Knees, Ankles, and Feet, and with Facts about Heat-related Illness, Steroids and Sport Supplements, Protective Equipment, Diagnostic Procedures, Treatment Options and Rehabilitation, Along with a Glossary of Related Terms and a Directory of Resources for Additional Help and Information. Third edition. Ed. Sandra J. Judd. Detroit, Mich.: Omnigraphics, 2007. Print.

Watterson, John Sayle. College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Print.

Ya boy MiMz. “Madden NFL 12 – Opening Introduction.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 29 August 2011. Web. 4 February 2016.