GEFLAND ON … AN ENDANGERED SPORT-There are two ways to look at American football here in LA. The late Jim Murray, sportswriter for the LA Times, used to do a riff that went something along these lines: Down in the valley, the peasants have been living safely, absent the old terror, but suddenly they notice that there is a light in a window of the old deserted castle up on the mountain top, and that shuddering fear reasserts itself. USC (not Dr Frankenstein) is back, and the victory over Stanford a couple of weekends ago is that light in the castle. The rest of the Pac 12 has reason to fear.
Or, you can look at the really scary findings coming out of recent neurological studies and wonder if the whole structure of American football is doomed to come down, much as boxing did a few decades ago.
Two points of view, one short term and the other long term: In the short term, Los Angeles can look forward to renewed strength in the cardinal and gold, maybe going back to the days of coach Pete if not of coach McKay. The northwest schools will finally get some competition, and Stanford will go back to winning Nobel Prizes and losing football games by last minute field goals. USC will go back to hosting the Rose Bowl game on a near-yearly basis. Athletic honors and alumni joy will decorate our city.
But looking a little further out, we have to consider a more sobering view.
Over the past couple of years, it has become more and more obvious that the veterans of professional football represent a class of highly damaged people.
Some fraction of them have suffered substantial damage to brain function during their playing lives. Loss of memory and loss of self control have been the most publicized problems. Rages and violence have become a problem to the victims of this brain damage, leading to arrests and divorces.
Many years ago, it was well known that boxing ruins the brains of a large fraction of those who fight professionally. The term "punch drunk" was the oversimplified expression for widespread damage to the brain that led to every manner of mental and physical debility. It took longer to recognize that professional football players suffer some analogous loss of function. At the moment, we don't know how many football players will ultimately suffer loss of brain function, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is a huge risk involved.
Until recently, the only definitive way to diagnose the long term damage to the brain now called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) has been postmortem examination. It required removing the brain and looking for changes that occurred in life. Recent studies in Boston on the brains of former NFL football players showed CTE in a significant fraction. This kind of study is always going to be limited by the number of samples and by the chance that the samples obtained by researchers were not typical of lots of other living, healthy football veterans.
But the evidence, such as it is, remains something to worry about.
One of the more disturbing aspects of the recent studies is that some of the brains were obtained from suicides -- men who were no longer willing to keep on living with increasingly debilitating symptoms. In southern California, the suicide of a respected member of the San Diego Chargers shocked that community.
CTE has been found most often in postmortem examinations of professional football players, but it's not just the pros. There have been a few deaths of much younger men who happened to be football players, and CTE has been found in the examination of one player who was only 17 years of age. It has also been found postmortem in a young man who was only slightly older.
Is this a new thing for football? It is not unreasonable to think that it is. If we attribute the long term damage to the shocks to the brain that are repeated thousands of times during a player's career, then the increase in the number of games during a season and the extended intensity of practices, combined with the increase in player weight, must have all contributed. In other words, players are getting hit in the head harder and for more times during their careers. They are also starting younger.
Some football obsessed communities have a regular pipeline starting with Pop Warner football and going up, step by step, to the high school varsity. By the time a modern player has finished a couple of years of college ball, he's been through what a pro endured in the old days, at least in terms of head trauma.
We don't know for sure whether a large fraction of younger players are starting to be damaged already, or whether it's only a modest fraction of long term professional athletes. But we do know about the pros, and that finding is a legitimate reason to worry about the younger players.
What has professional football done about the problem? I think it is fair to say that the industry is doing its best to stay in denial over its long term prospects. The rules have been tightened up with regard to demonstrable concussions, but this may be just a fig leaf. Concussed players are kept out of practice and out of play somewhat longer than they used to be. But the occasional violent blow that leads to a diagnosed concussion may be the least of the modern football player's worries. The word "subconcussive" refers to all the smacks to the head that players get routinely. These probably happen to a substantial fraction of all players on each and every play.
That's because in football, unlike other contact sports such as rugby and soccer, most of the players are supposed to hit somebody hard on pretty much every play. Even if the hits are not always to the helmet, the human anatomy results in the brain banging back and forth within the skull during a substantial collision. And substantial collisions are what characterize what players do in order to keep their jobs. Benchwarmers are not protected. They have to do their best in practice, which means engaging in the same conduct as the starters.
Recent research at UCLA has allowed neurobiologists a chance to get some hints about what is going on inside the brains of living players and former players. I won't go into the biochemistry, but there seems to be a molecule that is detectable using advanced imaging, and seems more and more likely to be indicative of CTE in the living individual. Several NFL veterans have volunteered themselves for testing, and some show up positive.
There are several possible reasons that we might be seeing increased levels of damaged individuals coming out of the ranks of professional football. One is the aforementioned length of the schedule. Another is the size and speed of the current generation of players. Half a century ago, it was common to see college linemen weighing in at or around 200 pounds, with a 250 pounder being considered quite large. Nowadays, it is hard to find a ranking college football team with linemen much smaller than 300 pounds. They don't seem to have lost any speed, as stopwatch testing shows, so when you get hit by a lineman nowadays, it's going to be much harder.
But there's one other aspect of the game that doesn't get as much discussion, and that is the so-called protective equipment worn by the modern player. Back in the days of black and white movies, players wore helmets made of leather. It made it a lot more difficult to deliver blows by ramming your head into another player. Then came sturdily constructed hard shell helmets. Players were taught to jam the head into the opposition player. In the NFL, defensive linemen became famous for their ability to head slap the opposition player. The helmet was supposed to be protective, but it may have ended up playing the same role as the boxing glove -- it allowed for lots and lots of blows that added up, with fewer immediate knockouts. If it's the helmet that is the proximate cause of damaged brains, because the helmet protects from cuts and bruises but not from shaking, then even the high school players are at risk.
We can speculate on the what and the why, but the publicity that football has been receiving is already having effects down at the Pop Warner level. Fewer young boys enrolled this year, and it's not an insubstantial change. As Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, "this is how you lose her," where he is referring to America's moms.
Modern parents aren't likely to encourage their children to engage in boxing, considering the known effects. As the dangers of football become apparent, it may be that fewer and fewer American children will be enrolled in youth football or end up playing high school football. The net result will be a slow decline in the quality (if you want to call it that) of college football, and ultimately of the professional game. This is the model if you believe that football will ultimately be shown to be like boxing in its effects on the brain.
There are of course other scenarios we might imagine, such as a return to less dangerous helmets and pads, or even a return to limited substitution, but it is hard to imagine this happening in the next few years. But if it becomes obvious that the inevitable result of long term football is substantial brain damage, then American football will either change or wither.
All those aggressive young men and empty stadiums -- maybe there is a future in the World Cup for American soccer at some point.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 96
Pub: Nov 29, 2013