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Super Bowl Vow: My Son Won't Play Football

Head-slamming highlights no longer bring joy. Concussions may doom the sport.

Andy Prest 4 Feb 2011TheTyee.ca

Andy Prest is a reporter for the North Shore News who is on parental leave. His blog can be found here.

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Final blow: Steve Young's brilliant career as San Francisco 49er quarterback was cut short by concussions, this one his last.

Brain injuries aren't funny.

OK, they were from 2003-2006 when ESPN's Monday Night Football ran a segment called Jacked Up! in which commentators shared their patented phony laughs while counting down the five hardest hits of the week.

The segment is now called C'mon Man, and while it is still an affront to all things that are actually funny, it at least does not make a habit of rewarding players for "turning out the lights" on their opponents.

I loved Jacked Up!, but as more information comes out about concussions in football, the very thought of it makes me a little nauseous. Concussions are no longer a joke -- although Slate does a decent job with their preview of the Concussion Bowl, outlining the key players in Sunday's Super Bowl who have suffered brain injuries recently. Some people are now even asking if concussions will be the death of football altogether.

Football concussion concerns hit the big time in 2007 when Alan Schwarz began writing articles about the topic for the New York Times. For his work on the subject -- the Times made it his full-time beat -- he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 and 2010 and received a George Polk Award in 2009. The Times now devotes an entire section of their website to articles and information about head injuries in sports.

Worse than dog fighting?

Malcolm Gladwell, the brainy Canadian behind some of the most popular work in The New Yorker, took the topic to an even wider audience with his 2009 article comparing football to dog fighting. Since publishing that article, Gladwell has often argued that football cannot be made safer and will likely die out.

"We now have incontrovertible evidence that playing football poses a serious long-term neurological risk to some significant percentage of players on the field," he said in this 2009 interview. "Once that fact becomes widely known, what parents will allow their sons to play tackle football anymore? Especially when there are lots of other sports alternatives that aren't dangerous?"

Now, in the lead up to Super Bowl XLV, it seems like everyone is talking about concussions, including The New Yorker again with another expansive report, this one written by Ben McGrath called "Does Football Have a Future?"

Other columnists and commentators have also taken up the call, arguing that as more information comes out about football concussions and more people become aware of the dangers, the sport will go the way of smoking or boxing -- once wildly popular pursuits that are now relegated to fringe status. As parents pull their kids out of football programs the sport will die from the ground up, the argument goes.

Risk and its price

Even some players have voiced their concerns, including Pittsburgh's Jerome Harrison, a participant in Sunday's Super Bowl who is known as one of the hardest hitting players in the NFL.

"Hopefully I'll [have] made enough money and put in enough time that my kids don't have to worry about it. And if I got to go through a little bit of hell so that they don't have to, I'm fine with it," Harrison said on Showtime's Inside the NFL program earlier this season.

Harrison interestingly brings up the issue of money, saying that he hopes he's successful at the sport so that his own children won't have to play it to pay their bills.

The idea of economic class determining who will play football is often mentioned in the discussion over football concussions and brain injury, the inference being that only lower-class parents will let the kids play the sport.

Closer to home, the senior football team at West Vancouver Secondary folded for the year in the middle of their fall 2010 season due to lack of numbers. I wrote a story about it for the North Shore News and interviewed both the school's head coach and athletic director. Neither mentioned concerns about concussions as a reason for their dwindling numbers. Instead, things such as an abrupt coaching change, frustration with several years of losing seasons and plain old peer pressure were mentioned as reasons why only four of the school's Grade 12 boys came out for the team. Also a lot of the players who did suit up ended up getting injured. The junior ranks are strong at the school and football should be back and thriving at the senior level next year, the coach said.

But could the folding of a football season in West Van, one of the wealthiest districts in Canada, be an indication of what's to come as well-educated, well-informed parents begin yanking their kids out of football?

The NFL has finally started to acknowledge that concussions are a serious problem and something needs to be done about it. Most other football organizations have come to the same conclusion. Football B.C., the governing body for all amateur football in the province, introduced a comprehensive new concussion policy on June 1, 2010.

New rules can't protect

While new policies are welcome and well-intentioned, some of the latest research indicates that any attempts to curb concussions in the sport might just be window dressing, like putting lipstick on the pigskin.

While explosive hits on high-flying receivers make the highlight shows and fuel the concussion crusaders, the truly scary thing is that it is much smaller actions that can be taken by football players dozens of time every day, particularly the linemen that ram into each other on every play, that can lead to brain damage. ESPN.com's Patrick Hruby breaks it down here:

"Then there's chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease found in people who have suffered brain trauma, including a number of deceased football players... It's a nasty, mind-mushing, irreversible disorder -- and experts believe it's caused not just by concussions, but also subconcussive brain trauma. In football terms, little hits. The same little hits that are part and parcel of the sport. The same little hits that aren't regulated -- can't be regulated, really -- by parsing and tweaking the rules of the game."

The symptoms of CTE can include memory loss, erratic behaviour, mood swings, confusion, depression and dementia. In one oft-cited case, former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Terry Long slid into depression and killed himself at the age of 45 by drinking antifreeze. There are many other horror stories of former football players leading troubled lives and often dying in sad or tragic ways at relatively young ages.

Of course, plenty of people play football and then go on to have very successful lives -- including, as Slate's Concussion Bowl preview argues, several former U.S. presidents such as college players Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Ford and Reagan lived the longest lives of any of America's presidents, although Reagan died of Alzheimer's Disease.

And football isn't the only sport coming under criticism. Hockey is under fire too, with signature superstar Sidney Crosby's current concussion bringing even more attention. But that's another story.

A parent's responsibility?

With the Super Bowl only days away, the spotlight is on football, a sport that is booming right now with revenues dwarfing those of the other "big four" professional North American sports. But playing football might eventually come down to being a bit like riding a motorcycle -- you know you could crash and die at any time, but it's a lot of fun while you're out there, if your parents give you the green light. It seems, however, that more and more parents are holding up a stop sign.

I was an athletic kid in high school, but my mom, a physiotherapist, did not let me play football. I'm glad now that she made that call. During the fall seasons I played volleyball instead, a sport I never really liked but one that helped me prepare for basketball season and left me only with the occasional sprained ankle, not a concussion-bashed brain.

That was almost 15 years ago, when less was known about concussions. Now it's hard to believe that any parent would be completely oblivious to the possible consequences of kids running into each other over and over with battering rams strapped to their heads.

I recently started writing a silly little blog about two of my passions: sports and my new baby boy. The only earnest thing that I've written, in and amongst the poop jokes, is that I will not let my son, who is now five months old, play football. I'm not a fan of bubble-wrap parenting, but I'll stick to my ban unless the sport changes drastically in the next 10 years.

I want my child to live a life full of laughter and fun as someone who is in on the joke, not part of the punch line.  [Tyee]

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