Guidelines include defining a “hit”; limiting the number of hits permitted by day, week, season and year (with all counts stratified by age); developing a “total force” threshold “when the technology is available”; and mandating days of rest for a young athlete following “a minimum brain trauma exposure.”
Like mom and apple pie, all this is close to critic-proof. If, tomorrow, 100 percent of the country’s thousands upon thousands of youth and high school football programs were to magically summon both the political will and the material means to adopt and enforce each and every one of these proposals, they would reduce the gross national football mental-health toll, without a doubt. They wouldn’t do much, if anything, about the annual incidence of discrete catastrophic injuries (whose most widely accepted accounting, co-directed by Dr. Cantu, seriously lowballs the carnage, according to journalist Matt Chaney). But they would take a bite out of cumulative subconcussive injury and CTE. So in five years, or 10 or 20 or 50, we could do another study and assess the “legacy” in “Sports Legacy Institute.”
Others and I have a better idea: end tackle football in public high schools. (Private schools and club programs, which don’t operate with taxpayer funds, could continue to do what they do.)
Also, issue a surgeon general’s style warning that no one under age “xx” should be strapping on helmets under the delusion that they will be protected while playing a sport that inevitably and systematically involves knocking heads, with levels of bad outcomes that are both morally and economically unacceptable. Every now and then, Cantu and colleagues tiptoe to the edge of such a warning, but they seem too beholden to the NFL to issue it in plain English.
Cantu and Nowinski want to make football safer, and good for them. But there’s a difference between safer and safe. The ultimate safety here is that of their own entrenched positions.
My last observation on the white paper, for now, is the revealing way it cites as a model the already evolving practices of Ivy League college football programs. Revealing in several ways:
The Ivy League is the cradle of popular American football, and this echo of President Teddy Roosevelt’s early 20th century reforms there is conscious. I argue that the parallel is flawed and without relevance in today’s era of globally marketed sports and superstars.
Nowinski and company hold up the Ivy League’s brain-trauma practices without also promoting our most esteemed academic institutions’ total “student-athlete” model. How about turning every NCAA Division 1 football program into a Division 3 program? Oh, right, that’s outside the scope of their advocacy.
And finally, the analysis of football and concussions is assumed to rest, with definitive authority, in the hands of experts. I don’t buy that. I think there is a larger problem with sports in this country, and that is its rampant professionalization — money-wise, health-wise and otherwise. (I deliberately didn’t say professionalism.) Thus, if the NCAA is trampling educational values, then the only solution isn’t to trim its sails but to make sure it pays its players. Did I hear someone complain that baseball’s Little League World Series exploits little kids? Well, then don’t think about eliminating the exploitation of little kids on international television — just make sure you cut them (and their moms and dads) in on the profits.
When it comes to football safety, we — parents, citizens, all of us — are being manipulated into unleashing “solutions” that will cost vast sums of money, which we are supposed to apply to amateur athletics without a debate over cost, proportion, or priority.
8 February 2012..........
Last summer Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports, a really good overall columnist, made an odd proposal that I find sadly characteristic of the state of our culture, in which there is no demarcation between adults and children — and in which, as a consequence, adults are expected to behave like children and children like adults. “Pay the Little League World Series players,” Wetzel wrote.10 Don’t protect ’em. Just pay ’em. It’s the American way.
With somewhat less caricature, the same dynamic infuses the debate over paying athletes in the so-called college revenue sports. I wrote a supportive article about this issue for the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 2003, years before Taylor Branch came along to brand it and Joe Nocera to backstop it. (And by no means do I claim to be the first.) I’m bothered, though, by the breezy confidence with which our leading voices — Branch, Nocera, Wetzel, all of them — seem to believe that giving a fair share to young people who are professional athletes in all but name will solve the American sports problem. For the American sports problem, as I see it, is that it is a perpetual growth industry: fun and character building by faith, and without accountability.
It’s not too big a reach to relate this theme to the Cantu-Nowinski white paper on youth football solutions. I’m all for having coaches who have some idea of what they’re teaching, and I’m all for having safety guidelines and background checks. (One of these days I’ll tell you about my daughter’s USA Swimming club coach, who turned out to be one of the many across the country later ID’d as child rapists.) But we’re doing this sports thing backward. Professionals and Olympians might set the dream bar for our kids, but they shouldn’t be setting the standards for the youth sports industry. That’s the job of the rest of us: the parents. Yet, time and again, we are seeing the consensus of the football concussion debate reduced to a game of gotcha with the National Football League — as if the stupidity of Michael Vick’s and Troy Polamalu’s and Colt McCoy’s health care matters because it “sets a bad example.”
It matters, all right. But it matters because the NFL, which pays out a few dozen short-term multimillion-dollar contracts to its hired help, is so blatantly pulling the strings anywhere and everywhere, from the Congress of Neurological Surgeons to the Senate Commerce Committee to the Centers for Disease Control.
The NFL-coopted Cantu and Nowinski are playing right along with hit counts, politically calculated silence about the expensive awfulness that is Dr. Joe Maroon’s ImPACT “concussion management system,” and state-by-state “Zack Lystedt Laws.” This mutual massaging of the leading players in Concussion Inc. is not, in the end, about the kids; it’s about the cottage industries and self-congratulation created around gestures for the kids.
(Notice in the white paper where they foresee calibrating the “total force” on young-uns’ noggins as soon as “the technology is available.” The very first post on this blog to use the term Concussion Inc., months before the blog itself was so named, talked about the confused relationship between Cantu and the Rollerball-esque Xenith Helmet Company.)
Even the best-intentioned children’s advocates have it backward. We don’t need to be dedicating disproportionate capital to the best and the brightest so that they can reinvent football’s answer to the better mousetrap. We need to be exercising common sense — summoning the political will to take this blood sport back where it belongs, several notches below a national obsession.
It’s now a cliché of the concussion discussion that the sport has gone through this kind of thing before, and TR stepped in and saved it from itself, and it’s happening again today. To that analogy I say, not so fast.
A hundred years ago the Ivy League was both the spiritual and the financial center of the football universe. There was no NFL, no television, no $10-billion-a-year marketing juggernaut. Lads from Harvard brawled on the gridiron with lads from Yale. These representatives of the ruling class used the manly man’s arts, with all their good qualities and all their pretense, to polish their résumés for destinies on Wall Street and elsewhere. In that environment, containing death and disability was achievable.
But that is no longer the case, in my view, and not just because athletes are bigger, stronger, faster, and therefore more menacing to each other’s lives and limbs. Football long ago graduated from the Ivy hothouse to the too-much-is-never-enough demands of turbo-charged capitalism. Friday Night L
ights dramatizes how football has lost its cultural homogeneity, as well, and become a brass ring, a lottery ticket, a vehicle to greater things for all the classes.
Except when it’s not.
26 April 2012..........
After nearly two years, the name “Dr. Bennet Omalu” is once again fit to print.
New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof today wrote a piece about Dr. Bennet Omalu’s work on military service persons’ traumatic brain injuries.11
Omalu is also the researcher who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players. Yet in the 22 months since Omalu’s name was last invoked, I counted 22 quotes or mentions of Dr. Robert Cantu in the Times archive. Cantu, of course, directs the Center for the Study of CTE at Boston University, which two years ago this month received a $1 million grant from the NFL.
“$1 million, and zero strings,” Times reporter Alan Schwarz wrote in celebration that day.
In the wake of Schwarz’s promotion (or exile), Times concussion coverage remains sparse, opaque, mysterious. We could use the kind of sharp investigation and cogent analysis that can be provided only by our leading newspaper and unofficial house organ of the ruling class. Unfortunately, we’re not getting it. Instead, we’re gorging on reactive coverage of the New Orleans Saints’ NFL-concocted “Bountygate” scandal, pro retiree litigation, peer-reviewed studies of CTE autopsies 501 through 999.
7 May 2012..........
Next Tuesday, May 15, is the night of the premiere, in Chicago, of a new documentary, Head Games, which was inspired by the 2006 Chris Nowinski book of the same title.12
Billed as an account of the “public health issue of our time” — a characterization I wholeheartedly agree with — the film seems to have a substantial budget. Steve James, of Hoop Dreams fame, directed. Billy Corgan composed the score, which I am guessing employs a lot of violins.
Needless to say, I was not invited to the red-carpet opening, but I am looking forward to seeing the movie. Based on my screening of the trailer, I have some concerns over whether Head Games will get past the long-running self-congratulation phase of the work of Nowinski, Boston sports doctor Robert Cantu, and on-again off-again New York Times concussion writer Alan Schwarz. I also doubt that the film will push for more formidable reforms than have been advanced by this group ever since the Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University started accepting National Football League money two years ago.
All the usual suspects/role players make appearances in the trailer. These include Schwarz, who, in keeping with his romantic curation, is billed as “The Reporter,” and is listed on the website as the film’s associate producer. Bob Costas supplies an appropriately measured sound byte. In February, Costas teed up Schwarz in the audience at a pre–Super Bowl town hall meeting in Indianapolis for the NBC cable sports network. As he has been doing in a very unfocused fashion ever since formally leaving the Times concussion beat last summer, Schwarz used that opportunity to further promote the idea that he and his buddies invented the concussion issue. It is a stance I find journalistically unseemly, and I fear Head Games will offer additional such preening.
My larger concern is that this slick, and no doubt competent and compelling, film will monopolize the oxygen for the off-season national conversation on the future of football and frustrate the funding and progress of other documentaries on the subject.
Email exchange with Alan Schwarz:
[Muchnick to Schwarz]
… Please answer a few questions. (I wanted to cc Bruce Sheridan in case he is better positioned to answer the first question in particular. But the Columbia College Chicago website directory is balky right now. I’ll forward this to him later.)
There is no information on the website about the funding of Head Games. Can you provide it?
Also, I’m sure the Times has policies on outside projects by staffers, so I would assume that there was a process by which you disclosed your involvement and secured permission from the editors. Please share with my blog’s readers how and when this played out.
Finally, does the film project relate in any way to your departure from the concussion beat? And what is your current role at the Times? The last time I looked at your Twitter profile, it no longer said you were National Education Correspondent, as the bio at the film’s website says.
[Schwarz to Muchnick]
Questions regarding the funding of Head Games should be directed to the producers.
Yes, the Times has policies regarding projects like this, and yes, I went through that process and received permission. As for the substance of that process, please direct your questions to the Times.
This film has nothing to do with any “departure from the concussion beat,” as that very voluntary process had begun in early 2011 (and perhaps before, I don’t remember) and had been long completed when a producer approached me last summer. I agreed to participate in September, months after I had joined the Education department.
I am now a National Correspondent, period. I do not have any formal attachment to any particular subject, although I remain very interested (and encouraged by the Times) in covering news regarding education issues. I have been heading a massive project regarding children’s health for the past several months, hence my few bylines during that time.
I have never “promote[d] the idea that he and his buddies invented the concussion issue” [ … ] I have repeatedly stated that this was news long before I ever showed up, and fantastic work had been done at least 10 years before, specifically by Michael Farber of Sports Illustrated. I agree with you that OTHERS have cast me as having invented it, but I have repeatedly, when possible, corrected them in that misperception. You might not find proof of this on the Web — I know you will look, so I did — but it’s not my fault that the many people who have interviewed me have not included that comment in their stories. At the very least I can send you the following note I sent to Mr. Farber back in 2009:
—–Original Message—–From: Alan Schwarz Sent: Wed 12/2/2009 3:07 PM To: Farber, Michael – Sports Illustrated Subject: from Alan Schwarz / New York Times
Michael–
I hope this note finds you well. I just wanted to let you know that through my three years of covering head-injury stuff for the Times, and watching all sorts of change take place, I have been very aware of the fantastic story that you did way back in 1994. I still think it’s one of the best treatments of the subject that I’ve ever seen; people treat me as if I’ve invented concern for this subject, but you obviously were around far earlier than I, and long before what much has been learned since was known. It’s a damned shame that your story didn’t effect the change it should have, making my work unnecessary.
I’ve been meaning to write you for a long time just to say that your story was great.
–Alan.
[Muchnick to Schwarz]
Thanks. [ … ]
One follow-up: since becoming associate producer of the film, you have had, I believe, one co-byline on a concussion story, and a solo byline earlier this year on the report of the Duerson family lawsuit against the NFL. I can understand the thinking of the editors that, since you are so knowledgeable on the subject, it was helpful to return you to it on an ad hoc basis. What is potentially troubling, though — and let’s not make too much of this, nor, frankly, too little — is the failure to disclose your role in the Head Games film. Any thoughts?
Alan Schwarz, who almost exactly a year ago took great umbrage at my comparing his relationship with Chris Nowinski to that between the co-authors of the bestselling book Freakonomics, has become exactly what he insisted he wasn’t in May 2011 (and what, by the way, I had never accused him of being): a business partner of Nowinski.
Schwarz is the associate producer of the new documentary, Head Games.
Here’s the New York Times’ explanation. Eileen Murp
hy, vice president for corporate communications, told me:
The New York Times has a detailed and comprehensive ethics policy. There is a specific section that deals with consulting agreements on films or television programs.
It states: “Staff members offered consulting agreements by agents, producers, studios or others must consult the standards editor or the deputy editorial page editor before accepting. No staff member may serve as a consultant to a film or program that he or she knows in advance is tendentious or clearly distorts the underlying facts. In no case should a consulting role be described in a way that invokes the Times or implies its endorsement or participation.”
Alan’s role on Head Games was approved in advance and meets with all other aspects of this policy.
Murphy did not answer my second question: why the Times didn’t disclose to readers Schwarz’s involvement in the Nowinski film project after Schwarz, who had putatively left the concussion beat, continued to byline stories on such subjects as the Dave Duerson family’s recent lawsuit against the National Football League.
When I suggested that Times standards editor Phil Corbett might be asked for a fuller explanation, Murphy got testy: “Thank you for your instructions on how to do my job… . We’re not commenting further on this.”
I don’t advise anyone to hold his breath waiting for commentary by Arthur S. Brisbane, the Times ombudsman (or, as the Gray Lady calls that position, with perfectly pitched pomposity, the Public Editor). The Public Editor’s column, you see, is better suited for things like busting freelancers who accepted perks while working on travel articles. Times ethics are like NCAA compliance — meant for the players more than the coaches.
Concussion Inc. Page 15