As part of the settlement, the district admits no responsibility, yadda yadda yadda.
14 March 2012..........
Last Saturday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bruce Jenkins wrote a column that I would describe as consistent with his philosophy of “Football is war — get over it.”12
The exchange below followed. I give Jenkins credit for responding honestly, though I believe mistakenly. Too many of his sportswriting brethren either don’t think about the subject at all, or, when they do, try to have it both ways.
[Muchnick to Jenkins]
I would like you to reflect on the concussion crisis and tell my blog’s readers why you believe football at the youth and public high school levels remains medically, financially, legally, and morally sustainable in light of what we have learned about traumatic brain injury.
Your column is useful in several ways: as a piece of nostalgia, as a deflation of the PR-driven hypocrisy of the NFL regime, and as a description of football’s essence. I am not, however, asking you whether professional head-hunting linebackers or bounty-bearing defensive coordinators should be disciplined by the commissioner. I am asking you whether this sport can continue on its present course of participation and popularity. My own view is that it cannot. Middle-class kids, by and large, no longer box, and as awareness and lawsuits penetrate, neither will they play football.
In a previous exchange, you first responded, essentially, that nothing would change because football prowess has always been a chick magnet (I paraphrase only slightly). Then, when pressed, you said you’d have to think about it more.
Have you thought about it more? And what do you think? Some sports columnists prefer not to get involved in social issues, and I appreciate that. But this is not about the playing of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch, or the meaning of Pat Tillman. It is about the direct impact of your commentary beat on public health.
[Jenkins to Muchnick]
I believe the increasing awareness will reduce participation to a degree, largely through parents’ input, and I have no problem with that. I was a decent athlete growing up, and I played just about every sport BUT football. It’s a crazy way to go unless you’re fully committed to the nature of the game. The sport will not die, however, and I’m not sure it will even suffer a significant loss in participation. As I follow youth sports in my area (Half Moon Bay), I see countless boys who either play the game or wish they were good enough to make the team. As my wife put it so well, “Men go to war” (she was talking about the A’s-Giants territorial-rights issue), and an awful lot of boys seek out contact sports. For years, it was widely believed that boxing would die out as a sport, but it won’t, for the rest of time, because there will always be guys who want to beat the hell out of each other — because it’s fun, because they have nothing else going in life, because they want to take out frustration. I’m on the side of common decency, but I don’t see major changes in the game of football down the line, as far as popularity or participation.
I have never argued that football “would die out as a sport.” With that in mind, the way boxing has not become extinct — but rather, and significantly, declined — seems to make my point, not Jenkins’. Everything about his boxing model (most especially the way it skews by class) reinforces this.
Football as a brutal spectacle of undeniable primal fascination? Yes, of course. Football as the national hearth? No possible way, once the seeds of concussion awareness finally get around to sprouting a full-fledged “Mothers Against Drunk Football.”
A taxpayer-funded school system on the outskirts of San Diego is out nearly four and a half million bucks. This is dough that could have gone to football safety or to a new line of cheerleader uniforms or to swimming or girls’ lacrosse or the jazz band or the dance troupe … or even (gasp!) to teachers and libraries.
We also know that there’s a lot more litigation where the Eveland case came from, and that these heavily lawyered tussles at the Pop Warner and prep levels — and more important, the circulation of their underlying narratives — are what will drive American sports reform. As a football nation, we can bathe only so long in bathos and war games and maimed linebackers and running backs being wheeled out to the 50-yard line at halftime of the homecoming game to drink in the affection of the crowd.
26 March 2012..........
In a better world, the news media would show a hundredth as much interest in the killing and maiming of kid athletes as they do in whether the New Orleans Saints can still compete for next year’s Super Bowl despite the suspension of their bounty-busted coach, Sean Payton.
Alas, Scott Eveland, the Southern California teenager who was paralyzed for life four years ago — leading to a recent $4.4 million settlement between his family and the San Marcos Unified School District — isn’t on anyone’s fantasy team. The only place Eveland belongs is in the dystopian literary vision of The Hunger Games.
So let’s move the courtroom chains from disability to death, and let’s take the parameters beyond pedestrian ambiguities in medical advice and administrative oversight. The next frontier of football litigation involves specific issues surrounding the ImPACT “concussion management system.”
Call it legal fig leafs and their discontents.
In September 2008, Ryne Dougherty, a linebacker for Montclair High School in New Jersey, suffered concussions in back-to-back games, yet was cleared to return to play. The next month, another hit caused a fatal brain hemorrhage. He was 17. In 2009, the Dougherty family sued both their son’s personal physician and the Montclair school district in state superior court. That lawsuit is still in the pretrial and discovery phases.
Though the Dougherty story touches on ImPACT, it does not neatly fit what I believe may become a classic fact pattern of these cases: an athlete who is explicitly cleared through the use of a second ImPACT neurocognitive test and goes on to suffer a disabling or fatal further injury.
Of course, even when that happens — I consider it a matter of when, not if — we can be confident that if ImPACT is named as a defendant or if a defendant school district tries to draw it into the case to share liabilities, the company will mount a defense that the software was not to blame, but rather the imperfect way it was applied.
Even so, Dougherty v. Montclair is an interesting opening volley for this coming flurry of multimillion-dollar litigation. I believe “avalanche” is not a hyperbolic predictive word. For all we know, there are many such underreported cases already in the pipeline.
When young Ryne was first concussed, the Montclair High School program was just beginning to use ImPACT, and he was among the first group of football players there to take a “baseline” examination of their cognitive functions. Discovery may clarify some of these facts and whether ImPACT played substantially into the return-to-play recommendation of the Doughertys’ physician, Michelle Nitti.
There are so many open questions here, it’s hard to know where to start. Since Ryne had already suffered two concussions, a baseline test at that point made no sense. Indeed, even those with a kinder assessment than I of ImPACT’s value would be forced to agree that a midseason baseline test for Dougherty’s teammates was oxymoronic, as well. In any case, school officials said Ryne’s particular test was considered invalid at the time because one of the kids in the room during the session was behaving disruptively … whatever that means.
My tentative takeaway is that this episode illustrates not the potential of ImPACT, fully installed and used precisely as designed, but rather the never-ending pitfalls, loopholes, fine print, and literally deadly caveats associated with a product aggressively marketed to high schools as a solution, if not the solution, to prevention of “second concussion syndrome.” Not to mention the legal exposure associated therewith.
I further contend that the ultimate lesson of all these cases will be the tail-chasing, bottomless-budget-pit inanity that is �
�concussion awareness.” You can mandate the staffing of an athletic trainer. You can mandate the purchase of ImPACT. You can mandate contracting all the paraprofessionals and support personnel — real or phony, certified or simply earnest — to interpret the data. But who makes the call to send the kid back out there to get head-banged again?
And when the worst happens — as it inevitably will, time and again, despite layer upon new layer of expensive, unproven, ass-covering measures — who will foot that bill?
The taxpaying public doesn’t yet seem terribly exercised by the ramifications of turning teenagers into human cannon fodder for Friday night lay religious services. But one diligently spotlighted narrative at a time, the rationalizations let loose by “concussion awareness” are destined to send the dollars flowing in a different direction.
9 May 2012..........
During the 1981 Major League Baseball players’ strike, I traveled to Norfolk, Virginia, to watch the New York Mets’ top farm club at the time, the Tidewater Tides. As I would confirm over the years in attendance at more minor league games at all levels, there are only a handful of genuine prospects on the field at any given time, even in Triple A. The overall skill level is such that routine relays, rundowns, and double-play balls get bungled, and baserunning is atrocious. Why, the ’81 Tides even had a first baseman named Ronald McDonald!
In the developmental product, a good 80 to 90 percent of the roster consists of filler: guys either chasing delusions or playing for the love of it, who are under professional contract only because every team needs 25 players. They’re cogs in the machine. They’re part of the cost of refining those one or two or three diamonds in the rough.
This principle — the meritocratic bell curve of God-given talent — applies to all sports. But as we are now learning with accelerated alarm, only in football does it have profound public health implications.
Football is more than a game — and in case you’re wondering, that is not a compliment in this context. Football is a kind of lifelong lifestyle, burdening its enthusiasts with the unintended dead weight of long-term mental disease. It is a game meting out not just wins and losses, but life and death.
And that is why I say, with gathering conviction supported by crystallizing science, that any fellow parent who lets his son play public high school tackle football, at an age clearly before both his brain has developed and he has agency to decide for himself, should have his own head examined.
In a recent radio interview, I was accused of advocating a “nuclear option” when I reject the idea that youth football can be saved from itself through a combination of better helmets, new rules, more careful coaching, and abracadabra state laws, which will force public school systems to turn their sports fields into triage centers and their locker rooms into neurocognitive testing laboratories. But the only thing I’m really calling for is the dissemination of better information in support of better choices.
The toothpaste of “concussion awareness” is out of the tube, oozing like spinal fluid. When all the solutions have been implemented and (mostly not) paid for, more or less the same critical mass of bad outcomes will happen anyway. These include, silently, insidiously, the killing of brain tissue over time. And if I happen to be exaggerating a tad, who among us really want to volunteer their sons for the next generation of guinea pigs in the “control groups” of NFL-underwritten “peer-reviewed literature”?
Yes, football promotes some good values, such as teamwork and community. So does the marching band. So does the school drama group. So do basketball, volleyball, and crew, not to mention math study gangs. (Oops, that last example was a rhetorical mistake — it exposes me, once and for all, as a “pussy.”) Let’s seek our bonding opportunities elsewhere, and let’s leave the risks and astronomical preventive and medical costs to private clubs catering to the genuinely elite, the unambiguously professionally tracked jocks.
Last week I got a call from Tom Farrey, the fine investigative reporter for ESPN’s Outside the Lines. We spent some time picking each other’s brains, so to speak, on concussions. But as the conversation moved along, I told Tom that I thought he’d already spotlighted much of the problem in his book Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children.
A lot of people believe the trouble with youth sports is that they aren’t professional enough, in the sense that too many of the coaches don’t know what the hell they’re doing, in terms of both athletic technique and sports medicine and safety. For my money, these activities are, instead, too professionalized: rather than pushing the bodies and minds of our young people toward some larger purpose, they become obsessed with the mannerisms, recklessness, and brass-ring-grasping of the one-dimensional superjocks, the celebrity wannabes.
In every healthy society, there’s a mix of elements of patriarchy and matriarchy. Only in Football America, it seems, have our mothers been reduced to enablers. If these voices of pragmatism and safety have not been drowned out altogether, they’ve been channeled into the cottage industries of Concussion Inc.: desperately trying to make an untenable state of affairs just a little less untenable.
Meanwhile, the national male football death and disability toll mounts.
10 May 2012..........
On Tuesday’s Outside the Lines on ESPN, Matt Chaney, a good friend of this blog, debated Merril Hoge, the network commentator whose own NFL career was aborted by concussions.
Hoge’s setup was boilerplate apologia, though I must say somewhat more coherently articulated than his despicable attack a few days earlier on Kurt Warner for the corporate sin of thinking out loud in public about whether football was really a desirable activity for his own kids.
In his OTL confrontation with Hoge, Chaney lucidly cited the views on brain trauma by such distinguished doctor-researchers as Ann McKee and Bennet Omalu, and forcefully made the case that promises of future prevention and reform are the same-old, same-old in football history, and this time doomed by both a public health tipping point and sheer marketplace economics.
Hoge thereupon called Chaney “uneducated” and “ignorant” — two of the more inaccurate epithets one could pull out of one’s anus to defame this courageous heat-seeking loose cannon. A cable talk shoutfest broke out.
I’ve also had a chance to view the ballyhooed Intelligence Squared debate over whether college football should be banned. It pitted writers Buzz Bissinger and Malcolm Gladwell against former players and current media types Tim Green and Jason Whitlock.
The debate was a hash, because this overbroad prompt, with its specter of prohibition, sucked everything but the kitchen sink into its vortex: not only the concussion crisis but also general sports and higher education corruption, the challenge of American competitiveness in the global economy, and, from the proponents of the measure, some fierce moralizing that might not have taken its own prescriptions entirely seriously. But, what the hell, that’s the polarized format of these things.
Green and Whitlock, for their part, were reduced to simply citing football’s powerful mystique, over and over and over, like subconcussive blows. Whitlock, in particular, kept returning to the theme that you had to be there, in the trenches, in the locker room, and in the great bootstrapping experience of the American melting pot, which had handsomely rewarded him. He appeared to have done no preparation beyond rehearsing this burly persona and wishing everyone else would lighten up and indulge the excesses of our cherished freedom — which he parsed as “free-dumb,” the right to choose consumption of tobacco, pornography, football, what have you. This blaze of intellectualism nearly blinded me.
Green touted the ritual of playing the national anthem as evidence that spectacled sports entertainment fosters community and nation-building. Playing defense with a more amiable, yet somehow even more shocking, dose of denial than even Merril Hoge, Green pooh-poohed the drumbeat of the past decade of TBI findings as hyperbolic neurosis, analogous to the concern t
hat cell phone usage might cause brain cancer.
I don’t know whether college football should be “banned.” But if Green is the best his side can produce, football at all levels is in big trouble. Compared to him, Dave Duerson was Stephen Hawking.
8 September 2012..........
If the NFL is serious about paying its fair share for the public health carnage wrought by its $10-billion-a-year global marketing colossus, the league can offer to underwrite catastrophic insurance for every amateur youth program that persists in enrolling kids in an activity of unavoidable fast or slow brain death — despite growing and widely accepted evidence that no one under the age of, at most, 14 should be doing this.
Instead, Roger Goodell and the NFL decided to take Congress and the news media out to dinner and a movie, in the form of a $30 million grant to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.
Congressman Chaka Fattah, the Pennsylvania Democrat who is Mr. Brain Research in Washington, couldn’t be happier that the NFL has turned the federal government into an honest woman.
Advancing our knowledge and treatment in neuroscience requires a mix of public-private resources and partnerships. The National Football League is showing the way with today’s generous, well-placed gift. This $30 million grant provides a model for significant public-private research partnership to learn more about how our brains function, develop, and misfire. The NFL and the FNIH are to be commended for joining up on this major step. I look forward to working with our federal science agencies and with private/nonprofit partners including the pharmaceutical industry, other businesses, sports, academic and research institutions, the military, the National Science Foundation, and other government research agencies to assure that we advance brain science in a cooperative fashion.
Meanwhile, what passes for healthy skepticism in consensus news commentary can be summarized as follows: “Great step. Of course it’s just PR on the part of the NFL, and of course they’ve got to give a lot more. But let’s hope this money enables valuable new research on traumatic brain injury.”
Concussion Inc. Page 19