Who will carry the day? The slick elites at Harvard who just fleeced dumb jocks out of $100 million to build a bridge to nowhere? Or the creaking wheels of government in its role of protecting public health and safety during Obama’s second term?
31 January 2013..........
A hundred million bucks! Folks, that’s not a research grant — it’s a line item in the budget of a sovereign nation with designs on developing its own hydrogen bomb. It reminds me of the Corleone family’s nine-figure gift to the Catholic Church in Godfather III.
“Scorcher,” said Paul Anderson, editor of the Concussion Litigation Reporter, commenting on my commentary. Thanks, Paul. You and others know that I always try to execute Mother Nature’s grand plan for burning away old forest growth.
We’ve all come a long way, baby, since Chris Nowinski and his Boston University Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy three years ago got panned in some circles, including this one, for accepting $1 million from the National Football League. Frankly, there are lots of people who have worked longer and more effectively than me on this issue, and Nowinski is near the top of that list. With some additional perspective, we should concede that he was savvy enough to pocket some of Roger Goodell’s loose change, but persistent and resilient enough to stay on the attack in his own way. Though still dissatisfied with the strength and consistency of the statements emanating from Nowinski, Dr. Robert Cantu, and their sister Sports Legacy Institute, I have no question that, in speaking out against pre-teen tackle football, they’re going a lot deeper than most similarly invested critics. These include, most especially and disappointingly, the female sports blogger community, which continues to nibble at the “NFL Evolution” carrot instead of mobilizing a principled Mothers Against Drunk Football movement.
Nowinski and some journalists, notably Patrick Hruby, are also putting traumatic brain injury at the center of the debate over the unpaid mercenaries who stock the rosters of college football — the NFL’s zero-cost farm system.
Over the past 24 hours, I have been bombarded with requests to target this or that conflict in the NFLPA’s heavy petting with the prettiest girl in academia. (If the players’ union is A.J. McCarron, then Harvard is Katherine Webb in tweed.) For the most part, I decline such invitations. Yes, NFLPA president Domonique Foxworth is enrolling in the Harvard Business School, and his wife, Ashley Manning Foxworth, went to Harvard Law. And as retired Chicago Bears quarterback Bob Avellini points out, Bears owner Michael McCaskey taught for a while at a certain well-known institution of higher education in Cambridge (“Our Fair City”), MA. None of this establishes anything more than we already know about Harvard’s enormous influence on Wall Street and Main Street; it is the same reason the bestselling book in China is a primer on how to groom your kid to get accepted there for undergraduation admission. How many U.S. Supreme Court justices didn’t come out of Harvard, Yale, or Columbia law?
Did I forget to mention that Chris Nowinski is both a Harvard alum and a former WWE wrestler? Chris didn’t. But before anyone gets started — no, Domonique and Ashley’s wedding planner, Sara Muchnick, is not related to me, so far as I know. (Though who can say precisely what went down in those 19th-century Pale of Settlement shtetls … )
The far more interesting story on Foxworth (who himself is rehabbing an ACL knee injury, the better to underscore the point that Harvard is expected to use its windfall to dilute any swift and purposeful study of traumatic brain injury) is the one of his dashed hope to succeed the disastrous DeMaurice Smith as executive director of the NFLPA. Smith has spent the past year with his mind barely on the store as he hobnobbed in the nation’s capital in search of landing a new job, before the growing evidence emerged of the incompetence and corruption at the union, on his watch and for his gain.
As that great academician-satirist Tom Lehrer sang in his composition “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”: “Impress them with our prowess, do!”
6 February 2013..........
Kevin Guskiewicz — MacArthur genius fellow to the world, “Dr. No Junior” to us — has pulled out the culture war/gun control rhetoric.
Despite being a MacArthur GF, or maybe because of it, Guskiewicz can’t stop making embarrassing statements in defense of football. In a new quote in Education Week, this intellectual titan stoops to the rhetorical level of “football doesn’t kill people; it’s people who pull the trigger on football who kill people.”
Well, OK, let’s not put words in the mouth of “Dr. No Junior”:
Guskiewicz cited recent comments made by President Obama regarding the safety of football, but respectfully disagreed with the president. He expressed optimism that “we can find a way to make the game [of football] safe,” noting that two of his three children participated in football this past fall.
“There’s no evidence that football makes people stupid,” Guskiewicz said. “There is evidence, however, that people make football stupid.”
I think this passes for wit in Guskiewicz World. Someone at the University of North Carolina public relations office should take this dude aside and explain that it’s not words that make people appear stupid. There is evidence, however, that words stupidly strung together sure do.
One of the tactical conundrums of the future-of-football debate is whether to play the culture-war card. The idea, supposedly, is that you present the most neutral, clinical, non-ideological facts in support of the proposition that we shouldn’t devote so many public resources to the spectacle of kids beating each other’s brains in, and let them speak for themselves. The celebrated obstructionism of “geniuses” like Guskiewicz, who plays to the grandstands and the yahoos, shows just how hard that is.
31 March 2013..........
Now that the NFL and its trickle-down entities are in limited hang-out mode — to borrow the Nixonian term — official authorities like Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, co-chair of the league’s Head, Neck and Spine Injury Committee, are sustaining verbal hernias in public. The litigation deluge means they have to disclose. But defensive litigation mode means they have to qualify, question, play to the inner skeptic in us all. And hope that no one applies that skepticism to the messenger as well as the message.
Last week the New York Times reported on the fact sheet, covering epidemiological findings with regard to various neurological disorders in the ex-player population, which was mailed out by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The newspaper leaked the nugget that an unnamed doctor-expert affiliated with the NFL had advocated removing chronic traumatic encephalopathy from the fact sheet, on the grounds that the phenomenon was “not fully understood.” Thus, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s made the cut; CTE did not.
Ellenbogen, plowing upfield to his right — always to his right! — and with his head up — always with his head up! — endorsed this approach. “We’ve got to be careful because CTE is a pathological diagnosis,” he said. “We know that exists. That’s been proven forever. What’s important about this study is, if I played sports and had concussions, what’s my chance of getting these?”
Note the rhetorical stutter-step: CTE has “been proven forever.” But that was just health talk. Now we’re talking about the real stuff: risk management. What are the numbers and at what threshold are those numbers actionable?
The NFL, enabled by the people my friend Matt Chaney calls “yaks,” would like us all to forget, thanks to collective spiritual memory disorder, how recently and grudgingly it has conceded the existence of “proven forever” CTE. The question of research focus “was surely discussed by every football official with a clue by 1986, whether of league, union, or NCAA, then inexplicably dropped from a Johns Hopkins University study that initially planned a control group of college football players,” says Chaney.
And nearly two years ago, Chaney was still hammering at the carefully circumscribed parameters of epidemiological studies of footballers.
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Soon the banks for study of the effects of traumatic brain injury–heavy occupations will have bigger surpluses than our national petroleum reserves, and Harvard University will be $10 million into its $100-million fleece of the National Football League Players Association to tell us what we already know, what has “been proven forever” — just not yet in Harvardese.
Football’s golden age is over. Yaks like Ellenbogen remind us that golden ages end at the height of their popularity, revenue, television ratings, national obsession; and when smartly managed, they don’t plummet. Those numbers can hold, desperately, conterintuitively, self-deceivingly, for quite a while. Silver ages have long shelf lives.
8 August 2013..........
Public health takedowns of the football industry are in the works, both on film and in print. Maybe some day, and if we’re lucky maybe very soon, American sports culture will be blessed with anti-football movement spearheaded by Christian Rightists and headquartered in one of the states of the Old Confederacy, or at least one of the counties of Pennsylvania somewhere between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. “You may say I’m a dreamer …”
Ah, but Concussion Inc. is a world of ever-shifting alliances and treacheries. A neurologist at Loyola University in Chicago, Christopher Randolph, is out with a study casting doubt that football players show mental decline distinguishable from the general population: “We still do not know if NFL players have an increased risk of late-life neurodegenerative disorders. If there is a risk, it probably is not a great risk. And there is essentially no evidence to support the existence of any unique clinical disorder such as CTE.”
One of the contributors to the study is the University of North Carolina’s football-first Kevin Guskiewicz, whom I have taken to mocking as “Dr. No Junior.” The MacArthur Foundation, inexplicably, gave Guskiewicz one of its “genius” awards — which in this case must be a genius for simultaneously homing in on the zeitgeist while propounding research that gives comfort to the already comfortable.
By contrast, previously I’ve spoken highly of Randolph for tearing to shreds the quackery (my word, not his) of Dr. Joseph Maroon, neurosurgeon to the Pittsburgh Steelers and the superstars of WWE, and his fellow witch doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who have foisted on public school districts and parents of youth athletes across the country the for-profit ImPACT “concussion management system.”
See what I mean about alliances? I ask you not to hold Randolph’s current lunacy against his previous bullseye on ImPACT and its cousin “How many fingers am I holding up? What day of the week is it?” software “solutions.”
Paul Anderson, the sharp attorney who edits the Concussion Litigation Reporter, has noted the extent to which mere dubiousness, no matter how reasonable or reckless, becomes an exalted scientific and rhetorical commodity as the football industry manages what shapes up as its long, slow decline.
“Let the manufacture of doubt begin in earnest,” Anderson tweeted in response to the Randolph-Guskiewicz news.
18 August 2013..........
It’s time for more than left-handed compliments to ESPN’s Outside the Lines on the football traumatic brain injury story. Today the investigative unit’s Steve Fainaru, John Barr, Mark Fainaru-Wada, and Greg Amante have the down-low on the National Football League’s founding concussion guru Dr. Elliot Pellman — a quack with an offshore medical degree and no neurology credentials, whose renewed and continuing prominence in NFL advisory circles can’t be killed with a helmet-to-helmet hit.19
The New York Times busted Pellman for résumé hype years ago. Earlier this year, Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth updated the new-and-improved Pellman20 — though Patrick held off on using the line I fed to him about Pellman via LBJ: “The NFL would rather have Pellman inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”
One of the new facts in ESPN’s excellent piece is that Pellman had a doctor-patient relationship with then–NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.
Choose your favorite mallard on the NFL pond. With my pro wrestling pedigree, I’ll always be partial to Dr. ImPACT Dr. Resveratrol Dr. Sports Brain Guard Supplements, Joe Maroon, and his fellow Anatidae at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (at least one of whom is a convicted growth hormone trafficker).
21 August 2013
The tyranny of football-think is evident everywhere: in the passive solutions of parents who should know enough to “just say no,” and now in the intellectual backlash of writers who ain’t going to jump on no anti-football bandwagon.
Alexander Nazaryan of Atlantic Wire has an overview of the newest examples in “The Culture War Over Football.”21
The antidote for this new round of counter-attacks on behalf of the savage wars of peace, domestic variety, at the expense of our sons’ health, and the gross national mental product, is Matt Chaney, the Cassandra of football harm. Chaney, author of the overlooked book Spiral of Denial, is readying a new article for ChaneysBlog.com; he uncovers 35 cases of football fatalities in 2012 that didn’t make the cut of the not-so-authoritative, though widely cited, list compiled by Dr. Fred Mueller at the University of North Carolina.
A dose of Chaney from his article-in-progress is the cure for the common football-is-good backlash.
A teen football player dies suddenly in America, for reasons unrelated to collisions on the field, and the postmortem investigation produces more questions than answers — particularly whether the sport contributed mortally.
And so it goes for too many fatal cases of active football players, mostly juveniles, with the game’s possible link neither verified nor nullified because of two prime areas of limitation:
First, the reputedly “deficient” state of autopsy in America, especially for children, as part of the death-investigations system that a government report22 characterizes as “fragmented” and “hodgepodge.”
And, secondly, the equally challenged research field of football fatalities, funded in present form by game organizations and led by two men lacking medical doctorates and certifications, Fred Mueller and Bob Colgate, a professor and a sports administrator, respectively, who largely troll news reports for gathering incomplete data.
Thus the mortality rate of American football remains incalculable, despite those long-standing Mueller-Colgate statistics widely cited as epidemiology, including by the CDC.
Such holes in football-injury tracking are “known for years,” says Charles Yesalis, ScD, retired epidemiologist. “You have the problems articulated [regarding death investigations], but it goes beyond that. It’s often based on whether an autopsy is done. And even if an autopsy is performed on the athlete, there are a lot of times that it’s just not nailed down, particularly, regarding what’s the cause of death and the like. So there’s that issue.”
Meanwhile, the researchers aiming to quantify football’s risk and casualty face their own obstacles.
Beyond the few cases of collision fatalities tied directly to the sport, injury researchers typically rely on minimal data for judging whether a case was “indirectly” game-related, such as a cardiac death.
Anecdotal information and subjectivity can influence the record-keeping process, like coaches’ quotes and other bits from news items. In many cardiac cases that kill players, grieving parents declare football was not a factor; some families refuse to cooperate with researchers.
For player deaths involving autopsy, researchers Mueller and Colgate value official rulings, but local coroners or medical examiners, elected to the job in many jurisdictions, often do not go far in probing cause or link to football. Many coroners are incapable themselves and lack funds for contracting specialized follow-up that could shed light.
“You really have to start digging through the medical charts,” Yesalis suggests for strengthening a Mueller-Colgate study, although “the variability of [medical records] is scary when it comes to producing
really solid research.”
“All this variability, of how the medical record [of a casualty] is written, how it is accessed or not by the researchers, and whether it’s clear that this event was precipitated and related to some sport activity — football, track and field, whatever — anybody who thinks the process is precise is very naive and hasn’t done a lot of work with medical records, examining them for research purposes.”
This review of 35 players who died during 2012 — see annotated cases below — demonstrates the problem. Determining death risk and casualty in vast American football remains a lofty goal, mere talk, despite the contemporary clamor for accurate injury reporting as part of establishing a “safer” game.
Indeed, Mueller and Colgate, funded by football and publishing from the University of North Carolina, qualify merely 15 of these fatalities as game-related for their 2012 report.
25 August 2013..........
We’ve finally found the writer who puts the “foot” in football stupidity. It is Max Boot. We recently brushed off his ill-researched Wall Street Journal essay, “In Defense of Football,” on the grounds that it would be a waste of bandwidth.
But as a Blog of Record, we are duty-bound to inform you that a plagiarism controversy has erupted inside the conservative community over the provenance of Boot’s 2,000 poorly chosen words. Politico has the story23 of the rejection by WSJ of freelance journalist Daniel Flynn’s article “In Defense of Football” — quickly followed, as fourth down follows third, by the newspaper’s soliciting of Boot to write a piece under the same (admittedly hackneyed) headline.
Boot is a think-tank expert whose special expertise is being wrong about America’s benevolently imperial wars. The Journal editor who solicited Boot noted that he has a “football obsession.” Perhaps what he most loves about football is that it is such a faithful metaphor for America’s benevolently imperial wars.
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