Concussion Inc.
Page 28
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was criticized for going years without uttering the word “AIDS.” But if Obama has just shown us the best he can come up on the public health ramifications of concussions, I’d prefer that he keep his mouth shut, too.
27 January 2013..........
Last March I gave President Obama an “F” for his first, trivial remarks on football’s traumatic brain-injury crisis. In a new interview with the New Republic, the President does a little better. Perhaps he is emboldened by reelection, as well as more informed and thoughtful:
I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.
I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.
Let’s hope that over time Obama becomes more worried still about public high school and peewee league players, and also disabuses himself of the fantasy that blood sport is fixable for kids by “changing gradually” — or at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Irvin Muchnick is author of Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal (2007) and Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (2009). His writings have spurred Congressional investigations of health and safety in WWE and of sexual abuse and cover-up in USA Swimming. He is named respondent of the 2010 United States Supreme Court freelance writers’ rights decision, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick; the case, which Publishers Weekly called “the central rights dispute of the digital age,” settled in 2014.
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Copyright © Irvin Muchnick, 2015
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Muchnick, Irvin, author
Concussion Inc. : the end of football as we know it / Irvin Muchnick.
ISBN 978-1-77090-651-8 (ePub)
Also issued as: 978-1-77090-650-1 (pdf); 978-1-77041-138-8 (pbk.)
1. Football injuries—United States. 2. Brain—Concussion—United
States. 3. Football—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. I. Title.
RC1220.F6M82 2015 617.1’027 C2014-902582-3
C2014-902583-1
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes
Cover design: David Gee
Cover images: brain © angelhell/iStockphoto; helmet © lishenjun/iStockphoto