Your brain (injuries) on football: "Perhaps evolving standards of decency will reduce football to a marginalized spectacle, like boxing."

Andrew Luck's exquisitely rational human decision to retire from football reminded me of George F. Will's essay, reprinted below.

In recent years, I’ve turned away from football because of the increasingly well-documented, regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by the players. It isn't just the professional game. The more I read about youth football injuries, the greater my disconnection.

We begin to see difficult subsequent lives, erratic adulthoods, and eventual dementia in a different light, and it’s easier to look away – not from the sadly afflicted, but from the violence of the game itself.

The gladiator as macho metaphor stops being entertaining when the suffering and death are real, not just implied in a voice over.

Click here for a list of NAC articles with the search label "brain injuries."

At any rate, Will's opening paragraph is worth the price of admission. Most readers will remain undeterred. To me, the world already is cruel enough without entertainment that cripples.

Football’s enjoyment is on a fade pattern, by George F. Will (Washington Post)

This combination of photos provided by Boston University shows sections from a normal brain, top, and from the brain of former University of Texas football player Greg Ploetz, bottom, in stage IV of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 

Autumn, which is bearing down upon us like a menacing linebacker, is, as John Keats said, a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Actually, Keats, a romantic, did not mention that last part. He died before the birth of the subject of a waning American romance, football. This sport will never die, but it will never again be, as it was until recently, the subject of uncomplicated national enthusiasm.

CTE is a degenerative brain disease confirmable only after death, and often caused by repeated blows to the head that knock the brain against the skull. The cumulative impacts of hundreds of supposedly minor blows can have the cumulative effect of many concussions. The New York Times recently reported Stanford University researchers’ data showing “that one college offensive lineman sustained 62 of these hits in a single game. Each one came with an average force on the player’s head equivalent to what you would see if he had driven his car into a brick wall at 30 mph.”

Boston University researchers found CTE in 110 of 111 brains of deceased NFL players. In 53 other brains from college players, 48 had CTE. There was significant selection bias: Many of the brains came from families who had noticed CTE symptoms, including mood disorders and dementia. A Boston University researcher says, however, that a 10-year NFL linebacker could receive more than 15,000 sub-concussive blows ...

Your NFL Sunday: "As Iceberg Slim might put it, the players and public alike have been sold a series of air castles."

It's gaslighting all over again in this essay, which connects the autobiography of a pimp (spoiler: not a pretty story at all) to big-time football, health problems and brain damage suffered by players, thoroughbred horse racing, and the plantation-president.

As usual for a longer essay, I've included only one excerpt, and highlighted a single passage from it. You're encouraged to read all of the essay.

American Pimps, by Shawn Hamilton (The Baffler)

The NFL, Donald Trump, and Iceberg Slim

Retirement by Gaslight

The thoroughbred horse has reached what Richard C. Francis, author of Domesticated, calls an “evolutionary dead end.” Breeders have not produced a faster thoroughbred for decades.

Thoroughbreds have evolved “inordinately large hearts and lungs” to increase their aerobic capacity. They have evolved a huge chest cavity to make room for those larger organs, which then crowd the stomach and intestines, causing them to “shift around in hazardous ways.” The bodies of the thoroughbreds are “too large” relative to the legs and feet, making the animal “extremely top heavy.” And this, Francis writes, “goes a long way toward explaining the high frequency of leg injuries, often catastrophic.”

This is not the face of racing that the public sees. The early years of a racing horse’s career are glorious. As the horses get older, drugs are often used to keep them going. And when the thoroughbred comes to its end, quietly—away from the cameras, seersucker suits and sun hats —it is put down and perhaps later immortalized in statues, photos, or crappy movies.

The NFL player who sees a connection between himself and a poor kid in the ghetto appears nuts to many fans. But the working-class fan who thinks his interests align with those of billionaire owners is perfectly sane in their view.

In Pimp, Glass Top recommended retiring his obsolete thoroughbreds to mental asylums. He used a combination of ruses and drugs to convince them that they had gone insane. “I got a thousand ways to drive ’em goofy,” said Glass Top, “That last broad I flipped, I hung her out a fifth floor window. I had given her a jolt of pure cocaine so she’d wake up outside that window. I was holding her by both wrists. Her feet were dangling in the air. She opened her eyes. When she looked down she screamed like a scared baby.”

“She was screaming when they came to get her.”

Some have attributed NFL protests to a similar kind of insanity, stoked by the fervid imaginings of the players themselves. They are rebranded as “spoiled,” “entitled,” or just not that bright. The fan, meanwhile, is the paragon of reason and logical consistency.

This is the same fan who believes that paid patriotism is okay, but peaceful protest is not. This is the same fan who is eager to subsidize billionaire team owners, while labeling a dissenting player “spoiled” or “privileged.” And this is the same fan who is willing to watch the game despite scandals ranging from domestic violence, to prescription drug abuse, to the conspiracy of official silence surrounding the head-injury scandal. This fan is willing to accept all these contradictions and lies as just part of the game or as an unspecified price of doing business. And when the owner refuses to really “own” his players and put them in check, this fan is ready to boycott.

The NFL player who sees a connection between himself and a poor kid in the ghetto appears nuts to many fans. But the working-class fan who thinks his interests align with those of billionaire owners is perfectly sane in their view.

However, none of this wishful thinking will alter the fundamental shifts in the rules of engagement: the players can no longer “just play the game” the way the fans want them to. They know too much. The stadiums remain, but the air castles are gone. And this is probably just the beginning.

Your brain (injuries) on football: "Perhaps evolving standards of decency will reduce football to a marginalized spectacle, like boxing."

I'll keep it brief.

In recent years, I’ve turned away from football because of the increasingly well-documented, regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by the players. It isn't just the professional game. The more I read about youth football injuries, the greater my disconnection.

We begin to see difficult subsequent lives, erratic adulthoods, and eventual dementia in a different light, and it’s easier to look away – not from the sadly afflicted, but from the violence of the game itself.

The gladiator as macho metaphor stops being entertaining when the suffering and death are real, not just implied in a voice over.

Click here for a list of NAC articles with the search label "brain injuries."

At any rate, George F. Will's opening paragraph is worth the price of admission. Most readers will remain undeterred. To me, the world already is cruel enough without entertainment that cripples.

Football’s enjoyment is on a fade pattern, by George F. Will (Washington Post)

This combination of photos provided by Boston University shows sections from a normal brain, top, and from the brain of former University of Texas football player Greg Ploetz, bottom, in stage IV of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 

Autumn, which is bearing down upon us like a menacing linebacker, is, as John Keats said, a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Actually, Keats, a romantic, did not mention that last part. He died before the birth of the subject of a waning American romance, football. This sport will never die, but it will never again be, as it was until recently, the subject of uncomplicated national enthusiasm.

CTE is a degenerative brain disease confirmable only after death, and often caused by repeated blows to the head that knock the brain against the skull. The cumulative impacts of hundreds of supposedly minor blows can have the cumulative effect of many concussions. The New York Times recently reported Stanford University researchers’ data showing “that one college offensive lineman sustained 62 of these hits in a single game. Each one came with an average force on the player’s head equivalent to what you would see if he had driven his car into a brick wall at 30 mph.”

Boston University researchers found CTE in 110 of 111 brains of deceased NFL players. In 53 other brains from college players, 48 had CTE. There was significant selection bias: Many of the brains came from families who had noticed CTE symptoms, including mood disorders and dementia. A Boston University researcher says, however, that a 10-year NFL linebacker could receive more than 15,000 sub-concussive blows ...

"I’ll be breaking party lines this Super Bowl Sunday and rooting for (Tom Brady's) defeat."

I seldom watch pro football, because the gladiatorial mythology so enthralling to many football fans sickens me.

Paul Tagliabue Yearns for Hall of Fame, but Concussions Tarnish Legacy, by Michael Powell (New York Times)

We reporters can be disagreeable, and who has not uttered words he comes to regret? Let’s step past words and take a close look at Tagliabue’s role in overseeing a decade-long cover-up of the N.F.L.’s destruction of the brains of its players.

However, I understand that we all must have distractions, so as to avoid contemplating what it really means to concentrate vast sums of a nation's wealth in the hands of the 1%, and so by all means, "watch on."

Here is one Patriots fan who isn't feeling very patriotic this year.

Go Other Guys! (Why I’m Rooting for My Team to Lose this Super Bowl Sunday), by Zach Wyner (Medium)

My dad, my brother and I will watch the Super Bowl this Sunday. I’m sure there will be moments when my body and mind will be in conflict. Like I said, Boston sports fandom is a hereditary trait buried deep within my DNA and there will be plenty of Patriots on that field worth pulling for.

But I know what a Patriots victory will bring: Tom Brady, the trophy toothpaste ad, smiling at the center of the grotesque circus. And I feel that, as a true fan of the Patriots, it’s my job to root for their failure with the hope that it might spare them the fetid stench of fascism — a stench that, unlike moisture in a towel, doesn’t evaporate in the Super Bowl’s bright lights.

THE BEER BEAT: Football, how it used to be for me, why I seldom watch it at all -- and don't even mention those horrid beers.

(Part two of two ... part one is here)

In the first part of this Sunday morning mental exercise, as we await the games later today that will decide this year's Super Bowl contestants (I'll watch little if any of them), there is little in the way of righteous indignation to disrupt the medicinal effects of the coffee. It's more about weariness at the time elapsed, and wariness of those moments when I allow nostalgia to warp my discernment.

Unlike Kevin Turner's parent, it isn't easy for me to persist as a spectator, knowing what I know, and knowing it far less directly than them. On the other hand, slaughterhouse videos seem not to deter me from eating animal flesh. Perhaps football has come to symbolize those aspects of America that I fail to grasp and wish not to indulge, while baseball's analogies still resonate.

I wrote the following essay in 2014 and published it at the beer blog. How much do I miss those Sundays? A better question: Do I miss the person I was then? Now that's the real head-scratcher.

---

Football, swill, brain death and the American Dream.

RING RING RING RING RING

“What the … ?”

(Old school, rotary dial – it was 1989, for chrissakes)

“Yeah.”

“We’re cooking and drinking.”

CLICK.

Translation at the speed of hangover …

This undoubtedly meant it was Sunday morning (who’d have known?) and the football games would be starting soon. Barr lived just a few miles away. It would have been senseless to call back.

So, I threw on some clothes, brushed my teeth and drove right over. The house smelled like chili, pre-game shows were blaring, and of course there wasn’t any beer.

That’s not quite true. There was beer, although far short of the amount needed to carry us through the entire day. Because Indiana prohibited carry-out beer on Sunday, the inevitable trip across the Sherman Minton to the Louisville's West End needed to come sooner rather than later, when highway driving would be inadvisable.

The really dumb thing about our Sunday beer shortages was their frequency. Most of the time, I’d have worked a Saturday shift at the liquor store, and it would have been easy for me to pick up a case of something/anything, receiving my employee discount on top of it.

But no; advance planning would have made far too much sense. Perhaps there was a secret, nostalgic enjoyment about these runs to Louisville, and actually we were reliving junior high school.

There we’d be, cruising down the Interstate, allowing the chili to simmer for another 35 minutes or so as we tried to time our arrival at the front door of the package store to the precise moment of its 1:00 p.m. opening time. Once inside, pushing past the crowds of fellow Hoosiers, the hunt for acceptable swill began in earnest.

---

Kindly note that by this point in our drinking lives, we knew what good beer was; it’s just that we weren’t always interested in paying the price for it, especially when purchased in bulk during times when the hot pepper content of the chili threatened to render one’s taste buds null and void.

As celebrity chef David Chang recently observed in GQ, mass-market swill pairs with any food owing to its vigorously carbonated flavorlessness. But these were the days of $5.99-per-case Wiedemann and Top Hat, beers to which the words “benign” and “tasteless” seldom were attached. They had plenty of flavor, just the wrong kind, and consequently a process of thoughtful triage was required.

I’d witnessed it countless times while working at the liquor store. Standing in front of the glass door, we’d begin by eliminating the brands we couldn’t or wouldn’t stomach – essentially, all of them – before beginning Round Two by working backwards and nominating two or three of the least objectionable choices. Price points briefly were parsed, cash collected, and within minutes we were back in the car, pointed toward Indiana and safety.

Subsequently, those cryptic words from the telephone came vibrantly to life, usually achieving saturation around halftime of the afternoon game. The feast would continue into early evening, but because Sunday night football had yet to be invented, there was a two minute warning in the form of the weekly and obligatory viewing of 60 Minutes.

Maybe a final cigar … and the last dregs of a dirt cheap Schaefer.

By then, I’d have beered myself totally sober (or so came the slurred insistence), and would take the back road home. By Monday, almost all of it had been forgotten, making an encore performance the following Sunday all the more likely.

---

Thinking back 25 or more years to those hours of chili, swill and football, it was all about the camaraderie with wonderful people, not specifically the cooking, drinking and watching. I miss it for that reason alone. Granted, the chili was good. The beer usually wasn’t, but what strikes me today is the football component of the equation, and the way times have changed for me.

We always used to blithely joke about the damage being done to our brains while watching football, never realizing that the carnage on the field was no laughing matter. Today, ignorance no longer constitutes an excuse.

I played football only briefly as a lad, and never was a diehard football fan. Twice I attended college football games, and both were utterly forgettable, not because of the quality of the games themselves, but reflecting my own level of inebriation.

Professional football always appealed to me more; even so, my attention span over the period since those halcyon Sunday couch residencies has waned steadily, to the point where in recent years, I've seldom seen more than a quarter or two of action prior to the playoffs. This year, I haven’t seen a single down, and probably won’t.

I’ve turned away from football because of the increasingly well-documented, regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by the players. It isn't just the professional game. The more I read about youth football injuries, the greater my disconnection. We begin to see difficult subsequent lives, erratic adulthoods, and eventual dementia in a different light, and it’s easier to look away – not from the sadly afflicted, but from the violence of the game itself.

The gladiator as metaphor stops being entertaining when the suffering and death are real, not just implied in a voice over.

And if it ever required so much good, bad or indifferent beer to fuel those entire days seated in front of the television, soused and insensate, screaming slogans and pumping fists … well, perhaps the memory of it also compels me to look away from the collisions in the modern coliseum.

Into yonder mirror.

Football, and how the late Kevin Turner's parents now watch it differently.

(Part one of two ... part two is here)

Nostalgia is a strange phenomenon. Consider those folks of a certain age and disposition residing in Eastern Germany, who are old enough to remember life in the German Democratic Republic, and who now warmly recall the "pros" of life during Communism rather than dwell on the "cons."

We needn't contest that there were pros and cons to life in such a place at such a time. Rather, if we were to ask one of them to explain how the good seems now to outweigh the bad, when the negative aspects of totalitarian rule have been so exhaustively documented, it seems certain that the answer might be a variant of this: “But it’s hard to explain, really. It’s just all so hard to explain.”

As you'll in the linked essay about the parents of pro football player Kevin Turner, whose early death in 2016 owed to brain damage suffered while playing the game, it's hard for them to explain why they are able to watch football, and see their grandchildren playing football, all the while knowing what they know.

In my view, the writer Juliet Macur masterfully tells their story. It would be easy to be omniscient and even flippant, bandying terms like cognitive dissonance and Stockholm Syndrome. Macur avoids doing so. Instead, the reader is left to contemplate universals: How could something that felt so very right turn out to be so catastrophically wrong -- and why's it so hard to explain now?

Kevin Turner’s Parents Still Watch Football. But Differently, by Juliet Macur (New York Times)

HOLTVILLE, Ala. — In an airy, four-bedroom house here on Jordan Lake about 25 miles north of Montgomery and around the corner from cotton farms, there is a 90-inch flat-screen television on the living room wall.

The TV belongs to Myra and Raymond Turner, the parents of Kevin Turner, a former Alabama fullback who played eight seasons in the N.F.L. This Sunday, that TV will be tuned to the N.F.L. playoffs, to the game that killed their son.

“I know a lot of people are going to say, ‘How do you watch football knowing football had taken your son’s own life?’” Raymond Turner said. “But it’s hard to explain, really. It’s just all so hard to explain.”

I traveled to Alabama to hear an explanation and try to understand it — and maybe even understand why they allow their two teenage grandsons to play football after Kevin, the boys’ father, suffered for six long years with a brain disease that research has linked to head trauma in football. He died last March at 46.

"Here’s a US import Britain should ban – and it’s not Donald Trump."

I don't have any kids, but I understand why those of you who do rightly seek to protect them from things like drug use at an early age, as we know how this can damage the brain. But knowing what we do now about brain injuries and football, it's unclear to me why we're still encouraging it.

Here’s a US import Britain should ban – and it’s not Donald Trump, by Martin Kettle (The Guardian)

We can embrace presidential elections and the Oscars, but the NFL is too dangerous to adopt ... the problem about American football is that it’s way too dangerous for the players. As the Packers coach Vince Lombardi (the Super Bowl is played for a trophy in his name) once put it: “Football is not a contact sport; it is a collision sport.” In a long career, a successful player can expect to endure more than 70,000 blows. Most of all, this means blows to the head, and repeated concussions. Current estimates, according to the writer and Packers fan David Maraniss, are that nearly 30% of all NFL players will suffer some form of dementia after playing the game. NFL players are up to 19 times more likely than the rest of the population to suffer this condition.

From boxing to Westerns ... to pro football?

By Tuesday of last week, it occurred to me that even though I'd avoided viewing the NFL's championship game as it occurred, Katy Perry's 13-minute Super Bowl halftime show could still be seen on YouTube.

I stopped watching it after an hour.

I've stopped watching football altogether. Brain injuries in progress just aren't that entertaining to me.

Lexington: The end zone (The Economist)

... The mingling of football and politics stretches back to the turn of the century, when Theodore Roosevelt, who worried that a fondness for billiards had made the country’s ruling class soft, brokered a deal to make football safer. The three most recent Republican presidents were all cheerleaders, before that activity came to be considered girlie. Hunter S. Thompson once spent most of an hour talking football with Richard Nixon. “Whatever else might be said about Nixon—and there is still serious doubt in my mind that he could pass for human,” wrote Thompson, “he is a goddam stone fanatic on every facet of pro football.”

Though it may not seem like it, the days of politicians using football to relate to ordinary Americans are numbered. This Super Bowl has an extra edge because it is the first since actuaries for the NFL, which runs the professional game, estimated that a third of ex-pros may eventually suffer brain damage. Put another way, 35 men on the pitch in Phoenix can be expected to endure early-onset Alzheimer’s or dementia pugilistica for the entertainment of everyone else. (The NFL agreed to set up a fund to compensate players with brain injuries in 2013.)

Are football fans in a "morally queasy position"?

I covered much the same yardage a year ago, prior to the last Stupor Bowl.

Brain injuries, the NFL, and my indifference ... to football.

... Finally it has dawned on me that where there was never before very much interest in football on my part, now there's virtually none, and it is the increasingly well-documented, regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by the players which is to blame for my turning away.

It isn't just the pros. The more I read about youth football injuries, the greater understanding we have as to how, even only occasionally, difficult subsequent lives, erratic adulthoods, and those suffering from dementia far before their time might be explained.

Almond's piece in Sunday's NYT mag is being derided in the usual corridors as effete and namby-pamby. I don't agree, although the word "immoral" strikes me as a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, I'd say that watching the television advertisements definitely is immoral. No contest there.

Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?, by Steve Almond ("Riff" at the NYT Magazine)

... Recently, though, medical research has confirmed that football can cause catastrophic brain injury — not as a rare and unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is played. That puts us fans in a morally queasy position. We not only tolerate this brutality. We sponsor it, just by watching at home. We’re the reason the N.F.L. will earn $5 billion in television revenue alone next year, three times as much as its runner-up, Major League Baseball.

Zirin: "The NFL’s highly selective approach to player safety."

Cock-fighting and bear-baiting gradually became socially unacceptable, too.

What Can We Learn from the Opening Game of the NFL Season? Actually A Lot, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

... How announcers navigate the fact that we are watching an entertainment that is unsafe at any speed will be something to chart throughout the season. As much as the NFL has tried to keep the dangers in the closet, they are now part of the narrative of a sport that bells and whistles aside, has probably began a generational downturn. No amount of seven-touchdown games can obscure what is coming: a mass reassessment of how we view this most American of games.

"Keith Olbermann Reflects on the Life and Career of Doug Kotar."

The NFL settled, and to me, that's too bad. We won't know the extent of its complicity with respect to generations of players and their brain injuries. In short, it was a good time for Keith Olbermann to return to ESPN, as the commentary above attests.

Brain injuries, the NFL, and my indifference ... to football.

Several times over the past two or three years, I've posted links to stories about brain injuries in sports, primarily football, but with at least one sobering report on concussions in hockey. Readers can search for them if they're interested.

Brain injuries, the NFL, and my indifference ... to football.

Several times over the past two or three years, I've posted links to stories about brain injuries in sports, primarily football, but with at least one sobering report on concussions in hockey. Readers can search for them if they're interested.

As a prelude to what follows, note that I've never been a diehard football fan. The last college game I saw in its entirety ("watched" would be assuming a level of sobriety that was not at all the case) was the last one I attended in person, a University of Louisville game in the late 1980's. I've always liked professional football far better, but even so, my attention span over a period of two decades has waned steadily, to the point where in recent years, I'd seldom see more than a quarter or two until the playoffs started.

This year ... well, not even that.

In fact, with the Stupor Bowl coming today, I've seen exactly zero games all year. Maybe a few seconds of live action on a television screen at a bar, but that's it. The playoffs began, and still there was no compelling interest. Tonight, barring the unexpected, I won't tune in to the big game. I'll have to miss Beyonce, too.

(When the Black Eyed Peas played the Super Bowl halftime a few years ago, I thought it was a Marcel Marceau tribute band. Maybe that's because I had the TV on mute)

Finally it has dawned on me that where there was never before very much interest in football on my part, now there's virtually none, and it is the increasingly well-documented, regrettable, lifelong physical toll suffered by the players which is to blame for my turning away.

It isn't just the pros. The more I read about youth football injuries, the greater understanding we have as to how, even only occasionally, difficult subsequent lives, erratic adulthoods, and those suffering from dementia far before their time might be explained.

Gene Demby's NPR essay is an eloquent statement. I never was a fan, so it's easier for me. I've just entirely stopped watching.

Brain Injuries And The NFL: A Fan's 5 Stages Of Grief, by Gene Demby (National Public Radio)

A few years ago, before "CTE" was as much a part of football conversations as "quarterback rating" or "wild card spot," I had a conversation with some friends about unsettling news stories that linked the sport to brain injury.

As we spoke, an avowed hater of sports piped up. "Football, as it's currently played, is completely indefensible," she said.

I bit my tongue at the moment, but I later talked about it the way any dyed-in-the-wool Eagles fan might: "She hates sports and football! What does she know? These cases could be isolated. And anyway, these dudes play of their own volition!"

I look back on that conversation with a kind of mortification now, given all the stuff we've learned about football-related brain injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy since then. She was right.

Anyone familiar with the Kubler-Ross model would recognize my defensive apoplexy as denial, the first stage of reckoning with a terrible reality. It's followed by anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

The late Junior Seau: "Degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma."

Let's check back with a topic sure to liven your enjoyment of the NFL this playoff weekend.

ESPN: Junior Seau and our "appetite for destruction." (May, 2012)

As human sports go, are boxing and football exempt from personal moral scrutiny merely because people have a choice not to participate?

The Seau autopsy report is finished, and the verdict, while not unexpected, is chilling.

Seau Suffered From Brain Disease, by Mary Pilon (New York Times)

The former N.F.L. linebacker Junior Seau had a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma when he committed suicide last spring, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday.

The findings were consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease widely connected to athletes who have absorbed frequent blows to the head, the N.I.H. said in a statement. Seau is the latest and most prominent player to be associated with the disease, which has bedeviled the sport in recent years as a proliferation of studies have exposed the possible long-term cognitive impact of head injuries sustained on the field.

ESPN: Junior Seau and our "appetite for destruction."

Of course, ESPN profits mightily from the urge explored by its columnist. I took my usual hits over the weekend for suggesting that horse racing is a nasty, exploitative spectator sport, and my comments were rationalized by more than one respondent on the basis of racing being something that humans have enjoyed since the dawn of time (alongside boxing), and thus must be tolerated. I'm not sure it's a good argument. War, murder and rape date back to the dawn of civilization, too, and at least human society pays lip service to eliminating them.

It's ironic that having elevated horses to a symbolic place above other animals, i.e., we seldom eat them in this part of the world, we seem not to care so much how they're treated by the whole of racing, from top to bottom.

As human sports go, are boxing and football exempt from personal moral scrutiny merely because people have a choice not to participate?

COMMENTARY: Reflecting on football, Junior Seau, LZ Granderson (ESPN.com)

 ... Although it is irresponsible, given the incomplete information available, to say Seau's tragedy is a result of football, you'd have to be somewhat of an idiot not to at least consider the possibility. There is just way too much information out there about other former players' suicides and subsequent discovery of brain damage.

These aren't the "he got the wind knocked out of him" or "he got his bell rung" days of the 1980s and '90s. Science has provided us with a new vocabulary, and we are now equipped with phrases such as "grade 3 concussion" and "chronic traumatic encephalopathy." We could claim ignorance before, but now we know better.

Yet our appetite for this destruction has only increased ...

"Punched Out: The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer," a series in the New York Times.

This is a sad, compelling New York Times series on the life and death of the hockey player Derek Boogaard. In today's NYT, sportwriter George Vecsey makes a pertinent observation, one not asked by John Branch's investigative piece:

Has there ever been such a dismal month in sports — a time to question why we are so enthusiastic about spectator sports, particularly as part of so-called education?

It's worth remembering, lest our attachment to the spectacle overwhelm considerations of fundamental humanity.

Punched Out

The Life and Death of a Hockey Enforcer

• PART ONELearning To Brawl
• PART TWOBlood on the Ice
• PART THREEA Brain 'Going Bad'

"The NFL star and the brain injuries that destroyed him."

As substantial portion of the populace has no clue what to do with themselves on fall and winter Sundays without the lure of dawn to dusk football. Currently the professional players and owners seem about to resolve their latest labor dispute, and the sighs of relief from the hinterlands are palpable, and yet in all of the current anguished verbiage, only Jim Brown's comments in the past Sunday's New York Times have remained with me.

"I don’t want the game to be a killer of our players.”

Yesterday morning, The Guardian's Ed Pilkington picked up the story. It is not a pleasant read, reminding us of the physical toll exacted by the modern game.

The NFL star and the brain injuries that destroyed him

Before the former American football player Dave Duerson killed himself, he asked that his brain be left to researchers studying head injuries among athletes. What it revealed shocked the scientists.