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 ...