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 ...

Andrew Luck has some money. He took back his life. More power to him.

"No one else besides the NFL is stupid enough to keep engineering ways to sustain an unsustainable game."

Andrew Luck's description of the cycle of injury, pain and rehab sounds a lot like the current state of cancer-ridden capitalism, except that "rehab" hasn't really occurred. But good for Luck; human rationality is such an elusive thing.

What Andrew Luck Means, by Drew Magary (Deadspin)

.. They want you to enlist. They want you to serve your team for God and country. That is the blueprint. The NFL has always been in love with its war metaphors. So it’s fitting that the league now finds itself existentially lost when trying to deal with the consequences of REAL human wreckage—of players discovering that this sport will kill them, and it will kill them faster the longer they play it. The NFL doesn’t want players like that. They want something beyond mere passion. They want players too obsessed to see the danger, or to feel the pain. They want you, pardon the expression, brain damaged. Andrew Luck knew better than to give his entire life to this league. He won’t be the last. In some critical ways, he is merely the first.

"Jay-Z Isn’t a Sellout, He’s a Capitalist."

Dave Zirin? He's perhaps the only sportswriter who truly matters. We are reminded of the importance of following the money.

Jay-Z Isn’t a Sellout, He’s a Capitalist, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

He’s a billionaire who wants to be an NFL team owner, and erasing Colin Kaepernick is the price of admission.

 ... The truth is actually much more banal. None of this is about social justice. It’s not about, as Shawn Carter put it, “helping millions and millions of people.” This partnership is happening because Shawn Carter is a billionaire who wants to be an NFL owner, and erasing Colin Kaepernick is the price of admission. Now Shawn Carter gets to multiply his fortune, and the NFL believes they will no longer be branded as racist, or have to schedule skim-milk Super Bowl halftime shows headlined by Maroon 5.

Jay-Z is a boss. Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid are workers. It is the interest of workers in the NFL to unite and say that blackballing people for their political beliefs is never going to be OK. It is in the interest of workers to stand up for their colleague. It is in Shawn Carter’s interest to stand up for himself. It’s not “millions and millions” who are going to be helped. It’s one person. It’s Jay-Z’s ultimate hustle—a hustle he told us, over 20 years ago, we were never to knock.

As Eric Reid said when the news broke, “Jay-Z claimed to be a supporter of Colin…and now he’s going to be a part owner.… It’s kind of despicable.” It is despicable. It’s also the reality of doing business. Colin Kaepernick is a worker. Shawn Carter is a boss. Better to have clarity on that question than the idea that billionaires will ever lead social movements in anyone’s interests other than their own.

NFL: "A sport where player careers last only three and a half years is built on disposable black bodies, indifference to brain damage, and a country-club dismissal of black brain power."

Ladies and gentlemen, just about the only sports writer who genuinely matters, precisely because he doesn't refrain from contextualizing tails that wag dogs.

The NFL Has Fired Almost All of Its Black Coaches, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

The firings reflect a league that is actively hostile to black progress.

The day after the end of the NFL season, when teams fire allegedly underperforming head coaches, is known as Black Monday. This year that nickname was a tad too “on the nose.” Of the seven NFL head coaches fired earlier this week, five are African American. That leaves the league with only two black head coaches, Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin and Los Angeles Charges coach Mike Lynn. In a league that is 70 percent African American, the number of black head coaches has never even hit 30 percent.

There are also of course still no black owners, and “the Rooney rule” that owners interview candidates of color is completely toothless. A sport where player careers last only three and a half years is built on disposable black bodies, indifference to brain damage, and a country-club dismissal of black brain power. It is this reality that compelled Michael Bennett of the Philadelphia Eagles to write in his 2018 book (which I co-wrote):

If the NFL were really integrated these [ownership, coaching and executive numbers] would be different. The NFL needed what’s called the Rooney Rule just to require owners to sit down with Black coaching candidates. They needed a rule just to talk to us. Not hire us. Talk to us…. We are integrated only on the level that people see on the field, yet all sports celebrate this half-view of integration. When Major League Baseball memorializes Jackie Robinson, they leave out that he wanted to be a manager or executive but they would not give him the opportunity.

But why should anyone be surprised that we’ve arrived at this point in 2019. This is a league whose owners gave upward of $8 million to the shady Trump Inauguration Committee. This is a league that is still signing quarterbacks who were terrible in college, let alone the NFL, while denying Colin Kaepernick employment because he dared to speak out for racial justice and against police violence. This is the league that has almost certainly been harassing Carolina Panthers safety Eric Reid with repeated drug tests, for the crime of continuing to demand justice on behalf of his friend Kaepernick ...

Every day, too: "NFL Owners Sure Came Off Like Dumbasses When They Met With Players About Protests."

"Don’t ever get old. Don’t ever get rich."

Terry Pegula, owner of the Buffalo Bills, might be interested to know that Charlton Heston retired from the National Rifle Association in 2003 and died in 2008.

One wonders if Pegula ever read a book.

NFL Owners Sure Came Off Like Dumbasses When They Met With Players About Protests, by Tom Ley (Deadspin)

... How do advanced age and generational wealth affect a person’s ability to have a meaningful discussion about a heavy subject? Not well, it seems. The Times reports that the meeting was full of school-room invocations of Wise Men Of History—Falcons owner Arthur Blank quoted Thomas Paine while Dolphins owner Stephen Ross brought up Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march on Selma—and failed metaphors. Bills owner Terry Pegula was in rare form.

Then the pinnacle of foot-shot references from Pegula, who made his fortune in fracking.

And then Pegula came back with whatever the hell this idea is:

Pegula offered that he thought the league was battling a perception and “media problem.” He said it would be great for the league to find a compelling spokesman — preferably a player — to promote all of the good things they were doing together. He suggested that the league could learn from the gun lobby in this regard.

“For years we’ve watched the National Rifle Association use Charlton Heston as a figurehead,” Pegula said. “We need a spokesman.”

NFL Follies: "Billion dollar teams choosing to fail rather than sign Kaepernick is a scandal for reasons beyond wins and losses."

I'm told that the national concussion league's playoffs begin this weekend, moving from wild cards and betting lines toward the inevitable Stupor Bowl, which exists for otherwise intelligent people to indulge their childlike glee while comparing the merits of advertisements designed to relieve them of their money.

Meanwhile, Dave Zirin remains the only sportswriter who matters, because he writes about things that ... matter.

Zirin places sports into a context, as a part of life, not removed from it. I only wish he had time to bring the same skill set to beer writing, which is in a wretched condition these days.

As a prelude to Zirin, consider this: Colts fans offended by anthem kneeling could receive refunds under legislative proposal.

Colts management tanked its season after it became obvious Andrew Luck wouldn't return -- but fans are strongly urged to be outraged by freedom of expression and civil rights, not the team's ineptitude.

Uh huh.

The NFL Chose to Tank Its Season Rather Than Sign Colin Kaepernick, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Billion dollar teams choosing to fail rather than sign Kaepernick is a scandal for reasons beyond wins and losses.

... That is why the sports story of 2017 was how many NFL teams chose to flush their seasons, screw their fan bases, and gut the local economies that had lavished them with tax payer dollars rather than sign free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick ...

... This matters not only because it reveals the moral rot of a league that would sign abusers of women before people who have given time and money to organizations that empower women or a league that lives in fear of the tweets of a racist autocrat with a 32 percent approval rating. It matters because so many of the above teams cited have stadiums at least partially built on the public dime. Whether you are a sports fan or not, you are subsidizing these organizations. By fielding an inferior product, that means fewer fans in the seats, fewer people in the bars and restaurants, fewer rooms filled at the hotels. It means that the always exaggerated bang-for-your-buck that comes from subsidizing a stadium was muted just so NFL owners could send a shot across the bow to other players that political talk would not be tolerated. Of course, all they did was spur more resistance.

Kaepernick’s current collusion lawsuit against the NFL should not be complicated. It should be as basic as showing videotape from the 2017 season and asking the question, “Why would multiple NFL teams with playoff hopes willingly choose to tank rather than sign me? Why was Tom Savage put under center only to be concussed?” To even ask the question is to answer it: the Bob McNairs and John Elways of the world hate the idea of a free-thinking, openly anti-racist player more than they love the idea of winning a Super Bowl. That damns this league as much as hiding concussion data, and ignoring instances of violence against women. It’s more evidence that the league’s moral compass points in one direction: it’s not toward money and it’s not toward winning. It’s toward remaking this country in their political image: an image where billionaires make the decisions and the rest of us just shut up, work, and salute on demand.

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.

Mike Pence's NFL walkout proves our former governor still isn't "worth a bucket of warm piss."

About which we are thankful that Dave Zirin sets matters straight about John Nance Garner's quote. Warm spit never made any sense to me.

Mike Pence’s NFL Walkout Was a Cheap, Transparent Stunt ... For which taxpayers picked up the tab, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

Vice President John Nance Garner once said that being the vice president was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” (Many know this quote as “bucket of warm spit.” It’s “piss”.) The current holder of that office, Mike Pence showed on Sunday that Garner, if alive, would owe an apology to piss buckets everywhere.

Pence used the NFL to star in a cheap, transparent political stunt. The narrative Pence tried—and failed—to sell was that he showed up at the Colts-49ers game in Indianapolis and then supposedly left in a huff after being shocked—SHOCKED!—at seeing the San Francisco 49ers kneel. After assumedly taking a whiff of his personal smelling salts, he immediately released a statement that magically was already prepared, which read in part, “I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem.”

Except ...

It’s not what happened. It’s how it happened. This was staged: a taxpayer subsidized stunt aimed at attacking dissenting black athletes. It was revealed in record time to be yet another toxic effort by this administration to divide people along racial lines and distract us from a train wreck of an administration, described by Senator Bob Corker as “an adult day care center” that looks after a big orange baby.

Skip to the conclusion ...

This was amateur hour fraud. It was Gulf of Tonkin for idiots: a ham handed effort to isolate people brave enough to dissent in the face of the most powerful people in the world and raise issues of racism that this administration is too craven to discuss. It’s also very disturbing. The very week Sarah Huckabee Sanders spoke about Trump’s “respect for the 1st Amendment,” we had a staged spectacle with the highest levels of government attempting to intimidate and coerce people to not exercise those rights. It’s disgusting and another example of Pence’s degradation, his Faustian bargain with this administration. If Mike Pence thinks he can deodorize Trump with a fraudulent photo-op, he should know that even the contents of John Nance Garner’s bucket gives off less of a stench.

Learning how to kneel: "Over the past century, 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and baseball have become inextricably wed."

It wasn't necessary for Colin Kaepernick to take a knee to dissuade me from watching football. Whatever waning interest remained was jettisoned some years back when the appalling extent of brain injuries and crippling physical impairments finally started being reported.

The NFL's lies and cover-ups since then sealed the deal. By all rights, we should be protesting the nature of the sport itself, but as for those other protests currently compelling white America to boycott modern gladiators:

(Psst -- it's not about the flag or the military, and it never has been.)

If you're saying to yourself, well, I never protest, and when I do it is done tastefully, so as to be inoffensive to others ... you just might be revealing yourself as a privileged societal cog unable to fathom injustice.

Would you have participated in the American Revolution?

If so, on which side?

So much for football. I've always been a baseball fan, anyway, and I was proud as proverbial punch when Bruce Maxwell, a catcher for my beloved Oakland A's, became the first major leaguer to take a knee. He comes from a military family, and his military family gets it.

The bigger question for me is this: How did the tradition begin of the national anthem being played before sporting events?

It goes back a century, to 1918 and the Great War, which did more than another single event to inaugurate and define the parameters of American "patriotism" as we now (usually unthinkingly) accept it -- and also gave us Prohibition, among other intrusions.

America's forgotten past: "It is worth reviewing how World War I turned out so much worse than the experts and politicians promised."

 ... Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924, “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.” Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine “alien enemies.”

This entertaining 2011 account tells the rest of the story.

The song remains the same: Over the past century, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and baseball have become inextricably wed, by Luke Cyphers and Ethan Trex (ESPN The Magazine)

THE FIRST THING to remember is that it's a battle song.

The most memorable lines involve rockets and bombs, and the lesser-known verses conjure "the havoc of war" and "the gloom of the grave."

The second thing to remember? It's a taunt, a lyrical grenade chucked at a defeated opponent. "See that flag still flying, the one you tried to capture?" it famously asks the British. Then it answers: "Scoreboard."

That's why, in a country that loudly lauds actions on the battlefield and the playing field, "The Star-Spangled Banner" and American athletics have a nearly indissoluble marriage. Hatched during one war, institutionalized during another, this song has become so entrenched in our sports identity that it's almost impossible to think of one without the other.

Our nation honors war. Our nation loves sports. Our nation glorifies winning. Our national anthem strikes all three chords at the same time.

Taking a knee with Nick Wright and Bill Hanson.

Wright rests the case.

Hanson?

It's back to the same old symbols, not social justice.

You know it's bad when you wish Chris Morris had written it instead.

I understand why a newspaper like the News and Tribune feels it is compelled to write at an elementary school level.

What I'll never understand is why it must think at the same level.

Watch Wright's video, Bill.

HANSON: Symbolism and Sensibility — our national angst, by Bill Hanson (Southern Indiana Christianity Today)

 ... Players and coaches have every right, I guess, to take a knee, lock arms, hang out in the tunnel or turn cartwheels during the playing of the National Anthem. OK, not cartwheels. That would be disrespectful and just plain silly. But they do have a right to protest oppression and racism. And, I’ll admit that Sunday’s protest garnered plenty of attention. But to what end? Social media exploded with just what you might expect. Videos and memes from each side supporting or tearing down the other. Not a lot of meaningful dialog about the best ways to stamp out oppression or racism has come to light so far.

(Psst -- it's not about the flag or the military, and it never has been.)

I'm often reminded of Thomas Jefferson's words:

"Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

To avoid misinformed confusion, readers old enough to remember the Vietnam War era will recall Tricky Dicky Nixon's law-and-order platform, as a blunt missile aimed squarely against "anti-American" war protesters (attacking the flag and our soldiers overseas) and African-Americans (being all uppity about rights and freedoms).

A space alien (or Mr. Spock) might ask: But was the overseas war just, and did the civil rights protesters have a point?

If you're saying to yourself, well, I never protest, and when I do it is done tastefully, so as to be inoffensive to others ... you just might be revealing yourself as a privileged societal cog unable to fathom injustice.

Would you have participated in the American Revolution?

If so, on which side?

You see, etiquette typically goes out the window when TJ's tipping point occurs, as it did in America in 1776, or in Russia in 1917.

Of course, the plain fact is that NFL protests have been breathtakingly sober and polite. If you're upset about free speech and conscience, but not troubled by the mangled brains of players who perform so you can remain safely inside your bubble, there isn't much more anyone can say except "dude, I'm so very sorry for you."

It’s Not About the Flag or the Military. It Never Has Been.

When athletes protest during the national anthem, they are acting on behalf of people who can’t speak as loudly.

By Andrew Cohen (Brennan Center for Justice)

President Trump’s weekend attack on athletes exercising their constitutional right to protest followed the longtime model used by police unions. Instead of acknowledging the legitimacy of the complaint that there is discrimination and misconduct in policing — Trump, like the unions, changed the subject, lashing out at the athletes as unpatriotic, even anti-American. The protests were mischaracterized as attacks on the flag, the anthem, the military, or the nation itself. As if it were ordained somewhere that one must stand, as opposed to kneel, for the anthem.

This is nonsense, of course. There is nothing more American than protesting injustice when it is manifest, nothing more patriotic than speaking for those who do not have a voice or whose voices are rarely heard. When people protest police misconduct, and racial disparities in our criminal justice systems, they are acting to improve the conditions of their fellow Americans, acting to force necessary reform on people (like Trump) and institutions (like police unions) that resist this change. This is “anti-American” or unpatriotic only if you believe the protections of the First Amendment are overrated or unnecessary. And only if you believe it’s unpatriotic to want to make America more just ...

Colin Kaepernick and the NFL, a league "more comfortable with concussions than someone having a conscience.”

From just about the only sportswriter in America who really matters ...

"Dave Zirin is sports editor of the Nation and author of eight books on the politics of sports. He is working with Seattle Seahawk Michael Bennett on Bennett’s autobiography."

 ... on the NFL's latest public relations nightmare.

When it comes to conscience, specifics and circumstances may vary, although non-conformists of many sorts in this purportedly "free" country can easily imagine themselves wearing Kaepernick's cleats.

As an atheist, permit me to inform you that it happens all the time. In my reckoning, any time it's the occasion for all of us to perform the same rote act (pray publicly, declare allegiance to the flag) all at once, then it's time to consider dissenting.

For a very long time, I've always stood for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance in honor of my father, a World War II veteran of the Marines. However, I've refused to recite the pledge of allegiance aloud, because the words "under God" simply have no place in it and should be removed.

Now Colin Kaepernick has me rethinking this position, primarily because he's right.

Maybe I need to dissent a little harder from this point forward.

Op-Ed The NFL wants you to think Colin Kaepernick isn't being sidelined by politics. The NFL is wrong — again, by Dave Zirin (Los Angeles Times)

 ... As Green Bay Packers star quarterback Aaron Rodgers said last week, it is “ignorant” to think that Kaepernick is unemployed because of his play.

“I think he should be on a roster right now,” Rodgers told ESPN’s Mina Kimes. “I think because of his protests, he’s not.” Rodgers is not alone.

The rash of anonymously sourced articles trashing Kaepernick’s play came just days after several thousand people rallied in front of Goodell’s NFL headquarters on Park Avenue in New York City: a demonstration that loudly called out a league dependent on the physical punishment of black bodies, a league that — in the words of the Rev. Jamal Bryant — is “more comfortable with concussions than someone having a conscience.”

The NFL seems to believe that shutting out Kaepernick will be like a crack of the whip across the backs of its players, stamping out dissent, keeping everyone in line. But the opposite has been the case. During the preseason, and in the wake of events in Charlottesville, Va., more and more players stepped forward to sit, take a knee or raise a fist during the anthem, and they are not shy about telling the world why. Unlike last season, white players also have involved themselves in these protests ...

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.

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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.

Peyton Manning: "That dopey grin that’s sold countless pizzas."

Hagiography? But Manning isn't an old hag -- he's a football player!

Oh, dear.

This looks like a case for SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS, coming on Wednesday. In the meantime, I found a fellow cynic. I'm always happy when this happens.

Peyton Manning retires – and ends the world's most exhausting hagiography, by Dave Schilling (The Guardian)

... The Sheriff is gone, but is he really gone? Sundays will still be littered with his adverts for Nationwide, Papa Johns, and surely Budweiser at some point. He’ll pop up on Saturday Night Live once or twice, donning a funny wig or tripping on a banana peel at an inopportune moment. Phil Simms will call a rookie quarterback “a young Peyton” or compare Brock Osweiler’s mediocre game management to his predecessor’s.

"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.