Football: The Darker Side

I love watching football, but I found Malcolm Gladwell's article comparing football to dog fighting made quite an impression on me. Researchers are increasingly finding that football players at all levels of the sport can suffer severe brain injuries from the constant repetition of contact to the head caused by normal activities like blocking and tackling. Helmets help, but the force of normal football contact is equivalent to being in several severe car accidents in a single day. Often this damage isn't apparent at the time (except in the case of concussions), but appears a decade or two later in the form of personality changes, memory loss, and dementia. In this respect, football is increasingly starting to look like boxing, where researchers think about 20% of pro boxers are suffering lasting damage. Gladwell's point is that, if this is true, and every Sunday we're witnessing dozens of guys virtually lobotomizing themselves for our entertainment, how does that make us better than people who watch dogs tear each other apart? One answer is that the players can know the risks and give informed consent, unlike the dogs; but that logic would also mean voluntary Roman-style to-the-death gladiatorial matches would be moral to watch. This New York Times column discussing recent Congressional hearings over dementia offers some additional info.

I haven't given up watching football, but this issue is percolating in the back of my mind now whenever I watch a game. Every sport holds the risk of accidental injury--a pedestrian can get hit by a foul ball in baseball or a point guard can wrench a knee in basketball--but knowing that severe brain damage is a potentially widespread and inevitable result for players of a sport is an entirely different thing.