WARNING LABEL

            They’re playing football again, and I’m glad because I enjoy watching it, but I must report that I blush to admit that. I’ve come to feel about football as I do about boxing—that it’s gladiatorial and should be engaged in only by people who are aware of its risks.

           

            Until about a decade ago those risks weren’t fully clear, but they are now. Numerous studies have shown that, in addition to whatever other injuries football might cause, the repeated blows to the head that are intrinsic to the game can result in irreversible brain damage. This can manifest itself in memory loss, cognitive difficulties and chronic, debilitating headaches, in the worst cases leading to suicide.

 Blows that result in concussions are the most dramatic evidence of those dangers, but it’s also been shown that over time lesser impacts can have the same, cumulative effect. While research into the probability of players sustaining lasting damage is just beginning, what I’ve read indicates that about one in three men who have performed at the professional level can expect to come away with neurological ailments of some sort. Further, the longer one plays the greater becomes the probability of such an outcome.

Most people, I think, have come to share my conclusions, but the ones who run National Football League see them as an existential threat. As witnessed by its ten-figure settlement with former players who sued it because of its handling of concussion cases during past years, the league tacitly recognizes its problem. That perception was reinforced in May when it severed its connection with Dr. Elliot Pellman, the rheumatologist and former New York Jets’ team physician who was its long-time medical point man (i.e., denier) on concussion-related issues. On other levels, though, the league is proceeding as though everything is okay.

 Nothin’ to see here, folks, just move along.

One prong of its counterattack is its “Football Is Family” promotion, a series of national TV ads in which active NFL players associate their participation in the game with their respect for such bedrock American values as teamwork, community, conscientious parenting and appreciation of the military. It would be a cliché to describe the ads as “warm and fuzzy,” but no better phrase presents itself.

Another is its outreach to parents—and at the same time to kids—in its sponsorship of USA Football, a league it formed in 2002 for children aged 6 to 14, and in its newer (since 2013) funding of Heads Up Football, an online video program that (for a fee, natch) instructs coaches in blocking and tackling techniques, proper hydration and other topics that are supposed to contribute to greater football safety.

 That the coaches aren’t the only targets for the effort was seen in some off-the-cuff remarks before a coaches group last year by Bruce Arians, the salty head coach of the NFL Arizona Cardinals. “[Football] is the best game that’s ever been f---in’ invented and we’ve got to be sure moms get the message because that’s who’s afraid of our game,” said he. “It’s not the dads, it’s the moms.”

The NFL is so hipped on the “Heads Up” approach that it commissioned a private research group to study its effectiveness, then jumped the gun by last year hyping preliminary results that showed steep declines in concussions and other injuries among youth leagues that used the program’s methods. Trouble was, final results that later were published in a medical journal, and reported in the New York Times, showed that the declines appeared only among teams in Pop Warner leagues whose rules ban heads-on blocking and tackling drills that USA Football permits, and also sanction less full-contact practice time. Leagues employing Heads Up Football teachings experienced no injury-rate drops in games unless the teams involved also used Pop Warner practice restrictions, and had a smaller overall reduction than the preliminary figures showed.

To be sure the NFL, colleges and high-school and youth-football leagues are more concussion-aware than they were a few years ago, and have taken welcome steps to reduce the injuries and better deal with them. Formal concussion protocols have become part of the game at just about all levels, and TV broadcasters are less likely than before to chuckle when a player leaves the field after being “dinged” or “getting his bell rung.”

Still, the idea that football is a very dangerous pursuit seems to be taking hold, especially among the parents who have to sign the release forms that permit their kids to play. The Physical Activity Council, a partnership of sports-industry trade groups, reports that football participation in the 6-to-14-year-old age group dropped to about 2.2 million last year from about 3 million in 2010, and a survey this year by the University of Massachusetts’ Lowell Center for Public Opinion showed that close to 80% of adults—84% of women and 72% of men—thought that tackle football of any kind was not appropriate for children younger than 14.

Additionally, and perhaps tellingly, some NFL players are deciding that the risks they run by playing may not be worth the salaries they make by doing so. Such notables as Jerod Mayo, Patrick Willis, Calvin Johnson, Percy Harvin and Marshawn Lynch—all at or near their 30-year-old competitive and earnings primes—announced their retirements after last season, and while jocks have been known to unretire the fact that some are giving up even a year of seven-digit paychecks to increase the odds of escaping in one piece is significant.

Football won’t go away suddenly—we fans and most players like it too well for that—but it now comes with a warning label that can’t be ignored. And that’s a good thing.

 

  

 

                

IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY?

                Every fourth year there’s a summer Olympics, and as it approaches the news-media predictions for the host city’s prospects always are dire. London (2012) was supposed to have gone under because of traffic congestion, Beijing (2008) from air pollution, Athens (2004) from that’s city’s normal chaos. While there was more than a germ of truth behind all those forecasts, they stemmed mostly from the press’s predilection to predict problems—it’s what we news types do. But in fact all those Games came off pretty well, as did most of those before them.

               Beginning Friday (Aug. 5) it’s Rio de Janeiro’s turn, and the naysayers have been more vociferous than ever. Rio is crime-ridden in the best of times and visitors had best beware, they say. The Brazilian economy is in the dumpster and the country’s political turmoil is at full moil. The bay where the sailing races are to take place doubles as a toilet.  The mosquito-borne zika virus, the Hemisphere’s new scourge, lurks in every puddle.

                I must admit that if I were planning to attend I’d be worried, especially about that last thing. I’d be worrieder yet if I were a woman of child-bearing age-- roughly between the ages of 16 and 40-- because the effects of zika are supposed to fall hardest on the children they produce, even though their own symptoms may be slight. That category, by the way, includes just about every female athlete who will compete, and males who are bitten will be at risk of infecting their young because the disease can be transmitted sexually.

                Athlete dropouts have been few, however, and mostly limited to tennis and golf, sports for which the Olympics are not a high priority. In part that may be because of the special precautions being taken, such as the adoption of an official Olympic bug spray (Deet) and a plan to distribute 450,000 free condoms in the Olympic Village, three times the number passed out in London four years ago. With about 10,000 athletes expected to be involved, that works out to about 45 per for the two-week fest. It reminds of the story of the man who, having bought a gross of condoms on a Friday afternoon, was told by the druggist to have a nice weekend. Mostly, though, the jocks’ disdain of danger reflects their mindset that they are invulnerable—that illness and injury are things that happen to other people, not them. Some will be wrong about that, but let’s hope it’s only a few.  

                But while the Olympics are likely to proceed pretty much as planned, it’s also timely to ask if they’re worth the trouble. Yeah, I know, they aren’t going away, if only because their massive infrastructure, propped up by such corporate-giant sponsors as Coca Cola, Visa, P&G and General Electric, puts them in the “too big to fail” category. When billions of dollars are being passed around, many hands will reach for them.

                Still, the Olympics’ foundation has shifted so many times over the years that it’s tough to pin down their reason for being besides the box-office one. Their modern version was begun in the late 19^th century by European aristocrats who saw sport as a way in which they and their fellow upper-crusters could rub elbows; their standards of amateurism, which ruled the early Games, were used mainly to deny working people access to their fields of play.

 As the Games evolved politics took on an ever-greater, and less-savory, role. The International Olympic Committee, the self-appointed group that runs the show behind the cover of lofty ideals, long has favored authoritarian regimes where the graft is conveniently centralized, allowing Nazi Germany to fly its swastikas over the 1936 summer edition and completing the original Axis of Evil by giving both the 1940 Summer and Winter Games to Imperial Japan and the 1944 Winter Games to Italy before World War II intervened. That practice has continued with the IOC’s largess toward the USSR/Russia and China, both multiple awardees from 1980.

Like everything else about sports, commercial considerations have ruled Olympic decision making in the post-WWII era. While the IOC insisted publicly on amateurism during the first three-plus decades of that span crypto-professionals were allowed to compete under various, winking guises. Now the O’s are mostly for pros, and the major ethical issue has changed to doping, but the IOC’s prioritizing of its show above all else continues.

 This was illustrated in its handling of the overwhelming proof that Russia has engaged in a government-operated, long-running effort to dope its athletes and hide the evidence, one that thoroughly corrupted the 2014 Winter Games, which it hosted in Sochi, and maybe still continues. One sport—track and field—has banned from Rio 67 of the 68 Russian qualifiers, but rather than enacting a deserved total ban on the country the IOC kicked further sanctions back to its 27 other single-sport governing bodies, which vary widely in motivation and competence.  (The honorary president of the Judo group is the odious Russian prez Vladimir Putin.) As of this week about 380 athletes will march under the Putin (oops, Russian) flag in Rio, down only about 100 from the original list.

The five-ring circus is a great show, and like most of us I’ll be watching it. It’s a showcase for sports I enjoy that get short shrift in our crowded sports calendar. But each of those sports has an annual or biannual world’s championship that provides a similar forum without the Olympics’ baggage. In a better world those would suffice, but we’re stuck with the world we’ve got, O Games and all.