The death of football?
The culture surrounding the game we know as American football will likely change in a radical way over the next couple decades. Ta-Nehisi Coates, magazine editor and author, refers to himself as a former fan of the game who has said he watched fewer than a couple professional games this season because of a growing conscientious objection. Citing new research, he lays out a brief but pretty convincing argument that the professional version of the game will likely be the last one standing, and may itself be toppled within a generation or so. Researchers at UCLA believe they have isolated the protein that causes football-related brain damage, specifically a disease diagnosed as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Coates writes:I don't know if this will change anything, right now. But telling a player "You have CTE" is a lot different than "You stand some chance of developing it."
There's something more; presumably, if they really learn how to diagnose this, they will be able to say exactly how common it is for football players--and maybe athletes at large--to develop CTE. This is when you start thinking about football and an existential crisis. I don't know what the adults will do. But you tell a parent that their kid has a five percent chance of developing crippling brain damage through playing a sport, and you will see the end of Pop Warner and probably the end of high school football. Colleges would likely follow. (How common are college boxing teams these days?)
After that, I don't know how pro football can stand for long.
The reference to boxing seems most apropo to me. I can't see the sport ever disappearing-- cockfighting still exists, after all-- but people today have almost no Earthly idea how popular boxing used to be. The United States has a seemingly endless supply of collective bloodlust, particularly when it's well-organized, extrajudicial, and "defensive," but the contact sports that have broad popularity, like football, still hold a reputation for possessing a general civility. The Journal of the American Medical Association came out formally and adamantly against boxing in 1983, and that's also, likely not coincidentally, about the same time the sport started to plummet in popular fashion. The most famous boxer in the world, and one of the most recognizable men, period, Muhammad Ali, also retired around that time, but it was around that time ('84) that he also announced publicly that he had contacted Parkinson's Disease due to extensive head trauma he had suffered.
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I've been meaning to take sides in the most fundamental magician debate ever since I read a biography about Harry Houdini ("The Secret Life of Houdini," recommended), and an autobiography by Penn Gillette, and that is this: The Amazing Kreskin is a putz. And not only because he stiffed Deadspin today, as the linked article describes, but because he claims to have supernatural powers as a "mentalist." A whole cottage industry of "spiritualism" grew up around Houdini following his death in 1926, claiming that the famous magician was one of their own, and thereby defaming him as well. Harry Houdini did not, repeat.. did not believe in communication with the afterlife, despite some claims by even some hucksters that were able to get to his widow. The practitioners of Houdini's marvelous art, always most fascinating, and very honorable as well when advertised to the public properly, should always be referred to as "magicians" or "illusionists." Kreskin, regardless of the level of his talent, is full of shit as to its source.
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National news coverage of Stan Musial's death has been generally dismal, as I expected. I watched ESPN all morning on Sunday, the day after he died, and the crawl at the bottom of the screen kept a constant notice, but the talking heads on the screen never once mentioned his name for all I saw, what with the breathless excitement of a pair of pending NFL playoff games that afternoon and evening, and even the Friday night, delayed debut of the National Hockey League season-- and ESPN despises hockey! The hipster website for sports news, Grantland.com, an ESPN bastard child of some confusing bloodline, missed the story of Musial's death entirely. But they did manage to publish multiple on-the-scene reports from Sundance.
Stan should have invented a young chippie to be his new life companion after his wife's death last year.
posted by CM @ 9:34 PM
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