In his interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, former NFL star wide receiver Antwaan Randle El revealed that at the age of 36, he can barely walk down stairs, and his mind is failing:
“I ask my wife things over and over again, and she’s like, ‘I just told you that. I’ll ask her three times the night before and get up in the morning and forget. Stuff like that. I try to chalk it up as I’m busy, I’m doing a lot, but I have to be on my knees praying about it, asking God to allow me to not have these issues and live a long life. I want to see my kids raised up. I want to see my grandkids.”
The odds are against him. Resaerchers believe that a majority of NFL players suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage caused by repeated head trauma. CTE was at the center of the film “Concussion,” as well as the documentary that inspired it, “League of Denial,} about the NFL’s efforts to deny and obscure that fact it was slowly killing its players….for entertainment. And money.
Randle El says of the game he now wishes he had never played:
“There’s no correcting it. There’s no helmet that’s going to correct it. There’s no teaching that’s going to correct it. It just comes down to it’s a physically violent game. Football players are in a car wreck every week.”
Immediately after this story aired on CNN this morning, the network cut to an upbeat, exited preview of this weekend’s AFC NFL championship. It was chilling.
Has there ever been a greater irrational, irresponsible, ethics disconnect in our society?
Enjoy the games…
Ethics Alarms 
The article frames his cognitive issues thus : “The crazy tning is Randle El feels his mind slipping, too.” as if this is something unheard of, and unique to him.
It’s a cult. The Coloseum without the immediate death by lions…they’re dying just the same, but out of sight.
Out of sight and with a pile of money IF they made it to the top… and that makes it A-OK. I don’t get it, a fraction of this damage to young people in any other area and people get up in arms. But football is like sacred?
“Has there ever been a greater irrational, irresponsible, ethics disconnect in our society?”
Slavery.
Hmmmm….was slavery ever that popular?
Seems like it.
Would it be possible to post a link to the study that the graphic is from? It looks interesting, and I would like to read it.
Here you go…
http://deadspin.com/5978074/new-study-reveals-that-cte-may-be-detectable-in-living-patients
Thank you, Jack. The deadspin.com article links to the full study, which is notable for finding a method to test for CTE in living patients. If the methodology stands up to peer review, the science here should advance rapidly, as large amounts of data are amassed and assessed.
It’s hard to see 50 years down the road, but my crystal ball doesn’t see much football in America in that future. Fortunately, as a Mariners fan, I’m not worried about baseball tickets becoming hard to get.
Meanwhile, when Danny Kaye bought the Mariners, he promised a World Series title within the lives of someone in the room. It’s getting close….and King Felix isn’t getting younger. Come on.
Well, I’m not a big fan of football anymore even though I played it during high school and enjoyed watching the San Diego State games immensely when I was going there as an undergrad. I saw “Concussion” and am fairly knowledgable about repeated brain trauma but I really don’t think hardcore football fans would give up the Super Bowl. Flag football wouldn’t draw much of an audience. Maybe the men would settle for watching young ladies playing undie football.
My theory of football’s only hope for continuation is no helmets or fabric ones with ear protectors and it goes back to rugby style, stand up, shoulder tackling (from whence it came). So ironic that plastic helmets and face guards turned players’ heads into weapons. Talk about unintended consequences. To protect noses and teeth they ended up trashing brains.
I can’t see parents letting their kids play Pop Warner football anymore. There are cases of high school players having the disease. I think the game will atrophy from lack of players at some point. Not sure how long it will take. Maybe there will continue to be a steady supply of really poor, bereft kids who will play for the shot at getting out of poverty. Before the game was integrated in the ’60s, the sought after players were miners’ kids from western Pennsylvania. Beat the hell out working below ground and dying from black lung disease.
There was a documentary years ago where Tom Landry spoke about how injuries rose when they introduced the modern helmet and then again when they put on face mask.
That’s really interesting. I wonder whether it can be found on youtube. Landry would have seen that technology make its appearance.
“I can’t see parents letting their kids play Pop Warner football anymore. There are cases of high school players having the disease. I think the game will atrophy from lack of players at some point.”
Maybe. Football remains one of the very few ways for the most destitute of families to raise their children into the higher echelons of the upper class within a single generation, or get a university education. When you consider the mortality rate of professions like deep sea crab fishermen, I think a strong argument could be made that not only is there a place for football, but that CTE might be an acceptable trade-off for the opportunity.
I don’t know that I buy that argument because the offset to it is that this is a gamble. Not everyone who plays football makes it big, in fact, most of the people who play don’t. Most wash out long before they have the opportunity to even be scouted due to various injuries, some of which are permanently debilitating. So how is this more or less ethical than a lottery? The poorest of us are doing something stupid for the chance at money that they won’t know what to do with.
The odds of having a lucrative, long term career and then parlaying that into a successful adult and family life for one or two generations have to be microscopic. College players at high levels were phenoms and all stars in high school. Average pros were superstars on college. And then there are all the other career ending injuries: knees in particular.
If a poor family wants to hit it big, get the kids through school and into a decent paying job or into college and a more decent paying job and then just have them keep their noses down and clean. Blown knees and brain injury are not a threat that way. Nor the risks inherent in having a posse and a series or group of wives to support.
“So how is this more or less ethical than a lottery?”
I had the exact same thought, prior to reading your comment. I often hear of the lottery as a tax on the poor; I disagree, because “tax”, colloquially, implies something that is mandatory, and as long as there is free will, regardless of your lot in life, or how something is marketed, the decision to play football/the lottery is still a choice. Rather than a “tax”, I think of the lottery (and now, playing football) as something that is targeted at the poor, taking advantage of a lack of education typically common to poor people, in order to thrive.
Regardless, at what point does “targeting” (or “taxing” of you prefer) end, and responsible decision making begin? Much like I find the left’s insistence on fighting voter ID rules disingenuous (because it implies whites are capable of a simple task, like acquiring an ID, but minorities aren’t…and we’re the racists?), I kind of feel the same about the subject of the poorer among us choosing to play football at a greater rate than those with means. The Deadspin article is easily available to everyone, as long as you have access to a computer and the internet, and Concussion has been widely publicized during commercial breaks of football games. Anyone who hasn’t, even once, heard about the connection between football and CTE (or the odds of winning the lottery) just isn’t paying attention. And, assuming everyone’s heard of the connection, those that have ignored it, chosen not to investigate further, or disregarded it, with the hope of chasing money, have made a personal choice, a risky one, but one that personal autonomy allows them to do.
However, cheering on poor decision making is creepy and/or wrong….and yet, that’s me. I hate that I am that way, as I am in control of what I choose to do, but, having rooted for the Burgundy and Gold for the last 26 years (about 70% of my life), it’s a lot easier (albeit, unethical) to ignore what these players are doing to themselves. I’ll have to live with that.
For the time being though…Go Caps and O’s!
Maybe that’s it. The cheering. No one cheers on Lottery winners. How… decadent (Is that the right word?) do we have to be to actively cheer on an activity that we know causes permanent debilitating conditions on people? But is that an ethical consideration, or just more ick?
Nice comment, Chris. Who are the Burgundy and Gold? BC? Redskins?
Thanks!
The Burgundy and Gold are the Redskins….though, former coach Jim Zorn got off to a terrible beginning by referring to his new team, at his introductory press conference, as the “maroon and black”.
It only got worse from there.
Reminiscent of how introducing boxing gloves to the ring dramatically increased the popularity of head blows and brain injuries, both short and long term.
And still manage to get boxers killed and brain-damaged.
A chance for poor, (mostly) non-white kids to make themselves (and their families) rich and famous . . .. Ali fought one last time on December 11, 1981. It took six more years of oh-too-bad-he-just-got-old to spill the open secret that definitively connected the cause and effect: “Muhammad Ali suffers from Parkinson’s syndrome because of injuries to the brain caused by pugilism.” Period.
My dad, born at the turn of the century (yes, that one), was an inveterate boxing fan. He waxed most nostalgic — and most dangerous to any listener nearby, since he couldn’t resist some physical demonstration — when telling how he and his kid brothers had stood in an beery, hooting, shoving crowd for twelve hours to watch the “other” crowd — the ticket-holding 91,000 — fill the arena at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in Jersey City one humid July day in 1921, and to hear first-hand (by shout) the blow-by-blow of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight. It was the first long-range radio sportscast, and considered the inauguration of the “big money” matches and national fandom.
He stopped telling the story 40 years later when Sonny Liston KO-ed Floyd Patterson in the first round, not because it was a disappointing mere two-minute fight, but because his best friend, also a physician, a neurologist, had refused to join him in bemoaning the outcome, arguing that he couldn’t watch any more head-banging … he had ordered autopsy x-rays done on his nephew, an amateur pugilist, the day before, which turned out to show as predicted (he said) by earlier x-rays for increasing headaches and speech problems that, in spite of full protection (as much as they had at the time). the boy’s brain damage had increased to fatality with every blow to the head. My dad didn’t quite make it to seeing the rising star of Cassius Clay three years later, which might well have reignited his enthusiasm for boxing as it did so many others’, but he didn’t seem to miss it very much. He had turned his interest to college football instead.
Apparently nobody wanted to make the connections or do the studies. (Or did they? And we just weren’t listening?)
FYI: https://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/D_Pages/Dempsey_Carpentier_Fight.htm
I think other governments should ban American Football as it is today from being played in their countries. You might get every country to pass a ban easily due to a lack of popularity. If NFL could no longer play “International Series” games abroad and could not expand past the U.S. they would have to be content with the U.S. market only or improve the game to a reasonable point.
I think they’re trying to stay ahead of you, Tim.
http://www.bbc.com/sport/american-football/35360989
NFL to open franchise in London within six years.
Frankly, I can’t imagine European kids being in any sort of hurry to start banging their heads when they can dribble footballs with their feet. And play the game recreationaly well into adulthood.