Denial is the adrenaline of a white chalk line fifty yards into a football field, or the stick hovering above the line at center ice.
We decry shaken babies, support the care of shell-shocked veterans, but put a football helmet, boxing trunks, wrestling shorts, kimono, rugby or hockey jersey on a human being and head trauma is magically transformed from a societal ill to an unfortunate side effect of America's addiction to physical violence in sport.
As I outlined in my Huffington Post piece last week, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is real, really unfixable in many sports, and not going away. What may be going away are the sports themselves that cannot amend their play to avoid all of the damage that they cause.
The NFL's paltry $190,000 settlement per player for those with signs of CTE-related early dementia had significant impact because the league admitted in court that approximately a third of its players could suffer early-onset dementia.
The Mom Factor
A 30% chance your child is brain damaged by playing in contact sports is not exactly a recruiting poster.
"According to a June 2015 poll conducted by YouGov and Huffington Post that asked 1,000 Americans what sports they would want their kids to play, 24 percent picked soccer, four percent said football, and only one percent picked hockey," says Vice Sports.
Do mothers put their precious peas into the equivalent of thousands of car wrecks over their lifetime, just to play a sport, when sports like soccer can amend their rules and be a much safer game, or their children can go into sports like baseball where sub-concussive contact is rare and salaries are in the millions?
If mothers don't starve the system of players, the tsunami of litigation in the wake of the NFL's settlement could do in contact sports. I conservatively ballparked the stats for HuffPo. Based on the NFL settlement, and a class action suit brought before the NFL settlement where the NCAA dealt out $70M to the players in the class, settlements could still cost the NCAA more than $50B.
High schools' liability for an even smaller fraction of total players injured over the last 65+ years could conservatively exceed a whopping $1.24T.
Add in hockey and rugby and wrestling and the various forms of boxing and karate, and the financial losses, even with very conservative estimates, are mind boggling.
Is Contact Sport Like Tobacco?
"League of Denial" the excellent PBS Frontline series, which shares its title with the book of the same name chronacle the discovery of CTE and, in particular, the National Football League (NFL)'s attempt to bury, marginalize, discredit, and co-opt research on the disease which is caused by excessive repetitive trauma to one of the body's most delicate organs, the brain.
There is pretty extensive research that clearly draws the dots between the sports and the physical damage. It's not just the contact. Players thrown to the ground or the ice hundreds, or a thousand times a season in both practice and games suffer damage to their brain. Sub-concussive and concussive shocks add up. If you read the article, one study revealed that 42 high school players tracked suffered 32,510 sub-concussive or concussive impacts in a season.
Some sports, like world futbol (soccer) can amend their rules to take the vast majority of head trauma out of the game and still play at a high level. Hockey, too, has the ability to modify its rules to reduce the trauma to the brain that can cause CTE-related dementia.
Football, Rugby, and Australian Rules Football are not as blessed. These are, by their nature, violent physical contact sports. Players are excessively weighted to maximize damage. Wounding, disabling and otherwise physically attacking opponents is an accepted part of the sport.
We've all assumed, for these many years, that the punishment being dealt on the field is temporary and transient. Medical science suggests otherwise. The only way to document CTE is to dissect the brain. This has been done many times, with the same result: Playing football at any level damages the brain at any level of a contact sport.
"CTE has been found in the brains of high school and college football players, including football players who never had a diagnosed concussion," reports Forbes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported more than 25,300 kids under age 19 had to go to the emergency room for traumatic brain injury because of football.
The question is never IF one can bypass the damage; The question is how much damage turns into full-blown dementia and the brain being choked by the build-up of tau proteins that are the cause of CTE, and how quickly it will happen to a particular player.
"Working with the Concussion Legacy Foundation, the group of researchers from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University also studied players on the high school, college and semipro levels, and overall 131 of the 165 brains analyzed showed signs of the disease. The researchers say 96 percent of the NFL players and 79 percent of all football players studied had CTE, according to the PBS program Frontline," said Newsweek just a few days ago.
The science is increasingly clear: The NFL admitted in court that 3 in 10 of their players are likely to develop early onset dementia.
Contact sports are containerized tribalism with managed levels of combat for a modern human race that channels its penchant for violence into sport and film. Players are called "warriors." Leagues and colleges cultivate their fans' addiction to the violence because it is a primal tap that opens the floodgates of profit in television revenue, tickets, alcohol, food and sales of tribal gear.
So are we surprised when men like Ray Rice, Jovan Belcher or Adrian Peterson, with so much contact damage to their brains, engage in explosive behavior that channels into partner or child abuse? Relative to the general population, FiveThirtyEight found that NFL players rates of domestic abuse were far out of line with the general population.
"Basically, NFL players are about four times more likely to be arrested for domestic abuse than you’d expect, based on their overall arrest rates," notes Forbes.
With increased bulking up of players at the high school level through better weight training and conditioning, there are more crash landings on fields and rinks, more hard contact. Could that be a contributor to high school players' increased violence?
Neurologists are still working on connectivity of brain damage to violence, but one link is clear. The prefrontal cortex is our "off switch" for violence and repeated brain injury can affect its operation.
The observation of the cause doesn't make excuse for the rage of athletes, and one could say that the majority of athletes in contact sports aren't up on charges for abuse.
“Does smoking cause lung cancer? Yes, but many people smoke and do not have cancer. But certainly smoking raises the odds of lung cancer, just as damage to the prefrontal cortex can raise the odds of impulsive, aggressive behavior,” Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is the nation’s most prominent “neurocriminologist” told Forbes.
Off the field aggression that harms family or friends of players at all levels of the game potentially impacts millions of people exposed to more than a million living athletes and retired athletes who played at some level of contact sport.
Yet, unlike shaken baby syndrome, or concussions suffered in the military, there is no investigation by the Congress, no calls for health risk assessments from the Surgeon General, no government-generated caution to millions of parents and students of the risks associated with the national pastime. The NFL has some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington.
The addiction of the media to football news, in particular, tends to make American news media more complicit enablers than objective analysts, although ESPN and PBS both stood up to the NFL with "League."
Off Television, Out of Mind
The players, when they're worn out, or they can't make the cut of the next rung of the ladder, retire. Fans move on to the next young athlete with sparkling promise being thrown into the contact sports grist mill.
Out of the limelight, these men, whose jerseys find their way into the Salvation Army pile, often take their millions in winnings from their physical gifts and run businesses or work with investment managers to enjoy their long retirements. Until, for at least a third, the memory loss, physical abuse, fits of temper, erratic behavior, disconnects with family and friends, wild business decisions, isolation from family and friends, and struggles with depression and substance abuse start occurring.
A report back in 2011 shows that, at least for pro football players, early onset dementia hits usually within 8 years of their retirement, well into the "didn't that guy play for [Insert Team Here] back in the day..." of their careers. The average age is 41 years. The NFL conveniently wants to compensate players who are under the age which much of the actual CTE damage starts to appear.
Even if a player's career wasn't that long, concussive damage in college and high school athletes is reasonably likely to be a contributor to any number of common societal abuses, from spousal and familial to substances, compulsive gambling, and rage behavior in millions of Americans who were in contact sports.
"At this point, there’s no debate that football itself changes the brains of its players," observes Forbes' Dan Diamond. "The NFL has admitted to it. The sport’s head injuries have long-lasting consequences — and may even alter personalities in the short term."
Fan Denial
Most amazing is the pigskin and puck psychosis of parents and avid athletics addicts in the contact sports. The documentary and the book are only half right: The League of Denial isn't just the NFL, the NHL, or the NCAA. It's the fans who are in equal or greater denial.
An HBO Real Sports/Marist poll found that "36% of poll respondents said they view the NFL less favorably based on its handling of the concussion controversy. Sixty percent say it has no effect on their views... The scales tipped dramatically for respondents when it came to youth football players and concussion; 80% of the public considers concussions sustained by middle school and high school players to be a serious problem."
Fans follow the careers of players as they're put under their noses by the sports marketing machines of the colleges and the professional leagues. People gather around the big screens every game. They wear their player's jersey replica; Cheer their victories for the colors.
Are Fans to Blame for Players' Brain Damage?
In large part, yes. They get caught up in the heroin of victory, berate players who cannot take them into that nirvanah of the euphoric sports addiction: A championship. The move to bigger, heavier players and more violent contact was largely because it spikes ratings. It sells.
"We all love collisions and hard hits and things like that until it happens to your boy," said former Auburn player and current high school football dad Chris Vacarella.
The NFL, NCAA, NHL, Rugby and their feeders from the schools draw billions of dollars in income because you, the fan, spend more of it per capita on contact sports.
The question isn't about making contact sports safe. They will never be. The question is: Can America wean itself off its addiction to violent sports?
We save children and animals from harm. Is the life of a professional athlete any less valuable?