This Christmas, Will Smith will be making helmet to helmet contact with the NFL. In the film Cuncussion, Smith portrays a doctor trying to convince America’s most popular sports league to deal with its head trauma problem. It is an issue that almost everyone concedes is both real and serious. Will this film make people turn off their TV’s on Thursday, Sunday and Monday? Probably not. But will it make parents think twice before they let their own kids play? It might.
I am big believer in the value of sports, especially for kids. Sports are one of the last areas where we actually let our kids fail. No helicopter parent, no matter how vigilant can make an important free throw go in. No dragon mom can ensure that her child doesn’t strike out with 2 outs and the bases loaded. Decades later, I still recall the pangs of such failures in the fog of my past, but I also remember going back and trying again, sometimes even succeeding.
Football teaches boys these lessons and more. With every snap of the ball 22 players, 11 on each side perform a choreography of violence in which each athlete is responsible for the safety of others. In no other sport that we let kids play do they line up with the intention of hitting another one hard. I played a year of football as a teenager, and that one season I had more nicks, cuts, bruises and sprains than I had in a decade of basketball and baseball. I also enjoyed it enormously. And if those minor injuries, or even the threat of a traumatic injury were the greatest danger in football I wouldn’t think twice before letting my son play. But they aren’t.
The Risks Of Football
It is often noted that sports like gymnastics, and cheerleading also lead to significant injuries in young athletes. Even youth baseball has seen tragedies in which pitchers hit by line drives have died. The difference is that the traumatic injuries in these other sports occur as a result of terrible accidents. In football the danger is that head trauma is a normal part of the game. The fear is not that some freak event will happen, but that in the regular course of practice and games the head is taking unnatural abuse. For any parent this is a scary thing.
To be fair to football the science is not settled. Studies abound about cumulative head impact exposure. But nobody can say for certain just how dangerous these head impacts are or how many boys will sustain permanent injury. Perhaps the movie Concussion is exaggerating the dangers, but perhaps it isn’t
As a father, that uncertainty is a scary thing. While all sports incur risk, the risk in football is like the risk of smoking, not so much a danger out of the blue, but a continual assault on the body. Each and every play, the sound of helmets colliding, wondering if it is part of a dangerous pattern. It’s loud.
All of these thoughts and concerns create a moral dilemma for me because I am a big fan of football. Growing up in Philadelphia I learned from my family that watching the Eagles meant yelling at the TV and each other while furiously pacing. The first time my in-laws ever saw me watch a football game they thought I was a lunatic. The pure joy that I take in watching football is tremendous, and if it was gone it would leave a big hole. But there is a difference now. We are no longer blissfully unaware of the risks to players. Twenty years ago we thought of an ex NFL player as a guy with car dealership who spoke at pee wee football banquets. Now we think of a shattered human being whose mind is no longer his own.
At the start of last season for the first time, I had a few friends — not many, but a few — who gave up the NFL. This was generally announced in Facebook posts warning about complicity in these dangerous working conditions. I did not give up the NFL. After all, these are grown men making their own choices. They are well rewarded for their sacrifices and free to choose to cash in their chips and go home. But there was still a nagging doubt, the understanding that without college and high school and middle school football programs, there would be no NFL.
The Intersection Of Sports And Education In America
The United States is unique in the way we marry sports and education. Sports are not only a pathway to college in America, they are also central to the identity of many of our colleges. In no other country does college sports play anywhere near the role it plays here. In some parts of the country even high school football draws crowds in the thousands. In fact, high school and college football are the only reasons the NFL doesn’t play on Friday and Saturday.
Most of these student players will never make a dime playing football, but it is through their collective competition that we find the best players. In other parts of the world athletes as young as 11 or 12 start playing for professional club’s youth teams. Their deal is made more explicit. If you succeed and go pro, you got it made. In the U.S. we pretend all these kids are just going to college, and a few happen to be NFL prospects. These aren’t employees being taken advantage of by NFL owners, they’re just some college students tossing the ball around for crowds of 100,000 and millions of TV viewers.
There is much to be said for the way our education system incentives sports. It makes a lot of sense to put some value on talent and dedication to a sport in college admissions, but just as most college players will never make the NFL, most high school players will never get a scholarship. Yet, without them, the more talented or harder working boys would never develop. With this in mind, we need to ask ourselves if the product we love on the field is really just a group of well compensated grown men, or if it is, at least in part, the result of a dangerous practice among our kids.
Once we realize the important role our sons are playing in developing the game we love so much, we have a responsibility to protect them. Much good work is being done in this area. From fatigue and dehydration to head impacts, we have never known more about the dangers of football and how to protect against them. As this science grows, we will see more improvements in equipment and rules, making the gamer safer, but right now, there is valid reason to worry every time a teenager straps on a helmet. As a parent, it is very hard to accept that risk to your child for the reward of a game, even a game that we deeply love. If my son brought me the permission slip to play football, I don’t think I could sign it.
