ECW Press Announces Irvin Muchnick’s Upcoming Book on ‘The American Way of Death in Youth Football Conditioning’

ECW Press has announced a fall 2023 publication date for investigative journalist and author Irvin Muchnick’s book Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Youth Football Conditioning.

The public health harm of football has been widely explored in recent years mostly in relation to traumatic head injury – including in Muchnick’s own 2015 ECW Press book Concussion Inc.: The End of Football As We Know It. His new book tackles this important subject at another level, with shocking new research on how several American amateur, and often underage, football players are killed every year. These fatalities are not even from trauma or contact, but simply from the excesses of youth coaches’ practice drills. The author characterizes this annual toll as an underreported “social pandemic” attributable to the sport’s huge and unchecked commercial and cultural footprint.

Among the cover-ups of these deaths of young student-athletes exposed in Muchnick’s book – some all the way down to high schools – is that of Ted Agu at the University of California. Agu had a condition, sickle cell trait, that makes many African-Americans susceptible to sudden death during extreme exertion. Yet knowledge of the syndrome is suppressed from widespread public knowledge. The full stories of the Agu cover-up, as well as others involving exertional heatstroke, asthma, and other causes, are told in part through Muchnick’s years of public information lawsuits against schools and other public agencies.

IRVIN MUCHNICK “produces magnificent investigative journalism,” wrote Frank Deford, the late legendary dean of sportswriters. Muchnick has written cover stories for the Sunday magazines of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and hundreds of other articles for Salon, People, The Washington Monthly, and many other publications. His 2009 book Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death is now in its third edition. His reporting on sexual abuse in the sport of swimming helped launch separate grand jury and Justice Department investigations. Muchnick is lead respondent of the landmark 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, enforcing the economic rights of freelance writers. He is @irvmuch on Twitter. For more information, see https://concussioninc.net.

ECW PRESS is recognized by Publishers Weekly as one of the most diversified independent publishers in North America. ECW Press has published close to 1,000 books that are distributed throughout the English-speaking world and translated into dozens of languages. For more information, see http://ecwpress.com.