‘Sports Concussion Crisis a Culture-Wide Problem – Maybe a Post-Ideological One, Too’ (full text)

[originally published 8/8/11 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Sports_Concussion_Crisis_a_Culture_Wide_Problem_Maybe_a_Post_Ideological_One_Too_9407.html]

by Irvin Muchnick

Writing in The Nation’s special August 15-22 sports issue, currently on newsstands, recently retired Denver Broncos wide receiver turned social critic Nate Jackson reflects on the football concussion crisis. Jackson is short on specifics and long on the banal (“But at what price comes the glory?”). Jackson also makes regrettable separation from the essential theme: traumatic brain injuries are not the same as blown-out knees; the National Football League’s commerce-first values inculcate amateur sports, as well; and the depth and breadth of the resulting societal fallout far exceed the public’s current perception.

Like most painful attempts by intellectuals to be hip, Jackson and his fellow sloganeers for solidarity fail to account for the limitations of labor-model ideology in a popular culture dangling as far off the bread-and-circuses deep end as America’s in 2011. Through their solutions, obscene revenues would be shifted from the “bosses” to the “people,” and football would be “civilized” by rule-tweaking. But the nearly $10-billion-a-year NFL would not be held accountable for a system imposing documentable mental-health deficits on our public schools, work force, and prisons.

A similar inability to forge a vision more imaginative than the struggle between unions and owners leads to the overplaying of the class-warfare card throughout The Nation’s “Views from Left Field.”

After a strong introductory essay by Robert Lipsyte, we are served up a lot of the usual suspects saying a lot of the usual things. Noam Chomsky reminds us of the evilness of evil. In a series of short sidebars, an almost parodic litany of credentialed lefties asserts their sports-worship bona fides (Victor Navasky on Babe Ruth, Ralph Nader on Lou Gehrig, David Remnick on Muhammad Ali).

In an article co-authored with long-time activist and National Football League Players Association official David Meggyesy, guest editor Dave Zirin patiently explains how the pro football talent union “won” the recent lockout – news to the rest of us. I don’t advise hotel custodians or stadium beer vendors to design their own tactics around the delusion that Tom Brady and the Manning brothers might deign to honor anything so proletariat as a picket line.

Left unreported by The Nation are the lawsuits and counter-organizing by retired players who feel abandoned by the NFLPA’s “cash up front” philosophy; this colluded with the profiteering league’s underfunding of pension and disability plans, which in turn failed to forge meaningful solidarity with a generation of neurologically and orthopedically damaged brethren. On this raging controversy, Meggyesy has taken to Internet forums, including my blog and that of Dave Pear, the ex-Oakland Raider who heads a group of dissident retirees.

John Hogan, a disability attorney representing many players – along with some others in Pear’s Independent Football Veterans, who include famous names – are debating federal labor law rings around both Meggyesy and Sam McCullum, the former wideout who recently was named as an NFLPA replacement for Dave Duerson on the joint league-union disability board. Duerson, of course, committed suicide in February. Duerson’s hyper-macho passivity on colleagues’ cases of brain trauma in the years leading up to his own postmortem finding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy remains high on the list of “tasteful” sports journalism’s muted scandals.  The Nation playbook provides no audibles for that one, either.

NFLPA apologists really ought to quit while they’re behind. Concussions are a culture-wide problem, and a guild of elite mass entertainers is neither motivated nor equipped to lead us out of it.

Irvin Muchnick (https://concussioninc.net), author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, is @irvmuch on Twitter.