Senator Udall Finally Raises a Peep About Concussions
October 5, 2011To Congress of Neurological Surgeons Officers and Executive Committee: What’s the Deal With Your Standing Ovation for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell?
October 6, 2011
Sympathy and best wishes go out to the family and friends of former National Hockey League star Rick Martin, who died earlier this year of a heart attack at age 59, and who now has been added to the list of athletes whose post-mortem brain studies showed chronic traumatic encephelopathy.
The significance here is that Martin (like the sport’s biggest contemporary star, Sidney Crosby, who remains sidelined from the aftereffects of a concussion sustained more than eight months ago) was not a brawler; the damage to him was caused by the more or less ordinary wear and tear of the game.
The larger message should be that CTE findings in famous football and hockey players have reached the point of redundancy — and redundancy itself can become a rubbernecking and self-congratulatory spectacle. With America’s No. 1 sport, football, the focus needs to be on protecting youth amateurs, and on protecting society from the spiraling consequences of their industrial disability and death.
The bottomless public health costs of football should not be borne by the public education system. Let the football-crazed pursue their passion for blood sport by other means.
Irv Muchnick