Text Wrestling

In “Offensive Play”, Malcolm Gladwell proposes that head-injuries in football stem from the dysfunctional relationship between the sport’s players and the game. While I agree with Gladwell that relationships play a part in football injuries, I don’t think the blame lies solely on the sport’s players or the game. I think the relationship problem that is allowing brain injuries to occur in football is a lot more complicated and dysfunctional than Gladwell proposes.

Gladwell provides compelling evidence that there are a lot of people who have relationships with football, all of whom know that playing football can result in irreparable damage to the brain, yet appear to do nothing but watch it happen. There are players, like Kyle Turley, who puts himself back in the game, after being sent to the hospital for a serious head-injury, which his comrades then minimize by joking about the fact that he can’t remember being naked while hugging the team’s captain. There are neuropathology scientists, like Ann McKee, who is also a Green Bay Packers fan, and Bennet Omalu, who also studies C.T.E., who know about the devastating impact that Tau takes on the brain and how it slowly tormented the lives of some of football’s greatest players. There are researchers like Kevin Guskiewicz, the head of the U.N.C.’s concussion research program, who tracks data about hits to the head by analyzing the data he gets from helmet-mounted sensors, and then compares the impact to someone crashing their head on a windshield in a car accident. And last but not least, there is the National Football League that pays millions of dollars to former football players with dementia, a condition that eventually came after they lived years struggling through life C.T.E. (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) whose cause is tied to brain trauma.

However, “Offensive Play” reports that not everyone who finds out about football injuries chooses to ignore it. In 1905, President Roosevelt knew about it and requested a meeting at the White House to discuss the brutality of the game, although Gladwell doesn’t mention what happened as a result of that meeting, beyond Roosevelt’s concerns. But, considering that twelve of America’s top colleges met to consider abolishing the sport, that same year, the concern of Roosevelt may have at least prompted others to take a closer look at the sport. Yet, Gladwell’s essay only mentions one college who actually took the nation’s growing concerns over player-safety a step further. According to Gladwell, “Columbia University dropped the sport entirely”.

Over a century after Roosevelt’s meeting, football remains controversial, judging by the by the interesting connections that Gladwell’s makes between football and the unethical and brutal activity known as dog-fighting in his article that was published in 2009. One of the most interesting and disturbing connections of which I found to be the one between Roger Goodell, commissioner of the N.F.L. and Michael Vick. After a judge decided that Vick should serve two years in prison for torturing and electrocuting dogs and his participation in sport of dog fighting, Goodell decided that Vick would be a good fit for the N.F.L. and allowed him to rejoin the league.

Do football injuries continue to devastate the lives of its players because of those who have relationships with it? I think they do.