Concussions are an ongoing problem in sports, but nowhere like in the NFL.  No other sports brings a constant barrage of collisions and blows to the head the way that football does, not even boxing.  Over the past ten years we’ve seen Hall of Fame quarterbacks like Troy Aikman and Steve Young lose their careers to concussions, along with solid pros like Merrill Hoge and Al Toon and journeymen like Chris Miller.  This year, we have two running backs who have been stopped with concussions, Clinton Portis of the Redskins and Brian Westbrook of the Eagles.  Westbrook, in fact, is on concussion number two for this season. 

These two, along with countless others have gone through the injury, the rest, the diagnosis, and the inevitable return to the field.  Recent studies, however, have shone some major light on this that goes beyond we’ve known up to this point.  Several recent deaths of former players have revealed major brain damage. Former Steelers Mike Webster and Terry Long and former Eagle Andre Waters were found have suffered from severe dementia due to head trauma from their playing days; Waters had the brain of a 90 year old alzheimer’s patient, according to the doctors who did the autopsy. 

I remember reading stories about Hoge and Miller being unable to find their way home without written directions even though they lived 15 – 20 minutes away from the team facilities.  I remember Troy Aikman literally not remembering the NFC championship game or the Super Bowl from the Cowboys second title run.  I’m sure a lot of you have concussion stories about certain players as well. We also know now that the NFL isn’t doing these guys any favors when it comes to dealing with this problem.  The league has done everything it can to deny the severity of this problem, and to this day continues to express doubt in a direct correlation between the repeated blows to the head its players take and severe brain damage. 

They don’t deny it entirely, but instead say things like ‘the jury’s still out’ or ‘the science is still being debated’ when in fact the jury handed down the verdict a few years ago and the science (with the exception of those working on behalf of the league) is pretty solid already.  They want to muddy the waters and delay any serious action from being forced on them.  There are two reasons, one obvious and one not so much.  The first is that if football gets officially exposed as a cause of major brain damage, it could seriously affect their bottom line and their supply of future players. 

The other reason is that they’re betting on us not caring.  THe longer they can drag this out and keep it below the surface, the better chance they have of us not asking about it.  They’re making a cynical gambit that their fans do not care about it, and that we just want to be entertained. Are they right?  My bet would be yes, and we have to look no further than baseball and boxing for proof.  Baseball was rocked by a steroids scandal, major players were busted for using the stuff and many were hauled in front of Congress where they made fools out of themselves.  And yet, baseball’s business is still up.  People got pissed in 1994 when the strike happened, but didn’t give a damn when the cheating went down. 

And it’s not like we didn’t know all along; anyone watching could tell that there is no way some of these could grow the way that they did and suddenly become home run hitters without using some kind of performance enhancing drug, and we didn’t care.  Same thing with boxing; nobody cares that these guys are getting hit in the head all the time.  Boxing lost fans because of it’s business practices, not from people suddenly getting a conscience about what goes on in the ring. We’re more likely to get mad over guys asking for more money or getting in trouble away from the field/court/ring than we are about them cheating or getting severe injuries while playing.

Should we care?  Yes!  But we won’t, until it’s our Dad or uncle or brother or friend who gets hurt and can’t remember simple things like how to get home when they’re 40 years old.  Then we’ll be outraged.  But unless it hits home in a personal way, we won’t pay attention.  Because we don’t want to care.  Caring would mean that we’d all be considering whether or not we should even be fans.  Finding the real truth would force us to make a decision about what kind of people we want to be, and that’s a decision we don’t want to have to make. 

The same way we don’t care about what kind of long term damage baseball players did to themselves from steroid use.  The same way we don’t want to know everything that our favorite starlets are doing to their bodies to keep that perfect figure so they won’t end up on the cover of a tabloid under a ‘guess who got fat!’ headline.  We just want to be entertained, and we don’t care what the entertainers have to do to themselves to deliver it for us.  Just don’t ask for more money, even if you’ll need it to pay all your medical bills later on, or act like a jerk to us in public, and we’re good. Am I wrong?