Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
[M]ost boomers began watching the National Football League when the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions flickered across the living room on Thanksgiving in black and white, their uniforms covered in mud. It always seemed to be snowing — maybe it was the TV — and for most of us, football was about eating and drinking long before it was synonymous with performance enhancing drugs, domestic violence and the deteriorating mental and physical health of the players.
After autumn college weekends at the Jersey shore, we stopped for draught beer and individual pizzas — “bar pies” back in the day — and watched Monday Night Football. In retrospect, the early ’70s seemed golden: The essence of not much to do and all the time in the world to do it. Simple lives that would soon become exponentially more complicated with the normal transitions that went with adulthood. As Bob Seeger prophetically sang: “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
As we grew up, so did the National Football League, evolving into a $25 billion a year juggernaut, trampling baseball and the NBA like undersized cornerbacks and establishing itself as America’s game. With marching bands, 21-gun-salutes and Air Force flyovers, it felt almost patriotic to root your team on from the safety of your couch or favorite bar stool.
But gradually, as the value of NFL teams reached an astronomical average of $1.4 billion, muddy uniforms became a thing of the past with weather-proof domes covering stadiums, ACL-tearing turf replacing grass and the bottom line taking precedence over everything else, including the player’s well being. The dirt was still there but the league was extraordinarily efficient about sweeping it under the rug, just as climate-control is at providing fans an endless string of perfect Sunday afternoons, even as blizzards rage just out of sight.
For more than two decades, the league systematically covered up the connection between football and brain damage, specifically chronic traumatic encephalopthy, a degenerative disease caused by multiple concussions which can only be diagnosed through an autopsy. This cumulative battering is suspected of causing the myriad neurological issues experienced by former players including ALS, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
Another symptom is depression: Ten former NFL players have committed suicide in only the last four years, and at least two — Dave Duerson and Junior Seau — did so in a manner that would preserve their brains for study. Duerson even left a note requesting his be donated to the “brain bank” in Boston — to confirm what he and his family already suspected.
While the status of footballers as icons and role models has taken a well-deserved beating in the last year, as lurid stories of wide ranging criminal behavior including child abuse, domestic violence and murder have focused on the players themselves rather than on any responsibility the league itself might bear. Apart from Commissioner Roger Goodell’s bumbling interventions in the Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson cases, the league appears to have come through these crises with their fan base intact — and more importantly — their enormous cash-flow largely uninterrupted.
It turns out there is a growing body of evidence that the multiple concussions and traumatic brain injury suffered by an estimated 30 percent of former players may very well precipitate the kind of violence that has dominated recent headlines.
But suppose there was a direct link between the repeated, car-wreck intensity head trauma that occurs on almost every NFL play and the subsequent tendency of players toward depression, violence and suicide? Well, it turns out there is a growing body of evidence that the multiple concussions and traumatic brain injury suffered by an estimated 30 percent of former players may very well precipitate the kind of violence that has dominated recent headlines.
“A plausible hypothesis” was how noted neurocriminalogist Adrian Raine described the link in a Forbes Magazine article last September. Raine, who is known for his exploration of brain function’s relationship to violent behavior, has written “The Anatomy of Violence,” tracing the biological roots of crime. Although the book is not about football, the premise — that violent criminals have “broken brains” according to Raine — is entirely applicable to the NFL, a veritable concussion factory.
Generally speaking, traumatic brain injury research has been based on one-time incidents of head trauma. A study on injured Vietnam veterans, for instance, focused on soldiers who had head wounds and their subsequent histories of domestic abuse and violence. Another conducted in Spain determined blows to the head during development “can predispose (an individual) to criminal behavior” and went on to suggest rehabilitation of head injuries as a logical measure for crime prevention.
Studies that examined a correlation between domestic violence and traumatic brain injury determined that 53 percent of the perpetrators had a history of TBI, a prevalence significantly higher than in the population at large. Since the link between football and brain damage has clearly been established, it’s not much of a stretch to connect the violence on the field with the violence everywhere else.
In fact, the very nature of making it all the way to the NFL means that most elite football players have been on the field since elementary school and — in many cases — taking the kind of pounding for most of their lives that would be classified as child abuse if inflicted by teachers, babysitters or parents.
Our violent culture is only violent vicariously for most of us. We have surrogates who do the actual violence and take the risks. We are voyeurs. Whether a video game, a boxing or mixed martial arts match or the NFL, we like to watch. And in a society where boxing, with all its inherent dangers, has gone largely unchanged for decades and the savagery of MMA grows ever more popular, it is difficult to imagine any significant changes happening in professional football.
But even as enthusiastic spectators, every football fan has seen an especially vicious hit on a wide receiver or a quarterback blindsided by a blitzing linebacker and thought: “it’s amazing that no one gets killed out there.” Turns out they do. It’s just that the systematic, increasingly predictable destruction of a young man’s brain takes a really long time.
