Whisper it, CTE and spot-fixing are still with us
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Two contrasting and in their own way fascinating stories dropped into my inbox overnight.
The first is from the New York Times and involves a subject I have retained a special interest in: concussions in contact sport, in this case the NFL.
What is interesting about this opinion piece is the sense of despair. Jay Caspian Kang, who once worked as an editor for the short lived but influential sports website Grantland, argues fairly convincingly that the public just doesn’t care any more.
“Of all the disappearing stories in the American consciousness, none has receded from the public eye quite like football concussions,” Kang writes.
He says that alarm about CTE in athletes has been replaced by a macabre theatre.
“A player is knocked out, the TV announcers say, ‘Well, you hate to see this’; the player gets carted away or staggers off to the designated blue medical tent; the sideline reporter tells the audience that the player will not be returning to action. All this is done in somber tones with the implicit understanding that the player will probably be back in a week or two.”
CTE hasn’t gone away. Horrible, horrible tragedies involving former NFL players riddled with the brain disease continue to happen, like Phillip Adams who killed six people and then himself, but Kang writes that they “don’t pierce the larger sports conversation” like they used to.
This is interesting on a couple of levels.
One, there was possibly an assumption by some that the CTE/ contact sports conundrum would become a public health issue impossible to ignore, in much the same way that Big Tobacco and lung cancer became intertwined. To this end, a lot of scientists and researchers who work in CTE and brain health push this analogy.
If Kang is right, then Americans are far more attached to football than they are to cigarettes.
Secondly, rugby is probably a decade behind the US in terms of the CTE awareness cycle. I could make an argument that New Zealanders have probably never been more aware of the dangers associated with the concussive and, more insidiously, sub-concussive hits inherent in our beloved contact sports.
Kang writes: “This doesn’t mean we are unaware or even particularly apathetic — again, nine out of 10 sports fans believe concussions are a problem in [American] football; it’s more that we have no faith that we can change our institutions and, with ample evidence and sound reason, have dropped the belief that we even should have any input into how they choose to do business.”
If it follows that the issue will fade from the public consciousness here, then I can only push back on that inevitability, not because I’m conceited enough to believe that I can change institutions, but because those that are suffering deserve the chance to tell their story.