I read an article today about football and dogfighting. Anyone who subscribes to the specific magazine will know which article I mean. Anyway, it starts with an anecdote from a retired offensive lineman who keeled over in a Nashville establishment, woke up moments later on the floor, was helped out to his car and proceeded to vomit all over the place. He'd been experiencing spells of lightheadedness and nausea, bouts of forgetfulness and vertigo, during the last of his playing days and the last two years since he retired in 2007.
Next the article details a Vet hospital in Mass. that has a dementia section for patients afflicted with Alzheimer's. When patients in that ward die, an autopsy is usually performed for research purposes. For a seventy-two-year-old patient, a brain-scan performed during the autopsy showed an unusual pattern. The two proteins that show up like a buck-shot pattern in the stain-scan of patients with Alzheimer's--amyloid and tau--were in this patient relegated to the outer reaches of the brain, the outside of it basically, and amyloid was basically absent; this gentlemen's outer-layer was riddled with tau. Tau is a protein that builds up in brain-cells, eventually shutting them down and killing them. This patient had, it turns out, C.T.E. (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), a progressive neurological disorder caused by brain trauma.
C.T.E. afflicted patients will exhibit the same symptoms as Alzheimer's patients, and be housed in the same wards, and eventually pass on, and nobody would know unless an autopsy is performed. It turns out that the 72 year-old with the tau-only stain-scan spent a block of time as a boxer.
A few more brain stain-scans performed there revealed the same pattern, and each time the person had been either a boxer or a football player. Through another source studying the same thing, they found families of ex-NFL players willing to let the team study the brains of their recently deceased loved ones, and the pattern was always the same.
The football player who was highlighted in the beginning had other anecdotes about getting hit so hard that he saw bright white spots; that usually near the end of long continuous drives he felt like he was about to black out and faint; about how once he was knocked unconscious, woke up a minute later, sat on the bench trying to figure out where he was, and ended up missing the rest of the game in what to him seemed like a few minutes of catching his breath. He played the next week after that out-knocking.
That's pretty much the essence of the connection to dogfighting. Dogmen, the trainers of fighting dogs, basically exploit their animal's desire to be praised and perform well for their master, usually circling the ring during a match so the dog will be seeing his/her owner cheering them along. They put themselves at risk for their owners, for the love of their owners, just as football players put themselves at risk for their teams, for the love of their team.
NASCAR in the early 2000s lost a handful drivers--none more famous than Dale Earnhardt--to horrific crashes. They beefed up safety requirements in the cars, added a new type of outer wall that absorbed collisions better than concrete, and haven't lost a racer since. Can football be more like NASCAR than dogfighting?
Well...A research team at North Carolina had sensors put into the helmets of their football team to record the pressure of the collisions during both practice and full-on games. It turned out, that even in light contact practices, a player could have anywhere from 25 g to 100 g collisions (the g relates to gravitational forces, g-forces, like fighter jets and roller-coasters). A car-crash at 25 mph is about 100 g. So one lineman during the first practice had a 98 g hit and a 80 g hit, and it wasn't even lunch. He'd basically been in two car accidents. It seems like the drastic hits, however horrific they look, aren't as bad as the repetitive little hits sustained over a course of a career.
How is this solved? Switching to flag-football or touch-football? Outlawing the sport outright? In 1905 a collection of college administrators was one vote shy of outlawing the sport of football, one professor calling it a "boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport." The didn't outlaw it, just changed the rules; allowing the forward pass and extending the amount of yards needed for a first down from 5 to 10.
Could rule changes help? Vicious hits are policed, effectively so...
This is the six-billion dollar question...how to confront and deal with the ugly underbelly of being a pro-player...
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