Even though Browns coach Mike Pettine told a sports journalist that, while Ray Rice’s name came up in discussions regarding the search for a running back, he also said, “but at this point we’re not there yet” in terms of making a decision to hire him. Nonetheless, media outlets are allowing fans to weigh in with their opinions regarding such a possibility by conducting polls. The result of the one I saw was just about evenly divided.
For those readers who are not sports fanatics, Rice was captured on a hotel video knocking his wife out, and then dragging her out of an elevator; conduct that only can be characterized as loathsome and abominable. Domestic violence should never be condoned under any conditions. Not even if she just called his momma ‘ho.
Advocates that seek to bring an end to domestic violence are quite naturally up in arms at the mere suggestion that Rice would be allowed to go on with his life by pursuing the profession by which he keeps said wife (who, by the way has completely forgiven him) in luxurious circumstances, and one has to wonder how long they think he should be banished from earning a living: One year, five years, ten years … or forever?
But a poll you’ll never see in the mainstream media is one asking the question, “Does the proven damage that violence (in the form of blows to the head) inflicts on players make football too dangerous a sport for advocates of nonviolence to continue to support?”
Jim Brown evidently was way ahead of his time. Although he never has publicly said that he quit football at the height of his career out of concern for his long-term well-being, he allegedly has made such comments in private. And even the great Hall of Fame tight end Mike Ditka recently said on public radio that, knowing what he now knows about the damage all of those accumulated blows to the head can cause, he would not allow his son to play tackle football, even at the peewee level.
But football — virtually at every level, from pickup games in an open field to the pros — is part of our DNA … not to mention the literally billions of dollars the sport generates annually (with the lion’s share going into the pockets of very wealthy owners). In some parts of the country football is almost a religion, and in other parts it far surpasses the worship of any god.
And to talk negatively about a sport where one of the goals is to give another human being a concussion is considered blasphemy virtually anywhere in America, a conversation only engaged in by sissies and girlie men.
In spite of clear — and ever mounting — evidence of the severe damage done to players (10-time All-Pro linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide with a gunshot wound to the chest in 2012 at the age of 43 and later studies by the National Institutes of Health concluded “that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a type of chronic brain damage that has also been found in other deceased former NFL players), the only talk concerns making stronger helmets.
Indeed, more than 70 former NFL players have been diagnosed with progressive neurological disease after their deaths, and numerous studies have shown connections between the repetitive head trauma associated with football, brain damage and issues such as depression and memory loss.
Yet, in a poll taken some years ago, asking aspiring footballers if they knew that playing the sport would cause serious damage to their brains and bodies, would they still pursue the glory of the gridiron, a vast majority answered in the affirmative.
However, things may be changing. San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, one of the NFL’s top rookies this past season, recently told the host of a sports program that he was retiring “because of concerns about the long-term effects of repetitive head trauma.”
Borland, 24, said he notified the 49ers that he “made his decision after consulting with family members, concussion researchers, friends and current and former teammates, as well as studying what is known about the relationship between football and neurodegenerative disease.”
“I just honestly want to do what’s best for my health,” Borland said. “From what I’ve researched and what I’ve experienced, I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”
But of course he was characterized in some quarters as a girlie man simply because he doesn’t want to wind up in his old age in some rubber room playing handball with his own shit.
This begs the question: Is violence against one’s spouse in a fit of anger worst than the planned, premeditated, repetitive violence that men perpetrate on each other for the amusement of bloodthirsty hordes of fanatics?
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.