{"id":901,"date":"2013-10-09T17:17:28","date_gmt":"2013-10-09T17:17:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=901"},"modified":"2023-01-03T17:41:18","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T01:41:18","slug":"what-the-nfl-is-really-afraid-of-and-should-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=901","title":{"rendered":"What the NFL is Really Afraid Of — And Should Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I watched last night\u2019s PBS Frontline<\/em> report on brain damage in the NFL and learned little that I hadn\u2019t known before \u2013 except that things may be even worse than we now know, and that the professional football oligarchs are even less willing to deal with the ramifications.<\/p>\n

Kids make up the relatively undiscovered country for those probing the causes and effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which afflicts hundreds, perhaps thousands of those who\u2019ve played American tackle football. The frightening evidence emerging towards the end of \u201cLeague of Denial: The NFL\u2019s Concussion Crisis\u201d implies that even those who haven\u2019t played football for very long or been hit in the head very hard are susceptible to CTE. The program\u2019s producers and reporters are scrupulous enough to say such research is preliminary. Still, the idea of high school players becoming as suicidal or disoriented by CTE as veteran lineman who have battered each other senseless for decades makes you almost as queasy as watching human brains delivered and unpacked at laboratories for poking and gazing.<\/p>\n

As noted, most of the details in \u201cLeague of Denial\u201d have been covered before, notably by HBO\u2019s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel<\/em>, <\/a>ESPN\u2019s Outside the Lines<\/a>,<\/em> the recently-released documentary, The United States of Football<\/em> <\/a>and the New York Times\u2019 Alan Schwartz (among those interviewed), who\u2019s been growling and snapping at a recalcitrant NFL for almost two decades about the mounting evidence of CTE-related illnesses and deaths among retired and active players. As its title suggests, \u201cLeague of Denial\u2019s\u201d real story isn\u2019t about those who have suffered the effects of CTE, but the elaborate degrees to which the NFL has resorted to Cover Its Ass (CIA) against the revelations dislodged by Schwartz and others. That the documentary was aired on PBS and not on ESPN, which was pressured by the league to withdraw from a partnership with Frontline<\/em> on the program, only buttresses the points put forth by reporters Jim Gilmore, Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada. You cringe more in anger than dread over how the NFL tried to discredit, sometimes to the point of humiliation, doctors and researchers trying to counter the arguments made by the league\u2019s own research team \u2013 whose own findings were, saying the least, dubious, almost irresponsibly dismissive of any alarming trend.<\/p>\n

But, as somebody somewhere once said, scrape an arrogant bully and you\u2019ll soon reveal the squirming coward within. The NFL is wily enough to equivocate its way towards \u201cimproving safety\u201d and other CIA gestures; it\u2019s also smart enough to fear the consequences of inaction. The $765 million settlement the league made with players over concussion issues may buy enough time to figure out what to do next, especially since this furor has dealt mostly with long-term effects.<\/p>\n

So far, anyway. But still\u2026<\/p>\n

I wonder if NFL commissioner Roger Goodell knows enough about boxing history to acknowledge what happened \u2013 or started to happen \u2013 to that sport on the night of March 24, 1962 when Benny Paret and Emile Griffith met again to fight for the welterweight championship. The fight was broadcast live on the ABC network back in a time when Friday Night Fights<\/em> was as much of an American sports TV ritual as Sunday Night Football<\/em> is now. The story of that ill-fated match and its lingering, dismal aftermath has been well and fully chronicled in a haunting 2005 documentary, Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story.<\/em> For a long time, the story was simple enough: Paret taunted Griffith in the days leading up to their third and final bout as being a maricon, a derisive word for homosexual. Since then, others have speculated that it was the beatings Paret, as incumbent champion, had taken in his previous title defenses that made him more vulnerable to what would happen. Whatever the case, one thing is certain: During Round 12, before millions of viewers in addition to hundreds at Madison Square Garden, Paret somehow got tangled in the ropes and Griffith unleashed a vicious flurry of 29 successive punches, mostly to Paret\u2019s head. Paret slumped to floor and never regained consciousness. He died almost ten days later. (The moment, horrific as it was, summoned the very best of Norman Mailer’s prose. I have had journalism students whose resistance to Mailer was worn down by his descriptive powers here.)<\/p>\n

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