In the last few months, thoughts that football concussions have far dire ramifications than just headaches and blurry visions have skyrockets from conjecture to fact. This transition in thinking about sports-related concussions was exacerbated by a string of inexplicable player suicides, from Andre Waters to OJ Murdock to Junior Seau. Clearly, concussions cannot be the sole cause for suicide, nor can they replace potential mental and emotional issues. However, evidence of unusually accumulated tau in the brains of deceased athletes causes one to more intensely question the impacts of head injuries.
Sport is a funny animal, one that reimagines injury as an occupational hazard, a war wound, a sign of victory, an emblem of pride, or a way of protecting another teammate. The latter is particularly present in hockey, a sport in which certain players exist solely to occupy the position of “enforcer.” As a New York Rangers fan, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching Ulf Samuelsson (can there be a better-named enforcer) enter the ice simply to knock the other team’s best offensive players (specifically Cam Neely) back to the bench, spend a few minutes in the penalty box, and emerge to do it again.
Sport also teaches dedication, determination, family, integrity, and what better place for the documentary Head Games to begin than by a Pop Warner-football coach regaling his athletes with the story of David and Goliath, wherein the pad-clad boys are the underdogs fighting against the dominating giants on the other sideline – and their helmet is the “rock” that David launches.
As the film asserts, football is a way for the boys to stay off the streets. As one mother notes, the boys go to school and have practice immediately after until 8:00pm, so there’s nowhere for them to go afterwards but home to finish their homework. In tandem, decent grades are required – ideally — for the boys to remain on the team, so their time is occupied with things not found in dark alleyways. This point is understood and illustrates the fractured communities of many urban youths. At the same time, it’s difficult to justify subjecting children to “mild traumatic brain injury” (a glorious euphemism that somehow minimizes the definition of “traumatic”) that leads to a “loss of nerve cells,” a shrunken hippocampus, a higher likelihood of Alzheimer ’s disease, and “tremendous abnormalities throughout the gray matter” of the brain.
But we do, and we watch, every Sunday, cum Thursday, cum Saturday wild card playoff.
I’m not above this, which is what makes Head Games fascinating. It would be easy to pillory only football, as it is the most popular, profitable sport in the country. However, this documentary looks at head injuries in general, indicting hockey, lacrosse, soccer, boxing, professional wrestling, and football as concussion-enablers. It also looks at the athletic directors and various coaches who refuse to acknowledge that “concussion-like symptoms” equal concussions.
Of course, smaller college programs are not the only ones to feign ignorance. Roger Goodell and the National Football League have done this for years, until they were compared to the “tobacco industry,” placing the majority of liability on players and lack of scientific evidence to support their “billion-dollar industry.” In a separate, disturbing moment, Goodell likens the coincidence of 4/4 players with brain abnormalities who killed themselves to blaming swimming for causing concussions – because a number of divers each year smack their heads on the board. I understand the cursory logic here in that he’s trying to protect his business in the face of an indictment that – at the time – was not intensely researched (he had also recently taken over as commissioner from Paul Tagliabue).
But herein lies an example of the convoluted morality in the calculus of capitalism and humanity.
Or, at least, the question needs to be begged as to whether further investigation of head injuries – and the million dollars that the NFL donated to the Boston University Medical Center to study the effects of mild traumatic brain injuries – was encouraged because of the potential lawsuits that would eventually pile up. If preventative, it seems incentivized by capital. If reactionary, it appears to be the same.
At the same time, it was hard to shake my habit of watching intently the defensive backs collide with the wide receivers clobbered mid-field as examples of football’s intelligent application of violence. Head Games sprinkles in these images to remind us of the dangers of the sport, but this only sets in when we’re reminded that we’re supposed to recognize the violence and not connect it with the raucous excitement that has traditionally followed these plays.
Sport centralized our deeply undesirable, closeted, human natures: pride, hubris, shadenfraude, desire, narcissism. Somehow, because Joe Theisman’s leg was broken (to put it mildly) during a football game, millions of people are warranted to look for it on Youtube, and sports networks can show it on Worst Injuries in Sports lists. The pain becomes spectacle because the game has sanctioned it this way. (The same could be seen in Shaun Livingston’s atrocious leg injury or Clint Malarchuk’s neck injury.)
Bob Costas is correct when he states, “In most sports, the chance of injury is incidental; in football, the chance of injury is fundamental,” but this seems part and parcel when you “play to win the game.”
