There’s no way to save football, declared columnist George Will on a television talk show the other day.
Will was addressing the growing number of traumatic brain injuries suffered by football players — from high school age through the professional ranks.
Will points out that in 1980 there were only three NFL players who weighed over 300 pounds. Today there are three over 350 pounds and 352 who weigh 300 or more.
“Over 20 yards, which is where a lot of football is played, these guys are as fast as cats, fast as running backs, and the kinetic energy is producing what is called chronic traumatic encepthalopathy. The crucial word is chronic. Repeated, small but repeated blows to the head, the brain floating in the pan in the skull, now we know causes early dementia and other problems.”
Will went on to say he expects parents to begin pulling their sons off football squads as knowledge about the dangers of the sport spreads.
Another solution would be to disqualify players who weighed more than 165 pounds. Seems logical to me: I never weighed any more than that.
But knowing that civil rights groups would never allow this kind of prejudice to rule on free American playing fields, I withdraw the motion.
Football probably can’t be fixed. And as players get bigger, faster and meaner, the number of chronic brain injuries will multiply. We may as well get used to it.
So add football to the list of sometimes-fatal sports: rock climbing, car racing, skiing, scuba diving, water skiing and soccer (they hit that hard ball with their heads, time after time) — just to name those which pop to mind.
And the moral is: make sport as safe as it can be made and still be sport — and recognize that living is risky, which is part of the reason that it’s fun.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
