Football and the Body

Inveterate baseball fan George Will has a column today summarizing the increasingly troubling science of football and brain injury:

The opening of the NFL training camps coincided with the closing of the investigation into the April suicide by gunshot of Ray Easterling, 62, an eight-season NFL safety in the 1970s. The autopsy found moderately severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), progressive damage to the brain associated with repeated blows to the head. CTE was identified as a major cause of Easterling’s depression and dementia.

In February 2011, Dave Duerson, 50, an 11-year NFL safety, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest to spare his brain tissue for research, which has found evidence of CTE. Brain tissue of 20-season linebacker Junior Seau, who was 43 when he killed himself the same way in May, is being studied. The NFL launched a mental health hotline developed and operated with the assistance of specialists in suicide prevention.

Increasingly huge linemen also suffer increasingly from cadiovascular disease:

For all players who play five or more years, life expectancy is less than 60; for linemen it is much less.

As Jason Reid once put it, "Football players are killing themselves slowly."

I have been wondering, lately, how this medical knowledge is going to affect football culture over the long run. What I imagine is that football will slowly slide from being a mass phenomena to niche sport like boxing, an "increasingly guilty pleasure" as Will says. Certainly youth football will shrink as more and more mothers refuse to let their sons participate. I wonder if more and more of the players will come poor countries in Africa.

I find that I enjoy the game less than I used to, and I have been weaning myself from it.