Can Sport Media Act as Free Press in Football Crisis?

Seemingly incapable, mainstream media must lead reform
Oldtime abolishment specter revisits American game

By Matt Chaney

I. Introduction

II. Football-Media Complex Cleanses Game’s Dirty Laundry

III. Media Sell Football as Injury Crisis Reaches Public Agenda

IV. Forces Besiege Rotten Racket of Football and Pal Media
V. Media Gamble by Trusting Football, Avoiding Real Reform
VI. Recommendatins for Mainstream Sport Media

“But there is no cry to end football, nor will there be, because every society decides what it is willing to pay for its entertainment.”
James A. Michener, author, 1976

Regardless whether America really wants to know, historic problems are converging against football, the kill game and entertainment megalith facing threat for first time in a century, especially for head injuries of athletes.

Yet the party band plays on, up on the poop deck, mainstream sport media, generally unhearing as their formerly unsinkable Good Ship Football hits litigious straits.

American football organizations and friend media are all about ignoring the game’s dark side, anyway, like regular teen maiming and death, for sake of their lucrative, synergistic marketing that has pandered to audiences since the Victorian Age.

Football in the TV age is national religion for society and sacred cash-cow for organizers and media, perfectly satisfying consumer tastes for athletic feats, vicarious violence and social interaction. For Americans, the Super Bowl holds much higher appeal than a presidential debate, which pulls a fraction of TV viewership compared to this football game. Super Sunday inspires tens of billion dollars in money changing, establishes a de facto national holiday, and commands attention and spending of almost half the citizenry. An estimated billion people watch worldwide in about 190 countries.

“The entertainment’s good—as long as you’re not out there," mused the late Steve Courson, former NFL lineman for Super Bowl teams.

Ah, the catch for America’s football party since 1869: Millions of young people play this game every year, including an estimated three million in wild-west youth leagues, where games and practices largely operate without certified athletic trainers. Medical personnel are rare at youth action, concludes Alan Schwarz for the New York Times, reporting that “when a child is hurt, a parent, assuming one is present, walks out on the field, scoops up the child and carries him or her off.”

Tens of thousand serious injuries occur, children to young adult, their bodies a disposable commodity feeding the football spectacle. America may live with the brutality since football has killed thousands directly and indirectly over 140 years, while disabling millions. But someone always pays for the carnage, namely the unsuspecting public in costs for healthcare and insurance.

The smug football-media complex cannot damn the torpedoes anymore, cannot ignore long-burning problems—and atrocious debt to the public—not with terrible economy and a legal storm gathering to ravage the game. Football and media must act immediately, beginning with unprecedented open discussion of systemic problems, followed by valid moves forward, or unfavorable judgments of courts and insurance carriers will dismantle the game.

Cosmetic rules and posturing, in sudden response to football’s inherent violence, do not resolve anything. Third-party dissection and governing of collisions on a football field for establishing a quote safer tackle football is futile, hocus-pocus policy.

Speeding, helmeted football players can refrain from head contact? Really? Effective tests for muscle drugs, bus trips to Mars have a better chance.

And proper medical handling of football head injury is impossible for most the institution as it stands, thousands of underfunded programs in youth leagues, schools and colleges where complete coaching staffs aren’t even feasible. Certified trainers and immediate medical aid are wishful thinking for this outback sector.

Trial lawyers are salivating, unimpressed by attempts to prevent head trauma in football. Indeed, many legal experts believe anti-concussion law and policy only increases liability risk for the sport, raising stakes for personnel from athletes to coaches, trainers, doctors and administrators.

“Without disputing the seriousness of concussions, we note a rising level of interest, commentary and activity surrounding the issue on the part (of) the litigation industry. …,” observes Carter Wood, blogging for PointofLaw.com. “Ill-defined or hard-to-diagnose injuries—think soft-tissue injuries—obviously hold an appeal for plaintiffs’ lawyers pursuing damages. Passing a federal law would lend legitimacy to claims made in such lawsuits.”

In March 2009, months before Congress would uncharacteristically slam the NFL for a concussion epidemic, an attorney specializing in brain injury, Paul A. Slager, blogged the following for Sports Litigation Alert: “Recent revelations about permanent brain trauma suffered by football players raise serious ethical questions and liability concerns about head trauma in sports. Public understanding about the lasting effects of serious head injuries has been growing in recent years.”

Bad news extends elsewhere for football, beyond abhorrent casualties, if hardly addressed by sportswriters churning out the daily mountain of scores, statistics and hype. More bombs are dropping, modern, evolving legal vulnerabilities for football that include rampant drug use, sham NCAA amateurism, and even individual creepiness, jocks’ stalking women such as league and college employees.

Football fandom stands mostly uninterested of perils to the game, outside salacious superstar scandal like quarterback Brett Favre’s, but not surprisingly. Typically for developing disaster, the modern American way is to change the channel. America also tried to ignore economic meltdown in September 2008, which broke quietly in news over a weekend, with the culture in ritual football stupor, of course.

But the legal forces are set loose, and the wealthy, resourceful NFL should be the least of concern. Rather, football’s vast hinterland is particularly at-risk today, the Everyman leagues of schools and small colleges; they truly face legal danger, while youth organizations without backing of deep cash appear finished already.

Only journalists and policymakers can prevent unmitigated disaster for the sport.

History heavily favors the latter, incidentally, because revolutionary football reform would first require sea change in the mutual, inextricable business practice of the institution and mainstream media.

II. Football-Media Complex Cleanses Game’s Dirty Laundry

The business collusion between football and news was glaring in the case of embattled quarterback Brett Favre, before mainstream media would acknowledge the married NFL star’s vile “sexting” to former Jets employee Jenn Sterger.

Well before. The lame-stream media, playing God as usual with information damaging to the football empire—and thus anathema for these grid-partner outlets—sat on the Favre story for two months after its Aug. 4 breakout on the Deadspin Website.

The silence of TV and print was terrible journalism, an alarming conflict of interest because Favre was otherwise a major media figure of the moment. Sport reporters were in annual vigil over whether the hero would return to play from annual retirement. Favre also served as multi-million-dollar pitchman for products like Wrangler jeans, based on good-guy image or wholesomeness quotient for advertising, with “family man” an assumed quality of his. Moreover, the Favre allegations flew virally through Internet once unleashed on Deadspin.

Yet old media insisted on looking away last summer, dismissing the allegations as groundless rumor because Sterger didn’t cooperate with Deadspin's releasing the information. No reporter asked Favre if the story were true and no TV network addressed it. Only two newspapers published reports, the New York Daily News and the New York Post, while a gossip columnist made mention for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

“Ignoring one of the most talked about stories of the week, at a time when traditional news organizations are challenged on many fronts, seems like a mistake—a business mistake,” Milwaukee media critic Tim Cuprisin observed on Aug. 12, referring to huge audience for the scoop.

Actually, covering for Favre was strictly business for the football-media complex, but the proverbial crap hit fan on Oct. 7, with Deadspin’s fresh posting of Favre voice mail and alleged “dong photos” that he sent the 23-year-old Sterger two years ago, when both worked for the Jets. Media finally questioned Favre, now with the Vikings, and he declined comment on his messages to Sterger, stammering about having “my hands full with the Jets,” Minnesota’s next opponent.

Still reporters dallied nationwide, waiting another day to address the scandal, until the NFL announced an “investigation” of Perv Favre. The hero QB had officially turned from asset to toxin for the football-media complex. “I wasn’t expecting a Tiger Woods-like apocalypse,” columnist Jason Whitlock wrote for FoxSports.com. “But it seemed like most of the media folks I monitor on Twitter… were afraid to touch the Favre situation. I’m not sure why.” Surely Whitlock jested, as the rare sportswriter who often rips mainstream colleagues for shoddy practice.

The football-media alliance—and its objective to suppress negative news—is long documented. Sheer financial numbers stand in testament, historical data on broadcast rights and advertising, while supportive critique includes academic research and revelations of media insiders like Whitlock.

“Newspapers, radio and television… have prudently presented sports as entertainment,” author James A. Michener wrote in 1976. “Consequently, one of the happiest relationships in American society is that between sports and the media. This interface is delightfully symbiotic, since each helps the other survive.”

By the 1980s, critics were resigned to the sport-media grip on word. “Big Sports and Big Television are interlocked in a common interest,” media analyst Ron Powers observed for Inside Sports magazine. “TV’s mission is to make sports as attractive a package as possible—so as to catch an audience for delivery to advertisers. By what perversion of human nature should those same Big Sports Departments be expected to turn around and act as adversary watchdogs upon activities of their business partners?”

Neal Pilson, then-president of CBS Sports, was remarkably open about the arrangement. “When you are sponsoring events and generating profits, you can create conflicts and problems,” Pilson told Peter Alfano of the New York Times in 1983. “In CBS Sports, we have major business relationships that are worth in the billions of dollars and are renewable. You cannot use the people associated with CBS Sports to investigate the morals of the people you do business with.” Pilson said the network news division would handle in-depth reporting on public issues in athletics. “We can cover breaking stories like the use of drugs… But basically we are event-oriented. Maybe we shouldn’t be, and people will say it’s a copout, but that’s the business. It doesn’t mean, though, that we are not journalists.”

What? However illogical Pilson seemed then, the football-media complex is wackier now for mixed news signals, conflicting values, given monster elements like ESPN, the content kaleidoscope populated with everyone from Jockocrats and more NFL cheerleaders to hardcore analysts and investigative reporters.

Money is phunny fat in the complex. NFL franchises and the NCAA cartel used to charge TV networks billions of dollars over a course of years; now they collectively command billions in a season. The NFL markets its own TV network, Website and video streams, and some franchises own property such as team cable channels. In NCAA football, big conferences operate TV networks.

On the flop, media capitalize. ESPN, for example, sees solid return on its $1.1 billion for NFL rights alone every year, according to analysts. “No doubt the NFL has been good to ESPN as the network generated an estimated $3 billion in earnings before interest and taxes last year and is the most profitable media property in the world,” Kurt Badenhausen recently calculated for Forbes.com. “The NFL is the engine that makes ESPN go across all platforms including television, online, print and radio.”

Ad sales for broadcasts remain lucrative in a limp market, including sellout inventory for a Super Bowl, generating about $2.4 million per 30-second spot—and spawning pop sensations in some commercials. Football print news from preps to pros, meanwhile, is lynchpin content for newspapers, Websites and magazines, publications large and small across America and extending abroad. As a whole, football generates untold billions in advertising, with NFL franchises and NCAA schools among sales clients for media.

Television, of course, has jacked audience numbers and ratings on packaged football for a half-century, so it draws most flak for lousy news coverage on problems in the sport. But football’s ability to deflect a public health issue amazed critics long before Teflon and the boob tube.

Newspapers and magazines have enjoyed financial symbiosis with football—and concealed its bloody underbelly—since the game and Golden Press achieved national expansion arm-in-arm. The theory that “media made sport,” a phrase attributed to communication researcher Robert McChesney, is manifest in the case of American football. During a tempestuous early growth period, the latter 1800s through World War I, the press helped football outlast several assaults by determined abolitionists, people of all types outraged by ridiculous injury and death.

The sport phenomenon had begun humbly, a game to be merely played, not watched nor marketed. Rough boys at elite universities founded tackle football following the Civil War, a crude mix of soccer and rugby. But the burgeoning mass media took over and positioned football to grow enormous audience.

“That the popular press was primary, the game itself secondary, in football’s extraordinarily rapid emergence as a popular spectacle and cultural force is one of the inescapable conclusions of my inquiry,” cultural analyst Michael Oriard, an English professor and former NFL player, summarized in his 1993 book, Reading Football. Oriard reviewed thousands of Golden Press texts, identifying the game’s irresistible quality as a “contact ballet,” or athleticism in face of annihilation. The social setting and ongoing drama acts, or games, were also potent sellers.

Period sportswriters and editors framed the sport in grand storylines and drawings, and popularity surged for “the gridiron.” Football appeal transmitted powerfully on the printed page, mythical messages as much as factual. In turn, the sport created smashing new media in establishment of sports sections and the entire Sunday newspaper.

Oriard concluded football serves as “major cultural text,” a perpetual story of recurring media themes functioning as feel-good fantasy for the nation. From the beginning, media presentations had to be tasty versions of football that sanitized or outright ignored bitter reality. Fans wanted the bloody acts but with positive meanings attached, and football writers obliged enthusiastically.

Golden Press sportswriters and illustrators had to rationalize the carnage, as fans and extended workers of football, so they constructed basic themes of glory to feed wholesale denial that would spiral on among complicit parties of athletes, coaches, organizers, media and consumers.

Those basic media narratives of fantasy football rotate yet today, this hour. The same thematic umbrella shields the game, essentially portraying it as a laboratory for man-building and coaching genius staged in exciting, patriotic action for spectators in stadiums and for viewers of screens.

But new-world realism has come to pierce football delusion, demanding American acknowledgement and action on the game’s issues, especially for costs to the public.

Because the football malfeasance—its tentacles embedded in news, education, government, healthcare, insurance—is too evident, too accessible through contemporary multi-media no longer controlled by mainstream networks and publications. The football-media complex can no longer fashion word as it chooses.

The unfiltered picture is finally becoming clear, as ugly as it really gets.

III. Media Sell Gory Football as Injury Crisis Reaches Public Agenda

In the daily news menu, amid media season of football marketing, look beyond the pounding mythology of gridiron glory stories streaming forth infinitely—heroic players, great teams, big games in cycle---and find topics of the pastime’s untenable ills. Mainstream news content is anchored by football’s audience power, for print and television, and the game’s systemic negatives still hold low profile overall.

But alarms are sounding, drawing public scrutiny that’s getting intense, particularly from authorities who count. Lawmakers, judges, juries, attorneys and insurance officials are collectively poised to remake or break the game that seems unstoppable to fans.

Much has gone wrong for football in recent decades, varied issues impacting all levels of the nationalized sport. Foremost, head injury has become football’s legal nightmare through court decisions and accumulating clinical proof that brain trauma can debilitate and kill in any activity of contact, and slowly, through lighter impacts known as “sub-concussive.”

Football, the sport of necessary head contact, glamorized for violence by news media, institutionalized by 15,000 school districts and about 2,000 colleges, cannot even avoid brain trauma in “flag” competition for the collisions of speeding people. “Two years ago, two Lake Worth High flag football players suffered concussions in the same game,” Hal Habib recently reported, Palm Beach Post.

The issue of head wounding, often diagnosed as old injury, has exploded into critical questions of tort law for healthcare and liability, and injured players have won civil suits. Events in the issue timeline include:

*1976, National Federation of State High School Associations implements football rule prohibiting use of the head for initial contact in blocking and tackling.

*1995, former college player Michael Pinson wins lawsuit against the University of Tennessee-Martin and state for negligence of an athletic trainer who handled a 1984 brain injury that left Pinson with “severe and permanent neurological damage.” Court judgment awards him $300,000.

*2003, The NCAA Concussion Study is published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, founded on cases of injured collegiate football players. In concert with research on military casualties and the car-crash impacts of football contact, the football study raises concussion awareness for injury areas such as acute effects, diagnosis, recovery time and lasting impairments.

*2004-06, family of deceased NFL lineman Mike Webster wins lawsuit against the disability-pension fund, awarded retroactive benefits. Settlement total of about $2 million includes interest, legal fees and court costs. Doctors testified Webster suffered permanent damage of multiple concussions, “frontal lobe syndrome,” during a pro Hall of Fame career that ended in 1990 at Kansas City. One doctor said Webster likely suffered brain impairment as an active player. Steve Courson, Webster’s teammate and friend on Super Steelers title teams of the 1970s, said, “Here’s a guy that gave 17 years to the league, and you know the reason why he’s no longer with us: The fact that the win-at-all-costs mentality in football, as much as anything, killed that man. It’s got to be embarrassing for the (Steelers) organization. It has to. That was so unnecessary.”

*2007, winter-spring, disability cause for retired NFL players gains public traction through revelations of media. Support groups and a congressional hearing gain spotlight. Disabled retirees allege the union disability-pension board stonewalls their efforts for due benefits. Among demands, retirees press for treatment and compensation for concussion effects such as depression, cognitive dysfunction and dementia.

*2007, summer, NFL alerts active players and their families to new information on concussions, including research and recommendations for safe management. League pledges to continue its research on long-term effects while expanding neuropsychological testing for active players before and after injury.

*2007, fall, NFL implements rule that a player knocked unconscious cannot reenter a game.

*2007, September, concussion experts conclude brain damage could have spurred late pro wrestler Chris Benoit’s violent rampage three months before, the murders of his wife and son and his suicide. A researcher who studied Benoit’s brain tissue terms the damage of repetitive blows as “striking… maybe shocking in the extent.”

*2008, October, with research accelerating on sport-related concussions, a Boston University study finds evidence of “chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” or CTE, unhealthy browning and “tau” splotches in the brain tissue of deceased NFL players. “These athletes were in their 30s and 40s and had complained of memory loss and behavioral changes that made sense only in death, when their brains showed pathological signs of disease and cell death,” a report states. A research bank is established for athletes to pledge their brains for research following death, and donations begin.

*2009, January, a “breakthrough” study finds early signs of degenerative disease in brain tissue of a deceased 18-year-old football player. “The findings are very shocking because we never thought anybody that young would already be started down the path to this disease,” says Dr. Robert Cantu, leading the research team at the BU School of Medicine’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy

*2009, January, former high-school player Zach Frith settles for $3 million after filing lawsuit over brain damage he sustained as 14-year-old during 2005 football season in Missouri. The plaintiff Lafayette County C-1 School District did not contest the lawsuit in court and does not admit liability under the settlement. The district’s insurance carrier pays damages.

*2009, January, Super Bowl week, experts on concussions in football voice concerns as media speculate about superstar Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, who suffered head trauma a month previous. Chris Nowinski, a book author, former Harvard player and concussion victim himself, says, “Today we’re here to declare there’s a concussion crisis in football. … We can’t keep finding this out by autopsy.”

*2009, September, an NFL telephone survey of retirees finds memory-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s “appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population—including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49,” reports Alan Schwarz for the New York Times.

*2009, September-October, Times reports by Schwarz lead other media in elevating public debate on football concussions. The evidence is damning of systemic dangers, few safeguards, and of official denial and evasion. Two widely discussed magazine exposés are written by Jeanne Marie Laskas for GQ and Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker.

*2009, Oct. 15, politicians set hearing date in Washington, likely reacting to media deluge on head injury in football. Pols summon NFL brass to Washington, particularly league commissioner Roger Goodell, who missed previous hearings on other problems.

The congressional hearing on Oct. 28, 2009, titled “Legal Issues Relating to Football Head Injuries, Part I,” was watershed for concussions in football, primarily because the vaunted, cavalier modern NFL finally got smacked down in public. Opinion brokers of America, particularly national politicians and media, had not condemned football brutality for generations.

NFL immunity vaporized around this hearing and officials got skewered, with instant repercussion dowline in the sport: Football bureaucrats from preps to pros could no longer minimize the epidemic of head trauma, especially Goodell and “The League,” without heated debate from mounting opposition.

The league typically enjoyed heavy clout in Washington, richly financed and enhanced through lobby and the connections of former commissioner Paul Tagliabue, a D.C. insider himself—a 1960s Georgetown U. hoops star and later longtime attorney in the city—who vacated his NFL job in 2006.

But Goodell inherited the stormburst over concussions and took the brunt on Capitol Hill, drawing stern rebuke and lecture from the House Judiciary Committee. League officials had not fared so badly in Washington since the erstwhile regime of commissioner Pete Rozelle.

At the hearing, Goodell and an academic contracted by the NFL, University of Michigan research professor David R. Weir, tried to assert that no credible link of cause and effect had been made between contact football and brain damage such as CTE. Goodell and Weir suggested dementia was more a cultural problem.

“Those who assert that the rates reported by former players definitively show a higher risk do so by greatly underestimating the extent of dementia and cognitive impairment in the general population,” Weir said in his opening statement, even noting the “major” limitations of his own team’s recent survey of NFL retirees where respondents reported extraordinary rates of dementia.

Goodell, responding to experts who questioned NFL research methods and progress, said the league had studied football concussions over two decades and needed more time.

The majority of committee members lashed back, citing studies that independent experts believed established the NFL link to brain damage of players. Several lawmakers expressed disgust, anger, at the deplorable injuries and treatment of disabled retirees.

Women mercilessly attacked good-old-boy pro football at the hearing, including several who had intimate experience of NFL brutality and official tact for blaming individuals, athletes only.

“This is a business. It is a blanking cutthroat business,” testified former team executive Gay Culverhouse, an advocate of retired players whose family once owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “The bottom line is making money. And if their player ain’t playing and the team is losing, that is the bottom line.”

Culverhouse said athletes are “disposable commodity” paid in large part for performing, manning their jobs every week with little regard for wounds and imminent danger. “There is a draft coming up every April, and these players fight to hold onto their jobs. And they welcome (pain-killing) shots and anything else that will keep them on the field. This is, in my idea, inhumane.”

Committee member Rep. Maxine Waters, of California, announced her husband was former NFL player Sid Williams, then proceeded to rip Goodell. “How many players do you have out there who are suffering now, or have suffered from, dementia, or other injuries related to playing football that have not been taken care of because of your benefits packages of the past?” Waters posed.

Goodell replied in PR fluff, yakking, and Waters cut him off in mid-sentence. “We have heard from the NFL time and time again,” the politician said tersely. “You are always ‘studying,’ you are always ‘trying,’ you are ‘hopeful.’ I want to know, what are you doing in the (collective bargaining) negotiations that are going on now to deal with this problem, and other problems related to the injuries that football players obtain, and its impact on their health later on?”

Goodell meandered toward answer again and Waters pounced, interrupting. “I think that you are a, what, $8 billion organization who has not taken seriously your responsibility to the players,” she said. “The fact of the matter is, yes, people want to play. The fact of the matter is they are going to be injured. And we know, no matter what kind of helmet you build, no matter what kind of equipment that you have, it is a dangerous sport and people are going to be injured.”

“The only question is, what are you going to do? Are you going to pay for it? Are you going to pay the injured players and their families for the injuries that they have received in helping you to be a multi-billion operation?” Waters concluded her time by proclaiming Congress should review the NFL antitrust exemption “and, in my estimation, take it away.”

The female perspectives invigorated discussion and debate, grabbing attention of media accustomed to benign football hearings, protocol catering to officials like the lawyerly Tagliabue, an intimidator who expected softball questions from fawning pols. And this time the women’s questions of substance rang right with a neo-American sensitivity, a grassroots compassion for those gravely ill among us, particularly loved ones forsaken or abused by an increasingly cold healthcare industry.

The personal story of football injury, the suffering, sacrifice, passion and love entwined, was articulated at the concussions hearing by self-described “pushy broad” Eleanor Perfetto, wife of dementia-impaired former NFL lineman Ralph Wenzel. Perfetto, a licensed pharmacist with a doctorate in public health, once got cold-shouldered by Goodell in hotel hallway, as she was barred from a meeting with disabled retirees.

In Washington, Perfetto commanded Goodell’s attention and of football at-large. Her husband had been an offensive guard in the NFL for seven seasons until retiring in 1974. Twenty years later, Ralph Wenzel experienced misfires in his faculties, lapsing into uneasiness, anxiety and depression, symptoms that researchers soon associated with CTE.

“And in the fall of 1999… at the age of 56, Ralph was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, which progressed to severe dementia,” Perfetto said in her opening statement. “In the last 10 years, Ralph has lost his ability to work, drive, play golf, read, cook, and enjoy a glass of wine. He can no longer dress, bathe, or feed himself. He lost his sense of humor, he lost his personality, and he lost his dignity. He lost it all.”

“Almost three years ago, I had to place Ralph in an assisted-living facility for dementia patients, and he resides there today. Frankly, my husband no longer has a life. … In almost 15 years since our ordeal began, we have been through many ups and downs. You have a spouse who becomes aloof, disconnected, irresponsible, who may be hostile and you don’t know why. The diagnosis is frightening, but it is also a relief. You finally understand why these things are happening. It is not you, it is not him, it is an illness. …”

“But there are many out there in the situation that Ralph and I have been in over the last 15 years, and they need help. I speak with family members (of retirees) regularly, and I help them find doctors and other services. Often I simply just talk to distraught women and help them get through it. They turn to me because they have no place to go and they are finding their way the way I did years ago.”

At conclusion of the hearing, Goodell and the NFL had avoided liability hari-kari, for his declining to acknowledge a link between league play and brain damage of players. But that left the NFL as public villain in the issue, and Goodell quickly made moves to appear he and the NFL still donned white hats. First, the commissioner transferred responsibility onto players, contending “dangerous” techniques of individual players were culprit, not the system.

Goodell announced the resignation of NFL medical committee co-chair Dr. Ira Casson, whom politicians and media trashed for his insistence about no confirmed link between football and brain damage. Then Goodell allied the league with opposition voices, funding research and wooing critics such as Dr. Cantu of Boston University, whose work had been discredited by Casson.

Goodell deemed that independent neurologists would participate in concussion management of injured players, that rules and coaching techniques would be evaluated for reducing head impacts, and the NFL would join the Center for Disease Control in educating “young athletes and their parents and coaches on the importance of head-injury awareness.” The league would fund research into improved equipment and instruct players “to make informed choices” on using “the most technologically advanced helmets.” And, of course, Goodell promised to continue work for the plight of disabled retirees.

“We have undertaken a series of initiatives that will enhance the substantial progress we have made in recent years in concussion-related matters,” Goodell stated, declaring player safety took precedence over winning in his league.

That sounds good to sport media who just want their football, anyway, but legal guns remain fixed on the game for violence. Ongoing events include accumulating research, anti-concussion laws, more government hearings, predictable casualties, scary big hits and controversial rules—and hefty lawsuit settlements for former players, suffering damage of head trauma.

IV. Forces Besiege Rotten Racket of Football and Pal Media

At least American football can count on The Weather Channel these days, cable TV’s cheery forecasters who maintain the trusted storytelling of happy gridiron tales. TWC specializes in classic media theme that strokes spectator vanity, portraying fans as part of football action through their tailgate feasts, funny costumes, whoops and chants. TWC tells fandom that we really matter besides the gold we heap in offering to King Football, our national god. Bodily harm of real players? TWC only shows body paint in team colors, donned by fans and applied on pets.

But football’s partner media, sycophants in TV, radio and print, show strain in the relationship for having to cover the game affliction of head injuries. This is news unequivocally in 2010, among long-time football problems with nary solution in sight.

Even Jockocrats are conflicted, former NFL players turned media “commentators” whose role is to sing league praises. Their jobs might depend on it, but some Jockocrats have slammed the system for toothless anti-concussion rules and arbitrary enforcement that punish players with fine or suspension for “dangerous hits.” Jockocrats, thusly termed by author Robert Lipsyte in his seminal SportsWorld, are expected to criticize athletes, coaches and teams over wins and losses, and individuals over serious issues like brutality and doping—but their rhetoric should never affix fault on the league or football, much less question the sport’s very existence.

Mark Schlereth of ESPN broke Jocko rank thunderously on Oct. 20, with his compelling, informed tirade against NFL spin about instituting so-called safer football.

National furor had erupted the Sunday before, over televised NFL hits to heads, while a college player’s paralyzing spinal-cord injury during the weekend also raised volume. NFL commissioner Goodell reacted on Wednesday, levying fines against three defenders of sudden infamy for their collisions with offensive opponents. Pittsburgh linebacker and overnight villain James Harrison was fined $75,000 for two head knocks on Cleveland players, or playing the style he was taught and rewarded for, previously.

Then Schlereth jumped into the debate, ridiculing punishment of players and the societal delusion for changing football to become a game of “clean” hits. “Too bad the acronym NHL has been taken because we could call (the NFL) the ‘National Hypocrite League,’ ” Schlereth said on ESPN, brandishing a highlight DVD the league marketed for head-cracking collisions among players.

Moreover, the NFL had just ceased marketing pictures of the controversial hits, including Harrison’s, on a vendor Website. “The NFL sells it, and to take away $75,000 from a player who’s just playing is ludicrous to me,” Shlereth fumed, calling the fine “criminal” on part of the league.

“We glorify these hits,” the ESPN analyst and former lineman noted, the rare Jockocrat biting back on the entire football-media complex, the hand feeding Schlereth and his ilk for decades. “We make money on these hits,” he said. “That’s what we do (on ESPN), and the NFL profits on that.”

   

“You can’t take the NFL and what we do and eliminate (head) contact. The game of football is about going out there and separating the man from the ball. Going out there and playing hard. It’s reaction. The players are so fast, so big and so strong, it happens in a moment’s notice. It’s not like players are saying, ‘Watch me try to decapitate someone.’ ”

Schlereth rebuked the NFL’s false substance, acting as though violence could be scrubbed from the golden spectacle. “Go out on the field and don’t hit anybody, and let’s see how popular your game is,” he said.

Football, however, really has no choice this year but to act, earnestly or not. Officials must try something to prevent head injuries, or appear to, because American opinion on football now includes condemnation and fear, not merely the requisite adoration and loyalty. Game image flaps about in political winds, a flag alternatively positive and negative, reflecting legal strength or vulnerability depending on who, what are on attack in the moment.

Football Struggles Against Head Trauma as Litigation Looms

Former La Salle University linebacker Preston Plevretes and his legal team rocked football in late 2009, winning a $7.5 million settlement for a concussion and a subsequent debilitating brain injury he suffered in 2005, when he was 19. The university settled the case the day before it went to trial without any acknowledgement of error, and its insurance carrier paid damages. The university had dropped football in 2007, when a spokesperson said the decision wasn’t related to the lawsuit.

The Plevretes family declined a confidentiality agreement in order to raise awareness, their lawyer told the New York Times. The case “has shone a more intense spotlight on an exposure (risk of football) that has been a concern of higher education risk managers and insurers for years,” wrote Dan Reynolds, senior editor for Rick & Insurance magazine. “It is a teaching moment,” concurred Bonney Hebert, president of Academic Risk Resources & Insurance LLC in Boston.

A recent PBS analysis determined tackle football is “at a crossroads,” suggesting America must rethink its beloved pastime nurtured by public education, with the evidence of menace to children too great. “Since 1997, at least 50 high school or younger football players in more than 20 states have died or suffered serious head traumas on the field. …,” Imani M. Cheers reported for NewsHour Extra. “Taylor Davidson, 10, the only girl in a pee-wee league, was hit in the head during a scrimmage at her school. After complaining of dizziness and a headache, she died in 2003 from a subdural hematoma, or bleeding in the brain.”

Research news gets worse for tackle football, as more scientists and academics examine head injuries across sports and the government continues hearings that spotlight findings.

A recent study linked head trauma to some NFL retirees who are diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral scleroris, ALS, which slowly destroys muscle function until death. BU researcher Dr. Ann McKee concluded that ALS-like symptoms can result when brain injury converts healthy tau proteins to toxic form; HBO’s Real Sports reported higher than normal rates of ALS diagnosed in NFL retirees, Canadian football players, and soccer players in Italy.

At Purdue University, researchers concluded brain damage sometimes occurs without visible concussion symptoms, a finding that highlights quandary of proper diagnosis and management. The news shook prep football in particular, which struggles against the concussion problem for lack of resources. Among 21 high-school players monitored in the study, 4 were found to have suffered “sub-clinical concussions,” which, if missed by doctors, can lead to worse injury. “If I had a son playing football, I’d watch him closer,” said Dr. Dan Kraft, co-director of the Indiana Sports Concussion Network.

Previously, prep and youth coaches thought concussions mostly affected college and pro football, for bigger and faster players. But many medical authorities say more risk surrounds children or teens because their brains are still in development. “During practice and during games, a single player can sustain close to 1,000 hits to the head, in only one season, without any documented or reported incapacitating concussion,” said Dr. Bennet I. Omahu, director of the Brain Injury Research Institute at West Virginia University. “Such repeated blows over several years, no doubt, can result in permanent impairment of brain functioning, especially in a child.”

A correlating review at BU was the brain autopsy of deceased college player Owen Thomas, a head-ramming linebacker at Penn who committed suicide in April. Toxic tau and browning of tissue were found, the early stages of CTE, although Thomas was never diagnosed with concussion or depression. His parents said Owen never complained of a headache during 12 years of tackle football, which he played aggressively. Doctors “cautioned that Thomas’s suicide should not be attributed solely or even primarily to the damage in his brain, given the prevalence of suicide among college students in general,” Schwarz reported for The Times. “But they said that a 21-year-old’s having developed the disease so early raised the possibility that it played a role in his death…”

The extent of concussions in football is incalculable, but researcher Dawn Comstock estimates 70,000 annually among 1.2 million high-school players. Some data suggest hundreds of thousand are affected by severe head trauma, with a large majority of cases missed or unreported. In youth football, about 140,000 concussions occur among three million players, according to Comstock, national injury analyst at Ohio State University.

A handful of states have passed laws governing concussion management in sports, and about a dozen others consider action. The laws mandate education for coaches, immediate removal of suspected injured players from competition, and qualified medical clearance for their return.

At federal level, one bill has passed in the House and awaits the Senate, where a similar measure has been introduced and some form of the two is expected to reach vote. A second House bill has been referred to committee. “Many states have taken action, but there is little regulation on the whole to ensure that students in every state will have the same minimum protections,” said Rep. George Miller, of California, who chairs the Education and Labor Committee.

Protecting football and the people in charge, meanwhile, seems the overriding goal of many personnel at every level, youth leagues to pros, as lawsuits and settlements keep coming. “What drives a lot of decisions is liability,” said James Tobias-Becker, specialist in learning resources at Notre Dame De La Baie Academy. “The insurance and cost could drive football out of some high schools in the next decade.”

Legal risk heightens as funding drops everywhere in football but at the biggest colleges and NFL. In Washington, after the state established the first anti-concussion law, Schwarz, investigative reporter for The Times, found there a paltry amount of dedicated resources, short-circuiting awareness and conformity. Prep players still suffered head injuries, often with the nearest medical attention far from game or practice sites, and school personnel were often of little help, Two-thirds of the state’s districts did not even provide an athletic trainer for football. Parents of the injured encountered doctors and nurses with no specialized training in concussions, and some parents believed their teens were cleared to play again too soon.

But education officials of Washington state were keen on legal risks for managing head trauma in football, Schwarz discovered. One mother asked her son’s school district to begin baseline neurological testing on its football players, a program employed by some schools seeking better clarity in diagnosis and treatment. She was told the technology presented “liability and legal issues” and wasn’t recommended by either the district insurance carrier or the state association overseeing school athletics.

An official of the insurance pool for Washington schools, Mary Sue Linville, said her group follows advice of the athletic association in avoiding baseline testing for managing concussions. “If you purchase the program, you better be using it consistently and properly, because if you don’t, that opens up liability,” Linville said. “If you don’t own it at all, then you do not have that liability, and you are not responsible.”

Schwarz summarized that “examples of the way concussions are handled in one community in Washington, regarded as perhaps the most enlightened state on the issue, demonstrate the limits of (anti-concussion law) and how persistent football culture, as well as questions of legal liability and resources, can leave young athletes in danger.”

Much is unknown about head injuries, from diagnosis to management, including a critical point of expert disagreement---when exactly to clear a patient for returning to contact sport. “There is tremendous controversy and no definite right answer,” wrote Dr. Paul Kivela, an ER physician in Napa, Calif. “A study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy in Ohio reported that 40.5 percent of high school athletes who suffer a concussion return to play before it was generally considered safe to do so. … there is research that indicates that the brain cells recover slowly and make them more susceptible to ‘second impact syndrome.’ Almost all the deaths that occurred from head injuries in high school had a history of recent concussion.”

The 2010 death of a prep football player may illuminate the dilemma. Nathan Stiles, of Spring Hill High School in Kansas, suffered a concussion on Oct.1 and was reportedly pronounced ready to play a football game on Oct. 22. The 17-year-old was reexamined, cleared again for play on Oct. 28, but he collapsed during a game that night after reportedly complaining of head pain to a coach. He died the next morning, and a cause hasn’t been released a time of this posting. Elsewhere this year, two cases, a college football player died of head injury while the brain of a prep player who committed suicide is being studied for damage of concussions he suffered.

The Stiles tragedy was high-profile news along the Missouri-Kansas border as the American Academy of Neurology released its recommendations on concussions in sports. Coaches and officials were generally receptive to academy proposals, but they said public schools couldn’t afford to implement all criteria, particularly the staffing of a certified trainer for every game and practice in every sport with risk of contact. “There’s a whole gap between what’s desirable and what’s possible,” Rick Bowden, assistant executive director of the Kansas State High School Activities Association, told the Kansas City Star. “There are some areas of Kansas where there are more schools than there are athletic trainers.”

An official of the neurology academy readily concurred, incredibly but not surprisingly, given the jungle of football at schools and colleges. Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher, who chairs sports research of the academy, affirmed his group’s advice is moot but for matter of record. “We understand completely that (criteria set) is undoable in today’s (football) environment, but we think that is a correct way to organize our priorities,” Kutcher told The Associated Press.

In other words, these experts won’t be around for kicking when society finally faces football reality, the true costs in money for cultural addiction, if not of morality.

Many Schools, Colleges Hopeless for Anti-Concussion Funding, Legal Compliance

A new state law on concussion management is pressuring prep coaches and officials in Massachusetts. “Financially strapped Bay State high schools are grappling with a blizzard of sports safety regulations and litigation at a time when many don’t have money for news teachers, let alone CPR training and athletic trainers, school officials say,” reported Jessica Fargen, Boston Herald. “It’s an incredible challenge,” said Barry Haley, athletic director at Concord Carlisle High and president of the state athletic association. “There’s no education training monies available for coaches other than what an athletic director can spare out of his budget. The days of having the ambulance sitting beside your field are gone.”

In Connecticut, before a state anti-concussion law for sports took effect in July, prep coaches already had to complete a lengthy certification course, including 15 hours focused on legalities. Now a course on head trauma is required, and coaches are expected to “then build upon that knowledge through continuing education courses in subsequent years,” reported Douglas S. Mann, for Connecticut Law Tribune. Daniel B. Fitzgerald, a New Haven attorney in sport and entertainment, said, “There are some coaches I’ve spoken with informally who say it’s not worth it anymore.”

Trial lawyers, however, see their blossoming opportunity in tackle football, with the uncertain safety measures, the certain dangers increasingly documented, and perpetual injurious outcomes.

Lawsuits and mounting evidence continue to support negligence in football mishaps, blasting away at sovereign immunity, the former standby defense for personnel at public schools and colleges. If immunity is an obstacle for plaintiffs, they sue individuals such as coaches, trainers, and administrators. A complaint alleging recklessness might sidestep immunity. Also on shakier ground is the defense of a plaintiff’s knowing consent to have participated in the hazardous activity; a signed injury waiver, for example, likely won’t halt the lawsuit, as recent state outcomes indicate.

“A principle of assumption of risk doctrine, as it relates to voluntary participation in recreational events, is that an activity can’t be so harmful as to violate public policy,” wrote Gerard Magliocca, Indiana University law professor, in 2009. “Put another way, knowing consent is not enough—that’s why dueling is illegal. At what point will the evidence about brain injuries from repeated blows to the head, especially if causation can be established for injuries to young kids or high-school players, raise this problem for football?”

A recent, well-attended sport-law symposium at Santa Clara University was perfectly suited for the gridiron and litigation, examining the “cutting-edge legal issues” of head trauma, performance-enhancing drugs, and use of athlete likeness. The keynote speaker was Schwarz, of The Times.

Legal firms and independent attorneys troll for potential clients online, specifically soliciting brain-injured athletes and their families. Others are less direct for the same goal, to hook cases for lawsuit and winning compensation: One trial attorney, in a letter to a newspaper he framed as a concussion-awareness piece, concluded by declaring the injured “needs understanding from his or her family, school, employer and community.”

Oregon injury lawyer Matthew D. Kaplan notes that sport media fixate on pro and college football for head trauma; meanwhile, the school and youth ranks are fraught with precarious situations that “are, in some ways, far greater than those confronting the highly trained, closely monitored athletes of the NFL.” Writing for Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog, Kaplan asserted that state schools and football officials have responsibility “to create a properly safe sports environment” or the result can become “damage that permanently alters a child’s life. When such a tragedy occurs, an Oregon sport injury attorney can provide essential counsel to parents considering the best way to achieve justice and restore balance to their family.”

“Schools have already removed playgrounds for fear of litigation. Could high school sports be next?” posed Carter Wood, blogger for PointOfLaw.com.

Some in education aren’t waiting for a national verdict on tackle football, with a half-dozen or so schools and colleges having dropped the sport in the last year, citing costs. Officials of a school board in Kansas City blamed “safety concerns about spinal cord injuries,” wrote Claudine Stanley, wife of the coach who headed the defunct football program. Other schools have hesitated over tackle football, cancelling or stopping games this season in Ohio, Delaware, Rhode Island and the Virgin Islands.

As schools and colleges scramble to fend off threats, Goodell continues forming his NFL “partnerships” with opposition leaders in the concussion issue, providing funding and resources for their organizations. Goodell has particularly forged relationships with prominent critics of the league at its congressional flogging a year ago: Boston University researchers like Cantu, their associate concussion expert Chris Nowinski, representing his Sports Legacy Institute, and Gay Culverhouse, director of an outreach for retired players. Goodell also spearheaded an NFL program to educate kids about concussions, through posters distributed to schools.

Skeptics and cynics still crow, scoffing at seeming NFL sensitivity for player safety, calling it crass economic ploy. One law writer politely qualifies Goodell’s moves as “preemptive” against litigation or the shifting of more costs onto the league and union. Many observers outside mainstream media believe the commissioner’s motive is only money.

Officials of the NFL and NCAA football should indeed wink when talking “player protection” and “safety,” impossibilities for their billion-dollar enterprises. But they surely take seriously the contemporary environment and what it could mean for their riches, with multiple legal concerns stalking the sport at all levels, not only head trauma, and extending off their fields of violence.

Elephants Crowd the Room, ‘Chickens Home to Roost’ for Tackle Football

David Meggyesy has known football wrongdoing, and the sycophant media who try burying it, for a half-century, since his time as star football jock for a corrupt NCAA program and later as a head-ramming, outspoken linebacker in the NFL. By 1970 Meggyesy had retired as player in protest and authored Out of Their League, a hallmark of counterculture literature on sport and the special genre Oriard classifies as autobiography of football disillusionment during the Vietnam Era.

But the present is the most explosive time Meggyesy has witnessed in American football. “I would say the dominant culture represented and symbolized by good old football is over the top, and the chickens are coming home to roost. A big shakeup is going to happen,” Meggyesy, a retired leader of the players union, recently predicted.

A daunting list of hazards impacts modern football players, and mainstream media have little desire for addressing those risks, much less broadening the story to question both the culpability and stability of football. Sport media, like organizers, tend to qualify problems in athletics as personal troubles instead of public issues.

For at least a decade, medical experts and health officials have sounded dire warnings over the garish sizes of American football players, starting with teen 300-pounders at thousands of schools. And the health menace of giant physiques en masse begins with their obvious relation to a half-century of anabolic-steroid use in the game and a quarter-century of growth-hormone use, interfaced with more tissue-building substances available for athletes motivated and encouraged to add unnatural size and power.

The evidence is voluminous of a doping epidemic in football, the material and anecdotal, including allegations of doping experts, game insiders, and more qualified witnesses. “Nothing adds up. It’s no secret athletes can get by drug testing,” said Dr. Charles E. Yesalis, professor emeritus at Penn State University and premier independent doping authority since the 1980s. “Football players are getting bigger, and there’s no reasonable explanation other than drugs to explain this substantial increase in muscle mass,” Yesalis said, speaking a decade ago, with smaller players at every position comparative of today.

Meanwhile, a quarter-century of so-called anti-doping—steroid testing, testosterone testing, whatever—is a glaring, abysmal failure with nil future hope of turning back muscle drugs in football, for proven invalid technology, astronomical costs and nightmarish logistics. To conduct, for example, one round of loophole-ridden urinalysis with every prep player in America, the startup and implementation would top $1 billion, with dummies required for being detected. A one-time blanket application, a highly limited steroid test of high-school football, would cost triple to quadruple the going rate of annual funding for anti-doping worldwide. Then what to do?

And blood testing is impractical for American football, namely for the some 1.5 million players at schools and most colleges, those not on rosters of the NFL and big-time NCAA programs. Anyone who believes blood testing would answer doping in this sport need only search news files and ponder for a few hours, thinking clearly, devoid of fantasy-football content.

Problems confronting football continue within the focus of absurd player sizes.

Heatstroke and obese or overweight players often go together in football mishap, and experts have variously labeled each as football’s deadliest problem during the last decade, until head trauma reared of late, sucking air out of the room.

Experts say heatstroke and obesity are completely preventable conditions, even in football, as they testify in lawsuits against organs and personnel. A recent settlement awarded $1.75 million to the parents of Max Gilpin, a 15-year-old football player in Kentucky who died of heat-related injuries in 2008, three days after collapsing during summer practice at Pleasure Ridge High School. The parents had sued six coaches, alleging wrongful death, but the case settled before trial with no one’s admission of wrongdoing. The school district’s insurer paid damages. In 2009, the head football coach was acquitted in criminal court on charges of wanton endangerment and reckless homicide in Gilpin’s death.

Cardiac disease and death in football involves conditions such as enlarged heart and arrhythmia, and while athletes of varied ages and sizes are affected, the big bodies are red flags, say doctors. New Jersey cardiologist Dr. Arthur “Archie” Roberts is a former college and NFL quarterback who sees players from every level. “Many high-school kids are super-sizing with the dream of playing in the NFL. We’re finding increases in deaths at those levels,” Roberts said in summer 2005, as 552 players weighing 300 or more attended NFL camps, along with 82 weighing between 295 and 299, according to the Washington Post.

“We used to have 30 to 40 sudden cardiac deaths a year in all sports,” Roberts said. “There’s a national registry now and the number is close to 300. About 80 percent of those are in football and basketball. Something is going on. It’s the evolution of cardiovascular disease and its risk factors, one of which is large body size.”

Including Nathan Stiles, at least 11 American football players have died in 2010. Other reports are:

*Bennie Abram, age 20, 5-foot-9, 186 pounds, who collapsed after a workout in February at the University of Mississippi.

*Dylan Steigers, age 21, 5-foot-10, 180 pounds, who died of head injury in May, following a collision during a team scrimmage at Eastern Oregon University.

*Brian Colvin, age 18, 5-foot-9, 165 pounds, who collapsed in August at a scrimmage for Lewisville High in South Carolina. An autopsy concluded Colvin died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, thickening of heart muscle.

*Austin Trenum, age 17, 6-foot, 190 pounds, committed suicide in September after suffering a second concussion in two years playing for Prince William County High in Virginia, according to reports. His parents donated the teen’s brain for research at the BU Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

*Reggie Garrett, age 17, 6-foot-2, 180, collapsed and died in September during a game for West Orange-Stark High in Texas.

*Kody Turner, age 16, 6-foot-3, 315 pounds, died in September after three days in intensive care. He had collapsed during a practice for Chickasha High in Oklahoma.

*Olivier Louis, age 15, collapsed in September at football practice for Wekiva High in Florida. An autopsy concluded the youth died of “exertional sickling due to sickle-cell trait and heat stress.”

*Tyler Davenport, age 16, died of heat-related injuries in October. The youth had been hospitalized since August, when he collapsed at practice for Lamar High.

*Dontrel Claiborne, age 16, 5-foot-8, 275 pounds, collapsed at practice in October for Carver High in Louisiana.

*Michael Ellsessar, age 16, collapsed Monday after being hit as a receiver in a junior-varsity game for Oxford High in Massachusetts. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital, and no cause has been released. “This is truly a tragedy,” Worcester District Attorney Joseph Early said in a statement. “This young man died while playing a game. My heart goes out to the Ellsessar family. This is every parent’s worst nightmare.”

A football program is legally covered in cases of heatstroke and cardiac arrest—with optimal staffing, resources and preparation.

 “Under ideal circumstances, sports injury experts say, an ambulance, an orthopedic surgeon, a physician specializing in internal medicine, and several certified trainers would be at each (high-school) game,” noted Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times in 2001, for his in-depth analysis of medical precautions in prep football. Today the optimum conditions would be a medical staff to include a neurologist in attendance of every game, in-season practice and offseason training session, or pie in the sky for average programs.

In addition, football deaths involving congenital conditions such as cardio defect and sickle-cell trait have raised allegations of improper health screening, or lack of preventive measures for every player that constitute another impossible expense for most programs.

Catastrophic injury in football, involving irreparable cervical-cord damage, can reach a dozen cases annually with teen victims the large majority. Typically the affected school districts pay a $50,000 deductible and more costs not covered by catastrophic-injury insurance. During October at least two cases were reported in prep football, spinal injury resulting in paralysis, including a 17-year-old in Texas and a 16-year-old in Tennessee.

A former prep player left paralyzed by a hit recently settled for $8 million from New York City, the city parks department, and a public school league. Blake Hunt, 20, was injured in 2007 scrimmage between two high schools and lived afterward in a nursing home, confined to a wheelchair. “In a complaint against the city, Hunt alleged that his injury stemmed from improper and inadequate supervision, training, officiating and medical personnel at the scrimmage,” reported the New York Daily News. “That complaint said Hunt, who weighed 140 pounds, was too small to be competing against larger players and was already suffering from a leg injury when he was struck in the head by a player he was attempting to tackle.”

Disabling joint injuries occur by the thousands annually in American football, primarily to knees and ankles, and typically requiring surgery and rehabilitation. While the concussions furor leads to rules enforcement against head contact, orthopedists, conversely, implore football to set stricter rules against hitting below the waist, a demonstrative dichotomy for the inanity about a “safe” game.

Knee injury is the leading cause of sport-related surgeries and other costly procedures, according to annual data, and enforcement of anti-concussion rules in football should accelerate leg casualties. In 2008, researcher Dawn Comstock predicted an increase in adolescent knee cases for orthopedic surgeons and post-op therapists. “Knee injuries accounted for nearly 45 percent of all sports injury-related surgeries in our study,” she said.

For this qualitative review of media content in football crisis, this rather biased analyst focuses on sport reporters, commentators, editors and producers. They are clearly on the spot, over their handy relationship with King Football, as their erstwhile brethren christened the biggest friend ever for American media.

Questions of this examination include:

How are mainstream sport media covering the issue of football mayhem and head trauma?

Do sport media’s recommendations for change reflect necessary radical reform for football or parrot organizers’ superficial action?

Are sport media addressing the issue in sound journalism, versus their conventional lending support to the football establishment?

If not, what can sport media do differently?

V. Media Gamble by Trusting Football, Avoiding Real Reform

American institutions teeter in the new century, across the national board, bereft top-down of integrity and character. Football, news media, education are only emblematic of the cultural cancer.

Word, rhetoric, typically gets no respect by sender nor receiver, and lies ready cheap for both manipulation and interpretation in age of instant media. We talk the good game about anything. We accentuate the positive, deny the negative, exaggerating our way around challenges that confound us. The term is “truthiness.” Then consider how far society gets hyperbolic about football and sees no evil—the imperative coping mechanism for America, champion of human virtue—and rhetorical sensibilities go haywire.

It’s no shock both football and majority media already proclaim “culture change” in violence on the field, a month since Super Bowl hero James Harrison became public enemy for laying out opponents. Constructive debate has hardly begun, but that’s too much for football supporters hopeful of avoiding trouble, difficulty, including most sport media.

In recent weeks, coaches, organizers, researchers and many athletes have declared that rules, tackling technique and clean play are working, driven by fresh morality enveloping the gridiron. Raising “awareness” is the rally cry and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell postures that all is well.

The sport claims “safer” football and media spread the talk of voilà solution for inbred violence. Fandom remains gluttonous, generally careless, anticipating every head-banging kickoff.

The vast majority of mainstream sport media haven’t left the football party. Nothing’s changed in their practice and relationship with the game institution. Business as usual reigns, not impact reform, as the misbegotten football-media complex cannot handle truth, never could.

Peter King of Sports Illustrated leads the NFL parade, himself as much a blessed Jockocrat as a non-athlete could be anointed. Football folks love this guy for his fantasy writing, volumes of the ritualized trivia, but especially for his glossing-over of serious issues, and today he sits pretty as an NBC analyst. The NFL and unabashed media partner SI—the magazine proudly displays the league’s trademark shield on subscription solicitations—have placed King to become the famous football pundit.

As Goodell reigns as president of Football America, King is pontiff of gridiron ideology. This sportswriter minimizes NFL ills quickly as possible, like his fly-by look at anabolic steroids in 1990-91, when he deduced the complex problem was resolved by testing, however invalid. But then every widespread wrong becomes “isolated” for King, confined to a few bad apples among players, as he decrees, like the late Lyle Alzado for PEDs. Today, the scribe’s favorite whip is James Harrison for systemic violence and head trauma.

King, simplistic and impatient, espouses heavy fines and suspensions for players based on his concept of “flagrant hits,” with the judge-and-jury NFL acting on sacrosanct King judgment, of course. King’s lambasting Harrison since Oct. 17 has undoubtedly contributed to $95,000 in fines for the Steelers’ All-Pro linebacker, levied by NFL officials.

Critics deride King for his company line in issues, poorly veiled as expert analysis of a free press. “King’s suggestions are not unlike those who told 1950s children to hide under their desks in case of nuclear attack,” wrote Dave Zirin, sport analyst for The Nation. “The hits that cause (football) concussions aren’t just the kind of helmet-to-helmet collisions that make King shudder but often come from routine tackles. Frequently, brain bruises aren’t even diagnosed until the game has ended. … Here’s the reality check to Peter King and all who want their violence safely commodified for Sunday: There is no making football safer. There is no amount of suspensions, fines or ejections that will change the fundamental nature of a sport built on violent collisions. It doesn’t matter if players have better mouth guards, better helmets or better pads.”

Ripping King is easy, but unfortunately he’s the keystone opinion leader of American football, promoted as peerless grid expert by SI and networks for decades. King boasts an audience of millions for his endless NFL mythology, including media who mimic his childish moralizing.

King philosophy sets general philosophy on football crisis today: “Educate” everyone, tighten rules, improve equipment, preach clean play, blame a few athletes—as far as punitive response for “vicious” hits—and everything’s cool. And a fan media’s momentary criticism of the institution is not to be confused with call for impact reform: The commentator’s bottom line invariably favors football, coming around to praise or endorse system countermeasures in conclusion.

Modern mass media, especially television, have managed a political correctness in football rhetoric and imagery, sanitizing violence in content like the Golden Press. Formerly standard terms like “head-hunter” and “smash-mouth” are considered tasteless for commentators, including print scribes, and TV networks have shelved graphics like the colliding, exploding helmets that once promoted Monday Night Football.

The press have even settled into a ritualized trivia for concussions, their benign reports on status of injured players for gaining medical clearance and returning to action. Fans certainly consume this information for anticipating games in high school, college and the NFL.

But the core point of head trauma, the grave threat to football’s foundation, doesn’t make a good story for fans and most media. Football America doesn’t want to know yet, and President Goodell is either blissfully ignorant or bravely posturing, for his league and the entire sport, saying, “I don’t think it’s a perfect storm.”

Some mainstream writers see differently, thankfully for the free press, and a few broach the unspeakable for old media: the death of American football.

Patrick Hruby, ESPN.com contributor, took delight in chiding the NFL, media and fans for their collective fantasy of protecting players. “Problem solved,” Hruby wrote sarcastically on Oct. 22. “Crisis averted. Brains saved. Back to juggling fantasy lineups. Everything is once again hunky-dory on Planet Football, with two tiny, nagging exceptions: 1. The helmet hit crackdown doesn’t solve the brain damage problem, any more than cigarette filters solve lung cancer… 2. Sooner or later, said brain damage is going to kill the sport as we know it. To put things another way: Football is whistling past its future graveyard.”

ESPN senior writer Howard Bryant criticized the parties of football denial, athletes, organizers, fans and media—including his employer—decrying their complacency. On Oct. 27, Bryant noted “lately, perhaps even suddenly, it is becoming clear that football is not impervious to the forces that would chip away at its position atop the nation’s hierarchy of sports industries. In fact, the sport is doomed in its current form. A new scrutiny on the speed of the game and the violence of its collisions makes it unlikely that football will exist in 10 years the way it does today. … In a nation attracted to violence, the NFL has decisions to make that will reveal its courage—or its greed.”

Likewise, sport media must take gutsy steps, particularly to disconnect themselves from friend football. Media instinct is to trust the sport establishment for righting itself, but football requires guidance this time, for a remolding it cannot prevent, and sound journalistic discussion is the only alternative beside legal ruin.

VI. Recommendations for Mainstream Sport Media

Amid football crisis, sport media, to proceed in constructive fashion, must accept the fact their football associates are dread to affirm: Head contact and brain injury cannot be eliminated from football at any level in any locale. The scourge is universal, blatant by hard data and eyesight in this brutal sport.

American football is going down for health risks, hard and fast, and mainstream sport media must see their way forward as journalists, severing their rhetorical umbilical cord to Mother Game. And the woes of contemporary media for revenues and staffing, particularly newspapers, are for other discussions, not this space.

For the critical, highly relevant matter of football injuries, sport media simply must embrace their duty as independent watchdogs, constitutionally as well as ethically, or they fall too with the self-absorbed parties.

The late sportswriter Leonard Koppett warned of familial closeness between media and sport organs like football. “To know more, you have to be around more,” Koppett wrote in his classic 1981 analysis, Sports Illusion, Sports Reality, “but the more you’re around, the more you come to share the viewpoint of the people you cover. Up to a certain point, sharing that viewpoint increases the accuracy of your information: ignorance is no proof of impartiality. But beyond that point, being too close to the trees to see the forest can warp your judgment in three ways: by engaging your emotions on a sympathetic level, by lulling you into taking for granted a familiar situation that is not so familiar to outsiders, and by making you reluctant to give offense to those who have become long-time companions.”

Sport media must end suckling dependence on football, which requires their accepting establishment word at face value, and begin legitimate questioning of the entire system, not just athletes. “I think you have to start treating sports as big business—which is what they are—and covering them the same way you cover government, covering them the same way you cover massive corporations,” said Mark Fainaru-Wada, investigative reporter and co-author of Game of Shadows, in 2006. “There’s nothing wrong with doing some real serious investigating and probing into how these bodies work, and whether what you’re seeing is real.”

Fresh writing mindset is required for depicting football reality, a mentality that must sweep media management as well as frontline journalists. Beat reporters and commentators spin the football fantasy, but editors and producers assign stories and frame themes. Editors are largely responsible for football content of the type sport sociologist George H. Sage qualified as “journalistic pabulum.”

Twenty years ago, Sage noted “most of our written and broadcast information does not confront people with questions about the larger social issues and political and economic consequences of modern sport and physical activity. Instead, we are fed a steady diet of traditional slogans, clichés, sacred cows, and ritualized trivia.” A 2005 study of newspapers found sports sections were predominantly “a passive and reactive space” filled with repetitive theme in game previews and recaps, praise and criticism of coaches and athletes. Perhaps 10 percent of content was “enterprise” reporting, concluded the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“It’s not that all entertainment news is illegitimate,” intoned Bill Tammeus, Kansas City Star columnist, on editorial gate-keeping in general. “It’s that newspapers, by their fawning coverage, tend to give cultural legitimacy to what, in the end, are simply ways to make money from numbskulls who imagine their highest calling is to be consumers and fans.”

Sport editors must de-emphasize the ritualized trivia and allot more reporter hours and resources to public issues of athletics. And editors know that as a group, having pledged to do so for decades while always failing to abide. A 1993 survey of Associated Press Sports Editors, for example, found that members “strongly endorsed statements dealing with the value of journalistic professionalism and ethics,” or “moralizing” in their work. To a lesser extent, APSE members endorsed “the view this it is more important to give the reading public information that it needs rather than what it wants.”

There lies the essense of “traditional journalism,” or “all the news that’s fit to print,” the ability of reporters and editors to judge information for what a free society needs to know, like it or not. Specifically, sport media must begin linking adverse events of all sorts in athletics—violence, casualties, drugs, inequity, sex—to the overlying forces and consequences, versus treating each incident as disparate and forgettable.

The required analytical perspective is defined and sport media especially lack it—the acclaimed “sociological imagination” in communication, articulated by sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1959. Mills posited his theory as part of a personal battle against “social science” as it stood then, narrow-minded, establishment-infested, closed to outside argument or viewpoint—or strikingly similar to pretentious old sport media of today. At brink of the 1960s, Mills called on social science to become social studies, to broaden collective thinking, practice new methodology and outcome, to better employ the discipline’s political power in most challenging times.

In his field-altering The Sociological Imagination, Mills observed that people sought “a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.” Moreover, opinion leaders like “journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors” had to nurture new conscience, rationale and remedy.

Driving the approach, Mills envisioned, would be problem-solving that extended beyond individuals to exam societal factors as well. “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society. That is its task and promise,” Mills wrote, adding, “Both the correct statement of problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.”

Mills died in 1962, but his work can guide sport media today in their negotiation of football crisis, misguided so far. Rather than trusting football spin, sport media must connect empirical dots for revealing big-picture impacts on athletes and culture.

Reporters, editors and producers by the thousands must coordinate a national review of football injury, documenting extent of epidemic and estimate of societal costs, and of not only brain trauma but all wounds of players. The purview must include pertinent assessment of elements such as football-injury research, medical prevention and management, and the associate industries of education, litigation and insurance.

Every media outlet must contribute reports on its local football for completing the national mapping, including weekly papers. Reporters must test claims of local football officials—particularly the stock spin of “no problem at our school”—by gathering information of head injury from athletes, families, doctors and more qualified sources.

Media can follow story samples of the rare reporters and commentators enterprising on the issue thus far. Schwarz of the New York Times vies for a Pulitzer Prize in his continuing effort that has entailed sub-topics such as official evasion, legal risk, personal tragedy and media critique. Other writers to emulate include Michael O’Keeffe, New York Daily News, who’s produced an exemplary series on disabled NFL retirees; columnist Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times, for his searing anti-establishment perspective rooted in his past as football player and investigative reporter; and several journalists for ESPN television and print, led by Bob Ley and staff for the show Outside The Lines.

What sport media at-large cannot do is stand by, en masse, while the typical few investigate a panoramic problem of beloved football. This media shortfall is common during public issues, any type, with a famous example in the Watergate cover-up of the 1970s, largely unraveled by two journalists of the Washington Post as thousands of political reporters idled, watching. In sport, a mere percentile of media has produced the substantial reporting on the doping problem—the raging flock of commentators doesn’t count, always relying on information developed by the few.

And the football problem of head injury is a different probe than anabolic steroids and hGH, because smoking-gun evidence is apparent and game bureaucrats are on the run, already ditching their common defense to stonewall, obfuscate on systemic responsibility. 

Media must operate heretofore on the premise that while football is not dead in the water, the ship needs massive overhaul for moving ahead. The old game model is defunct for health risk and public cost, and immediate cognizance is imperative for sport and press.

An analogy is the sport of gymnastics, which schools once tried to host but generally failed, for the risk and cost. Insurance carriers basically ended coverage for school gymnastics by about 1980, and the youth sport returned to club environment.

Risk assessors scrutinized American football in the mid-1980s, over injuries and reports of muscle drugs, and insurance officials voiced concerns for continuing their coverage. Some carriers ceased underwriting players and organizations.

Assuredly carriers fret again about bloody American football, and expect their voices to enter contemporary debate on head trauma. Indeed, one good trial lawyer’s winning argument for a brain-damaged player could set tort precedent to send insurance companies scrambling for dumping the sport. Contrary to popular assumption, the sport cannot continue as virtual birthrate of the American child, offered by 90 percent of schools and a pervasive network of youth leagues.

Through independent consideration of pertinent information, including festering fiscal circumstances of American sport and culture, a picture begins to emerge of tackle football’s new form in the near future. Young aspirants will pay to play tackle football and expensively, whether backed by parents or sponsors.

Club leagues will predominate in the likely scenario, built on regional teams pooling resources and talent of a wide area. Affluent private academies will flourish still in tackle football, but the vast majority of tuition and public schools will divest individually, relinquishing the sport to regional clubs funded and administered by parents, booster organs and other support groups, such as business sponsors.

Clubs will reclaim college football—a movement already underway—outside the brand-name universities comprising the big-time, billion-dollar game, or programs averaging less than two per state. As for the quote amateur, non-profit, tax-exempt NCAA and its robber-baron departments and coaches, that’s another scam set to fall, in light of their illegal trust that doesn’t pay the elite labor at major colleges, about 10,000 players pathetically referred to as “student-athletes.” Current quarterback sensation and investigation suspect Cam Newton is a symptom, not the disease, and he should’ve been able to command a rightful multi-million-dollar contract after high school, had his game been baseball or hockey instead. Soon, the name universities will operate minor-league franchises in football and men’s basketball, they’ll draw players like Newton from an amateur draft, and the fraction of pro athletes who actually pursue higher education can pay their way.

The NFL and union will roll on, of course, but with increasing expense of risk and liability while feeling the blows to feeder systems. The league in particular will come to practice an openness or disclaimer for its array of serious hazards, spelled out in legalize and endorsed by the players union, ranging from bodily injury and disease to drug abuse.

Meanwhile, the clearest directive at present is that mainstream sport media must lead impact reform, as their news peers have achieved during upheavals of the American past. Undeniably, tackle football is more than mere game for this culture, and football storytelling more than harmless fantasy. Only journalists can ensure proper address of the reality and progress forward—or not.

Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and publisher in Missouri, USA. E-mail him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information, including about his 2009 book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the home page at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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