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Dogfighting = Football?
By Kyle | October 11, 2009
The merry contrarian Malcolm Gladwell, in this week’s new New Yorker, which is out tomorrow, is making the case that dogfighting and football are not all that different. From the press release:
In the October 19, 2009, issue of The New Yorker, in “Offensive Play” (p. 50), Malcolm Gladwell wonders if the football fans who have recently been horrified by the quarterback Michael Vick’s involvement in dogfighting are overlooking the more troubling aspects of their own sport. “Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport,” Gladwell writes. Yet scientists have recently found evidence that the violence inherent in football can result in serious brain degeneration for players, long after their playing days are over. In examining the brains of former athletes who, during their careers, endured repeated hits to the head, the neuropathologists Ann McKee and Bennett Omalu have diagnosed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), a progressive neurological disorder found in people who have suffered brain trauma. “C.T.E. has many of the same manifestations as Alzheimer’s,” and, similarly, appears later in life, Gladwell writes. “But C.T.E. isn’t the result of an endogenous disease. It’s the result of injury”—such as the concussions suffered by football players after collisions during play. In fact, all sixteen of the ex-athlete brains that McKee examined had abnormal levels of tau, the protein associated with dementia, which builds up in brain cells, shutting them down and ultimately killing them. Data from surveys show evidence of dementia in athletes as well; among more than a thousand retired N.F.L. players polled by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, 6.1 per cent of the ones older than fifty reported that they had received a diagnosis of “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease” (five times higher than the national average); for players between thirty and forty-nine, the reported rate was nineteen times the national average. According to the concussion expert Robert Cantu, what harms a football player isn’t just repetitive concussive trauma; it’s repetitive subconcussive trauma. People with C.T.E., Cantu tells Gladwell, “aren’t necessarily people with a high, recognized concussion history. But they are individuals who collided heads on every play—repetitively doing this, year after year, under levels that were tolerable for them to continue to play.” When we consider these “subtler and more insidious forms of injury, it’s far from clear whether the problem is the style of play or the play itself,” Gladwell notes. Gameness—the “willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain”—is highly admired in dogfighting circles. But it’s also a quality prized in football. Kyle Turley, a former N.F.L. offensive lineman who suffered from fainting and vomiting spells during and after his playing years, tells Gladwell that, after he returned to practice four months after back surgery, “They put me in full-contact practice from day one. After the first day, I knew I wasn’t right. They told me, ‘You’ve had the surgery. You’re fine. You should just fight through it.’ It’s like you’re programmed. You’ve got to go without question. I’m a warrior. I can block that out of my mind.” “Those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff,” Gladwell writes. “Dogfighting fails this test.” He goes on, “What football must confront, in the end, is not just the problem of injuries or scientific findings. It is the fact that there is something profoundly awry in the relationship between the players and the game.”
Topics: Sports |
October 11th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Football is for sissies. Helmets? Pads? Feh.
Now if he had written this about Rugby he might have a point.
October 11th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
He’s probably right. I watch football every Sunday, but lets be serious, it’s a stupid sport in some regards. I mean what’s the role of the offensive gaurd? Grunting and stopping a large man from moving forward. It really is an American form of sport.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:09 am
I’m sorry but this is all absurd.
The only way you could make the comparison is if the NFL were comprised of men who have been plucked out of prison and forced to play football against their will.
These players, of their own free will and volition, chose this as their profession and livelihood.
There is a world of difference between a shady coach suggesting that a grown man “just play through it”, than a lowlife like Michael Vick taking a creature who can not defend itself and doing such things as dumping water and electrocuting them, hanging them by the neck with wire and slamming them into the concrete until dead if they lose.
I think this article sums this up nicely:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/michael_vick_fails_to_inspire_team?utm_source=a-section
October 12th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Goofy isn’t a dog.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goofy
If Mickey is a mouse and Donald a duck, then the Goof is a dog. He started off as “Dippy Dawg”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goofy