Modern Gladiators
Mark Strage
Prof. Polyne
Sports Race and Politics
05/15/13
Modern Gladiators Football is an inherently flawed sport. It calls upon men to sacrifice their bodies and minds by using their heads as battering rams over and over again. In his Offensive Play, a 2009 article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explains “much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too (Gladwell).” There is no extricating the thousands of little hits from football.
The line of scrimmage is in its nature a battle of these small hits. Recent scientific discoveries in the field of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy connect these repetitive small head traumas with depression, suicide, memory loss, increased aggression and decreased motor skills. In his The Fragile Teenage Brain Jonah Leher describes “football's tragic flaw…that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency (Leher).” Leher also tells us that “a 2009 study commissioned by the NFL found that former players between the ages of 30 and 49 were being diagnosed with severe memory-related diseases at approximately nineteen times the rate of the general population (Leher).” Obviously there is a big problem.
Football’s lifeblood, the line of scrimmage, is created when numerous freakishly large men converge head first in a pile. Dr. Terry Ziegler explains that “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a degenerative brain disease that results in behaviors similar to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, according to researchers, CTE has a clear environmental cause (repeated brain trauma)
Prof. Polyne
Sports Race and Politics
05/15/13
Modern Gladiators Football is an inherently flawed sport. It calls upon men to sacrifice their bodies and minds by using their heads as battering rams over and over again. In his Offensive Play, a 2009 article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explains “much of the attention in the football world, in the past few years, has been on concussions—on diagnosing, managing, and preventing them—and on figuring out how many concussions a player can have before he should call it quits. But a football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too (Gladwell).” There is no extricating the thousands of little hits from football.
The line of scrimmage is in its nature a battle of these small hits. Recent scientific discoveries in the field of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy connect these repetitive small head traumas with depression, suicide, memory loss, increased aggression and decreased motor skills. In his The Fragile Teenage Brain Jonah Leher describes “football's tragic flaw…that it inflicts concussions on its players with devastating frequency (Leher).” Leher also tells us that “a 2009 study commissioned by the NFL found that former players between the ages of 30 and 49 were being diagnosed with severe memory-related diseases at approximately nineteen times the rate of the general population (Leher).” Obviously there is a big problem.
Football’s lifeblood, the line of scrimmage, is created when numerous freakishly large men converge head first in a pile. Dr. Terry Ziegler explains that “Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a degenerative brain disease that results in behaviors similar to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, according to researchers, CTE has a clear environmental cause (repeated brain trauma)