Before I watched this documentary, I knew football was a brutal sport. My parents didn't allow me to play the sport mainly out of fear of injury, but later in my adult life finding out we didn't have health insurance while in high school. I guess they were glad I was never good enough to make a sports team. I used to have the thought this was a game meant for tough masculine men, the creme of the crop. Over the last 20 years, it has changed significantly for me.
The spread of untraceable performance enhancing drugs soured my opinion on sports in general. Of course, 250-pound men with the speed of a gazelle and the power of a professional weight lifter with 5% body fat should have set off some alarm bells. Then I started hearing about the widespread epidemic of pain killers and how teams gave out cortisol shots the same way kids eat candy. I guess the final straw was when I saw this documentary. It illustrated a harrowing conclusion: no matter how safe you make the game, it will kill you in some way.
The main conclusion they tried to illustrate is that possibly not all who play the game will suffer CTE, but it is pretty clear these players will get some form of it regardless. Whether you turn into Mike Webster or ultimately become an old man with a bum body and some simple memory problems, its still unclear how prevalent the disease is and intense it can manifest into the body. I think now more people have an idea of whether they should let their kids play or not, but when dealing with potential life changing money, the threat of bodily damage is not as big of a deal for poorer families. The pressure to perform and save your family is a massive tool all pro sports promise.
Aside from the larger societal pressures and perceptions of playing the sport, the fact the NFL did all it could to cover up the link between CTE to playing the game is rather unforgivable. This a league worth 16 billion in profit and growing, and they continue to play games about the health of their players and the potential damage it causes. It's a distasteful stance that has tuned me out to the game over time. I might be more forgiving if they eliminated college football all together and created a farm system league, but we all know that rich men never want to pay for the development of their own product. Other people have to do it for them while they rake in the millions.
Frontline has always been a beacon of good journalism, and while they definitely slanted toward the conclusion that football does destroy the brain, they at least illustrated the cost of these conclusions. Bennett Omalu should be a well know and respected doctor for his work, but of course the NFL smeared him and used racial inclinations to banish him to Northern California. He doesn't even get to continue the research he helped pioneer! To this day, we continue to see stories of football players acting rashly or violently. While the old adage of "violent men play violent sports" used to ring true, the insidious nature of CTE may be a better fall guy. Either way, with the amount of money being thrown around to keep things quiet and keep people silenced, it will ever be a wonder if society will wise up and understand the cost of the game might not be worth the few hours of enjoyment you receive from it each week.
