Posted by
William D. Dannenmaier on Saturday, November 07, 2009 11:13:20 AM
As a football fan, two recent articles have interested me. On October 18th, a Pewter Report.com article claimed that within two years of retirement from professional football, 78% of the men were either in bankruptcy or in financial difficulty. These were people who were retired, many of whom had made millions of dollars, more in any one year than I made in a lifetime. The same is true of 60% of retired professional basketball players. At the time, I noted it, but reasoned that these men weren’t making those millions because of their brainpower, and semi-forgot it.
Then a second report appeared, usually appearing on television with shows of football players crashing into one another. This second article reported that professional football players were nineteen times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease (dementia) than were men in the normal work force. It seems the football association is concerned about this and is investigating the matter further.
Why limit the investigation to professional football? When these men talk about their careers, one and all (it seems) report that they played football in junior high school, in high school and in college. It is not just in professional football that players crash into one another in “head to head” encounters. It happens in junior high school, high school and college as well. A difference is that professional football players are provided with the finest protective equipment available and, if injured on the field, receive immediate medical treatment. Those playing football in schools, especially those in junior high and high schools have less protection, much less protection.
Hundreds of millions of the tax dollars collected from citizens to pay for the education necessary to succeed in life (English, language, mathematics) are spent on providing football games. That money includes not only the immediate costs of coaches, equipment and transportation to and from games, but also the construction and maintenance of football fields and spectator stands, not to mention the training room equipment also provided in many schools.
My friend, Dr. John Goodwin, was a highly successful football coach in a junior high school as a young man. He quit; over the objections of the players, parents, the administration and other coaches. He explained to me that every year he had coached at least one of his players had suffered a life time injury, usually to the knees, and that he, as a Christian, could not continue encouraging children to play a sport that might injure them for life. But a knee injury is trivial compared to damage to the brain.
A more important study for parents, which includes most of the people, than that of determining if professional football increases the probability of dementia in players would be a study that checked the possibility that junior high, senior high and college football players suffer an increase in dementia as adults. Is it possible that in the interests of providing entertainment for the public we are increasing the probability of mental as well as physical injury to our young?
Incidentally, such a study should not overlook soccer. I have a son-in-law who is deaf in one ear from a soccer injury and a friend’s son who is blind in one eye, also from soccer.