The football world was shocked this week by a bullying scandal in which former Rams player Richie Incognito verbally abused one of his Dolphins teammates, Jonathan Martin. However, there was another story last week that has received a great deal less coverage than it aptly deserves.
That story is about hall of famer Tony Dorsett. Tony Dorsett was a running back for the Pitt Panthers and then for the Dallas Cowboys. Unlike the bruisers of his day such as Earl Campbell, Dorsett seemed to dance around the field, avoiding outmatched defenders on his way to the end zone. He played as a “finesse back” throughout his 12 year career. He avoided the crunching hits that can end careers. But now, it seems he couldn’t avoid a much more debilitating disease as a result of his illustrious football career.
That disease is called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and is likely caused by repeated and heavy head trauma. The disease is also known to cause depression and dementia. Dorsett and a group of five other former NFL players who were tested at UCLA were the first former living NFL players to be diagnosed with CTE.
This finding, along with yet another suicide by a former NFL player in September, which follows the high-profile suicides of Junior Seau and Jovan Belcher last year (Seau was later found to have CTE), may be an important opportunity for current NFL players to take pause. These cases may give them a good chance to reflect if it is more important that they continue playing the sport they love, making hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year while risking memory loss, dementia, depression and CTE in the future. Or instead they could leave the game they’ve played their entire lives for an early retirement, or, much more likely, move to a new career.
The sports media coverage surrounding these suicides and medical findings have been important in getting the word out to both NFL players and the masses in general. Ten years ago, concussions and head injuries didn’t receive nearly the same coverage that they do now. Part of that has to do with medical advances in preventative and reactive care for football players at every level, but the media must still be praised for its investigative reporting on the issue.
What is most important for young football players and their guardians, as well as NFL players, is that they receive all the information they could possibly need in order to make informed decisions on the costs and benefits of playing football. There are people who espouse taking more drastic measures on a sport they see as too dangerous for young boys to be playing, but the realities of the time can’t allow for that. Football is a game of warriors and it is the warrior culture that still prevails in football. Kids and adults who play football understand the risk to their dignity if they take weeks off with a “headache.” So for now, the proliferation of information is all that can be done to give these warriors pause.
