'I'm the Wife of a Former NFL Player. Football Destroyed His Mind'

And after all the league has done to try to legislate those types of hit out of the game, it was legal because Cooks was a runner. I'm still amazed it wasn't called, but that crew wasn't calling much all night.

 

I had my high school friends over for the game, as usual. They are all good guys, mostly tradesmen. I think just two of us of seven who were there have a college degree.

Anyway, the Cooks injury brought forth five minutes of ranting about the “pussificstion of football “ etc. Drove home how many people not only don’t care about head injuries and CTE, they practically root for it.

 

My son's friend - who is in 8th grade - asked me why he wasn't playing football.
My kid, a HS freshman, weighs a 130 pounds. His friend weighs about 180. Not fat, but chubby. I told him I was worried about concussions.
Kid tells me he's had 4.
Four!
Not four diagnosed concussion, mind you: Two, of those and two that were described as "dingers." He said he's a taking year off football, before playing again.
I thought my wife was going to come unglued. She's dealt with wrestling and football parents who bring kids in with concussions and staph infections and want Johnny cleared to play immediately.

 

I'm trying to decide whether to make a joke about teachers or dicks.

 

You know what I mean. #editorneeded

 

I do. I'm an asshole.

 

Hot take that I actually believe: Cooks is 80 percent to blame for his own concussion on that play.

 

Your friends probably think - rightly, in a sense - that, if the players involved know the risks (and, at this point, how can they not?) then what's the point of hand-wringing over it? There was nothing "cheap" about the hit on Cooks. It wasn't spearing or late or a kick to the head or something.

Wholly unrelated, but, bout 15-20 years ago, there was a decent spate of stories on the horrors of meat packing plants- the difficulty of the work, the hours, the brutality of it, etc. And it's real stuff - not as bad as The Jungle, of course, but rough in its own way.

But you don't see those stories nearly as much anymore. One reason: Packing plants have a lot of refugees and undocumented immigrants working in them. Plant manages don't mind, either. They work harder, complain less and generally create fewer problems. (They'll also work for less, which is criminal.) Point is: The further you go up the economic ladder, the more awful more things in life get. And there's a presumption from liberal "high culture" that "low culture" would be living a better life if it just knew more, had all the facts, could make informed decisions.

That's textbook virtue-signalling. And this piece, heartfelt as it is, could just as easily be countered by the wife of a man who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment, became a professional football player, started a charity, and rescued dozens of kids from generational poverty with scholarships. If you want to balance the moral ledger, you include both stories, and let people decide.

 

I agree with all of this, and think the Times has made it clear they have no interest in providing nuance to the concussion issue (I wouldn't call it a debate, because no one is pro concussion).

 

The problem is that the refrain of guys like my buddies - "If you play football, you know you are signing up for a violent sport!" - willfully ignores the fact that for years people did not realize the cumulative damage that repeated head trauma, even sub-concussive blows, can cause. And when it was revealed, the NFL fought to bury it. Fans like my guys also get pissy about penalties instituted to protect players.

As an aside, just last year or so we had people arguing on this site that Muhammad Ali was a victim of pesticides at his training facility or, alternately, that they didn't care either way. Can't we just appreciate the Champ and his magic tricks?

 

Thanks for this post. I learned a lot. (No snark.)

 

"Willful ignorance" is five syllables for three better ones: "I don't care." And "did not realize" is four syllables for four better ones: "I didn't care."

As for what the NFL did, yes, it did was institutions of any kind almost always do: They fight the discovery of information that will cost them a shitload in lawsuit money. That doesn't excuse them doing what they did. But the NFL doing what it did was not a profoundly immoral act. It's just run-of-the-mill immorality.