We’re watching the Steelers/Eagles game and and Terry Bradshaw looks like death warmed over.
had his bell rung too many times.
It probably won’t be long before Troy Aikman starts down the same road. He had something like 13 concussions.
You know, as tragic as it is, maybe this is what football needs to clean up its act with respect to concussions and sub-concussive hits that cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
It’s one thing for some guy who was retired for 10-15 years and out of the public eye to suffer and die from it, but it’s another thing entirely for viewers to watch Terry Bradshaw suffer from it on Fox sports.
This syndrome is a particular cause of mine. I’ve seen it up close and personal. You are right that it take a visible celebrity for the public to take notice. What the public doesn’t see are the thousands of athletes that never made it in the pros but are suffering from the syndrome.
It’s also a real problem among returning veterans of the Mideast wars. Experiencing a roadside bomb, even if there is no visible physical injury, can permanently damage the brain.
Then you have to realize that athletes and soldiers are some of the most able-bodied people in society.
John Mackey recently died. he was a vegetable the last decade. Concussions made a mess of his life. I saw him on TV years ago, not knowing who he was or where he was, he was in a nursing home.
I’m now sounding like a broken record but this stuff is serious. Mackey, Derek Boogaard, Dave Dureson, Bob Probert, and now it looks like Rick Rypien. This is only the recent stuff.
As I mentioned, Aikmen is facing Bradshaw’s fate, Jim McMahon isn’t far behind, and there are plenty of others.
Enjoy those highlight films of great hits and great fights. You aren’t the one that’s going to suffer but those guys and their families will.
Sidney fucking Crosby. It’s only a matter of time, isn’t it? Say he comes back and plays, how many more hits until his career is over? What will his brain be like in 10 years? 30?
Some people just straight to “let’s outlaw all hitting and turn it into a sissy game” but can we really allow the current situation (in hockey and football, which is more progressive IMHO) to continue? Is there a “safe” middle ground?
Well thanks for the info. I had no idea that concussion injuries were so serious in the long term. Austin Collie had like 3 just last season and came back to play without any apparent side effects. I just assumed it was a “minor” injury.
Do professional boxers have the same problem (ala Muhummad Ali)?
Tommy Hearns is impossible to understand.
Look at another former Steeler, and a friend of Bradshaw, Mike Webster, who was probably the biggest example of what multiple concussions can do to a person.
I don’t think you’re going to see anything change. People enjoy the hard hits too much for the NFL to do away with them. Besides, none of these players are conscripts. They know when they sign the contract that there’s the risk of serious injury, and they’re compensated for it.
Er… you seriously think fame and fortune eases the pain of these men who are in daily distress from the ache in their joints and bones while their brains turn to mush? Really?
Not to mention that I doubt a 20 year old, or 25 year old, really comprehends what he’s setting himself up for 30 years later. After all, the doddering, drooling guys crippled up from their time on the gridiron aren’t in front of them, they don’t stand on the sidelines during practice saying “You’re going to be like me one day!”
I have a friend who played Big Ten football for Purdue. He’s a smart guy with multiple degrees and a ton of energy. Except for the days you see him wince in pain with every step he takes. And he’s developed a speech impediment. And memory problems. He’s a smart guy who knows he’s brain damaged. He’s watching his own mind crumble over time.
Every now and then someone asks him why his boy isn’t playing high school football. He says if the kid really wanted to play he wouldn’t stop him, but he has no desire to encourage him in it, either. The kid is an athlete - he’s sixteen and doing triathlons, has sailed the Chicago-Mackinac race twice, is on his school’s cross-country team - but he’s not taking regular knocks on the head like his old man.
What do you tell a kid who is 12 or 14 and watching his dad limp around and fumble for words, and he asks you “What’s wrong with my dad?” It’s the football kid. Getting hit on the head is a bad thing.
My friend at least never did steroids. If he had he might have made the pros, but he didn’t. At least his heart and kidneys and liver are in good shape. They’re talking about knee replacements. But there’s damn little to nothing they can do for his brain.
No, but I think they’re making that choice, and it’s their choice to make. These are adults, and they know the risk, or at least, by now especially, they should know the risk. I’m sorry about your friend, but if your friend played after the link between hits and the long term brain damage was proven, then he should have known the risks he was taking.
No, the link wasn’t know at the time he was playing. There was absolutely NO way for him to know the long-term consequences of his actions.
Same for his buddies that used steroids - at the time, they were completely legal. It was before a lot of the long-term effects were known. He has NO way to know the long-term consequences down the road.
The old guys we’re currently seeing struggle with this, like Bradshaw - they had no way to know. Sure, folks knew that getting knocked out or your “bell rung” wasn’t a GOOD thing, but they didn’t know the long-term effects like we now do. Those are the guys who are showing it to us. In fact, there’s a long-term research project relying on those guys donating their brains to science after they die to further establish the long-term consequences of concussive head injuries.
Meanwhile, the players’ union that’s supposed to protect them half the time won’t admit these guys’ injuries are from playing the game.
I don’t think it’s good enough to say “well, they’re adult, they’ll have to make their choice and just live with it”. How informed are they, really?
There are a lot of unscrupulous people willing to wave a lot of money in front of someone else to get that person to do what they want, and the money-wavers really don’t care about the long-term interests of the person they hire. Yes, I think there’s a real potential for exploitation there.
We still don’t even know all that much. There was that article a while back about the Crosby v Pacioretty concussions; how the former was more of a rotational hit and the latter linear. It seems rotational hits cause more damage, but looking at the video, Pacioretty looks like he should be the one still out of the game, not Crosby.
So many players go out there and get hit every day and never feel a bit of an effect in the minutes and hours and days after the hit. Science seems to be telling us that even those knocks to the heads will cause long-term damage, but I’m sure you can see the difficulty of telling someone that something they didn’t even feel is going to cripple them later. Sure they are adults - but they’ve spent their whole lives in the universe of that sport, and they are taught and trained by people who also neither know nor care about the effects of concussion. The average career is, what, 5 years in the NHL? Players are going to do everything they can to get the most out of the time they have and they’ll worry about what comes next later. The problem is, what comes next is often decided by what happens now.
Players won’t self-police, we know that. Some players need to start talking, some owners too…the fans need to accept that just because they paid a fortune for tickets doesn’t mean they get to encourage the destruction of people’s minds for their entertainment. There has got to be some middle ground, some understanding of just how dangerous certain types of currently legal hits are, and the rules need to be put in place by the league and enforced to ensure those hits don’t happen.
Players go into a game accepting the risk of broken bones, knee replacements, separated shoulders, etc. They don’t go into the game accepting the risk of early senility.
Don’t forget John Grimsley, Andre Waters, Justin Strelczyk, Tom McHale and Terry Long from the NFL side of things, along with Andrew Martin and Chris Benoit from the WWE side of things.
The dangers of CTE weren’t even known as recently as 10 years ago; I know for certain back in the late '80s/early '90s when I was playing high school football, there was absolutely no mention of anything like this from the coaches or anyone else for that matter. I doubt it was any different at the college and pro levels either- and now you’re seeing guys in their late 30s (like me) who are starting to show the effects of this disease.
The thing that everyone seems to be missing, is that it’s not necessarily the Troy Aikman/Terry Bradshaw/Andre Waters big bell-ringing concussions and hits that cause the problem.
Instead, it’s the day-in and day-out hits that offensive and defensive linemen make on every play that seems to be the most egregious cause. If you look at the lists of dead former players, it’s dominated by offensive linemen, not receivers, running backs and quarterbacks. Offensive linemen rarely get concussions, but they bang heads on every snap, practice or game.
The changes that need to be made in the game aren’t ones dealing with big hits, but rather with the fundamental way that the linemen play. That’s why suggesting no facemasks and leather helmets would be effective; you don’t see guys from the 1960s and 1950s with CTE; you only see guys who came up after the advent of facemasks and hard plastic shell helmets.
I am 49 years old, and my lower body is a wreck from being active in sports when young, starting with trashing out my knees playing soccer in high school. I took repeated damage by being spiked under both knees, trashing out my patellar tendon twice for my right knee and once for my left knee. I also suffer bone spurs in the hip sockets from a combination of many years of dance, and 7 years of steeplechasing/jump competitions. The same competitions have also contributed to the damage that has caused bone spurs in my sacrum.
Trust me, you do not want to end up like this.
I am over fifty, played football and was a catcher in baseball. I took many hits and totally sane*
Pussies.
*just ask my wife 
I am old, so i remember the old Lion players of the 60s and 70s. They did not live long. they were crippled. The knee operations back then were career enders with huge scars and infirm knees the rest of your life. If you saw an old player at the gym. they had a hell of a problem taking off their shirt or lifting their arms over their head. They limped and were in pain the rest of their lives.