Simply drill several holes into each contestant’s skull and implant medical grade bolts into each one. Then, for the competition, the bolts will be connected to a rigid frame that prevents the skull from moving significantly.
Since the skull is not accelerating, there can be no brain trauma. Contestants will have the joy of inflicting and receiving pain, but the damage will only be superficial. Unless they slap so hard that the bolts rip out. Which would be pretty cool.
Wow, WHAT a shock! You mean repeated blows to the head do NOT improve brain health?? Who knew? (/sarcasm)
This is how we lost my late father-in-law. He was on blood thinners (don’t recall why), bonked his head, was fine for several days, then very suddenly went into coma and died.
Up to this point I was following right along, nodding my head, thinking you had a fine idea there. Then you veered off into left field.
I expected your next sentence would be close to “For the competition, they remove one bolt as a pressure relief so any brain bleed can simply drip on the floor instead of compressing the brain fatally.”
More seriously …
Back in the early / mid 1980s there was a USAF A-10 that crashed with the pilot not ejecting. There was no obvious reason for the crash. USAF machines have real limited flight and voice recorders compared to airliners, and USAF’s mishap investigations are sometimes superb, sometimes cursory.
Anyhow, there was no evidence of anything wrong with the jet. It emerged that the pilot had whacked his head real hard on a protruding hunk of airplane while pre-flighting his jet. That’s an ever-present risk on airplanes carrying external ordnance; there’s just lots of random steel stuff sticking out to bonk your head on. And the shape is different on every flight depending on what you’re carrying. So not much reliable muscle memory for when and where to duck or …
Per the maintenance dude who prepped and launched the jet, After the pilto whacked his head on something the pilot sat down on the ramp for a couple minutes, told the ground crewman he was “OK”, got up, strapped on the jet and launched. And seemed normal and capable throughout their interactions getting him and the jet ready to go. Then he later crashed from an intermediate altitude without a comment over the radio to his flightmates.
The assumed / presumed cause was incapacitation due to a concussion sustained during the preflight.
Wasted an expensive hunk of machinery and an expensive USAF personnel asset too. Not to mention upsetting his family.
At least in football, head injuries aren’t inherent to the nature of the sport, and there’s some hope (futile, perhaps) that improvements to helmets, or changes in the rules, could remove the risk while leaving the fundamentals of the sport mostly unchanged.
Boxing, though, is inherently based on giving each other brain damage.
I’ve never seen slapfighting. I grew up in the days where the concussion protocol after a head injury playing sports was treated with the coach telling you to “walk it off” and then putting you back in the game. With better knowledge of medicine, most sports have improved. Not all of them, apparently. I don’t feel the need to watch ones that don’t respect or care for the athletes who participate, even if fully aware and consenting. I will watch ones where steps are taken to mitigate risk.