The Roughriders escaped with a 14-9 win over the lowly Edmonton Eskimos on Saturday, improving their record to 10-5 and keeping the hope of a home playoff game alive if they can beat the Lions next week.
The highlight was a crucial goal line stand by the Riders with about a minute to go, but that's not the image that stuck with me after the game. Instead, I couldn't stop thinking about Eskimos defensive tackle Almondo Sewell, who was carted off on a stretcher late in the third quarter after sustaining a neck injury during a punt return. It was a sickening but familiar scene: players from both teams crowded around Sewell as he lay motionless on the turf, surrounded by trainers and doctors. Fortunately, all tests for spinal fracture came back negative and Sewell has returned to Edmonton.
Still, I couldn't help but think to the night before when I watched League of Denial, a PBS documentary that aired last week about the NFL's concussion crisis. Viewers were exposed to a who's-who list of former NFL players who suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease associated with head trauma and concussions that can cause permanent dementia and depression: Mike Webster, a Hall of Fame centre for the Pittsburgh Steelers who depended on his teenage son to care for him before he died in 2002, at the age of 50; Junior Seau, the former linebacker, who shot and killed himself in May 2012. Perhaps most frightening of all was the story of Owen Thomas, a lineman at the University of Pennsylvania who hanged himself in 2010 despite having no history of depression. The scourge of CTE didn't stop at the U.S. border, either; Carlton 'Cookie' Gilchrist, who played one season with the Roughriders in the 1950s before going to the NFL, was diagnosed with CTE following his death in 2011. (CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem.)
What did Webster, Seau, Thomas and Gilchrist have in common? All of their brains showed the unmistakable signs of CTE.
According to League of Denial, of the 46 brains sent to Dr. Ann McKee at Boston University for analysis, 45 showed signs of CTE. Even assuming that only brains of people who showed some symptoms during life were sent for examination, that's an astounding number. There is still great debate about the link between football and CTE; for nearly 20 years the NFL denied that any link existed and, in a recent $765 million settlement with former players the league denied responsibility for the injuries sustained. We still don't know whether 80 per cent or 5 per cent of football players will be affected by CTE or whether there's any magic number at which one more concussion is too many.
There are also signs that it's not just the huge hits that can cause problems. Sub-concussive hits, those that don't reach the level of a concussion (think linemen smashing into each other on every play), might be as likely to cause CTE as the devastating hits like the one Sewell took on Saturday. The story of Owen Thomas also tells us that it might not take years of playing football to cause the onset of CTE; there might be teenagers who have already begun to develop the disease after only a year or two of playing.
League of Denial tells a powerful and disturbing story. It makes you question your own ethics if you're a football fan. Yet, less than forty-eight hours after watching the documentary I eased myself onto the couch, ready for another Sunday of glorious football. Does that make me a hypocrite? Absolutely. How can I be horrified by the brutality of football one night and then spend the better part of a day watching the very same sport?
Two thousand years ago the citizens of Rome packed the Colosseum to watch the greatest entertainment of the day - gladiators fighting each other or wild animals to the death. In the early twentieth century some boxing matches were so brutal that they became a literal test of survival. A 1919 bout between Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard saw Willard suffer a broken jaw, cheekbone and ribs while also losing several teeth. Did anyone in the crowd that day feel a little squeamish, a little ashamed of what they were watching? Were any of those Romans horrified by the sight of a gladiator being mauled to death by a lion, to the delight of tens of thousands? Should I have changed the channel once Sewell was taken off on that stretcher?
Two thousand years from now, will people look at football the same way we now look at those games in the Colosseum or those early boxing matches? They might, and if they do I'll probably be one of the millions of people who stood by and shrugged their shoulders. I'm a huge fan of a game that might be slowly killing its players and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
