Boxing may be bad, but football may be even worse

Boxing, the redheaded, ADD afflicted, halitosis plagued stepchild of sports.

No sport receives more punishment from abolition-minded folks who are looking for a juicy target to smear than boxing. Let’s be up front, though, sometimes we think they have a point. We can dissect the act of two people fighting for a fee for others’ entertainment and rationalize the concept ‘til the cows come home, but the majority of us at least occasionally feel a tiny bit dirty as we watch.

At no time do we feel dirtier than when a boxer pays the ultimate price for participation, and dies from blows taken during a bout. In recent months, we’ve been relatively blessed by a paucity of ring deaths and/or catastrophic injury, but we all know that as long as boxers box, the other shoe will drop. It’s not a question of ‘if,’ but ‘when’…

On November 20, 2006, former NFL defensive back Andre Waters committed suicide in his Tampa, Florida home. Yesterday, a forensic pathologist named Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh went on record as saying that he examined Waters’ brain tissue, and the tissue resembled that of an 85-year-old man…with early-stage Alzheimer’s. Omalu said, and let me emphasize this part, THAT HE BELIEVED THE DAMAGE WAS RELATED TO MULTIPLE CONCUSSIONS WATERS SUSTAINED DURING HIS 12-YEAR NFL CAREER. Waters was just 44 when he picked up a gun, aimed it at
his head, and said ‘No Mas’…

It’s not as if I’m referring to head trauma and the high incidence of concussions in the NFL as the 2,000-pound elephant sitting in the living room, unremarked upon. ESPN The Magazine has run stories in the last few months that have highlighted the prevalence of concussions.

As Peter Keating reported, following a spate of head injuries to stars such as Troy Aikman and Steve Young, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue established the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee in 1994 and named Elliot Pellman, M.D., its chairman. Pellman and his colleagues wrote in January 2005 that returning to play after a concussion “does not involve significant risk of a second injury either in the same game or during the season.” But a 2003 NCAA study of 2,905 college football players, Keating wrote, found just the opposite: Those who’ve suffered concussions are more susceptible to further head trauma for seven to 10 days after the injury.

Getting the most obvious fact out of the way, that I’m no doctor, doesn’t that seem obvious on face value? That if your bell was rung so hard that you experience a period of unconsciousness, vomiting, confusion, amnesia and visual disturbances, you may well be more susceptible to reinjuring that most sensitive apparatus, your brain?

But boxing doesn’t have a central ruling body putting forth lobbying pressure to minimize negative publicity, so the savage science receives a perhaps disproportionate share of bad pub when a fighter gets hurt.

I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be a constant, rigorous examination of the health issues facing fighters. I’m in no way dismissing the potentially severe ramifications that face someone who steps into a ring and absorbs blows from an opponent intent on delivering destructive punishment. I am saying, let the playing field on matters of health and safety and ramifications of participation be level. Every person taking part in a boxing match, or playing in an NFL contest, or an Arena League contest, or a NASCAR race, deserves to know the true risks of taking part.