YOUR HEALTH and MEDIA
The End of Contact Sports is Nigh
Don’t be surprised if within 5 years all contact
sports radically change or else become banned.
This applies to individual sports such as boxing and
UFC and any martial art that involves forceful blows to the head, and team sports
such as football and hockey.
Repeat concussions and their serious, debilitating and
life shortening effects are now well known and the topic most recently of Ken Dryden’s
new book, Game Change: The Life
and Death of Steve Montador and the Future of Hockey, which highlights the short 35 year life of dedicated
hockey player Steve Montador[1].
Ongoing mental
fuzziness and inability to focus one’s mind, attention and even one’s eyes,
memory problems, depression and the snake pit of painkillers and other drugs
are common.
I remember Eric Lindros,
that giant as strong as a bull who dominated junior hockey and then the NHL, and
was named one of the “100 Greatest NHL Players’.
His Wikipedia
biography never mentions the C-word,
concussion, but news of his repeated ’issues’ after blows to the head where
well publicized at the time including interviews he gave the media upon his premature
retirement in 2007 at age 34.
In the 1999-2000
season Eric Lindros, who often rushed with his head down, had 3 concussions and
his Flyers career ended when in game 7 of the Eastern finals he received an
open ice, legal, full blast shoulder to his head.
The great intimidator
was never the same thereafter[2].
Recently, Lindros has
been a major advocate for reform in all contact team sports re; concussions,
and was instrumental in the push to make law in 2016 Rowan’s Law, named after a
17 year old high school female ruby player Rowan Stringer who died after
suffering a second sports concussion in a single week in a rugby game[3].
Such overlapping trauma is now called Second Impact Syndrome and recognized as deadly[4].
Rugby players do
not wear helmets and maybe that would have helped Rowan, but it is unlikely a
helmet will achieve the holy grail of an injury proof head covering though all
the equipment companies connected to the NHL and NFL as well as independents are
trying.
More
importantly, new research has uncovered another and more pervasive, unintended
consequence of team contact sports: CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy)
which is a degenerate brain disease connected to repeated, high force body to
body contact – as in hockey body checking or football tackling!
Put simply,
the mere repeated jarring of the brain during repeated body hits can itself be as
deadly or lead to dementia.
The recently
published study of the brains of 111 early death NFL players found that 100 had
CTE degeneration, a 99.1% correlation[5].
So Ken Dryden’s new crusade to have
hits to the head in hockey outlawed and declared a penalty, intentional or
accidental,: helmet to helmet contact, shoulder to helmet contact or stick work
to the head, is laudatory but insufficient.
Public awareness alone will not
bring about the needed transformations to hitless, European style/Peewee hockey
nor replace tackling with the strips of fabric of flag football, but (class
action) lawsuits – again and again -- in the multi-billions of dollars, will force
all contact sports to radically change or become extinct.
The lawyers now smell
lots of blood!
Otherwise, baseball,
basketball, soccer and volleyball will alone rule the team sports world.
[1] See
article, “Enough!”, G&M, Saturday, October 14, 2017, F1 and F3.
[2]
See Sports Illustrated article, https://www.si.com/nhl/2017/06/29/eric-lindros-concussions-flyers-where-are-they-now
[3] See
above Sports Illustrated and http://nationalpost.com/features/rowans-law
[5] Time
Magazine, Sept. 18, 2017, p, 26; “Former NFLers warn parents of CTE risk, G&M,
Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017, S5;