That cheerleader’s spot
It’s football season! Woo-hoo!
But one tv football commentator and former player has quit his commentator gig.
[Ed] Cunningham, 48, resigned from one of the top jobs in sports broadcasting because of his growing discomfort with the damage being inflicted on the players he was watching each week. The hits kept coming, right in front of him, until Cunningham said he could not, in good conscience, continue his supporting role in football’s multibillion-dollar apparatus.
“I take full ownership of my alignment with the sport,” he said. “I can just no longer be in that cheerleader’s spot.”
Football has seen high-profile N.F.L. players retire early, even pre-emptively, out of concern about their long-term health, with particular worry for the brain. But Cunningham may be the first leading broadcaster to step away from football for a related reason — because it felt wrong to be such a close witness to the carnage, profiting from a sport that he knows is killing some of its participants.
And killing them in a particularly nasty way.
As a color analyst, primarily providing commentary between plays, Cunningham built a reputation among college football fans, and even coaches, for his pointed criticism toward what he thought were reckless hits and irresponsible coaching decisions that endangered the health of athletes. His strong opinions often got him denounced on fan message boards and earned him angry calls from coaches and administrators.
Because football is so much more important than some guy’s brain.
At first, Cunningham told ESPN executives that he was leaving to spend more time with his sons, ages 3 and 5, and because of his workload as a film and television producer. He was a producer for “Undefeated,” a documentary about an urban high school football team, and has a string of projects lined up.
“Those are two of the issues,” Cunningham said. He waited weeks before he revealed the third. “The big one was my ethical concerns.”
A football broadcaster leaving a job because of concerns over the game’s safety appears to have no precedent.
“I’ve been in the business 20 years and it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of anything like that,” Fitting said. “But this is the world we live in now. More and more players are stepping away in a given season or a given year, and who knows. Are there other announcers out there who have been afraid to do this? I don’t know. Is he going to be a pioneer in this small niche? I don’t know. Who knows what the future holds.”
I on the other hand find it pretty amazing that football just rolls on regardless, despite the growing evidence that it’s a very brain-trauma-prone sport.
If nothing else, Cunningham’s decision could prompt some self-examination among those who watch, promote, coach or otherwise participate in football without actually playing it.
Al Michaels, the veteran broadcaster who does play-by-play for NBC’s Sunday night N.F.L. broadcasts, said he did not see his role in the booth as an ethical dilemma.
“I don’t feel that my being part of covering the National Football League is perpetuating danger,” he said in a phone interview. “If it’s not me, somebody else is going to do this. There are too many good things about football, too many things I enjoy about it. I can understand maybe somebody feeling that way, but I’d be hard-pressed to find somebody else in my business who would make that decision.”
Yeah, that – that level of thoughtlessness surprises me. Yes, sure, let’s go on promoting football and cheering it on and advertising it and broadcasting it, so that more generations of players can end up with destroyed brains and slow miserable deaths.
“It’s not unethical for me to do it, because if I refuse, somebody else will do it.”
Interesting ethical stance.
Australian Rules Football* has fewer injuries overall, but in particular is not nearly so closely associated with CTE… despite being a full contact sport lacking any padding or helmets. This is because the padding in American Football is used to justify all manner of heavy tackles with an almost-anything-goes approach to severity, whereas the Australian sport acknowledges that certain tackles (e.g. the spear) are inherently dangerous, padding or not, and bans them. Thus the lack of padding improves safety by removing the illusion of near-invulnerability.
*Meaning, the Australian invented ruleset to the general ‘football’ idea. Many are confused by the name of the sport, thinking it means ‘Australia dominates the sport of Football’ or similar.
I wouldn’t anticipate major improvements any time soon if the example set by professional boxing is anything to go by, and the MMA and similar combat ‘sports’ are if anything even more brutal than boxing yet with apparently very little restriction on how much damage the fighters can inflict on each other.
American football is like a religion. Unlikely to change for a while, and for some until death by head trauma.
Holms: similar to rugby union, which is currently going through a period of significant rule and interpretation change to try to minimise head injuries.
The ‘protective’ helmet became a deliberate weapon. Hits inflict crippling injuries on their targets every year. And we’ve been forced to recognize that multiple impacts are insidiously damaging to the players that inflict them as well.
GBShaw pointed out that ‘protective’ gloves actually allowed boxers to strike each other in the face and head to a degree that bare-knuckle fighting did not.
‘Primitive’ rugby, Australian Rules, and perhaps even Broughton Rules boxing, would be improvements over the entrenched theaters of destruction we have in the U.S.
@5, I think a lot of the problem is that we view football players more as warriors than as players. The very language around sports reporting enhances that, with war-like terms used to describe wins (or losses). I also suspect this is enhanced by the refusal in the USA to accept a tie. It’s sin at all costs.
Yeah… I wouldn’t us (Europeans/Aussies/Kiwis) to congratulate ourselves too heartedly. The truth is, we are only now starting to wake up to the dangers of repeated shocks to the head. The problem with CTE is not only the violence of the hits but the fact that players/fighters suffer repeated hits over a long career. The brain does not really heal and even undetectable injuries will over time add up and create the condition. This is particularly true in young people which is why there are now calls to ban ALL tackles in young players until the age of 18, or at least 16. (Which in all honesty would also probably do wonder for the quality of the rugby they play later in life. “Spaces, not faces” and all that….)
These calls will not be heeded, or at least not for a long time.
So yes, some measures have been taken to limit injuries but not nearly as much as is really needed. The public still expect their ‘big hits’. *
Football (soccer) is also very slowly coming to the realisation that there is a problem. The mere act of repeatedly heading the ball can, over a period of time, be a cause of CTE. Of the eight surviving members of England’s 1966 World Cup winning team, 3 suffer from Alzheimer’s and a 4th has significant memory troubles. This is a pattern we find in lots of teams from the 50s, 60s and 70s. I have a solution for that, though.**
And boxing, Oh God, boxing. There, brain damage (concussion) IS the aim of the game…
*I am as guilty of that as any, I must admit. I was at Twickenham this week-end and cheered with the rest on some particularly well-timed tackles by London Irish players. A good ‘placage’ is a thing of beauty. But a lot of what we see needs to go.
**Ban soccer, it’s a ghastly sport.
And of course what makes it tricky is that CTE develops over time, usually quite slowly. Also people are really bad at thinking about their future selves. Players now are being “heroic” and saying it’s worth it…but that’s because now is now. When the time comes they discover it wasn’t worth it at all, but it’s too late.
Yeah the cards are stacked. The people who profit from the games, rarely the players themselves, mind, unless it’s at the highest level, and the public can assuage their consciences by saying that the players/fighters know the risks. Ignoring the fact that as you say we are very bad at evaluating future risks. And statistics usually don’t mean much to us either.
Which is why we need external pressure to be applied in the form of government- and state-imposed regulations and/or penalties.
This would basically be chapter 25 of my future book: 455 Reasons Why Arnaud Thinks Libertarians Are Shit.
It’s a good book, but a bit monotonous: I think the argument is well understood after chapter 3…
Hahahaha I can’t wait to read it. Love the title.
#8
Well, the point of my post wasn’t exactly ‘our sports are perfect’ but rather to point out that padding is all about reducing safety by encouraging aggression.