Sunday, December 04, 2011

Sunday afternoons in dens and rec rooms all across the USA, football fans are huddled in front of their large TV sets watching the weekly clash of the modern-day gladiators; the football players. The grunts, the crunch of helmets and the shouts of the quarterback fills the room. Adrenaline is coursing through the veins of the watchers and the watched and everything is fun, fun until one of the players fails to get up. Hurt or not, the player is expected to get up, brush himself off and let the trainer get him back into the game. Pain killers, steroids, braces or tape will hold the battered body together for yet another game.

Collecting the multi-millions from the enterprise, owners and anyone connected with the sport have all turned their heads when it came to considering the brain damage each collision caused and the pounding their jelly-like brains endured with subtle ruptures and tears. Again and again, the heads, especially in practice, bang brutally against the other helmets while the brains crash into the skulls.

When the game is over and the score has been put up on the board, the warriors go home to tend to their wounds. They, like the competitive runners and the boxers, may find their urine tinged with blood from the kidney injuries that follow the contest. It's part of the game, like the horses that will have their nostrils stuffed with something to keep them from winning the race, or the others that will be pumped up with something that will make them run until they fall dead. How different are they? One's an animal, the other a man, but both are valued for the income they produce and when they stop producing, they go to their respective rewards; the slaughterhouse or the high school athletic field, if they're lucky.

I rode back from Toronto years ago and on the same plane were three fine specimens of manhood; two black fellows and one skinny white kid who had to bend his head everywhere he went. Yes, they were basketball players and the skinny one was Sean Bradley.

Bradley was so skinny, I couldn't imagine he wouldn't easily break a bone if he were to be hit hard by one of the more muscular players. Even his neck was skinny. He had to sit in the first seat in first class just to be able to stretch out his legs.

When the plane landed in Newark, the three were met by three serious looking older white men; a driver, a coach and, for Bradley, the all-important trainer. It was this trainer who was seen later in the week putting Bradley through his muscle-building regime on the Cybex or Nautilus or whatever equipment would do the job best. The pounds had to be put on the frame because the bosses had paid highly for this piece of basketball player flesh and they wanted a good return on their investment.

At 7' 6", he was undoubtedly taller than the then-unskilled Wilt Chamberlain who was whipped into shape and seemed to have some skill. Does Bradley have any physical problems? Who knows. I assume they checked out his teeth and the bones of his feet and back to be sure he wasn't swaybacked. Looking and thinking about it, I'm reminded of how those fabled prizefighters of old were put into the promoters' meat grinders.

I grew up in a section of Queens, New York City where the one way out for a kid with promise was in the fight game. The young boys all wanted boxing gloves for Christmas and they practiced with their weights in the garages of friends. None of them ever made it and probably few gave it half a try.

For those who had made it into the ring, their glory was short-lived and they usually ended up as punch-drunk sparing partners who walked around with cauliflower ears and deeply scarred eyebrows. Others, who had caught the pity of the fellows in suits, ended up as numbers runners for the bookies. They were the lucky ones. The others would find themselves sleeping on a loading dock and swigging from a bottle of cheap wine as they cooked something in a coffee can.

I once saw Tiger Jones, a ranked middleweight, in an exhibition match in a local school hall. He had had a match earlier that month and the cut over his brow was closed with a combination of pink and green sewing thread. Prize fighters didn't usually have a physician to stitch them up. The cut man did the needlework. No need to waste money on needless skills and if the guy could thread a needle, he could do the job.

We like to think that prize fighters are well paid, fantastically fit men who are surrounded by beautiful women and live in the lap of luxury. Not bad for guys with something akin to a 10th grade education. No advanced degrees for these guys and yet they live like kings. But I'm also reminded of two of those "kings" who didn't fare so well even though they were incredibly successful.

One was the Brown Bomber. We watched him on 8mm films in my brother's friend's house and we saw the fights so many times, I almost knew them by heart. We begged our mother to let us stay up on fight night when the Heavyweight Championship of the World was at stake because we wanted to hear that Joe Louis had won again. He couldn't lose, but he did because he trusted men who read better than he did, who managed his money and didn't pay his taxes. He paid his flunkies well and they lived off him like so many sycophants, never telling him things were shaky and he was in financial trouble. When the time came, they would jump ship and leave him to live out his days as a "greeter" in the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel after he had gotten battered further in the wrestling ring.

The incredible Muhammad Ali, a.k.a. Cassius Clay, who was able to "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," got stung by the unkindest insect of all; promoters who used him until his brain was incredibly damaged. Once, a newspaper writer calculated how many times Muhammad had been hit in the head by hands that had the force of sledge hammers. I don't remember the number, but over time it had its effect.

So, the promoters and the scouts go to the playgrounds and the colleges as so many cattlemen go to auction, looking for prime beef they will serve up on Sundays or Saturday nights in venues that will bring in millions for the owners and scars, broken hands and battered brains for the contestants. They kill horses at the end of their careers, but they aren't so kind to athletes. The evidence is in the brains that have been donated to a special bank in Massachusetts that is keeping track of sports brain encephalopathy, but the one sport they can't collect brains on now is causing damage as we sit here; kids' soccer. Are we treating kids like horses, too?

Dr. Patricia A. Farrell, Ph.D.

Licensed Psychologist

Dr. Patricia A. Farrell, Ph.D., LLC

Fort Lee, NJ