Football players and fighting dogs, notes Gladwell, suffer serious injury and even death in an activity staged for the enjoyment of spectators. In both football and dogfight, “gameness” or “courage and grit” are highly prized.
Gladwell’s attempt to liken football to dogfighting is undermined by the obvious point that football players, unlike dogs, have some choice in whether to particpate or not. Nevertheless, his discussion of the potential dangers of playing football is worth reading. Gladwell refers to the work of Kevin Guskiewicz, who runs the Sports Concussion Research Program at the University of North Carolina. He writes:
For the past five seasons, Guskiewicz and his team have tracked every one of the football team’s practices and games using a system called HITS, in which six sensors are placed inside the helmet of every player on the field, measuring the force and location of every blow he receives to the head. Using the HITS data, Guskiewicz was able to reconstruct precisely what happened each time the player was injured.
Gladwell goes on to describe the experience of one lineman on the team.
"The first concussion was during preseason. The team was doing two-a-days," [Guskiewicz] said, referring to the habit of practicing in both the morning and the evening in the preseason. "It was August 9th, 9:55 A.M. He has an 80-g hit to the front of his head. About ten minutes later, he has a 98-g acceleration to the front of his head."
To put those numbers in perspective, Guskiewicz explained, if you drove your car into a wall at twenty-five miles per hour and you weren’t wearing your seat belt, the force of your head hitting the windshield would be around 100 gs: in effect, the player had two car accidents that morning.
When we think about football, we worry about the dangers posed by the heat and the fury of competition. Yet the HITS data suggest that practice—the routine part of the sport—can be as dangerous as the games themselves.
When Guskiewicz reviewed data for the first day of training camp he discovered that the lineman had been hit in the head 31 times. His concussion seemed to be the result of cumulative blows to the head. "This is a crucial point," Galdwell contends. The problem, according to concussion specialist Robert Cantu, is repetitive subconcussive trauma, "not just the handful of big hits ... It’s lots of little hits, too."
Gladwell estimates that a 10-year NFL lineman, when high school and college careers are factored in, probably has been hit in the head 18,000 times … “that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.”
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