Concussions in sports

[jerrym]

With the announcement that famous NFL players Gale Sayers and Dwight Clark are suffering from dementia and ALS, the price of playing pro football is being discussed again.

Because we know more today than we ever have, so many people who read about Gale Sayers and Dwight Clark over the weekend found themselves scrutinizing their stories of disease, pain and mortality for an answer to the obvious, inevitable question.
They found that Clark himself, and Sayers’ family, looked for the same answer. It’s the one people no longer are naive enough not to expect.

"Like the doctor at the Mayo Clinic said, 'Yes, a part of this has to be on football,'" Sayers’ wife Ardie told the Kansas City Star about the cause of the dementia that became public in a story late Saturday night.
"It wasn’t so much getting hit in the head … It’s just the shaking of the brain when they took him down with the force they play the game in."
Some 24 hours later, Clark got to that point midway through his open letter revealing his diagnosis with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. "I’ve been asked if playing football caused this. I don’t know for sure. But I certainly suspect it did," Clark wrote. "And I encourage the NFLPA and the NFL to continue working together in their efforts to make the game of football safer, especially as it relates to head trauma." ...
The awful price that football extracts just looms larger as the players paying it become sharper and more full-color in our memories. The number of players from Sayers’ era who are meeting this fate, and who can trace it to football, keeps growing, while their actual numbers are shrinking. Fates, which once seemed just consequences of age or bad luck or tragic personal problems, now are unveiled as connected to the sport they played for America’s entertainment.
Sayers is 73. Another Hall of Famer from his heyday, tight end John Mackey, lost his battle with dementia six years ago, at 69. Sayers’ story mimics Mackey’s in numerous disturbing ways: public appearances where he didn’t recognize friends or acknowledge fans or connect with highlights of his own career.
Besides Clark, at least two well-known NFL players since the turn of the century have publicly fought ALS — O.J. Brigance and Steve Gleason — but the possible connection to their playing is a very recent development.
In fact, as a third player diagnosed with ALS shows, the connection is downright complicated.
Kevin Turner challenged the NFL’s settlement of the class-action concussion lawsuit based on his post-career struggles. After he died a year ago this month, the renowned researchers at Boston University discovered Turner actually had CTE, which produced symptoms almost identical to those associated with ALS. Which makes the news about Clark a few degrees more chilling. Turner was just 46. Gleason turned 40 on Sunday. Brigance is 47. Clips of their NFL exploits (including Gleason’s legendary punt block in the first post-Katrina Saints game in the Superdome) are available 24-7. ...
For years, the sights of players limping at young ages, shaking hands with gnarled fingers or struggling to turn their necks from side to side were the saddest sights fans could imagine. They're now being replaced by the effects of brains deteriorating and taking bodies along with them — sometimes violently, as the Junior Seaus, Dave Duersons and Andre Waterses have shown. It’s wreaking havoc through more and more generations of players, coming closer to even the youngest ones. The time at which we see players being debated in free agency, even the draft, paying the price of playing this sport gets closer every day.

[jerrym]

Once again the NHL playoffs are played under a different set of rules where much of the rulebook is thrown away and injuries, especially concussions, of which Crosby's is only one of many, with there lifelong implications abound.

Because it’s the Cup — that old NHL marketing campaign, which featured players battling through adversity on their way to a championship, is one way of explaining what happened to Sidney Crosby in Monday’s game against the Washington Capitals.Playoff hockey is high-stakes hockey. It’s violent, aggressive and sometimes dirty. It’s both ugly and beautiful. It’s putting away the whistles and letting them play.It’s Scott Stevens knocking Paul Kariya out cold with an open-ice hit, only to have Kariya come back and score the gamewinner. It’s Claude Lemieux ramming Kris Draper’s face into the dasher boards or Nathan Horton being stretchered off the ice in the final. It’s everything you love and everything you hate about the sport rolled into one.So when Alex Ovechkin swung his stick at Crosby’s head as if it were a baseball in the opening minutes of Game 3 and then Matt Niskanen followed it up by cross-checking the Pittsburgh Penguins captain in the face as he was falling to the ice, it wasn’t surprising that some simply shrugged their shoulders and defended it as a hockey play.After all, this was playoff hockey. That means concussions — like the one that may knock Crosby out of the post-season — are part of the game. ...Yes, but why do the playoffs have to become a demolition derby? Why do they have to turn into The Hunger Games?Only hockey makes its star players run through a gauntlet of slashes and cheap hits every time they touch the puck in the post-season. Only hockey seems to have two rule books: one for the regular season and a much thinner version for the playoffs.Apparently Crosby should have known what he was signing up for when he drove the puck to the net. He should have known players were more interested in taking him out than taking the puck. You want to see skill? Go watch figure skating.It’s not just Crosby. And it’s not just this series or this year’s playoffs. A year ago, it was Kris Letang who delivered a headshot on Marcus Johansson. A week ago, Predators forward Kevin Fiala had his leg broken after Blues defenceman Robert Bortuzzo drove him needlessly into the end boards in Game 1. In the first round, Ovechkin nearly had his knee blown out after receiving a low-bridge hit from Toronto’s Nazem Kadri.I’m not going to say what Ovechkin or Niskanen did was malicious or intentional. Reputations are at stake and not just for Ovechkin — who has been criticized unfairly as a player who cannot raise his level of play in the playoffs — but for the entire Capitals team.Did they play Crosby harder than usual? Did they step over the line in trying to contain him? If so, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.Maybe, like Kariya, Crosby will return and play the hero. Maybe, like Bobby Clarke with his slash on Valeri Kharlamov in the 1972 Summit Series, this will be remembered as the time Ovechkin finally was willing to do whatever it took to win a Cup.Either way, it seems the NHL has another defining moment for its marketing campaign.

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/m...81891593178124