Brett Favre discussed the potential dangers of football today in a candid interview on the Today Show this morning, even going so far as admitting that he wouldn’t know what he would say if he had a son interested in playing. Favre is not alone in this thinking, of course, as there are seemingly more people every day speaking out about the dangers of football –especially as it applies to long-term head injuries. While opinions vary to the extent that football is dangerous, one thing we can all agree on is that more people are speaking out and prompting a closer look at what needs to be done in the future in order to better protect players.
Interestingly, we may have an even bigger and more complex issue at hand than simply football players and the risks they experience on the field. What I mean by this is that we might want to begin a broader sport psychology discussion that expands beyond football to any and all contact sports where participants might be at-risk. Off the top of my head I’m thinking mixed martial arts (MMA), where combatants regularly deliver powerful punches and kicks to every body part – including the head. In fact, MMA fighters are barely protected (unlike football players), leaving them even more at-risk to long-term damage.
The real questions, therefore, include the following:
- What will be the “tipping point” pertaining to even more aggressive protective measures in sports like football and MMA? Will deaths be needed in order to prompt changes?
- Can contact sports continue to ensure that their athletes face low levels of risk while competing? With today’s athletes being bigger, stronger, and faster than ever before, is it even possible to protect these athletes in the future — even with better equipment and more conservative on-field/mat protective rules and measures?
- Similarly, assuming football and MMA do eventually engage in even more protective measures, will this take away from the fan support (and the accompanying revenues that fuel these sports)? In other words, if MMA fighters one day have to wear traditional boxing gloves, head gear, and some sort of body armor, would you still watch?
It’s almost a given that we will continue to see more current and former athletes from contact sports experience life-threatening/altering consequences from their time on the field or in the ring — common sense tells us that.
As fans we seem to love watching the hardest hits and most powerful knockouts, but all of this comes as a great risk for the combatants who provide these thrills to us. Making this issue more complex is tracking former athletes who have had life-changing injuries after competing as they are often difficult to find – or their troubles have been washed away and assumed to be caused by other things, like alcoholism, mental illness, or drug abuse. As we speculate about sports and the inherent dangers they present, one thing we can be certain about if we study the safety trajectory is that athletes are only going to get stronger and more physical, and it’s to be expected that more damage will be done before it ever gets better — if it ever gets better.
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