Ouch.
Well, you survived.
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And the far side of Glenview today (basically Mt Prospect). “Once more unto the breach”.
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…
*slow clap*
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(On an unrelated note - I went looking for a clapping gif and discarded several since the people in them have … questionable histories. Hopefully we don’t find out this young ape secretly keeps a group of immigrant lemurs as household slaves)
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I’d like to act surprised… But I’ll confess, that sounds exactly like something Quark would do.
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Chimps eat colobus monkeys, which are considered bushmeat.
This ones eating something. Jussayin’.
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You know, if you find yourself missing having a high-contact sport in your lives but don’t like the racism, the commercialism, or the permanently damaging head trauma, there’s always Rugby Union, or an international smorgasbord of alternative games that are essentially excuses to watch grown men angrily touch each other without the horrible excesses of the NFL.
Just remember though: never, ever rugby league.
Not. Even. Once.
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Ironically, American football was invented because Rugger was killing too many players. Which is why it has the downs and the forward pass. Soccer also has concussion issues.
I think soccer could resolve these with bicycle helmets, which would protect against accidental impacts while discouraging headers. Of course players would have to learn other blocks and traps. Perhaps the rules could allow shoulders.
I don’t think American football can do that, unless it finds ways to reduce or eliminate deliberate collisions. But if Goodall cares about the players, I expect he would have already tried to find versions with lower injury rates, and insisted on a season switching among those rules.
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The problem is that American Football added body armour.
I played Union for a few years (I was tall and strong as a kid but not very fast, which made me useless at soccer but good at rugby) and throwing yourself at someone is always a bit scary. You have to work out how to keep your head out of the way while aiming yourself at someone who is running at you full speed and might well be bigger than you.
I was an angry teenager and I have absolutely no doubt that, had I been wearing pads and a helmet, I would have leaped headfirst into the other player’s sternum every single time.
Even in rugby, a hard hit on a good player can be game changing but the difference is that anything life threatening (which is most overtly violent play when you’re not armoured and convinced of your own invulnerability) is totally ban-worthy and very frowned upon.
I’ve watched a few games of American Football and I like the tactics of it but it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that serious brain injury is commonplace, especially with all the commercial pressure that the players experience to hit hard and walk away.
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Does anyone have a comparison of injuries and fatalities before and after armor?
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When helmets were made mandatory for professional hockey players, commentators who were once pro players themselves, loudly worried that head and neck injuries would increase. They were right. They had to add rules to the game to end the deliberate hits to the head that didn’t happen prior to the helmet rule.
In retrospect, the league also deciding to harshly punish fighting in the same time frame absolutely contributed to the increase in head injuries. Asshole players faced few on-ice consequences for intentional hits beyond a few minutes in the sin bin. You’re not going to try to ring a marquee player’s bell if you know you’re going to get your face pounded on by the opposing team’s “enforcer.”
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That might have been a redistribution of head injuries more than an increase, though. The enforcers had their own head injury problems from all the fights they got into.
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I must be missing something here…
Why would adding helmets make other players more likely to hit people in the head? Unless refs stopped caring about hits to the head? But you imply that’s when they started caring about fights in general?
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In hockey, a “hit to the head” doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s the point of contact between the player hitting and the one being hit; it implies that that’s the part that will take the most impact from the hit. So, a “hit to the head” might mean that someone is fighting for the puck, and a player from the other team gets a head of steam, hits them in the back, and plows them into the boards, with the head taking the force of that secondary impact.
it’s obvious that if you ram someone who is not wearing a helmet into the boards, head first, at full speed, that there is a high risk of a head injury. It is less obvious that the player receiving the hit will only have a lessened risk of the same, and not a total elimination of the risk, if that player is wearing a helmet; it’s especially less obvious by how much the risk has been reduced.
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“What aren’t we listening to?”
SMFH
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“Malcolm, is the message being lost…”
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