A post mortem examination of Chris Henry, former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver, has revealed the troubled former third round draft pick suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage caused by repeated blows to the head.
The Brain Injury Research Institute (BIRI) has conducted tests on a range of former athletes, and whilst nothing has been confirmed, many of these athletes developed serious behavioural problems that may have contributed to their death.
Included in the test sample was Chris Benoit, the wrestler who in bizarre circumstances executed his family in a murder suicide.He is one of many athletes to have been found to be afflicted with CTE and behave erratically prior to their death.
Such a phenomenon cast a very dark shadow over the NFL as a sport.
Whilst many Australians consider the use of pads an unflattering sign of weakness, that view disregards the speed of the collisions and the use of the head as a battering ram.
The armoured exterior of an NFL player provides them with the superhuman confidence that enables them to put their bodies in situations where they know a head first collision with either the ground or another 120kg behemoth will ensue.
Much like big tobacco and its stance on lung cancer and other diseases, the NFL has worked very hard to discredit any work that suggests that the repeated concussions suffered by the players leads to lasting brain damage.
I’m not alone in cheering on the sight of a player so committed to the ball they cling to it like a life preserver as their body twists violently in the air. I’m not alone in cheering on the vicious, but legal hit, that causes a player to lose their orientation.
But when we talk of how much a player earns or how much loyalty they owe to their team, perhaps we should give pause to consider the loyalty of his family who have to watch some of these once young proud men descend into depressive spiral that contributes to their deaths.
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The Crowd Says (6) | Page 1 of Comments
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- American Football, Chris Benoit, Chris Henry, Cincinnati Bengals
June 29th 2010 @ 7:26am
Hobart said | June 29th 2010 @ 7:26am | Report comment
The NFL does its best to broadcast a squeaky clean image. You rarely see any scuffles between the players because the TV directors are under orders to immediately cut away. Nobody is ever injured on TV, merely shaken up on the play. As for helmets, they were never worn in the early days of American football, and in the twenties and thirties were nothing more than thin leather fliers’ helmets. As fabrics got lighter and stronger the helmets improved out of sight, but they’re still not strong enough. It’s the law in the US and Canada that football players, at all levls, must wear a helmet.
In spite of the incidence of serious head injuries plummeting everywhere a helmet law is mandatory, there is still no helmet law for bike riders in 29 US states, and those that do exist cover, for the most part, only kids and teens under 18. In Illinois, Iowa and New Hampshire there’s no helmet law at all for motorcyclists.
June 29th 2010 @ 9:10pm
Tom said | June 29th 2010 @ 9:10pm | Report comment
Quite apart from the helmets not being strong enough, I think the helmets themselves are the problem. Wearing a hard helmet gives the player a false sense of security, meaning they do things like lead with the head into tackles etc, which league/union/AFL players don’t do. Hence, they may well make the problem worse.
June 29th 2010 @ 7:23pm
Jim Wilson said | June 29th 2010 @ 7:23pm | Report comment
What about heading the ball in soccer?
Isn’t there some evidence from Europe that former professional players (who can head the ball as much as 700 times a seasons) end up with advanced dementia & other brain injuries in their late 30s & early 40s?
June 29th 2010 @ 8:02pm
Whiteline said | June 29th 2010 @ 8:02pm | Report comment
How do you think Webber’s rock is going?
June 29th 2010 @ 8:44pm
sledgeandhammer said | June 29th 2010 @ 8:44pm | Report comment
This report’s been out for some time, and CTE has been found on a number of NFL players, and college players in the US. Now a number of players living with the effects of brain damage have come forward to say things have to change. . Apparently a lot of damage is done in practice matches, where they have measuring devices inside the helmet, so can track the number of collisions. From what I last heard the NFL Authority’s have now been forced to take this issue seriously and are taking serious steps, particularly in changing the culture of players pushing on through concussions. . Having said the Australia has a similar macho culture of playing on with concussions, guys don’t want to lose their place in the team. And yes, professional soccer players also get dementia from heading the ball. There was a report on this topic (head injuries in sport) on the ABC program Catalyst and I was surprised to see former Wallaby prop Andrew Heath suffers every day from head knocks he took on the field. In one interview he claims that during one test he actually thought he was playing AFL!
June 30th 2010 @ 5:18pm
ilikedahoodoogurusingha said | June 30th 2010 @ 5:18pm | Report comment
I remember reading a book on Grid Iron some years ago, it may even have been Vince Lombardi”s “Run for/to Daylight” that brought up the subject of helmets. Apparently when the hard shelled helmets were introduced it was at the behest of the club owners/managers as they could display logos and sponsorship nice and clearly, whereas the “experts” wanted a soft outer layer similar to RU/RL headgear of today as it provided better protection.