MarcSullivaFan said:
The claim was that they were intentionally misleading the players into believing that they were at little risk of longterm head injuries. That, of course, was a bald-faced lie.
Now, it should be noted, that the NFL's motivation in hiding the reality of the sport's dangerousness is not about a concern over having to compensate retired players. They could have paid twice this much without blinking. What the NFL is concerned about is that when all the information about the dangerousness of the sport and the league's attempts to cover it up get out, it could mark the begginning of the decline of professional football's stranglehold on the American sportsfan's wallet. Football fans have a high tolerance for brutality--indeed a thirst for it in many cases--but at some point the dangerousness is going to start turning a lot of people off. Not everyone, but enough to make a deep cut into profits. I love football, but I do struggle with moral problem of watching these guys kill themselves, especially the guys who had no other options. It's a real problem.
I agree, and I love football.
I think of the parallels with boxing. I'm in my mid-forties. When I was growing up, boxing was, IMO, more popular than pro football, and was as popular as any sport in the country - it's hard to make parallels with a team sport played on a regular schedule because it's not apples-to-apples, but boxing was clearly front-and-center in the public consciousness. I watched a LOT of boxing with my dad, especially on ABC with Howard Cosell. Ali, Frazier, Holmes, Foreman (in his first iteration), and guys like that were household names, instantly recognizable to even non-sports fans - in fact, whoever was heavyweight champion of the world was de facto considered the greatest athlete in the world and was a global celebrity - especially Ali, who may have been the most popular person in the entire world, or at least the most widely-known.
That has changed. Now, boxing is a fringe sport, almost never found on network television, existing mostly as time-slot filler on cable sports networks, only occasionally generating big headlines, with pay-per-view blockbusters becoming increasingly rare. I don't even know who the heavyweight champion is - one of the Klitschos? - I don't even know how to spell it - and whoever it is, he could probably walk through Times Square at high noon and not turn a head. Guys like Pacquiao and Mayweather are millionaires and are known to sports fans, but not very well to the general public. The last boxer to be a dominant public figure was Mike Tyson, which was a long time ago, and which was at least partially due to his bizarre behavior, celebrity marriage, arrest and conviction, etc.
Part of boxing's decline is maybe because of the rise of the even-more-violent MMA, but I think that's existing alongside boxing in its existing fan base and/or cannibalizing that fan base. Plus, the decline of boxing started long before the rise of MMA. I can't put my finger on it exactly. It was a long, slow slide into irrelevance. I do think there were two things that turned off the general public, and helped turn boxing from a sport that almost everyone followed into something that is marginalized and barely even discussed in polite society: Boom-Boom Mancini killing Duk Koo Kim, and Ali's Parkinson's.
I watched the Mancini-Kim fight live. Google tells me it was in 1982, so I would have been 13 years old. It was riveting and unbelievably savage. A complete slugfest. They stood toe-to-toe and beat the shit out of each other. Throughout most of the fight, I thought Kim was doing more damage - one of Mancini's eyes was almost completely closed - but in the late rounds, Mancini had the upper hand. You know the rest of the story - Mancini knocked Kim out with a crushing right hand, Kim hit his head on the canvas, struggled to his feet, collapsed, was taken out of the ring on a stretcher, taken to the hospital, and died there a few days later.
Between that fight, and the fact that Ali, who really was the biggest celebrity in the world in his heyday, noted for his outspokenness and verbal facility, is now a shambling, slurred mess who can barely speak, I think the man in the street just got turned off by boxing.
I think the same thing is going to happen to football someday. Some NFL player is going to become a poster boy for the violent excesses of the sport, just like Ali and Kim have for boxing. And just like Kim and Ali, there will be two flavors of this - the cumulative/degenerative case, and the sudden/violent case. For the former some famous player who is now beloved will be reduced by CTI/repeated concussions to a babbling, drooling mess, and even rabid football fans will feel their stomachs turn. For the latter, I believe that, before too long, someone is going to get killed in an NFL game. It has almost happened a few times. It may not be a big star - it could just as easily be a third-stringer on a punt return - but the game is now so fast, and so violent, that it's going to happen.* When that does, it's going to turn a lot of people off.
*I have posted in the Manziel thread at length about my disgust with college football and its exploitation, IMO, of players. College football is sometimes defended as a "minor league" for the NFL, and it is pointed out that the NFL may be the real culprit in the exploitation of 18-22 year olds because of its age limits that prevent young players from getting paid to play. Although it's a tangent to this discussion, I have no problem with prohbitions against 18-year-olds playing in the NFL, because, as I've posted before, if some 160-pound, 18-year-old wide receiver went over the middle and got hit by, say, James Harrison, the way Mohammad Massaquoi did a few years ago, I really believe he'd be dead:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRWZ5l0nzXo[/youtube]
Massaquoi is not a small dude. He's 6'2", 207 pounds. That hit, and Massaquoi's reaction - where he's on his knees, and his hands go up to his head, and he's clearly in a daze without any fucking clue as to what's going on - brings up a vomit reflex every time I see it. That's the moment where I started to have a problem with what these guys are subjecting themselves to for my entertainment.
I say all of this, again, as someone who loves football (and who used to love boxing), and who will happily sit there all day and watch football, college or pro, up to the Hawaii home games against Fresno State and Nevada at two in the morning.