From
The New York Times. In the picture, professionals, like the Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner, have begun to ease the stigma of concussions with more informed statements to the news media and by sitting out after head injuries.
A little less crack! accompanies the televised collisions between National Football League behemoths these days. Players are tackling as hard as ever. But broadcasters are toning down the glorification of the sport’s inherent violence.
“I would say in our place, since this story has taken on a greater and greater prominence, we’ve taken action to take out the sound effects on promos and highlights of punishing hits,” said Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports.
NBC, a broadcast partner of the N.F.L., is hardly alone in its shift toward greater sensitivity over brain trauma among football players. This fall, from the airwaves of sports talk radio to the broadcast booths at games to doctors’ offices, the language of brain injuries has taken an abrupt turn from silly to serious.
Game announcers have replaced words like “warrior” and “toughness” with “injury” and “dementia.” Among Fox pregame analysts, the former New York Giants star Michael Strahan described ex-teammates in their 40s taking Alzheimer’s medication, after which the Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw denounced the N.F.L. for dawdling on the issue. Recent brain injuries to some of the most high-profile players in college and professional football — along with a House Judiciary Committee hearing that compelled the N.F.L. to adopt sweeping new safety policies in the middle of its season — have forced announcers to explain why players are suddenly sitting out with concussions their predecessors played through.
“This season has really opened my eyes — everything that’s happening, whether it’s Congress or what’s being reported in the newspapers,” said Cris Collinsworth, the NBC analyst, who has devoted several minutes each game to somber discussion of brain injuries. “The correlation of playing with a concussion and being tough is a culture we have to change within the game and in our society.”
Dr. Gerry Gioia, the chief of pediatric neuropsychology at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, said he had noticed a drastic turn in the words teenagers were using to discuss their concussions.
For the first time, he said, they were regularly using phrases that were once gridiron blasphemy, like, “It’s not just an ankle,” “Ten or 15 years from now” and “Maybe I shouldn’t go back.”
“It’s almost a new age of discussion now,” Gioia said. “Kids are parroting what they see on TV, during the football games and on ESPN. They’re hearing intelligent talk about how serious concussions are.”
The change isn’t universal. The Fox pregame host Curt Menefee still casually refers to concussions as “dings.” During the House hearing on Oct. 28, Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, rued “the end of football as we know it.” On Seattle news station KOMO, Eric Johnson narrated a segment in which he celebrated the “bone-crushing action” of “heat-seeking football machines,” who had their worlds rocked but soldiered on: “Now that’s a football player!” he exclaimed.
They were 9 years old.
Yet many announcers are more like Daryl Johnston, a former Dallas Cowboys fullback who for Fox called Philadelphia Eagles games in which running back Brian Westbrook sat out because of post-concussion syndrome and wide receiver DeSean Jackson was knocked out of the game with a brain injury. Johnston said he has made sure not to use the words “ding” or “he got his bell rung,” but to approach the injury more soberly: “There should be no bravado — with the players, or with us,” Johnston said.
When there is — the most glaring example coming when the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Hines Ward brazenly criticized his teammate Ben Roethlisberger for sitting out a big game because of a concussion — talk-radio phone lines have buzzed as never before, said Mike Greenberg, co-host of ESPN Radio’s “Mike & Mike in the Morning” show. He said that all the concussion news this season has catalyzed several spirited offshoot debates, like the conflicts of interest among team-employed doctors and the pressures on players to hide their concussions.
“As this is more often discussed, parents are going to listen and say, ‘Why don’t we have this level of safety for my son?’ ” Greenberg said.
“Everyone is talking about this, so why aren’t we doing all these things for our kids?”
Prompted by Congress, the N.F.L. planned to run its first public service announcement regarding concussions during Thursday night’s Steelers-Browns game. The thrust of the message, which was approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is a voice-over for players of all ages: “Don’t hide it — report it.”
Collinsworth said that he expects the N.F.L. to limit its comments on the short- and long-term effects of concussions — particularly now that the league is instituting safety policies that for years, and through this October, it insisted were unnecessary.
“When you have an open-ended liability issue that the N.F.L. has now, and there’s so much money at stake, it’s hard to get to the heart of the discussion and to what’s right to do,” Collinsworth said.
Of course, some young players still court catastrophe by playing through their concussions in the name of toughness; last week, one day after the N.F.L. decided that no player showing any significant sign of concussion could return to a game, several players at Tustin High School in California admitted they still wouldn’t tell a trainer if they got hurt.
But professionals have begun to ease the stigma of concussions with more informed statements to the news media. The Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner explained with nuance how it was harder to sit out with a concussion than to play, but he had to anyway. At Eagles practice on Wednesday, Westbrook said of remaining injured, “I’m more concerned about how things will happen for me in the future, how having concussions now will affect me 20, 30 years from now.”
More subliminal messages will be harder to change. A coach who praises a player who returns from a concussion by calling him “tough” will be, perhaps inadvertently, calling those who remained injured less tough. When Eagles Coach Andy Reid said after Westbrook’s concussion that “I’m counting on he’ll be there” for the next game, however unintentionally he made it harder for the player to let him down.
As the language of concussions adapts to the new era, the messages will come from everywhere. Including the public.
“I’ve seen the light,” said Johnson, who received e-mail messages criticizing his glorification of hits by 9-year-olds. “I’d read some stuff before I did that spot, but you get a little carried away with the wow factor, and forget the life factor. That’s football, you know?”
From The New York Times. In the picture, professionals, like the Arizona Cardinals’ Kurt Warner, have begun to ease the stigma of concussions with more informed statements to the news media and by sitting out after head injuries.
