Crossing the line
Priorities. On the one hand, permanent brain damage; on the other hand, profits. We all know which one wins; it’s The American Way.
Former NBC sports commentator Bob Costas says the network pulled him from its football coverage after he criticized the NFL and its handling of the concussion crisis. In an interview with ESPN’s E:60, Costas revealed that NBC executives removed him from its Super Bowl LII broadcast after he spoke at a 2017 journalism symposium. “The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains,” he said during that discussion. After an ensuing series of media appearances, Costas says NBC Sports’ executive producer texted him, “You’ve crossed the line.”
What line? I guess it’s the line between rah-rah coverage of football and factual reporting on how football as currently played features a great deal of head trauma.
Costas had been at NBC since 1979 and often used his platform to discuss controversial topics. He had covered concussion-related illnesses on Football Night in America before, but the ESPN story notes that NBC nixed a monologue he intended to read during a 2015 Sunday Night Football game relating to the release of the Will Smith movie Concussion. “I remember the reaction almost verbatim,” he tells ESPN. “They said, ‘This is a very well-written piece, wouldn’t change a comma. We can’t air it.’ ” Shortly thereafter, Costas drew ire from NBC executives by mocking the NFL’s “Football is Family” ad campaign in outside interviews.
After his 2017 appearance at the University of Maryland journalism symposium, NBC released a statement saying, “Bob’s opinions are his own, and they do not represent those of the NBC Sports Group.” Costas was subsequently informed that he would not be part of the network’s Super Bowl broadcast at the end of that season, which was already slated to be Costas’ last Sunday Night Football appearance.
Well now who matters more here? The workers or the bosses? The players or the owners? Silly question, isn’t it, this is America, where unions have faded to ghosts and the boss always wins.
Sunday I was listening to a radio interview of a neuroscientist. She was asked how many concussions was too many. Before the question had even be finished she answered “One.”
She went on to clarify that studies of people who had a single mild concussion and apparently fully recover, could pass cognitive tests with flying colours, even years later. However, when placed under physiological stress (taken to 10,000′ in a hypobaric chamber), their performance plummeted. The brains resilience and ability to function was permanently diminished, even though under most conditions the subjects seemed perfectly normal.
I guess football is another one of those products that we’re not supposed to look too closely at, lest we discover the conditions under which the people producing them work. In this case the workers are often paid millions of dollars, but what price brain damage? Maybe it’s not quite the same as working in an Asian sweat shop and risking death in some industrial firetrap, but the mindset of management and ownership in both industries is perhaps not so different.
It’s the mindset of management and ownership in most, if not all, industries. I see it in my industry, too (teaching), but the obvious threats to health are not there. It is more that they are willing to continue slashing faculty while increasing workload, which can lead to eventual problems, but not dramatic and immediate enough, and the consequences are often less world-shattering. The problem with football is that the owners think like all other owners, in a business where failure to take proper precaution leads to serious injury and even death…and the employers remain as callous about it as employers in other fields, like mine, where the threats are not as dramatic or severe. In short, the owners see it as just another business, a particularly lucrative one, and they don’t want to risk their profits in the slightest.
I was using a bit of ironic understatement there. I’m betting the football team owners wouldn’t see themselves as being as similar to sweatshop owners as they clearly are. Just a guess, though. Humans are experts at self delusion, rationalization, and sweeping ugly truths under rugs (or astroturf). Sweatshop owners probably don’t see themselves as “sweatshop owners, ” and slum landlords probably have a higher opinion of themselves than do their tennants or health and housing authorities.
YNNB, football owners would probably point out that players in the professional league make much more money than in sweatshops, and in many cases, much more money than the rest of us. Fair enough, but…how much is a brain worth? Especially since football is at best a temporary career; age is a bigger detriment than in most other industries.