The Countryman: Cold Turkey, starting today

9 mins read
Bob Neal
Bob Neal

Few undertakings test your will power more than shaking off pounds. Or shaking off loyalty to sports teams.

This is my year to shake off pro football. Both of my teams, alpha-dog New England Patriots and bridesmaid Kansas City Chiefs. I won’t pretend it will be easy. But it’s time.

I’m not walking away from the teams so much as I’m walking away from the National Football League. David Brooks wrote in The New York Times of our sports institutions nourishing athletes who harvested a golden bounty of medals in Rio. He might also have written of sports institutions that fail their sports. And their players. And their fans.

Exhibit A is the NFL.

The league has unquestionably built a spectacle so appealing that it is nigh impossible to wriggle the hook out of your mouth and swim away. But swim away I shall.

Where to begin? How about Tom Brady? Golden Boy. Best quarterback ever. Hardest worker on the field.

So why was he deflating footballs or causing footballs to be deflated? No one has come close to proving that he knew air had been taken out of balls. In fact, no one has proved that air had been taken out.

Tests at MIT showed that the air pressure in the offending balls was consistent with the weather that day. Cold and drizzly. Naysayers, perhaps including NFL uber-dog Roger Goodell, dismissed the MIT study because it was performed 30 miles from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play. And it contradicted their pre-determined “finding.”

Call me naive, but do you know any grownups who would jeopardize a career in which they earn millions of bucks a year and get a guaranteed several million bucks a year after retiring? And would jeopardize being hailed as the best ever at what they do?

Not to blame Brady, who in the end may be culpable, though I doubt it. Blame Goodell. He authorized bogus tests of the footballs in question and he convened a kangaroo court to punish Brady. Prosecutor-Judge-Jury Goodell says sit out four games.

Brady wasn’t the first defendant in Goodell’s court. The prosecutor-judge-jury told Baltimore’s Ray Rice to sit out two games. Rice must have “deflated” half the balls in a game, eh? No, his suspension was half of Brady’s because, all he did was beat his fiancee unconscious in an elevator and drag her limp body by the hair into the hallway.

Goodell’s moral compass. Nothing to prove Brady guilty. Sit out four games. Hotel video to prove Rice guilty. Sit out two games.

For far longer than either of those cases dragged on, the NFL has been lying about and covering up the damage that the game does to players. Especially to their brains.

Can you say chronic traumatic encephalopathy? Neither could I, not without practice. CTE happens to people whose brains get banged around a lot. It is permanent and degenerative. CTE or its effects have killed a number of NFL players.

Junior Seau shot himself to death soon after retiring from the Patriots. Jovan Belcher was still a player when he shot his girlfriend to death, then drove to the Chiefs’ practice complex and shot himself to death in front of several coaches. Their daughter survives.

Belcher graduated from the University of Maine and was early in a promising career. By the way, he put the lie to the myth that athletes are numb. Belcher graduated from UMaine in three years while playing football. Anyone who follows Division I college sports knows that the athletes in whatever sport (basketball, football, field hockey, etc.) have two full-time jobs. At least at the schools, like UMaine, that do it right.

At autopsy, Seau’s and Belcher’s brains showed signs of CTE.

No one will know whether Ben Utecht has CTE until the docs examine his dead brain. Utecht played for the University of Minnesota and for the Indianapolis Colts. He had five diagnosed concussions. At 29, he could not recall being in a best-friend’s wedding.

After the NFL, Utecht tried music. He had long been a singer. But he couldn’t remember lyrics, so music went the way of football. He can’t recall a friend’s wedding or song lyrics, but he remembers the roar of the crowd. And misses it, concussions and all.

True, the NFL agreed to pay the players union what looks like a barrelful of money, $765 million. But that money settled a lawsuit by nearly 5,000 former players. Even if the lawyers took no cut (yeah, right), that comes to about $153,000 for each player. If the current players are added to the list of recipients, as is likely to happen, it’s even less, about $118,000 each. How much is your brain worth? Would 118 grand compensate you for brain damage?

Yeah. I thought not.

Remember the Joe Bornstein commercial about mesothelioma? A guy dressed to look like an asbestos miner says, “They knew, and they didn’t say a word.” Then, a tough looking woman comes on and says, “They’ve got to be made to pay.” Et tu, NFL?

Parents are beginning to hold their sons out of football. Some of those parents played football in college and even in the pros. A star NFL linebacker quit after one year rather than risk rattling his brain. He must have learned to use that thinker while he was at the University of Wisconsin (playing football).

This might actually be the trigger that finally sets up soccer. For nearly 50 years, soccer has been called America’s “next great sport.” Hasn’t happened. Too many boys preferred football. But if young boys start piling out of SUVs at the soccer pitch instead of at the gridiron, the ground will have shifted (pun intended).

The NFL has stacked up a pile of something that Bobbie Hanstein won’t let me write in a column. As is its wont, the pile has begun to stink. The odor will only get worse.

Will I be able to avoid the stench? I think so. After all, I lost 63 pounds in five months. So, wish me luck.

I can use Sunday afternoons to work up firewood. Exercise and no NFL. What’s not to like? I can put my sports eyes on my Kansas City Royals and on my University of Maine women’s basketball team. Go, Royals. Go, Black Bears.

When I told my older son I was going to bail on the NFL, he said, “I can help you with that.” He is wonderfully talented and intelligent and wouldn’t know a Patriot from a Ranger from a Lynx. Lead me on, son. Help dear old dad make himself an honest man.

Starting today.

Bob Neal got interested in sports in 1951 when he was home three weeks with measles and listened to Harry Caray broadcasting the St. Louis Cardinals. By year’s end, he knew Stan Musial’s career statistics and admired Stan the Man right up to Musial’s death three years ago.

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8 Comments

  1. Soccer can be pretty tough with the brain injuries, also. There has been more investigation into the brain trauma aspect of that sport lately. My niece received a concussion while playing soccer. She had to drop out of college for a while, and it took her about 2 years of recovery to get back to where she could finish school and begin working. There’s no excuse for being ignorant about injury possibilities in sports. People will still participate, however, because sports are darn fun to play, and they also can be very financially lucrative for the most talented athletes.

  2. Cheating has been a staple in the Patriots playbook for a long time. I don’t understand America’s obsession with watching grown men chest bump, do a little dance when they catch a ball, and pat each other’s butt. One would think more men would like women’s beach volleyball. And virtually no chance of concussions is a huge bonus.

  3. I think that men patting each other’s butts in pubic and on national TV shows just how far we have come in the changing life style’s game

    Who’da thunk that the NFL wood take the lead on this! Chapeau NFL!

  4. When Brady decided to cheat, lie about it and destroy evidence (the cell phone) he should have at least consulted with Hilary or her advisors first.

  5. Bob: I want to know how on earth you lost 63 pounds in five months?
    Captain Planet: “one would think more men would like women’s beach volleyball” – You do realize WOMEN are football fans too!!

  6. Just saying! Poor English on my part. Obviously should have written ‘one would think more men and women’. And you are justified in enjoying football. My comment was more directed to men :)

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