The recent incident in an (American) football game where Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest after getting hit hard in the chest during a tackle has once again highlighted how dangerous this sport is. Football authorities and fans tend to quickly label these as isolated events and any actions they have taken in the wake of them have focused on extra protective gear or changing the rules to reduce some dangerous practices.

But Irvin Muchnick writes that those remedies merely skirt the fundamental issue and that is that this sport kills.

One month and a day before Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin came frighteningly close to becoming the second in-game fatality in NFL history, he was ejected from the Amazon Prime Thursday night game for an illegal hit on New England Patriots wide receiver Jakobi Meyers. See it for yourself on YouTube. Hamlin, a defensive safety, blasted Meyers helmet-to-helmet, preventing a touchdown catch in the end zone. As everyone reading this undoubtedly knows, on the aborted Jan. 2 edition of ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” Hamlin made a clean tackle against a Cincinnati Bengals receiver, and then collapsed seconds later, likely from commotio cordis, or percussion-induced cardiac arrest.

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I juxtapose these two plays in Hamlin’s recent career to underscore the point — which was made properly neither in the initial horrified media reaction nor in the feel-good sequel — that “making football safer” is an illusion. For every band-aid fix of the rules, there’s a Newtonian equal and opposite reaction, a cosmic game of life-and-death Whack-a-Mole. In the second Hamlin play above, he was dutifully following the recently emphasized “heads up” tackling doctrine (which is already almost always impossible to execute at game speed). The result left him unconscious on the field, without a pulse, seconds or minutes from death.
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There have been at least a dozen football deaths, below the professional level, from chest-trauma cardiac events. The classic Journal of the American Medical Association article on the syndrome was published in 2002. Lead author Barry Maron, a prominent cardiologist who maintains a registry of known death cases, also chronicled deaths that involved incidental and intuitively sub-lethal contact (such as a teacher who was elbowed in the chest the wrong way while breaking up a playground fight). But around a fifth of such fatalities occurred in sports, including, of course, from chest blows in football.

He argues that remedies like extra padding and the like may actually make things worse.

And for God’s sake, in the wake of the Hamlin catastrophe in Cincinnati earlier this month, no more smoke signals to the future contractors of Concussion Inc. to start developing a better protective pad for the precordium (the area in front of the heart). Players are already armored up the wazoo, and the only thing that has accomplished is to give them a false sense of being bulletproof.

Few people realize this, but boxing’s transition from bare-knuckles to gloves made the sport far more lethal. Padded gloves protect the hand inside them more than the head it hits, and the diminished fear of broken hands made punches harder, faster and more confident, worsening the damage at the other end.
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The problem of football won’t be solved by changes on the periphery. The problem of football lethality is football. The truly dangerous aspect of the sport is playing it.
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Since the human race has never been able to legislate stupid, we should just play on. But at least let’s get our public schools and public fields out of the business of blood sport.

I agree that we cannot eliminate football as long as there are people who are willing to watch and pay to see this modern day equivalent of gladiator combat where inflicting pain is part of its appeal. So professional football is likely to be around for a long time. But to play it has to be a choice made by adults.

But I agree with Muchnick that there is absolutely no reason why our schools (and I would add our universities) should be giving their stamp of approval to football by sponsoring teams. Professional football teams like to have schools and universities play the game so that they can serve as minor leagues for them to scout talent. But that is not the purpose of those institutions whose primary purpose is education. Those institutions are meant to nurture healthy minds in healthy bodies, not damage minds and bodies by subjecting their students to a brutal contact sport.

The major collegiate sports body the NCAA dropped that other gladiator activity known as boxing from the list of sports it sponsors, a sign of disapproval. In response an organization known as the National Collegiate Boxing Association sprang up to sponsor boxing but the number of participating colleges is far fewer than other sports in the NCAA. Boxing also seems to have largely disappeared in public schools in the US. Let’s hope that that will be the fate of football too.