.......I had never passed out like that before, and I started becoming really paranoid. I went into a panic. ....... I started to lose control. My limbs were shaking, and I couldn’t speak. I was conscious, but I couldn’t speak the words I wanted to say.”
Turley is ...... thirty-four years old,
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A good story of head injuries in football, with professional evaluation of brain damage, and framed in an interesting moral perspective. Protective gear has come a long way, but can only do so much. Perhaps Gladwell has found a way to reduce health care costs.
Football faced a version of this question a hundred years ago, after a series of ugly incidents. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency summit at the White House, alarmed, as the historian John Sayle Watterson writes, “that the brutality of the prize ring had invaded college football and might end up destroying it.” Columbia University dropped the sport entirely. A professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” In December of 1905, the presidents of twelve prominent colleges met in New York and came within one vote of abolishing the game.
Boxing continues to be a more challenging topic, along with the crazy ultimate fighting and cage fighting. The topic is personal as I reflect on those ancient years of high school football and remember so many forearm slams to the helmet as the smallest lineman on the team. Relative to wars of choice, perhaps the topic is trivial.