Football, for one. And horse racing, for another. RealSports packed a punch last night on HBO--a double whammy about the NFL having its head up its ass about concussions and long-term effects and horses being so doped up during races that it's destroying the sport. Both stories were incredibly hard to watch, though no moment was so hard as when two younger-looking (fifties, maybe) ex-football players literally couldn't answer questions, one because of early-onset Alzheimer's and the other because of short-term memory loss and dementia. It was very devastating, the kind of devastating that brought tears to my eyes. I personally have a hard time believing that football didn't contribute to these illnesses, and even though right now much of the evidence is anecdotal, it seems convincing. I don't think it's just two men, or three; I think possibly the numbers are greater than can even be imagined, especially when taking into account mental illnesses such as short-term memory loss and depression, which ex-football players seem to suffer from in spades.
The NFL, of course, is denying any connection between multiple concussions and later problems, and is even saying that it's not proven dangerous to go back in a game before completely recovered from a concussion. They deny that any of these men's problems have anything to do with football. Because if they don't, it looks really bad, doesn't it? It might even hurt the league in the long run; in fact, it's hard to see how it could NOT hurt the league. One ex-football player says it's all about money, and he may be right. Which just makes it all the more despicable. And in fact, most of the guys who are still competant aren't asking that football stop being football, just that the NFL appraise every NFL player of the risks, so that each man can make his own decisions about whether to play while concussed--whether to play at all. If that means more men opt out (though with the money the way it is, who knows. Some of the guys who aren't stars, maybe, will opt out. But guys making millions? I'm not sure.), then so be it. I do think that hand-in-hand with this, though, is the fact that coaches need to be aware of the risks, and allow and accept that concussed players (even if the players happen to be the star quarterback or the RB or whoever) may not be playing for a few days, at the very least. Either way, it was a really horrific story, and really heart-wrenching to watch. It's another football story that diminishes respect for the NFL and football, in general.
And as for the horse racing, I'm not surprised that the sport is corrupt. I'm also not surprised that there has not been a Triple Crown winner in twenty-some years (the report last night coincides perfectly with my current reading of The Horse God Built, which is about who else, Secretariat), because drugs have weakend the sport to such a degree that horses no longer seem built for the kind of racing that the Triple Crown demands. I don't think this current horse, Street Sense, will win it. The Belmont at a mile and a half is too much for horses these days, and it's too much because training has broken down. When three or four of the top trainers (Todd Pletcher being one, though his horses obviously didn't win the Derby, so there you go) have drug offenses on their records, that points to a dearth of integrity in the sport. Which is too bad, because I'm of the opinion that there is nothing so beautiful as a great racehorse winning a big race. I love it; I never grew out of that teenage girl love of horses, I guess. But it means that there are no great racehorses anymore, because every win must be suspect. It's ugly, and if I were a betting person, I'd never bet on the horses. Too many problems with drugs.
Not to mention the fact that it's incredibly cruel to horses to race them drugged and injured. An enormous amount of pressure is exerted on the leg bones of a racing horse, and running through pain--as though there wasn't pain--is insanely cruel. Horses aren't sentient enough to make the decision to play through pain, like humans can, and furthermore, they can't then take care of themselves forever when they're living crippled from the cruelness perpetrated by humans. Thousands of Thoroughbreds are sent to slaughterhouses every year because they're no longer winners or they're not breeding champions or they're barren--or they're too injured to do any of those things any longer. And those injuries aren't always freak accidents. Sometimes they're caused by negligence and again, cruelty on the part of their trainers. It's hideous, and we're the only horse racing country in the world that allows such practices near our courses. Drugs are mostly 100% banned in other horse racing countries, which means the sport is still as it should be. Ability and training and jockeying wins races in England or Ireland, Australia or France. There is no such assurance here in the states. We (really) should be ashamed of ourselves.
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