Charlie Rose

tabs  07/08/2011 04:57 PM Report

"Let them have Bread and Circuses" was the mollifying cry of the Roman Emperors

SharkswithfrikingLazers  07/08/2011 04:15 PM Report

Yes, football is our gladiator sport and the injuries are life long.

FRONTLINE:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/football-high/

MY NOTES:

COACH: Every hit is a kill shot!

WALT WILLIAMS, Sports Promoter: If you're in a great high school program, you will spend more time working in high school than you will in college. A lot of people don't understand the way college works. In a full seven-day week, you have 20 hours to complete all football-related activities under NCAA rules. There's not a great high school program in America that does anywhere near 20 hours. They're (high schools) considerably over that. (working a part time job should be 15 to 20 hours a week)

WALT WILLIAMS: People were saying, you know, "Let him be a kid. Let him have fun." The same kids that are being kids right now will be making $35,000 at an entry-level job when they're 24 years old. Kiehl will make more than that in one day if he signs with the NFL.

NARRATOR: But Garrett's intensity has its price. Over the years, he's had multiple injuries, including two concussions. In his junior year, he had to be helped off the field after being smashed between two players from the opposing team. He was hit again in the first game of his senior season.

NARRATOR: There are at least 60,000 concussions like this one every year in high school football. Concussions have always been part of the game, but lately, they've been met with far more scrutiny. The NFL's high-profile drama over big hits played out all fall in the media.

ANN MCKEE, M.D., Dir., New England VA Neuropathology Lab: It was shocking, actually, from the first case forward.

NARRATOR: Dr. Ann McKee is a neuropathologist who has found evidence of degenerative disease in the brains of over a dozen ex-NFL players. The disease, called CTE, can lead to depression, dementia, even suicide.

Dr. ANN McKEE: It's a progressive deterioration of your brain. We're seeing it over and over again in football players.

NARRATOR: Despite the public discussion about its health risks, more kids play football than any other sport, over a million across the country.

KELVIN WILLIAMS, Private Trainer: If you look at it position by position, you can only compare it to an NFL team. You really would. You're going to see 300-pound linemen. You're going to see 240, 250-pound linebackers. You're going to see 200-pound backs. I mean, it's just crazy. [laughs] They are huge.

GREGG EASTERBROOK, Columnist, ESPN.com: As recently as 20 years ago, it was pretty rare to find a high school offensive lineman who weighed more than 220, maybe 230. Now a lot of high schools, all their starting offensive linemen weigh more 300 pounds.

CHRIS NOWINSKI: You know, if force equals mass times acceleration. Your mass goes up, and the kids are faster because they're training better, you've got more force in every hit.

NARRATOR: Trinity embraces the power that their size provides. The motto here is "If it ain't rough, it ain't right."

TRAVIS MOSELY, Euless Trinity Parent: That's their style of ball— hit 'em, hit 'em, hit 'em, hit 'em. They're going to hit you in the mouth. They're going to keep hitting you in the mouth until you say uncle. So— so it's a beautiful thing to be on their side, you know?

CONNOR COLE, Euless Trinity: We've been taught from, you know, 4th grade on that to be physical is the only way to play football. Our goal isn't to just win the game. Coaches talk about, you know, playing so hard that your opponent loses their next game, as well.

JASON DIBBLE, Euless Trinity Asst. Coach: We expect it. We demand it, for them to be that way. Football is violent. It's a violent sport. And I don't know that it can be too violent. Our brand is a physical brand of football. You know, it's got to be that way.

JIMMY HARRIS, Shiloh Christian Asst. Coach: They (Euless Trinity of Texas) would hit us and hit us and hit us and hit us and hit us and come back and hit us again. Some of our guys, they went, "Man, this is different than what I thought it was going to be."

NARRATOR: By halftime, Shiloh trailed 53 to 20.

The final score was 80 to 26.

NARRATOR: Half of the athletes with no reported concussions performed increasingly worse on cognitive tests as the season wore on.

TOM TALAVAGE Assoc. Professor, Purdue Univ: In the very simple task of, "Does this letter match the ones that I was just shown," their brain simply couldn't do the tasks as well.

DAVID EPSTEIN, Staff writer, Sports Illustrated: That's a new part of the story, and that's a little frightening. We were saying, "Look, the best predictor of the cognitive impairment in that study group, in that high school group was not concussions, it was the number of hits that they were taking." It's starting to look a little bit more like the daily wear and tear in football on the brain might be looking a little more akin to the daily wear and tear of, you know, the rotator cuff in someone who pitches, where it's not a single blowout event, but there might be some repetitive damage over time.

CHRIS NOWINSKI, Boston Univ. School of Medicine: The sensors in helmets find that high school kids take more force to the brain than college kids. And the reality is, we know from the literature that the young, developing brain is far more vulnerable to this trauma.

B.J. MAACK, Arkansas Assoc. of Athletic Trainers: A helmet is not going to prevent a concussion. The helmet design of today and the past has always been about keeping the skull from getting a fracture, not a concussion. Just because you have a helmet on doesn't make you invincible. And that's the danger that we've got to change the culture on.

BROOKS COATNEY, Ozark High School Head Coach: There's not anyone in Arkansas that needs to be explained what Shiloh Christian football's about. Their reputation is that they pretty much beat people's brains in.

NARRATOR: Ozark, Arkansas, population 3,500, financed a bond to build a $415,000 turf field for their football team and hired a new head coach with big ambitions.

DOUGLAS CASA, Ph.D., Korey Stringer Institute, UConn: There should never, ever be a person die from exertional heat stroke because it's 100 percent survivable.

NARRATOR: Doug Casa is a leading expert on heat stroke.

DOUGLAS CASA: The key to surviving an exertional heat stroke is what you do in the first five to ten minutes. You have to minimize the amount of time that the athlete is hyperthermic. It basically comes down to somewhere between around 105 to 106 degrees. How many minutes are you above this critical threshold for cell damage will impact if the athlete lives or dies.

NARRATOR: That's what was at stake for Tyler Davenport on the field at Lamar when he collapsed.

LANCE SPENCE, Lamar High School Asst. Coach: Some of the kids got up and they hollered out, "Coach, something's wrong with TD."

NARRATOR: Without an athletic trainer to respond, Tyler's coaches were left to manage on their own. (Tyler died.)

NARRATOR: Unlike college and the pros, high school football has no national agency with the power to enforce safety rules or policies. Critical decisions fall to those in charge on the sidelines, who are often under pressure to win.

COACH: Every hit is a kill shot!

doodah  07/08/2011 11:48 AM Report

I find I'm agreeing with everything said here.

Also, the New Recent Findings of head and brain trauma that All football players are and will be subjected to, adds to the 'working-class' reality of their profession and sport. And they Deserve compensation, much much more than basketball, baseball, etc..

Also, based on pure interest and entertainment value, the intensity of football makes it head and shoulders above all other sports.

REMant  07/08/2011 11:18 AM Report

In many respects this is a copy of the taxing and spending fight and illustrative generally of what is wrong with our economy.