Thanks, and same to you. Just seems very performative to me, that's all.
As someone with a TBI and 30+ years of experience living with it as well as seeing the toll it’s taken on my wife and kids, for me it’s hardly performative.
There are aspects that if you’ve never lived it, you can’t know.
It may seem performative to you, but for those of us who’ve lived it, it’s beyond the scope of the price an athlete can be expected to pay for our entertainment.
I’m speaking from experience here. I’m not jumping in on something I don’t know about intimately. Moreover, I’ve been in pain management groups and talked with fellow vets who have more serious TBI and the difficulties aren’t worth any amount of money.
And seeing that there are greater guardrails to protect fighters in gladiatorial sports than in football, it’s reasonable to expect football to enact similar rules. It not only shouldn’t be controversial, but it makes the game better. I mean, I’m pretty sure the game isn’t better leaving Tua to his own devices seeing as he didn’t inform the team of any symptoms after his first concussion leading to that horrific concussion several weeks later. It’s not like we didn’t know. Neurologists were all over the media saying he’d had a significant concussion and the NFL fucking dithered and Tua had the second huge concussion which forced their hand.
Bottom line is that there are manifold instances where we protect people from dangers including themselves if need be. In most instances, it’s not controversial and we sometimes lament having to do it at all (just think of all the insane warning labels we have now).
Kids that play pop Warner that feed into HS football dropped precipitously after CTE came to the fore. The future of football was in jeopardy . The more we understand about brain development, the more we have scientific evidence about the causes and effects of concussive and sub-concussive impacts on the brain.
The only performative stuff I’ve seen is the NFL and their half measures and their bullshit claims that they care about player safety when they refuse to even consider some of the most clear and easy to address reasons for player injury.
Sorry, this is personal for me and I’ve consistently been all over this since the beginning. Feel free to check my history.
Be well, all