Charles Jay for Cheap Boxing
STOP PICKING ON BOXING - THE NFL IS MORE DEADLY
Anyone who considers boxing as a sport too brutal for words needs to tune into HBO's "Real Sports" for May, which features a report on concussions and other head injuries in football. Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player and WWE wrestler, is leading a crusade to create awareness of a problem in which repeated head blows leads to long-term dementia, depression and other conditions, which the NFL refuses to acknowledge. But several players were interviewed for HBO's report, including ex-Dolphin and Saint safety Gene Atkins, who couldn't even remember the months of the year when quizzed by a neurologist, and former New England Patriots linebacker Tim Johnson, who said that just four days after suffering a concussion in a game, coach Bill Belichick forced him to practice in full-contact mode, at which point he had a collision with a running back and suffered yet another concussion.
If this were the sport of boxing and a trainer was found to have put a fighter in a sparring session just four days after being stopped, I would think that trainer would be suspended and/or banned by any responsible athletic commission. The NFL's problem is, of course, worse, and it is consistently demonstrated that boxing does a much better job at dealing with concussions. While it is commonplace to see players who suffer concussions to be re-inserted into the same game (in fact, statistics indicate this happens about 50% of the time), a boxing commission will suspend a fighter for a minimum of 30 days after a TKO loss and up to 90 days after a KO. And the medical testing that is required before each bout by some jurisdictions is in fact NOT required in the NFL.
Not only does the league run from the situation, HBO's Bernard Goldberg interviewed one NFL doctor who even denied that putting a player back into a game after sustaining a concussion has no conclusive long-term effects. This would seem to strain credulity, but it is indicative of something else - the press has ignored it as well. Otherwise, we would have heard a great deal more about it. So I would suggest that when some dumb-witted sportswriter wants to pick on boxing for its "brutality," he put his thinking cap on and take a long look at the much more popular institution, and much more appropriate target - the National Football League.
by: Cheap Boxing
