Football: Is Seau's death ‘a tipping point’?

Junior Seau didn’t just kill himself last week, said Joel Mathis in PhillyMag.com, “he probably killed football itself.” The NFL legend and future Hall of Famer was found dead at his California home with a gunshot wound—tellingly, to his chest. Though the 43-year-old former linebacker left no suicide note, the speculation is that, like former Chicago Bear Dave Duerson last year, Seau avoided shooting himself in the head so that doctors could study the damage done to his brain by 20 years of high-speed collisions in the NFL. Duerson’s brain was found to be ravaged by chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition brought on by multiple concussions that causes depression and early-onset dementia. Autopsies on a host of other players who committed suicide or died prematurely in recent years have also revealed CTE, with doctors saying that one player, 44-year-old Andre Waters, had the brain of an 85-year-old suffering from Alzheimer’s. How does anyone with a conscience continue to watch a sport that turns men’s “minds into mush”? The suicide of the charismatic, widely liked Seau may be “a tipping point,” said Barbara Bruno in HuffingtonPost.com. Fans have been in denial, but it’s now obvious that everyone who watches the game is “complicit in these tragedies.”

I love the game dearly, said Ta-Nehisi Coates in TheAtlantic.com, but “I’m out.” While players are consenting adults who have a right to do whatever they want with their bodies on a Sunday afternoon, I refuse to participate in their self-destruction. Even the players are starting to rebel, said the Chicago Tribune in an editorial. More than 1,500 former players are suing the NFL in dozens of lawsuits for allegedly concealing the impact of repeated concussions on their brains. When both medical science and the courts assess the full human cost of America’s favorite spectator sport, football—just like boxing before it—could soon “end up a sport whose best days are past.”

I’d hate to see that happen, said Andy Staples in SportsIllustrated.com. Football is a wonderful game, not only for spectators but for amateur players, who learn so much about life by testing themselves in that crucible between the end zones. To save the game, the NFL—and college football, too—has to do whatever it takes to make the sport safer. Yes, “it will require something drastic”—perhaps outlawing the helmets that embolden players to use their heads as weapons—but “football is too great a sport to continue under this cloud.”

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But how do you take the violence out of football? said Buzz Bissinger in TheDailyBeast.com. The game is “primal and vicious and visceral,” a form of warfare staged on grass. One reason tens of millions of us watch the college game and the NFL is the vicarious thrill we get when one player flattens another with a hit that knocks the snot out of his nose. When autumn rolls around and we’re asked, “Are you ready for some football?” we’ll say, “Sure am!”—even if we feel slightly guilty about it. The fans may not turn off the game right away, said John Kass in the Chicago Tribune, just as it took decades for boxing to wither. But as tragedies like Junior Seau’s continue to mount, parents will decide that it’s not worth the risks to let their sons play at any level, from Pop Warner to college. When there aren’t enough young players to replenish the ranks, we may see the beginning of the end of “the world’s most violently glamorous sport.”