The sports world is abuzz right now with concussions. Player suicides, careers cut short, dementia, etc. = bad publicity for your league. I think they’ve come a long way…then I saw Art Schlichter’s lawyer claim he ripped off a bunch of people’s life savings because of the 15 concussions he suffered in his football career. Ah, leave it to the lawyers to ruin whatever sympathy I was starting to have.
Concussions suck. I have had five – falling off monkey bars (don’t land on your face), baseball to the face (that one knocked me out for three hours), helmet to helmet collison (I went to wrong team’s huddle), rugby hit (from my own teammate, thanks for tackling with your head down, stupid) and of course, drunken wrestling in college. The doctor told me no more contact sports and for once, I listened. As fun as it is to lay people out, I’d rather not be soiling myself at 55, assuming I live that long in the first place. That’s not a real side effect of concussions, but either way I’d rather not be soiling myself at 55.
The only thing that annoys me to no end is that some pussy or group of angry mommies is going to someday try to ban football. Guess what do-gooders? People get hurt. Cars are pretty safe now, but every once in a while there are accidents. Should we all get horses? People died on those too. Let’s focus on the real problem at hand – middle school girl’s basketball. I had to keep the clock for two years’ worth of games and I nearly died of boredom. I actually let the clock run on timeouts to end the suffering earlier. Someone step up and end this menace!