Let's go through both of these things together.
David Haugh wrote:
Next to my spikes on a football field in Wheatfield, Ind., back when nothing mattered to me more than Friday nights, my two front teeth just lay there in the grass.
I didn't pick them up and don't think anybody ever did. Too much chaos ensued after I had run over to the sideline between plays to get my broken helmet fixed. A well-intentioned assistant coach tossed a replacement helmet when I wasn't looking and, bam, it hit me squarely in the mouth.
What happened next still makes me chuckle and my mom cringe. The head coach called timeout so I wouldn't miss a play, handed me two pieces of bubble gum to chew and, after I followed his instructions, we stuck the wad into the part of the mouthpiece my teeth used to go.
And I played on.
Someone else has already pointed out the hilarity of using getting hit in the face by a helmet on the sidelines as a manly football injury anecdote, so I'll move on.
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No, four out of five dentists surveyed wouldn't dare recommend such behavior and, all these years later, neither do I. It was extreme and reckless and thankfully something that couldn't happen today because of the increasing awareness of injury and fear of liability.
But as football comes under siege at every level across America due to understandable concerns related to concussions, lately I think of that toothless experience as a personal reminder of the good that often outweighs the bad in a sport that changed my life.
They make fake teeth. We are a few years away from developing fake brains.
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Despite the gap in my gums, it never occurred to me to stop playing that night or let anything get in the way of the goal at hand. It never occurred to me to quit. At 16, football already had developed an instinct in me to keep going regardless of mental anguish or dental emergency, to take pride in persevering.
From sixth grade in North Judson, Ind., through a career at Ball State University during which I experienced at least two concussions, football taught me to be aggressive, take a hit, get up and don't back down. To respect all but fear nothing. Football taught me how to work harder than I thought possible, and with others. I saw football give countless lost teens direction by building self-confidence and turn hundreds of shy kids into bold ones. I was one of those kids.
Football helped raise a small-town boy into a man and often parented me while my own parents struggled to make ends meet. Football paid for the college education and created opportunities that made me who I am.
I feel confident my wife and I can teach those lessons to our 11-year-old son if he never plays football. I have little doubt he would learn them quicker if he does.
So...what, then? Football is good, but lots of things are good, but football is better? Bernstein is obviously right here when he says that lots of things could do this.
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So far he prefers the kind of football the Fire play, and Messi and his idols on Man U play, not the Bears. My wife is relieved and I am happy if he is. But if his interests ever change and he asks dad about trying the sport he knows I appreciate, I would encourage him without hesitation.
His wife should look at the absolutely frightening rate of youth soccer injuries, including head injuries. This isn't a thing yet because they are still the preferred youth sports of rich white people, but the anti-soccer (and anti-hockey) movements are coming soon.
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Experiences inform all of our parenting decisions. Mine tell me that if my son wanted to play football, the potential rewards outnumber the risks. Perhaps yours compel you to say your son never will take those chances. Both of us are right. I won't tell you how to raise your kid if you won't tell me how to raise mine.
I do suspect, when debating the football question, more parents have begun letting a necessary and important focus on the exceptions — the catastrophic injuries — overlook the rule. The rule being that football offers kids the type of structure and discipline and camaraderie they often can't find anywhere else.
They both do this. "I won't tell you how to raise your kids. I do think your ideas about raising kids are wrong though."
I trimmed a bit of Haugh. I'll come back to it. Here is Bernstein.
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“I won’t tell you how to raise your kid if you won’t tell me how to raise mine,” writes the Tribune’s David Haugh.
Agreed. That’s a deal.
But I can tell someone to base such important decisions on something more than logical fallacy, cheesy romanticism and complete unawareness of science, medicine and facts.
"I won't tell you how to raise your kids. I do think your ideas about raising kids are wrong though."
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Football is fine for his son, he says, because it just is. At least that seems to be the foundation of the argument. For him, “Football helped raise a small-town boy into a man.”
Cue the Mellencamp.
“I saw football give countless lost teens direction,” we find out, and I’m sure that’s true. That’s absolutely the case for boxing and military service as well. But carrying that fact over to justify involving one’s own son is curious: is he somehow “lost?” If not, what is his point?
I'm surprised more people didn't find the "military service is for other people's kids" comment curious.
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There’s more disconnect, too, as he falls back on the erroneous idea that there’s something inherently special about the game that teaches young men important things about life. This is a pillar for those retroactively justifying their own participation, one that conveniently ignores the truth that the very same things could have been learned through other means.
He's right here, and this is the problem with Haugh's article, at least if you give the article its broadest reading. That second sentence has three adverbs, by the way, which is how you know it is a shitty sentence.
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But because it happened to be via football, it could only have been via football – an assumption that makes absolutely no sense. The same self-discovery could have occurred any number of ways, but too many football minds can’t allow for that. Oddly, Haugh does, kind of, which makes it even more weird.
“I feel confident my wife and I can teach those lessons to our 11-year old son if he never plays football. I have little doubt he would learn them quicker if he does.”
Wait! Bernstein created the straw man,
acknowledged it was a straw man, then used his straw man argument against Haugh. I'm not even mad. That's impressive.
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So wait…now it’s not about whether or not he learns such things, but the speed at which it occurs? Present the two options to reasonable parents: one, your son learns important life lessons. Two, your son learns the same important life lessons faster (maybe, based on no actual evidence that this is even true), but exposes his developing brain to trauma that causes still-unknown risks. Per that silly, flimsy logic, there’s an obvious right choice.
"I won't tell you how to raise your kids. I do think your ideas about raising kids are wrong though." Also, read the third and fourth sentences and notice that they say almost the same thing, except that he changed the connotations around a bit. "You could do this, even though there's a lack of hard evidence, or you could do that, even though there's a lack of hard evidence."
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He doubles down on the canard, even.
ugh
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“The rule being that football offers kids the type of structure and discipline and camaraderie they can’t often find anywhere else.”
This is nothing but baseless supposition, the furthest thing from a “rule.” All sports have those three things, as do various non-sport pursuits, but football always causes people to fall back on this very lie.
Now he's just being unfair, as Haugh was just writing within the common "exception and the rule" idiom. Bernstein is twisting the words around here.
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The most important problem with all of this is Haugh’s apparent choice to be frighteningly uninformed about what the dangers of football – particularly for younger players — actually are. He refers to “the exceptions – the catastrophic injuries,” and makes the mistake of focusing on “understandable concerns related to concussions.” He makes a strange, failed attempt to inoculate himself against counterpoint by half-bragging “I experienced at least two concussions.” So?
At the very least, he should be expected to read his own newspaper. On October 5th of 2010, the Chicago Tribune published this. The sobering study is but one that ties cognitive decline in high school football players not to concussions, but to the accumulation of sub-concussive hits over time. Indeed, the kids who suffered concussions were actually LESS brain-damaged than those who never had the repetitive pounding interrupted. This has been bolstered by research at Boston University, and by the specific case of Chris Henry, who suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy despite never having suffered a concussion.
Haugh tangentially brought up the scientific evidence and wondered whether it wasn't a case of greater detection. Also, Bernstein is being dishonest here, though I don't think intentionally: the study he quoted is a bit of an outlier. There's also quite a bit of evidence that former football players are, on the whole, healthier than the rest of the population for their demographic data, though there are some self-selection problems here.
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It’s not just concussions, we now know, it’s football. It’s the constant jarring of the brain inside the skull. Haugh should know better than to misrepresent this, should know better than to casually and irresponsibly say things like, “I wonder if efforts to change rules, improve equipment and manage concussions have made it safe as ever.” Instead of wondering, find out. Determine the actual risks, or allow for all that we just can’t know until more results of longitudinal, scientific study are available, instead of giving us a misguided, misleading paean to football.
This is makes no sense. How is Haugh supposed to look at longitudinal studies of football safety from the 19th and 20th centuries that don't exist? You don't have the evidence here either, Bernstein. Haugh's point, I think, was that football isn't a recent invention, and safety equipment has (assumedly) been getting better. If CTE wasn't an epidemic in the 1960s, there's reason to think it won't be in 2040, either. But we don't have the data either way. Remember, Bernstein kinda admitted as much above.
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Doing so is a disservice to the many parents trying much harder than he is to make the right call on whether their own sons participate.
He is free to do whatever he wants, of course. I will not tell him how to raise his kid.
But there is never an excuse for something so significant to be shaped by a perilous, unfortunate combination of flawed reasoning and willful ignorance.
"I won't tell you how to raise your kids. I do think your ideas about raising kids are wrong though."
Back to Haugh, who I think has the better side of the argument overall, mostly because of one of his final points: you can't protect your little darlings from everything. Kids, especially boys, enjoy doing stupid, painful, potentially harmful things. If Bernstein's job involves watching and commenting on football, there is a very good chance his son will enjoy football. Given how boys are, little Bernstein's options aren't play football or don't play football. They are play organized football under adult supervision, or play padless seven on seven tackle football with the other sixth graders after school instead. There is no football free option here, at least if Bernstein's kid is anything like 90% of the boys I grew up with.
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Nice.