Posted on 01/07/2023 6:15:17 PM PST by shadowlands1960
The “terrifyingly ordinary” nature of football’s violence disproportionately affects Black men
Millions of people watched as Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old player in the National Football League (NFL), executed a seemingly routine tackle during a highly anticipated Monday Night Football game. Immediately after, Hamlin rose to his feet and then collapsed. Players from his team, the Buffalo Bills, and the opposing team, the Cincinnati Bengals, created a tight huddle around him on the field as medical personnel tried to revive him. We learned the next day that Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest; his heart had suddenly stopped working.
This scene was horrific for both its regularity and its exceptionality. Matt Gutman of ABC tweeted as much: “The scariest part of this is that the hit was in fact not scary. It looked terrifyingly ordinary.” The ordinariness of men running into each other at full speed represents a normalized—even rationalized—violence that is routine to this American game.
This ordinary violence has always riddled the sport and it affects all players. But Black players are disproportionately affected. While Black men are severely underrepresented in positions of power across football organizations, such as coaching and management, they are overrepresented on the gridiron. Non-white players account for 70 percent of the NFL; nearly half of all Division I college football players are Black. Further, through a process called racial stacking, coaches racially segregate athletes by playing position. These demographic discrepancies place Black athletes at a higher risk during play.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
Looks like Rachel Dolezal, the fake black.
She says players are literally ‘stacked’ into more dangerous positions based on their race...paraphrasing...
I was trying to think who she reminded me of... thought it might be some obscure actress.. you nailed it...
Just more racism from the left. “These black men are too stupid and ignorant to even know what is happening to them.” Disgusting.
Oh, for crying out freakin’ loud.
LOL, those days of playing tackle football with no equipment!
Hahahaha, insanity.
Love it! I LOVED playing football in the mud.
When I was in the Navy as a 20 year old guy, playing tackle football with no pads and helmets, that was as irresponsible a thing as I ever did.
We were playing with a bunch of other high-spirited young guys, and it was rough play.
I have some great pictures from after I purchased my first SLR camera with a telephoto lens (back in the mid-Seventies) and took some pictures of us playing in the mud...I never developed that film, and it sat in a drawer for nearly ten years before I wondered enough what was on them that I sent them in to be developed...and those were some of the pictures.
My overriding memory of that day, though, is playing center when a guy in our squadron named Faragasso lined up on defense in front of me.
As I snapped the ball, he brought his fists and arms up in front of him while I was still looking down, and he hit me square in the bridge of my nose. (Note-I don’t think Faragasso meant for that to happen, and the fact we didn’t get into a fight kind of buttresses that. When you play tackle football without any pads or helmets, that kind of thing happens.)
I was wearing plastic, black-framed Navy issued glasses that were derisively known as “BCD Glasses”, which stood for “Birth Control Device Glasses”.
Well, when he hit me, those glasses broke clean in half, and the razor sharp edge of one of them was driven into the fleshy area right up above your nose and between the eyebrows.
I got up, that gooey dark mud smeared all over me including my face, and when I put my mud-soiled hand up to my face, when I looked it it, there was blood all mixed in with the mud.
Clutching both halves of my mud spattered glasses, I left the game and went into the barracks to clean up and see if I needed to get stitches. Gazing in the mirror, there was a curved gash about a quarter inch long, but I decided against the stitches.
I got into the shower, where were fed by steam heated, scalding hot water. It was dangerously hot. See, you could adjust it, and it was an endless supply, never ran out.
The problem was, there was a large row of urinals on the same cold water circuit, and when one was flushed, the cold water moderating input in the water mix being sprayed dropped out for about half a second, and the wonderful, bottomless shower changed from nice and hot to 2nd Degree burn water.
And the real problem wasn’t someone flushing one of those urinals while you were showering, it was someone who was focused on playing a “prank” on you by flushing the urinal. People often didn’t flush if they heard someone showering, or would even call out before doing it. But the people who were intent on their “prank” were the real bastards.
I got scalded in there a few times, one time so badly the top of my scalp burned for about a week. I became so tuned in while showering that, if the water pressure dropped suddenly, even if in nearly imperceptible way, I would frantically leap in a panic out of the shower stream to avoid being burned.
I married my wife nearly ten years after I got out of the Navy, and she can attest that we were married for at least 20 years after that before I finally stopped jumping out of the shower any time the water pressure dropped! It took me a long, long time to break that habit!
Anyway, as I lingered in that bottomless hot shower, washing the mud, blood, and soreness from my body, as a final indignity, some joker came in and flushed the urinal and I was totally unprepared. I got burned pretty good there.
And I have since sported a small curved scar dead between my eyes that was caused by the sharp edge of my broken glasses.
With age, it has faded, and I have to look more carefully to see it, but it is still there, and every time I see it, I smile and remember what it used to be like to be a young man and invincible...:)
SA has reached a new low, even though that seemed impossible prior to this article ...
Yes and we didn’t wear helmets or pads. al that padding makes for lack of caution.
It only “disproportionately affects Black Men” because Black Men are disproportionately represented in the NFL and are thus disproportionately drawing those league minimum $660,000 annual salaries. They are of course free to give up those big fat salaries and not subject themselves to taking hits anytime they choose.
LOL — nice post. Those are some great memories.
These people do realize 43% of NFL players aren’t black right?
I remember playing Dodge Ball in gym class.
If football is violent, shut it down completely. What a dumbass!
Actually, the truth is, I used to be a great football 🏈 fan, but due to the violent nature of the game, I am no longer a fan of the game. People can be fans if they want, but I am not.
This game of football is racist I tell you. All those who have ever played it must get reparations immediately.
/sarc.
I bet that babe would do anything to get hooked up with one of those wealthy football players.
Science is corrupt.
Ridiculous. I’m 6’4” and haven’t weighed 200 lbs since 9th grade. I enlisted at 18 and gained weight in boot and AIT. Put on 10 lbs. Came out of AIT at 225. The average weight of our line in high school football was 230 lbs. Our fullback was 240, our quarterback weighed 160. I was a defensive back and weighed 215. We weren’t the biggest team in our league. We had three blacks on our team. There were not many blacks in our community back then. We were a blue collar community and back then and the only way out was through sports. I’ll give you a hint. In high school Mike Curtis was on our team. We were 50 - 0 when I graduated.
Wild guess here, using that logic:
I think the NBA is even more racist because the vast majority of basketball injuries are suffered by black players!
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