And he has been talking about it for years. Reminds me of the parody on his show about the organization called Keep Our Own Kids Safe, aka KOOKS. Hitting a soccer ball with your head could be dangerous :)
It's a business, and if you don't look out, the lawyers will put it out of business. And there won't be any anti-trust exemptions to help you.
Why bother? They’ve gayed it up with disco diva dance singers, pink ribbons for abortionists, and refuse to air footage of cheerleaders shaking their hips.
Add to it the thuggary and billion dollar welfare queens who make dime off the public taxpayers.
WHO NEEDS IT?
I don’t think you have to be a pointy headed intellectual to look at the concussion data and second guess a decision to let a kid play football. I love the game, but permanent brain damage is a scary thing. The especially scary one to look at it Chris Henry, never missed a game due to head injury and yet had tons of brain damage they found in his autopsy, which probably contributed to him being such a discipline case.
The sissies (including our president), are all venting their fear of football.
Who is this girly-man trying to fool? He doesn’t like football. He’s just piling onto the latest girly-man PC cause.
If the NFL takes measures to make the game a little safer, I may or may not agree.
For example:
Clipping, as a penalty, is a good thing.
Rough the passer, as a penalty, has been overused.
Ball-carrier lowering his head, as a penalty, is just wrong.
But when the NFL started issuing penalties for “taunting” and “excessive celebration”, that is a dead give-away that liberals are in charge of the game and it is only a matter of time.
The guy who started all of this ‘concussion’ stuff was an ex-NFL’er who then became a pro wrestler. He suffered head and neck injuries in pro-wrestling then for some unknown reason went after the NFL instead of pro-wrestling.
Or was able to have a child with a woman.....
Rush is an idiot.
I played football. My kids played football. Given what we now know, I wouldn’t have played nor would I have let my kids play. There is no question that the dangers of playing were covered up. There is “violent sport” and then there is “gladiators dying for others amusement”. Pro football became the latter. I SO love the game and I hope they fix it. It looks like they may. But there comes a time when I can find other ways to be amused that do not involve someone dying ... or worse.
Rush Limbaugh is talking about this today...saying “pointy headed intellectuals” are agonizing about football, the eventuality being that it will be banned
...that is true...to an extent...the pointy heads want football banned, all right, but not because it’s unsafe (if studies should emerge about dangers in soccer, these same people wouldn’t say boo), but because little girls can’t play football, and therefore it upsets the gender equity bunch and their utopian visions...the ideal sports scenario is a school fielding only teams which have both male and female versions...
I’d like my son to one day be able to assess football dispassionately, and thus do his part to help society progress. But in helping him accurately judge the game, I’d also be inviting him to judge me. Far easier to curl up with him for this Sunday’s AFC championship game as father and son—co-conspirators.
His ideas about football are completely wrong and he obviously never played the game at any level past grade school. Here's why I say that...
Football is a very personal team sport. It teaches a lot of great things about life. It's personal because it is tough. The team effort relies on individuals physically dominating opposing players. And it is violent starting at the high school level (to a lesser degree and not before). While there are seemingly "big" collisions in 7th and 8th grade football, they are infrequent and made more dramatic by the otherwise slow motion of the game surrounding them. By the time one gets to college, the violent collisions are on most plays. Watching a game distorts the image of how hard the players are hitting each other precisely because the game is so fast. Only the open field high speed collisions seem to get noticed (and these are arguably some of the hardest hits). Unless you have experienced the amount of energy that is absorbed when a 310 lb guard and 275 lb defensive tackle collide after only accelerating for 3', you can't really begin to understand how personal it can get. But I digress...
The amount of miserable preparation, hard work, dedication and mental toughness that comes with the occasional (by comparison) glory builds the character of a man. The love of the game is not about the violence. It is about the bond that forms when men step onto the grid-iron together, with specific assignments, to engage in a physical battle. It's about the competition. You learn about dedication to a cause and individual self worth measured by teammates, coaches and fans. You learn about controlling emotions and pushing through pain and exhaustion when necessary. You learn humility and leadership. And yes, you learn to have respect for another man that you purposefully attempt to physically dominate in between the whistles. You also learn to accept that there is always a looming risk, danger even, of personal injury for the cause of the team that is greater than the individual. You learn to operate a levels most other people will never experience. You learn about physical, psychological and emotional limits, and you learn to surpass them. There is something about the end of an exhausting effort, battered and bruised as the adrenaline high starts to subside and the aches and exhaustion creep in, where you contemplate and reflect on your effort, the meaning of your pain. In victory and defeat there is intrinsic satisfaction in what you have done (hopefully) as a contributor to the team. That reflection continues the next morning, during films and turns back into work as you recall where you succeeded but focused on where you failed in order to work on how to improve both for yourself and for your team. Ultimately competition is what you love and glory is the reward you work so hard for.
I believe that only the military can otherwise teach and provide this experience (maybe wrestling). (I have never been in the military. So that is an unqualified assumption.).
I believe in the life lessons associated with the character development that football provides, especially at younger ages. There will be injuries. I have had several and my body has some lasting affects today (I only played a couple years of college football). But it was worth it in my opinion.
People have the choice of whether they want to subject themselves to the risks of playing football. Government robs and controls all of us and we have no choice. Leave it to liberals to get all worked up about the wrong thing.
It was always 6 seconds of action followed by minutes of spitting, scratching, etc.
I played football in Jr. High, attended one football game in High School (1968) and have never watched a game since.
I know people enjoy it and that's fine with me.
However, the attraction is still a puzzle.
Geez, I always thought Peter Beinart was gay.
Beinart was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa.
His mother, Doreen (née Pienaar), is former director of the Harvard’s Human Rights film series at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. His stepfather is theatre critic and playwright Robert Brustein