Ron: A few things to consider as football training camp starts

Can you believe it? Football training camp is about to start. We’re only a few short weeks from the exhibition season, and then it’s time once again for the most popular sport in America to dominate the airwaves each Sunday. And Sunday Night. And Monday. Oh and Thursday Night does pretty well, too.

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This year feels different for me though. It’s all because of CTE. The brain disease that literally destroys a human from the inside out due to repeated blows to the skull.

I’m a lifelong football fan. My family has been season ticket holders in the NFL for as long as I’ve been alive, and I was strapping on a helmet for full contact action at the age of seven. I played every year until I graduated from high school, and have missed very few weekends of football ever since. Every summer was filled with football camps and imaginary reenactments of famous touchdowns featuring my favorite players.

But it’s getting more and more difficult for me to push aside the mountain of evidence growing right in front of me. Repeated blows to the head will cause a significant number of football players to lose the function of their brain after their career ends. The tragedy usually ends with a former player’s life in ruins. Anger problems, domestic violence, and increasingly suicides that avoid destroying the brain so that it can be sent to be studied. It’s almost like these players are calling out from the grave, “See, I told you so. My brain is gone. That’s why I was behaving this way.”

It’s easy to do the calculus and say, “Well, you get paid millions of dollars to play a game.” And, “the players know what they are signing up for.”

Both of those things are true. But what is my responsibility as a fan to respect the bodies of the players? Is it OK to root for a game where I know some of the athletes wearing my team’s jersey are incrementally destroying their brain for my entertainment?

I’ve said before on the show that I’ve come to terms with the fact that I just like the inherent violence built in to the game of football.

I’m sure I’ll still watch this season, but I’m waiting for some kind of miracle solution to this dilemma. I hope it comes quickly, because future lives and the life of the sport itself depends on it.

You can hear “What are we talking about here?” everyday at 4:45 p.m. on 97.3 FM.

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