Sporting Violence: The Injuries

The following is the first in a three-part series examining violence in sports, and its role in society.

We all know the benefits sports bring to our world. The classic and predictable clichés abound: “Sports build character, teach athletes to bounce back from defeat, and keep kids off the street.”

I’m not denying these and other sayings hold some credence. In many cases, they do. But let’s not kid ourselves: Like all major corporations, sporting institutions have their imperfections. 

In athletics, the primary commodity that is labeled with a value is the human body. Bodies are manipulated by athletes themselves and those vested in promoting their commodities in hope of maximizing a financial return.

In other words, get as much out of the body for the longest time frame possible without risking a future loss on that investment. It’s a cynical reality of capitalism, and sports are hardly immune from falling into our economy’s pitfalls. 

At some point, we need to ask if our societal obsession with athletics pushed the industry too far. In addition to the outrageous salaries prevalent in some professional sports, we need to question why we celebrate—even revere—various dimensions of violence.

Are our daily lives so mundane and saturated with occupational stress that we come to crave time off simply so we may fall into the foray of sporting violence? 

I have to ask myself this question all the time. My fascination with mixed martial arts (MMA) made me question if I was a violent person, sucked into the spectacle of fighting as a sport. But as I entered the MMA world, I came to learn more vividly that sports in general tend to be violent, and, further, that sporting violence does not discriminate. No matter how invincible an athlete may seem, everyone is vulnerable. 

Athletes, coaches, and fans generally don’t know how serious or pervasive concussions are in certain sports. Remember former Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Trent Green's head bouncing fiercely off the ground in a 2006 game, or his head colliding with a Houston Texans lineman’s knee the following year (Battista, 2007)?

Both of those injuries were Grade 3 concussions, the most severe. Research on NFL retirees has shown that those players who sustained three or more concussions during their career were significantly more likely to fall into clinical levels of depression later in life for no apparent reason other than the concussions (Schwarz, 2007a). 

And it’s not just at the professional level. About 10 percent of all youths who play football and hockey report sustaining a concussion every year. For kids, suffering from a concussion is especially problematic. If a child sustains a concussion, the younger he or she is, the easier it will be for him or her to sustain a subsequent one, and the next concussion has a greater chance of being more severe (Schwarz, 2007b).

What’s worse, athletes rarely tell others when they have a head injury out of fear that coaches and teammates will ridicule them as weak (Essoyan, 2007), so, actually, the percentage of youth suffering from sporting concussions is higher than we realize. 

It’s not just sports that tend to be popular with males, either. Girls and women who play soccer sustain concussions at the same rate as football players, and the rates are very high for girls’/women’s basketball as well (Sokolove, 2008).  Not to mention the fact that, in those two sports, the rates of ACL tears for females are disturbingly high. In fact, females are two times more likely than males to tear an ACL playing soccer and three times more likely playing basketball (Arendt, Agel, & Dick, 1999). 

And while medical technology has made it easier for athletes to recover from knee injuries, the long-term effects of knee ligament damage can be very detrimental.

“Blowing out an ACL can end a girl’s sports career, but doctors have also suspected that the injury sets the stage for osteo-arthritis, a degenerative joint disease that typically strikes older people” (Fackelmann, 2004, p. 9D).

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