Now, as a basic matter of civil liberties, I’d never suggest banning football. You have a right to endanger your life doing dangerous things, and if your idea of fun is scaling cliffs or tackling running backs, that’s your business.
Likewise, if professional football players want to accept a high likelihood of debilitating mental illness in exchange for millions of dollars, that’s their prerogative, I suppose.
But whether mature adults should be allowed to play football is a different question from whether tackle football should be supported and encouraged, especially at the youth level, given all that we now know about its hazards.
Which brings me to high schools. Why are schools, including public schools, still subsidizing, promoting, and sometimes glorifying a sport they know full well may be endangering their students’ lives?
Sports have lots of social benefits, and I understand the argument that providing sports keeps some students engaged in school who might otherwise tune out.
But should one of those sports really still be tackle football? All sports involve the danger of injury, but they don’t all correlate to such high risks of life-threatening illness.
CTE does not just affect professional athletes. It’s been found in former high school and college football players, too, including some who died under age 30.
Schools have tried to reduce the risks associated with football — for instance, by forbidding tackles during practices. But almost the whole point of football is to tackle your opponent. As more and more evidence about the prevalence and risk of CTE emerges, we need to consider the possibility that there is no safe version of football that would still be recognizable as football (flag football might be one alternative, but is that really still football?).
In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu has been attempting to build a new White Stadium that would be used, among other things, for high school football. The project is embroiled in controversy for a variety of reasons, including its $325 million price tag and its use of parkland.
But maybe what we really should be asking is whether it’s just a little perverse for the city to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to host a sport it knows may destroy some of its students’ brains.
Now, it’s undoubtedly true that if there were no high school football teams, kids would still play the game, informally or in out-of-school leagues. The sport is too popular to imagine it fading away.
But closing high school football programs would probably mean fewer kids overall exposing themselves to the game’s risks. Such a move might also help dislodge football from its cultural place of honor as a mainstay of the American high school experience.
Would that be so terrible?
I get it. Football is the national pastime. But we’re long past the point where we can pretend not to know what the sport is doing to thousands of young men. The only question is whether we’ll act on those warnings — or keep searching for excuses not to.
Alan Wirzbicki is Globe deputy editor for editorials. He can be reached at alan.wirzbicki@globe.com.
