|
|
 |
 |   |
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Video Plus Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities 
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE | |
End game When death strikes, sports get off scot-free
Death is not uncommon in athletics, but the competitors are young, and sport is the very essence of the physical, so when someone does die in competition, it always seems rather rude of that man with the scythe to have intruded on us. We have suffered, too, these past few weeks, with an unusually high consciousness of mortality in sports. The investigation into Dale Earnhardt's death has seldom left the news since his fatal crash last February. Yet another boxer died from ring injuries earlier this summer after a nationally televised bout, and, most recently, several young men perished from heat exhaustion on the football practice field. We mourn them all, of course, but, invariably, we seek to explain away these tragedies by absolving sports. Boxing, for example, is the only accepted sport where the intent is to hurt your opponent. A "good" spectator fight is one in which the bodily harm and pain are the most conspicuous. Only when a man does not get up do we catch ourselves and regain our best instincts. But, ah, we quickly accept boxing's wonderful rationalization that it really isn't boxing that kills. No, it is simply the way of the boxing bureaucracy. If only we could "clean up" the sport, get more honest officials, better organization, yada, yada, yada. So far as I know, boxing is the only institution in the world that is palpably cruel, but survives because it successfully diverts attention from its evil to its chicanery. Don King is not the problem with boxing. A legal blow to the head is. As for Dale Earnhardt, whatever details were in the cause of his death, the bald truth is that if men race in a bunch, going up to 200 miles per hour, a certain number must crash, a certain number must die. Earnhardt himself often said: "We are not racing. We are just existing on the track together." In a way, then, the prolonged investigation was more of a tribute for the popular Intimidator -- and, also, in not a little bit like boxing, a more benign way of avoiding the obvious. Sad and simple as it is with men racing cars: Speed kills. The loss of football players to heat is different, however, for we so identify with them. We have not boxed or driven race cars. We have played football. Our sons do -- something like 800,000 American boys every year. And we all know what it is to endure ghastly, enervating heat. Certainly though, trouble is not supposed to come to big strapping fellows in shoulder pads, is it? What's the matter with the coaches? The trainers? But, you see, the hard truth is that, in so many of these cases, the players themselves are most responsible. And that's painful to accept. But the culture of the gridiron is such that players are not supposed to show weakness, and that can make a footballer as vulnerable to his pride as a boxer is to a punch, as a racer is to high speed. If not much has changed in how we deal with death in athletics, at least one thing has: Whenever a player dies in any sport, we all now want to know what substances are in their body. At least that way we can think it was the medications, the drugs. It really wasn't the fault of the sport that we love. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNNSI.com
| |||||||||||||||||||||
