It's time everybody. The moment you've all been waiting for: health update! If I've learned anything in my 37 years on this Earth, it's that there is nothing people like more than hearing others gripe about their minor ailments. With that said, it seems as if I can never get completely healthy. As soon as one issue goes away, another one crops up. I finally got my back feeling normal again, so of course my hand pain has returned. It's like it was waiting in the lurch for the right moment to strike. On top of that, I woke up yesterday with a crick in my neck (presumably from sleeping on it weird), and it still hasn't gone away. It's strange; it's not really my neck. It's above my neck just behind my left ear. It feels like I pulled muscle in my skull, which, although I'm no doctor, I imagine isn't even possible -- but that's what it feels like. I guess I'm just getting old.
In other malady news, Lil' S has come down with a cough. I wouldn't even mention it, but we got a notice from his daycare saying that two kids at his school were diagnosed with something called the EV-D68 enterovirus. This sounds a lot scarier than it actually is. This virus, I came to learn, is basically just a common cold, but in some cases, particularly for kids with asthma or other respiratory problems, it can require hospitalization. The recommended way to handle it is to let it run its course, unless your kid is having difficulty breathing, and then you should take him or her to urgent care or the emergency room. So ... basically treat it like you would any other illness. I know the daycare is just doing their due (and perhaps legal) diligence, but this is a case in which the information does more harm than good. Nothing is really gained from knowing it -- if my kid is sick and having trouble breathing I'm taking him to the doctor regardless (as is pretty much every other parent). Effectively it only serves to worry.
Speaking of health, I read some interesting articles about two subjects near and dear to me: football and liberalism. It all started with Jonathan Chait's In Defense of Male Aggression: What Liberals Get Wrong About Football (FYI, this is long and rambling; the subject is interesting, but it's not one of Chait's better written pieces), and then went to Dan Diamond's rebuttal, and then went back to Chait for the rebuttal of the rebuttal. Despite the title of the first article, liberalism actually has little to do with anything. It's mainly about football and safety. And this is something that interests me: 1) Because I love football (go 'Hawks!), 2) Because I have a son who might want to play football someday, and I (along with my wife, of course) might have to decided whether or not to let him.
Chait's basic thesis is that football (excluding college and professional, which most people never play) is not that much more dangerous than other sports, and that its benefits -- namely character building, and a structured release for male aggression -- outweigh its risks. He further suggests that many anti-football-ites simply don't like the sport, and so they overstate its danger. He has a bunch of data to support his assertion, and then Diamond says he's mischaracterizing this data, and then Chait says it's actually Diamond who is being misleading. And you can read the entire exchange if you like.
Personally, I side mostly with Chait, which is probably not a huge surprise for people who know me. But I will say, it's not a slam dunk. Although I love football, I also love objective thinking, and sometimes this puts my heart and my brain at odds. In the case of the professional football (and college, although I'm not a huge college football fan, anymore), it's getting harder and harder to support an NFL team each year with a clear conscious. Aside from the ethical question of whether or not it is okay to follow a sport in which a relatively high percentage of its participants will end up cripples or vegetables before the age of 60, there is the other ethical question of whether or not it is okay to follow a league that punishes somebody who smokes weed more severely than somebody who punches out his wife in an elevator and then drags her unconscious body around instead of seeking help. Right now the NFL is still king of the sports landscape (which is why commissioner Roger Goodell still has a job despite being completely and obviously inept), but things could be very different a few decades from now. The only people I believe about what the NFL will look like in thirty years are the people who say they have no idea what the NFL will look like in thirty years.
High school and peewee football are a completely different story because there is no Roger Goodell and the health risks are not nearly as great. The chance of injury is greater than in other sports, but some sports has to be the riskiest; football shouldn't be disparaged just for that. Everything is a risk, so it's all about tradeoffs. Do the net benefits outweigh the net risks? And that depends largely on what you think about football. Personally, I wanted to play football as a kid, and my parents let me (with a little trepidation, I think), once I got to junior high. But I didn't really enjoy it, so I quit my sophomore year. My main reason for quitting was pretty silly: I never found a helmet that fit my head right. I went through like ten different helmets, but they all pressed down on my head in an uncomfortable way and started to hurt throughout practice, even when I wasn't doing any contact drills. I'd go home every night with a terrible headache. Actually, when I put it this way, it's not so silly at all. It's actually a pretty good reason.
As for Lil' S, if football is still around and its risks haven't gone up drastically, I would probably let him play if he really wanted to. But I wouldn't push him. All the benefits Chait gives of playing football -- the character building, the release of aggression, the teamwork, the camaraderie -- they're all legitimate. Playing football is meaningful and important to a lot of boys (as corny and jock-ish as that might seem to some people), and I wouldn't want to deny it to my son, if it's something he really wanted to do.
Plus, I was thinking about how we assess risk and decide what's acceptable and what isn't, and how it can be weird sometimes. Consider the following hypothetical: Suppose you had a son who didn't want to play football but instead wanted to learn figure skating. Suppose that the rink was very far away, an hour drive, and practices were in the morning, requiring you or your spouse to wake up early to drive him. Nobody would bat an eye about allowing their son to ice skate in this scenario for safety reasons. And yet cars can be dangerous, especially when the driver is tired. Nobody would say, "I can't believe you're exposing your son to all that extra road time in less than ideal driving conditions. Aren't you are worried about him? Didn't you hear about that high school kid who died in a car crash?" This wouldn't even cross people's minds. And yet if you had a son who wanted to play football, many people would be more than willing to give you the dangers and tell you an anecdote about a kid who was paralyzed during a high school game. Why is that? Like I said, it's weird.
Anyway, since Chait included an anecdote about the power of high school sports in his essay. I'm going to do so in this blog post. Bear with me.
In high school I was a pretty good wrestler -- varsity all three years (at my high school ninth grade was still junior high) and a record well north of .500. My senior year I was really good. I went something like 20-1 during the regular season, and then, in my crowning wrestling achievement, I won my league tournament. The victory qualified me for the regional tournament, and if I finished in the top four of eight participants there, I would go on to wrestle at the state championship in the Tacoma Dome -- the Big One.
The problem is that I was starting to fade. I wrestled at 168 pounds, but I naturally weighed about 185, and the weight cutting was starting to seriously enervate me. I just wanted to eat again. And the practices everyday after school were getting to me to as well; I wanted to goof off with my friends and be a normal teenager. Mentally, I just didn't have it anymore. My thought process going into regionals was, either I would go on to state or the season would be over, and both seemed equally good. I won my first match at regionals easily, but then I lost my next two, dropping my from a qualifying spot. Then in the final match of my high school career I wrestled the same guy I had crushed earlier in the tournament for the "first alternate" spot at state. He beat me in overtime, as I had all but given up. My wrestling days were done.
As chance would have it, somebody got hurt in my weight class and couldn't wrestle at state. The guy who beat me in my final match got to take his place. Had I just sucked it for one more match (let alone one more tournament) and bore down against somebody I was much better than, I would have gone to state. But I didn't. And it still haunts me -- well, haunts is the wrong word -- it still bothers me to this day. Why didn't I just put in a marginal amount of additional effort to achieve a big goal? As pathetic as it might sound, I would rank this as one of the biggest -- if not the very biggest -- regrets of my life.
And after wrestling there was a small, but important void in my life that I figured I would fill with other things, but I never really did. As an adult, there is just nothing you can really do to replenish that thrill of contest. No competition I can do at this point will feel as meaningful as my high school wrestling did.
This is why I would let my son play football if he wants to. But I would push for wrestling first.
Until next time...
In other malady news, Lil' S has come down with a cough. I wouldn't even mention it, but we got a notice from his daycare saying that two kids at his school were diagnosed with something called the EV-D68 enterovirus. This sounds a lot scarier than it actually is. This virus, I came to learn, is basically just a common cold, but in some cases, particularly for kids with asthma or other respiratory problems, it can require hospitalization. The recommended way to handle it is to let it run its course, unless your kid is having difficulty breathing, and then you should take him or her to urgent care or the emergency room. So ... basically treat it like you would any other illness. I know the daycare is just doing their due (and perhaps legal) diligence, but this is a case in which the information does more harm than good. Nothing is really gained from knowing it -- if my kid is sick and having trouble breathing I'm taking him to the doctor regardless (as is pretty much every other parent). Effectively it only serves to worry.
[A Hall-of-Fame offensive lineman 50 years ago]
Speaking of health, I read some interesting articles about two subjects near and dear to me: football and liberalism. It all started with Jonathan Chait's In Defense of Male Aggression: What Liberals Get Wrong About Football (FYI, this is long and rambling; the subject is interesting, but it's not one of Chait's better written pieces), and then went to Dan Diamond's rebuttal, and then went back to Chait for the rebuttal of the rebuttal. Despite the title of the first article, liberalism actually has little to do with anything. It's mainly about football and safety. And this is something that interests me: 1) Because I love football (go 'Hawks!), 2) Because I have a son who might want to play football someday, and I (along with my wife, of course) might have to decided whether or not to let him.
Chait's basic thesis is that football (excluding college and professional, which most people never play) is not that much more dangerous than other sports, and that its benefits -- namely character building, and a structured release for male aggression -- outweigh its risks. He further suggests that many anti-football-ites simply don't like the sport, and so they overstate its danger. He has a bunch of data to support his assertion, and then Diamond says he's mischaracterizing this data, and then Chait says it's actually Diamond who is being misleading. And you can read the entire exchange if you like.
[Typical offensive linemen today. Notice anything different from the pic above?]
Personally, I side mostly with Chait, which is probably not a huge surprise for people who know me. But I will say, it's not a slam dunk. Although I love football, I also love objective thinking, and sometimes this puts my heart and my brain at odds. In the case of the professional football (and college, although I'm not a huge college football fan, anymore), it's getting harder and harder to support an NFL team each year with a clear conscious. Aside from the ethical question of whether or not it is okay to follow a sport in which a relatively high percentage of its participants will end up cripples or vegetables before the age of 60, there is the other ethical question of whether or not it is okay to follow a league that punishes somebody who smokes weed more severely than somebody who punches out his wife in an elevator and then drags her unconscious body around instead of seeking help. Right now the NFL is still king of the sports landscape (which is why commissioner Roger Goodell still has a job despite being completely and obviously inept), but things could be very different a few decades from now. The only people I believe about what the NFL will look like in thirty years are the people who say they have no idea what the NFL will look like in thirty years.
High school and peewee football are a completely different story because there is no Roger Goodell and the health risks are not nearly as great. The chance of injury is greater than in other sports, but some sports has to be the riskiest; football shouldn't be disparaged just for that. Everything is a risk, so it's all about tradeoffs. Do the net benefits outweigh the net risks? And that depends largely on what you think about football. Personally, I wanted to play football as a kid, and my parents let me (with a little trepidation, I think), once I got to junior high. But I didn't really enjoy it, so I quit my sophomore year. My main reason for quitting was pretty silly: I never found a helmet that fit my head right. I went through like ten different helmets, but they all pressed down on my head in an uncomfortable way and started to hurt throughout practice, even when I wasn't doing any contact drills. I'd go home every night with a terrible headache. Actually, when I put it this way, it's not so silly at all. It's actually a pretty good reason.
As for Lil' S, if football is still around and its risks haven't gone up drastically, I would probably let him play if he really wanted to. But I wouldn't push him. All the benefits Chait gives of playing football -- the character building, the release of aggression, the teamwork, the camaraderie -- they're all legitimate. Playing football is meaningful and important to a lot of boys (as corny and jock-ish as that might seem to some people), and I wouldn't want to deny it to my son, if it's something he really wanted to do.
[Who says football is violent?]
Plus, I was thinking about how we assess risk and decide what's acceptable and what isn't, and how it can be weird sometimes. Consider the following hypothetical: Suppose you had a son who didn't want to play football but instead wanted to learn figure skating. Suppose that the rink was very far away, an hour drive, and practices were in the morning, requiring you or your spouse to wake up early to drive him. Nobody would bat an eye about allowing their son to ice skate in this scenario for safety reasons. And yet cars can be dangerous, especially when the driver is tired. Nobody would say, "I can't believe you're exposing your son to all that extra road time in less than ideal driving conditions. Aren't you are worried about him? Didn't you hear about that high school kid who died in a car crash?" This wouldn't even cross people's minds. And yet if you had a son who wanted to play football, many people would be more than willing to give you the dangers and tell you an anecdote about a kid who was paralyzed during a high school game. Why is that? Like I said, it's weird.
Anyway, since Chait included an anecdote about the power of high school sports in his essay. I'm going to do so in this blog post. Bear with me.
In high school I was a pretty good wrestler -- varsity all three years (at my high school ninth grade was still junior high) and a record well north of .500. My senior year I was really good. I went something like 20-1 during the regular season, and then, in my crowning wrestling achievement, I won my league tournament. The victory qualified me for the regional tournament, and if I finished in the top four of eight participants there, I would go on to wrestle at the state championship in the Tacoma Dome -- the Big One.
The problem is that I was starting to fade. I wrestled at 168 pounds, but I naturally weighed about 185, and the weight cutting was starting to seriously enervate me. I just wanted to eat again. And the practices everyday after school were getting to me to as well; I wanted to goof off with my friends and be a normal teenager. Mentally, I just didn't have it anymore. My thought process going into regionals was, either I would go on to state or the season would be over, and both seemed equally good. I won my first match at regionals easily, but then I lost my next two, dropping my from a qualifying spot. Then in the final match of my high school career I wrestled the same guy I had crushed earlier in the tournament for the "first alternate" spot at state. He beat me in overtime, as I had all but given up. My wrestling days were done.
As chance would have it, somebody got hurt in my weight class and couldn't wrestle at state. The guy who beat me in my final match got to take his place. Had I just sucked it for one more match (let alone one more tournament) and bore down against somebody I was much better than, I would have gone to state. But I didn't. And it still haunts me -- well, haunts is the wrong word -- it still bothers me to this day. Why didn't I just put in a marginal amount of additional effort to achieve a big goal? As pathetic as it might sound, I would rank this as one of the biggest -- if not the very biggest -- regrets of my life.
And after wrestling there was a small, but important void in my life that I figured I would fill with other things, but I never really did. As an adult, there is just nothing you can really do to replenish that thrill of contest. No competition I can do at this point will feel as meaningful as my high school wrestling did.
This is why I would let my son play football if he wants to. But I would push for wrestling first.
Until next time...
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