Good reading today from The Atlantic: It’s about white families discouraging kids from playing football because of evidence of the risk of long-term brain injury. The trend is less evident among black families and shows up in a rising percentage of blacks playing college football.
Today black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college-football players, up from 39 percent in 2000. White athletes make up 37 percent, down from 51 percent.
This divergence paints a troubling picture of how economic opportunity—or a lack thereof—governs which boys are incentivized to put their body and brain at risk to play. Depending on where families live, and what other options are available to them, they see either a game that is too violent to consider or one that is necessary and important, if risky. Millions of Americans still watch football; NFL ratings were up this season. That a distinct portion of families won’t let their children play creates a disturbing future for the country’s most popular game.
I’d love to see numbers on trends in Arkansas.
Little Rock on the surface seems an outlier to this article’s theme. There’s been a recent effort to encourage more kids to play football in lower grades in the Little Rock School District. Football has fallen on hard times in the majority black school district, at least as measured by won-lost records. College football recruiters complain that Little Rock isn’t the resource it should be. Football’s low estate in Little Rock has been blamed, at least in part, on a perceived historic lack of emphasis on athletics in favor of academics. Meanwhile, majority white private schools — Pulaski Academy and Little Rock Christian, for example— have been football powerhouses in Little Rock.
It’s an issue complicated by tradition, cultural norms, emotion and the trials of adolescence.
I wanted to play football in high school. My parents wouldn’t allow it for the longest because I was born without a left eye. I finally prevailed in my senior year in high school, in time to be a bench warmer on a state championship runner-up and presumed protected when I did play by a face mask with more bars than customary. But I made the cut on a Division III college football team, only to be ruled off the day before our season opener by the college president. This was the result of a medical review of all athletes after a soccer player’s death from a heart ailment. My lack of an eye was deemed too risky to put me on the field.
See, I coulda been a contender on the D-line. That’s my story, anyway. I was definitely a contender on the keg line subsequently. The irony of my personal story is found in the people at my recent 50th high school reunion who remembered a singular event of my high school athletic career — when I lost my artificial eye during a rebound scrum in a basketball game against the West Lake Rams. My parents had thought basketball was safe enough to play. I’m happy to remain sighted and without enough football knocks to blame for my mental lapses. I just own the latter.