Concussion by Jeanne Marie Laskas

The mind, he long ago discovered, was a private playground, a place for random conversations and games, always welcoming and never proscriptive. It was something that could clamp irrationally onto something unknowable like depression. It was a mystery as vast and elusive as God.

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What the mind doesn’t know, the eye can’t see. But what the mind knows too well, the eye can miss altogether.

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I do think there’s a mind-set—no matter how much we may want to deny it in this country—about the perception of blackness. And sometimes it’s a subconscious mind-set. Where anything associated with blackness has a negative connotation. This mind-set has a very fundamental assumption. A false assumption that black people cannot be intelligent.

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Technically, according to the books, the NFL is a trade organization, an unincorporated nonprofit 501(c)(6) association made up of and financed by its thirty-two member teams, and as such, it is required to pay no federal taxes. (Individual teams are for-profit entities, so they have to pay income taxes.) The NFL’s tax-exempt status was bestowed in the 1960s when Congress allowed the then American Football League to merge with the National Football League, granting the newly formed group antitrust waivers. That gave it a monopoly on broadcasting rights—and that’s largely how the league now makes about ten billion dollars every year, and how it can afford to pay Goodell’s annual salary of about $44 million. (In 2015 the NFL will decide to end its tax-exempt status, explaining that the nonprofit designation had become a “distraction.”) Meanwhile, state and local tax dollars go into funding stadiums—about 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers.

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A player doesn’t have to be knocked out cold and taken off the field on a stretcher to be in danger of getting CTE. The subconcussive collisions may, in fact, be the real culprit. The little hits. Thousands of them, the little hits that look like nothing, that look like…football. All those linemen starting out every play, banging heads. Bennet’s findings, and the ones others make after him, suggest it’s these subconcussive collisions, all those regular bashes that linemen absorb in practice, twenty to thirty g’s on every play—it’s the accumulation of those hits that ends up making guys go crazy.
 It could, for all anyone knows, begin at the peewee level.