For more than 20 years, every new concussion in footy and every premature retirement is described as a wake-up call for the sport, so either we’re wide awake now and complacent still, or we need a new alarm clock. At very least, we’ve got to stop hitting the snooze button.
The cycle can be broken only by answering an existential question that no one is prepared to ask. When it comes down to it, what toll would be considered acceptable? In a contact sport, the answer cannot be zero, but beyond that, no one knows where to draw the line or what drawing it might mean for the code.
Adelaide’s Mark Keane holds his head after being concussed by Port’s Sam Powell-Pepper.Credit: Getty Images
“Unless they do something” … “there must be something they can do” … “they’ve got to do something”. But the something is never defined, and the conversation goes around in ever-diminishing and never-resolving circles.
We presume the necessary wisdom exists within or close to football. But the victim are footballers for now, citizens and community members for life. It’s a public health issue. That is now somewhat recognised, but acted upon only in the margins.
A Senate inquiry last year made recommendations. A coroner this year made more recommendations. A body of scientific and medical knowledge has built up. But still no one has dared to mould it into a set of unbreakable protocols, the thing that must be done.
Players, medics, administrators all will have their own ideas, for their own reasons. Between them, they will say that the game has gone too far already and not nearly far enough yet. The whole exercise is a contradiction of itself. So on we go to the next wake-up call.
A concussed Nathan Murphy before he was subbed out of the 2023 grand final.Credit: Paul Rovere
It is the human condition that we thrill to the bodily contest at the same time as we flinch at it. They’re our avatars, mustering our courage for us, displaying it on our behalf. It’s been that way since lions versus Christians.
And let’s face it, it works. It works because most of us don’t have to make that fateful decision about when is the right time to go and when to wait, most of us don’t have to contemplate the potential for short- or long-term damage, most of us don’t have to face a question about early retirement. Most of us aren’t Angus Brayshaw.
Angus Brayshaw.Credit: Getty
It’s always been a badge of honour for our major football codes that they are played with so little padding and protection. Maybe it’s time for them all to re-sit that badge.
The game has changed as society has changed, so more change is as inevitable as a tomorrow. The bill at the Colosseum in Roman times was not thought primitive then, but is now. So is bare-knuckles fighting. Who’s to say that in time, the way we play our games now might be reviewed as inhumanly – inhumanely – crude?
I’ve watched the game change over many decades. What some now might see as brutal I see as refined. I would find more wholesale change odd. But let’s see. Let’s see where the science leads and what an educated and informed consensus says.
What risk is conscionable for what reward? How much agency should a player have in decisions about his playing future, remembering that most are young and will nearly always choose to press on? How can financial considerations be neutralised as a factor? What thresholds are non-negotiable?
I don’t have an answer. But at the moment, it’s as if on the roads we say: here is an upper limit beyond which fatal crashes tend to occur, but you can drive as fast as you think you safely can below it.
The question that no one dares to ask is not new, nor is it confined to Australian rules. Nearly 15 years ago, as the CTE cloud began to form over the NFL in the US, author Malcolm Gladwell figuratively shook his head in an article in the New Yorker.
“There is nothing to be done, not so long as the fans stand and cheer,” he wrote. “We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else – neither considerations of science nor those of morality – can compete with the destructive power of that love.”
It rings truer now than ever.
