THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, September 30, 2011

Ken Dryden, head injuries, and Grantland

Ken Dryden is the best combination of professional athlete, intelligence, and articulateness.  Indeed, you can probably remove any one of those three qualifiers, and it would still apply.  If you haven’t read The Game because you are not a hockey fan, then you are missing out.  At the very least, that book should be read by all sports fans.  I don’t know how any pro athlete even bothers to write a book after Ken Dryden.

So, there, in my RSS Reader, from Grantland, was an article by Ken Dryden, discussing Sidney Crosby, and head injuries in general.

He starts by discussing how sports relates to us, the fans:

Bettman, Goodell, and sports leaders who came before them have done only what the players, fans, and media have wanted them to do. They know we want our athletes to be better than they’ve ever been. We want them to be superhuman versions of ourselves — faster, bigger, stronger, more skilled, more committed. We want them, no matter the risk or pain, to prove beyond even unreasonable doubt that they’re not in this for the money but for the love of their/our sport and their/our team, and to demonstrate that at every moment by being willing to do whatever it takes. The players, fans, and media want great plays and thunderous hits. They need “wows” to compete against every other challenge — in sports, entertainment, news, politics — for the public’s attention. And the players and their commissioners, Bettman and Goodell among them, for the most part have delivered.

If the result has been collisions that are too dangerous, you “tweak” the rules, “tweak” the equipment, “tweak” the strategies of play, often in the face of great resistance — and the leagues have done this. But still, the careers and lives of their players are being compromised, and now everybody can see it.

And talking about the workplace safety issue that I constantly bring up:

In the future, if a play results in an incidental and minor hit to the head, or one that is the fault of the player’s being hit, no penalty need be called. But now the presumption needs to be that every hit to the head is an attempt to injure, with the onus on the player doing the hitting, through his actions and in the eyes of the referee, to defeat that presumption.

And he even talks about fighting:

The problem of fighting, for most critics at least, isn’t fighting itself. It’s the consequences of fighting. To many, fighting seems out of place in sports, turning away prospective fans from a game that needs many more. To some, rather than acting as a “safety valve” to reduce further fighting, it creates increased ill-will and generates more fighting. So why allow it?
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And questions have now arisen: Why did postmortem studies on the brains of Reggie Fleming and Bob Probert, two brawlers of different eras, show brain damage? Why did three contemporary fighters — Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belak — who were young, rich, and seemed to have everything to live for, commit suicide in recent months? We don’t know the answers, but we know enough to know we need to find them.
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The NHL rulebook is judicious in distinguishing a bodycheck to the head from other contact to the head, treating fighting as its own separate category. For an illegal check, it is necessary that “the head is targeted and the principal point of contact.” But in a fight, is the head not “targeted?” Is the head not “the principal point of contact?” Is a fist not part of the body? And in fights today, with fighters who can truly fight, what’s the difference between being hit in the head by Niklas Kronwall’s shoulder or Zdeno Chara’s fist? This is about head injuries, not fighting’s place in hockey. This is about the outrageous damage that hits to the head are doing to lives and to a sport.

And he tackles the “tradition” aspect, what I call inertia:

Every time big changes are discussed, the same flood of examples comes forward in support of the aggrieved hitter and the historical game — but what about, butwhatabout — and every time it steals focus from the gravity of head injuries, and derails significant action. No more. The truly aggrieved is not the player or the team who receives the occasional unjust penalty. There’s only one but what about that matters. It’s the player or family who has to live with years of an unfull life.

For Gary Bettman, the challenge is not to be distracted by history, by the voices of those who grew up as “hockey people,” or by the overwhelming power of the status quo. He is the central custodian of the game. If he takes on head injuries aggressively — and he must — some of his changes might be ineffective, others may be embarrassingly inept, and he may very well be mocked by fans and the media. But he and we will learn, and it is far worse to be mocked by damaged players for not doing what clearly needs to be done.

And he’s asking for a paradigm shift, the old “if you had to start from scratch, what would you do today” idea:

Most important, however, it’s time to think about our sports a different way.

What would hockey look like if it were played in a “head smart” way? If the safety of the brain were central to the rules? What about football and other sports?

What would we have to do differently? When do hits to the head happen? In what circumstances? On what parts of the ice? Against the boards? Against the glass? By whom? With shoulders? With elbows or sticks? They don’t happen often. During most of the game, with most of the players, they don’t happen at all. Why then? Why them?

What about the big hits?

What would we need to do to minimize the risk? Because this isn’t about no risk. It’s about smart, informed risk. How would we make hockey safer?

What would need to change? How would this game feel different to play? To watch? What would be lost? Unable to do some of the things they did before, what would players do instead?

My guess is that a lot less would change and for many fewer players than we think. My guess is also that many of the changes would make our games better, and not only for reasons of safety. If some rules are changed, players and coaches will find ways to adapt and to gain a competitive advantage, because that’s what players and coaches do. They’re dreamers and imaginers. They’re competitive. They need to win. Once, players and coaches came up with the forward pass in both hockey and football and gave flight to sports that had become a static snarl of bodies. They’ll do it again. The mediocre will dig in their heels — they fear they can’t change — and usually that’s enough to stop everything in its tracks. But this time we have no choice. Not everyone will be affected the same way. Some things will change more for young kids but not for adults, or for girls and not boys, or for boys and not girls. The crucial point is that at every age and every level “head smart” will become the way we play.

This “head smart” movement should be global, not North American

And he throws down the gauntlet:

The Crosby press conference suggests an opportunity. The future doesn’t have to be one of pointed fingers and shouted denials. None of us knows the answer. All of us know the problem. We are all in this together. We love our sports. We love to play them and watch them. We love to argue over them. We love the inspiration and the excitement they bring. We want sports to be part of our lives forever. We know that sports will not go away, but we also know that the role they play in our lives is at risk. This is a fearful time, but it can be an exciting time.

The NHL and Gary Bettman and the NFL and Roger Goodell have an opportunity. This is the moment.

On a purely selfish level, I wish that it didn’t take such a serious issue for us to see the eloquence and power of Ken Dryden’s writing on such full exhibit.