What Ever Happened to the NFL's CTE Controversy?

Remember when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars? Of course you do.

Remember what led up to that infamous confrontation? Probably not, the origins of all that lost in the expressions of shock, the insistence of many that the event must have been staged, the criticism of Smith and of Rock and of the critics of Smith and Rock, the speculations about the motives lying behind it all and what it would mean for the persons involved and much, much else amid lurid talk of cuckoldry and many, many jokes of greatly varying wit and taste that made it no less stupid an affair than any of our other Internet-galvanizing tempests in a teacup. As it happened those origins lay in the #OscarsSoWhite protest against what some saw as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' shortchanging African-Americans in its nominations for its annual awards, which protest Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith supported, and wanted Chris Rock to also support by declining the job of hosting the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony--which Rock refused to do, apparently beginning the feud between them. Where all this was concerned it was relevant that Smith seems to have expected a nomination for playing Dr. Bennet Omalu in the docudrama Concussion about Dr. Omalu's discovery of the prevalence of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in former players of the National Football League (NFL).

Remember that whole controversy? Probably not, because unlike such stupidities as Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, which the media milked to the last drop, social media was content to let that controversy be swept under the rug. After all, if the Smith-Rock slap was a piece of idiocy all the way down the line in this case there was a real threat to a colossal vested interest given what its becoming widely known that CTE is the price of a shot at gridiron glory potentially meant to the NFL, and professional football more broadly. Single football teams are valued at as much as $12 billion these days, the League as a whole hundreds of billions, with that far from the limit of the whole football-industrial complex. There is, for example, the multi-billion dollar business that is college football. There is the involvement of the broader media-industrial complex with it, the airing of football games being a big earner for them--indeed, a lifeline for the big but declining "legacy TV" business for which football still supplies the great majority of the most-viewed events of the year. Those invested in the vast enterprise do not allow such things as health concerns to interfere with them easily--all as, as is so often the case, Big Business was entirely able and willing to enlist the culture warriors on its side. After all, this wasn't just business, it was football! An American tradition, a major part of the fabric of life of much of the country--the real, heartland, Southern-Midwestern, small town America that the rest of the country only sees in reruns of Friday Night Lights--where playing on a team is a rite of passage and "maker of men," such that every grifting jackass running for office goes on and on about his what-in-the-name-of-high-school0football days where he gave a hundred and ten percent even if he never so much as tried out for a spot. Were they going to let a bunch of Blue State coastal elitists sniveling about safety interfere with that? Hell no. Oh, hell no.

That combo of Big Business and the culture warriors proved plenty to thwart redress of a potentially apocalyptic climate-energy crisis (not least, by making adoration of fossil fuels incumbent on "real" Americans, for some reason) for decades. It was certainly more than a match for concern about some dudes getting head trauma, especially with the NFL promising to provide better protective gear, as one cannot help but notice seeing the aggressive promotion of the current football season, even if one isn't a fan of the sport (the publicity blitz stepped up this year) as the mainstream media did not breathe a word about a matter that so roiled up the business and the country a decade ago. Indeed, the concern was squashed so totally that this didn't even make very many parents leerier of their kids being on high school teams. Yes, somewhat fewer young people do play these days than, say, twenty years ago, but that has more to do with fewer parents having the money, or time, to enable their kids' participation in athletic programs (they are having a harder time even keeping food on the table), all as, frankly, there are a lot of kids you can't get away from their video games. But that still leaves some one million young men in grades nine to twelve playing football, scarcely less than was the case before (with, I might add, any grudging pursuit of the limited number of college football scholarships not to be overestimated as a factor). And so the sport and its place in American life endure--and Will Smith's slapping Chris Rock may well be the most significant legacy of a controversy which is behind us even as the problem that raised the controversy in the first place also endures--per the norm in our times.