Search Results for: Concussions

Liar: A Memoir

Rob Roberge | Liar: A Memoir Crown | February 2016 | 23 minutes (5,688 words)

When Rob Roberge learns that he’s likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he’s terrified at the prospect of losing “every bad and beautiful moment” of his life. So he grasps for snatches of time, desperately documenting each tender, lacerating fragment. Liar is a meditation on the fragile nature of memory, mental illness, addiction, and the act of storytelling. The first chapter is excerpted below.

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Longreads Best of 2015: Essays & Criticism

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in specific categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism. Read more…

We Are All Compromised: The Access Game Isn’t Dead Yet

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, via Wikimedia Commons

John Herrman’s excellent Awl series on the anxious state of the media business (featured in our latest Top 5) should be required reading for anyone who creates or consumes content on the internet. His conclusions—advertising models are sputtering, no one wants to pay for news, Facebook dictates the entire tenor of conversation and its subject matter—do so much to explain why we are inundated by media but largely unsatisfied with what floats to the surface. Come for Herrman’s dystopian vision—a future in which professional journalism is suffocated to death—and stay for the animated robot GIFs. Read more…

Necessary Roughness: Our College Pick

Journey Bailey played football for years and, after one concussion too many, came to in a hospital bed with a subdural hematoma. In his searing essay, Bailey writes about a football culture that kept him from revealing his symptoms to coaches who downplayed the seriousness of concussions. The power of Bailey’s writing comes from his voice. He’s a football player talking to other football players. He’s not a doctor or a concerned parent or an aging former athlete. He’s a a guy who speaks the language of locker rooms and long school-bus rides to away games. “[T]he next time you’re out on that field pushing for that first down or tackling that running back and you start to see stars, feel dizzy, or develop a headache that won’t go away, don’t ignore the signs in order to stay in the game,” he urges his fellow players. “Think about having tubes shoved down your penis. Think about having dents in your head. Think about crying yourself to sleep while trying to decide whether or not to buy a shotgun off of Craigslist and blow your brains out.”

Knock to the Head

Journey Bailey | The Huffington Post | December 8, 2014 | 10 minutes (2,408 words)

Why We Play

Longreads Pick

Reconciling our love of sports with the risks associated with them:

When I graduated after four seasons of high school rugby, and prepared to head off for four more seasons in college, I felt transformed. I no longer called myself a tomboy, and rugby was no longer a crutch.

So much for the revenue side of the balance sheet. Rugby had, for a time, given me everything. But around the same time I’d begun to outgrow my need for it, I’d also begun to understand its potential cost. I racked up pulled muscles and strained ligaments, and chipped a bone in my ankle that still aches under pressure, more than 15 years later. I played with women sporting twin scars on their knees from ACL surgeries. I saw a man come off the pitch one afternoon with his ear torn half off. I helped concussed teammates stagger off the field, unable to remember their own names, and suffered one concussion myself — a minor one, but still an injury with the terrifying power to reach back in time and erase my memories from even before the hit. I had one friend, on my college’s men’s team, who swore he would quit after three concussions, but he only counted the big ones. Once, I saw him pick himself up after a collision and line up alongside the wrong team. And then, finally, I watched that young man break his neck under the floodlights on a cold night in northern England. I was haunted by the question of my own potential regrets.

Source: SB Nation
Published: Jun 25, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,110 words)

Sasha Belenky on Jeanne Marie Laskas's 'The People V. Football'

sasha
Sasha Belenky is a senior editor at The Huffington Post.

Whether it’s negotiating murder-for-hire with a fake hit man or visiting old stomping grounds with the vice president of the United States, if you’re in the car with Jeanne Marie Laskas, you’re pretty much guaranteed that the story will be good. I’ve found myself most riveted, however, by her 2011 profile in GQ of Fred McNeill, former star linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings — which similarly begins in the car. It’s a heart-wrenching scene, with McNeill’s wife, Tia, fighting his dementia along with the Los Angeles traffic, and it’s a great example of Laskas’ gift for capturing language. As journalists continue to shed light on the concussion crisis in football, Laskas’ article stands out as one of the most personal, most devastating accounts of the long-term damage being done on the field.

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How Far We're Going to Save Youth Football

“You’re talking about putting accelerometers in equipment. Equipment specialists to outfit our children. Having independent observers of coaches on the sidelines at practices and games to monitor what’s going on. At what point are we kidding ourselves about youth football, that this is not a sensible proposition when you need this superstructure for every game in the country?”

A quote from journalist Stefan Fatsis, from Patrick Hruby’s latest Sports on Earth story about parents, youth football and an important decision. Read more on concussions.

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Photo: t_fern, Flickr

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A Parent’s Dilemma: Should You Let Your Kid Play Football?

Longreads Pick

Hruby talks to families and those involved with youth sports to find out what’s changed—and what hasn’t changed—since the revelations around concussions and CTE:

Earlier that season, Parker had leveled another boy. He earned a personal foul. Monet remembered the moment, how proud she felt as her son skipped back to the sideline.

Mommy! Mommy! I made a kid eat dirt!

“I sat back and said, ‘Wow,’” she says. “What if I’m the parent of that other kid?”

Source: Sports on Earth
Published: Nov 15, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,019 words)

An Excerpt From the Book the NFL Doesn’t Want You to Read

Longreads Pick

An excerpt adapted from League of Denial, about the National Football League’s long denial about the connection between football and brain damage:

“Nine months later came yet another NFL study in Neurosurgery. This one dealt with repeat concussions. Numerous previous studies had shown that one concussion left the brain vulnerable to another concussion if the brain wasn’t given time to heal. But that wasn’t a problem in the NFL, according to Pellman, et al. The league looked at how quickly players went back on the field and concluded that they were at no greater risk than if they had never been concussed at all. The logic was that because players returned to the field so quickly, they must have been O.K. or the medical staff wouldn’t have cleared them. This flew in the face not only of previous research but of widely known realities on an NFL sideline. First, players often didn’t report their injuries. Second, they hid their symptoms whenever they could. Third, NFL doctors often deferred to the wishes of coaches and players.

“For the first time, the NFL also took on the issue of football and brain damage, a growing concern among researchers. The league’s scientific opinion? This wasn’t a problem in the NFL either. Boxers got brain damage. Football players didn’t. It was as simple as that. ‘This injury has not been observed in professional football,’ Pellman and his colleagues wrote.

“That was technically true: No one had yet cut open the skull of a dead football player to examine his brain for signs of neurodegenerative disease. But that day was coming.”

Published: Oct 3, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,067 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Jamie Mottram

Jamie Mottram is the Director of Content Development for USA Today Sports Media Group and a proud supporter of Longreads.

I work in sports media and read and think about sports A LOT. So the task of boiling the year in sportswriting down to some kind of best-of list is daunting indeed, and I won’t do it. Nor am I going to name my favorite sportswriter or piece of sportswriting in general, because I’m sure to overlook someone or something and probably offend my employer (USA Today Sports Media Group!), and I’m unwilling to do that.

But I will tell you my favorite athlete in 2012 was Robert Griffin III, who is suddenly playing quarterback at an extraterrestrial level for my favorite team, the Redskins. Of all the words spilled over RGIII’s emergence, none struck a chord in me like those in Charles P. Pierce’s piece for Grantland, “The Head and the Heart.” It touches on the phenomenon of this young athlete, the burden of great expectations met by even greater talent and the horrific brain injures caused by pro football. The last line will linger for a long, long time.

My favorite team in 2012 was the Orioles. The longtime doormat of Major League Baseball’s AL East, they somehow pieced together a playoff run for the ages, banding together like grown-up Bad News Bears before falling to the mighty Yankees in October. Before all of that, though, Tom Scocca wrote “‘Motherfuckin’ Shit! Take Your Ass Home!’ Or, Why the Baltimore Orioles Matter” for Deadspin, predicting it all, sort of. I thought then that it was a beautiful sentiment wonderfully expressed but also kind of sad to hold out for a team so hopeless. I was wrong, though, because anything can happen, and eventually does.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.