Concussion Inc. (33 page)

OBAMA THE KITSCH KING

8 May 2009..........

This is what happens when the president-elect goes on
60 Minutes
to promote the creation of a college football national championship playoff. Last week Congressman Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, held a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection on this urgent issue, questioning Bowl Championship Series coordinator and Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford in the opening volley for what Barton is calling the College Football Playoff Act of 2009.

Among Barton's pearls of statecraft was this quote: “They keep trying to tinker with the current system and to me it's like — and I don't mean this directly — it's like communism. You can't fix it. I think they should change the name to the BES — Bowl Exhibition Series — or just drop the C and call it the BS system because it isn't about determining a champion on the field.”

There was no word on whether the bill would get stuffed with such pork-barrel measures as improved health and safety standards for “student-athlete” gladiators who are pushed to the limit and beyond in 12-month-a-year training regimens, leading one to croak every couple of years.

Let's not even get into whether these unpaid mercenaries are ­entitled to a fair share of the profits that their prime-time spectacles produce for the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its ­members. No, the revenues are reserved for the “educators,” the coaches, and their shoe sponsors. To operate otherwise would be too much like — and I do mean this directly — communism.

As it turns out, your correspondent knows a thing or two about the ways of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. Two years ago, the then-ranking minority member, Florida Republican Cliff Stearns, weaseled into the wall-to-wall cable TV news coverage of the murder-suicide of pro wrestler Chris Benoit by proposing legislation to force the wrestling industry to adopt Olympics-level testing for steroids.

Stearns acted after Mark Kriegel, a columnist for FoxSports.com, called for Congressional involvement in wrestling's pandemic of occupation-related deaths. Kriegel quoted my just-published book
Wrestling Babylon
, whose appendix listed 89 deaths of pro wrestlers under age 50 from 1985 through 2006 — a list
Wrestling Observer Newsletter
publisher Dave Meltzer called understated. In his press release and media shots, Stearns cited the numbers from my book, without attribution.

The crusading congressman soon lost interest in the subject and moved on to the telecommunications subcommittee, though not before making a televised appearance at a show at the Funking Conservatory, a wrestling school run by retired great Dory Funk Jr. in Stearns' Ocala district. Funk gave Stearns a signed pair of wrestling boots.

The reformist baton was passed to the chair of the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, Illinois Democrat Bobby Rush. Coincidentally, Rush is the only politician ever to defeat Obama, who challenged Rush's reelection in the 2000 primary.

Rush huffed and puffed. In November 2007, the congressman promised hearings combining the wrestling issue with the findings in major league baseball's just-released Mitchell Report. In February 2008, the subcommittee grilled the heads of all the legit major sports leagues and their players' union chiefs — but not World Wrestling Entertainment chair Vince McMahon, who claimed his lawyer had a scheduling conflict.

“I am exceptionally and extremely disappointed,” Rush said. “I want to assure Mr. McMahon that this committee fully intends to deal with the illegal steroid abuse in professional wrestling. And we hope he will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

It was a bigger sham than WrestleMania. Though the public didn't yet know, Rush himself had to know that McMahon had already given testimony to another Congressional committee — in a closed-door interview two months earlier with staffers of Congressman Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

At the time, the lead investigator for Waxman, Brian Cohen, reviewed the ground rules that had been negotiated. “Our intention was that you were able to come in here without having a media circus,” Cohen purred.

Never one to foster media circuses, Congressman Waxman proceeded a few weeks later to stage an internationally televised hearing to probe, among other things, whether an abscess on baseball pitcher Roger Clemens' ass cheek was caused by repeated injections of human growth hormone by his estranged personal trainer, Brian McNamee. Clemens heatedly denied this but acknowledged that McNamee had given HGH to Clemens' wife, Debbie, prior to a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit shoot. And the Republic survived the revelation, even if Clemens' reputation didn't.

Getting back to Obama and his high-priority war on the BCS, one of the questions arising from his first 100 days is exactly when, if ever, he will be held to account for his descents into frivolousness and bad taste. He certainly got away with yukking to Jay Leno that his poor bowling scores were like “Special Olympics.” (Obama also, deservedly, has gotten high marks for changing the tone of American foreign policy, and other achievements.)

Maybe the explanation is that the president is a fox, and his BCS BS is a diversionary tactic to pacify yahoos like Congressman Barton while Obama hits one out of the park with his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

Whatever the outcome, this is all about the uses and misuses of kitsch in an epoch of bread and circuses. The brilliant Czech writer Milan Kundera has defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” Kundera added, “Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of
totalitarian kitsch
.”

America's saving grace, so far, is that our kitsch is bipartisan.

8 March 2012..........

The President of the United States has spoken on the football concussion crisis. With the utmost unseriousness. I'm thumbing through my thesaurus for the antonym of
gravitas
.

Interviewed last week for Bill Simmons' “B.S. Report” at Grantland.com, Barack Obama made his obligatory pitch for expanded college football playoffs and his obligatory riffs on the Chicago Bulls and March Madness. Asked about concussions, Obama allowed:

Concussions is a tough one. When you see what's happened — I actually knew Dave Duerson and used to see him at the gym sometimes, and [he] couldn't have been a nicer guy. And when you think about the toll that NFL players are taking, it's tough. Now, the problem is, if you talk to NFL players, they're going to tell you that that's the risk I take; this is the game I play. And I don't know whether you can make football, football if there's not some pretty significant risk factors.

Part of the problem is just the speed and the size of these guys now is — you watch the old tapes from the '50s and the '60s — they look like they're going in slow motion. And now, what, they just had the Combine and they're talking about some guy who is like 340, who runs a 4.8 —

In the video, the camera cuts back to Simmons — who has built a superfan persona into a mini-empire — sitting there with a shit-eating grin. No follow-up questions on the Congressional hearings that have analogized the National Football League to Big Tobacco; on the dozens of lawsuits by hundreds of retired players; on the journalistically elemental point that we are talking about the prevalence of traumatic brain injury in this sport because it affects millions of American kids at the feeder levels — in the Pop Warner and in our public high schools, where informed consent and risk are a slippery slope toward material decline of gross national mental health.

B.S. Report, indeed.

And thanks a bunch, Mr. President, for making sure your fellow citizens know that you rubbed shoulders with the great Dave Duerson, and for not wasting a moment of their time reflecting on the meaning of his suicide after years of denying the reality of the long-term brain damage suffered both by himself and by other NFL veterans whose disability claims he had helped reject while serving on the NFL retirement fund board.

In 1962, John F. Kennedy threw out the ceremonial first pitch at baseball's all-star game in Washington. After mugging appropriately for the cameras, he used his broadcast interview to plug the new President's Council on Physical Fitness. His point was to remind us that, while on this day we were all fans and spectators, the next day we would resume acting as participants in our lives and our futures. In the chief of state's expression of interest in professional sports, there was at least the faintest hint of a communal philosophy … some care in public presentation … a smidgen of intellectual and moral heft.

That was then. Obama — along with all the other cardboard-­cutout presidents you and I create — is now. I've written about how I believe those who compare this moment in football history with President Theodore Roosevelt's intervention to spur the banning of the “flying wedge” 100 years ago have it wrong; these critics grossly underestimate the greater influence of football in today's culture, even as they grossly overestimate the solutions that have been proposed to fix the sport. But as Obama's useless preening on the concussion issue shows, there's another reason to be worried. Today, only celebrity-­sniffing hand-wringers need apply for the Oval Office.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was criticized for going years without uttering the word “AIDS.” But if Obama has just shown us the best he can come up on the public health ramifications of concussions, I'd prefer that he keep his mouth shut, too.

27 January 2013..........

Last March I gave President Obama an “F” for his first, trivial remarks on football's traumatic brain-injury crisis. In a new interview with the
New Republic
, the President does a little better. Perhaps he is emboldened by reelection, as well as more informed and thoughtful:

I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football. And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much.

I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they're grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well compensated for the violence they do to their bodies. You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That's something that I'd like to see the NCAA think about.

Let's hope that over time Obama becomes more worried still about public high school and peewee league players, and also disabuses himself of the fantasy that blood sport is fixable for kids by “changing gradually” — or at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Irvin Muchnick is author of
Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal
(2007) and
Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling's Cocktail of Death
(2009)
.
His writings have spurred Congressional investigations of health and safety in WWE and of sexual abuse and cover-up in USA Swimming. He is named respondent of the 2010 United States Supreme Court freelance writers' rights decision,
Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick
; the case, which
Publishers Weekly
called “the central rights dispute of the digital age,” settled in 2014.

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