Callousness of sports fans

Last week, I was reading an article on Yahoo about former Chicago Bears quarterback Jim McMahon and how his memory was shot after years of playing football and experiencing the collisions and head trauma that comes with the game.

Nothing in the story itself surprised me, and I will admit that I even may have had a smart-ass thought or two cross my mind about how memory loss can be caused by certain other high-risk behaviors in which McMahon indulged during his heyday. Still, I WAS surprised by the tenor of many of the comments under the piece. All sorts of people felt the need to post those wise-ass remarks, many similar to the ones I had. But there was also a strong current of "So what?" in those comments.

Hey, Jim McMahon lived hard and played hard, and who knows exactly what caused any memory loss issues he may be having today. But the guy is participating in some studies, and maybe he's willing to help out and further the cause of concussion- and head-trauma-related research in sports medicine. So let's give him credit for that.

I'd rather see at least some level of compassion, even if you're a Packers fan, than the kind of comments that kept popping up on Yahoo, many of them basically saying, "Hey, get over it. That's why you get paid the big bucks." Or things like, "I forget things, too, but I don't get paid millions of bucks." You know, that sort of thing.

What these fans are really saying, it seems to me, is, "We don't care what happens to football players as long as we get entertaining games to watch." The money thing is a convenient excuse to justify a certain level of callousness out there. Well, sports fans, I got news for you: This issue is not going away. In fact, it is going to get more and more play as the people we grew up watching get older and experience these kinds of physical issues. Earlier generations of fans have been able to ignore the ravaged knees and the scar tissue of older players, but will we be able to ignore the star quarterbacks of today experiencing slurred speech or loss of mental acuity as they age?

This Jim McMahon story is just one aspect of a much larger thing, and many of the comments I read are just tossed-off casual remarks from people making knee-jerk reactions. But I feel it's symptomatic of a big percentage of the country that just doesn't care about the impact of football on the health of its players. Yeah, these guys get paid a lot of bucks. But does that mean they sacrifice the right to have safe work conditions? I think we should at least continue to look into the issue and start considering the costs of the sport. And I think fans need to consider that some things just may be more important than their God-given right to watch professional football the way they want it to be played several times a week.