Is it possible to be both shocked and not at all surprised? That might be the most accurate way to describe the mind of a football fan today.
At the NFL level, football is a brutal game that leaves its mark on the men who play it. This much, fans already knew. The players, too, are well aware by now that the number of ex-NFLers who escape the sport unscathed is small. Even the league knows this, though you may have to get them under oath before they admit it.
But just how much of a mark does football leave? And how much of that damage is preventable? And was there another way to treat the injuries that everyone involved in the sport now takes as an eventual given?
In a perfect world, these would be questions for players and team officials and medical professionals. In the world we live in, though, they are increasingly questions for a court of law. One day, perhaps, we’ll have answers—but they will likely never be perfect answers and, it increasingly appears, they will be hotly contested, with the health of future players and the financial security of the league at stake.
On Tuesday, the NFL was hit with another class-action lawsuit, this time focusing not solely on the problem of concussions and their aftereffects, but on the propensity of the sport to—and anyone who has followed the game for any amount of time has perhaps even romanticized this to some extent—encourage its participants to play through pain. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleges that playing through serious injury isn’t just the effect of its participants’ vaunted toughness, but the direct result of team coaches and doctors masking fractures and other injuries, hurrying players back to the field with risky drugs and illegal painkillers.
The claims—among them, that players were given pills in lieu of treatment for serious injuries, and often came away with painkiller addictions—point toward the worst suspicions fans can harbour about the culture behind closed doors of the sport they love: That the league cares more for profits than the health of its players, and doesn’t feel particularly responsible for the kind of shape they might be left in when they can no longer take the field. It’s nasty and it’s the kind of allegation that sticks in the mind, because it’s the kind of thing fans are prone to wondering whenever they see footage of a star stumbling around the sidelines.
Eight players named in the suit, among them former Bears quarterback Jim McMahon, share stories of misdiagnoses and pill-popping. McMahon himself claims he was once taking more than 100 Percocet pills per month. The players claim no records were kept and the pills were not prescribed, which would seem to make the suit difficult to prove in a court of law—but not, perhaps, in the court of public opinion.
In that court, the league can’t really afford another loss. Not on this topic. Not now.
It was news last summer when the NFL and its former players came to terms on a $765-million settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by former players who were now grappling with the effects of brain injuries suffered during their playing careers, arguing that the league knew the damage caused by these injuries, and didn’t do enough to protect its employees from them. It wasn’t enough money, many critics said at the time, but at least it was something, and maybe it was also an acknowledgement of the need to do more in the future. (The NFL, of course, went to great legal lengths to ensure the settlement was not, by any courtroom interpretation, an admission of any sort of guilt or precedence.)
But that settlement was initially rejected back in January by a judge who demanded proof that the relatively meagre amount (the NFL’s revenue was reportedly north of $9 billion last year) would be enough to adequately care for the increasing number of players who were displaying symptoms as they aged. Whether it was the fault of the NFL or not, the perception was of the league coming close to—but just missing out on—getting off cheaply.
This new suit is something of a well-timed body blow. The league has not yet officially settled the last one, and with the NFL Draft in the rearview mirror, there’s a small window in which the national football media horde will have nothing substantial to talk about. This suit gives them the chance to resurrect and put into print all the worst things they’ve suspected about how the game is really played. Unlike the previous suit, this one is less a who-knew-what-when case and more of a he-said-he-said affair—which means it’s both tougher to prove and uglier to think about.