Are contact sports too dangerous?

I don’t think E M Forster had much interest in sport. He does, however, in his novel “The Longest Journey” kill off one of his characters by having him “smashed-up” in a football game – rugby football, I assume.

That novel was published in 1907. The next year, the outstanding Scottish three-quarter K G Macleod retired from rugby at his father’s request. He was only twenty. His elder brother had been seriously injured, smashed-up you might say, in a match. Evidently, their father thought the game too dangerous. K G Macleod, scorer of a famous try when Scotland beat South Africa in 1906, turned to presumably less dangerous games; he played cricket for Lancashire and football for Manchester City. Unlike his brother who died very young, he lived to be seventy-nine.

We have been made more aware of the dangers of sport, especially contact sport, in recent years. Only this week we learned that Sir Bobby Charlton and Roy Laidlaw, scrumhalf for Scotland and the Lions, have been diagnosed as suffering from dementia. Laidlaw at the rather early age of sixty-seven. Then obituaries of Charlton’s Manchester United and England team-mate Nobby Stiles revealed that he had also succumbed to dementia in his later years.

In the case of other great footballers who went the same way, such as John Charles and Celtic’s European Cup-winning captain Billy McNeill, repeated heading of the old leather football was held to be a contributory cause of brain damage. Roy Laidlaw also thinks that blows to the head and concussions suffered in his playing days may be responsible for his condition. On the other hand, neither Sir Bobby nor Nobby Stiles was famous for their heading ability, a reminder that damage to brain cells and consequent mental deterioration have other causes (which may be termed natural).

Nobody has ever pretended that blows to the head aren’t damaging. A career in the boxing ring left many what we used to call “punch-drunk”, slurring their words and suffering memory loss. Sugar Ray Robinson, arguably the greatest pound-for-pound fighter of all, died demented. He had fought more than 150 professional fights, and though he was so skilful that he never, I think, suffered a bad beating, he undoubtedly went on too long. He fought far beyond the days when his defensive skill was equal to his punching ability. Muhammed Ali contracted Parkinson’s disease in his early forties and, though both he and his physicians denied that boxing caused his condition or even contributed to it, few who have watched his fiercest battles, particularly the fight against Joe Frazier in Manila, can have doubted that boxing did him great damage.

It also made him one of the most famous men in the world and I suspect that even when speech had deteriorated to such an extent that he could barely speak, the words of Edith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien” might have sounded in his head. Likewise, whatever the consequences, I doubt if Bobby Charlton and Roy Laidlaw wish they had lived otherwise. They did what they had a special talent to do, and that is its own justification, whatever the long-term consequences. In Christ’s Parable of the Talents, it is the timid servant who buries his talent in the ground who is upbraided.

The present pandemic has reminded us that death may lurk around any corner. We have, insensibly perhaps, come to expect that we are all entitled to live to old age, even a healthy old age. Medical science has done wonders and so we have come to see any early death as “premature”. We see senility as an offence against nature, when in truth it is natural. Shakespeare describes the seventh age: “second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Of course, we hope to avoid this decline, and many fortunately do so but few will give up an activity which brings pleasure and delight for fear of what may go wrong many years in the future.

Of course, organized sport has a duty of care to participants, and, happily, this is better recognized than it used to be. To take an obvious example, concussion – that is, the condition most likely to cause brain damage – is treated far more seriously than it was a few years or a generation ago.

In 1984, for instance, Scotland won Rugby’s Triple Crown against Ireland in Dublin. Roy Laidlaw scored two tries before being concussed and replaced. Two weeks later, Scotland played France at Murrayfield with both teams having the chance of winning the Grand Slam. Laidlaw was adjudged fit to play. He played well, but I am not sure he would have been permitted to take the field today. Another example, this time from cricket. At Lord’s two years ago the Australian captain Steve Smith was felled by a bouncer. The Laws had recently been amended to allow a substitute batsman to take over from a concussed one. This was done in Australia’s second innings, and indeed Smith was ruled unfit to play in the next Test because he was still showing some symptoms of post-concussion consequences. These might well have gone unremarked even a few years earlier.

All physical activities can be hazardous, any contact sport is dangerous because of the possibility of brain damage. Mountaineers tackle dangerous ascents. People sail boats or swim in the sea or rivers. They ride horses and may put them at jumps. They ride motorbikes or drive fast cars. They pilot gliders and light aircrafts. They run marathons. They box, play rugby, football and cricket. None of this is a “safe activity”. In all of them people are injured, even killed. Many of these pursuits will cause long-term damage, often physical, often mental. There is risk, but for most the risk is acceptable. It’s acceptable in prospect and usually in retrospect.

But the question arises for parents: do you allow your son or daughter to play rugby or box or ride a racehorse or show-jumper, or do you dissuade or even forbid them? Parental fear and hesitation are natural; so is the boy or girl’s eagerness to engage in that activity. Approval of the activity carries risk. So does prohibition – though this second risk and the mental or psychological damage done by such prohibition may be less obvious, yet in the long term just as damaging in a different way.

Not easy – but good parenting never is.