Moral escapism.
There is no other way to describe the NFL’s month-long breast cancer awareness campaign. Other leagues and businesses have the luxury of picking causes to champion for public relations purposes and/or out of sincere concern. The National Football League, its broadcast partners, corporate sponsors, or fans, can have only one public health focus—brain injuries.
The facts about football and brain injuries are terrifying. Post-mortem examinations of former NFL greats Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, both of whom committed suicide by gunshot to the chest, revealed significant brain damage. The league, while lawyerly avoiding any admission of culpability, just recently paid $765 million to settle a brain injury lawsuit filed by former players. Evidence, while not yet conclusive, seems to suggest that pro football players are likely to live shorter lives.
Rather that spending so much time on breast cancer, a disease with no shortage of corporate funders and profile, the NFL should focus it's philanthropic efforts exclusively on brain injuries and brain diseases. It’s as obvious as a mining company focusing black lung disease.
What’s more, for the NFL to do anything else is as absurd as Marlboro placing anti-diabetes messages on cigarette boxes.
Yet here we are in October and the NFL is awash in breast cancer pink, pink cleats and pink towels and pink team gear and pink logos. Incidentally, just 8% of the revenue from this merchandising bonanza reportedly goes to actual cancer research.
Meanwhile, Seau and Duerson and Mike Webster are all dead after suffering from a brain injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, likely brought on by on-field concussions and collisions. It’s not at all hyperbolic to suggest that with every play, football players are slowly killing themselves for our amusement.
That’s especially tragic because there is no reason football cannot be made safer at all levels. Nor is there any reason the game couldn’t go all-in aiding brain injury research.
Instead of dealing with this very real public health issue that directly affects football, fans outside Ford Field prior to Sunday’s Lions-Bengals game were given pink Mardi Gras beads (thanks to our friends at Ford and Pepsi) because the NFL wants to expand its female fanbase breast cancer is bad.
The entire effort, arguably the most egregious case of pink-washing, comes with a unique and expensive opportunity cost—the lost chance to help brain injury research.
To counter this self-righteous orgy of cause marketing, I decided to pass out green awareness ribbons for brain injury research just outside Ford Field’s gates. The response from fans was largely positive. They understand the seriousness of the game’s problem with brain injuries. It’s unfortunate the NFL won’t leverage that concern into positive action.
At one point, a man digging empties out of a trash can asked for a ribbon because, he said, he’s living with a brain injury. That’s the tragedy. The NFL should be trying to help that guy. It has an obligation to help him. As fans, we have an obligation.
His fate could be the reality for too many NFL players. The aforementioned Mike Webster, a Hall of Famer from the Pittsburgh Steelers glory years, died at the age of 50 after living out of his truck and smearing glue on his teeth to numb his pain.
Imagine for a second if green ribbons at a NFL game weren’t some half-baked bit of street theater, but a coordinated league-wide effort to discuss brain injuries and how to make the game safer. Imagine if, instead of peddling ever more pink crap, the league genuinely and efficiently tapped its fan base to raise funds for brain injury research. And imagine if, instead of marketing interns passing out plastic baubles, the league committed itself to legitimate education campaigns about identifying concussions or preventing dementia.
Such an effort, unlike those pink penalty flags, would be an act of corporate philanthropy worthy of respect.
And it might spare thousands of people, football players and otherwise, the unspeakable horror of living life with the symptoms of a serious brain injury.
Videography: Lauren Ann Davies
