Both events had huge audiences, but the game between the Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings, featuring the return of Brett Favre to Green Bay, was watched by an average of 29.8 million viewers — considerably more than the 22.3 million viewers who turned up for the Yankees’ win over the Phillies in the World Series.I'm with the majority. But after reading Malcolm Gladwell's piece on the head trauma football players endure, I'm wondering just how stupid a sport it is and why a 21-year-old kid like Tim Tebow is being put back on the field so quickly in the wake of a brutal brain bruise:
Turley is six feet five. He is thirty-four years old, with a square jaw and blue eyes. For nine years, before he retired, in 2007, he was an offensive lineman in the National Football League. He knew all the stories about former football players. Mike Webster, the longtime Pittsburgh Steeler and one of the greatest players in N.F.L. history, ended his life a recluse, sleeping on the floor of the Pittsburgh Amtrak station. Another former Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted into chaos and killed himself four years ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Waters, a former defensive back for the Philadelphia Eagles, sank into depression and pleaded with his girlfriend—“I need help, somebody help me”—before shooting himself in the head. There were men with aching knees and backs and hands, from all those years of playing football. But their real problem was with their heads, the one part of their body that got hit over and over again...Turley said that he loved playing football so much that he would do it all again. Then he began talking about what he had gone through in the past year. The thing that scared him most about that night at the bar was that it felt exactly like the time he was knocked unconscious. “It was identical,” he said. “It was my worst episode ever.”
