Alex Kingsbury

I’m pleased that the New England Patriots made it to the AFC championship game again this year. On Sunday, they’ll play the Kansas City Chiefs at 6:40 p.m., and the winner will advance to the Super Bowl.

I’ve been a Patriots fan my entire life, long before they were good enough to loathe. But I won’t be watching football this weekend. I haven’t watched a single pass or tackle all season.

I don’t remember much about last year’s AFC championship game between the Patriots and the Jacksonville Jaguars. But I’ll never forget the sound.

The Pats were down 14-3 with 1:23 left in the second quarter when the tight end Rob Gronkowski tried to catch a long, lofted pass from the quarterback, Tom Brady.

But the Jags’ safety, Barry Church, hit Gronkowski just as he was pulling it down.

Their hard plastic helmets hit each other with such force that — even through the tinny speakers on my television — it sounded like a rifle shot. .

As the sound of the hit faded into a commercial break, I realized with absolute certainty that I couldn’t watch football anymore. There aren’t enough yards to gain or Super Bowl rings to win that are worth the cost.

To use a euphemism from the era before we knew about brain damage, Gronkowski “got his bell rung.” Shaken by the impact, he struggled to his feet, wobbled and was helped off the field with a concussion. Church was fined $24,309 by the NFL for an illegal hit.

“I hope he’s all right,” Church said after the game. “If you go low for the knees, you are considered a dirty player, and if you go high, they throw the flag at you. It’s a bang-bang play, and I was just trying to play football.”

“It’s football,” Gronkowski later told the press. “It is what it is.”

The first research into the link between football and traumatic brain injury was published in 2005. Since then, the science has become impossible to ignore.

In 2017, The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of the autopsies of the brains of 111 deceased former NFL players, whose relatives gave their bodies up for study. The group was not a random sample, yet 110 showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to concussions. Research published in November estimated that a minimum of 10 percent of all professional football players would develop CTE at some point in their lives.

Professional athletes are well compensated for their dangerous job. But the pipeline is a problem. It can take more than a decade of hard hits to make it to a college team or the pros.

Research published in The Journal of Pediatrics last month found that concussion rates for youth football players were higher than previously reported. In all, some 5 percent of all youth football players receive concussions each year, a figure that may sound low, but compounds with each additional year of play. In 2017, a study found that playing football before age 12 doubled the risk of problems with behavioral regulation, apathy and executive functioning. It tripled the risk of elevated depression.

It’s little wonder that lawmakers last year in New York, Illinois, California, Maryland and New Jersey introduced bills to ban or restrict youth tackle football.

All this isn’t the snowflaking of the next generation of American men. It’s physics. Technology — in the form of, say, better helmets — will not save the game. Researchers note that helmets don’t prevent all concussions and might be making the problem worse, by giving players a false sense of invincibility.

The dangers of the game are clear to the insurance companies that cover youth and professional leagues. An investigation published by ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” this week found that the insurance market for youth football is “fundamentally altering the economics of the sport, squeezing and even killing off programs faced with higher costs and a scarcity of available coverage.”

“People say football will never go away, but if we can’t get insurance, it will,” Jon Butler, executive director of the youth football program Pop Warner, is reported to have said.

The report said that the NFL is also having problems finding companies willing to insure against head injuries.

With no safe way to play — short of flag football — it’s little wonder that participation in youth football is on the decline. Some high schools have dropped the sport altogether, while state legislatures are passing and updating concussion laws to ensure schools that do field teams take the issue seriously. Every state now has a concussion law on the books.

Nor is it surprising that some younger NFL players are calling it quits. Gronkowski, now 29, reportedly considered retirement after last season. Reports say he’s considering doing so after this one, too.

There are still Newton deniers, who contest his laws of physics, which explain how the human brain slams into the interior walls of the skull during a concussion.

“Your body gets used to the hits,” the Patriots’ Tom Brady told a sports radio show last month. “The brain understands the position that you are putting your body into, and my brain is wired for contact. I would say in some ways it has become callous to some of the hits.”

Brady’s former teammate, Ted Johnson, spent 10 years in the NFL and told The Times in 2007, at age 34, that he was suffering from symptoms characteristic of early Alzheimer’s disease as a results of concussions. “There’s something wrong with my brain,” he said.

Johnson called Brady’s recent remarks about concussions “irresponsible.”

“I’ll be honest, and I love Tom, it made me throw up in my mouth a little bit,” he said.

Despite all these concerns, there’s little indication that football will be dethroned as America’s favorite sport. Television ratings, which have taken some hard hits of their own over the past few years, have rebounded this season. And the Super Bowl might be the most communal experience the country has in 2019.

This Sunday, I won’t begrudge my father, who’ll watch the game delayed on DVR, so he doesn’t have to endure commercials to get to the 11 minutes of action. Nor my cousin, who’ll bet money on the game. Seeing the occasional Patriots hat or jersey on the street is a nice reminder of the tribe I’ve parted ways with.

Because as long as I can hear the sound of Gronk getting his bell rung, I’ll find something else to watch.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/opinion/tom-brady-nfl-concussion.html" id="804e24ab-88ac-373d-a03c-6da21b2a4ce6">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer)

What Time Is the AFC Championship Game?

<h1>But Normal America produced Donald Trump, fueled his cult of personality and created the conditions for him to rise to the height of political power. </h1>

If anything, Michael Cohen’s testimony was a devastating indictment of decisions that Normal America made over the past few decades that produced President Trump in 2016.

Most of the charges — proved or alleged — against those caught up in the Mueller investigation are not obviously related to treasonous collusion with Moscow. It’s proof, the president’s blinkered backers bray, that the whole inquiry is a waste of time.

Read another way, that set of facts shows how decades of declining prosecutions of white-collar crimes may have allowed Paul Manafort, a man guilty of tax evasion and bank fraud, to lead a presidential campaign. If the number of white-collar crimes prosecuted by the Justice Department had not fallen more than 40 percent in the past 20 years, perhaps Cohen, who committed tax fraud and bank fraud, might not have ascended to become deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, a post he held until June 2018.

Then there’s the president himself, Exhibit A of what happens when a country spends decades treating crimes by the poor as felonies and crimes by the powerful as misdemeanors.

At the start of Trump’s career, he and his father were charged with discriminating against African-Americans in their apartment rentals. Father and son settled with the government and admitted no wrongdoing. Later in life, Trump’s casino was charged with money laundering and got off with a fine. Just after Trump was elected, his cardboard castle of a university that bore his name settled a class-action lawsuit brought by former students.

It took a shoe-leather investigation by The Washington Post to prompt authorities to assess that the Trump Foundation, founded in 1987, was being used as the family ATM. The New York state attorney general charged the foundation with “improper and extensive political activity, repeated and willful self-dealing transactions, and failure to follow basic fiduciary obligations or to implement even elementary corporate formalities required by law.” Imagine if the foundation had been scrutinized years before Trump ran for president.

Democrats, paging through the catalog of legal malfeasance connected to the president, worry that investigating too many of them will make the party vulnerable to claims of overreach. But exuberance in defense of justice is no vice, so as long as they don’t go full #Benghazi.

It may well be a myth that no one was jailed after the 2008 financial crisis — 56 bankers and traders, including 13 CEOs, were sent to prison. But none were prominent. And the boiling rage about the fact that mortgage owners got stuck with the bill for the sins of high finance was an animating factor for Trump voters. The Tea Party got its revenge on the system it saw as corrupt in 2016. Occupy Wall Street is now standing restlessly in the wings and calling for world revolution as it waits for its turn in 2020. Justice delayed, after all, is justice denied.

Democratic societies are the result of choices that voters make. Last year, more than 60 percent of federal criminal prosecutions came in immigration-related cases. That follows: The voters who put Trump in office wanted a crackdown on noncitizens making lives for themselves illegally in the United States. That’s happening. But it also means that the number of prosecutions for all other types of crimes — committed by citizens making their living illegally in the country — are way down.

When gobs of resources are directed at something like reducing violent crime, the amount of violent crime declines. When the IRS’s Criminal Investigation Division gets stuck with the same number of special agents it had 50 years ago, lots of tax cheating is going to go undetected and unpunished. If Congress decides not to properly fund the IRS, it wouldn’t be overreach for Democrats to look into the president’s tax returns. After all, Trump’s tax scheming over the years included outright fraud, according to a Times investigation.

Recent research suggests that the public is increasingly aware of the seriousness of white-collar crime and becoming more punitive toward those found guilty of it. Sentences for white-collar criminals are getting longer. But while Americans still feel that violent criminals warrant harsher sentences, they say they want equal or more resources devoted to white-collar crime control.

Harder still is deterring white-collar crime, wrongly perceived as victimless, in the first place. “Without the same psychological stop signs that signal that one is about to break the law, many white-collar criminals cannot identify in hindsight the moment they crossed the line,” wrote former federal prosecutor Nicolas Bourtin.

Cohen now says, after a decade of dutiful service including issuing some 500 threats against those seen as somehow threatening to Trump, that it was Trump’s behavior in office that led to an epiphany about the weight of Cohen’s own guilt. But Cohen was no doubt hustled along to that realization when he was arrested and staring down the long corridor of a multiyear prison sentence.

Normal America gave white-collar criminals parking tickets, while sending SWAT teams after drug dealers because it viewed one type of criminal as a far greater threat to the republic. Now is not the time to return to what was normal. It’s a time to learn from past misjudgments.

At the end of his eloquent remarks concluding a hearing where the president was accused of multiple crimes by his former attorney, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the House Oversight Committee chairman, pined for a return to a pre-Trump America. “We have got to get back to normal,” he said.

Go back to normal after Trump? No thanks

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Alex Kingsbury

Articles written by the author

What Time Is the AFC Championship Game?

Go back to normal after Trump? No thanks