After being injured during a crash on January 24th during the X-Games, Caleb Moore submitted to his injuries and passed away yesterday at the age of 25. Hopefully this will spur some appropriate and effective safety measures to prevent such future tragedies. There has been a lot of ink spilled recently over the (very real) dangers that football poses, with many folks predicting that absent on-field reform, we are headed towards seeing a player die on the turf. Regardless of how you feel about recent rule changes, nobody wins when a young man or woman dies playing a game. Large men running into each other isn’t exactly safe. Nor is jumping 400+ pound machines off of ramps. My thoughts go out to Moore’s friends and family and I hope that his death is neither forgotten nor in vain.
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Other than banning these guys from twirling these 400 pound machines through the air and off jumps, how are you going to make what they do any safer?
I don’t know. I really have no idea what the answer is. Or if there really is an answer. But it strikes me that football has been inundated with talk about making the game safer. Meanwhile, elsewhere we’ve got folks jumping off ramps with 400-lb vehicles. Perhaps we shouldn’t be doing the latter. Or shouldn’t be so panicked about football. Or maybe the activities are so different that they shouldn’t be in the same conversation.
What I do know is that a young man is dead. And I wonder if the same folks who think football players should tackle differently had used some of that energy and their forum to question the safety of jumping snowmobiles, he might be alive.
And as for “banning”, I’m not calling for any form of legislative action.
Well, I said that short of banning them, how would we make them safer? Apologies if it appeared I was claiming you were seeking a ban.
I think some folks are just wired differently. It’s like these people who want to scale 1000 foot sheer cliffs in Zion National Park. What must they be thinking? But apparently it’s like oxygen to many of them. And some of them die doing it.
I think the difference with football is that a large part of the game revolves around hitting and tackling other players. Especially as helmets have gotten more advanced, many of these guys are leading with their heads. And it really hasn’t been until recently that they’ve discovered just how damaging what appear to be slight hits will do to a brain over time, e.g. the kinds that offensive and defensive linemans incur in the normal course of blocking.
A guy jumping his snowmobile knows that there is a risk of landing wrong and getting hurt. But it isn’t necessary that he do so in the course of performing. A football player, almost by definition, is going to take a bunch of head shots.
That’s fair. If folks want to participate in these activities, they should have every ride to, provided they are not putting others at risk (e.g., jumping snowmobiles off buildings into crowded pedestrian areas).
And it is entirely possible that football and the X-Games are apples and oranges. I’m musing more than concluding here. Thanks for your input.
If folks want to participate in these activities, they should have every ride to
Heh.
The internet indicates that there are around 30-40 skiing (& snowboarding) deaths a year.
I’m not really seeing your point here. The reason that there is much more ink (both literal and digital) spilled over football is that the NFL is quite a bit bigger than the X-games.
I don’t know that I have a real “point”. Only some loosely cobbled together thoughts. I realize that many sports have inherent risks to them, some of them deadly. I wonder if we have the proper perspective on the different risks that different sports pose.
Not a sports guy here – with that out of the way –
What does the “X” in “X-Games” stand for? Should that indicate the risks to any and all comers?
Snowbillies’d be jumping snowmobiles, X-Games or no (“here, hold my beer and watch THIS!”)
I am sorry for his family, but this sort of thing seems to be entirely expected; in fact, I submit if there was no real risk of death/injury, people wouldn’t do it, nor would they watch it.
There is no “goal” in such a “sport” (no point system, no basket, no endzone, no finish line); the nature of the “competition” here is to go ever faster/higher/farther/more complicated (all of which necessarily = “more risky”), without incurring serious injury or death.
Take away the risk of injury/death, and you remove the possibility of “losing” – IOW, where’s the “sport”?
Don’t get me wrong, it all seems pretty silly/stupid/barbaric to me.
But in a way it seems less barbaric than football or boxing, where we pay good money to watch one human attempt to hit another one so hard that they can’t get up. At least these guys generally hurt/kill themselves, rather than another.
I believe the X is for Extreme, though I could also see it being related to Gen X or just a broader shorthand for youth and counter-culture (or all of the above).
There are some good points here. But I think there is a difference between folks doing stupid things seeking their own entertainment and folks doing stupid things on ESPN in a multi-million dollar event with corporate sponsors that people tune in to watch.
Mostly, I’m curious if this will change anything. I don’t know if it should. But I wonder if it will.
Banning the specific backflip maneuver mightn’t help (he seems to have had his accident upon landing, so it seems like the kind of thing that could happen on any jump).
The only thing that likely would have saved him is if snowmobiles were designed more like racecars (rollcages, safety harnesses to keep the rider in place). But this will add weight, and I don’t know that it’s what people want to see (or at least, I doubt it would replace “traditional” snowmobile tricks; after all, people still watch motorcycle racing/jumping, despite the existence of “safer” racing vehicles).
I guess I’m just curious if, collectively, we’ll say, “Maybe we should build a sport around jumping snowmobiles off ramps,” in much the same way we decided we shouldn’t continue to build sports around feeding people to lions or speeding at one another on horseback with lances.
And maybe we won’t. And shouldn’t. Again, I don’t know. I just find it interesting that one segment of the sporting world is debating the safety of football and another segment of the sporting world is watching young people jump off ramps on snowmobiles.
As a non-sports guy, a LOT of what goes on seems pretty crazy to me.
But I have had some serious skiing accidents, and cracked a rib snowboarding, so what do I know? 🙂
I’m from the South. To most of us, people who slide down snowy hills on anything are crazy.
Yeah, we know that no snow is required:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrvkrwPysVY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
The best part is how you can hear the empties clinking.
Glyph, that’s just good fun!
I think I saw Kenny Powers on that dirtbike.
You know, my nickname for a while in college was “redneck,” because despite the fact that almost everyone I knew at college at that point was from Kentucky (mostly Louisville and the western cities, like Owensboro), my Tennessee accent and the fact that I’d grown up on the edge of a small town, meant I was the redneckiest of the rednecks. I lost my accent and started hanging out at coffee shops, and the nickname disappeared, but for a while there…
At that same period in my life, I couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking me for weed. This, combined with the redneck part, should paint a very clear picture of what I looked like in college.
Hopefully not like this.
It’s Darwin Award time, once again. There’s no saving the stupids from themselves.
Well I guess I should be glad that my brother in law died on the slopes before he and my sister had any kids. The pain and heartache she suffered as searchers combed the mountain for days, only to find a corpse, was all in service to bettering the gene pool.
Fuck you, you heartless fuck. These are real people with real lives and real families. How dare you treat it like some big joke.
Alan,
I can’t speak for Blaise or what he was getting at, but please know that neither my post nor any subsequent comments were meant to deride recreational winter sports. I am sorry for your loss and don’t consider the death of anyone to be a joke.
On the contrary, Kazzy, I appreciate that you’re having a discussion about the safety of winter sports. Your comments, and those of most of the other posters, are nothing if not respectful of the deceased. I just couldn’t let the callousness of Blaise’s comment to pass without rebuke.
The fact is, my brother-in-law might still be alive if he had taken other safety precautions. It’s tough to know, because the most unsafe thing he did was to go snowboarding by himself on a slow day. I know he was a practiced snowboarder who knew the mountain well. I suspect it was random accident, not recklessness, that left him buried in the snow. But if someone else had been there, they might have been able to free him before he suffocated.
I don’t think there’s any magic safety bullet that would have saved his life. But if he’d had a locator beacon sewn into his jacket his loved ones would have been spared those three days of waiting for an answer; three days of agonizing hope and terror at the thought of him out there, alive but lost or trapped, on the cold dark mountain.
I am sorry to read of your tragic loss. I had no intention of angering anyone in saying such a thing.
Was your brother in law in the X-Games, attempting to do a backflip in a supposedly-sanctioned event? Do you think Caleb Moore’s many sponsors or the X-Games themselves just might be responsible? Where does this sort of thing cross the line, where a 150 pound rider goes under 500 pound sled in midair and somehow the possibility of that sled landing on him doesn’t enter the equation. These questions you haven’t quite answered. The rider ought to be on top of the sled, not under it.
Players have died as a result of their injuries in football. I was listening on the radio to the game during which Chucky Mullins was injured, an injury that ultimately led to his death.
Only one Major League player ever died from being hit with a pitch, Ray Chapman in 1920. That led to the banning of the spitball and in general the tactic of dirtying the ball to make it hard to see, as well as the practice of frequently putting fresh balls in play. That was a huge change to the game; home runs went from rarities to an important weapon, as a fresh, lively ball that the hitters could see well was far more likely to be hit over the fence.
Kazzy, the question that should be asked is one of self-determination.
Caleb Moore practiced this stunt extensively before so it’s not like he just walked up to a snowmobile and said “Hey, guys. Check this out.” He presumably knew the possible risks. He was paid as well as X-games athletes get paid to do snowmobile flips. Adding safety equipment may lead to the same slow ratings decline that has been happening to the WWE for the last 6 years.
I’ve been accused of veering too much towards “Society over the individual” answers recently so I’ll mix it up a little. Even if he viewed the offer from a youthful perspective of invulnerability, Caleb Moore decided “Wooo! I’d rather do this than work in an office.” If an organization is willing to pay someone to make himself a Darwin Awards candidate and this person, with full knowledge of the risks inherent in this offer, accepts, is it really society’s place to stop them?
I don’t think society should stop him. Not at all. But society should wonder what it says about us if millions of us tune in to watch young people ride their invulnerability to early deaths.
*shrug* Stuff happens. People weren’t necessarily watching the games to see which one of the D-bags were going to buy it.
To volley your question back at you: Jaybird watches wrestling. Jaybird watched wrestling before Owen Hart took a fatal swan dive from his zipline during a botched intro. Jaybird still watches wrestling afterwards. Yes, they made changes but, as Chris Benoit (or any number or wrestling-related disabilities/deathes) afterwards proved, it is an inevitability that someone will be crippled or even killed in the ring. What does that say about Jaybird?
Hell, I did martial arts for a while. One of those injuries during those 19 years opened up the side of my neck. Instead of getting paid, I was paying for the privilege of endangering myself. What does it say about me or a society that let me do such things?
Perhaps better stated is this:
If we accept that sometimes people are going to die during the X-Games or wrestling, why do so many folks believe that an on-field death during an NFL game will spell the end of the sport and, thus, should take actions to avoid?
Because gramma watches football.
So do you think that the NFL’s actions are more grounded in marketing and sustaining the league for monetary reasons than actually protecting the players?
“But society should wonder what it says about us if millions of us tune in to watch young people ride their invulnerability to early deaths.”
that dangerous things are exciting?
I think you may have just answered your own question.
Note, I’m dead certain that there are plenty of people who are legitimately and honestly concerned about football players, and I’m certain that there are plenty of people inside the power structure of the NFL (coaches, captains, trainers, doctors, owners, the League officials, the League itself) who care very much about individual players and player safety and health.
Modern organizations are structured such that this sort of feeling stays silo’d away from the money and the marketing. Modern organizations are very good at that. I don’t think this is intentional, it’s just an accident of design.
All of the incentives at every level of decision making are aligned with money and marketing. None of them are aligned with reducing long term physical problems with retired players that are no longer in the league.
If humans are good at one thing, it’s following the incentives. Especially when they can’t really see the problem clearly.
I don’t know, Kazzy. People do stuff, and sometimes it goes bad.
I live in a sky town. Nearly every winter, at least one person dies in a sky accident, usually from hitting a tree and exploding the chest cavity. People drive their snowmobiles on to thin ice every winter; just a few weeks ago, three men died that way. People die hiking Mt. Washington nearly every year. They die in hunting accidents. Bicycle accidents (I almost died that way at 14).
What’s amazing to me is how most people doing extreme, challenging things, survive and thrive. There is something in many of us that makes us need to challenge death. Most of us survive, and grow out of it. And I know a lot of people who create these kinds of challenges for kids who’ve gotten involved with drugs; that feeling of risk-taking and being alive is, so they tell me, one of the best tonics for addiction.
My concerns are typically for those places we think are safe but aren’t; the baby’s crib, the school bus, the food we eat, the medicines we take. And the on-the-job risks that should be remedied by the employer. If you know there are risks, it may be worth the reward. Hidden risk? That’s another kettle of fish.
I get the “doing stupid stuff” thing. I’ve done two Tough Mudders, including all the electrocution portions. I’d do more stuff if it wasn’t for a near-debilitating fear of heights. I’m really wondering more why we don’t take the same tact with football that many have argued we do and should with recreational winter sports. If we say it is cool for guys to jump off ramps with snowmobiles despite the danger, why can’t we also say it is cool for football players to run head first into one another?
Part of it is that it’s quite clear what the risks are doing extreme sports. Whereas with football and the NFL right now the issue is hiding the long-term impacts of playing which affect everyone who plays tackle football. CTE, etc. are long-term results, not things like on-field paralysis.
It’s the fact that the NFL’s consistently tried to downplay the dangers of long-term brain injuries and the impacts such things are having on players (and may be having on non-professional athletes as well) that’s making football a big target right now. Not the inherent risk.
TNC has a brief history of the NFL and football head injury, documenting their actions:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/the-nfls-response-to-brain-trauma-a-brief-history/272520/
TNC is making the very common error that organizations are people. They aren’t. They’re hive minds.
I think that most people who worked for Big Tobacco in the 60s and 7os were probably aiight folks, too. Even the ones who made horrible decisions were probably more weak and stupid than nefarious and evil.
That’s the thing about organizations. Weak and stupid follows incentives. When the incentives are all aligned with money…
The NFL has one guy at the top setting the agenda, who claims to care about player safety while forcing them to play on three days rest and pushing for a longer season.
Pat- I assume your familiar with the concept of diffusion of responsibility. Its easy for people in orgs to go along to along. The banality of evil is not a new phrase and i’d say a lot of it came from people just doing their little bit in a giant evil org. But orgs have leaders and boards who have responsibility. Corp’s want the rights of people without the problems.
Nob has it exactly right. Cutting down on the obviously unsafe monster hits (say, by outlawing spearing, which the NFL did after Darryl Stingley was paralyzed) doesn’t address the real problem.