Sport keeps head in the sand on traumatic brain injury issue
Shock horror, they fell out a while back.
Who would have thought two giant egos with their best years behind them could possibly set fire to the bond that united them?
The Vegas booze-ups and goading everyone not lucky enough to be on their team with those aforementioned stacks of cash?
And so, in a moment of precisely weighted emasculation on the part of the rapper, Mayweather was dared to read a full page of a Harry Potter book without a misstep.
If he pulled off the seemingly straightforward task, 50 Cent promised to donate $750,000 to the charitable cause taking the world by storm: the ALS ice bucket challenge.
50, aka Fiddy, knew intimately how impossible this would be for poor old Floyd Jr. And the rest of us chuckled at the schadenfreude, taking care not to take sides in this face-off of two regrettable human beings.
Then a radio show host somewhere decided to put up audio of Mayweather’s farcical attempts to read out a jingle promoting that station’s support of a charity aimed at helping US veteran military men and women.
Before listening, the advice from a couple of online media outlets was to bear in mind that Mayweather was imprisoned briefly for the beating of his former wife.
Despite that odd but appropriate reassurance, it was still a little difficult to listen to the fighter slur and stumble and ultimately fail to get through the relatively brief jingle.
Inevitably, Mayweather avoided the Harry Potter dare and instead called on his Twitter and Instagram followers to read the multi-million dollar cheques made out to his company by Golden Boy Promotions over the last couple of years.
Still though, it was a timely reminder of how the brain can fall to ribbons through repeated head trauma.
College Football begins again in the US this weekend and like I always say, this is a good thing for those of us fortunate enough not to have to put our bodies on the line.
The NFL will follow a week later, which means a few million of us non-athletes will be putting together our fantasy teams and watching the fate of Wes Welker with bated breath. Will the Denver Broncos wide receiver’s career be over because he has suffered yet another concussion?
It emerged on Tuesday that a former college footballer who played at Missouri State was suffering from severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) when he died in 2013, at 25. His death was caused by an unrelated heart attack but he had retired from the sport after transferring from Missouri to Missouri State. The linebacker only managed to get in a couple of training sessions at his new team before being knocked unconscious.
According to Associated Press, before he died, Keck asked for his brain to be examined at Boston University should anything ever happen to him. The levels of destruction discovered after his death were said to be unprecedented for someone so young. His wife recounted how his personality took a turn for the aggressive. He was convinced he suffered from CTE. Had it not been for the heart attack, his condition would have only worsened.
College Football and the NFL remain on course for greater dominance of the US sporting landscape and the head will continue to be overruled. None of us has the resolve to avoid looking the other way.
At the other end of the sporting glamour spectrum, I occasionally bang on about the Manhattan Gaels GAA team in this column. At this safe distance, I can’t tell if it bores the reader or not. I try and limit the mentions. Who really cares about our humble set-up? But then again, I could write about the players I manage every day. Class acts, one and all.
We lost our New York Junior B Football Championship final on Sunday, falling well short of our divisional buddies and rivals, Donegal NY. There was a double hammer blow because our brother club Hoboken lost their Junior Hurling Championship final in the subsequent game at Gaelic Park.
Both teams had a certain degree of poor luck but there are no excuses. And just like the Brooklyn Dodgers, there’s always next year.
Both the Manhattan Gaels and Hoboken are slowly building something that could have long-term sustainability for the GAA in the less Irish sections of New York City and New Jersey. Losing two county finals in a row and — in the case of Hoboken — four in a row is a short-term setback that simply adds to the overall desire to improve things around here.
* johnwriordan@gmail.com  Twitter: JohnWRiordan
