Ball Dropped

Apologies, as professional obligations prevented me from commenting on Shank's latest foot stomping until now.

The again, it doesn't matter much. His complaint from yesterday's column reads like your standard whining from the leftist Globe weenies - Entity X is bad because it derives money from a product we don't approve of. Which is rich, coming from a columnist getting somewhere between $80K and $100K in income every year to write two or three columns of questionable quality every week.

I'll grant his point about the long-term effects of concussions on football players, but let's ask this question - why is this issue now coming to light in the press in recent years when that specific phenomenon may have been known for decades, and these reporters and columnists probably / likely knew about it and chose to look the other way? Long term injuries from football, like former Chicago Bears defensive lineman Dan Hampton's ten (maybe twenty) knee surgeries, are fairly well documented. Should we be led to believe that the media simply didn't know about concussions until recently? Much like the steroid era in baseball, can we conclude that sports reporters and columnists were aware of the situation and chose not to report on it until other forces compelled them to do so?

If columnists like Shank want to pretend that they didn't know about these situations and now use them as cudgels against certain professional sports organizations, what weight should we give to their opinions now? I say little, if any.