Humanity needs to evolve beyond violent sports

For the past two weeks, it has been a pleasure to look at Olympic sports competition, all these young men and women showing magnificent athletic skills. If a few swimmers have misbehaved, so has the management. It's not just a director scalping tickets. Receiving less comment but surely as disgusting was the stroke of the regulatory committee in removing the requirement of headgear in boxing this year after decades of requiring it. It's much more fun isn't it, to see the momentary distortion of a face and the sweat fly as a good left hook smashes into a competitor's face? A knock out! Terrific. Brain damage? Hush.

It may be time to admit that, with or without headgear, boxing has no honorable place in contemporary society. It has been slowly phasing out from the days when it occupied center stage in early 20th-century America. Muhammad Ali was a great hero, sure, with slush for brains at his end. Making it more dangerous by removing headgear is shameful.

The West has constantly evolved, but we still have many brutal moments.  Overall, the standards governing interpersonal behavior have moved steadily away from the brutality of ancient Rome even if we regularly fall short of the compassion standard set by Jesus of Nazareth, among others.

It is still true that "bread and circuses" keep the lower classes in line. Distraction and gore, sponsored by the ruling class, appeased and stopped the Roman masses from addressing problems of inequality in their society. For athletes near the bottom of the social scale, a short life fighting wild beasts for public entertainment might have had appeal. Even today, pollsters have noted that young men would consider giving up a few years at the end of life for some contemporary famous athletic moments. That possibility still sends tens of thousands of wannabes, better off focused on academic learning, chasing a few hundred professional sports openings.

Typically, a lot of us Olympic couch guys are looking forward to a following football season while worrying, often with wives, that we will spend too much time staring at a screen, drinking beer and neglecting other responsibilities. But we have our team to support. Football loyalties fill the genetically built-in clan loyalty gap between family and nation. What's your excuse?

But this year, we start with a hangover. Where does it come from? It's the headache of concussions, an issue unresolved as the last season ended. For years we have been lied to (sort of) with assurance that helmet technology took care of almost everything and that brain damage from football injuries was very rare.

[Concussion reports should give parents pause before letting Johnny take a snap.]

The Olympics prove that interpersonal violence is not the only route to athletic accomplishment and fame. Most of the sports world has embraced a football that we call "soccer." The American taste for violence will keep American football going for several more years even while the rest of the world enjoys a "football" game without the casualties.

It is astonishing how so many of us displace concern for violence against people by embracing concern for pets. A few years ago a top football player got two hard years in the pen for running dog fights on the side. Maybe the fact that he was black and the court was in the South had something to do with it. Not that dogs bred to like fighting can be safely salvaged as pets. Certain breeds are prohibited in some states for that reason.

There is rising concern for the way food animals from chickens to cattle are raised. This may reflect a rise in compassionate standards, but dodges analogous human misery. Poverty brings with it violence and brain damage, either directly or as a by-product of the conditions of poverty.

We do not need to let animal care get ahead of human care. Considering today's state of scientific, medical knowledge, there is no reason to encourage, at the Olympics or elsewhere, including Anchorage, gladiator-style sports resulting, directly or indirectly, in lasting physical damage.

John Havelock is a former Alaska attorney general who boxed and played football as a young man.

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