Watching professional sports day in and day out (and we really have a surfeit of it now-no one, it seems, goes outside any more on a weekend, the old TV is on constantly to feed our hunger for watching the spectacle that professional sports has become), one becomes concerned about the long-term effect of those smashing sports injuries that seem to happen in every game.
What we are watching of course, are those athletes who have succeeded, not those whose injuries have prevented them from reaching their peak and enjoying the multi-millionaire lifestyles that professional athletes have become accustomed to. I read somewhere that only one in 10,000 amateur basketball players goes on to the NBA. The others fall away because of injuries.
Yet it seems that professional athletes are able to recuperate much faster than in years past, so fast that one wonders what drugs and what methods are being used to obtain incredible results. Sprinters with potentially crippling hamstring injuries running 100 metres in ten flat, a month later? But let's forget the drugs for a minute. What about the long-term effects of these injuries, serious ones, that happen again and again?
For the past ten years I have been trying to obtain data on this. Amazingly it's not available anywhere. I recently asked the principal research fellow of the Australian Centre for Research into Sports Injury and its Prevention (ACRISP), Prof Caroline Finch, who is based at the Monash Injury Research Institute (MIRI), Monash University, if she knew anything about the long-term effects of cricket injuries on Test players.
Her answer was, "That is a really good question, but unfortunately I am not aware of anything in this area." There is a lot of information on acute injuries among Test cricketers, the most serious being the lower back problems of elite fast bowlers. And the history of acute cricket injuries goes as far back as 1751 when Frederick, the Prince of Wales, who apparently liked to play cricket, was killed by a strike with a cricket ball.
We all can recall with horror when Charlie Griffith hit Nari Contractor on his head in Barbados in 1978. He survived. But what happens to these guys 30, 40 years after they retire, quite incredibly, is not known. There is some information on long-term effects of cricket injuries on non-Test players.
One study looked at 20 of the 23 former fast bowlers with a mean age of 48 years who had played state-level cricket for Western Australia. Seventy per cent of them had evidence of degenerative changes of their vertebrae, which caused quite serious problems with their movement.
We know that repetitious throwing can result in overuse shoulder problems, chronic pain and the like. The end or middle finger joints of bowlers are frequently traumatised repeatedly by the bowling action and sometimes the consequent osteoarthritic changes are severe enough to prevent further participation in the sport. And wicketkeepers may also suffer osteoarthritic changes in the knees due to the unnatural action of repeated squatting.
Most cricket injuries seem inconsequential compared with American football. Imagine a 240-pound linebacker hitting a fullback who also weighs 240 pounds and who is running at nine yards per second. The time the linebacker first touches the fullback, to the time his forward motion is stopped, is about 0.2 second. It's been worked out that the force generated is equivalent to about one-half ton in the negative (backward) direction!
Yet no one seems to know or care about what the effect of these repeated collisions to these guys is, years later. David Meggyesy, a former National Football League linebacker, author, and now director of the NFL Players Association's San Francisco office, likened the issue of post-NFL injuries to "the elephant in the room that no one wants to say is in the room."
Some studies are beginning to appear and the results ain't good, especially with regard to head injuries. All that headbanging beloved by fans is not too good for the brain. A 2000 study surveyed 1,090 former NFL players and found more than 60 per cent had suffered at least one concussion in their careers and 26 per cent had three or more.
Those who had had concussions reported more problems with memory, concentration, speech impediments, headaches and other neurological problems than those who had not. Shades of Mohammed Ali?
A 2007 study by the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Retired Athletes found that of the 595 retired NFL players who recalled sustaining three or more concussions on the football field, 20.2 per cent said they had been found to have depression. That is three times the rate of players who have not sustained concussions.
In September 2009, a study done by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research reported that Alzheimer's disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league's former players vastly more often than in the national population-including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49. Elephant indeed!
