Yeah it’s almost like all these fighters who are acting out have CTE or something
I think for years we just assumed that people who got into hard hitting sports, be it football, or hockey, or fighting, were simply aggressive meatheads by nature.
The research is piling up though, and it's becoming harder and harder to deny that at least some percentage of these behaviours are a direct consequence of long time participation in these sports.
The latest football research is downright frightening. One study had 20% of guys who played high school only showing mild CTE. University players had CTE at a 90% rate, with about half of those cases being severe. NFL was 99% with CTE, and 85% of those cases being severe. If you play, you are at risk right from they very start. And the longer you play, the worse it gets.
Boxing and MMA have gotten a bit of a pass on CTE so far based, I would guess, on the fact that Pugilistic Dementia has been on the radar for a long time and people assume that it's already being addressed because the risks and precautions associated with the latter are the same as those associated with the former... but this isn't entirely true. Slurred speech, shuffling feet, and loss of memory and mental processing speeds are one thing. Personality transformations, violent mood swings, and dangerous and threatening bahaviours are quite another.
If anyone ever has the sense to move the discussion to pro wrestling, I'd be willing to bet that steal chairs to the head would quickly become a thing of the past, as well.
I know that a lot of people want to just dismiss the whole thing as some sort of mass hysteria brought on by a emasculated society. But this stuff has been hiding from us in plain sight for decades. And it's had literal life and death consequences.
Still a huge fight fan.
