Indianapolis Colts Owner Compares Risks Of Playing Football To Taking An Aspirin
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay compares the risks of playing football to taking an aspirin.
Speaking to Sports Business Journal, Irsay said players know there are risks in playing football, but that not enough research has been done to go after the league over brain injuries. He likened the side effects to playing football as to what might happen when people take an aspirin.
"I believe this: that the game has always been a risk, you know, and the way certain people are," he told Sports Business Journal. "Look at is. You take an aspirin, I take an aspirin, it might give you extreme side effects of illness and your body … may reject it, where I would be fine. So there is so much we don't know."
Irsay added, "One thing I have always felt strongly about, that to say, 'Oh, someone knew something and they didn't tell way back in the '60s or '70s,' that's just not true. I was there. I know that's a lie. You know no one knew anything. The only thing we know and always knew is when you strap on that helmet and go out on the field, boy you know you are taking a risk, but the reward is something. It's worth it."
Earlier this month, the NFL acknowledged for the first time a link between playing football and the brain injury CTE.
Irsay stated there's a risk with any sport people play.
"Look at it: When you get into Olympic bobsledding – I could sit down and name a dozen different sports – it has always been a known factor that you know you are going in there and you are taking a risk," he said.
Irsay said the league is looking into making the game safer, but he doesn't want to change the way football is played.
"Obviously we are not going to go to a situation where we put players in almost balloon-like equipment, where it becomes a pillow fight, so to speak," Irsay told Sports Business Journal. "We are trying to look at everything about the safety of the game without changing the game."
The Colts owner, who has battled a painkiller addiction, called it "absurd" to tie football into other diseases.
"To try to tie football, like I said, to suicides or murders or what have you, I believe that is just so absurd as well and it is harmful to other diseases, harmful to things like … when you get into the use of steroids, when you get into substance abuse, you get into the illness of alcohol and addiction. It's a shame that gets missed, because there [are] very deadly diseases there, for instance, like alcoholism and addiction. That gets pushed to the side and [a person] says, 'Oh, no. Football.' To me, that's really absurd," Irsay explained to Sports Business Journal.
Irsay's comments come on the heels of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones saying that it's "absurd" to say there's a relationship between CTE and football.
"We don't have that knowledge and background and scientifically, so there's no way in the world to say you have a relationship relative to anything here," Jones said at the annual league meeting last week. "There's no research. There's no data … We're not disagreeing. We're just basically saying the same thing. We're doing a lot more. It's the kind of thing that you want to work … to prevent injury. A big part of this is prevention. But the other part of it is to basically understand that we don't know or have any idea that there is a consequence as to any type of head injury in the future."
Last year, researchers from the Veterans Affairs Department and Boston University found evidence of CTE in 96 percent of NFL players they examined.
Before two weeks ago, the NFL did not previously link playing football to CTE, a disease linked to repeated brain trauma and associated with symptoms such as memory loss, depression and progressive dementia. It can only be detected after death. Among the players found to have CTE in their brains were Hall of Famers Junior Seau and Ken Stabler.
Former New York Giants players Frank Gifford, Tyler Sash and Dave Duerson were also found to have CTE.
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