What A Day - The Fate of Football (Players) with America Dissected and Garrett Bush

Episode Date: February 12, 2023

It's Super Bowl Sunday! We're pleased to present the latest episode of America Dissected, tackling America's love of what can be a dangerous (and sometimes deadly) sport just in time for the big game. Host Dr. Abdul El-Sayed reflects on his complicated relationship with football, then interviews Garrett Bush, sports commentator and former college football player, who recently went viral over a rant about the sport.Listen and subscribe to America Dissected wherever you get your podcasts

Hey WOD Squad, I know we're usually dark on Sundays so we can take a news break, very necessary. But today is Super Bowl Sunday, so the reason I'm in your ears right now is because the latest episode of our health pod, America Dissected, has this really compelling chat we want you to hear. It's about the dangers of football and our complicated relationship with it. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed talks with Garrett Bush, a sports commentator and former college player who recently went viral for his rant about the sport. Take a listen and check out new episodes of America Dissected each week wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll bring you a new episode of What A Day tomorrow. America Dissected is brought to you by the

DeBeaumont Foundation. For 25 years, the DeBeaumont Foundation has worked to create practical solutions that improve the health of communities across the country. The foundation advances policy, builds partnerships, and strengthens systems to give everyone the opportunity to achieve their best possible health. To learn more, visit debaumont.org. This season of Smokescreen Deadly Cure brings you back to the early days of the pandemic. Remember when President Donald Trump, yeah, suggested disinfectant might cure COVID? It just seemed nuts, like no one would do that, right? Turns out, in the dark corners of the internet,

a radical group made a fortune doing exactly that. They called it the Miracle Mineral Solution. From Neon Hum, Sony Music Entertainment, and Bloomberg comes Smokescreen Deadly Cure, now available. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. The Biden administration will officially end the public health state of emergency for COVID-19. Vaccine manufacturers who've made billions on the vaccine are refusing

to pay back $1.4 billion for unused vaccines intended for the world's poorest people. And police in Memphis murder Tyree Nichols, another defenseless black man in cold blood. This is America Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Look, I'm just going to put this out there. I love football, but I hate having to admit that. I loved playing football as a kid, going to games in college, and now watching it as an adult. But hey, look, I often credit football with some of the most important, wholesome lessons of my life. How to lift people up when they're down. How to inspire your teammates.

How to persevere through pain and challenge. And how to prepare. Like, really prepare. Spend hours in the gym, on practice fields, watching tape to achieve a goal. There's no doubt that football has made me a better teammate, a better leader, and a better person. At the same time, I can't deny that there's something rotten at the heart of the sport. All sports have a narrative structure. It's what keeps us coming back. There are winners and losers, underdogs who overcome all odds. Today's loser can be tomorrow's champion. Today's champion will one day fall from glory.

That's true of all sports. But in football, there's more. On top of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat is brutality. Football players put their bodies on the line in ways unlike any other sport in America. There's real pain involved. And it's not just injury, which of course is possible in any sport, but that every single play is about inflicting violence upon your opponent. The whole point of this sport is tackling another player to his needs. And as much

as football taught me about how to be a better person, there was always something that appealed to the most carnal aspects of myself. I love football in part because it was an arena, literally, in which I wasn't just allowed to be violent, but I was encouraged to be. And as a teenage boy, there was something about getting to run wild, to take out life's frustration on the guy in the opposing jersey. But that guy was trying to do the same to me. And you kind of wonder whether or not that's what we should be telling teenage boys that they should do with their angst. There are days that I wonder what the lasting consequences of that might be. I find myself reflecting way too often on the high school drills I put my body through in late summer days that marked the start

of the football season. After months off, there was always a day when we'd put our pads back on and start tackling again for the first time. And in order to get us back in shape for it, we'd spend an entire day doing the highest contract drills. One of them involved two players literally laying on their backs with the crowns of their heads touching. One of them would be given the football, and when the whistle blew, there was an all-out collision, as the player without the ball tried to tackle the player with the ball, and the player with the ball tried to break that tackle. We'd do these kind of drills all day. The next morning, you'd wake up with a splitting headache.

We literally called it the hitting headache, and everyone thought that was just normal. Our understanding of the long-term consequences of those kinds of drills has taken a big leap forward over the past decade, as our understanding of the brain has brought the gnarly consequences of CTE into focus, with some really gruesome consequences. Several former NFL stars have died by suicide. When Junior Seau, a legendary NFL linebacker, took his life at 43. He shot himself in the chest so that scientists could study his brain. He knew the consequences that a career in football had taken on his brain, and he wanted the world to know them too. We've known about these violent consequences for years, but we push them out of our minds as if to apologize for our favorite spectacle.

Then, just a few weeks ago, the brutality of football was thrown back into sharp relief. DeMar Hamlin, a 24-year-old safety for the Buffalo Bills, collapsed on the field on a Monday night football game after what looked like a routine tackle. He went into cardiac arrest because of an extremely rare injury called comodio cordis, in which the heart is hit at just the wrong place and the wrong moment in its cycle to trigger arrhythmia, a condition in which the heart muscle no longer beats in unison. Unable to pump blood to the body, and more importantly, the brain, the person collapses, just as Hamlin did.

Thankfully, EMTs were able to revive Hamlin, and he's expected to make a full recovery. But it was a stark reminder that every week for most of the fall and winter, we watch young men destroy their bodies for our entertainment. Billions of dollars are made, the vast majority of which the young men at the heart of the game never see. This weekend, an estimated 100 million Americans are going to watch the Super Bowl. All in, the Super Bowl generates roughly $15 billion in revenue, all for a four-hour game and a

halftime show. But at what cost? Right after DeMar Hamlin's injury, Garrett Bush, a former college football player and sports commentator, went viral for his incisive analysis of the economics of the sport and the exploitation of the young men at the heart of it. I'm kind of hot because we do this every freaking time something happened on this field. Everybody want to pivot and act like they, I done heard people talking about, oh, you know, just the mental health of the players. And yeah, you could die.

They don't even know they could die out here. We sit here and talk about this stuff every single time. Schedule remakes. How are we going to make it up? What the league feels about it? I don't give a damn what the league feels about it. Let's be clear about this. You got to play three to four years before you even sniff a pension.

So all this heartwarming and prayers and condolences don't do nothing for that boy's mom that got to go home, look at her son, and he might need extensive care for the rest of his life. And you know what the NFL will tell you? Well, you know, we'll look out for the people like him. No, you won't. No, you won't. Let's talk about the disability policy for the NFL. They moved it from $22,000 a month to 4,000 in the last collective bargaining agreement. Did you know that the NFL has a private board that reviews all aspects with their doctors and with their neurologists and their specialists? They can deny benefits even if Social Security deems you to be permanently disabled. The league can come back and then say, you know, the government

is, you know, they're experts, but let's take it over so we don't pay anything out. Only 15% get approved by Social Security. The league says that number should be lower. After watching Garrett drop knowledge, I invited him on the show to join me for a conversation. I wanted to think a bit more about why in 2023, we continue to watch football. What is it about this brutal sport that keeps us coming back? Is there a version of football that's actually ethical, safe? What would need to change? Just to note, this is a subject that inspires a lot of contradictory feelings, and we don't really get to a single neat and tidy answer.

But the conversation helped me frame my own feelings about the sport. I hope going into Super Bowl Sunday, it'll help you frame your perspective on it, too. Because even if you're just watching the commercials, the NFL is still making a dollar off you. Here's my conversation with Garrett Bush. All right. Can you introduce yourself for the tape? Yes. My name is Garrett Bush.

I am currently a host for the Ultimate Cleveland Sports Show. That's on YouTube and WKYC TV Channel 3+. I also work for 92.3 The Fan. I'm a host of a show called The Barbershops, which is a weekly show on 92.3 The Fan, WKRKFM in Cleveland, Ohio. I'm also the host of the Locked on Browns podcast. You can find it anywhere on your Apple stores or wherever the case may be on YouTube as well. We appreciate you coming on the show.

And we're talking in the lead up to the Super Bowl about football, football as a public health concept. And, you know, we'd done a previous episode about football, about youth football in particular, with someone who's done a lot of work thinking about the long-term consequences of youth football, but not somebody who came to that research with a love of football to begin with. And I wanted to talk to somebody who's played the game, who cares about the game, who's engaged with it in a way that is beyond research, but has been a part of your life for some time. I have to be honest, football has been a big part of my life, in particular in middle school and high school. So I want to ask you, you know, just to set the stage, what has football done for you? Well, I mean, I could say what has football not done for me. It's done and it shaped the most part of my entire life. One of the earliest concepts that I had of

football was just watching games with my dad. So I always loved the fact that my dad, he would veto my mom on bedtime when it came to late-night games, right? So usually my mom ruled with an iron fist, but my dad was the person who says, I'll let them stay up and watch late-night on the West Coast swings, baseball or whatever. And one of the biggest things was, I remember coming up and watching on Monday Night Football. That was just the biggest thing, no matter who a team was on. I always wanted to stay up, so football was a big part of even how me and my dad bonded. I didn't play football growing up until I was age 15

because I just didn't like it in terms of playing it. I didn't know if I wanted to. I realized that they got way much stuff going on they got two days they got practice you got to hit people i'm like man i don't know how i feel about doing this now my brothers were hooked on it so they played at a much younger age than i did i was like i can't do that i so i started playing when i was 15 um and i was very very very trash i was garbage like you know my family used to tell me the only thing i used to do because i was the biggest kid out there i used to always have to be pulling my pants up and

stuff like that and i really wasn't doing anything i wasn't that aggressive um but eventually um two years later i went to high school and you know some fans understand this some people don't sometimes when you have a big guy or a kid that's really athletic either you you peak early or you peak late and for me I peaked late like I was probably at my peak probably about 17 18 and so football gave me an opportunity to go to college to give me an opportunity to get a full scholarship um and and it definitely taught me things that I handled today I always talk about perseverance and, you know, time management stuff, you know, being able to go to class and have to

lift weights and doing the study tables and that stuff and being able to study when you're hurt, but your mind is thinking about a game. So all those things help me in a way shape who I am today. And I use some of those skills today. So that's why I have a very mixed feelings about when it comes to football, mixed emotions when it comes to whether or not the game is safe to play and the risk reward factor in playing the game. You know, it's interesting. I was one of those who peaked early. I was like the biggest kid in eighth grade. And then I just started going. And you know, depending on who you talk to, I was either too slow or too short, um, to play, uh, football in college.

But I, for me, football taught me a ton about teamwork because it really is the truest team sport. Um, you can have the greatest quarterback, um, and their face will be in the ground if you don't have a strong offensive line, if you don't have good receivers, if you don't have, um, you know, good blocking out of your running backs. And so there are other sports that any one player can carry the game. Basketball is like this. Um, baseball to some respects are like, is like this.

You got a good pitcher and a couple of good hitters. You're gonna have a good baseball team, but football is a true team sport. And, you know, all of those other individual characteristics that you talked about, time management, all of the work that goes into it, the direct translation of effort in practice or effort in the weight room or effort in two-a-days into winning games,

like those are things that there are very few analogs in sports or in life that have such a direct translation to performance. And, you know, for me, football was a huge one. And I played other sports, but there was nothing really quite like football. And I know that, you know, for folks who are in bands and folks who are in other activities, whether acting, that they talk about it the same way. But football is one of those things that for a lot of young folks, it really does help mold them from a young age. And at the same time, those tradeoffs are real.

So, you know, I asked you what football has done for you. I got to ask you also what football has done to you. Yeah. Well, yeah, there's always the other side of the coin. So football has really placed a lot of strain. It's placed a lot of stress on my body. You know, for me, I think if you were to look at a person and say, this is the representation of a person who never even really played in the NFL.

He just played in college. So when you look at my medical history, when you look at my medical track record, people will be shocked that I've had this many surgeries. I've only played at the collegiate level. So, you know, I've never played it down in the NFL. And I still have these residual effects. So I've had over 17 surgeries. I have ACL surgery on my left knee, ACL surgery on my right knee.

I've had back surgery. I've had neck surgery. I undergo three or four procedures each year in order to kind of burn the nerves in my neck so I don't feel them because I got 380 discs that, you know, aren't able to be operated on. So I have a pain management doctor. So I take a bunch of medication. Some of it prohibits me from doing my job. I'm like, man, I can't be stumbling over my words. I can't, I can't be sleepy and groggy, but sometimes, you know, depending on what it is, you're taking so many, you know, medicines and, and different things like that for nerve pain, it kind of

dulls you and numbs you. So you have to kind of really force and concentrate on what you're actually saying some days. I've had surgery on my toe, my calf. So, you know, I've had, you know, all of those gambit of injuries and football is, you know, would probably be the main culprit of them. Now, I did play baseball, basketball in high school. So I led in those sports too. So, you know, I played a lot of games playing basketball on concrete. It wasn't the smartest thing to do. But, you know, just doing it and wear and tear all year round, I think football has put a tremendous stress on my body. And, you know, as you get older, there's certain things that I can't do that other people do. Like

pick up basketball is something that I always wanted to do. I was always a big fan of playing pick up basketball with my father. And I don't have kids yet, but by the time I do get to that age, there's going to be no question whether or not my kid's going to be able to beat me because I just can't. I won't play pickup basketball because it's too great of a risk to be injured again. So, you know, there's been a bunch of injuries, but I do say that pros will tell you this too the day that you start playing football or either high school or college there's no such thing as being completely 100 healthy so they put the injury without device so i'm still gonna play he's questionable i think he's 100 anybody will tell you after they cut on you that first time you are not a hundred percent you just trying to get to the to the 90s maybe 92 93 you can still do your job but that's something all athletes go through

so i gotta ask you knowing what you know now if you were to get to talk to that kid trying to pull up his pants on the football field would you tell him to play as long as he did yeah yeah i would sometimes when i'm in interviews and people say, well, you just told me on one hand you have all these things going on wrong with you, all these complications with your health. Why then in the next step you didn't even hesitate to say you would play again? Well, for me, like a lot of other people, football was a way for a better life. There's people who always sacrifice their well-being and a way for a better life. There's people who always sacrifice

their well-being and their health for a better life. I kind of compare it to people who used to work in steel mills in the Midwest. My grandfather worked in a steel mill his whole life, and he was hurt badly. He was almost crippled because steel fell on his legs. They didn't have the greatest safety requirements back then. I've had my great-grandfather lost his arm building a railroad. So my grandfather only had one arm. So those were very difficult jobs back then, whether you were working in steel mills, whether you were working on sanitation department, whether you were doing manual labor. Back then, you did whatever you had to, you know, make sense, especially in the black community. You did what you needed to, to survive for your family, provide. You know, my mom has eight brothers and sisters. My dad

has 10 brothers and sisters. So, you know, just think about the amount of income you needed to feed all those kids. So, you did whatever you could. And so, for me, my parents were always married and they were there, but, you know, they didn't have what we would call a nest egg to send people to college. Like, I used to ask my mom in the beginning, well, how am I going to college? Have you guys started saving? They were like, yeah, right. You go get a scholarship either academically or you go get it athletically. And so from a very intimate level, I wouldn't be where I am today or possibly going where I am going tomorrow. As I grow and expand, football was the foundation to that. And without that, I don't have college. I don't have the relationships I have right now. And I wouldn't have the ability to, you know, truly do something that you love, which is something that I think is a true blessing for anybody anyway.

If you could just, you know, do something that you love every single day, then that's, you know, you're winning in life. So I would still do it again. We'll be back with more with Garrett Bush after this break. You don't have kids yet, but let's say you have a son. And football has given you this set of opportunities and given your kid a set of opportunities. And your kid says, Daddy, I want to play football. What do you say? Well, I would sit him down and I would talk to him about it.

I would talk to him about some of the great things that can come along with football. I would tell him some of the things that he's going to have to adore. And I'm going to tell him about some of the things that are reality about football that can happen. Most people say they don't try not to tell their children everything. They need to just be kids. Well, I don't kind of believe in that.

I think, you know, in this world, kids grow up fast. And if you're not the one telling them, somebody else is telling them, whether it's the Game Boy, the TV, their friends, they'll get wherever they want to get from anywhere. So you can't just stick your head in the sand and say, I'm going to try to shelter them. And I let them know, like, look, you know, I, to this day, my body hurts because of certain things I did on the field.

You can be seriously hurt playing football. You can be, you know, the things that come along with it. If you don't hit people the correct way, you can become paralyzed. You can break your arm. You can, you know, you can pass out because you run so much. And I would just give them the pros and the cons. But I say, you know, those things are really rare. And that's why they teach you the game in a way.

And you get a good coach that teaches you how to tackle. They know when to give you water. They know when to make sure that you look for the signs that you're okay. And they slowly but surely bring you along. I don't think your kid needs to be playing tackle football at seven or eight like it just does you no good like i didn't i always look at it like this i didn't play till i was 15 and i still got a scholarship and all the other people if it's gonna be if you're talented and it's meant to be, they'll find you, right? So you don't need to be out there since you're five years old,

tackling each other, beating your body up. Heck, you can play flag football if you want to. You do seven on seven. But, you know, I would give him the real about what I think about it, and I'd give him the roadmap. But one thing I won't do is I won't deprive him an opportunity to do something while he's young, just because I was scared. I hear that. And I appreciate that perspective as well. And I get a sense from

what you've shared that, you know, the choice to play football, either as an amateur or as a professional, there are a set of risks that come with it inherently. And that choice in, in, in so many ways is a function of, um, the choices we make about protecting folks or hedging against those risks. Right. And you talked about, um, your, your, uh, own family members and, um, the risks that they went through and the accidents that they sustained in a workplace. And of course, they had unions, right? Unions were built out of those industries because of the inherent risk of doing work in a steel mill or doing work on a railroad. And in some respects, you know, the challenge with football is that while the NFL players have a union, the union hasn't done everything that it's supposed

to to protect those players against the risk. I want to focus in here on the DeMar Hamlin injury and your reflections following that injury that went viral. What do you think resonated so much about them? And what are the kinds of things that we need to do to protect football players' bigger picture in the same ways that, you know, unions for steel workers protected so much of the opportunity for folks who worked in that field? Well, firstly, I think it resonated with people. I would call it a perfect storm.

So the game was on a Monday night. It was a game between the Bills and the Bengals. And both of those teams were really good. They're fighting for uh playoff positioning and they're just you know two good quarterbacks two marquee names so everybody is watching that game everybody is you know sitting there and they're glued in so you know when the injury happens i think the reason why it took kind of storm was we had never seen somebody like die on the field though Like he had to be resuscitated twice and then on top of that they called the game

so there was a bunch of different things that happened that really gave a lot of uh Gasoline to kind of spread the little smoldering flyer underneath of what a lot of people were talking about and i think one of the reasons it also resonated is because when you are looking at dalton mclean sports show right before that clip we had a dd kicking ball on and she was talking about how the fact that she's um she knew damar hamlin's um mother and she knew that back in the day um his her mother cleaned houses and babysat and did extra jobs and cleaned offices and cleaned people's houses so that he can have a better chance of going at a private school, which was much better. He grew up in a tough neighborhood. A lot of his friends and family had died because of gang violence and just the neighborhood was being so tough.

So she scraped and scrounged and did whatever she could to get him there. And she was just really proud of it. Went to the University of Pitt. He decided to stay close to home to be next to her and her and his little brother. His father was already incarcerated for a long time, long period during his adolescence. So for me, I think I was just infuriated because, you know, everybody just was talking about, you know, why the NFL had done such a great job and, you know, salute to the first responders. And I have the greatest, utmost respect for first responders.

They do their job, right? But my problem is that it became this who can who can be the most solemn and who can virtue signal the most like everybody's oh yeah i just you know right now the best thing that we can do is just pray and and just our thoughts and wishes and and i just it was just so disingenuous and it still is disingenuous because they they'll talk about all those things but if you start talking about guaranteed contracts all of a sudden it's oh we don't have the money for that oh well that's that it's no way we could pay guaranteed contracts it's no way we can well that we can't really, the NFL has everybody kind of in their pocket a little bit. Everybody is an affiliate of the NFL.

And most of the times, people that's on the media and people that's talking will never, ever, ever say a bad word about the NFL. Because most of the people commentating are either former players and or guys that are at the networks with the suits who are getting the propaganda. So they're not going to say anything about this. And what I was bringing to the table was these guys are billionaires. We shouldn't be praising them because they got first responders out there on time. If you was really worried about that why would you not be worried about his long-term care after that because the reality of situation is if he doesn't make the team next year he doesn't get a pension you know if if he doesn't get a pension that means he don't have insurance if he don't got insurance how is he going to get insurance moving forward and he already has a pre-existing condition of a heart issue and we've seen it all over the country so my thing is the nfl there

should be way more that they're doing in order to meet these players at a certain level because the reality of the situation is everybody thinks that the players are making this amount of money up here because the league projects that but the reality is that most players make under the iceberg um under the you know under the water where you see the large group of people um that are making uh two hundred thousand three hundred thousand these guys aren't making the millions and have just as many responsibilities as it goes that those guys at the top. Yeah. Aside from guaranteeing contracts and pensions, what are some of the other things that the NFL needs to do to take seriously the well-being of its players, both while they're playing, but then certainly afterwards?

Well, first of all, they can stop making people jump through thousands of hoops in order to get CTE disabilities filed. So the league, I think it was 2014, I think, 2013 maybe. So I think it's the 10-year anniversary or whatever. So the league was sued by the Players Association and the players for CTE. They said the DNFL knew that CTE was something that would be part of football and that was debilitating as players got old, but they covered it up and never gave them the information. The league lost that settlement.

It was upwards of $700, $800 million. It could have been upwards of a billion, but the Players Association, as always, caved. But now to get any of that CTE money To get any disability Or to be deemed disabled Now the NFL has gone to the lengths of saying You have to be diagnosed by your doctor And then you got to go before A certified board of hand-picked people That the NFL deems And will let you know if you're

disabled. So they used to go by the fact that they should just trust the social security disability to lead them and guide them on whether or not these individuals should be deemed disabled. Now you have to go through a panel or board and you can be denied for CTE or disability based on what their panel says. And it is regardless of social security. They can say you're disabled. They can override that. Your doctor can say you're disabled. They can override that too. So what ends up happening is you get a lot of people who are suffering, whether they have symptoms of CTE, suicidal, mood swings, bipolar, violence, drinking, you know, just all of those things continue on as you have CTE. And they can't even get treatment. You made a point about where most of the players in the NFL actually are, right?

We hear about the multi-million dollar contracts, but those are the tip of the iceberg. And most of these guys will matriculate into the NFL, they'll play three or four years making less than a million dollars a year. And then because their whole life was football, and they may not even have graduated college, it becomes really, really difficult for them after the fact. Plus, they're dealing with all the medical consequences. What happens to some of these players that we don't really pay attention to who never quite make it? Where do they go? What do they do? What does their life look like after three, four years in the league? Well, if you're smart, maybe you've had infrastructure.

Maybe you've had some of that. Maybe you've learned how to, you know, keep your money. Maybe you've learned how to, you know, use your money wisely. But I've always said that this is a concerted effort on the part of the NCAA as well as the NFL to keep wages down. And so the way the game is set up, it makes people slot these kids in a way where they maximize how well they're going to play. They maximize what they can get out of them for multiple different places.

The NCAA gets paid. Nike gets paid. Adidas gets paid. The pros get paid. the owners get paid and and the people who are actually doing it there's maybe the top of the iceberg where the quarterback selections or a quarterback maybe defensive end or receiver those guys make it to second pick contracts the rest of them they're just living check to check they're just trying to make it just like you and me, trying to get to that second deal. I want to step back, right?

Because all of this, every piece of this, very exploitative system that has young men putting their bodies on the line, potentially at risk of deadly injuries and long-term consequences, all of this is driven because we can't stop watching, right? So what is it about football that leaves off spending billions of dollars? Why do you think we're so hooked to the sport? When we talk about the American dream

and like manifest destiny and the American way, what we're talking about is this thing, this inherent property that America is the best, we're the strongest, we're the most powerful, we'll go through hell or high water to get it done. America is strong, we're masculine, and we don't take no prisoners. All of that is just a bravado. All of that is something you've been taught from the day you was born. Hey, if you cry too much, hey, stop crying so much. You know, you're a boy, girls cry, boys don't, right? You know, if you're a guy and you don't identify with certain things, right? They're like, I don't know. If you're soft-spoken, they call you a beta male. Oh, he's a beta. You know what I'm saying? Is he really an alpha male? Can he command the minds and the energy of

a room? And all of that is just, all it is is is just it's this thing this bravado america has and so when we talk about our pastime when we talk about our sports it's a direct mirror on the way we view society and ourselves it's been going on for years back in the days and the romans it was the gladiators who you know would go out there and and they would fight to the death. And the gladiator who was a lower ranking individual usually was a slave. Sometimes he could have been a person who was just basically a criminal or a mercenary. But what people loved was the fact that you did see those slaves and mercenaries and people that are disenfranchised fight their way up the top, fight their way up the chain. So when you talk about the story, that's where the feel-good

story comes from. It's like, wow, look at this underdog. He was a slave for half his life. The family got took away from him. Now he's in a gladiator arena, beating champions and thieves and lions and all kinds of stuff we put in front of him and he's won 10 in a row we don't see that that guy is crushed and his family ain't never coming back and he's he's damaged inside and he's hurt we don't see that all we see is we want to entertain this is what it is and so when so when you look at football, it's the next best version of that. It's just part of the American fabric at this point.

What I hear you saying is that football takes some of the most egregious narratives that we tell ourselves about who we are as a country, and it puts it on the field every Sunday. People get to watch folks push to the max, hurting each other or getting hurt. And the violence is almost the point, right? And it plays out some of the, I hate to say it,

but like weird sort of machismo fantasies around which American identity is born. And, you know, as you say that and you think about it, you know, you really do sort of recognize so many of the worst narratives about who belongs here, about what America is and about what we want to play out, play it out on the field. And so I guess, you know, I got to, I got to ask you, you know, thinking through that and the point that you made in particular about the disenfranchised, you know, both you and I played football. And I think both you and I could identify some of the things that it taught us. And at the same time, you know, when, when you sort of hear it told like that, you got to ask, did it tell us the best things about ourselves? Right. I mean, it's, it's interesting, right? Because on the one hand, I love playing football because it was one of those places where I could take out any aggression I had and nobody told me

it was wrong. Everybody told me, in fact, that that's exactly what you're supposed to do. You go hit that guy as hard as you possibly can. And, you know, I don't know that as a young man, that was like the best thing to be taught, right? And like, in some respects, I can identify that it helped me work out a lot of those things. But at the same time, I kind of wish somebody would sat down and said, hey, Abdul, like, if you're feeling these kind of emotions, we probably work through it together. We should probably talk about it. Like, why do you feel this kind of way? And what's a, what's a productive use of your time and energy if you feel that kind of conflict? Right. And so I guess I, you know, on that side, like I think about it, I'm out there hitting somebody, trying

to hit them harder than, than they hit hit me, recognizing that both of us are at risk of injury, all because we got to tell ourselves that we're stronger, faster, more powerful. And, you know, let alone, and like in our own lives, it has destructive consequences, let alone what that tells us about what our country does, right? You think about all the wars that we fight abroad, all of the sordid history of oppressing other people in the name of this American idea, right? Whether it was, quote, manifest destiny and destroying Native Americans, or it was the

transatlantic slave trade where, you know, folks who, quote, founded this country on the backs of Native folks that they destroyed, then captured people, enslaved them, and had them work their fields because they thought it was their right, right? And all of this, like a lot of these narratives you kind of see echoed in the ethos of football. So I got to ask you, like, is there a productive way to do football that, you know, beyond even the injury point, that doesn't reify and play out a lot of these narratives that we can identify as being so harmful, both for individuals who play, but then also for what we tell ourselves our country ought to be. Well, that's a hard thing. I'll try to unpack that as much as I can. But I do think, could they separate those two? Sure. You know, the ethos and all of the doctrines that come with the American identity, could you take that and separate it from football?

You could, but then you would end up with the football that wasn't as popular. You'd have to go back to the Howard Cosell football. Those weren't interesting enough, right? For football to get where it got, people got to realize in this country, you know, cycling was huge. Boxing was huge. Baseball was America's pastime. You know, the old radios and guys sitting around listening to the radio and stuff like that. Football was wasn't the darling and mega sports business that it is today. They had to do a lot of things to get it there, starting with antitrust laws.

They had to get it there with tax exemption to even grow it to that level and so when you talk about you know how is it that we go about figuring out how to separate that from the american dream and all of those different things like that i don't think it's it's possible But it's very difficult case in point You know they're so Good at Weaving and tapestry And putting things together about Narratives and about collective identity That's why it's so powerful

When they say salute to Service we gonna Have a salute to service we gonna watch Camouflage all The whole month of this month of november we're going to have new jerseys we got the camouflage gear army comes out the jets fly over every single sunday everybody's up for the anthem with their flags see but what a lot of people don't understand is they charge the defense department for that the air force the navy all those people get

charged to advertise right and people never think they was like oh this is such a nice thing that the league is doing no no what it is is trying to gain a a foothold in a place, in an organization, in a group of people that they know have diehard principles. When you talk about a veteran communicating with other veterans, they have nothing but the utmost loyalty and respect. So if you're a marketing machine, the best thing you can do is indoctrinate yourself and stand beside people that have loyalty, have some sort of integrity, that are true hard workers. They do the same thing with Breast Care Awareness Month. They realize that, hey, some of our athletes are idiots and they're getting into too many domestic violences. They're getting into way too many different things outside with women. What way can we bring back some of our fan base that happen to be women?

Well, like we always say, if I don't got cancer, we are all touched by somebody who has cancer. Everybody. It doesn't matter if I got it, but you know, an aunt, you know, a cousin, you know, a sister, you know, a neighbor, you know, a great grandmother grandmother you've been touched by it so what better way to indoctrinate people is to say we're gonna wear pink we're gonna salute pink all that whole month right so it shows women in virtue signal says hey listen we're here for you we understand your plight and the league in the nfl cares NFL cares. They also get advertising dollars that they have to pay to the NFL to do that. So what happens is when you mix in politics, religion, hope, morals, and social norms, and you mix it all in with a great game

and a competitive game and a game where each year your team could be good. Jaguars weren't no good. Guess what? They're good this year, right? It's year to year you'll go on another team. So every year you even think your team's going to win. When you put that all together,

that is a very powerful marketing plan. And it's tough to debunk or hit on all of these different things because people are just so enthralled because they're doing it in multiple levels. You know, I want to ask you, right, because you talk a little bit about the sort of intermixing of narrative and narratives that, you know, not all of us like or agree with, with the power of the narratives that come out of any given game. This week, this team could win, this other team could win.

Who's going to make the playoffs? Who's going to win the Super Bowl? What's going to happen next year with this player that I happen to like and follow? One of the things that I think is so powerful and a testament to what you shared and sort of brings us back to where we started is the fact that the league has weathered now several crises, controversies around health,

but also around racial justice. You think about Colin Kaepernick taking a knee and the way that the league, in effect, drummed him out. You think about the CTE controversy that's ongoing and the way that the league tried to use race to argue that some people were not as intelligent to begin with and therefore should not be entitled to corrective action because of the CTE they sustained playing the game. The league's weathered all that.

And yet there was something about the DeMar Hamlin injury that I think brought it front and center again, that this is a very dangerous game and that all of us are entertaining ourselves. And the league is making billions of dollars hand over fist at the risk of young men, many of whom come from underserved backgrounds. Where do you think the league goes from here? Do you think the league can weather this? Do you think this will change any of the narrative about football? And, you know, think about it. We're all about to sit down and watch the Super Bowl. What should we have in the back of our minds about that injury and about what that means for this sport that, know we are participating in uh as as

viewers well i think what a league goes forward is they continue to deflect just like most politicians when they you know they do it they even do such a good job of stopping people like me from saying anything right when i came into radio and i wanted to do my first um first radio shows or whatever one of my first radio shows was about how the ncaa is not is not i can't compare it to slavery but it sure is sharecropping um that was my first show and i think my second show We talked about The fact that you know You know with Kaepernick

He was taking a knee and everybody In their mind was like oh he's disrespecting The flag disrespecting the flag Our troops disrespecting the flag And my second show was Well look You guys that are so You know upset about the flag

And disrespected it I said you guys are liars Because at the time The American flag Flies Right by The confederate flag At every SEC stadium

And the Southeastern Conference And that confederate flag W waves at all of your state capitals right underneath the United States flag. So you meaning to tell me a guy who's sitting down, you know, peacefully protesting police brutality for African-Americans. He's the traitor. He's the treasonous guy but whole institutions readily wave a flag that was waved in the battlefield killing union soldiers literally treasonous people these the definition of treason right and so you you fly that and you say well it's all about time it's all about state history and Southern pride.

Why would you even want to be prideful about anything that's happened in the South back then? Right? So after you pose that question, they're like, who's this guy? Who's this kid? Cause you know what they tell you hey i have so many people if you want to go far in this business you don't talk about religion you don't talk about money and you don't talk about politics and then i came in and said you can't talk about the nfl without money religion in the politics that's what the league is made of so what are you talking so if they get you to think i may never get to the espns or fox news desk i'm gonna just play my role and i'm gonna shut up and play and toe it like this and maybe i can just look out for myself because i don't feel like i

can make some sort of change they threaten you with that and if you're the only voice you're one voice eventually you'll go away, right? But with the DeMar Hamlin situation, I think it resonated so much was, it wasn't the fact that it went viral because of what I said. I think I've said more elaborate things or even, frankly, more important things in my life. However, it was the NFL players,

the current players, who took it and ran with it. And that tells me something. That tells me the Players Association ain't doing their job. That tells me that they've been cashing checks all along, not looking out for the best interests of their constituents. And it also shows me that a lot of these people either don't know, players don't know what's in their collecting of bargain agreement, or better yet, or even more alarming, is that they feel a sense of that they can't rock the boat. They don't want to rock the boat. They don't want to say anything and mess stuff up. And so when all those players took it and ran with it, it validated what I was saying.

It validated the sentiment um it wasn't necessarily something that was that was shot heard around the world but what it what it did it showed that other players feel like this is something that's concerning to them and that's something that they don't agree with that they want to take a look at yeah do you think the league is going to make any changes? They'll give DeMar DeMar Hamlin his money. They'll probably if it was me

and I was a fixer I would tell him listen I would come up have a press conference and say look you know DeMar you know

we're so ecstatic for him to be back and what we're going to do is the Buffalo Bills is going to guarantee That no matter what, he'll get the remainder of his contract With the Buffalo Bills, no matter what it is We'll reevaluate that And then I'm also going to let him know That the rule says you get insurance for five years after you're done

Then you have to re-up. What we're going to do with Buffalo Bills, we're going to make sure that he has a permanent insurance from now until when he touches the grave. We'll make sure that he has health insurance for that. And, you know, I just think this is important for us to do, and I think it's something that, you know, that our players deserve. Now, the Buffalo Bills did that.

The story goes away, right? For them, it goes away. The problem is now you've set a precedent. Now the precedent is, well, Jerry Jones, that kid tore his ACL. Are you going to make sure he has insurance? Well, that kid over there, neck injury. You're going to make sure he has insurance. Well, that kid over there, neck injury. You're going to make sure, Daniel Snyder, you're going to make sure he has health care. He can go to therapy.

So then it puts in a point where now other owners is like, man, you out here speaking for our money. You're in my pockets right now. We didn't agree with that, right? We are a unified group. We believe in collective bargaining and you just went off and did some one-off i don't think in the long term that the league will do it which is very unwise um because my thing is when you look at this we talked about it and going back a little bit before football football attendance is down.

Football participation is down. You look at it from all different age groups. Teams that used to be Division I have to drop down because they don't have the amount of boys. You look at soccer programs on the rise. You look at other things, basketball. There's a lot of other things people are playing besides football. The CTE thing is the scariest thing in the world because right now they can't test for CTE unless you die. And they need your intact brain to do so.

They found 99% of the brains that they received from those players, 99.9% of those guys had CTE, which is a devastating, you know, basically that statistic says it all. Now, you can't test for it now, but what if within three, four years you could test for it and you could test at all different levels and you're able to take a test and a doctor come back and say, you already have stage one CTE. And guess what? You got a choice to make. And now, if you don't have that, that could possibly end your, could possibly end your career. It could possibly end everything. So if I was the league, what I would do, I would come out and give them insurance now in lieu before that happens. So you can always say, well, we knew this game was a dangerous we knew it was a very dangerous sport however um we we're gonna make right by y'all we're gonna make sure that we give you health care continuing on it doesn't have to be something crazy they could even start by giving

something like va benefits because we know va benefits is not that crazy right they get you to work on their stuff too but i think if they came out and did that i think people would would definitely put this injury thing in the back of their rear view our guest today was garrett bush he's the host of the ultimate cleveland sports show the barbershop and the locked on browns podcast and we're not going to hold it against him that is from the state of ohio garrett thank you so much yep as usual here's what i'm watching right now. The U.S. COVID-19 emergency declarations finally have an end date. The Biden administration says it will extend both the national and public health emergencies only until May 11th. That's right. The Biden administration plans to end the COVID-19 state of emergency that will have existed for more than three years in May. On the one hand, emergency implies that a problem is newly emergent, and it's hard to call anything that's lasted for three years an emergency.

On the other, so much of the COVID-era investments in public health and healthcare hinge upon that state of emergency. And stepping back for a second, it's a full-on indictment of our healthcare and public health systems that you need a, quote, emergency to be able to provide people vaccines, testing, and treatment that is free at the point of care. And that's what I'm worried about. Even if you have good insurance, you'll likely have to pay co-pays for PCR testing and treatment. And those free tests the government was sending to our homes? Those will end too. For Medicare recipients, seniors with the highest risk of COVID death, some COVID treatments may require co-pays too. But uninsured folks, that's who I worry about most. Vaccine manufacturers are already planning to jack up the price of their vaccines to up to $130 a pop for Moderna.

And that's unaffordable for the uninsured. And there are about to be a lot more uninsured folks. The public health emergency kept many state-operated Medicaid programs from booting folks off their insurance. With that emergency over, they'll be forced off now. But there are also things we're not thinking about, like SNAP, the public benefit food program. Throughout the pandemic, SNAP beneficiaries have gotten an added boost, allowing them to buy more food for their families. That's ending this month, in the midst of inflation that has raised the price of eggs up 60% and the ongoing risk of a recession.

Make no mistake, COVID itself isn't over. It's hard to say that something that's taking nearly 400 lives a day could be. And so ending the emergency seems a bit premature. And it's definitely more about political pressure than public health. But beyond that, the fact that we've required a declaration of emergency to provide people basic healthcare,

basic access to healthy food, and better security says a lot about the pre-COVID normal we're about to go back to. Fixing that has to be the primary goal. Now, remember what I just said about vaccine manufacturers raising their prices after the emergency ends? Well, it's not just you and I, the taxpayers who funded the research that created their vaccines who they're trying to nickel and dime. According to a report from the New York Times, Gavi, the nonprofit behind the ill-fated COVAX plan to vaccinate the lowest

income people in the world, is out $1.4 billion for vaccines that were never actually given. The plan, of course, was to contract the drug companies for supply that COVAX would then deliver. As global demand for vaccines waned with misinformation, many of these doses never made it to where they were supposed to go. But that hasn't stopped the companies, including Moderna, Novavax, and Johnson & Johnson, from trying to keep the payments. But here's the thing. This wasn't just any 1.4 billion, with a B, dollars. It was money intended to protect the health and well-being of the poorest people in the world.

That money, even if it's not being spent on COVID vaccines, could still benefit those people, but not if it's sitting in corporate back pockets. The greed. Last week, Rovon and Rodney Wells laid to rest their son, Tyree Nichols, who was murdered, beaten to death by Memphis police. Tyree was remembered as a kind soul, an avid skateboarder, and a loving son. He was murdered in a routine traffic stop in a murder that was being targeted

by Memphis' quote, scorpion unit. Video released by Memphis PD showed officers taking turns beating him with an asp baton, punching and kicking him, and tasing him. Even EMTs stood by for 19 minutes as Nichols lay beaten and bloodied. Five officers directly involved with Nichols' murder have been relieved of duty and charged almost immediately. Two more have since been relieved. But the murder of Tyree Nichols at the hands of police has reignited a conversation about the brutality of policing in America. One issue is the so-called Scorpion Unit that committed the murder, cartoonishly named for specifically tasked with aggressively policing high-crime neighborhoods in Memphis. The thesis that underlies units like these, that often measure their progress on the number of stops or arrests they commit, is that that kind of activity is a deterrent.

But the numbers don't add up. These units just end up hassling a bunch of folks who are now both victims of crime and aggressive policing. And that's when they don't end up hassling a bunch of folks who are now both victims of crime and aggressive policing. And that's when they don't end up killing defenseless drivers just trying to get home for the night. Memphis disbanded their Scorpion unit. But I hope that this serves as a lesson for other communities who think that standing up police units named after deadly insects or animals that terrorize high-crime neighborhoods is a good idea. Maybe instead of pumping yet more money into putting war material onto streets, we could invest in improving the mental health and well-being of our communities and the folks tasked with upholding public safety. Because one thing is clear, the cops who murdered Tyree Nichols had long since lost their humanity. That's it for today. On your way out, don't forget to rate and review. It goes a long way. Also, if you love the show and want to rep us,

I hope you'll drop by the Crooked store for some America-detected merch. We've got our logo mugs and t-shirts, our Science Always Wins sweatshirts, and dad caps are available too. American Dissected is a product of Crooked Media. Our producer is Austin Fisher. Our associate producers are Tara Terpstra and Alex Uguiera. Our executive producers are Leo Duran, Sarah Geismar, Sandy Gerard, Michael Martinez, and me, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, your host. Thanks for listening. This show is for general information and entertainment purposes only. Thank you. present the view and opinions of Wayne County, Michigan, or its Department of Health, Human, and Veteran Services.