The bleak, unlovely month of February has two things to recommend it, and one of those is that it’s all over quickly. The other is that it brings the Six Nations with it. Since the championship starts in winter and ends in spring, it always feels like the harbinger of better things, and in the meantime there’s the welcome prospect of long weekend afternoons spent watching games at the pub or at home in front of the TV, or, if you’re lucky, a trip out to one of the grounds, maybe even a weekend away in Paris or Rome. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. This year the championship already feels diminished, fraught and perilous, just like everything else.
It’s not just the lack of fans, the empty grounds, the shuttered pubs, bars and restaurants. These will be the first Test matches since Steve Thompson, Alix Popham, Michael Lipman, and two other former professionals revealed that they have been diagnosed with either early onset dementia and probable CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), or other post-concussion symptoms.
It gets worse. Popham tells me that behind the scenes more and more players have been coming forward to report symptoms, men and women, amateurs and professionals, in the UK, New Zealand and Australia. “The scary thing is that the numbers are growing every day.”
I was talking about it all with Peter Robinson last week. In the run-up to this year’s championship I have spent more time chatting to doctors, patients and activists than I have players and coaches. Peter’s 14-year-old son, Ben, died of Second Impact Syndrome during a school rugby game in 2011, because he was allowed to play on after he was hit in the head. Peter still watches rugby. “But I watch it differently now,” he says. “Do I enjoy it? I don’t know.”
How much do you need to know about the damage the sport can do before your enjoyment of it sours? How much do you need to know before you stop wanting to watch it altogether? “Maybe now with the latest about the litigation, people are realising how dangerous this all is,” Robinson says.
Like a lot of the people I’ve spoken to lately, Peter is convinced that the culture of the game needs to change, so that everyone involved is more aware of the risks. He gets frustrated that the coverage of the issue is still so intermittent, that “when you get an incident on TV everybody talks about it for a week, and then it all goes away again”.
Truth is, there are times when I’ve switched on and off that way myself. I suspect almost everyone who watches the game has, because it’s so hard to reconcile our day-to-day enjoyment of it with the growing body of evidence about the long-term damage it can do to the men and women who play it. Too often, the easiest way is to ignore it, until you can’t.
Peter isn’t the only one making this argument, I’ve heard similar from plenty of other people, too. Like Dr Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist who first diagnosed CTE in the brain of the retired American football player Mike Webster. “What we need to do is engage with the culture,” Omalu told me last week. He compares it to an oil tanker – “it will take time to turn it around, it may take one generation, or two”, but it will happen, even if it’s “one person at a time”.
And Dr Judith Gates, who is, along with Popham, one of the founders of the new charity Head For Change. “This is an epidemic,” Gates says. “This must stop now. We must all acknowledge the fragility of the brain, alongside its centrality in defining the person.”
This isn’t just about changing the attitudes of the people who play the game, or who run it or referee it, but everyone who talks about it, writes about it and watches it, too, at elite and amateur levels. One group trying to help the sport navigate this change is the Concussion Legacy Foundation, founded in 2007 by Chris Nowinski and Dr Robert Cantu.
They have been working in the United States for most of that time, and now they’re expanding into the UK. Among other things, the CLF is running a media engagement programme to help educate journalists about how best to report on these issues. Their idea is that children learn most of what they know about these issues from watching sport on TV. So if you want to change the culture, then commentators are a good place to start.
The CLF held its first UK concussion reporting workshop on Monday, in partnership with Oxford Brookes University (they have a useful toolkit on their website, too, offering a free course in responsible reporting). It puts a lot of emphasis on the need to use honest, accurate and unvarnished language, which is something Robinson spoke about too. He mentioned how glad he was when he heard a commentator describe a concussion as a “traumatic brain injury” on TV, even if “it made a lot of people fall off their seats because it was such a shock”. It is a small but significant change, one that puts more emphasis on the seriousness of the injury.
“If you ask me what could improve,” Robinson says, “it would be getting that message out, consistently and clearly: that this is a traumatic brain injury, and you have to take it seriously because it can be fatal.”
It still feels like there are too many people in the game who are reluctant to acknowledge the risks, who would rather step around them, or pretend they’re not there at all. This Six Nations, hopefully we’ll see signs that the change the game needs is coming, even if it’s being done one word at a time.
