Why I've decided to give up football

SANDUSKY — For as long as I can remember, I've followed University of Oklahoma sports. I grew up in Oklahoma, and I got my journalism degree there.But I've made no attempt this fall to watch any Oklahoma football games, not even the one the Sooners played in Columbus.My house is in Berea, where the Cleveland Browns have their headquarters. It's impossible to live in the Cleveland area without hearing about the Browns. I haven't watched any Browns games this year.Admittedly, giving up watching the Browns isn't a heavy sacrifice, but Oklahoma is having a pretty good year. The Sooners defeated Ohio State, in case you hadn't heard, and have won their other games, too.My reasons for shunning football go deeper than wins or losses for any particular team. Now that I know what football does to people, I can no longer justify supporting it in any way.We like to think we are better than the ancient Romans, who watched gladiators kill each other in the arena.But in fact, by the time the western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the Roman Empire had become Christian, and gladiatorial games had been banned. In the New Rome, Constantinople, chariot racing became the main sport.In our country, still somewhat Christian, people amuse themselves by watching people gradually destroy their brains in football stadiums.Nigerian doctor Bennet Omalu — they made a movie about him called "Concussion" starring Will Smith — has estimated that more than 90 percent of American professional football players suffer from CTE, chronic encephalopathy."I have not examined any brain of a retired football player that came back negative," Omalu told Time magazine in an interview you can read online.A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association of 202 American football players who had donated their brains for research found symptoms of CTE in 177 of the players, 87 percent of them, including 110 of 111 former National Football League players.Here are a couple of quotes from the article that Fox News ran on the study."Many former NFL greats were included in the study, namely Bubba Smith, Ken Stabler, Junior Seau, Frank Wainright and Dave Duerson.""Wainright was 48 when he died in October of a heart attack, which (his widow) Stacie said was triggered by a brain bleed. He spent 10 years in the NFL before retiring, and spent the last eight of his life suffering from confusion, memory loss and behavior changes. Stacie said her husband was adamant about donating his brain to science over fears of CTE."I wish it were easier to give up football.One of my favorite bloggers, PQ of the "A Building Roam" blog, wrote in 2014, "I've always considered football to be the most boring of all the four major American sports." Giving up football would be easier if I agreed, but like many Americans, I think football is an exciting and fascinating game. I didn't really want to give it up, but I can't any longer ignore the evidence of the medical damage to the players. I understand the people who love football. I'm not trying to insist that my habits are necessarily better than other people's habits.If you decide that you've had enough, too, and you're not going to support football anymore, it's not as if you have to give up sports on TV.Thanks to the age of cable sports, baseball is available seven days a week for most of the year, with the gap nicely filled by basketball. There's soccer, hockey, and so on.I've become a bigger Cleveland Indians fan than ever, and that helps. I'm also going to make a conscious decision to pay more attention to the NBA.I do have more free time these days, because I no longer read the annual long "Browns finally have found a quarterback" stories in the Plain Dealer, or the weekly "plucky Browns almost win" articles.But there's still plenty to read on the sports pages. And in our modern age of entertainment, there's plenty to do.The rest of the world gets by without American football. Maybe I can, too.Oklahoma running back Dimitri Flowers, left, outruns Ohio State defenders Erick Smith, center, and Damon Arnette to score a touchdown during the second half of an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Sept. 9, 2017, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon)Register photo/JASON WERLING 2010