I’ve been dealing with a lot of guilt over the last couple of days. As I mentioned earlier, my previously concussed son Andy played in his level’s state hockey championships over the weekend. Midway through the first game he tripped over an opponent and slid head-first into the boards and immediately removed himself from the game. He didn’t play the rest of the tournament, complaining of slight, intermittent headaches. His team won that game, and the next, but lost in overtime in the finals.
The likelihood was great that they would have won. The likelihood was also great that continuing to play would have done him no long-term harm. So should he have played?
“Of course not,” you say in unison, and I get that. That was our decision, too. We were good parents. He lives to play another day. But as time goes on, I find more merit in the counterarguments.
First, the medical facts as we know them: Second concussions are not a good thing. Receiving additional head trauma when you have a concussion – even a first concussion -- can result in something called “second-impact syndrome,” and that can result in death. A handful of athletes die each year from second-impact syndrome.
A number-cruncher would tell you there was a slight risk to my son’s life from having him play, which is true, though the additional risk was only a very, very small amount greater than the risk to anyone’s life from playing hockey. You can die playing hockey no matter how your head feels, yet we continue to play hockey.
There are good reasons why, of course. Your risk of dying while playing hockey is about the same as your risk of tripping on a Higgs boson. More importantly, if a player’s throat is cut by a skate blade and he bleeds to death on the ice, it’s a freak accident. The survivors can sue all they want, but who are they going to sue? The skate manufacturer? The skate-sharpener? The rink? The program? The parents? Liability is scant. No one’s going to walk away rich from a lightning strike like that.
On the other hand, if a coach knowingly plays a kid with a concussion and he gets hurt, the coach and the organization are liable to the gills. So like a lot of safety decisions, the decision to hold out players with concussions has a candy shell of compassion and a dark center of money.
Ah, but there is philosophy. Philosophically, we respect life. We don’t treat lives cavalierly. We’ve know implicitly that it’s wrong to throw a 13-year-old boy onto the ice with a known injury so his team can stand a better chance of winning a made-up tournament for a pretend league created by drawing boxes around a bunch of players and teams.
It’s so clear, yet this is where things get murky.
Respect for life is a Judeo-Christian ethic, but so is noble sacrifice, putting the good of all above the needs of one. The Unknown Soldier fell on the grenade; Jack Youngblood played the Super Bowl with a broken leg; Jesus died for our sins. From the bloody sock to John Wayne in The Searchers to Joan of Arc dying at the stake we make these sacrifices a part of our mythos, no matter how hackneyed their truths might be. (The Searchers was fiction, Joan of Arc might as well be, and what does it really matter that the Boston Red Sox won a World Series?)
Many of Andy’s teammates had never won a state championship in anything. This was their last best shot at something – no matter how made-up it might be -- that they would cherish the rest of their lives. By choosing to accede to the sliver of risk and not let Andy make the modest sacrifice of playing, we were depriving these kids of a glory that was rightfully theirs. We chose the selfish Judeo-Christian ethic over the selfless one.
We have a hard time with selfishness. We repudiate it, yet the most important decisions we make in life and the emotions that play through those decisions are essentially selfish. All that’s asked of us is that we balance selfishness and selflessness. If everyone in the World Trade Center was selfless, they all would have died trying to get each other out; if everyone was selfish, they would have clogged the exits and perished.
Selfishness and selflessness only stick out when we they contradict expectations. We close our eyes to the charity done by the robber baron; we turn our face from Lance Armstrong’s blood-doping; we feign outrage when parents force a teenage athlete to play through a concussion.
However, in this case had we allowed Andy to play and had his team won, this act of selflessness and sacrifice would have come at his opponents’ expense. A once-in-a-lifetime thrill would have been transferred, not created. There would have been no additional winners, only different winners.
To me, the only meaningful justification for our actions is that we wouldn’t have made anything better by letting him play. We only would have created an alternate ending.
In the end, we made a right choice, not the right choice. There were others.
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