I have no beef with Fox Sports reporter Jay Glazer. I think he’s a pretty smart football “insider” who is clearly well respected to his sources across the National Football League. But today on The Bill Simmons podcast he made some really wacky comments about football, CTE, combat soldiers, and PTSD, as first noted by Deadspin.
During the conversation, Glazer tells Simmons that there are underlying issues that cause PTSD and CTE in football players and soldiers. This completely negates the “trauma” part of “post-traumatic stress disorder” or “chronic traumatic encephalopathy.” That’s a weird thing to say to a combat solider or a football player who has had their heat smashed dozens of times on the gridiron since the age of 6. Here’s a transcript via Deadspin:
A lot of times, if you’re a soldier, you have depression, you have some issues, that’s what’s leading you to war … It’s not sane for me to go sit in a cage and get kicked in the face by people, right? It’s not sane. First of all, it’s not sane. And second of all, I’m Jewish so I’ve really got everything against me. There’s something off about me going in.
Any football player, it’s the same thing. It helps lead you away from certain problems, and now that we’re going, “Oh man this guy’s suffering from depression, this guy’s suffering from this and this.” No, we had it going in. For the most part. Not every single person, but a lot of us had it going in. Now we’re just lumping it all together. You know, our soldiers come back and they tell you, “Man you’ve got depression, man. You’ve got this 10-percent PTSD.” And they’re like, “Pffff. This is nothing. You oughta seen how I was before this.”
[…]
Again, I know I have issues. Getting knocked out did not lead me to my issues. My issues led me to go do that sport, and there’s a lot of people in that same position.
You can listen to the whole podcast here. The conversation about CTE starts around 16:00.
https://soundcloud.com/the-bill-simmons-podcast/ep-78-jay-glazer
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