Are You Not Entertained?!?! The Glorification of Gruesome Sports Injuries



By now, most of you have heard about or seen the lower leg injury that Louisville Cardinals' guard Kevin Ware suffered playing against the Duke Blue Devils in the NCAA Midwest regional final on Sunday.  With a little over six minutes remaining in the first half contesting a three-point shot, Ware came down awkwardly on his right leg, which bent at a 90-degree angle and led to an open fracture where nearly six inches of bone protruded through his skin.  In a scene filled with coaches crying, teammates regurgitating and an arena full of people praying for the sophomore guard, it is arguably the most horrific injury ever seen on a basketball court.  CBS, who aired the game, may have shown the replay a total of three times and that's it.  Other media outlets like ESPN showed it afterwards and gave warning to their viewers of its graphic nature.  I didn't actually see it as it happened, but once I heard about the specifics the next morning, I had no desire to see any replays.  Only by research for this particular post did I come across a few of the bone protrusion pictures.  To date, I still haven't seen the video and don't want to see it.

Simply hearing about the nature of Ware's injury instantly conjured up memories of Joe Theismann's career-ending breakage of the tibia and fibula in his right leg as he was being sacked by New York Giants' linebackers Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson during a 1985 Monday Night Football game.  As ferocious of a defender as LT was, he immediately set his team rivalry aside and had an instant moment of humanity as he was the first to frantically shout for EMT assistance.  Fast forward almost 28 years later, Theismann was "sickened" by the sight of Ware's injury--which I'm sure served as an unwanted reminder of his own injury that left his right leg shorter than his left due to insufficient bone growth during recovery.  Chicago Bears' and former Louisville running back Michael Bush suffered a similar injury to his right tibia when he was still playing for the Cardinals in a 2006 game against the Kentucky Wildcats.  When he heard the news about his fellow Louisville brother, he tweeted this:

Oohhh [expletive] I just cried. I feel so bad. #flashback of myself. Anyone if he needs anything please let me know. #teamware. I can't even get myself together. I don't even wanna watch the rest of this game. His life just changed.

Bush recovered enough from his injury to be drafted as the 100th pick in the 2007 NFL Draft by the Oakland Raiders--though he spent his entire rookie season on the Physically Unable to Perform (PUP) list.  Though he's typically been a backup halfback, the fact that he was able to overcome a situation like that and keep a steady NFL job is encouraging.  So knowing what players like Theismann and Bush went through in a much more physical sport than basketball, it's hard to fathom how anyone would want to see any indication of the pain that Ware suffered.

Interestingly enough, on the ESPN podcast His & Hers with Michael Smith and Jemele Hill, Smith expressed his disappointment with Hill's retweeting of a YouTube video that showed the play on which Ware suffered the fracture.  This was Hill's defense:

It's news, Mike, and you can't know how awful it is, those reactions that you talked about--the players, Pitino, even players on the opposite sideline.  You don't know the gravity of the situation until you actually see the replay because Kevin Ware was not the focus of the play.  So for you to even understand what happened, how can you do that without actually watching it?

After Smith responded by calling Hill's actions "insensitive" and saying that he "didn't see the need for it", Hill responded: "I knew that I wasn't the only one who missed it, and to be able to put something in context to know the gravity of the situation, you can't do that unless you see it."  Smith then asked, "Why is that your responsibility?  Why is it on you?  Are your followers dependent upon you to see an injury that everybody else saw?"  Hill offered the following rebuttal:

Whenever I see something that I feel like would be of interest to people or is a discussion point...I put it out there.  And to your point, you weren't the only one that felt that way.  I got several tweets from people saying it was insensitive [and] I shouldn't have posted that...I'm not glorifying it; I'm showing people what happened.  That's what I do as a journalist.

Although I ended up agreeing more with Michael Smith, Jemele Hill's points were definitely well taken--especially because she's in that particular line of work.  Additionally, seeing something for yourself is often more verification of just how bad or tragic a situation is.  Nevertheless, it still begs the following question: when does it stop being news and starts being glorification when it comes to gruesome sports injuries like those of Kevin Ware and Joe Theismann?

There are many people who would say that once is enough, i.e., when it happens live.  In fact, when CBS replayed Kevin Ware's injury a second and third time, several people expressed their displeasure through various social network mediums like Twitter.  Would I go that far?  Quite possibly because I can understand the extreme person's point-of-view.  If you already had to witness it once, why would you want to see it again?  It's bad enough that you see the initial injury as well as his teammates crying and the undeniable pain on Ware's face.  Initially, I was going to post a picture of Ware on his back in pain sans the protruding bone, but merely seeing his grimace was enough for me to decide against it.  I don't need to be reminded of what that young man went through, and I darn sure don't need to post any reminder of it.  I prefer the approach that the NFL Network took when they talked about it because they merely showed pictures of Louisville teammates and training staff tending to and encouraging Ware in lieu of replaying the incident like CBS or ESPN--regardless of giving viewers a disclaimer of the graphic material.  Now I'm not one of those people who will lose the chicken wings and mumbo sauce that I just scarfed down if I see a dude's bone poking through his skin, but I will get the bad kind of goosebumps.  I understand that many people were watching the game and may have missed the play when it first happened, but it's hard for me to grasp wanting to subject yourself to such a horrible sight.

Another point of consideration is the fact that people are making lists of the most gruesome sports injuries of all time.  Many of these lists include or reference the Ware and Theismann injuries, Toronto Maple Leafs' defenseman Borje Salming getting slashed in the face by a Detroit Red Wings player's skate in 1986; wrestler Sid Vicious breaking both his tibia and fibula in his left leg during the 2001 WCW championship; France international football player Djibril Cisse breaking his leg prior to the 2006 World Cup; and Buffalo Sabres' goalie Clint Malarchuk being slashed in the neck by a St. Louis Blues player's skate in 1989, which severed one of the largest blood vessels in the human body in his carotid artery.  Nine fans fainted, two others suffered heart attacks and three players regurgitated on the ice witnessing Malarchuk barely escape death as trainers rushed to apply pressure to his neck.  Your heart just goes out to people when situations like these occur...but that's if you have much of a heart.  My issue is not as much with the lists being created, but more so with how these lists often bring out the most degenerative characteristics in people.  When people make comments like "now that's what I call 'breaking news'," "what a lame copout" in response to "the full footage is too gruesome to show" and "got anymore", it further makes the point that there is no need to relive any of these moments through video, pictures or "worst ever" lists.  This is when it becomes sensationalizing an incident for the sake of shock value or comparing what injury is worse than the other.  A person who creates a list like this should already know that at least a third of their target audience will comment along the aforementioned lines.  Although seeing pictures of Malarchuk trying to keep himself from bleeding out is by far the most horrific thing I've ever seen in sports, I'm not sitting here arguing if it's worse than another sports injury or trying to conjure up images of other injuries; they're all bad.

Then again, maybe I'm just making the mistake of expecting a significant amount of decency and respect out of our society.  From robbing the Native Americans of their land to achieving independence from England to the enslavement and mistreatment of Blacks, America's foundation is rooted in violence and bloodshed.  Between action movies, horror flicks  and even watching various episodes of Family Guy and Robot Chicken, it appears that the motto is "the more blood, the better".  I think about 80s shows like Knight Rider, The A-Team and Miami Vice that attempted to minimize the appearance of bloodshed; however, in the CSI era, it's about making crime scenes as real as possible.  It's bad enough that there's violence in most inner cities--especially the recent teen murder epidemic in Chicago.  To add insult to injury (no pun intended), numerous rap songs often glorify them and force the victims' families to relive the memories of losing their loved ones.  (Think 50 Cent's line in "Heat" where he says, "And your brain pop out the top like Jack-in-the-Box."  Despite unproudly rapping along with many of his other songs, that particular lyric has always bothered me the most.)  The most popular sport in this country is football--a sport that is inevitably physical and is going through a makeover to reduce some of its inherent violence.

With that said, football has been my favorite sport since the late 90s, and the physical nature of the sport is one of the things that I love most about it.  However, I know there's a stark difference between getting excited over a big hit and sensationalizing a brutal (or in the case of Malarchuk, a life-threatening) injury; it's many others who don't exercise the same amount of consideration.  The problem is that when you're dealing with people who are desensitized either because of their immediate surroundings or by what they see on TV or hear in music, asking them to exercise sensitivity is like asking a pig to roll around in glue and feathers and call itself a chicken.  If anyone wanted to lodge a defense for themselves against someone who is disturbed by or critical of their fascination, then the quote from Partnership for a Drug-Free America's famous 1987 PSA immediately comes to mind: "I learned it by watching you!"  Furthermore, one might argue, "Well, when you sanction or celebrate a seemingly milder form of violence or physical aggression, you're potentially sanctioning the glorification of the extreme and adverse effects of those lesser forms of violence."  Very hard to argue against that.  Maybe that's why I haven't pulled out my bullhorn to sound off about the safety measures that the NFL has been taking in the past few years.  Maybe that's why I don't mind the fact that there's not as much fist fighting in hockey anymore.  Maybe that's why I'd rather watch some of those older crime shows where there's not as much violence or blood involved.  Maybe that's why listening to overly-violent rap music makes my ears bleed now more than ever.  Gruesome is just not as cool as when you didn't know any better.

All things considered, I won't heavily criticize Jemele Hill for her actions because she's a journalist and going about the Kevin Ware injury in the way she did was like a "natural reflex" for her.  I also understand that we live in the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram age where a lot of people get their "news" on these sites, but "reporting" on something as graphic as this has to be done in the right medium.  Even Hill had the following to say about Twitter:

Here's what kind of annoyed me about this whole outrage on Twitter.  Now look, you [Michael Smith] and I both have fun with Twitter, but we both know to some degree Twitter's a dumpster fire.  All I know is I don't need the dude that's posting ratchet pics of people's Easter struggle meals or posting pics of girls at the club to be at me about what I'm posting on this injury.  So considering what the standards are on Twitter, I just think it's kind of an interesting outrage from that particular group that they're gonna all of a sudden develop standards on a medium that more often than not has no standards.

Exactly, and that's why it's risqué to post a YouTube video with such sensitive material on such a site.  Granted, you're going to find immature and insensitive people everywhere, but what you think is a tweet that simply keeps people in the loop is an invitation for some idiot to make an asinine remark like "now that's what I call 'breaking news'".  I don't know if anyone actually said anything remotely close to that in response to her tweet because many people were too busy criticizing her decision, but it still potentially opens that can of worms.  Additionally, taking a stance like "I don't see anything wrong if people want to see that" borders on the assumption that most people don't already have vivid imaginations.  Unfortunately, I imagined the injury because TV and print journalists described it well enough.  Knowing about the agony that Kevin Ware went through was painful in and of itself; sometimes a picture (or a video) has 1,000 words too many.