Linking yesterday to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Coolhunt” piece made me think about his 2009 New Yorker article “Offensive Play,” which was bold for connecting the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal to NFL play and spectatorship. Because of the work of the Sports Legacy Institute and Dr. Bennet Omalu and Ann McKee, among others, there had been some media noise about the game and brain damage, but I don’t recall any mainstream attention on such a meaningful level until Gladwell’s inconvenient truth. And since then there’s been an avalanche of it. Sure, there are some key differences between dogfighting and American football (e.g., lack of free will vs. free will), but there are many uncomfortable similarities. I think it’s one of his best-ever pieces for the publication. An excerpt:

“At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?”