When I first became conscious of sports as a child, I was obsessed with boxing. But I was still a kid when Muhammad Ali lost his amazing speaking ability, and I never could watch it again. Ali was very important to me not only as an athlete but for his politics. It isn’t giving him enough credit in and of himself to say that he was for me a gateway drug to Malcolm X, but there’s a lot of truth to that statement. In fact, studying boxing matches that took place long before my birth taught me so much about history and race and politics and sociology. The sport had the same effect on millions of others. Boxing was king until it wasn’t. The shadiness of the promoters had something to do with its decline, but mostly it was watching these beloved figures grow shaky in their hands and voices.

Rich Cohen has an article in the New Republic about football’s future being threatened by the growing awareness of the sport’s unavoidable head injuries. It seems inconceivable that football could severely decline because of the cash cow that the NFL is, but, then again, no one is building insta-stadiums to handle overflowing boxing crowds anymore. An excerpt:

“The worry is not just that people will stop watching the game—it’s that parents will stop letting their kids play, starving the league of talent. Speaking on The Tonight Show, Terry Bradshaw, the great Steelers quarterback, predicted the demise of football, saying if he had a son, he would not let him sign up. ‘The fear of them getting these head injuries,’ he explained, ‘it’s just too great for me.’ Something similar happened to boxing, which was once the biggest sport in the United States. But the country evolved away from the ring, until boxing became a mirror of its own saddest character, the nobody, the palooka, the bum.”