In the latest episode of the University of Press podcast, The UPside, we sat down (virtually) with Guest Editors Dr. Stephen Townsend, Dr. Rebecca Olive, Dr. Murray G. Phillips, and Dr. Gary Osmond to discuss a new special issue of Journal of Sport History on “Concussion’s Past.” You can listen to the podcast here or read below for a transcript of the conversation.

UIP: Welcome to the University of Illinois Press podcast, The UPside. I’m Mary Warner, the Journals Marketing Assistant for the Press, and today I’m excited to present our podcast highlighting a special issue of Journal of Sport History. Volume 51, Issue 2, is entitled “Concussion’s Past” and is focused on studying concussions and head injuries in sports from a historical perspective.  

I’m joined today by Guest Editors Murray G. Phillips, Gary Osmond, Stephen Townsend, and Rebecca Olive. We’re so excited to have you all here. Before we discuss the issue, I’d love it if you could all introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about your backgrounds.

Murray Phillips: Thanks, Mary. I’m Murray Phillips from the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at the University of Queensland. I’ve been a sport historian for the last 30 or 40 years, and over the last 3 or 4 years have become really interested in sport concussion, which is one of the key issues in Australian sport and also in international sport.

Gary Osmond: I’m happy to go next. My name is Gary Osmond. I’m also a sport historian and also in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences working closely with Murray and with Steve, and in the past, Beck. I’ve been a sport historian for about 20 years, and I became interested in this issue really through the work of Steve. So, I’m going to hand over to Steve.

Stephen Townsend: I’ll keep the theme going. I’m Stephen Townsend. I’m also a sport historian. I’m at the University of Queensland, a Research Fellow here at the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences and also the Queensland Center for Olympic and Paralympic Studies. Sport concussion and brain trauma is my primary research focus. So, I’ve been working on this for not quite 10 years, but also a bit more than 5. It’s difficult to put a timeframe on it. And Murray, Gary, and Rebecca and I’ve been working together on various different projects, on concussion and other issues in sport history for quite some time.

Rebecca Olive: And I’m Rebecca Olive, and I’m based in the Center for Urban Research at RMIT University in Melbourne, and I came here from the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, where I worked with these guys at UQ for quite a while. My work is in feminist cultural studies of sport and physical activity. So, I look at those relations of power that operate in different ways for people. And I also contribute to medical and health humanities work there, too.

UIP: Great. Thank you all so much again, and welcome to The UPside.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the Journal, the Journal of Sport History (JSH) is a triannual journal, edited by Daniel A. Nathan, that promotes the study of historical, social, and cultural aspects of sports. With topics ranging from American football to cycling in South Africa to the Seoul Olympics and beyond, JSH is proud to publish a wide selection of sports scholarship about the past with international appeal, written by a diverse array of contributors. You can learn more about the Journal, including how to subscribe, submit your own work, or read online, at go.illinois.edu/JSH.

Now that we know a little bit more about the Journal and all of you, can you give us a brief overview of the issue’s focus and some background of how it came to be?

ST: I could probably take this one. The focus for the journal, as the title suggests, is about concussion. We’re interested in concussion, which is a colloquial term for mild traumatic brain injury, which is obviously a really big issue in sport currently. And we’re very interested in figuring out—us and a number of other historians around the world, particularly in North America and in the UK—as to just how long this has actually been a problem. Because it seems like something that’s only really popped up into the consciousness of sports, fans, and health authorities and the general public in the last, say 10 to 15 years. But clearly, we’ve been playing sport for much longer than that, and we’ve been getting hit in the head whilst playing sport for much longer than that.

So, the impetus for this issue sort of came out of the end of my PhD Studies. I wrote my PhD on Muhammad Ali and looking at the way he was represented in the media between 1960 and 1975. But the final part of my PhD thesis looked at Ali’s representation post-1996 in Atlanta and how people saw him differently when he walked out on stage, clearly suffering with Parkinson’s—his hands shaking and clearly quite ailed—and how that shifted his public persona. And that made us think about the risks of playing violent sports like boxing or like football. So, I started to learn a little bit more about brain trauma in sport. I started to learn a little bit more about CTE, the acronym for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is this disease that we’re all really scared of and really interested in learning more about.

And yeah, with my colleagues, Murray and Gary and Beck, we’ve been talking and teaching about this in our various courses and over coffee for a really long time, and I decided to take it up and make it my focus. And Murray and Gary and Beck lent their knowledge and their expertise to putting this special issue together and we all bring really different and, I think, unique perspectives to this. There are historical perspectives. There are cultural studies perspectives. And the issue overall is trying to uncover what is, at the moment, a hidden past of concussion, and trying to understand how and why an issue that seems so contemporary and so modern actually has a really long history to it.

UIP: So great to learn more about how you guys all started collaborating. It’s rare for our journals to have four guest editors for one special issue. I’d love to hear more about how you all collaborated on this issue and the benefits that came from the different perspectives.

MP: Well, I think a lot of us bring to the table different skillsets. So, when you have four people who have different capacities, different backgrounds, different knowledge bases, it really helps when you try to pull together what is essentially a historical focus with a multidisciplinary approach. So, it was a really pleasurable thing to be involved in and the challenges really are at the level of the contributors because they are writing their pieces, and, as you know, editing any large-scale piece of work brings the challenges of individual’s timing, workloads, content knowledge, and managing that process. So, we’re really lucky in the sense that we all get on really well. We’ve got complementary skill sets, and the Journal of Sport History with Dan Nathan was excellent to work with. The Journal is a high-profile journal in our field and the editorial team is terrific to work with.

GO: Just add to what Murray said, NASSH also gave us an opportunity through its annual pre-conference workshops. So, for about a decade NASSH has sponsored these workshops, which enable groups of people, 10 to 15 scholars from around the world to gather together to workshop an idea, some important issue relevant to the history of sport. We took advantage of that workshop opportunity and gathered together the contributors to this special issue. So, we have Dan and we have NASSH to thank for that opportunity. And what that meant was, we spent two full days together in a room discussing the papers that eventually were published as the articles in this special issue, which was very productive, very generative for us. And having four of us together, then, was a chance, as Murray said, to bring together complementary skills, not just ideas, but various strengths encouraging each other on to make sure this issue worked as well as it did.

ST: I think it’s probably worth pointing out as well if it’s if it wasn’t already clear: the four of us have all worked together for quite a long time. We’ve all come from the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at UQ. And Rebecca is now at RMIT University, down south in Melbourne, but in terms of any the challenges, a lot of those were smoothed out because we have worked together on in teaching various different administrative tasks within our school and on writing projects and research projects before. So, we all know each other really well.  So, you’re right. Having four editors on something like this can certainly present challenges, but we’re in a unique space where we’re not sort of coming at this cold. This isn’t our first time working together and won’t be our last, either. So, we’ve got complementary politics around this as well. We’ve got different perspectives, but the ethics that we bring to this around player welfare and inclusivity, trying to ensure that sport can be safe and accessible for everybody, and how we can leverage a historical knowledge to do so. That was sort of our aim for this, and that’s something we all agreed on, almost without talking about it.

UIP: It’s great to hear that you guys all collaborate so well together. Very clear from the quality of the issue. In the issue’s introduction, you discuss the current state of discourse around concussions and head injuries in sports. Why do you feel that it’s important to discuss this issue from a historical perspective?

MP: I think it’s really interesting to discuss concussion and try to understand from a historical perspective because there is a sense in the community that this is a new issue, that concussion has just suddenly emerged in the last two decades after a couple of specific moments in our time and place in history. And the reality of our work shows that concussion has been an issue for a long time, ever since we started to play contact sports in the modern era. So, we can stretch right back to the 1850s and ’60s to see the emergence of the challenges around brain injuries that were totally unrecognized to a certain degree, but also became really a big issue when sports became more intense, became more popularized, and injuries started to emerge that were involved with the brain. So, the idea that somehow we have this new issue to deal with is a myth in the sense that we’ve had combat sports for over 150 years and the consequences of combat and contact sports are exactly that, that you’re challenging your brain in ways in which the brain should not be challenged. So, the key issue is, how do you understand sport concussion if we take the long view rather than the short view in in our study and approach to understanding concussion?

RO: This approach also helps us think about some of the factors like, why has this become focused on men’s sport almost exclusively until quite recently. So, it helps us think about the role of masculinity in how this crisis works and has worked for a really long time. It helps us think about race. It helps us think about power, how power operates through concussion on different people. It’s really helpful to think in that way to see: Who is the focus of this? What narratives are the focus of this? And who’s left out of these discussions as well.

GO: I think, also, Mary, we realize that as discussion of concussion increasingly encompasses or addresses the sociocultural as well as the biomedical, we felt there. It was time to have a specific historic focus as well to look at the entanglements between the past and the present, and we felt as sport historians or people who work with the sporting past that we had something to contribute here, and we were able to bring that team of contributors together. And I hope we’ve done that.

ST: I think that Gary’s use of “entanglement” there is really powerful as well, because there is an activist element to that entanglement. We’re really interested in figuring out why this is only seemingly become an issue in the last few years, but then, also pointing out that, as Murray said and as Gary and Beck have said, this is not a new issue. But then asking the question, why have we only started caring about it now? And what some of the research that we’ve revealed in this issue, and also in some of the other things that we’ve written, shows is that there have been concussion crises before now and that they’ve been suppressed. They’ve been ignored.

So, part of this is a call to action for policymakers, for athletes, for parents, and for the general public to say, we can’t just let this issue sit and hope that it will fix itself or hope that governments or sporting bodies or health bodies will just inevitably make changes that protect athletes because it’s happened before. We’ve had these concussion crises before, and they have been suppressed. So, in order for us to address this concussion crisis in the 21st century effectively, we’re hoping to show that the different ways in which those crises have been ignored or suppressed in the past to avoid those mistakes now. We’re trying to figure out where we are now and where we’ve come from, what steps we took to get to this point, and then also sort of looking forward, projecting, and trying to figure out where we’re going with the crisis in the future.

UIP: The introduction more specifically discusses the “origin myth” of the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, in football players and states that this issue challenges that myth. Can you discuss this origin of the modern concussion crisis and why it’s important to examine it further?

ST: The origin myth is like any other myth in history has a kernel of truth to it. In 2003, a pathologist by the name of Bennett Omalu, a North American pathologist, discovered CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, in the brain of a former NFL player called Mike Webster. So, this is a really well known, much loved, respected, former NFL player, who was suffering from significant cognitive decline, took his own life. And during the autopsy this pathologist, who was then portrayed by Will Smith in the famous movie Concussion (which is one of the big turning points for public awareness around this), publicly revealed that he had in his brain either a form of dementia called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And that was, at least ostensibly, the turning point for public interest in this and there is a kernel of truth there. There certainly was a huge increase in litigation. There was a huge increase in public interest. There was a huge increase in research funding around concussion and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. This is a really worrying form of dementia that former athletes are starting to get. So, in that sense, there certainly has been an uptick in interest and in activity around concussion since that Bennett Omalu paper in 2003, or since that diagnosis in 2003.

But as our friend and colleague Doug Booth would tell us, never trust a neat origin story. And again, what this issue and what some of our other research and some of our colleagues have shown is that not only has getting hit in the head and concussion been an issue for as long as we’ve been playing sport, but the athletes and doctors and parents and the general public as well have been aware of the long term impacts of concussion and brain trauma for about 120 years, if not longer. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which was previously known as dementia pugilistica, and then also known as Punch Drunk syndrome, has been described in scientific literature since the late 19th century and was actually really clearly described by someone called Harrison Martland, a scientist in 1928. So, this this is almost 100 years ago. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is not new. Concussion is certainly not new. And we’ve actually known a lot about it for a long time. So, we’re really starting to get into this issue. In some of our other research, what Gary and Rebecca were talking about, is the broader social forces, particularly around masculinity, as issues around class and race and gender that have helped to suppress concerns about the concussion crisis, because the science is not settled by any means, but the science has been really well developed for almost 100 years now.

UIP: In the issue’s introduction, you also write that you are “engaging with aspects of Foucauldian approaches to history” and that this lens is “rarely a feature in the work of sports historians.” Why did you feel adopting Foucault’s approach to history was appropriate and necessary for this issue?

MP: Well, I think the Foucauldian approach gets us to think critically about the history process and the writing and creating and developing of history. And in some ways it’d be really easy to make this a continuity with a concussion that occurred in the 19th century right through to now, and drawing all the dots. And what Foucault makes us think really critically about is that history is more about ruptures and disjunctions than it is about continuities, and to kind of investigate that approach. We compared the American football crisis in the early 20th century with the crisis of concussion now and what that does is it shows that while it’s similar issues, the context is so different. In the early 20th century, I think there were 18 fatalities in American football in one year. So, this was significant news. It was a major concern for football players, for parents, for colleges. It was covered extensively in the press and even the President got in on the act and played a role in redefining American football in this period.

But if we compare that to contemporary concussion, we’re looking at a whole different world. And this is where Foucault’s approach is really quite important, because there was almost no scholarship around concussion in the early 20th century. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of articles now published about concussion and mild traumatic brain injury. We’ve got really large research bodies that are pouring money into research around brain injuries and sport. We’ve got brain institutes established around the world which exclusively look into brain health. Now, we’ve got things called brain banks, where athletes have their brains dedicated to science, so that we can actually look at their brains, because the only way to actually diagnose CTE is after someone’s died. And we have whole new industries around the brain itself about neurology and neuroscience. These are relatively new fields of the 20th century.

The context, now that we’re looking at in terms of brain health for athletes, is radically different. Governments are now pouring funds into examining this. Sports organizations themselves are under threat. They’re throwing money and research into this. So, we’ve got an issue that governments think is so important that we’ve got Federal and State legislators looking at sport concussion, debating it in the Senate, in Australia, and other parliamentary wings throughout the world. Our argument is that Foucault tells us that while we can see continuities—actually ruptures and discontinuities—is actually a more important way of understanding the contemporary issue of sport concussion.

RO: I would add, too, that Foucault also helps us think really relationally about power. And so, instead of just thinking of power as something oppressive, he can help us think about how power operates through language and through structures, to govern us and to govern our bodies, to govern our relationships, to govern how we live our lives. And so, he also argues that power is not only just forced down upon us; it’s not only oppressive down. We all have power to different degrees, so it’s very unequal. But he’s also interested in looking at how power operates in resistance, you know, from kind of below. He has this great line, where he says, “If all power did was say no, none of us would be brought to obey.” But since it leaves opportunities to say yes and move through, then that’s why it’s so effective. So, it also helps us look for those moments of, where are the breakthroughs? Where are the schisms that Murray’s talking about and the ruptures? Where are these little moments as well that people also resist? So, he reminds us that power is relational and it’s complex, and we can’t only think of it in that continuity that Murray’s described that he pushes back against.

UIP: In addition to your editorial work on this issue, some of you also contributed to the articles. Murray and Gary, you both co-authored “The Double Folds of Racism and History: Silences, Concussion, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Athletes” with Kai W. Wheeler; and Stephen, you authored “Punch-Drunk Murderer: Boxing, Brain Trauma, and the Murder of Hilda Meek.” Before we discuss the rest of the articles in this issue, I’d love for you all to give the listeners a preview of the articles you contributed and what led you to the topic.

GO: I’m happy to have a go with describing the background of our article with Kai. Murray and I work quite closely in our school, which we should have said probably at the beginning. It’s called Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences. In the United States that might be known as the School of Kinesiology or Human Kinetics. So, we’re a multidiscipline school. Kai is a biomechanist, an exercise scientist who is an Aboriginal man, a proud Ngarabal man. Murray and I do quite a bit of work with Kai. We work together but separately on First Nations issues in Australia, and we were quite intrigued by silences around rates of concussion and brain trauma in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander athletes in Australia. Those athletes are, in terms of their proportion of the overall Australian population, overrepresented in some of the more violent sports, including the football codes. But we rarely hear anything about the way that Aboriginal athletes in particular are impacted by brain trauma issues related to sport.

Our approach then to that article, having identified an issue, was to look at silences that surround concussion, and we looked at essentially two folds of silences. One is the silences historically around concussion and brain injury in sport. And then, silences around the issue as it relates to or impacts on Indigenous Australians. So, the first issue, concussion in sport, as we’ve already discussed, is now a major talking point in Australian society and Australian sport as it is globally. So, that issue is being addressed, and the article looks at the long history of silences around that. But the issue of brain trauma and concussion in Aboriginal athletes is still not researched. It’s not discussed. It’s not part of public or health discourses. And we analyze that in terms of silences around the impact of colonization on First Nations people in Australia. So, this was a perfect opportunity for the three of us with very different backgrounds and very different interests to come together to focus on this issue.

ST: And the article I contributed to this issue looked at a fairly tragic set of circumstances. In 1935, in Britain, a boxer who fought under the name Del Fontaine. His real name was Raymond Henry Bousquet. He was a boxer from Canada who was fighting in Britain at the time who murdered his girlfriend, and her name was Hilda Meek. She was a local Londoner. She was very young, and there was absolutely no question that he did murder her. He shot her in the family room of her family home in South London. People saw him do it. He admitted openly that he had done it. There was no question that he’d done it.

But after he had been caught by the police and put on trial he claimed insanity and said that he was not responsible for his actions because he’d been in a series of punishing fights in the weeks and months beforehand and was suffering from what he called a concussion, but we would now call chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or some form of dementia or cognitive decline. So, Punch Dunk Syndrome in its broadest sense. The article came out of a really fortuitous set of circumstances. I was working on another project, and I saw a reference to this in a newspaper. It was a really small couple of lines that said, “Del Fontaine executed for murdering Hilda Meek, claimed insanity,” and I had never heard of this before.

I did a little bit more digging and found in the UK National Archives that he had two files on him, one from the Metropolitan Police and one from the Home Office. So, the Metropolitan Police is the police force in London, and the Home Office is in charge of national security and prisons. I had no idea what was in these files, so I just sent the sent the National Archives a message requesting access to them. This was, I think, 2021 and so we’re deep in Covid. And they essentially said, “You can have access to them if you come here. They’re under a hundred year seal to protect the names of living persons.” And, as I said, it was 2021, we weren’t yet allowed to leave the country and travel was really difficult at that point, so I was never getting over to the UK. And I kind of just abandoned the project at that point, thinking, okay, it’s a nice, interesting bit of history, but probably not going to go anywhere. And then, about six months later, they actually sent me all these files, and it was 300 and something documents, including his arrest records, police reports, psychologist reports from the prisons, personal letters that he’d written. There’s a really troubling letter that he actually wrote to Hilda on the night before he murdered her that details his reasons and really clearly details his cognitive and personality decline in the weeks leading up to him murdering her.

And so, I had this treasure trove of documents, and what I did with them in the article was, I took two angles. One, I used them as a way to understand the medical evidence and the medical knowledge around brain trauma and concussion in 1930s England and that was really useful. That revealed some interesting insights around particularly how important lay people were instead of doctors and professional medical personnel in terms of understanding long term brain trauma. But the other, and I think probably the more important part of this—and this is informed by my admiration for Beck’s work and many long conversations with Beck around gender and sport—was not trying to be neuroreductive about this.

And what I mean by that is not assigning or portioning all of the blame for him murdering his girlfriend, this very young woman, very young, to a brain disease. So, there is certainly a narrative where this normal man gets a brain disease and then goes crazy and murders his girlfriend. And that’s one narrative that you can put over the top of this. But the more complex and I think the more realistic narrative is that this is someone who has been involved in boxing and been involved in a misogynistic culture for a really long time, who was taught to use violence as a way to solve problems. And questioning how his involvement in this hyper masculine sport for a really long time and in what is a hypermasculine and deeply misogynistic boxing culture in 1930s England—how that shaped his attitudes towards women as well. So, I’m trying to complicate the picture a little bit in terms of gender and interpersonal violence. There’s a scientific aspect to it. But there’s also a broader aspect of interrogating gender norms and using those to complicate some of those narratives around interpersonal violence, brain, trauma, and sport, which I think is necessary not only historically, but contemporaneously, too.

UIP: Thank you both for those previews of your articles. Would you be willing to walk us through some of the other articles that readers will find in the issue?

ST: The opening two articles in the issue are “The NCAA, Concussions, and the Lack of Concern for Athletes” from Ron Smith and “Concussions in NCAA Football: A History of Rule Changes, Public Relations, and Ongoing Research” by Teresa Walton Fisette, and they both write about the concussion crisis in American college football, and they specifically focus on the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the way that organization, particularly within college football, suppressed concerns around brain trauma as a way just to let the game carry on. Ron Smith’s article has more of a legal focus, and so he investigates very successful and unsuccessful lawsuits against college football organizations. Foucault’s conception of power is about times when power says yes, and this is one of those examples of a powerful organization, like the NCAA or the NFL or the footballing authorities here in Australia, in the UK, and elsewhere. Who will sponsor research and who will say we’re leading the charge on fixing this concussion crisis? So sometimes they say yes, and this is an example of that, but then also the ways in which these organizations will obfuscate and defer blame through public relations and through a media blitz. So, they’re a really interesting pairing, these two articles, and they both look at the same organization, but through quite different lenses.

RO: And we have Kathleen Burszynski’s article, “‘When Fathers Beam and Mothers Wince’: Narratives of ‘Worried Mothers’ in Youth Football Safety Debates.” This article looks at a different part, which is non-players and not the medical institutions and all the coaching institutions that surround player experiences. But instead thinking of the effect on women, in this case the mothers of players, and women in sport, as they are in other institutions like the military, are positioned as the caretakers, so they’re the nurturers who do a lot of the behind-the-scenes care practices. So, they’re not the on-field heroes. They’re the off-field kind of caregivers. And women are positioned in this sport, both as moral guideposts of caring for sons and having conversations about when to hold back and whether they should be playing or not, and should they be raised, and often the ones raising issues around the effects of concussion on their sons. But at the same time, they’re treated as a problem by the sport. So, they’re sort of celebrated for this off-field caregiving role. But they’re also seen as a problem because their concerns are holding the game back—they’re stopping the flow of the game and the development of the game with their worries. One of the things the game does is try and educate women about the game and about the necessity for these forms of play to try and allay their fears, while also requiring them to do this caregiving work, because then they don’t have to do it. This article looks at that complexity and tension and contradiction around women’s role on the sidelines of sport.

MP: In “Prelude to a Crisis: A History of Sports-Related Concussion Research and the Influence of Neuropsychology,” Owen Griffith and Jamie Schultz take a medical history approach as they survey the historical development of neuropsychologists and how neuropsychologists have addressed concussion and its prevalence in sport. And this article is really interesting because it finds that neuropsychologists played an important role in drawing attention to cognitive changes in athletes long before Omalu’s 2003 diagnosis of Mike Webster. So, it’s a classic case again of deconstructing the myth around Omalu and Mike Webster. And this is kind of a novel approach, and it ties in much broader with the medicalization of sport through the 20th century.

What’s really interesting about this paper, and I think is a great step forward in terms of concussion research, is the way in which we’ve got two scholars, one who’s a historian—Jamie’s a sport historian well known in our field—and another one is a neuropsychologist. So, this is genuinely interdisciplinary work, and I think the future of this field is more in interdisciplinary work than in the silos that have traditionally characterized sport concussion because sport concussion has been essentially driven by the medical field. It’s only now through the kind of works that we’re doing that it’s starting to become an issue or an understanding provided by a group of people, including a whole range of scholars who are sociologists, historians, cultural studies, people who were looking at the social and cultural dimensions of sport concussion. It’s when we combine the two (medical knowledge and the social cultural knowledge) that I actually think we’re really going to move forward in in this field.

GO: And I’ll talk about Stephen Lechner’s contribution to the special issue, “A Swann’s Song: The NFL’s War on Violence and a Concussion Crisis Averted in the 1970s.” Stephen joined us from North Carolina State University. Steven’s work normally is with legal dimensions of sport history, and he takes us back to the 1970s to examine what he argues was a missed opportunity in discussion of these issues by the National Football League. And he uses as his as his pivot point here the case of Pittsburgh Steelers rising star Lynn Swann, who threatened in the mid-1970s to retire from the sport because of head injuries he’d suffered as a player. This was a period when American football was increasingly popular with television and live audiences, but there was also at the same time an increasing public discussion about the dangers to athletes to football players in particular, of head injuries in the game. What Stephen looks at here is how the NFL addressed the concerns that were really brought to the fore by Swann, rather than take the full opportunity on offer to examine the risks to player safety the actual dangers and to address those head on, so to speak. They didn’t seize that opportunity. So, it’s a really interesting example in this in this issue, as we try to historicize these issues.

ST: Thanks, Gary. Rounding out the issue, we’ve got a really fun and really important article, which is always a nice combination for a piece of academic writing when it can be fun and important from Connor Heffernan and Claire Warden, “‘I Quit’: Head Trauma, Chair Shots, and North American Professional Wrestling in the 1990s.” And they take an alternative and much needed angle on the concussion crisis when they examine concussion and CTE in professional wrestling. By professional wrestling we’re talking about the WWE, so this theatricalized broadcast spectacle of the kind that was really popular in the late ’90s, early 2000s, but I think continues to be really popular. And they look at the Attitude Era, as it was called in 1990s, of professional wrestling, when the boundaries of sport and scripted spectacle were deliberately blurred. So, no one was really sure—well, some people were really sure, but I certainly, as a kid watching it, was not really sure—whether or not this was real. Was it scripted? Were the injuries real? And they remind us in this article that not only is professional wrestling dangerous, these are athletes who are taking on significant risks, but also that athletes—whether they’re footballers, they’re baseball players, whether they’re boxers, surfers, whoever it might be—that they are entertainers.

And it provides this really interesting historical context to some of the modern concerns around brain trauma. Professional wrestling has been this kind of surprising but very significant birthplace for concerns around concussion. Chris Benoit, who’s a former professional wrestler who murdered his family in the early 2000s, was very widely rumored to have been suffering from some form of brain trauma at the time, possibly had CTE. One of the most significant concussion and CTE campaigners is currently Dr. Chris Nowinski, who is a neuroscientist but started his public life as a college footballer and as a professional wrestler. So, there’s these really interesting connections between the current concerns and the current advocacy around concussion in sport, and that Attitude Era of professional wrestling in the 1990s. And we’ve come almost full circle with Stone Cold Steve Austin, this very famous wrestler from that era who’s now one of the most vocal anti-concussion or anti-CTE voices out there, saying that he doesn’t believe that CTE is real and this whole thing’s overblown and it’s just a sign of woke culture gone mad, that sports going soft, and that we all need to just get back to being hard men in the in the ring or on the field. So, the way that they examine professional wrestling in this rupture between entertainment and reality in that article is fun and also really important and really informative for the current moment.

UIP: Thank you all so much for those previews. So, this is always a difficult question for editors to answer. But what would you say is the main takeaway, or a few key points, that you’re hoping readers take away from this issue?

RO: I can jump in with an answer for that, because for me it really is the value of multidisciplinary. These are complex problems that we’re not going to understand from one perspective, if we just pathologize it as an example of violence against women, but within sports, if we pathologize it as an issue of head injury, we’re going to ignore the role of social pressures, gender discourses. And so, we really need a multidisciplinary approach to this, and personally, what that does for me is it expands my understanding as well and makes me think more complexly in my work. So, it’s like looking at these voices in relation to each other. We don’t need to be experts across every part of this. But we need to be willing to think about it from multiple perspectives. And that’s what I think this special issue really emphasizes.

MP: I think, for me the really interesting thing is the contradictory nature of sports concussion. So, at one level it’s not new. It’s gone on for over a hundred years, and it’s been an issue for that long period. But it’s also new in the sense that the context in which concussion is occurring now is radically different. The structures around it, the politics around it, the consequences, the size of sport, the industry around the brain, aging populations all make this phenomena now a different phenomena.

GO: Just to add to Beck’s point, I mean many of us, if asked on the spot to us to name an association off top of our heads with concussion, we might think of football today. And what this issue and these contributors do is they take us to multiple spaces, multiple times, applying multiple disciplinary lenses. And that was our attempt, in attempting to historicize this issue, really to show that this is not simply the current issue, as we’ve said repeatedly in this podcast, but it applies to a much bigger range of sports than we might immediately think, and with many more repercussions, as Steve’s pointed out with his discussion of Hilda Meek, than may be obvious.

ST: I think one other thing that this does is, it really highlights the utility of history in informing the present moment. So obviously, history stands by itself as an important study of the past, but I think it’s really powerful when we can use history to inform our way forward on really complex issues. And hopefully, what we’ve done in this issue and what we’re doing in some of our other projects as well isn’t from a specific disciplinary perspective. And when we’re talking about history is showing that 1) concussion is not a new problem and showing some of the continuities, but also 2) some of the ruptures that have led to the present moment, that have created a crisis essentially, and how we can use history to inform our path forward and to ensure that sport in the future is ethical, that it’s inclusive, that it’s as safe as possible for participants and speaking truth to power in terms of some of those sporting authorities and governments and health authorities. To essentially say, “This has been an issue for a really long time, and we should have done something about this earlier, but now is the time to really address this in a meaningful way.”

UIP: If you had to make a prediction, in what direction do you see, or hope to see, sport concussion scholarship and policy moving in the future?

ST: I think we all have our own views on this. It’s a difficult question, because as we’ve said and hopefully has come through in this podcast, it’s a really complex issue. And it’s difficult to predict which way sporting organizations are going to go, but also how the public is going to react to this issue. Clearly, there is an appetite for violence. Clearly, there is an appetite for risk from sports fans who want to see athletes risk their bodies and risk their brains. We don’t watch rugby, we don’t watch American football, or boxing despite the violence. We watch it because of the violence in so many ways.

There have been these really concerted and I think well-meaning efforts from contact sport authorities to try and safeguard player health. There is no part of me that doesn’t believe that there are lots of people within footballing authorities that genuinely do care about their players. Most of them genuinely want their players to be happy and healthy and safe. Some don’t, but most do. And as these sports are becoming safer, we’ve seen rule changes. We’ve seen changes around exclusion protocols and new equipment. And there is some evidence that these sports are at least making an attempt to protect brain health.

Now we’re seeing these new sports emerge—I hesitate to call them sports. Things like power slap or the runner challenge that we’ve seen emerge in Australia. So, for those of you who might be unfamiliar, power slap is a new sport, which I think is under the auspices of the ultimate fighting championship, where essentially, you’ve just got two people standing across the table from one another, slapping each other in the face as hard as possible and you’re trying to knock the other person out with one slap. And the runner challenge, which has emerged just in the last couple of weeks here in Australia, is essentially two massive footballers running at each other down a gauntlet, trying to knock each other over, and frequently ends up in one or both of the opponents being brain damaged and knocked out. In these sports, concussion and brain trauma is not just a consequence of participation, but is the aim of participation. I think that the question around public attitudes and the public desire for violence is really difficult to predict. But clearly there is an appetite for it.

RO: Also, around women’s sport because the focus has been really heavily on men’s sport, and as women’s sport is getting more opportunities and more funding, hopefully, that continues, including in football codes. But there will be different kinds of injuries for women, and they might play out a bit differently. We’re seeing that with the research on ACL injuries in women as well. So, understanding and prioritizing that women suffer these injuries as well, not only men. And that might be around the domestic violence aspect of that as well, the effect on the people in the players lives, not just the players themselves.

UIP: The issue’s introduction mentions a few different examples of scholarship on sport concussion, including Sociocultural Examinations of Sport Concussions edited by Matt Ventresca and Mary G. McDonald and The Concussion Crisis in Sport by Dominic Malcolm. Are there any other books, articles, or other resources on this topic that you’d recommend to interested readers?

ST: Well, one in particular: The four of us actually have an edited collection coming out in June of this year with Manchester University Press called Head in the Game: Sociocultural Analyses of Brain Trauma in Sport, something we’ve been working on for a couple of years now, and we’re really excited to see it out in the world. And this is very much a multi- and interdisciplinary collection. We take a socioecological perspective on sports concussion and try and see how all these different sociocultural influences and these tendrils of influence affect different risk profiles for different people. So, women, people of color, we look at issues around class, the medicalization of sport. There are historical chapters in here. There are sociological chapters. There are articles from public health academics. We really advocate for a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to this and that’s what we try to do in in Head in the Game.

And there’s a few other really interesting books that have come out recently. Annette Greenhow— she’s one of our colleagues at Bond University—looks at governance in sports, some of the legal aspects around that. She’s had a book that’s come out late last year called The Brain Matters: Regulation of Concussion in Sport-related Injuries, which is an excellent piece of work. And the aforementioned Matt Ventresca and Kathryn Henne, from Australian National University, also have a book which I think will be released later this year, Violent Impacts: How Power and Inequality Shape the Concussion Crisis, around, again, governance and trust in sport, which is a really important part of this whole conversation. We’re really excited about the explosion of sociocultural work in this space. There was a long time where this was solely a biomedical issue, and we’re really happy that, from a historical perspective, this special issue contributed to more sociocultural work in this space. And we’re working really hard to add multi- and interdisciplinary work through Head in the Game  which is going to be out in June, so you know, just in time for Christmas or Christmas in July, anyway.

UIP: Great! Yeah, we’ll have to check that out. The Journal of Sport History covers a wide range of topics outside this special issue, and in fact all of you have other articles and book reviews published in previous issues. Some of the articles that you all have contributed includes “The Power, Politics, and Potential of Feminist Sports History: A Multi-Generational Dialogue” by Rebecca Olive and Holly Thorpe, “Tensions, Complexities, and Compromises: Sharing Australian Aboriginal Women’s Sport History” by Murray G. Phillips and Gary Osmond, “Too Deadly: Tracking Sport Histories with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities” by Gary Osmond, and “Clay vs. Ali: Distant Reading, Methodology, and Sport History” by Stephen Townsend, Gary Osmond, and Murray G. Phillips. While I have you here, could you please say a few words about some of your other contributions?

RO: As the non-historian, I published in the sport history journal with Holly some time ago now. So, I’m in cultural studies. But when I started at UQ and working with Murray and Gary, it really was made apparent to me how important history is to understanding the present, which sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it is something that’s often ignored in other disciplines. And so, Holly and I, through our work, in her case at the time it was snowboarding, and I was looking at women’s surfing, we got really interested in those histories and what wasn’t there when we went to find out about them. So, we kind of started this little collaborative project, and it culminated in a collection in Journal of Sport History that wasn’t just about women’s sport, but was about how women’s sport has not been attended to in sport history and also looking at the many women who have long been working in sport history and doing feminist histories—and feminist history of sport is not just research histories of women. It’s also asking questions about how we do those histories. So, it’s questioning the sources that we look at the methods that are used. It’s questioning the idea of objectivity, how we can even do work, and who we should be focused on. It’s bringing in different theories as well. It’s really interested in those much bigger questions around epistemology, really, and how we do that work.

In that paper you mentioned, we looked across a number of articles that existed by feminist sport historians as well as doing some interviews, and we created kind of a fake dialogue, as though we were all in the same room having a conversation, and it was really fun to work on and to think across those intergenerational changes. And in feminism, politics of citation is absolutely essential to how we do our work, because often they just become sources that one must cite, and they’re rarely women. And so, we wanted to look at who else is there, and the kind of work they’re doing and showing that work not just as work about women, but as work that was made asking much bigger questions. And looking at those politics amongst feminist sport historians as well: how they agree and disagree, and any tensions, and also how they’d supported each other over time. So, it was a really, really satisfying project, and one that we were both Holly and I are both really proud to contribute.

MP: I have been working with Aboriginal sport history and Torres Strait Islander sport history for over a decade now. This paper, “Tensions, Complexities, and Compromises,” is really, I guess, a part of a series of contributions that we’ve made in this field. We worked with a number of First Nations communities in Queensland. These papers in the main have been around Cherbourg, which is an Aboriginal settlement town not far from where we’re located at the University of Queensland, a couple hundred kilometers away. And we’ve worked to tell the story about Aboriginal women’s sporting involvement. We started working with Aboriginal men. And then, after a couple of years, these women said to us, “When are you going to tell our story?” And we said, “What story is that?” because we’ve done the research trying to find what female Aboriginal participants were engaged in sport and there wasn’t much, so this was an insight into the contributions and participation of Aboriginal women in sports.

So, this is a continuation of that research that looked at some of the sports in which Aboriginal women have participated in, and it was part of a much larger project that looked at Aboriginal women and their role in what was called Marching Girls, which was a competitive sport of precision marching. And we investigated the challenges of being, firstly, non-Aboriginal writing about Aboriginal people, and secondly, about being males writing about women, and in the end, we worked with Rebecca and collaborated on another paper that actually brought feminist perspectives into the work that we were doing. This paper is just one of the series of papers we’ve done on this particular topic.

GO: The paper that you’ve mentioned here, the article I published last year called “Too Deadly,” is really a reflective piece that speaks to some of the themes that Murray’s just mentioned. Murray and I have been working with Aboriginal people and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities now for a long, long time, and I wanted to reflect on some of the challenges that I faced as a non-Indigenous, white settler sport historian in working with those communities. And many people might assume that the challenges come from the communities themselves and that’s not the focus of this piece. It’s really a focus on some of the assumptions, and often repeated tropes and themes in public discourse, on Indigenous sport, in this country, and on Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people themselves. So, one of the things I wanted to challenge and wanted to examine was what are called deficit discourses, a tendency in the literature to focus on problems in communities, and instead to talk about, research, and reflect the way that communities derive strength and pride from sport. The way that sport has been appropriated by indigenous people to continue culture, traditional culture in new ways. It really on the one hand is a reflective piece, on the other is a challenge to sport historians to start considering new ways, to dig a little deeper in the themes and topics that we that we approach.

ST: My paper “Clay vs. Ali” is actually the methods chapter from my PhD, and this is something I wrote with Gary and with Murray, who were both my PhD supervisors—which seems like a long time ago now. And what I did in this this article, and across the whole PhD, was essentially try and map shifts in Muhammad Ali’s public identity through African American and white-run newspapers between 1960 and 1975 in North America, and specifically look at the way in which his name—so, changing his name from Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., which is his birthname through to his chosen name or his Black Muslim name of Muhammad Ali—and how you could use that as sort of a key to unlock discursive changes in the way that the press, and then by extension, the American public and different groups within the American public, particularly Black communities, and particularly the Black middle class, the way that they viewed and understood Ali as not just an athlete, but as a significant social figure, as an activist during the Civil Rights and the Black Power era.

And essentially what my PhD thesis found was that there is an assumption that white newspapers and white journalists, particularly white conservative journalists, refused to use his name because they saw it as a rebuke of white America and of conservative values. But what my PhD found, and what’s elucidated in this article was that Black newspapers—which were really important social institutions for Black middle-class communities—also rejected the name, but for slightly different reasons. And so, these Black newspapers, who were very interested in the politics of respectability and of the, I guess, more mainstream Civil Rights approach to legislative change and slow incremental advances which Ali was clearly not aligned with. Their reasons for rejecting his name were different to those given by white journalists and by the white conservative groups in the 1960s and 1970s. The other interesting thing from this article and something I think that comes through in all three of our articles is our focus on methodology and epistemology. So, in this I really try to highlight the importance of distant reading, but also newspapers as sources for historians, and some of the challenges around that of essentially using media sources and newspapers as a lens for understanding social changes. And the way that that lens is refractory. We don’t get a true sense of the world, and we have to try and figure out how those sources, particularly newspapers and the choices that we make around using those sources, affect the way that we see the past from the present.

UIP: They all sound like really fascinating articles, and I hope our readers take a chance to check them out as well as a special issue.

So, I think it’s about time for us to wrap up the episode. I want to say again, what a pleasure it was to have you all on the podcast to discuss this special issue. Thank you all for your fantastic work on this issue and for joining us today.

GO: Mary, can I just chime in here on behalf of the four of us, to shout out to The UPside, and to the University of Illinois Press for your support, and of course, to the North American Society for Sport History.

ST: And I’ll chime in and say again, thanks to NASSH, thanks to you, Mary, and thanks to The UPside, but also, thanks to our contributors in this special issue as well. So, Ron Smith, Theresa Walton-Fisette, Kathleen Bachynski, Owen Griffith, Jamie Schultz, Steve Lechner, Connor Heffernan, Claire Warden, Kai Wheeler, and Murray, Gary, and Rebecca as well, who made this not only a really easy and pleasurable task to work on, but I think we produced something that’s meaningful and has a lot of significance, not just from a historical perspective, but from a contemporary perspective as well. It would not have been anywhere near as fun or anywhere near as meaningful without the brilliance of the people we worked with.

MP: Thanks, Mary

RO: Yeah, thanks, Mary.

UIP: Thank you all for your kind words. And a big thank you to our listeners for tuning in to learn more about this special issue of Journal of Sport History. If you’re interested in submitting your own work, the editor of the Journal, Daniel Nathan, invites scholarly articles, research notes, documents, and commentaries exploring the development of sports; their societal impact; their intersection with politics, economics, and identity; and more. To find out more about the Journal, please visit go.illinois.edu/JSH. For further reading, the University of Illinois Press is also the publisher of Journal of Olympic Studies. The Press has also published books on sport history, including Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball by Courtney M. Cox, Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks Minnie Miñoso, and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams by Don Zminda, and Winters of Discontent: The Winter Olympics and a Half Century of Protest and Resistance edited by Russell Field. You can view all of those and more at press.uillinois.edu. Thank you.