“Generally speaking, mankind does not empathize with brain diseases as well as with physical ailments; there is this negative response, culturally, for diseases of the brain,” said Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who first discovered cerebral damage in an American football player, deceased NFL lineman Mike Webster.

“If you talk about having mental disorder, psychological disease, people wouldn’t empathize with you,” Omalu said. “Rather, they would stigmatize you and ostracize you. And I can see the same cultural trend in football.”

In pro football, if a player complains too loudly about head injury, or stays too long on the disabled list, he risks public stigma, ridicule and unemployment. Adding insult, irony, players are blamed most in this issue, widely presumed to disregard their own head injuries and foil detection.

But the true forces against impact reform—which would begin with mandated rest of one to three months for every concussed player—remain dogmatic football personnel, football media and football fans. The football horde stands impatient and dismissive of cognitive injury affecting athletes.

Only for NFL entertainment, amid today’s risk-averse society, could a person with brain trauma come back rapidly like Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers did in December, when he banged through an NFL game only 14 days after his second concussion in two months.

Forget that Rodgers went on to lead the fabled Packers to Super Bowl victory and cursory glory, including a widely disseminated New York Times tale that Green Bay somehow played safer football than Pittsburgh, two pro teams fighting for a championship.

This preposterous storyline of football redemption, channeled through supposedly clean-playing champions, proved feel-good for faithful of the bloody national pastime—especially football’s close business partners, traditional media, the news outlets and networks of the “free press,” historical leeches of the show and thus the players.

Which is the point of the football-media complex: Package the sport for tasty consumption by exaggerating the positives while stifling, denying negatives.

Football is American fantasy flight, for games at celebrity level down to local, with only the replaceable gladiators suffering injurious outcomes. Through 130 years of tackle football, a cult psyche has suspended common sense about maiming on the fields, including contact deaths of a thousand kids, as America proclaims the game's benefits outweigh its costs.

Modern organizers and media shroud the carnage through glorifying myth, basic themes first crafted by gridiron officials and the Golden Press during growth of football commerce at elite universities of the Victorian Era. Cultural analyst and former NFL player Michael Oriard investigated the phenomenon for his seminal 1993 analysis in book form, Reading Football: How The Popular Press Created an American Spectacle.

The sport defied gravity by end of the 19^th century, operating above shackles of civil law, medical ethic and educational mission, primarily through a meta-narrative of goodness spun by media, stories for sanitizing football brutality and courting audience, which responded in droves.

The gridiron mythologists, Golden Press writers and illustrators, reasoned that rampant injury of young bodies didn’t constitute barbarism. Rather, football was “necessary roughness,” lessons in manliness for all. Oriard has found this particular theme predominates American narrative on football to date, during his analyzing thousands of texts from early newspapers and magazines to modern multi-media saturation of print, audio, video and film.

Early grid tales cast coaches not as sadistic tyrants but as geniuses, moral leaders who motivated young men to perform and achieve, and players weren’t thugs but football heroes, exuding qualities every male should emulate.

Fans, moreover, needed to feel worthy and patriotic in their role, not masochistic, so the Golden Press portrayed a football contest as must-see social event, a wholesome American happening, not a public bloodletting.

But many people resisted the hype, branding the spectacle instead as a demoralizing health menace, and they aimed to abolish football at turn of the new century.

Shailer Mathews, professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, said “there arises a general protest against this boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.”

Casualty rates were outrageous, but more football malaise befell campuses and towns, including conniving coaches and mercenary players available to highest bidders. Players engaged in public drunkenness, gambling, beatings of students and citizens, and committed sexual assaults of women.

Football supporters countered that football was a sound maturation process, even if few of them ever lined up to bash at scrimmage.

“To bear pain without flinching, and to laugh at the wounds and the scars of a hotly contested game, is very good discipline and tends to develop manliness of character,” opined a popular magazine, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly.

By 1905 football boasted clout in the Oval Office, game advocate President Theodore Roosevelt, who brought spotlight onto a campaign for “safer” football through rule changes, the same spin voiced by advocates a century later, in present-day controversy.

Although T.R. stated his intent to reduce injuries—“I wish we could learn… to make the game of football a rather less homicidal pastime”—this president loved watching the sport, which he lauded for boys in need of a “strenuous life” he perceived to be vanishing.

Roosevelt was angered by much of the criticism bombarding football, and he blasted injured players who complained: “I have a hearty contempt for [a male] if he counts a broken arm or collarbone as a serious consequence when balanced against the chance of showing that he possesses hardihood, physical prowess, and courage,” the little big man declared.

Roosevelt fashioned his fame as rugged individual and obviously savored talking tough about football manliness. But he had avoided the gridiron as a Harvard man, back in the late 1870s. “He never played himself—he was too small and wore glasses—but he became an enthusiastic fan,” explained author John J. Miller, author of the new book The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football.

Roosevelt surely capitalized politically, with his stance endearing and fortifying football fans in every major institution of society, people lapping up the game mythology.

There was American wise man Oliver Wendall Holmes, U.S. Supreme Court justice, drinking the football Fool-Aid to believe he saw bloodshed with merit. “Out of heroism grows faith in the worthiness of heroism,” Holmes said. “Therefore I rejoice at every dangerous sport which I see pursued.”

Many educators backed the game, such as MIT president Francis A. Walker, who said it developed “something akin to patriotism and public spirit” in a young man. Illinois professor Edwin G. Dexter theorized that a football player might hear the “Call of the Wild… echoing down from a thousand generations.”

Fortunately for football, public opinion largely favored it and the game survived a tempestuous incubation period. On urging of President Roosevelt, university leaders established the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, forerunner of the NCAA, with a stated mission to make football “safer.”

“Football was saved not by eliminating all violence but by compromising on an acceptable degree of physical danger,” Oriard observed.

“Basically, the coaches and [football supporters] had pulled a slick one on the public and universities,” Rick Telander wrote for his 1989 book, The Hundred Yard Lie. “By making rule changes that made the game safer (though certainly not safe), they had also effectively killed protests about the game’s ethics and its place on campus. Indeed, by the 1920s the complaints about college football became little more than a nuisance, part of the background din…”

The ruse succeeded smashingly. By end of the 20^th century, public schools banned religious expression but most were football churches, with adults shepherding children to playing fields out back, the collision sport of myth.

No real heed for football brain injury has arisen in this culture, just more blustery cultural leaders like old T.R., only swiping at the irritant problem as though trying to shoo flies. Head trauma in beloved football is yet obscured, off public radar, especially once a loop-legged or unconscious player is removed from view.

Even the term is a misnomer, “concussion awareness,” for true scope of epidemic, since experts increasingly believe the constant sub-concussive blows of football—wholly undetectable under current clinical practice around the sport—pose greatest threat to participants.

The football public embraces suspect countermeasures, like it did Roosevelt’s NCAA concept a century ago, and otherwise intelligent people babble about “concussion testing” and minimalist state laws to “protect” children.

And game officials and pal media continue capitalizing on the gory game, standing dually responsible.

Today football and supporters seek to defy restraint on the sport like never before, to avoid necessary, dramatic remake of where the game is played, by whom, and under what conditions.

Significantly, cutting-edge science and independent opinion are eschewed for antiquated shoddiness in reform, even silliness, rank obfuscation, just to keep the game intact as-is, largely publicly funded and available in every nook and cranny of society.

“Let me make a statement here,” Omalu intoned, as a premier independent brain expert considering football context during a January interview. “Policies are made in science based on the prevailing and emerging evidence, and the evolving ways of thinking. Our understanding of brain injury has advanced in a very fast pace in the past 10 years.”

“Current policies in football are based on what we knew 20 years ago. Policy-making and policy-enactments in football are not on par with the advances in science. Why? Because the advances of science are further confirming that football is a very dangerous game.”

Matt Chaney is a journalist, editor, teacher and restaurant worker in Missouri, USA. Email him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information, including about his 2009 book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the homepage at www.fourwallspublishing.com.