In 1999, my eldest son and I went to see the Pittsburgh Pirates play the Milwaukee Brewers in a Fourth of July game. I have no idea now who won, but I do remember seeing catcher Jason Kendall suffer a grotesque compound fracture of the ankle (that’s the kind where the bone sticks out of the skin) when he hit first base wrong trying to beat out a bunt. The thing I remember most, other than Mr. Kendall writhing in pain, was seeing his ankle twisted at an angle no ankle ought to be at.
I was reminded of that summer afternoon over the weekend when the news came out about Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffering a compound fracture of his tibia and fibula in their game against Duke.
The sports blog Deadspin had an interesting post today that raises questions about how CBS handled their coverage of the accident. The network showed the injury twice in fairly rapid succession, and then announced at halftime that they would not be showing the injury again.
As Deadspin notes, it’s not hard to find the video on the Internet, including the Deadspin blog, but I think that it is a very different thing to deliberately click on a video clip because you want to see it than having it play on your big screen TV before you quite realize what’s coming at you. (If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you don’t. It’s not that explicit, but you see a let doing something that is thoroughly unnatural.)
Dan Diamond, writing over at the Forbes web site, raises an entirely different ethical issue coming out of the Ware case. He asks what does the NCAA owe Kevin Ware now? While I’m sure Louisville will do right by Mr. Ware, technically they could drop his scholarship, now that he’s not going be playing basketball again anytime soon. The point he makes is that the kids who do all the playing that draws the huge TV profits for the networks and schools do it all for a scholarship that may or may not last.
Food for thought.