George here on the late shift with some food for thought.
The New York Post's Larry Brooks believes that the concussion lawsuit filed against the NHL has merit, and he also believes that both players and those who covered the game back when concussions were supposed to be something you either "shook off" or "played through"--which was as little as ten-to-twelve years ago--should have been asking harder questions, and Brooks believes that those who played need to do the same thing that those who shrug off wearing visors as a matter of "choice" or those who defend fighting as a matter of "self-policing" need to do today: wake up to the fact that there are some parts of the body that you can't fix once they're broken:
I started covering the NHL in 1976. The players back then didn’t ask the kinds of questions that have been raised in the class-action lawsuit, and neither did I. We should have asked, we should have known. We didn’t. Did the league executives? Did the club physicians and medical trainers? If they did, for shame. If they did, if it is proven they did and colluded in a cover-up, they will pay.
I have spoken in the past week with a substantial number of players I have known for almost four decades. They all seem to have mixed feelings about the lawsuit, and few believe they were lied to by responsible parties. These guys bemoan their lousy pensions, but they don’t blame the league. They don’t think they were lied to, and they don’t even blame the Players’ Association for their plight.
If they blame anyone and anything, they blame themselves, they blame their culture, and they blame their time. They took blows to the head, they took an aspirin, and they got back on the ice.
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