<p>Rich Wandschneider</p>

Total victory!

Football injury news has been bleak of late. The NFL has settled with over 4,000 former players and survivors over its negligence in dealing with players dementia, depression, and suicide following head injury, essentially admitting that it ignored its own research in promoting the game and how it is played. The settlement is in the millions of dollars not peanuts, but still small in this billion-dollar industry.

The news on the pre-NFL front is scarier. Younger and younger players who are bigger and bigger are experiencing severe head injuries with outcomes similar to those of their NFL heroes. On a recent high school football special on public television, a neurologist described autopsying an 18-year-old suicide victims brain; she said it looked like that of a 70-year-old. Arkansas lost one out of four players hospitalized for severe heat stroke last year, but one of the heat strokers returned to a great season and an NCAA scholarship, and another rising Arkansas star with multiple concussions interviewed for the program will walk-on at Auburn. Hell take his chances.

When I talk about these things with some of my liberal friends, they immediately go to the over-emphasis on athletics in high schools, and point to other countries where sports are club activities and separated from education programs.

This week I found myself answering that sports is not the problem, that competition is. Where did I get that?

It came out of nowhere until I remembered that it came from an interview with the late Alvin Josephy. Alvin was in his 80s, had written a well-regarded history of the U.S. Congress along with his many books on Indian history and affairs, and old friend Jack Loeffler was talking with him about politics. And Alvin was saying that the current Congress this a few Congresses back was the worst in our history. Competition, he said, was taking over everything. And it was winner-take-all and to hell with the other side.

Competition and individualism are among the cherished American values. But compromise, teamwork, cooperation, helping neighbors, playing fair, making and following reasonable rules are also cherished American values check the Boy Scout Oath, the Rotary Pledge, or the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

But when competition is the highest value, it pushes others aside and it can and seemingly has become winner-take-all in our country. The small town athletic, math, and music competitions in local schools (and the fact that a student can participate in more than one such activity) seem still to include those other values. But big-time high school sports, and the competition to get into the best colleges, are something else. There are classes and tutors for taking the college entrance exams, recruiters and special counselors to coach parents and their children into the right schools.

The competition for student athletes is fierce both the competition among the athletes, and when premier athletes are identified, the competition among schools for their services. These student-athletes are then coddled until they are done. About half of the Division I men actually graduate. The new Eastern Oregon mens coach told a recent Rotary crowd that he left a Division I school because his primary job last year was making sure one player got up in the morning and got to his classes during the day!

There are still plenty of real college students taking classes in medicine, law, art, music, liberal arts, education and mathematics who work towards normal lives, become part of research or work teams and cooperating members of communities. More than half of all such students are now women, by the way. Men still predominate in business and finance, where some of them dream of becoming, and a few become, killer CEOs, men who can push aside the competition and move or manage a company rated Fortune 500 (only 5 percent of 500 CEOs are women!)

For the non-college crowd there is plenty of competition. For every one that makes it onto American Idol or Survivor or one of the bachelor shows, millions are watching and dreaming of being there. And if they cant do that they can cheer on their chosen gladiators in the NFL, where cheering injuries runs a close second to cheering touchdowns.

Or they can cheer on a raging partisan politician.

This morning on the news a South Dakota rancher, lamenting the loss of thousands of cows and appreciating the efforts of neighbors who didnt know each other helping find the survivors and bury the dead after their freak October storm, noted that the USDA offices who might help are closed and the Farm Bill is wrapped in Congressional wrangling. The rancher wondered why the people in Washington couldnt act like South Dakotans.

Main Street columnist Rich Wandschneider directs the Alvin M. and Betty Josephy Library of Western History and Culture housed at the Josephy Center for Arts and Culture, located in Joseph.