Canada

I'm not from Brantford, but I'm from SOnt, and he was a god to a kid in the 80s. I remember fighting every ounce of my energy trying to stay up to watch the late night games as a little tiny kid. I remember saying as a 3 or 4 year old that I'm going to Edmonton when I grow up, I'm going to work and watch Wayne Gretzky (and it's funny how that almost actually played out, but I got the wrong city). It breaks my fucking heart. You broke our hearts Wayne. Never meet your heroes they say, and it's a funny saying because most of my heroes have actually turned out to be pretty stand up in person too. All but one.

Lemieux still isn't the goat. Gretzky sucks hot ass, fuck the guy thoroughly and completely. But you can't take his stats away. There's plenty of athletes who have done impressive feats of athleticism and are still total pieces of shit.

Brantford is the most MAGA place in Canada outside of Alberta. Worst drunk driving and domestic violence rates in Southern Ontario.

Seriously this is really old news.

Elbows up, our defense doesn't care whether he's a star player or not.

The not so great one

I know it's funny to insinuate that brain damage caused people to become conservatives, but I think we should accept that the culture around aggressive, full-contact sports tends to be conservative to start with. Surround yourself with that culture day-in, day-out, and before long you find yourself ingrained in more than just their favorite sports.

But I mean, that doesn't mean it's not the brain damage. A thing can be more than one thing.

Football (soccer as you call it) is so underrated in this respect it's not even funny, heading the ball is extremely dangerous for the brain in the long term. Not to mention head clashes in challenges etc. Granted, most injuries are in the lower limbs but still.

As opposed to victims of the never ending human thirst for blood sports

Wayne wasn't the subject of very many hits in hockey. CTE isn't a factor that you can blame. As it goes with shit stains, everyone around him probably has the CTE as they were collateral damage, guys like Dave Semenko (it's never been publically disclosed but he was post-mortem investigated for it after dying of cancer) or Marty McSorley (who is not dead but he states he has memory loss and other symptoms).

I'll spam this fact wherever I see comments on CTE.

CTE is not correlated with the number of concussions. It's correlated with years of exposure to repetitive minor hits. It's a very important distinction because the NFL (and every other professional sport with blows to the head) is trying to push the narrative that concussion is the boogeyman, so that if they can reduce concussion (and they can), they can declare their hands clean from CTE. The only way to reduce CTE is drastic changes to the game.

and they can keep his shitty grape juice and industrial solvent whisky.

Stan Mikita Donuts?