Comparing professional football to boxing and smoking, President Barack Obama said that if he had a son he would not let him play pro football because of the risk of concussions. Last year, Obama said that he would have to think “long and hard” before he would let his son play football.
“I would not let my son play pro football,” Obama told the New Yorker in a lengthy piece that was published on Sunday. “But, I mean, you wrote a lot about boxing, right? We’re sort of in the same realm.”
Obama then compared playing professional football to smoking.
In an interview with the left-leaning New Republic last year before the Super Bowl, Obama said that “change” was coming to the NFL and said that even though he is “a big football fan,” he felt that “if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football.”
“And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence,” Obama said last year. “In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.”
A federal judge recently ruled that the $765 million settlement between the NFL and former players for concussion-related injuries was not enough. Breitbart’s Daniel Flynn has debunked many of the myths associated with the “NFL suicide epidemic” in his series here, which the organization that first spread the assertion without substantiation to remove the claim from its website.
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