PLEASE show it again, in super slo-mo. Lots of times.

Man, oh man. In all the fun of watching sports, we often forget that there is inherent danger in the games we play.

I watched quite a bit of football this weekend, and I just watched some of the Monday Night Football game between Tampa Bay and Indianapolis, a game which features two of the more physical defenses in the NFL....and the biggest, ugliest hit I saw in all the sports I've watched in the last couple of days just happened in the Red Sox/A's game. Two Boston players, Johnny Damon and Damian Jackson, went for the same deep fly and collided in such a way that the back of Jackson's skull smashed, with some force, into the front of Damon's. The two guys literally bounced off one another and ended up prone on the grass. Jackson got up and returned to the dugout, but Damon was just driven off the field in an ambulance.

Baseball is stereotyped sometimes as the least physical of the major sports -- after all, it's sufficiently unphysical that they play 162 games a year -- but let it not be forgotten that these guys are athletes, the game is physical, and they do it wearing a minimum of contact gear.

(And I just had a football-related thought. "Former" Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett is suing the NFL because he wants to enter the NFL draft, but he's too young by NFL rules. The NFL's position is that the age requirement is necessary because the game is so physical that they have to make sure that their players are of sufficient physical maturity to play it; a 19-year old football player, no matter how gifted, simply isn't physically able to match up with the athletes in the NFL. Well, I remember hearing a year ago, on one of the Syracuse radio stations, some guy opine that it was only a matter of time until some player actually dies from an NFL injury. I kind-of scoffed at that, but if we see 19-year olds entering the NFL, I think it may just happen.)