Alumni Speak Out: Are Soccer Kids Heading for Disaster?

As we head into fall and girls soccer season, some haunting Madison memories spur me to sound the call for soccer helmets to replace soccer "heading" for boys and girls.

 

This concern started with a summer bike ride this summer in Madison past the playing fields near the University of Wisconsin hospital where soccer camp for teenagers was in session. The ride ended close to the Shorewood Hills school playground, where children were practicing AYSO soccer.

 

In between those young and happy scenes, I rode by the UW Field House, where I had attended countless boxing matches as a boy growing up in the 1940s and as a college student in the 1950s. Two blocks away, I also rode by my old Spooner Street house, where our next-door neighbor, economics professor Walter Morton, had lived.

 

E. Richard Stiehm believes helmets would help prevent head trauma in young soccer players.

Walter, considered an eccentric by most, raved for years about the evils and dangers of boxing in general and UW college boxing in particular.

 

That evening, I traded medical notes with an old friend, Dr. James Whiffen (MD '55), who gave me a ringside account of the end of college boxing.

 

That bike ride and that conversation were the genesis for writing about the dangers of soccer "heading" to children's brains.

 

Soccer players, even youngsters, use their unhelmeted heads to advance the ball (a move known as heading), much like boxers use their heads to stop the opponent's fists. Flying soccer balls and flying fists are BAD for the brain!

 

Remembering Charlie Mohr

 

Charlie Mohr, a 22-year-old Wisconsin 165-pound boxing middleweight champion and a campus hero, was in the finals of the NCAA boxing tournament held in the UW Field House on Saturday night, April 9, 1960, the eve of Palm Sunday. If Mohr could defeat his opponent, Wisconsin would win its fifth NCAA boxing title.

 

But it was not to be.

 

Mohr received a hard blow to the left temple in the second round and fell to the mat for a TKO. He staggered back to the dressing room, apologized for losing the bout, and then collapsed.

 

Jim Whiffen was the surgical resident on call when Charlie was brought to UW Hospital. He and a fellow resident immediately took Mohr to the operating room while neurosurgeon Dr. Manucher Javid rushed to the hospital to decompress Mohr's hemorrhaging brain. Charlie Mohr never regained consciousness. He died a week later, on Easter Sunday.

 

Shortly thereafter, a colleague of Walter Morton, professor David Fellman, introduced a faculty resolution for the University of Wisconsin to halt college boxing. This was formally approved by the faculty and subsequently by the Board of Regents. That ended college boxing at the university and throughout the United States. Mohr's death left a long wake as an unexplained tragedy of Wisconsin athletics.

 

Local supporters of college boxing said Mohr's fatal injury was due to a congenital aneurysm, a claim disputed by Dr. Javid. Mysteriously, Mohr's medical records, his death certificate and the archives of the fight at the UW athletic library disappeared by the time sportswriter Jim Doherty researched the event for his article, "Requiem for a Middleweight," in the April 2000 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, exactly 40 years after Mohr's death.

 

Soccer Players at Risk for Head Trauma

 

Defenders of college boxing declared that despite the occasional transient wooziness, minor concussions and rare knockouts, the larger gloves and the three two-minute rounds made the sport perfectly safe. Nowadays, soccer coaches and fans throughout the world claim that heading is of no risk and helmets unnecessary.

 

Indeed, nearly every sport in which there is a risk of head trauma has adopted helmets in the last 50 years, including amateur boxing, football, skiing, equestarian events, lacrosse, hockey, bicycling, even NASCAR racing. But not soccer, probably because it would interfere with accurate heading.

 

I asked several neurology and neurosurgical colleagues about soccer heading, and each one deplored the practice. Dr. Christopher Giza of the UCLA Neurosurgerical Head Trauma Service pointed out that a perfect heading, in the midline of the forehead, does not result in brain trauma. But an off-center heading may well cause brain displacement.

 

Minor repetitive brain trauma is cumulative - indeed, Muhammad Ali can no longer speak as a result of sustaining repeated blows, and pro football players get early dementia up to 17 times more often than other men. Further, a child's developing brain has more plasticity and thus is particularly susceptible to minor trauma.

 

Multiple studies in the medical literature discuss the risks of soccer heading (308 citations in the National Library of Medicine); several show that brain proteins are released into the blood stream following minor head trauma such as soccer heading.

 

So until a child gets a severe concussion or brain injury from heading, nothing will change. He or she will become the poster child for a no-heading rule and soccer helmets - the Charlie Mohr of children's soccer. Or, as we approach the 50-year mark since his untimely death, let's take a simple step to prevent another one like his.

 

By E. Richard Stiehm, MD '57. Stiehm is a professor of pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine. He grew up in Madison. He can be reached at estiehm@mednet.ucla.edu.

Date Published: 11/11/2009