Concussion Risk Quotes

He [Gerald R. Ford] played too much football with his helmet off.

I can go and fight, take one punch, and have a concussion and start having issues with it, or I can wrestle my entire career and never have a concussion. It's just a hazard of the business.

At some point, we're going to have to get to the point where, before you play football, I'm going to test you at some stage in your life to determine if you're susceptible to concussions. We need a test that shows us that your brain is situated a certain way that puts you at risk. If you are susceptible, don't play football.

I would not admire hitting against Ryne Duren, because if he ever hit you in the head you might be in the past tense.

Home-plate collisions are something you cannot ignore.

A lot of people believe that I retired from the game of football because of concussions - that is not accurate. I really retired primarily because of a degenerative back condition that I had.

I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."

All of the sports have a safety net, but boxing is the only sport that has none.

While we know, on average, that certain positions experience more repetitive head impacts and are more likely at greater risk for CTE, no position is immune.

In gymnastics, smaller will always be better in many ways. The stress in the head, that will be the same for all. But the stress on the body and the concussions it must endure, that will always be easier for the little ones.

It's impossible for me to dissociate the risk of playing football from the risk of C.T.E.

Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.

I think health-wise, pro-wrestling is probably ten times worse for you than MMA.

The NFL today has bigger, stronger, bodies than ever, moving faster than ever, hitting a stationary object harder than ever before - so the physics of the hit have changed.

I think they shouldn't allow cut blocks, because our knees are important to us, too. I know concussions are a big deal, too, but I think knee, cut blocks are a big deal, but that seems to be OK with the NFL. So they're not too concerned about safety, obviously.

Football is potential post-career suicide.

The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

If you don't want to play and get concussed, then don't play. It's your career, it's your life. You have to make that decision on your own.

One thing you gotta take into consideration is that it's professional wrestling, and you know it going in. There's dangers to every profession, and our particular profession, concussions is one thing.

The last time I played rugby, I busted my nose bad, and that's incentive not to get down and dirty in the park anymore.

We don't realize how much the NFL is quietly drifting towards flag football. During the '80s, part of the defense's goal was to put the fear of God into offensive players... that's fading away.

Until they study the general population and find out what the likelihood of CTE in a soccer mom is versus an NFL brain, we really have no baseline to rate this study off of.

The idea that just the basis of the game, repetitive hits, could bring on a cascade of issues later in life, that was - it changed the game for me.

Football is brutality. Football is career-ending, life-threatening injury just by stepping on the field.

One of the wonderful things about wrestling, to me, is that you can protect people who have had head injuries.