JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

I could have spent years stomping my feet and pounding the walls about football and traumatic brain injury before I would have made the slightest dent in football’s popularity.

But out of left field, so to speak, along came President Trump on Friday to advance by huge strides my personal crusade to kick football to the curb.

Trump didn’t kick with his feet, though. He used his most deadly weapon — his big, fat mouth.

A little more than a year ago, many of us would have been flabbergasted to hear a President, any President, call someone, anyone, a “son of a bitch.” But now that we’ve seen and heard how President Trump talks — i.e., “Grab ’em by the pussy; you can do anything” — whatever insulting language or specific words he uses barely register on the shock meter.

Before Trump spoke out Friday, only a slight crack was visible in football’s institutional bulwark. The increasing awareness and evidence of the link between repeated concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.) has been giving more people, especially mothers of young boys, pause about the hazards of football. But by essentially declaring war on National Football League players who choose to publicly demonstrate their frustration with racial injustice (see white cops killing unarmed black men with impunity), we may well see a lot more people turning their backs on pro football. And that could, in turn, push down to the college, high school and grade school level.

(As an aside, I found it interesting — and a bit cowardly — that Trump made his indictment in Alabama, which does not have an NFL team but has the nation’s No. 1 college team.)

Pro football was at the height of its popularity a year or two ago, just before former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided he would start kneeling in protest during the playing of the National Anthem before games.

After a preseason game in August 206, he told NFL media…

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.

On Sunday, we saw that this situation has, indeed, gotten a lot bigger than football.

It was reassuring to me to hear reports that owners, coaches and players alike were banding together and metaphorically locking arms against Trump’s blusterous campaign to purge the NFL of protesters.

In the end, though, I don’t think we’ll look back and see the past weekend as the straw that broke the NFL’s back. There’s too much money on the table, for owners, the league and the players themselves. This will get worked out and we’ll probably see a Super Bowl-winning team back at the White House before the end of Trump’s first term.

In the end, it will be the brain injuries that drags football off its lofty entertainment perch and leaves it in the same category as boxing, which, not that long ago, was America’s favorite sport.

We’ve come a long way. It’s important to keep in mind that as recently as 2010, a neurologist named Ira Casson, who had recently resigned as co-chairman of the NFL’s “Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee,” told a congressional committee…

“My position is that there is not enough valid, reliable or objective scientific evidence at present to determine whether or not repeat head impacts in professional football result in long-term brain damage.”

For we who are intent on making more Americans aware of football’s danger to the human brain, we can use all the help we can get — even from a President who often seems deranged.