Sen. John McCain is calling on the National Football League to do more to address the threat of concussions and repeated head trauma.
The Arizona Republican, who has previously criticized mixed martial arths fighting as "human cockfighting," weighed in on the matter following a Tuesday presentation by the Cleveland Clinic in which a doctor displayed how brains of MMA fighters deteriorated after years of bouts.
“It’s interesting that it is the least organized of all professional sports, in other words you have all this alphabet soup of boxing agencies and yet in the case of the NFL you have one czar who could dictate that these things happen,” McCain told The Guardian on Tuesday, referring to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
“I’m going to be urging the NFL to be joining this Cleveland Clinic program so that we can prevent the tragic outcomes of too many blows,” he added. “We already know it’s happening, it's already been covered enormously by the media.”
The NFL acknowledged for the first time in March a link between playing football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease. The issue was thrust into the spotlight recently following the movie "Concussion," starring actor Will Smith.
According to The Guardian, McCain said he would write Goodell a letter asking him to join Cleveland Clinic’s research. “We’ll see what they say,” he added.
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