Blog

Chew on this

by Quitters Unite  |  June 22, 2011 - 12:00am

I always find it interesting that chew or spit tobacco is so synonymous with sports. We've all seen the professional baseball player with a cheek full of the stuff, spitting onto the field every 30 seconds or the rodeo cowboy stuffing a wad of chew under his lip.

Perhaps chew is the tobacco of choice for athletes because it doesn't impact lung function or because they can't really be seen sucking back a cigarette while in left field. Although not as prevalent in sports as it once was, I still see athletes, both professional and recreational using the stuff. This includes a guy or two on my softball team and a few of my golfing buddies. These are guys who don't smoke and don't chew unless they're playing a sport...I just don't get this.

First of all it's just sick. My friends are a pretty considerate bunch of guys. They wouldn't ever spit in public regularly, but when they chew, they're having to rid themselves of a disgusting, brown wad of saliva every 20-30 seconds.

Second, smokeless doesn't mean harmless. Chew is every bit as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. It's got 28 cancer causing chemicals that may not lead to lung cancer, but significantly increases your chances of cheek and gum cancer as well as other lesions and mouth sores.

I've asked my friends why they chew, and only when playing a sport. Interestingly, they don't really have an answer aside from, "I don't really know, it just seems to go with golf, baseball, whatever."

Is it really so ingrained in our culture that chew and sports go together? Many people think so. In fact, many people see the use of chew by professional athletes as the main reason why kids continue to pick it up. Kids are especially impressionable during their pre-teen and teenage years. This is also the time of their lives that they are most likely to first try chewing tobacco. 

There are even some myths about chewing tobacco among teenagers and young people. Some popular myths are that chewing tobacco makes someone play better, or that tobacco is cool because the professionals do it. So when these adolescents enter into high school, they will most likely try tobacco because they have seen their favorite professional athletes do it.

For this reason many people think chewing tobacco should be banned from professional sports like Baseball. Would my friends have ever started using chew when playing sports if they hadn't seen this on TV growing up? Maybe, maybe not. But, personally, I believe this does have an impact on kids and think it should be banned in professional sports.

What do you think?