Ward was articulate about how to preserve boxing's future. I do think his urge to ban children from contact sports until age 14 is excessively early though. I lean more towards a minimum age of 18, so no more high speed contact sports in high school.
As children, we played sandlot tackle football, but obviously head contact was automatically out. (We didn't even think about it.) We would also box with gloves, but only targeting the body, never the head. We enjoyed the hard physical contact, whaling the tar out of each other, but nobody ever sustained a facial cut, had their bell rung or teeth loosened. Heads and faces were off limits, and that was that.
My father played with helmets on the high school gridiron which didn't have face masks. Nobody ever suffered facial injuries, had their bells rung, and none of his teammates ever had CTE related dementia. (The only players who did eventually sustain symptoms of senility were those who had it run in their families.) Archival gridiron films from the era of faceless helmets showed that those players did not use their heads as weapons or targeted the heads of their opponents. It was a physical game, but not a headhunting game. The modern decline of NFL viewership and interest could offer the NFL a chance to ban face masks and heavy "protective" gear. You'll see head to head contact disappear pretty quickly. Bring back leather helmets, and you'll stop seeing heads getting lowered upon contact with startling suddenness.)
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