In the run-up to the Super Bowl, amid too much attention to shrunken footballs, let us consider deflated heads. This week’s report of another deceased player found to have suffered from head-trauma disease related to the sport, and a medical study revealing increased risk of memory problems for kids who play tackle football prior to age 12, are what ought to scare the stuffing out of the NFL.
This is the kind of real news—as opposed to the vacuous Super Bowl media angst over players who won’t answer questions, Tom Brady’s sniffles and the chain-of-custody for game balls—that speaks to the future health of a $10-billion-a-year business. That so many former players, and potentially so many children entering the sport, will be losing their marbles prematurely would appear to dull the Big Game’s usual fireworks-and-marching-bands atmosphere.
And it could gradually siphon off future talent and fans, which is why the NFL, as reported by the New York Times, has been taking evasive action by backing nationwide Mom Clinics, meant to convince parents about the safety of having their tykes—as young as 5 years old—cracking heads in youth leagues.
It has become fairly standard for the NFL, and many of its players, to reference increased study of concussions and improved protocol in treating head injuries as their assurance against having a screw loose in later life. True enough that we all have learned plenty about the dangers over the years.
Long ago and far away, during my high school days on the football team in Hobbs, N.M., we dismissed “getting our bell rung” as an insignificant test of toughness. My friend Ronnie Foster, in fact, perfected a ball-carrying style in which he would lower his head to meet a would-be tackler, spinning away from the helmet-to-helmet blow to keep on going. I tried this in practice, with some success, but was fortunate to spend most of my time on the bench, so that I never got enough game-time action to render myself any goofier than I am.
That was 1964. In 2002, Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic neuropathlogist, diagnosed so-called “punch-drunk” syndrome—specifically, CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy—during his autopsy of former Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Mike Webster. But it wasn’t until 2010 that the NFL announced it was hanging posters in all of its teams’ lockerrooms to warn players about the long-term dangers of head trauma.
“Why this took so long, I don’t know,” Omalu told me in a telephone conversation at the time. “I’m no genius; this is something I read about in medical school more than 20 years ago.” Since Omalu’s discovery about Webster, CTE repeatedly has been found in deceased old players. Former New England Patriots running back Mosi Tatupu, who died at 54 in 2010, was the latest cited in a Wednesday Boston Globe article.
Of course, there have been rule changes to prevent “targeting the head area,” restrictions on contact in practice and scientific work on finding the perfect helmet. But Omalu has argued that brain damage results not just from specifically diagnosed concussions but also from repeated blows to the head, and that helmets “do not prevent concussions or sub-concussions, because they don’t stop the brain from bumping around in the skull.”
“We have to take the head out of the game,” he said.
As a cerebral exercise, discovering a way to do that—and still have football as we know it—is a far bigger challenge than keeping all the pigskins inflated properly. Especially when fellows such as Jim Tressel, when he coached at Ohio State last decade, instituted the “Jack Tatum Hit of the Week Award,” glamorizing the viciously aggressive defensive play of a man known as the “Assassin,” and whose savage 1978 hit on New England’s Darryl Stingley left Stingley paralyzed the last 29 years of his life.
Maybe not everyone in football has a screw loose, though. A year ago, the school board in Marshall, Tex.—which fields a perennial state gridiron powerhouse and where Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle played high school ball—approved plans to replace the district’s entry-level, tackle-football teams for seventh graders with a flag-football program. At least until they are a little older, those Marshall kids won’t have deflated heads.