I lost interest in football back when Joe Namath was quarterbacking the NY Jets. I remember how opposing defensive players would rush him, deliberately trying to inflict further damage to his already ruined knees — not that Namath didn’t bear some blame for putting his physical health at risk. For me, the excessive violence ruined what might otherwise have been an interesting game of strategy and skill.
Before I knew there was such a thing as football — or American football — my game was Fussball. My father, a German immigrant, played on a club team against club teams made up of immigrants from other European countries. I’d watch him play on chilly Sunday afternoons in Queens, NY, and even as a small boy I came to understand that Fussball, which meant football in German, was called soccer in the US. But soccer is football, because it’s played with the feet, while American football is played primarily with the hands. In fact, it’s illegal for any player except a kicker to move the egg-shaped football with their feet.
Today American football is under scrutiny because of the cumulative effects of head injuries that are claiming the health and even lives of older players, some of whom committing suicide in a way that preserves their brains for medical study. On my block we did play touch football when we were kids, and except for the inevitable skinned knees that were the risk of playing on asphalt, no one got hurt. It’s hard to imagine touch football becoming a multi-billion-dollar game though.
It’s harder to imagine an American landscape without football. Despite the risks, Americans just love violence, and parents would have to uniformly deny their kids the permissions required to participate to have an ultimate effect on the player pool. It won’t happen as long as many continue to see a football scholarship as the ticket to college.
Because we don’t usually see the grievous effects of a concussion immediately, most are not turned off enough by the violence as I was. And when we hear of a retired player shooting himself in the chest in order to preserve his brain for dissection, we don’t really make the connection to what happened repeatedly to that player during games.
I suppose over time things may change. There’s too much at stake for Professional Football to ignore the problem, even if the victims are relatively few in numbers. In my opinion, modern helmets give a false sense of security because of how the brain is encased in the skull — and the brain isn’t immune from Newton’s First Law of Physics, which states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion.
Visualize it this way: When a 260-pound running back builds up a head of steam, his brain is traveling at the same speed. When the back comes to a sudden stop, his brain keeps going at his original speed because it is surrounded by a cushion of cerebro-spinal fluid, which gives the brain room to move about bit. But when the brain does come to a stop, it slams against the inside of the skull, which can cause bruising — and no helmet in the world will prevent this because nothing humans can devise will cushion the brain inside the skull. And if this happens too often, permanent damage can develop. And it does, unfortunately, as the number of former players with brain damage will attest.
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