There’s a movement afoot in the National Football League to sanitize the game. High-dollar fines for helmet-to-helmet hits make headlines. Snazzy commercials with Ray Lewis, Tom Brady and men in white lab coats dazzle viewers.
But everything the NFL does today comes with a tacit admission that football is an inherently violent sport.
Just look at the history of the game.
Back in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt threatened to shut the game down after 25 players had previously died that year. Only the institution of the forward pass made Roosevelt back down.
But that was then and this is now. In spite of the worry, thousands of kids strap on their helmets and play each year.
“[A] parent says they wouldn’t let their kid play football — women do it all the time, they say they don’t want their sons to play football,” former Giants running back Billy Taylor says. “And I think it’s so wrong, because they don’t understand the big picture of it, because, you know, a kid got hurt the other day riding his skateboard down, he hit his head and had a concussion.
“I think football’s the best game for kids to play to learn how to work together.”
Then why sue? Taylor is one of the seemingly-countless retired players taking the NFL to court.
“[Because of] what [the NFL] did over the years, by not allowing players to come out of the game and stay out of the game and let the doctor be on the team’s side of things,” he adds. “I think the way they did it was wrong because players in the NFL, because of the intensity of the game, they’ll do whatever the coach says.”
There was a time when that attitude cost Taylor dearly.
“I hurt my knee one time, and the doctor told me to rest the knee, and the trainer told me so … Coach came in and said: ‘I’m not gonna play you unless I need you.’ About the fourth quarter, the game got tight, and coach said: ‘Run in there Taylor, run in there!’ And I said: ‘Coach, my knee!’ And he told me to get in there anyway, and I hurt my knee and missed the next four games because of that.”
After hearing a story like that, I instantly began to wonder just how many of those old NFL highlights of the 1970s and 80s that I grew up on were built on the backs of broken-down warriors unfairly herded into battle.
***
Former Giants quarterback Scott Brunner remembers his first concussion.
Sophomore year at Henderson High in West Chester, Pa. Kickoff coverage. Last man back against the state’s 100-yard dash and shot put champion returning a punt.
“I was running down the left side and I saw this wall forming on the right side of the field,” he says. “So being relatively intelligent, I played the game. I figured, ‘Well, if the wall’s forming on the right side, he’s probably not coming to the left.’ So I got myself down to the end of the wall. Of course, he broke it clean and it was me at the end of the wall between him and the goal line.”
The return man weighed 220 pounds. Brunner weighed 175.
“I don’t remember much after that.”
Nowadays, a hit like that to a high school player would result in the player being held out for weeks, not returning to play until after passing multiple neurological tests.
Brunner played in the very next game.
I don’t remember Brunner for his high school exploits, though. I remember him for his stint as the Giants’ quarterback from 1980-83, leading the team in 1981 to its first playoff berth in 18 years.
I had an anthology of Daily News articles from that era that regaled him as a hero, making him bigger than the game to me.
But he sounds human when I ask him if he’s been experiencing the effects of the concussions that he accumulated over the years.
“You know, it’s hard to tell.”
He pauses again.
“It’s hard to tell if it’s age or concussion symptoms.”
These days, Brunner spends his free time acting as a private quarterback tutor. You may have heard of his star student, Super Bowl XLVII MVP Joe Flacco.
I can’t wrap my mind around what he tells the high school kids he teaches.
“I tell them there’s less likelihood that they’re going to get [a concussion] than I did,” he says. “Just because of the way the rules have changed to protect the quarterback in these days.”
Brunner’s happy with the way the NFL has adapted itself over the years.
But I can’t shake the nagging thought that it’s too late.
***
There’s something oddly beautiful about an empty football stadium, a certain “je ne sais quoi” about seeing a structure that seats 66,000 or so, completely devoid of life.
Sitting in complete solitude, I feel compelled to treat Franklin Field like a blank canvas. Its turf screams out to be covered in frenetic motion. Row after row of metal bleachers sitting on off-white concrete yearn for life, for color.
Maybe it’s just football’s inherent hyperactivity playing tricks on my mind, but I have to see something happening on a football field.
When I’m sitting in Metlife Stadium and the Giants aren’t out there, I hit the “rewind” button in my mind, and watch scenes from previous years play out before me.
And now, six rows up on the sideline at Franklin Field, with the sun making it way too hard for me to see my laptop screen, I flash back once again.
I lean back, and with a wave of my hand, the disassembled superstructure for the Spring Fling concert, sitting in pieces like a just-opened Lego set, disappears, and I’m back in 1958.
I can see 66,000 men and women, all dressed in their Sunday best, watching the Giants of Gifford, Huff and Conerly duking it out with the Eagles.
I hit fast-forward to 1982, and I can see 30,000 Quakers tearing down the goal posts after Dave Shulman rips Harvard’s still-beating heart out from its body.
But just as I’m about to hit fast forward again, something else hits me.
All of a sudden, I can feel the moral outrage of Gladwell and Taylor. I can feel the pain felt by the late Andre Waters and Junior Seau and their families. And yet still, I feel the optimism of Brunner and former Buffalo Bill Mark Kelso.
And all the vividness and color I had been seeing is swept aside and replaced by a deep, all-consuming stillness and a feeling of unease that I don’t know if the sport can ever escape from.
At least, until training camp starts up again.
IAN WENIK is a history major from Short Hills, N.J. and is Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. He can be reached at wenik@theDP.com.
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