The 'football mentality'

There were a couple pieces that didn't quite fit into my story today on concussions and academic aftereffects, but I thought I'd share a few more quotes here:

Ex-Penn football player Colin Donnelly told me that he thought the head injury dilemma would be the end of football, eventually. I asked him what he thought about the recent changes the NFL had made in its policy against vicious hits. His response:

My mentality when you go out on the football field, you don’t want to kill the person across from you, but you do play to hurt them. You know if you hurt them you will win. That’s just kinda the football mentality. And now that you’re taken away from the hitting it’s going to change the game a lot.

Back in the day when they would wear the leather, people wouldn’t hit, and same with rugby, people don’t hit with their head in rugby. And pretty much your helmet is like your battering ram. You feel like you can hit people with your head because you feel like your head is protected, so I think that that might start change.

The other notable piece came from Dr. Kathy Lawler. She talked about how hard it can be socially for athletes to deal with these problems:

Especially for athletes, when they can’t play, sometimes they really are miserable. Think about it: you can't sleep, you can't concentrate, you feel guilty you, can’t study — the whole range. And then on top of that a lot of them feel like they let their teammates down; they're not playing. There’s this sort of ‘god I’m a wimp I have a concussion, I have a headache.’
Sometimes I kid around and say 'what I really want to do is put a big orange cast on you'. Because if you have a fracture, no one questions you can’t play. Whereas when you have a concussion you look fine.

And I think there’s that whole layer of it’s hard to be around and maybe your whole social, maybe you live with other athletes, its your whole social network and all of a sudden you’re not playing and you feel like god I’m being a wimp and it’s hard socially. What do you do on the weekends when you get a headache? it’s noisy, music, talking, partying and it gives you a really god awful headache. So that’s another whole layer, socially it can be really miserable, which I think plays in to the depression piece.

But as both mentioned, attitudes among players are changing drastically. Donnelly:

From my history, when I was younger, I think when people would get a concussion you would almost be like ‘oh they’re just like a baby’.
In the lockerroom, if you have a concussion everybody’s asking about you, everyone cares about you, so I think that the perception has really changed in the past 10 years, that the awareness has really come up and people realize that it’s a serious thing.

I’m sure almost everyone has had a concussion in their history of playing, so you know how it is, you know how it feels, you try to help each other out.