Before you see the movement you’re waiting for, the process has to start in the frontal lobe. The premotor cortex has to prime the system, then the primary motor cortex has to send a signal down the spinal cord. The signal travels on a spinal nerve onto a peripheral nerve until it reaches the muscle fibres, which shorten to create movement—the biceps and brachioradialis, the intrinsic and extrinsic wrist muscles, the digitorum and digiti, the interossei and pollicis. All of them have to get the signals straight in a nanosecond. If they do, the arm comes up, the fist clenches and the thumb pivots skyward. And everybody watching the football game feels better.
So when Darrius Heyward-Bey’s thumb goes up, after 11 of the most terrifying minutes an NFL field has seen this season, as he lies prone on a stretcher strapped to a cart making its way across the O.co field to a waiting ambulance, the roar of 62,373 frightened football fans in the stadium, and presumably the collective exhalation from millions more watching at home, is deafening. His muscles got the signal. So did we.
It’s almost laughable that watching a badly injured football player—rushed to the hospital with a brain injury of unknown severity—raise an arm, extend a digit and proffer it to the crowd, is enough to make us relax; to focus again on the business at hand—wondering if Oakland can mount a stirring comeback or if Heyward-Bey’s backup, Rod Streater, is a free agent in our fantasy league.
The injury delay had, around minute four, crossed the threshold of routine football concussion—the sort you see a few times per week and cringe at, before using the timeout to relieve yourself or grab a beverage—and landed in a place you instinctively feel a football game should never go. Somewhere deep in the brain of almost every fan is a place that understands all the ugly things we don’t like to think or talk about while watching the action. That place knows Heyward-Bey’s body might be broken, sees the Raiders receiver hasn’t moved at all since he hit the ground after a violent helmet-to-face-mask, mid-air collision with Steelers defender Ryan Mundy, strains for a reassuring glimpse of a chest rising and falling, wonders if this is it, the day we watch a man die on the football field. And in that place, we start to wonder if we’re at fault. If it happens, and I was watching, cheering for a big hit, am I partly to blame?
It’s an awful place. We go there rarely and we sure as hell never stay long. And the thumbs-up brings us back, heals a guilty football conscience in a blink. It doesn’t heal anything else, but we don’t care so much about that. It says, we tell ourselves, more than “I’m OK.” It is an acknowledgement of the pact we all signed—Heyward-Bey agreed to get his brain rattled regularly in exchange for a million-dollar living as an NFL star, and we agreed to love it and ask him to do it again and again. The thumbs-up, in that context, says: “I’m OK. I understand what happened to me, and I accept it, and I give you permission to stop worrying about me and get back to the game.”
So we do. And quickly, whistling past the football graveyard. Maybe later we’ll wonder if we ever will watch someone die on the field. Maybe we won’t.
We might well see it one day, and it wouldn’t be a first, either. Football players used to die frequently enough—18 fatalities in 1905 alone—that Teddy Roosevelt convened a summit at the White House that led to rule changes that introduced the forward pass and changed a first-down from five to 10 yards. Players in other leagues—from youth to high school to college and second-tier pro leagues like the AFL—have died of spinal cord injuries or cardiac arrest or severe head trauma suffered during play. Lions receiver Chuck Hughes collapsed and died on the field of a heart attack in 1971. The game continued. A death from an on-field hit has never happened in the NFL but there’s every possibility that scene will one day play out on Monday Night Football—some freakishly superhuman combination of speed and size and aggression will slam into another towering mass of humanity and in a split-second something will go horribly, horribly wrong.
But here’s the thing: It won’t end football, or even significantly change the heart of the sport we love. One week later, more than 1,600 players will still make the choice to step onto a football field, despite the risks. They will still play football, we will still watch football and you’d better believe a score of writers will locate the safest moral ground and plant themselves righteously upon it, proclaiming that neither of those things should happen. But they will. Nothing will change that. Not the scary reports of dementia rates among former players, nor the more than 3,000 ex-NFLers who have filed suit against the league, nor the pundits who rush to paint a picture of a severely troubled sport, its violent nature literally consuming the minds of its most precious assets.
The intense scrutiny of the concussion crisis is slowly changing the culture of football. But the spirit of the game, based on the same painful, eternal 100-yard ground war, can’t be altered to protect everyone who plays it. You can tweak rules, raise awareness, educate players and even change the climate surrounding head injuries in football. These things are happening, and they’re making the game safer. But the nature of the NFL itself? The speed and power and collisions and concussions and memory loss and dementia? The awesome, disgusting, bone-rattling, heart-eating violence of the hits? That ain’t goin’ nowhere.
Big hits sell tickets, and jerseys and Game Pass packages on NFL.com and (though you’d have a hell of a time getting executives to admit it) advertising spots. They’re on YouTube and Facebook and sports blogs and they’re still the talk around the water cooler on Monday morning. They don’t show Jacked Up—the ultra-slick compilation of the week’s most explosive (and concussive) hits—anymore at the end of the NFL’s Monday Night Countdown. Does it make me a bad person that I wish they did? It’s better than lying to ourselves about what we’re watching. Say what you want about a show that underscored brain injuries with humorous punchlines, but at least it gave the audience what they wanted without trying to disguise its identity. We pretend that we don’t glorify them anymore, but we do so many things as football fans that put the lie to that, I’m not sure who we’re trying to convince. Our non-football-watching friends and colleagues? The players we momentarily feel bad for, before we go and see if the hit’s been uploaded yet so we can share it on Twitter (with, perhaps, a statement indicating that we don’t condone this, but you should totally watch it right now)? Ourselves?
On the Tuesday after Heyward-Bey was sent to the hospital, Sportsnet.ca’s Top Five Hits from week three had his concussion at No. 4—which is a strange place for it, really. If the hits are ranked for sheer devastation, Mundy’s hit (illegal—he was fined $21,000) should be at the top. Devastating or not, it’s what fans want to see—of the top 10 suggestions offered by YouTube after typing Heyward-Bey’s name, seven of them lead straight to videos of the hit.
It’s hard to type this without sounding as base as a riled-up Don Cherry, but here it is: We like watching guys get smoked. There are plenty of studies that attempt to explain why; mirror neurons, one theory says, allow us to experience the thrilling hits we see on TV without suffering the damage. “We all have within us the remnants of the capacity to respond violently to conflict or confusion, and yet it’s no longer functional in modern life…So we need alternative ways to deal with our violent impulses,” writes Dr. Jeffrey Kottler in his book The Lust for Blood: Why We Are Fascinated by Death, Murder, Horror and Violence. We like thrills and violence, especially without personal consequences. Football offers that, and we eat it up.
Twelve of the 25 top-selling NFL jerseys belong to quarterbacks. Next come, not wide receivers, running backs or tight ends, but pass rushers, with six on the list. Troy Polamalu, the Steelers safety who admits to suffering at least eight or nine recorded concussions and has inflicted dozens on his opponents by using his body as a heat-seeking missile, is No. 10.
Since the NFL truly entered the concussion era with a high-profile congressional hearing in 2009, there’s been no hint that any of the hand-wringing has slowed the league’s growth. NFL revenues were an estimated $7.6 billion in 2007. In 2011, they were pegged at $9.5 billion, and leaked documents revealed that the league is shooting for $25 billion in revenue by 2027—helped by a series of TV deals totalling $27.9 billion (signed last December) that will, when they’re all in effect in 2014, kick in a total of $6 billion per season. According to Kantar Media, a market research group, advertising rates for NFL games climbed by 27 percent from 2007 to 2011, even as the cost of similar, non-sports advertisements fell by 14 percent over the same time period. That’s probably because NFL games accounted for 23 of the top 25 most-watched shows in the U.S. in the fall of 2011.
If there’s one thing the saga of the replacement refs taught us it’s that we’ll bitch about an inferior product, but we won’t stop watching. We care about the game, the vicarious thrill of its speed and violence, and the result. We don’t care all that much for the actual quality or safety of it. Three weeks of replacement officials and the NFLPA was considering ways to keep their players safe on fields that were growing more and more dangerous. At the same time, NFL games were the top-rated television programs in all 30 markets each of those weeks, the first time the league had ever achieved that feat in each of the season’s first three weeks. In other words, the game was more dangerous than ever, and ratings had never been higher. Does it sound to you like we’re turned off by an increased possibility of violence?
It’s the buried lead in every story you read about the End of Football. Hundreds of words are spent on the physical and mental damage inflicted on players. It’s compelling, disturbing stuff, and journalists are great at dragging the macabre out of any closet and beating it to death. Much further down, are a few words that, thankfully, allow for the notion of freely given consent—the fact that these grown men made their own decisions to play, and the majority believe they chose correctly.
A group of former players testified about the NFL’s disability benefits before
Congress in 2007. They were each asked
if they’d make the same choice to play, knowing what they know now about the consequences. Most of them answered yes. Former Bears QB Jim McMahon, perhaps the most public face of memory loss and mental health issues among former players, still says football “beat the hell out of a regular job.” In 2011, Sports Illustrated surveyed 39 members of the 1986 Cincinnati Bengals, and 37 of them said they’d suit up all over again, even though 36 of the 39 said they’re still bothered by health problems related to football and 17 reported memory loss. Only five Bengals said they wouldn’t want their sons to play football. This past summer, The Sporting News surveyed 125 former players (115 of whom had reported they’d suffered at least one concussion, 76 of whom said they were dealing with mental health issues), asking them specifically if, “knowing what they know now, they would do their NFL careers over again.” The story’s headline read: “NFL Career Worth It? Two Hall of Famers Say No.” The 96 players who said yes—many “enthusiastically”—didn’t make it into the big, bold type.
They never do.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an infamous piece in the New Yorker in 2009: “Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football?” Sometimes a writer doesn’t need to move far from the idea in the headline. Below Gladwell’s lengthy introduction, which chronicles in horrifying detail the mental decline of former Saints tackle Kyle Turley, are 16 words that cut right through the basic premise of his first 1,000: “Turley said that he loved playing football so much that he would do it all again.”
Well then, what are we talking about here, Tipping Point? The dogs don’t choose to fight. It was Kyle Turley’s choice to play football, and even though his faculties are slowly deserting him, he doesn’t wish he’d made a different one. That’s a powerful statement. Only 16 words in an 8,000-word piece touch on it.
The lack of regret, the idea that football players understand the risks they’re taking and consider it a fair deal, is marginalized again and again in pieces about the cost of concussions in the NFL. The players are essentially disenfranchised in print, their own agency reduced to the most cursory of sentences, only after the writer has spent a few hundred words martyring them. The price we all have to pay for thoroughly investigating the very serious risks of a sport millions love to watch and play is putting up with Much Ponderous Typing from those who want to explore the dark side of the issue. And the dark side of the issue comes with headlines like “Does Football Have A Future?”and “What Does The End Of Football Look Like?” It’s tough to sell a concussion story with the headline, “For 76.8 Percent of Former Players, Fame and Fortune Worth The Risk.” Doesn’t exactly jump off the page, does it?
We have to assume that responsible adults are capable of assessing costs and benefits to their person. That is more or less the basis of our entire society. Millions of men and women—many of whom, like NCAA and NFL players, have precious few options otherwise—enrol in the military and serve in the most dangerous places in the world or become policemen and firefighters and walk into places most of us run from. Heroes choose every day to put their lives at risk in the name of our safety. Others choose risky professions that come with less renown—finding work as loggers and long-haul truckers, or as Alaskan crab fishermen, doing the world’s most dangerous job for less than a government paper-shuffler takes home. People die every year doing what they love. More die every year doing what they have to do just to get by. They don’t die years later, either, with a family and a modest fortune, with their jersey numbers hanging in stadiums and a few highlights living forever on the Internet. They don’t do it while living out their boyhood dreams. They die. Sometimes heroically, but mostly anonymously. Their deaths are just as tragic as Junior Seau’s or Dave Duerson’s, but there are no cameras at their funerals.
NFL football does a lot of things to its players. It makes some of them stars, others legends, others scapegoats and villians. It makes most of them rich, though only a few truly wealthy. It offers a way out of poverty and a chance to make a difference in communities across the United States. It offers fame and fortune, the proverbial wine, women and song, so the players eat, drink and are merry, for on Sundays—slowly but surely—they die. And they damn well know it. “I can’t blame anybody for my death,” former Panthers lineman Kris Jenkins told the New York Times last year, detailing the series of concussions he played through. “I made the choice to play football. I made the choice to walk through the concussions. I could have stopped. I could have said, ‘My head hurts.’ It was my choice, as a man.”
“When you sign up for this job, you know what you’re getting into,” Lions offensive lineman Dominic Raiola said this spring, when he was asked if he’d ever join the thousands of former players who are suing the league. “It’s common knowledge people are going to suffer. Memory loss is going to come. I’m ready for it. It’s worth it.”
“I probably won’t live as long because I play this game,” said Kansas City Chiefs tackle Eric Winston. “And that’s OK. That’s the choice I’ve made. That’s the choice all of us made.”
The nature of the game is violent. The culture of the game doesn’t have to be.
If you want to understand how safe football can be, picture Robert Griffin III. Picture Andrew Luck. Picture them sliding, feet first, after a scramble, or sprinting out of bounds before the defender arrives, doing their best to keep their heads out of harm’s way while still accepting the risk that comes every time a quarterback ventures out from behind the line of scrimmage with the ball in his hand.
Both superstars use their mobility as a major part of their game, but both are also intelligent young men who understand that their most precious resource—football or otherwise—is encased in that hard plastic helmet. They know what’s at stake, so they slide or run out of bounds when they can, eschewing an extra yard or two to hop back to their feet and run the next play with a clear head. And they don’t apologize for it, either.
And it works. Except sometimes, because this is football, it doesn’t.
If you want to understand how safe football can’t be, picture RGIII again, this time face down on the ground and holding his head, the result of a week five collision that came as he tried to turn the corner on third down and scramble the five yards to the end zone—you can’t slide feet first into the end zone. Falcons linebacker Sean Weatherspoon’s shoulder was already aimed at his lower body, a textbook legal football tackle, more than enough to knock RGIII out of bounds. But Griffin slipped, and Weatherspoon’s shoulder slammed into the back of the rookie’s head. It wasn’t intentional, but it was a concussion. It’s football. Shit happens, and Griffin knew that when he put the jersey on earlier that afternoon.
Perhaps the strongest argument for the death of the sport is the thousand cuts of litigation. Currently more than 3,000 former players have filed suit against the NFL, arguing the league failed to acknowledge the potentially devastating effects of a life spent slamming one’s helmeted head into those of other players. If courts find in favour of the players, this argument goes, large settlements will make insurance companies hesitant to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. And without insurance, those schools would in turn be reluctant to field teams that would leave them exposed to litigation. Without high school and college teams, of course, the pro game withers and dies.
These are the players who do have real regrets—perhaps not all of them regret that they played football in the first place, but they are all suffering now, they claim, because they weren’t properly informed of the consequences and the resources weren’t there when they needed help. The courts may well side with them, concluding that, like Big Tobacco, the NFL knew harm was being done and didn’t take appropriate steps to stop it.
But it’s difficult to imagine even that ruling setting a precedent that would scare insurance companies away from insuring the next generation of high school and college players for one simple reason: It’s impossible for any reasonable person to believe that football players who enter the game in the current climate lack the information to make an informed decision. Can you imagine an NCAA player today succeeding with a legal argument that states he wasn’t properly informed that playing football in 2012 could potentially damage his brain down the road? He would be laughed out of the courtroom, the same way a smoker would be if he claimed today that he didn’t know that his cancer sticks could give him cancer.
For all the justifiable complaints levelled at the NFL’s historical handling of safety issues, recent measures show a league working a high-wire balancing act—finding ways to keep players safer without altering an on-field product that is more popular than ever. Dealing with a public relations nightmare, the NFL is reacting with the overly-hearty enthusiasm of a once-absentee dad, showing up with an armful of presents to make up for the lost years: a series of donations and grants for head injury research, including a $30-million unrestricted research grant to the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (the largest single donation in the league’s history); the harshest suspensions in NFL history handed down to Saints players and coaches who allegedly ran a bounty program that targeted the heads of opposing players; the Heads Up youth football tackling program that aims to instill proper fundamentals from an early age; TV commercials that wouldn’t look out of place in a presidential campaign featuring a smiling Tom Brady endorsing commissioner Roger Goodell’s plan to make the game safer; posters, videos and fact sheets for players that detail the dangers of head injuries and how to avoid them on the field; helmet replacement programs for youth leagues; and an overhaul of the league’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee with a focus on independent medical professionals. Ask the league what they’re doing tomorrow and they’ll send you their first-ever Health & Safety Report, a glossy 29-page document that paints a slick picture of a bright and healthy future for football. They may be self-serving gestures that reek of an organization trying to cover its backside, but that doesn’t mean those gestures aren’t real or that they won’t help.
The increasing number of reported brain injuries since 2004 seems like an antithetical argument to prove the point that football is getting safer, but it’s simple—the real damage from a concussion comes not from the first one, but from the second and the third, or from sub-concussive blows suffered while the brain is still recovering from the initial hit. The fact that more concussions are being diagnosed and players are missing more games because of them means that awareness is increasing. Doctors (like those on the Redskins sideline when RGIII went down) are more likely to stop a player from returning to the game after a blow to the head, despite his protests. Soon, players may have sensors in their mouthguards and helmets that measure the impact of blows to the head, allowing the medical staff to know exactly how hard that last jolt was—even if it didn’t look so bad from the sidelines. Every time an NFL player is pulled from a game with a concussion and forced to pass independent tests and work through a return-to-play protocol before he retakes the field—all of which Griffin was diligent about—his brain is being spared further punishment.
Teams now hold fewer full-pads practices, which are breeding grounds for repeated sub-concussive blows. Kickoffs now take place from the 35-yard line instead of the 30, allowing for more touchbacks, which eliminate the chance for a special-teams concussion, and, when the ball is returned, offer less space for players to get a running start before impact. (It’s worth noting that the only decline in the number of concussions in a season since 2004 came as a direct result of this rule—a study found that NFL players suffered 270 concussions in 2010, and 266 in 2011, and the number suffered on kickoffs fell from 35 to 20.) A rise in penalty calls for personal fouls in the secondary indicates referees are increasingly on the lookout for illegal hits on what are now called “defenseless receivers.” And any scanning of the league’s weekly fines will show you that players are getting nailed in the pocketbook for illegal hits on the field more than ever before.
If there’s one thing players understand, it’s money, which is why attitudes—even among the fiercest of defensive predators—are slowly changing, too. The sharks of the league—the relics who have staunchly refused to evolve, and are known for their brutal head-on tackles—are, little by little, coming around to the necessities of football in the 21st century. Last year, Steelers linebacker James Harrison openly contemplated retirement rather than play in a league where he couldn’t slam his helmet into those of Cleveland Browns receivers Josh Cribbs and Mohamed Massaquoi without facing a $75,000 fine. “I’m going to sit down and have a serious conversation with my coach tomorrow and see if I can actually play by NFL rules and still be effective,” Harrison said. “If not, I may have to give up playing football.”
One year later, Harrison came roaring around the edge of the defensive line with Eagles QB Michael Vick in his sights. Rather than deliver the kind of trademark Harrison hit that concussed Browns QB Colt McCoy last year, however, he held back. He still barrelled into Vick, but a second after the ball was released, and with less ferocity than fans would expect from a former defensive player of the year. “I thought he might duck his head,” Harrison said afterwards of the play, which ended in an incomplete pass. “It’s Michael Vick; he goes shake and bake. If he at the last second drops his head and ducks down and we make helmet-to-helmet contact, it’s the fault of the defender.”
To some, this was a travesty, the latest pansification of a violent game that is suddenly confused enough about its identity to be fining its own for just doing their jobs.
But really? Grow up. Harrison hit Vick hard. The pass fluttered to the ground, incomplete. The play was made and, if Harrison hadn’t spoken about it afterwards, it would have been one of hundreds of plays every week that don’t make it into the highlight reels. Deciding not to do something that’s against the rules isn’t a sign that the game is becoming soft, it’s a sign that the message is, against all odds and the bleating of dinosaurs like Harrison, actually getting through to the players.
One week later, Packers rookie linebacker Nick Perry was fined $15,000 for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Luck. Perry didn’t lash out at the league, or the refs, or the rules. That stuff, more and more, is so last year. “I’ve got to be more focused on making a play without the head,” Perry said. And that’s it. That’s all it is. It’s harder than it sounds, sure, when the adrenalin is pumping and a split-second play is right in front of you. But it’s not impossible. The speed and ferocity isn’t going away, and James Harrison and Nick Perry will both dole out and suffer their share of concussions before their careers are over. But, slowly, the tide is turning. Cultures, like brains, don’t fix themselves overnight.
Still, some things never change. They didn’t change in 1905 and they won’t change now. You’ll never be able to slide your way into the end zone—you’ll always have to get through 11 men who are trying to hurt you if you want to reach pay dirt. And that is exactly as it should be.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.