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The Sporting Scene Does Football Have a Future
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The Sporting SceneDoes Football Have a Future?The N.F.L. and the concussion crisis.by Ben McGrath
January 31, 2011 The violence of football has always been a matter of concern and the sport has seen periodic attempts at safety and reform. But recent neurological findings have uncovered risks that are more insidious.
National Football League (N.F.L.); Concussions; Craig Heyward (Ironhead); Pittsburgh Steelers; Alan Schwarz; Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (C.T.E.); Sports I still remember my first football game. It was 1983. I was six. My father took me to our local high school,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], in northern New Jersey, and we sat on the home team��s side, but it wasn��t long before my allegiance began to waver.
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The opponents, from a town called Passaic, were clearly superioror, rather, they had a superior player whose simple talents were easy to identify in a game so complex and jumbled-seeming that even lifelong fans do not fully understand it. He wasnt the biggest person on the field, and probably not the fastest, but he was strangely fast for a big person and unusually big for a fast person. He played both sides of the ball: running back and linebacker. He was also the kicker, and he returned punts. In my memory,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], he scored a touchdown, kicked a field goal, and sacked the quarterback for a safety. 12C0. As my father and I searched for his name in the program,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], a man seated a couple of rows in front of us spun around and said,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], They call him Ironhead. I was smitten.
Ironhead, whose given name was Craig Heyward, went on to become a star at the University of Pittsburgh and then a pro with several N.F.L. teams,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], although he was probably more famous for his nickname and for his physique than for his accomplishments on the field. He was strictly a running back after high school, but he looked more like a lineman: a bread truck with feet, as one writer called him. Heyward did not run sweeps. He ran up the middle: into, through, and over,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but seldom around, defenders.
His style of play embodied Newtons second law of motion: force equal to mass times acceleration. I think of him every time I see the Old Spice commercial in which the Baltimore Ravens star Ray Lewis emerges from the shower naked except for a suit of fake soapsuds,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], because Ironhead,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], as a spokesman for Zest body wash, in the mid-nineties, was a pioneer of the genre. He was that crucial thing in the marketing of football: a cuddly warrior. Its easier to marvel at the gladiatorial nature of the game when the participants appear to be laughing about something as trivial as personal hygiene.
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He would lower his head into opponents stomachs, and one opponent said it hurt so much that Heywards head had to be made of iron: that explanation for the name that made him my favorite player appeared in Heywards obituary in the Times, in 2006. The anecdote referred to his habit while playing street football, without a helmet, as a wayward boy in Passaic. He was only thirty-nine when he died, from a brain tumor. Even the hardest of heads is vulnerable to disease.
Ive never read or heard any suggestions that the cancer was related to Heywards football career, but when the executives at the N.F.L.s headquarters, in Manhattan,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], talk about changing the culture of the sport,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], as they have been doing with increasing urgency in the past few months, in response to growing public concern over concussions, the use of the head as a battering ram, with or without a helmet,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], is near the top of the list of things theyd like to disown.
I thought of Ironhead last month as well, while standing in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel, where a special meeting of the leagues Head, Neck,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and Spine Injury committee was convening in one of the function rooms. Bert Straus, an industrial designer with a background in bathroom fixtures,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], dental-office equipment, and light-rail vehicles, was showing off a prototype of a new helmet called the Gladiator, whose primary selling point is that it has a soft exterior.
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A colleague of Strauss handed me a pamphlet titled Collision Physics for Football Helmets. This stuff goes way beyond Newton: elastic versus inelastic collisions, Complex Modulus = f (Rate of deflection, Youngs modulus, % compression). I picked up the helmet. It felt awfully heavy. It also didnt feel very soft. The Gladiator is made of reaction-molded polyurethane, like the bumper on your car. Truly soft shells run the risk of causing friction,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], which is bad for the neck.
Colonel Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist with the Defense Department, had come to the InterContinental to share some of the governments research with the N.F.L.s medical brain trust. (Concussions among the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], one doctor told me, could be the next Agent Orange.)
If you look historically, what really hurts our soldiers from blasts is artillery shells, mortar shells,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], Ling said. The combat helmet was designed particularly for mitigation of fragments. It does have some ballistic protection. You could shoot at the thing point blank with a 9-millimetre pistol, and you wont penetrate it. Thats pretty doggone good. Im surprised New York City policemen arent wearing the doggone thing. But, like, I wouldnt play football with the thing. It aint that good.
Was Ironhead a role model for a sport with no future?Weve been here before, historians remind us, and we have the pictures to prove it: late-nineteenth-century newspaper and magazine illustrations with captions like The Modern Gladiators and Out of the Game. The latter of those, which appeared in Harpers Weekly in 1891, describes a hauntingly familiar scene, with a player kneeling by his downedand unconsciouscomrade, and waving for help, as a medic comes running, water bucket in hand.
It accompanied an essay by the Yale coach Walter Camp, the so-called Father of American Football, whose preference for order over chaos led to the primary differentiating element between the new sport and its parent, English rugby: a line of scrimmage, with discrete plays, or downs, instead of scrums.
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