On this hot early September night, Ole Miss’s punter, Jim Miller, boomed a high, hanging kick late in the game, and I had zeroed my facemask in on Tide All-American and eventual All-Pro Tony Nathan, convinced that he either had to duck out of bounds or run … straight into me and my oncoming face mask. I was a center, the guy who had to snap the ball to a punter about 13 yards behind me in eight-tenths of a second or less, then run downfield and try to tackle the world-class sprinter who catches the punt. My worst bell-rung moment came in a 1977 game against Alabama in Birmingham. We laughed it off when a defensive player who “had his bell rung” stumbled into the offensive team’s huddle in practice. ![]() The results, even in practice, were predictable. There was a phrase for it: “Bow your neck and stick your nose in there.” My freshman season in college, we were explicitly instructed to aim the middle of our face masks like guided missiles between the numbers on the ball carrier’s jersey (the one part of his body he can’t juke) and explode through the target with the force of our whole bodies. Such blows would have been unfathomable a generation earlier to players who wore leather helmets sans facemasks and were taught to block and tackle with their shoulders. That sense of invincibility was abetted by advances in headgear and equipment design, particularly unbreakable fiberglass helmets with shatterproof, steel-reinforced face masks that allowed players to use their faces as battering rams, heedless of the devastating consequences that the shock from such crashes causes inside the cranium. That feeling of being 10 feet tall and bulletproof is why we played the game as recklessly as we did – with players far larger, faster, stronger and more violent than than our fathers, in more primitive, less protective gear, had been. Such admonitions hold little currency among testosterone-fueled boys that age who believe they can run unscathed through a brick wall. My answer is equivocal because I doubt my younger self would have listened to the creaky, cautious, old gray man offering him hard-learned decades of insights. If I could, the 66-year-old me writing these words would zoom back in time half a century and tell the 16-year-old me, about to start my final high school season, that the game’s not worth the risk. If I knew then – the 1970s – what I know today about CTE, which essentially hollows out vast expanses of its victims brains over time, I might not have risked playing the game I loved and still follow devotedly in spite of myself. Stories like this one about the late Ray Perkins – one of Johnny Unitas’s favorite receivers as a Baltimore Colt and later head coach of the NFL’s New York Giants, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and his alma mater, the Alabama Crimson Tide – tend to make the story real for football fans.īut when you learn that a former teammate and old friend is in the same twilight struggle that contributed to Perkins’ demise and those of many other former football players of a variety of ages, it becomes personal. ![]() If you follow the sport at all – or, perhaps more notably, if you follow neuroscience – you are familiar with “chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” an insidious, irreversible degenerative condition linked to brain trauma from the same type of blows to the head that are inherent to American football and boxing, to name two conspicuous causes from sports. So pardon me while I bite the hand that fed me: football must change itself radically to survive. Much as I once dreamed of playing the game on Sundays, my skill set was not NFL caliber, and I realized that in time to get serious about academics and a future as a journalist. I was fortunate enough to do it longer than many and play the game at a respectable level – Ole Miss of the Southeastern Conference. Football was all I wanted to do when I was the age of these kids who will take the field for the opening games of 2022 on Friday night. Tomorrow, the first rituals of fall and a fresh school year will renew themselves as boys (and some girls) across Virginia snap the chin straps to their helmets, dig their cleats into the turf and start a new season of high school football.įor me, the nostalgia gets so thick I could spread it with a butter knife.
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