[Vision2020] Something to go with Sunday's chicken wings

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 3, 2012
The Cost of Football Glory By JOE
NOCERA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/columns/josephnocera/?inline=nyt-per>

Thirty-six years ago, Clark Booth, a young Boston journalist, went to Miami
to cover Super Bowl<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>X.
Though primarily a television newsman, Booth was on assignment for The
Real Paper, an alternative weekly long since closed, for which he often
wrote. His plan was to interview the players about the potential
consequences of the injuries they suffered playing football.

Today, on the eve of Super Bowl XLVI, everyone knows about those
consequences. Thanks, in large part, to the groundbreaking work of Alan
Schwarz of The Times<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/sports/football/18waters.html>,
the National Football
League<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_football_league/index.html?inline=nyt-org>has
gone from minimizing the lasting damage that repeated concussions can
cause to instituting rules about how soon a player can come back after
suffering a head injury. Former players have filed class-action
lawsuits<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/sports/football/nfl-football-roundup.html?_r=1>against
the league, claiming they suffer permanent brain damage as a result
of concussions sustained while playing football. Stories recounting the
lifelong toll of football injuries are common.

But no one had ever written an article like that before Clark Booth went to
Miami. I remember being thunderstruck reading it. D.D. Lewis of the Dallas
Cowboys talked about having nightmares and his fear of breaking his neck.
Lee Roy Jordan, a veteran Cowboys linebacker, was asked by Booth why he
kept playing with a sciatic nerve condition.

“By the time I’m 55, I feel they’ll have learned enough to medically treat
me,” he said. “If they can’t, I can accept that.”

Booth asked sportswriters and ex-players about the worst injury they had
ever seen. The stories he heard were almost too gruesome to read. He wrote
about Alex Webster, a former great for the New York Giants who had
“developed a radical mastoid problem from repeated thumps to the head.”
Eventually, Webster required surgery that “involved cutting off his ears
and then sewing them back on.” He then developed middle ear problems.

“Why maim yourself?” said Irv Cross, the former player-turned-sportscaster.
“I don’t know. You just do it.” Jean Fugett, a tight end for the Cowboys
who made $21,000 that year, said, “Injuries are just like death to a lot of
players ... death of a career ... death of all that a lot of them want in
life. So you say, ‘I’m not gonna worry about dying. I’m gonna go ahead and
live!’ ”

I never forgot that article. And a few weeks ago, I tracked down Booth, who
is 73 and living in Florida. He dug up a copy of the
article<http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/oped/ClarkBoothArticle.pdf.pdf>,
entitled “Death and Football,” and sent it to me. It was every bit as
powerful as I had remembered.

“It was different then,” Booth recalled, talking about how he got the
story. “You had a lot more contact with the players than reporters do now.
You could catch them in the bar, or the hotel lobby, or talk to them after
practice.” When he asked players about injuries, he said, there would
usually be a long silence, and then they would start talking about their
most hidden fears and their deepest denial. Other players, overhearing the
interview, would chime in with their own stories.

“I felt like I had opened a door that nobody had tapped before,” Booth
said. “I was amazed at what they were telling me.” Other reporters who
overheard Booth’s interviews were also amazed. But Booth never had to worry
about being scooped. Sportswriters back then just didn’t write about
subjects like whether concussions led to dementia. “They were fascinated,”
said Booth, “but they had no use for the material.”

After talking to Booth, I tracked down one other person from Super Bowl X:
Jean Fugett, now a lawyer in Baltimore. “Would I play football again if I
could do it all over again? Probably,” he said. “But I cried when my
youngest son took a football scholarship.”

Today, says Fugett, he can’t sleep more than three hours a stretch without
feeling pain somewhere in his body. He has no idea, he told me, how many
concussions he sustained; back then, “you didn’t take yourself out of the
game unless you stuffed two ammonia tablets up your nose and your head
didn’t jerk back. That’s when you knew you were really concussed.” And he
views himself as one of the lucky ones. Most of the former players he knows
live with far more pain than he does.

Thanks to rule changes aimed at lessening the chances of career-ending
injuries, football is a tad less dangerous than it once was. But it is
still a game whose appeal lies in its violent nature. You cannot play
football at the professional level without having it affect — and quite
possibly shorten — the rest of your life.

“I don’t think anyone should play tackle football before high school,”
Fugett told me before getting off the phone. “Kids’ bodies are not ready.”

“Flag football,” he said, “is a wonderful game.”

  [image: DCSIMG]


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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