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<div class="timestamp">February 3, 2012</div>
<h1>The Cost of Football Glory</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/columns/josephnocera/?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Joe Nocera" class="meta-per">JOE NOCERA</a></h6></span>
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<p>
Thirty-six years ago, Clark Booth, a young Boston journalist, went to Miami to cover <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about the Super Bowl." class="meta-classifier">Super Bowl</a>
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. </p>
<p>
Today, on the eve of Super Bowl XLVI, everyone knows about those
consequences. Thanks, in large part, to the groundbreaking work of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/sports/football/18waters.html">Alan Schwarz of The Times</a>, the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_football_league/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about the National Football League." class="meta-org">National Football League</a>
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 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/sports/football/nfl-football-roundup.html?_r=1">class-action lawsuits</a>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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!’ ” </p>
<p>
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 href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/oped/ClarkBoothArticle.pdf.pdf">a copy of the article</a>, entitled “Death and Football,” and sent it to me. It was every bit as powerful as I had remembered. </p>
<p>
“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.
</p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
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.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
“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.” </p>
<p>
“Flag football,” he said, “is a wonderful game.” </p>
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