by Steve Almond
It came as a pleasant shock that the book was actually about football, and more so that it was set in West Texas. This seemed like a very big deal to me. It encouraged the delusion—always so tantalizing to the chronically self-involved—that there was some cosmic connection between the text and myself.
End Zone’s narrator is Gary Harkness, a running back who winds up at tiny Logos College to evade the draft board and settle his addled brain. “Whatever complexities, whatever dark politics of the human mind, the heart—these are noted only within the chalked borders of the playing field,” Harkness assures us. “At times strange visions ripple across the turf; madness leaks out. But wherever else he goes, the football player travels the straightest of lines. His thoughts are wholesomely commonplace, his actions uncomplicated by history, enigma, holocaust or dream.”
I had no idea what this meant. But I loved End Zone for its descriptions of football, passages in which the sensual experience of the game generated a hallucinogenic intensity. “On a spring-action trap I went straight ahead,” Harkness says, “careened off 77 and got leveled by Mike Mallon. He came down on top of me, breathing into my face, chugging like a train. I closed my eyes. The noise of the crowd seemed miles away. Through my jersey the turf felt chilly and hard. I heard somebody sigh. A deep and true joy penetrated my being. I opened my eyes. All around me there were people getting off the ground. Directly above were the stars, elucidations in time, old clocks sounding their chimes down the bending universe.”
I had never thought about football as a transcendent experience. I’d accepted the allegedly more enlightened view that it was a diversion from the serious business of adulthood, and that my fandom represented a shameful refusal to leave childhood behind. But the exquisite renderings of football in End Zone suggested a richer possibility: that sport awakens within us deep recesses of emotion, occasions for reflection, reasons to believe.
Late in the novel, Harkness and his teammates play a pickup game in the driving snow. It quickly degenerates into a free-for-all. “We were adrift within this time and place and what I experienced then, speaking just for myself, was some variety of environmental bliss,” he observes. “We were getting extremely basic, moving into elemental realms, seeking harmony with the weather and the earth.” This was the novel’s thrashing heart: an ecstatic celebration of the body at play.
Passages like this sent me reeling back to my own youth, to the game we played every day at recess and after school. Tackle the Pill had one rule: bring down the kid with the football. You didn’t even need a ball. Some days we played with an empty milk carton. And what I loved about the game were the revelations of momentum and leverage, the way an abrupt reversal of direction would send a tackler slingshotting past, and you would burst into the clear, adrenaline fizzing beneath your ribs, the next tackler taking his angle and some ancient instinct within you already working out how to make him miss—stutter step, spin, straight-arm, all three synced and firing in sequence—and always the need to keep those knees churning, especially if someone grabbed your shirt, to churn toward that magical trice when your centrifugal energy ripped his grip loose and sent his body hurtling out of your orbit like a satellite hitting escape velocity.
This was football distilled to its essence: You think you can tackle me. Go ahead. Try.
Emmett Creed, the gnomic coach in End Zone, puts it like this:
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
Creed was right. I loved the pileups, the sensation of being crushed by the weight of my loyal enemies. The rules dictated that some other boy would have to grab the ball and set off. But a few times a game, after a long run, there would be a stillness where by some unspoken assent we could briefly retire from the hard work of being boys, all the fighting and feinting, the pretending not to be afraid, where we consented to be joined in these secret burdens, a dozen brothers pressed against each other and the earth in an unembarrassed embrace.
It’s true: we accepted the pain. I can remember being knocked cold in a game with some bigger kids and staggering home from Los Robles Park with a knot above my eye and a thumping headache, livid they wouldn’t let me keep playing. I was probably nine. At a sleepover in seventh grade, we snuck out for a midnight game and Steve Hayes tripped on a sprinkler head and broke his arm and we got his best friend to walk him home so his dad could drive him to the emergency room so we could finish the contest.
During a pickup game in high school, in a drenching rain, someone came up under my arm and lurched me out of bounds. I walked back to the huddle with a peculiar sensation of tightness on the right side of my upper torso then heard a dull pop, which was the ball of my shoulder joint slipping back into its socket. The same thing happened again a few plays later. It never occurred to me to stop playing.
Much of this was the invincible idiot joy of youth. But there’s something about football that elicits this behavior. You know you might get hurt playing. That’s part of why you play, to see what you’re made of, how you take a hit, to see what happens when your courage meets real hazard.
In high school, I began showing up outside Stanford Stadium on Saturday mornings so I could sell hot dogs at the football games. This involved lugging around a giant steel box heated by two cans of Sterno and filled with hot dogs wrapped in white paper, a set-up that led to blistered hands and several small fires.
I loved the job. Stanford wasn’t much good in the early eighties, but they had an all-world quarterback named John Elway. He was almost comically handsome, a blond, horse-jawed kid who ambled around with a pigeon-toed grace. If Johnny Unitas were crossbred with Zeus the result would be John Elway. He threw so hard in practice his receivers all bore identical bruises on their sternums: a tiny purple x where the seams of the ball met.
The play I’ve never forgotten from that era was a third-and-long from midfield. Elway’s offensive line broke down, as it did most plays, and he rolled out to his left, where a blitzing linebacker awaited him. He zipped back to his right only to encounter more rushers and reversed field again. At this point, he had retreated some 25 yards and was being chased by a conga-line of homicidal defenders. It was a strange sequence. What happens, I wondered, if the quarterback never stops going backward? If he exits the field of play? The stadium? The municipality? What’s the penalty in that situation? We never found out. Because Elway did something categorically insane. He wheeled around and cocked his throwing arm, even as his antagonists closed in.
I should note that the mood in the stadium at this point was one of concerted dread. Nothing good was going to happen on this play. Elway had done something very stupid and his punishment was likely to include the cracking of his bones and the sucking of his marrow.
But there is a reason that John Elway was down on that field and we were sitting in the stands. Elway knew the capacities of his body. He knew (or at least believed) that he could throw a football 80 yards in the air off his back foot as he was about to get steamrolled. And the amazing, almost spooky thing, is that one of his receivers knew this too, because he was standing on the opposing team’s goal line waiting as Elway let fly. He waited for what seemed to all of us a very long few seconds, as the ball fell out of the sky and into his cradled arms. No defender was anywhere near him. It was like watching an outfielder shag a lazy fly ball.
I remember also that the old Stanford stadium had this little patch of grass off to the side of the end zone where kids could scrimmage. And during the next timeout, I watched a bunch of boys I knew—they were members of my soccer team, actually—attempt to recreate the play, over and over.
That’s what kids do. We’re a mimetic species. We see greatness and we try to locat
e a version of it in our own bodies.
We all recognized what John Elway had done on that field. He might have been any kid on any playground. Elway ran around like crazy until he spotted something nobody else did, a path to redemption where others saw only ruin. In the moment of greatest peril, he summoned poise. In the midst of entropy, he found order. We all want to find that magic within ourselves. And failing that, we want to watch as someone else does.
3
YOU KNOCK MY BRAINS OUT THIS SUNDAY AND I KNOCK YOUR BRAINS OUT THE NEXT TIME WE MEET
And if that’s all there was to football, well, we could stop right here and go stock up on snacks for this weekend’s games. But of course I’ve left the ugly parts out of this highlight reel. I’ve failed to mention, for instance, the single most haunting memory of my childhood fandom.
In the summer of 1978, during a pre-season game, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots named Darryl Stingley lunged for a pass just out of his reach. Before he could regain his balance he was leveled by Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum. It was clear at once that Stingley was, in the gentle parlance of the broadcast booth, “shaken up on the play.” Team doctors rushed to his side.
I was eleven years old. I knew I was supposed to feel bad for Stingley, and I did in some minor, dutiful way. Mostly I was proud of Tatum, of the destructive capacities central to his identity. The whole point of being Jack “The Assassin” Tatum was to poleax wide receivers in this manner.
The problem was that Stingley wasn’t moving. The doctors kept tapping at his knees with reflex hammers and I remember this because my dad had pulled a reflex hammer from his old medical kit and done the same thing to us. The longer Stingley lay on the chalked grass, the more ashamed I grew. I knew, even then, that part of my attraction to football was the thrill of such violent transactions.
I can still see that hit. Stingley lowers his head just before impact. Tatum’s shoulder pad strikes his helmet. What you don’t see, what’s safely hidden away under the armor, is how this impact compresses Stingley’s spinal cord and fractures his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. Tatum and his teammates stride away from Stingley’s grotesquely bent body with no apparent remorse.
What I remember most of all is the fear that dogged me in the days afterward, as it became clear that a star player had been rendered a quadriplegic on national TV: surely the game of football would now be outlawed.
Two years later, a congressional sub-committee did call Stingley to testify about a proposed bill to limit excessive violence in pro sports. But that measure, like other previous efforts, proved ceremonial. Instead, the Patriots gave Stingley a desk job and honored him in the manner of a war hero. Tatum, who was neither flagged nor fined for the hit, continued to terrorize opposing players. The NFL juggernaut rolled on. And I kept right on watching.
I spent most of my youth playing soccer. I was lucky enough to witness the first heyday of the pro game in this country. We lived twenty minutes from one of its marquee franchises, the San Jose Earthquakes. So why didn’t I watch soccer instead? Why did I gravitate towards football? Why did I take up with the Raiders and remain loyal to them even after their rebel mystique had curdled?
I’ve argued above that the game of football is simply more gripping as a spectacle, a more faithful reenactment of our fundamental athletic impulses. But if we’re going to be honest about all this, then we should specify what when we say “impulses,” we’re not just talking about the frolicking verbs—run, leap, catch—but the delight that boys (and later men) take in tackling and pounding and hurting.
And I should talk, too, a little more about the family in which I grew up. My parents met in medical school and later established private practices. They were politically active on the left. They made homemade jam and bread and candles. They read novels and performed Lieder as a duet, my father singing in German while my mother accompanied him on piano. They were gentle souls with three well-behaved sons who earned good grades. That was the public version of our family.
The private version was troubled. There was a lot of anger in our home and very little corresponding mercy. As I see it now, my folks had too many children too quickly—Dave was barely two when my twin Mike and I arrived. They felt overrun in ways that I, as a parent of three young children, am only beginning to comprehend.
My folks worked hard to connect with us individually. My dad, for example, coached my soccer team for years. But he and Mom also had ambitions of their own. And none of us boys, to be blunt, felt entirely secure in their love. We desperately wanted more attention, but this desperation frightened us, so we strangled it into silence. Rather than entreat our parents, we froze them out. It was how we punished them. We turned our brotherhood into a furious little fortress.
We sought to humiliate and injure one another constantly. I took a perverse pride in the fact that both of my brothers broke their hands in fights with me. One afternoon in high school I arrived home to find my brother Mike stomping around with a carving knife. Dave had stabbed him in the thigh with a fork and now he wanted revenge.
Beneath all the fury, we felt tremendous fear and despair. Later in life these emotions would bubble up through the cracks and swallow each of us, but back then we remained loyal to our chosen omertà. To reveal any weakness, to ask for comfort or love, was forbidden.
We all dealt with the pressure in different ways. My older brother maniacally pursued hobbies. My twin brother withdrew into himself. I watched football. In a home swirling with chaotic rage, it soothed me to see aggression granted a coherent, even heroic, context.
I’m setting all this out to explain why, even after watching a man get crippled, my devotion to the sport never wavered. My dad may have felt the same way, because I don’t recall that we ever talked about the Stingley incident. We must have been content to write it off as a freak accident. We had that luxury back then.
We don’t anymore.
Over the past few years, a growing body of medical research has confirmed that football can cause traumatic injury to the brain, not as a rare and unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is played. The central concern among doctors is no longer catastrophic injuries—concussions that result from big collisions—but the incremental (and therefore largely invisible) damage done by numerous sub-concussive hits.
A study commissioned by the NFL Players Association determined that recently retired pros (ages thirty to forty-nine) are nineteen times more likely to suffer from brain-trauma-related illness than—what’s the right word here?—noncombatants. Given that aging stars don’t want to be seen as disabled, they tend to downplay or even hide their infirmities. The numbers are likely higher.
Players may die younger, too. “Whereas white males live to 78 years and African-American males live to approximately 70 years, it appears that professional football players in both the United States and Canada have life expectancies in the mid to late 50s,” according to Dr. Lee Nadler, a neurologist at Harvard. A 2011 study conducted by the Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at the University of North Carolina put life expectancy for players at fifty-five.
NFL officials have sought to rebut these claims by trumpeting a 2012 study conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. It tallied death rates among more than 3,400 former players and concluded that they enjoy greater longevity.
But this approach, as any actuary would tell you, is inherently flawed, because the average age of death among men in the general population factors in those who die as children or young adults, as well as the poor, sickly, and undernourished. Oh, and smokers. The proper control for NFL players would be a cohort of super-fit, affluent, college-educated men. The study also tracked subjects who turned pro between 1959 and 1988, an era when players were much smaller. Until a sound longitudinal study is conducted, no one can say for sure how playing football effects mortality.
What has become increasingly obvious is that numerous NFL players in
cur brain damage. Doctors have autopsied the brains of dozens of former pros such as Junior Seau, Mike Webster, and Dave Duerson, and confirmed that they suffered from a form of dementia called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Like Seau, Duerson, an All-Pro safety, shot himself in the chest. Before taking his life, he sent his family a text message requesting that his brain be used for research.
A new crop of retired stars is just beginning to report symptoms. Brett Favre, among the most heralded quarterbacks of the past two decades, shocked fans when he confessed to memory lapses last year. “I don’t remember my daughter playing soccer one summer,” Favre said. “So that’s a little bit scary to me. For the first time in forty-four years, that put a little fear in me.”
Terry Bradshaw was so concerned about his faculties that he sought diagnostic help five years ago. “I couldn’t focus and remember things, and I was dealing with depression,” the sixty-five-year-old Hall of Famer recounted. “I got tested to see what condition my brain is in. And it’s not in real good shape.”
Running back Tony Dorsett received the same news last year. At fifty-nine, he had been living with bouts of depression and memory loss. In a tearful television interview, he admitted he gets lost driving his daughters to their sports games. “It’s painful, man, for my daughters to say they’re scared of me … I’ve thought about crazy stuff, sort of like, ‘Why do I need to continue going through this?’ I’m too smart of a person, I like to think, to take my life, but it’s crossed my mind.”
Once again, nobody can say for sure what the prevalence rate of CTE is in active NFL players. The diagnostic tools don’t exist yet. Doctors have yet to determine how factors such as drug use or genetic disposition might contribute to the brain damage they’re seeing. And the sample group is admittedly skewed—former players whose families have submitted their brains for examination. But the numbers are stark. As of March, neuropathologists at the NFL’s designated brain bank had examined fifty-five former football players. All but one showed signs of CTE. Already, the disease has been identified in the brains of deceased college players and even one high schooler.
