"If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much."
This morning's NYT brought me up short, as it often does, this time with a multi-media article about the prevalence of CTE among young men who played organized tackle football in their youth.
The piece begins with a cellphone video made by an eighteen-year-old, who'd played football since he was in elementary school, calmly describing the demons in his head, the voices, and other markings of an organic brain disorder. Immediately after he turned off his camera he stepped out of the car and shot himself in the chest, so his parents could ship his brain off to Boston University to be part of their CTE study. The results showed State 2 Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, characterized by depression, short term memory loss, and explosive mood swings. It was only going to get worse for this young man, and he knew it. And he knew the cause was years of blows to the head playing football.
Other suicides are chronicled, including the twin sons of George Atkinson, the Raiders hall of famer known as the "Hit Man" for his savage style of play in the 1970s. Both of his boys were football stars, playing for Notre Dame and then, for one of them, in the NFL. Both started to display signs of CTE. Both killed themselves within a year of each other, in their mid-20s.
The parents are all over the map on the question of whether they'd let their now-deceased sons play tackle football, knowing what they know now. Some unequivocally answered in the negative, while the Hit Man said it was their decision to make. At seven. The head coach of the University of Maryland football team and his wife were interviewed about the death by suicide of their son, a football standout since he was in elementary school. Obviously, Coach has a seven figure incentive not to suggest young men shouldn't be playing football, and both he and his wife professed their love for the game. But you could feel the coolness on the couch between this man who makes his living coaching a sport that will leave a chunk of his players physically or mentally debilitated, and the woman who'd buried her boy because of that game. Economic ambivalence, I guess.
I played organized tackle football, but was a relatively late arrival because I was always scarecrow thin as a kid, and my parents rightly worried I'd get maimed. Their marital troubles almost exactly forty-five years ago gave me the space I needed to walk onto the practice field of the Vines High School Vikings in the ninth grade, and I went on to play four forgettable seasons, lettering in the last two. I thought about walking on at USC, but at 187 pounds was too small to return to my old position of outside linebacker and too slow to play in the backfield. Probably a blessing.
Although I didn't play much, I did get my bell rung a couple times, once when I slammed into a defender on a pass play (or, more accurately, he slammed into me) and broke my nose. But overall it was a sufficiently positive experience, teaching me discipline, perseverance, and how to handle adversity: my final exam on this last point was my last game against Norco High School in 1981, when I played both sides of the ball with a 102 degree temperature and a re-broken nose.
So it should come as no surprise that I encouraged my three to play the game when they reached the age when organized football became an option. Two took me up on my suggestion. And I had them out there playing in elementary school. I suppose that was part of my campaign to be the exact opposite of my own father in every way possible. He wouldn't let me set foot on a playing field for fear I'd get mangled. My guys would be out there showing their stuff from the time they were in second grade.
The last of the three didn't play long, maybe three seasons before he tearfully demanded that we not force him to go back out there and endure other boys plowing into him. And it was always that and not the other way around, because Sean didn't have a mean bone in his body, and didn't want to hit anyone.
Jim, on the other hand, took to the game and seemed to enjoy it. He had the barber shave his number into the hair on the back of his head when he was ten, and paint the "45" orange and blue, the colors of his Lynn Haven Raiders. He'd decided, however, to hang up his cleats after middle school, when the rancid politics of football parents and coaches left him as the second-team defensive end at Mowat after the father of his competitor "volunteered" to coach after work in exchange for his son getting the starting job.
But when we moved to Charleston Jim tried again, playing for the Fort Dorchester junior varsity squad. I came to a practice one afternoon to watch (law professors have a lot more free time than actual lawyers) and was horrified by the speed and the violence of the game. It all looks a lot different when you're a parent watching your child out there. Jim was one of only a handful of white players on the field, and seemed one of the smallest as well. During a scrimmage he took a hit that was sufficiently savage that he teetered a little when he got up, and tried to run to the wrong sideline. So I felt a measure of relief when he announced after that season that he had no desire to move up to the varsity and get pummeled some more. And when we came back to Panama City for his last year of high school, he immersed himself in his IB studies rather than trying again as a Rutherford Ram.
But what damage had the game already done? Who knows? He'd surely suffered a concussion or two, but so had I and I'm pretty sure my brain won't end up in a study up in Boston, unless they shift their focus to the long-term effects of gradual pickling.
I understand the whole grandparent thing now, not only the part about getting to spoil some youngster and then hand him or her back to the parents to do the hard stuff. It's also a chance to apply what we've learned, what we wish we'd known when we were parents. An opportunity for redemption.
I think sometimes of the lines from the old Paul Simon song Slip Slidin' Away, about regret and raising sons:
I know a father Who had a son He longed to tell him all the reasons For the things he'd done He came a long way Just to explain He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping Then he turned around and headed home again
Lots of stuff I'd love to explain one day, and not just that lunkheaded parenting decision to encourage them to play a sport that could've ruined and ended their lives. Dad of the Year, I was not.
I reckon this is just a sign of the onset of my usual holiday mawkishness, with Thanksgiving always being the most fraught day of this season. Missing my own mom today, looking forward to spending time with Issac and the Reeves in a week, and hoping one day the three amigos will be a part of all that again.
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