Browns to interview Kirby Wilson for running game coordinator
January 19, 2016J.T. Barrett fourth in way-too-early 2016 Heisman odds
January 20, 2016Happy Wednesday, Blawg Pound. I’m going to break an unspoken but fiercely held rule of mine today. I’m going to spend a bunch of time talking about the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I never much cared for Antwaan Randle El. He was a Steeler, so as per Cleveland city ordinance B-K054R, I was sworn to hate him and anyone who stood with him. He was one of those players the Steelers always seemed to have, a receiver/returner who at the worst possible moment would be featured in a trick play that broke little brown and orange hearts everywhere. His most famous such play came not against the Browns, but against the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL.
Gross, right? Of course the Steelers are the only team to ever pull off a wide receiver reverse pass for a touchdown in the friggin’ Super Bowl. They went on to win the game, one for the thumb, though the stink of suspect officiating will follow them all to their graves. I hate those guys.
It’s hard not to be sympathetic, however, when reading about Antwaan Randle El and how he views football today. In a story by Brady McCullough for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — part of an admittedly nifty feature about the Steelers Super Bowl X- and XL- winning teams; again, gross, I know — Randle El revealed that he now struggles to walk up and down stairs. He revealed that he has memory issues. He revealed that, if he could do it all over again, he wouldn’t have played football. He would have passed on the whole thing, because he doesn’t think the shape he’s in now is worth the glory of then.
He’s only 36 years old.
“I ask my wife things over and over again, and she’s like, ‘I just told you that,’” Randle El said. “I’ll ask her three times the night before and get up in the morning and forget. Stuff like that. I try to chalk it up as I’m busy, I’m doing a lot, but I have to be on my knees praying about it, asking God to allow me to not have these issues and live a long life. I want to see my kids raised up. I want to see my grandkids.”
Randle El didn’t hesitate when asked if he regrets playing football.
“If I could go back, I wouldn’t,” he said. “I would play baseball. I got drafted by the Cubs in the 14th round, but I didn’t play baseball because of my parents. They made me go to school. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game of football. But, right now, I could still be playing baseball.”
…
“The kids are getting bigger and faster, so the concussions, the severe spinal cord injuries, are only going to get worse,” he said. “It’s a tough pill to swallow because I love the game of football. But I tell parents, you can have the right helmet, the perfect pads on, and still end up with a paraplegic kid.
“There’s no correcting it. There’s no helmet that’s going to correct it. There’s no teaching that’s going to correct it. It just comes down to it’s a physically violent game. Football players are in a car wreck every week.”
As far as What This Means and What It Says About Football, I don’t know. I don’t think we’re going to see any one big tipping-point moment that will bring about the end of organized football, short of Tom Brady literally getting killed on the field. What we have are stories like Randle El’s and tragedies like Junior Seau’s. (Seau would have turned 47 yesterday.) With each public case of a high-profile player suffering from debilitating football-related injuries, or expressing regret about playing the game, or, in the very worst case, taking his own life as Seau did, the dangers of the game will become more commonplace and difficult to deny. This is hardly breaking news. In time, the thinking goes, the talent pool will dry up, the quality of the game will degrade, and football as a whole will become an untenable institution.
When it will happen, who knows? Randle El said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if football isn’t around in 20, 25 years.” If that’s the amount of time it will take for concussions and CTE and such to affect the game as a moneymaking tool, then I agree.
I never played football, but I came awfully close once. I was a rising sophomore in high school, and the game had piqued my interest. Basketball was always No. 1 for me, with other sports sprinkled in through the years. I ran/loathed cross country in middle school, primarily as a means of keeping myself in shape for hoops season. After I got sick of that I turned to soccer for a year, but my only career goal being of the “own” variety indicated that the beautiful game wasn’t for me.
A bunch of my friends played football in high school, I’d always enjoyed it, and I was a big (if skinny) kid, so I thought I might give it a shot. I spoke to a coach or two and went through preseason weightlifting testing at the end of my freshman year. I was a touch intimidated by the whole thing, but wanted to see if I could cut it.
My dear mother, however, was not as keen on the idea as I was. I don’t recall how the conversations went, but she made it clear that she wasn’t supportive of my 150-pound ass getting wrecked on the gridiron. Had I been more headstrong I suppose I could have gone through with it anyway, but I wasn’t. (I also couldn’t drive yet, and jogging home from practice didn’t seem like a great idea.) I wish I could better recall the points we raised in favor of our respective sides, but my memory of the early teen years is rather hazy — and that’s without a summer’s worth of Oklahoma drills.
Though I don’t think Mom said as much then, I think I know now why she didn’t want me out there. When I was roughly 10 years old, I went to some manner of summer camp. Games, crafts, lunches, that sort of thing. We were running around a field like the little aimless pinballs that we were, playing capture the flag or freeze tag or some such schoolyard game. I came flying around an object — perhaps a tree, perhaps the corner of a building, perhaps another human — as another kid did the same. Our heads collided real, real hard.
I know what happened after only because the stories have been recounted to me. An ambulance came to hustle me to the nearest hospital. While in the back, possibly while strapped to a backboard, I said or yelled or screamed or cried to my mom that I couldn’t see her, which I suppose is the sort of thing that causes concern while your son is in the back of an ambulance with his eyes open. We arrived at the hospital, and I was to get a CAT scan. There was a summer storm that day, and the hospital’s power went out. They had backup power good enough to keep the lights on, but the CAT scan machine wasn’t part of that grid (or something). So we went to another hospital and had the scan done there. We were there for a while, then we were home and found that our power was also out. My dad, who was secretly super disappointed when Y2K wasn’t the end of the world, fired up our generator, and we watched the Indians game.
I was diagnosed with a concussion. They say I left tooth marks in the other kid’s forehead. I blame the former for my not having gone to Harvard, and the latter for my still having a gap between my two front teeth. (Neither claim has so much as a micron of legitimacy.)
It’s not a particularly glamorous concussion story, but it’s the one I’ve got. It was scary as hell. If I could do it all over again, I would still go to summer camp. I understand, however, why Antwaan Randle El would not play football.
8 Comments
good read WILL … i really enjoyed your football / concussion story … and very clever on the cleveland city ordinance #.
I think Randle El’s message to parents shouldn’t be about the danger of spinal cord injuries, but exactly what he told the interviewer, that even if your kid makes it out seemingly unscathed, the game will take its toll to the point that at a time where Randle El is supposed to be in the prime of his life, he is experiencing the consequences of football and slowly breaking down. In short, he should be asking parents whether they would like to see their kids be like him at the age of 36, forgetting things and struggling to navigate stairs.
Unlike you Will, my parents put me into football early, probably just to get all of the kids out of the house. I played football from I believe 3rd grade all the way to 8th, and I hated it. The main thing I remember hating was the headaches I would get during and after playing. I thought it was just due to the condition of the helmets (and may have been) but looking back, it may have been just my brain squishing around a little too much.
I have had at least one concussion, but can’t think if I have had another. I think it is a testament to the brain that a concussion can manifest itself in so many ways. If you have a broken arm, you know you have a broken arm. If you have a concussion, you may not know.
I “played” football in middle school, but I should probably use the word “practiced” instead. I was the third string safety and probably played a grand total of 5 actual game minutes in 2 years. I was so frustrated that I stopped going to away games, and I don’t think our coach even noticed. I was a small and frail kid, so my helmet was way too big and my head rattled around in it. Combine that with some concussions I got playing goalkeeper on the soccer team my senior year of high school, and I get a lot of headaches as an adult. I used to absolutely love going on rollercoasters as a kid, but I can’t do that anymore… even one ride makes me sick for 2 hours. So today’s lesson is: concussions suck and my kids won’t be playing football.
Times really have changed. In Jr. High football, my head was so big that they didnt have a helmet to fit me. I had to wait for them to get one appropriately sized (ostensibly from the high school). I got to particpate in all the conditioning (joy!) but had to sit and watch practice and the drills for a week. At one point they were doing an Oklahoma drill and I hopped in line, sans helmet. And the coaches let me go. If that happened today, no less than 10 people would be prosecuted, most likely.
The real question is, what 12 year old wears a 7 5/8 helmet?
As a parent of 4 sons, my wife insisted that none of our boys was going to play football. Rather than argue the point (no intelligent husband ever has an argument with his wife over something that might not actually occur) I simply exposed my sons to many other sports. Given that they were all going to be skinny, I understood that their success would be in sports where this would not work against them. Thus, all 4 played baseball, and I was able to coach them in my favorite sport.
However, my youngest decided to go out for the 7th grade youth football team. I told my wife to let him go, and that he would not last. He made it through a season (albeit mostly on the bench) and that satisfied his urge.
My advice to parents concerned about this is to let your children play a multitude of sports and steer them away from football, but not forbid it. Three are now adults, and in great health, with one more to get through college.
I have two now teenaged sons that each played football for one season. They learned what I already knew about them, the gear, helmets and pictures were cool, getting hit was not. It was fine by me.
good post TSM …
one with a lot of brains … or possibly one with antlers on his head (?).