Another constant throughout Myles’s childhood: dogs. The dogs he had were always beagles or coonhounds, and he named almost all of them Skippy. The reason he had so many different dogs during his childhood? They kept getting run over. It was one of Myles’s early lessons about the fragility of life. When Myles was in eighth grade, an older local boy in a truck ran over Skippy. Instead of expressing sorrow for killing the coonhound, the boy just laughed. Some years later, when Myles was in college, he saw that same driver who’d killed his dog. “Remember me?” Myles asked his old nemesis. Then, Myles punched him in the mouth.
Another constant was guns. Yes, the guns were for utility, for killing the rattlesnakes and foxes that menaced their farm animals, and for hunting the deer and pheasant that were in abundance on the family’s land. But the guns were also for entertainment. Myles was a quiet and serious boy. Most of his childhood joy involved himself, his dog, and his gun. For Myles’s ninth birthday, his dad got him a BB gun. “That’s all I did, every day, shooting that BB gun,” Myles recalled. “Shooting birds, sparrows. I shot a screech owl one time out in the barn. Shot a rabbit one time with it. At night, I’d go out to the barn with my headlamp on. We’d shoot twenty sparrows or starlings a night. The cats and dogs would go out and eat them.” The summer before he turned thirteen, he walked the bean fields all summer and pulled weeds, saving up fifty dollars. With that he bought a big bluetick coonhound named Duke.
A final constant in Myles’s childhood: football. One of the oldest black-and-white photographs from his childhood shows him dressed up in a football uniform as a toddler. “I loved football right out of the gate,” he recalls. Starting when Myles was three, Grandpa Easter would pick up him and his father on fall Friday evenings, and they would drive to Winterset, meet up with Myles’s other grandfather, and walk to the high school to cheer on the local football team. Even at age four or five, Myles was transfixed by the spectacle, the strategy, and the savagery—the big hits on the field that got the loudest shouts from the crowd, and that seemed to young Myles to define what it meant to be a real man. On other nights, Myles would go to his maternal grandparents’ house, and they’d listen on the radio to football games from the big Catholic high school in Des Moines. It’s a scene that would repeat when Myles had grown boys of his own, when he and Zac and Myles II and Levi would stand outside the truck on a Friday night, drink beers, and listen to high school games on the truck’s radio.
As a kid, Myles Sr. also went to Iowa State games seventy miles away in Ames with his grandfathers. When Iowa State played a small private school in Des Moines called Drake University, Myles turned to his father and said, “I want to play for Drake.” He liked the uniforms. In high school, Myles played strong safety, and he loved to hit people—hard. His favorite team was the Minnesota Vikings, a bruising crew whose defensive line became known as the Purple People Eaters. But his favorite player didn’t play for the Vikings. He played for the Oakland Raiders. It was Jack Tatum, the hardest-hitting safety of his time, nicknamed “the Assassin.” Tatum is remembered for paralyzing an opponent with a big hit during a preseason game. Myles channeled that on the field. He still beams when talking about those perfect hits, the ones that felt pure and true and utterly destructive. “I had a few of those hits where you really don’t feel it because you smoked the guy so bad,” Myles recalled of his own playing career, which progressed from Winterset High School to Drake University, just as he’d predicted as a kid. “I was always hungry for those. I was a Vikings fan, but Jack Tatum killed people. He blew people up. And that’s what I liked about football.”
Myles Easter paused after he told me this. It had been four decades since Tatum’s big hit paralyzed wide receiver Darryl Stingley, sixteen years since Dr. Bennet Omalu performed the autopsy of NFL Hall of Famer Mike Webster and found anomalies in his brain, six years since NFL star Junior Seau pointed a shotgun at his own chest and killed himself at age forty-three, and not even three years since his own son Zac had committed suicide at twenty-four—after only playing football through high school.
He sighed. Part of him still looked at the biggest of football hits as one of the great markers of real manhood; you don’t just erase that way of thinking after it had been etched into your brain for a half century. “You didn’t know people were getting hurt that bad,” he said, almost by way of apology. “That was the innocence of football when I was younger.”
Today, his feelings on football are nuanced and complex. He hates what the sport had done to his son, yet like so many millions of Americans, he still loves football. He spends Sundays in the fall watching his Vikings. He even took over Zac’s fantasy football team after his death. He still finds himself addicted to the sport’s cathartic form of violence—at least the violence that the sport used to have. But increasingly, as the concussion crisis has spurred a safety revolution in football, and as rule changes have “sissified” the game—Myles’s word—the sport of today does not resemble the sport he grew up loving. As he looks at the current style of football, a style that increasingly favors finesse and speed over hard hits and an old-school sense of manliness, he hates this version of the sport in spite of himself. This isn’t real football. The sport has become safer than even a few years ago, certainly, as fears of an epidemic of head injuries had spurred the NFL, colleges, high schools, and youth leagues to try to take the head out of the game. Myles realizes this is a very good thing, both for the football players as well as for the survival of the sport. But the game at times appears unrecognizable when compared with the sport he revered during his childhood.
“I don’t even like watching football anymore,” Myles Easter said with a shrug.
His reasoning is not so much because the sport had contributed to the death of his son, and not so much because the sport was going through this existential crisis as fans and parents grappled with how much violence was an acceptable amount of violence. His feelings on football have waned because of this: “It’s just gotten to be a track meet.”
In Myles Easter’s mind, it’s not that there is too much violence in football these days. It’s that there isn’t enough.
Myles Easter teaching his three sons the sport of football can be viewed two ways. On the simplest level, it’s one man who enjoyed a game and shared that game with his boys. No different than a father passing on to his children a love of chess, or woodworking, or comic books. But Myles as his sons’ first football coach can take on a deeper, almost anthropological aspect: A tribal elder passes on the ideas of violence to the younger men of his tribe, a lifelong lesson in the skills of warfare that are intended to protect and expand their society. That’s what you hear when Myles Sr. talks about his own football career, a joyful worship of the sport’s violent side: “I just wanted to knock the fuck out of somebody,” he said. His favorite teams were what he now looks at as old-school teams, before there were newfangled pass-happy spread offenses (he prefers three yards and a cloud of dust) and rules that protect and even coddle the quarterbacks (rules that he believes softens the game). Football and violence are part of the recipe to create a man.
Of course, training young men for the battlefield, whether through actual military training or through the “surrogate war” that is football, has also meant coarsening them to violence. Not all of America has been on board for that. Football’s history has been marked by a push-pull between two forces in society: the motherly concern that football’s violence goes too far versus the feeling of the red-blooded American male that sometimes football’s violence isn’t just acceptable but necessary. The game encouraged violence among its players and bloodlust among the increasing numbers of spectators who came to watch. A new rules convention in 1883 allowed for any manner of violence: “to hack, throttle, butt, trip up, tackle below the hips, or strike an opponent with closed fist three times before he was sent from the field.” A downed ball carrier might keep crawling forward, fighting for every inch as tacklers piled on top of him and kneed him and kicked him until
he verbally admitted defeat.
An 1888 New York Times story about a Yale–College of New Jersey game detailed the game’s brutality: “The favorite methods of damaging an opponent were to stamp on his feet, to kick his shins, to give him a dainty upper cut, and to gouge his face in tackling . . . He gets on his feet again, limps around a little, gathers his wandering wits and is as eager for the fray as ever.” This violence was both accepted as part of the nature of the game as well as glorified as what made the game great. There was beauty amidst the game’s brutality, and the game’s brutality made that beauty stand out even more. By 1890, the beauty and brutality had spread to Iowa when high schools in the Hawkeye State started playing organized football.
But the point of football was never the beauty; the point was battling through the brutality. Men who could withstand this level of violence were thought of as better men. A Harvard coach during the late 1800s refused to allow on his field doctors, medicine, or even timeouts, fearing that any of those would turn his players into “babies.” A popular song from the 1890s about players preparing for a game went like this:
Just bring along the ambulance,
And call the Red Cross nurse,
Then ring the undertaker up,
And make him bring a hearse;
Have all the surgeons ready there,
For they’ll have work today,
Oh, can’t you see the football teams,
Are lining up to play.
As some deified football’s violence, others pushed back against it. There have been calls to ban the sport since its inception, and proponents of football have always had to seek that middle ground—to find a level of danger that was still aggressive and manly while also being acceptable to civilized people who watched the sport. When football became a lucrative televised sport, the NFL commissioner wrote into TV contracts that broadcasters couldn’t show injuries or fights. “Football’s guardians have always tried to walk this absurd line between selling violence and disavowing it,” wrote Steve Almond in his book Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto.
Football’s original existential crisis came in the early 1900s. At least forty-five players died nationwide between 1900 and 1905 from injuries suffered during games: internal injuries, broken backs, broken necks and concussions. The Chicago Tribune called 1905 the “death harvest” of college football. On the final day of the 1905 season was a marquee game between Harvard and Yale that marked the low point of the sport’s early struggles with extreme violence. Francis Burr, a Harvard player, settled under a punt and called for a fair catch. That means he should have been allowed to catch the ball without interference from the opponent. Instead, two Yalies ran straight at him. One punched him in the face and broke his nose. The other “probably delivered a body blow with his feet which knocked Burr ‘senseless,’ ” according to college football historian John Sayle Watterson. It was a brutal play that made headlines nationwide. Burr didn’t die, but on that same day, three other football players did die in games: one in New York, one in Indiana, one in Missouri. That added up to at least eighteen fatal injuries during one collegiate football season.
University leaders nationwide began to speak out against football and ban the sport from their campuses. A series of stories in McClure’s and Collier’s, two of the most popular magazines of the time, denounced football’s brutality and detailed the public outcry against the sport, an outcry led by moralistic educators and religious leaders. (It should be noted that the coach at West Point said in the midst of this controversy that the United States Military Academy at West Point would continue playing football even if other colleges did not.) In Iowa, members of the newly formed Iowa High School Athletic Association banned the sport. Harvard was discussing outlawing the game. A certain resident of the White House read these stories and heard this moral outrage, and he was horrified that his alma mater was considering banning football.
“I emphatically disbelieve in seeing Harvard or any other college turn out molly coddles instead of vigorous men,” President Teddy Roosevelt stated. “In any republic, courage is a prime necessity . . . Athletics are good, especially in their rougher forms, because they tend to develop such courage.” Roosevelt was a proponent of football’s violence—he referred to a victory on the football field as “the prize of death in battle”—but he realized the sport’s future depended on making that violence more acceptable, and therefore less savage. (Roosevelt had more personal motivations, too: His eldest son, Ted, had suffered numerous football injuries playing at Groton School and at Harvard, including a broken nose during a Harvard-Yale game.) The president organized a summit at the White House to make the sport less physically dangerous and therefore more palatable to the average American, which led to a special White House commission and testimony before Congress. (“I demand that football change its rules or be abolished,” Roosevelt told college officials. “Change the game or forsake it!”)
That 1905 summit enacted big changes to make football more recognizable as the sport we know today, establishing a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage, opening up the game to the forward pass, and prohibiting dangerous mass formations like the flying wedge. (The flying wedge was a strategy derived from Napoleon’s military tactics.) The summit may have saved American football, and it led to the creation of a national legislative body: the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which was founded in 1906 and in 1910 became the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). For a while, it seemed the reforms did make the game safer. The numbers of deaths in college football sank to ten in 1908. That was a temporary salve to the concerns of the antifootball agitators, and Iowa high schools reinstated the sport for the 1909 season.
Despite the concerns, the sport continued its growth; football’s ruggedness—its out-and-out embrace of violence—has always been part of its appeal, and perhaps the biggest part. The 1920s was the first decade in which football rivaled baseball as America’s most popular sport. While reforms attempted to diminish the most horrific forms of violence, it had by no means disappeared. Another worrisome era in football came in the early 1930s; in 1931, forty-nine players died playing football. All sorts of articles during that period featured titles along the lines of: “Should Your Boy Play Football?” A 1936 issue of Good Housekeeping featured a cover illustration of a toddler boy trying on his older brother’s football spikes. Inside the magazine was an article, “Death on the Gridiron,” that offered a stark warning to parents of football’s risks. Even though today’s concern over traumatic brain injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy has the backing of modern science, these very same (though more visceral) parental concerns about the sport’s safety go back more than a century.
At the time, though, most Americans considered these safety risks acceptable because, as the famed sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote, football was a sport that developed “iron in the soul and steel in the heart.” And that’s what a nation that often found itself at war needed to teach its boys, right? Jimmy Conzelman, who coached the Chicago Cardinals in the 1940s, noted that the mentality football taught was a mentality the nation needed. Especially during World War II. “They have been taught to build—now they must learn to destroy,” Conzelman said. “Football is the No. 1 medium for attuning a man to body contact and violent physical shock. It teaches that after all there isn’t anything so terrifying about a punch in the puss.”
As the sport matured, regions of this growing nation developed distinct images for its style of football. Historian Michael Oriard, who also played several seasons in the NFL, breaks down the regional football identities this way: The Southwest was defined by its more speed-oriented passing game. The South was defined by its “fierce combativeness.” And the Midwest, where cold, wet weather during the fall and winter meant passing was difficult and being surefooted was valued, had its own version of “rock-’em, sock-’em power football.” The Midwestern style of football—the style of football that Myles Easter and his three sons adore
d—seemed most suited to the type of man Roosevelt hoped America would breed more of: “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, and sweat, and blood.”
That type of man also happened to be best suited to the military life, which may explain why football experienced another era of growth after World War I. An editorial in the New York Times in 1919 explained: “Football owes more to the war in the way of the spread of the spirit of the game than it does to ten or twenty years of development in the period before the war.” After the war came calls from the military to expand football. General Leonard Wood said that America had a preparedness crisis because half of American men drafted into the military were unfit for duty, and after that came nationwide calls for mandatory athletic programs for youth.
And yet parents continued to ask: Is football safe for my son? Do the benefits outweigh the risk? The role of the football coach began to take on a more paternal dimension. “The football coach bifurcated into this familiar tyrant and an altogether new type: the kindly, nurturing father,” Oriard wrote in his magnificent history of media coverage of the sport, King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies, and Magazines, the Weekly & the Daily Press. And this seemed to “have reflected changing ideals of fatherhood and masculinity in the larger culture.” Baseball has been sentimentalized in recent decades as the game made for fathers and sons. “You wanna have a catch?” Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner, asked the ghost of his father in Field of Dreams. But baseball is the sport a father turns to when he simply wants to pass time with his son. Football is America’s obsession, and points to the more complicated relationships between fathers and sons, “a grittier, more anguished relationship,” as Oriard put it. It’s the sport that teaches his son about life: that pleasure requires pain, that happiness requires suffering. It is the sport a father turns to when he wants to shape that boy into a man. That framing of football—not just as a hobby or a leisurely pastime but as a sport with undeniable metaphorical parallels to real life—was the reason that by the 1950s, football had become America’s most popular sport (despite nineteen football-related deaths in 1959 alone), and that by the twenty-first century, football has become more obsession than game, a vehicle for creating America’s alpha males.
Love, Zac Page 5