Love, Zac

by Reid Forgrave

  Listen to Kluver’s guilt: “There’s a lot of people out there: ‘I can’t believe they allowed this! These terrible coaches and athletic directors! How can you let this happen?’ Stuff like that. But, we just didn’t know. That was five years ago. We didn’t know! He was a tough kid. His dad was on the staff. He obviously lied about how he was feeling with all the concussions.”

  Kluver pauses and collects his thoughts. He’s not crying. Real Football Men do not cry. But his voice gets quiet, thoughtful, emotional. “We called it ‘dinged up.’ But it wasn’t like Zac was staggering around all the time. That’s the shocking part now, after everything has unfolded. Because you do think, ‘How could I have missed this? It was so obvious!’ But in reality, it really wasn’t.

  “I truly, honestly didn’t know what was happening to him. I think I’m able to cope with it easier because I didn’t know. Because none of us knew. But yet the guilt is there. Because we shoulda known. I’ll be a better coach because of that. We can’t let this ever happen again.”

  For Americans who aren’t obsessed with football, the equation is simple: The sport is, by its very nature, dangerous; young people are sustaining life-changing injuries in numbers that are too high for our society to stomach; our society must stop its endorsement of this activity, especially among our youth. Crystal clear. But for a Real Football Man like Kluver, the equation is much more complicated because all things that help turn a boy into a man must come with some element of risk. Yes, the sport must be made safer, both for the players’ safety and for the sport’s survival. But he worries about going too far, and risking what he sees as the essence of the best sport to help form a man. The sport that has wrought so much bad has also brought even more good. For Kluver, saving football is of vital importance.

  The concussion crisis has upended high school football as much as it’s upended the NFL. The speed with which high school students are shying away from football has increased in recent years as football’s concussion crisis has been recognized as something that’s not just affecting fifteen-year NFL veterans. Since its peak in 2008–09, participation in eleven-player tackle football has declined nearly 10 percent among American high school boys, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). Nearly thirty-one thousand fewer American high school boys played eleven-player tackle football during the 2018–19 school year than the year before, according to data from the NFHS. That’s a 3 percent drop in participation in just one year.

  But let’s not kid ourselves: A 10 percent drop is significant, and it meant that 106,290 fewer high school boys played football in 2018 compared with 2008, but that still means more than one million American high school boys played football in 2018. That’s nearly double the next-closest sport among boys: 605,354 boys participated in outdoor track and field, 540,769 played basketball, 482,740 played baseball, and 459,077 played soccer. Backers of high school football, even the ones like Myles Easter Sr. who bemoan the sissification of the sport, acknowledge that the sport’s future centers on containing the concussion crisis. That’s why Eric Kluver has turned over all the authority on whether a player reenters a game or a practice after a big hit from the coaching staff to the trainer. It’s why Kluver, in the first season after Zac Easter’s death, started teaching a rugby-like style of tackling that involves taking the head out of the impact of the tackle. It’s why Kluver has outfitted the entire team with Guardian Caps, a soft-shell protective cover that slides over football helmets. His team now wears these in practice. They look a bit goofy, as if each player is wearing a black mushroom on top of his helmet, but Kluver thinks they work, softening the impact of hits to the head.

  The sport’s concussion crisis is also why he’s changed his mentality as a coach.

  “I would say I’m an old-school coach. But boy, I sure err on the safe side now. I can’t always say I did that,” Kluver admits. “I have some former players on our staff. They’ll be like, ‘What?’ ” They were shocked that practice was already over. “ ‘We used to run forever, practice forever! I can’t believe how easy these guys got it!’ But when you go through some tragedy, it really is an eye-opener.”

  Kluver spent his early years on an acreage in rural Iowa. With two older brothers and one younger, any ball became a source of entertainment. By the time the family moved to Ankeny when Kluver was in fifth grade, to the same hulking suburban school district that Zac Easter and his teammates would so despise a generation later, the Kluver family’s focus had turned exclusively to football. Ankeny was lingering between being a small town amidst the farm fields and a growing suburb in the orbit of Des Moines. Kluver and his family dove into the football traditions that defined Ankeny’s Friday nights in the fall. What struck Kluver even then was that the younger boys looked up to the high school players as heroes, and yet these same boys were literally the boys next door: friends of the family, or fellow congregants at church, or cashiers at the gas station. Football in small-town Iowa was an intimate spectacle.

  Kluver’s oldest brother starred in high school and walked on at the University of Iowa, where he played center. Another brother was a long snapper at Iowa State University in Ames. By the time Kluver entered high school in the late 1980s, the only thing he wanted was to be the next Kluver in line to play football for their community. It was not unlike the feeling the three Easter brothers would have a generation later in Indianola. Kluver played linebacker, like Zac, and like his future player, Kluver loved to hit hard.

  The team was called the Ankeny Hawks, and the coaches had a special tradition: For a big hit—those special big hits that come only a few times a season, when you absolutely obliterate an opponent, and the players and the crowd roar in unison—the coaches would hand out a BAD HAWK T-shirt during the Monday-morning meeting after a game. It was Kluver’s goal during his high school football career to get one of those BAD HAWK shirts. His senior year, Kluver’s team was playing Fort Dodge, a small city in the north-central part of the state. On one particular play, the ball was snapped and Kluver stunted, switching roles with a defensive teammate to confuse the blockers. He ripped right past the blockers and sprinted into the backfield with a full head of steam. He hit the running back, who was much bigger than Kluver, hard enough to lift both of his legs off the ground. Kluver wrapped him up and slammed him into the turf. The next Monday morning, the coaches held the team meeting, and Kluver was presented with a BAD HAWK for that hit. Nearly thirty years later, Kluver still speaks of that moment with great excitement, one of those small but meaningful snapshots that stick with you for life: “It’s not one of those shirts you use as a rag. It’s pretty sacred.” Those BIG HAMMER T-shirts that Kluver gave out when he later became a coach are an homage to the BAD HAWK T-shirts from his own high school career.

  That same senior season brought Kluver’s first football tragedy. It was the summer of 1990. One of Kluver’s closest friends, Matt Hanke, who was a year behind him in school, had been in a car accident earlier that summer, so he missed the first several weeks of football practice. He was released by his doctors to play right before the team’s annual intrasquad scrimmage. The play that caused Hanke to collapse wasn’t particularly remarkable. Kluver doesn’t remember what exactly happened, just some sort of hit to the head. But Kluver vividly recalls what occurred moments after, when he was standing over his friend on the field.

  “He’s groaning, his eyes are rolled back,” Kluver remembers. “You’re in high school. You think you’re invincible. We thought he was a big, tough, strong kid, so everything would be all right. [So] we all took our time to get down to the hospital. We didn’t understand the severity of the injury. It became very obvious when we walked into the emergency room and saw the family.”

  Hanke had suffered a subdural hematoma. After the hit to the head, blood rapidly filled the area between his brain and the dura, the sheath-like membrane that covers the brain. The pooling blood compressed his brain tissue. By the time his teammates arrived at the hospital
, Hanke was sedated and in a coma. Doctors sliced out part of his skull to relieve the pressure. Kluver’s friend did not die immediately, and that alone was considered a medical success, given the extent of his injury. Kluver and a small group of guys from the football team spent much of the rest of the school year at Hanke’s side in the hospital, playing cards, doing homework, just being present with their friend. After the injury, Hanke’s life completely changed. He got around in a wheelchair. He permanently moved into a rehabilitation facility in Waterloo, two hours northeast of his family’s Ankeny home. It took him five more years to graduate from high school. He died in 2007, at age thirty-three.

  Kluver takes a deep breath and shakes his head.

  “It almost makes me sick to keep doing what I’m doing,” he tells me. He’s spent many nights grappling with the downsides of the game he loves so deeply. So much good comes from football, but there can be plenty of bad as well. He doesn’t want to put young lives at risk by sending the youths out on a football field, but he also doesn’t believe American boys ought to be coddled in Bubble Wrap, protected from every danger out there. At some point, you must live life, and for Kluver, football is an enormous part of life, one of the biggest parts.

  When Kluver stood over Zac Easter’s casket more than a quarter century after his high school friend’s brain injury on the football field, he felt a special kind of grief. Kluver loves all his players, but this wasn’t just any player in the casket. This was Zac Easter, the son of Kluver’s top assistant. Kluver knew the brain is a complicated thing, and that there were plenty of factors that led to Zac’s death—other concussions suffered outside of football, mental illness, drinking and drug use—but certainly, football played a significant part. And there was a chicken-and-egg question here: Was Zac going to struggle no matter what with mental illness and substance abuse, or did football set all those struggles in motion? Kluver could explain away Hanke’s death as an accident, a freak occurrence that could have happened on a football field or on a soccer field or in a car wreck or while riding a bike down the street. But Zac’s death? This was no accident. This was football.

  Maybe this was the universe telling Kluver that he should walk away from the sport.

  But . . .

  It’s complicated.

  “I truly believe what I’m doing is benefiting young men to become better people,” Kluver says. “They’re developing qualities they’re going to need in life. I’ve gained so much from football. It made me a man. I’d hate to see it go away. In life, you’re going to go through a lot of tough situations, no different than a football game. Some people say that’s not a good comparison. But truly: How are you going to react to adversity in your life? Are you going to quit? Give up? Or fight forward and make the most of it?”

  Kluver’s views are representative of a wide swath of American males whose definition of manhood is in large part formed by football. The ideal man is a disciplined part of a team, takes coaching and does not complain, puts his head down and does the hard work. The Easter mentality, in other words. But adherents of this Easter mentality believe there’s a part of progressive modern-day America that is using the current concern around concussions and CTE to attack not just the sport of football but the very archetype of the American male that football creates and represents. It’s not just that concussions are bad and should be reduced—who would disagree with that premise? Instead, it’s that this Easter mentality, this ideal of the American man, has been rebranded by progressives as “toxic masculinity.” That’s why people like Kluver believe it’s not just football that’s under attack these days. It’s their version of manhood that’s in the crosshairs: the strong, tough, stoic type of American male that helped build this country.

  “Those deaths, those injuries, they put things in perspective in a hurry—in a hurry,” Kluver says. “There’s definitely been times where I’ve said, ‘Is this worth it?’ The game of football helped me get through all those injuries and deaths, and yet the game of football also caused them. But I also know those guys wouldn’t have had it any other way, that they loved football that much.”

  Perhaps it’s because he truly believes the good that comes from football outweighs the bad. Or perhaps it’s because Kluver is, like a vast chunk of Americans, addicted to the sport of football, and he can’t imagine football going away, can’t imagine life without football. Kluver knows one thing: Despite all these tragedies, football is, in the most definitive way possible, worth it.

  A half hour before kickoff, the team retreats to its locker room of Indianola High School’s new $6 million athletic complex, built a few years after Levi, the last of the football-playing Easter boys, graduated in 2011. The players sit quietly, as if in church pews. Kluver paces behind them. The coach’s voice is quiet, almost prayerful, as he calls for the boys to focus: “Getting dialed in, getting dialed in. Ready to turn it loose now. Fast start, fast start.” The players form a circle and take a knee, helmets resting on the ground. For sixty seconds, not a word. It’s quiet enough in here that you can hear the soundtrack from the other side of the door, conjuring these scenes from a fall Friday night in America’s heartland: parents holding giant Fathead posters of high school players, cheerleaders with fresh layers of sparkly lip gloss chanting next to students with chests painted in school colors, a public address announcer introducing middle-school football players to the fans filling the grandstands as “our FUTURE Indianola Indians!”

  Then, the varsity players start banging their helmets on the cement floor, quiet at first, louder, then reaching a crescendo. Kluver’s persona shifts, from meditating minister to army general. The coach peers through the crack in the double doors. “Here we go, boys,” he says. Time to storm Normandy. The doors fly open: The click of spikes on cement. Middle schoolers lined up, wide-eyed, giving high fives as players stride past. Fireworks shooting into the sky. And later, cannon blasts after every Indianola touchdown, an assistant coach (perhaps a bit too into the moment) instructing his defense to “KILLKILLKILL!,” the sweeping sensation of seventy-some teenage boys all rooting for the same thing. In these moments, there is nothing bigger than football, no more important thing in the entire world.

  Of course we’re a nation addicted to football.

  How can you not get addicted to this feeling?

  And what would be lost if football—the sport Eric Kluver believes turns boys into men, that has helped turn our country into what it is today—is softened in the name of safety, and of treating what some see as a harmful national addiction?

  The scope of our addiction to football and its cathartic form of violence is mind-boggling. The NFL made $15 billion in revenue in 2018 and has a stated goal of reaching $25 billion in annual revenue by 2027. Forbes in 2019 ranked twenty-six NFL franchises as among the fifty most valuable sports franchises in the world. The Dallas Cowboys, worth $5 billion, topped the list as the world’s most valuable sports franchise. The eight most-watched television broadcasts in American history have been Super Bowls. College football, often looked at as the minor-league feeder to the NFL, is also a cash cow. ESPN’s fee for broadcast rights to the College Football Playoff for twelve years, starting with the 2014 season, comes to $87 million for each game. Even the pretend versions of American football have become national obsessions; Madden NFL is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, having sold more than 130 million copies, and some 75 million Americans play fantasy football, by far the most popular sport in the $18 billion fantasy sports industry.

  Football means much more to Americans than just a way to spend a few hours on a weekend afternoon. The sport that was called The Great God Football nearly a century ago has morphed into an American football-industrial complex that stands unrivaled in the history of sport. And while our national addiction is most apparent on Saturdays and Sundays, in the cathedrals to football that are NFL and collegiate stadiums, the seeds for this addiction are planted on Friday nights in late summer and fall, when one million
high school boys get their first real taste of football glory, and when America’s full-fledged addiction to this sport is at its most relatable, its most boy-next-door.

  There are plenty of big sociological conclusions about America that we can come to through our football addiction. In his 1993 book Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle, Michael Oriard described the plurality of meanings of football in America, which can be extrapolated into an explanation of why our national sport crosses every social, economic, and ethnic barrier: “Football is important to the corporate America that leases luxury boxes at NFL stadiums; to the religious right that proselytizes through such groups as the Fellowship for Christian Athletes and Athletes in Action; to ghetto blacks and coal miners’ sons in Pennsylvania dreaming of escape into American success; to southerners for whom football is tied to long traditions of honor in blood sports; to middle-class white boys in high schools throughout the country simply looking for social acceptance and relief from unleashed hormones; to their fathers dreaming of glory they once or never had, driving their sons to prove, as Don DeLillo memorably put it in his novel End Zone, that the seed has not been impoverished.”

  Perhaps the biggest sociological conclusion to be drawn from our football addiction is this: that the primal feeling it illuminates is by no means unique to America. In fact, the attraction humans have had toward these spectacles of mostly controlled violence has been present since . . . well, since the first instances of humanity playing sports. The words of George Orwell about what spectator sports conjure in humanity ring especially true in football, when he writes of the “sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.” “Games were built up into a heavily financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country,” Orwell wrote. “It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest.”