Love, Zac

by Reid Forgrave

  The most popular spectator sports have always been violent, noted R. Todd Jewell in his academic book, Violence and Aggression in Sporting Contests: Economics, History and Policy. Violence adds drama and risk. Studies have researched the types of sports that men and women most viscerally respond to, and while women show the greatest enjoyment from watching—as Jewell noted—“elegant stylistic sports” like gymnastics, for men it’s always been the more violent the better. “For men, excitement increased when violence was exhibited in athletic forms,” Jewell wrote of one study’s results. It’s a way for sports spectators to experience the catharsis of violence vicariously, and from the safety of their viewing spot in the grandstands or on their couch. For many men, it seems, they can fully appreciate the beauty of an athletic maneuver only if the possibility of a violent and disruptive collision is right around the corner.

  In the first recorded Olympic Games in ancient Greece in 776 BC, there was only one sport: the footrace. But it should come as no surprise that boxing and wrestling were soon added, as well as other sports that included the possibility of death, like chariot racing. “Since the beginning of time, humans have had types of play fighting—fighting for the pleasure of fighting rather than for attack,” said Dominic Malcolm, a sports sociologist at England’s Loughborough University and the editor of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport. Paleolithic cave paintings from more than fifteen thousand years ago in France may depict sprinting and wrestling, while Mongolian cave paintings dating back some nine thousand years show crowds of spectators surrounding a wrestling match. Wrestling is the only sport mentioned in the Bible. Historians guess that the earliest version of sport came as a form of military training, to determine whether males would be useful for military service.

  The combat sport that was most popular in ancient Greece was called pankration, a warrior-like contest with few rules. The aim was to either get your opponent to give up or to kill him. The ancient Greeks discovered exactly how useful training in combat sports could be for their military after the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, in which much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, according to classicist Michael B. Poliakoff. In ancient Rome, gladiator combat pitted armed men, typically either slaves or criminals, against one another or against wild animals like lions, bears, elephants, tigers, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses. The gladiatorial fights between humans and wild beasts were called venatio, and thousands of animals would be slaughtered during a single day’s competition. The risks of gladiatorial combat, such as severe injuries or death, were offset somewhat by the opportunity for money and heroism.

  In Central America, the Mayans played a racquetball-like game known as pokolpok; the sport simulated battle, and the losers were sacrificed to the gods. The Native Americans of North America started playing a version of lacrosse some twenty-five hundred years ago; the sport was a religious ritual that simulated war, and games would involve hundreds of players and last for days. The word that the Onondaga tribe of northeastern North America used for its antecedent to lacrosse was dehuntshigwa’es, or “little war.” In ancient Egypt, the so-called sport of fisherman jousting involved small boats with a handful of competitors who tried to knock one another into the water. Since swimming wasn’t something ancient Egyptians were particularly proficient in, competitions often ended in drownings. The medieval times of Europe brought the armored knight as the most prominent heavy cavalry warrior, and with that rose the violent sport of jousting.

  Over the past century, a frequent debate among anthropologists is whether violence, and by extension the enduring popularity of violent sports, is an innate part of human nature or something that’s learned through society. In other words: Is violence in our DNA? Anthropologists posit two theories on the origin of humans’ instinct toward aggression and war, a relationship that can be extended to violent sports. Essentially, it’s a nature-versus-nurture argument. One is the “drive discharge” model, which argues that individual humans have an innate drive toward aggression and violence that generates an internal tension. That tension can be relieved through the discharge of violence. This theory argues that aggressive behavior finds an outlet one way or another. This sort of innate predilection toward violence (and thus toward violent sports) is related to the “killer ape hypothesis,” which theorizes that war and interpersonal aggression were the primary forces behind humans evolving from apes. You could think of the drive discharge model as the “boys will be boys” interpretation. In this theory, violent sports help assuage humans’ natural instinct toward violence, so the presence of violent sports can actually mean a less violent society. This is the theory that Sigmund Freud ascribed to; he called sport a “substitute discharge.” “Warlike sports serve to discharge accumulated aggressive tension and therefore act as alternative channels to war, making it less likely,” explained Richard G. Sipes in his academic paper, “War, Sports and Aggression: An Empirical Test of Two Rival Theories.”

  The other argument is the “culture pattern” model, which suggests that individual violent, aggressive behavior is primarily learned through society. According to this theory, the presence of violent sports in a society actually increases that society’s inclinations toward war. The inverse would also be true: “The probability of war can be reduced, according to this model, by decreasing the incidence of combative sports and other behavior similar to warfare,” Sipes asserted in his paper for the academic journal American Anthropologist. While sociologists and anthropologists of Freud’s generation generally hewed to the theory that violence is innate, the past few generations of sociologists and anthropologists have convened over the idea that a human being learns to glorify violence through society. The modern theory posits that societies with a predilection toward violent sports like football and boxing end up being more violent and warlike than societies that don’t have a preference for violent sports. This suggests aggressive sports actually increase the overall violence in our society instead of just providing us with a release for the innate violent tendencies already inside us. This is obviously very theoretical. But Sipes offered evidence for how a violent culture can be connected to violent sports; he found that football spectatorship increased substantially during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, while spectatorship of the nonviolent sport of baseball dropped during each of those conflicts only to recover afterward.

  No matter which theory is correct, there certainly is something about America that makes our country especially attracted to a sport that’s based on violent collisions as a core principle. Our nation was birthed through violence: against the Native American population by the first European settlers, against Africans brought to the colonies as slaves, and then against the British during the Revolutionary War. Our country spends roughly the same amount annually on its military, some $650 billion, as the next eight countries combined, according to a 2019 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Despite considering ourselves an orderly, civilized people, violence is now and always has been a central part of American life. A 2018 study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, affiliated with the University of Washington in Seattle, indicated that only Brazil had more firearm-related deaths in 2016 than the 37,200 in the United States. The Global Peace Index 2019 ranks 163 countries by how dangerous they are, and the United States ranks as the thirty-fifth most dangerous country in the world. But it’s the fourth most dangerous country in the Western hemisphere; only Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico are considered more dangerous. (Countries less dangerous than the United States include Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.) And that thirst for violence extends to sport. There’s something sadistic about the fact that our national sport, the game that Americans most often play together and watch together, is one in which we take pleasure in people hurting other people.

  All this can be read as further reason to eradicate the violence from football. Since humans have evolved beyond our early savagery, shouldn’t our sports evolve beyond t
heir savageries as well? Haven’t we, as a civilization that’s learned how to fly, that’s traveled to the moon, that’s connected an entire world through the Internet—haven’t we become, well, better than that?

  And yet: If human nature is to be violent, how cautious must we be about watering down the sport? Yes, the health of athletes—specifically of high school and middle school athletes who won’t be going on to pro careers, and specifically the health of their brains—is of the utmost importance. But what is lost if football becomes a far less violent sport? Is the direction America’s foremost sport is heading something that could make the United States a lesser, weaker nation? Or is America better off to protect our brains at all costs? It’s a variation of the question that Eric Kluver has been wrestling with: What is lost when football becomes a safer—or, some would say, a softer—sport?

  “You do want your players to be tough and disciplined and work through adversity,” Kluver said. “You’re going to be hurt. But injuries are a different story. A generation ago, playing through injuries, that’s what you were supposed to do. That was football. It’s different today. Especially with the brain. It’s such a delicate part of the body. It’s different than a finger, an elbow, a shoulder. There’s a lot more caution now in the game of football, and there needs to be.”

  But not too much caution. That’s the beauty of football—that like in life, you have to navigate potential dangers around every corner. Sure, the football tragedies Kluver has experienced have softened him up. But he still thinks it’s the greatest game ever invented, and he still thinks that it’s the best sport at teaching boys the character traits—responsibility and discipline, teamwork and communication—that it takes to turn them into productive young men. For Kluver, the bottom line is this: Football’s physicality, its endemic violence, is an unavoidable part of the sport’s allure and its virtue.

  “I can’t make it bulletproof,” Kluver said. “There’s going to be collisions. Athletes are becoming stronger, faster, more explosive, even at the lowest of levels, and especially through high school. Kids are so much bigger and stronger and faster than even twenty-five years ago when I was playing. Ultimately, I just know that the good that comes from football outweighs the bad.”

  Sue Wilson is tall and athletic, with long brown hair that becomes gold tinted in summer. She has a slight gap between her front teeth, and pretty blue eyes that betray the deep wells of empathy that lie within. But do not confuse Wilson’s empathy for weakness. This mother of two hockey-playing girls is as tough as they come, an athlete who had battled through her own litany of injuries as a competitive downhill skier while she was growing up in Minnesota. Going through rounds and rounds of painful physical therapy to recover from her knee injuries is what first got her interested in athletic training, which wasn’t a popular career choice at that time; Wilson was one of seven students in her program. She got her degree in 2001 from Simpson College in Indianola, which was where she met her future husband, a soccer player who became a youth soccer coach. That was also where she first encountered a gruff football coach named Myles Easter. Wilson needed all the toughness she could muster when, in 2005, she was hired as the athletic trainer at Indianola High School. Her primary responsibility was caring for the dings and dents of the football players. That first team she attended to was small compared with those of other schools in the conference; there were thirty-three players that year, while the bigger schools in the Des Moines suburbs often had twice that. Six of the players had to play both offense and defense—Ironman football, which harked back to the way the game used to be played.

  Wilson was hired to protect these athletes, but being hired is different than being wanted. And at first, Wilson was most definitely not wanted. She’d often have to answer questions from coaches like Myles Easter: “Is that guy really hurt?” She was the first full-time athletic trainer in the school’s history, and one of her main focuses, especially for football, was concussions. She often felt cast in the role of Mrs. No: the willful, persistent woman who was standing on the sidelines for the most manly of sports, telling players whose bodies appeared perfectly healthy that an injury they couldn’t see—a mysterious, nebulous injury inside their brains—was going to keep them out of a football game. “I spent the first ten years of my career taking helmets away from kids,” Wilson said.

  Again and again, she’d hear the same words from a coach when she pulled a player out of a game for a suspected concussion: “You know how many times I hit my head when I played? This is ridiculous!” Parents would pull her aside: “Put him back in,” they’d say about their son, who Wilson suspected had a concussion. But Wilson has thick skin, so she held on to the helmet, even if there were only small lingering signs of a concussion. “That’s my job, not yours,” Wilson would tell the dissenters.

  An injury to the brain is not like a broken arm; there’s guesswork involved in diagnosing a concussion, especially in the moments after it happens. Wilson always guessed with caution. “At the end of the day, the coaches go home and they’re upset about the game and how they performed or didn’t perform,” Wilson told me. “At the end of the day, I go home and think to myself, ‘Is that kid going to cramp?’ ‘Is he on the verge of heat exhaustion and we didn’t deal with it right?’ ‘Is this kid going to start vomiting at midnight tonight because of a head injury?’ If I go home thinking whether I should have sent a kid to a hospital, that’s a long night for me.”

  One particular memory from her first year as Indianola High School’s trainer stands out. There was a player, who today is an emergency room doctor in Minnesota, who was a star wide receiver and team captain. He took a hit to the head and looked discombobulated. An obvious concussion, Wilson thought. So she told him he couldn’t go back in. “No way,” Wilson said. But when Wilson’s attention was elsewhere, the player ran back onto the field for a play. He appeared woozy and out of it. When he came back off the field after the play, Wilson watched as he lowered his head into his hands.

  Sue Wilson was an unwanted presence: The woman who would tell players to sit out for fear of concussion.

  “What’s up?” she asked him.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he replied.

  She looked at his eyes. They looked glassy and unable to focus.

  “You’re done,” Wilson told him. “Give me your helmet.”

  This was Wilson making her first big stand. The crowd was watching her.

  “Fuck you,” the player said. He threw his mouthguard at her. The rest of the game, he sat on the sidelines, glaring at her as she clutched his helmet.

  “I walked up to Coach Kluver,” Wilson recalled, “and I said, ‘He’s done, and I’ve got his helmet. So if he ends up back in this game and gets hurt, that’s all on you.’ ” Parents and fans murmured their disapproval. This was a time when there wasn’t a standard protocol for a potentially concussed player—the NFL didn’t introduce its concussion assessment guidelines until 2013. In the stands, a local doctor walked up to the school’s athletic director. “Why does she have the authority to take helmets away?” the doctor asked. The next day, the athletic director called her, wondering whether she was actually qualified to take a player’s helmet away, to take a team captain out of the game because of a nebulous head injury.

  A player telling Wilson to go fuck herself was not exactly out of the ordinary her first few years as Indianola’s athletic trainer. Nor was her being doubted by the team’s coaches. One of the biggest doubters was Myles Easter, Zac’s father. She’d known him for a decade, since he was coaching at Simpson College and she was a student studying to be an athletic trainer, so she felt like she could be blunt with him. “When I’d hold a person out, he’d say, ‘I don’t know what the problem is. I’ve probably had eight or nine concussions from playing football and I’m fine. I don’t understand why they can’t come in and play.’ And I’d say, ‘That’s my job, not yours.’ He’d just walk away.” Zac was the same way. Wilson did a baseline cognitive test at the
beginning of each season so she could better determine if a player had a concussion later in the season. In that baseline test, she asked each player to say the months of the year backward. Her first memory of Zac was during this baseline test his freshman year. “Where do I start?” he said. Sue paused: “Well, December, if you’re doing them backwards.” He was indignant. Yes, he was able to, but he was also stubborn, and he just didn’t want to do this concussion test. “I don’t even know the month now,” he said. “I just know it’s football time.” An Easter, Wilson thought. Of course this is an Easter.

  “The first three years were horrendous,” Wilson recalled about the time when she was constantly second-guessed. “And then we had Joey Goodale and his huge head injury.”

  Joey Goodale was the second of the three big football tragedies that Eric Kluver has experienced in his football career. Joey was a joyful sophomore at Indianola High School, in the same class (and on the same football team) as Levi Easter, Zac’s younger brother. Joey was the type of kid who was always the life of the party; he was friends with Zac Easter and a kindred spirit on the football field. Like Zac, Joey was a middle brother with something to prove. Sports were central to his identity: Baseball, wrestling, and most of all, football. Joey had always been a big kid. He was almost eleven pounds when he was born.

  “He came out as a football player,” said his mother, Dawn Goodale. The sport came naturally to him. His dad had played football in high school and college. All in the family were fans of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Iowa Hawkeyes. Joey started playing youth football in grade school, and he was so excited to finally get into a Pop Warner league, the biggest youth football organization in the United States, and put on the pads. As an offensive lineman and a defensive end, Joey loved to throw his body into the fray. He’d had a couple of concussions before high school, but he wanted to keep playing football. His mom didn’t like the idea. She thought about not letting him play in high school. But who was she to get in the way of her teenage son’s football dreams?