The Ball

by John Fox

  With mass plays a thing of the past, and the forward pass opening up the game to hundreds of new play patterns, football evolved into the game of “contact ballet” it is today. But as Camp learned early on as he tweaked and tested new rules, changes designed to make the game safer can also have the opposite effect. Helmets, introduced as protection and required in the NFL starting in 1943, are today used as weapons. Tackles that used to take place over short distances and involved mostly arms and shoulders are now high-speed helmet attacks. And the same forward pass that rescued football from the brink in 1906 created more room for players to gather deadly speed and momentum. Troy Polamalu, the All-Pro Steelers safety who has been dragged to the ground more times than he can count (including once by his wild mane of Samoan hair), has pointed to the passing game as it’s evolved as a reason for the rise in head injuries, including the seven concussions he’s had:

  In the past, it was a style of ball that was three yards and a cloud of dust, so you didn’t see too many of these big hits, because there wasn’t so much space between players. I mean, with the passing game now, you get four-wide-receiver sets, sometimes five-wide-receiver sets. You get guys coming across the middle, you get zone coverages. You know, there’s more space between these big hits.

  According to Timothy Gay, author of The Physics of Football, an average defensive back’s mass combined with his speed—40 yards in 4.56 seconds—can produce up to 1,600 pounds of force on collision. And that assumes the other guy is standing still.

  Less than two weeks after Super Bowl XLV, Dave Duerson, the Pro-Bowl safety who helped lead the Chicago Bears to a Super Bowl victory in 1985 and did the same for the New York Giants in 1990, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. In a final text message to his family, he wrote: “Please see that my brain is given to the NFL’s brain bank.” Duerson had deliberately spared his brain so it could be studied for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated concussions and head trauma in football.

  To date, some two dozen retired NFL players, including Duerson, have been found to have suffered from CTE, which can only be identified by autopsy. Most of them battled depression, many had run-ins with the law, and several ended their lives by suicide. “Iron Mike” Webster of the Pittsburgh Steelers took to living in train stations and tazing himself to relieve chronic pain. Fellow Steelers lineman Terry Long killed himself by drinking antifreeze, and his teammate Justin Strzelczyk died in a high-speed police chase by driving head-on at 90 mph into a tanker truck. After years of repeated collisions on the gridiron, the brain tissue of these large, muscle-bound men was found to resemble that of an 80-year-old suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

  The “concussion crisis,” as football’s latest come-to-Jesus moment has been called, has exposed the iceberg beneath the game’s long-stormy surface. We always knew the game was rough, even too rough at times. We saw the hits and the blood and the stretchers on the field, and we heard the sports commentators report on the medical implications of each collision, how long a player would be off the roster while he recovered, how therapy was progressing. But the research coming out of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy reveals through a battery of brain scans a more sinister, hidden toll. Young lives are being irreversibly altered by years of “dings” to the head, each ding cheered on by millions of loyal fans and rewarded with higher-paying contracts. Long after the Super Bowl rings are handed out, brains and families are being ravaged by depression, domestic violence, and suicide caused by a disease with a single preventative measure: avoid padding up and stepping foot on the gridiron.

  And it isn’t just seasoned NFL or college players who are affected. Between 1982 and 2009, the National Center for Catastrophic Injury Research reports 295 fatalities directly or indirectly attributable to playing high school football. In early 2009, at a turning point in the safety debate, Boston University researchers held a press conference to report their findings of the early signs of CTE in the brain of an 18-year-old high school player who had suffered multiple concussions. With several million preteens playing Pop Warner football every fall, what had been regarded by some as the price paid by a few overpaid professional athletes in a rough sport was now looking more like a public health concern.

  The crisis reached a fever pitch during a weekend in October 2010 when a Rutgers player was paralyzed from the neck down and three brutal helmet-to-helmet hits resulted in concussions, blood, and stretchers on the field. NFL officials vowed, once again, to enforce rules against tackling above the neck or leading with the helmet. Taking century-old positions for or against the game as it is now played, newspaper editorials and radio talk shows probed whether football had indeed become too violent. “Should You Watch?” asked the headline of one editorial questioning the moral culpability of couch dwellers.

  The Green Bay Packers were applauded later that season for putting the long-term health of star quarterback Aaron Rodgers ahead of winning after he took a hard hit to the head in an important late-season game against the Detroit Lions. But in the days leading up to their Super Bowl appearance against the Packers, Steelers linebacker James Harrison chided his opponents and the league’s crackdown on head-to-head tackles, suggesting that they “lay a pillow down where I’m going to tackle them, so they don’t hit the ground too hard.” And for all the fans who applauded the new level of vigilance, there were just as many who derided efforts to tame the game, like this online poster responding to a Roger Abrams article on “5 Ways to Make Football Safer”:

  I think it’s safe to say that Roger Abrams doesn’t play (or enjoy) football. Unnecessary violence? Really? What about boxing? UFC and MMA fighting? How many men have died in NASCAR? They don’t race because it’s the safe thing to do. We love the contests of men pitted against men. If you don’t have the stomach for it, Doc, change the channel. Tiger Woods needs the fans. As for me, I’ll continue to watch and play my gladiatorial pastimes. Men will be men . . . all the rest can watch, play golf or just knit.

  Why, with its inherent brutality and violence, is football “America’s Choice”? And how much does its enormous popularity and ascendancy have to do with the violence itself ? These are questions that have been keeping us up at night since the game’s inception. They emerge whenever the casualties once again start to mount and we’re forced to contemplate what Michael Oriard calls our “competing desires for danger and safety, violence and beauty—savagery and civilization in their many guises.” They subside when the long arm of regulation tilts the balance back toward the socially acceptable.

  Those competing desires are present in many sports, and have been for centuries, if not millennia. Just as dolphins and other mammals in the wild have been known to risk death just to play, we humans have always engaged in sports that test our physical and psychological limits. We’ve learned that it’s on those outer limits where we feel most fully alive, and where, as Peter Marin writes, we are “stripped morally to the bone.” The anthropologist Clifford Geertz described such experiences as “deep play,” where the stakes of participating are so high as to be considered irrational. It’s a concept that the ancient Maya and Aztecs clearly understood and took to its ultimate, ritualistic, spectacular end.

  Football’s violence—disciplined, controlled, and, with unfortunate exceptions, surgically deployed to stop the ball—is undeniably part of its widespread appeal, perhaps even its “special glory,” as George Stade described it. Every Sunday we wince and yet can’t look away as potentially life-altering collisions explode on our televisions. Every Monday we share and replay them on YouTube as often as we can stand to watch. Fantasy merges with reality as our favorite players become avatars on the screen, acting out in cathartic bursts of violence the urges and desires we may all secretly harbor but thankfully restrain. Until 2011, when the game was modified to help educate young people about the dangers of concussions, Madden NFL, one of the best-selling video games o
f all time, would allow players who got concussed to stay in the game. Ambulances could be seen running over players on their way to attend the wounded.

  And yet as spectators, we’re riveted not so much by the blood and gore but by the heroic aversion of it and the narrow escapes that define the magic of the game. We delight at football’s artful and precarious interplay of refined strategy and raw athleticism, crisp movement and crumpled mass, delicate grace and brute force. Ben McGrath of The New Yorker captured this poetic balance beautifully in his description of a successful punt return by DeSean Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles with 14 seconds left in a tied game against the New York Giants:

  It’s all there in the replay: the exuberant Jackson hurling the ball twenty rows deep into the stands; the angry Giants coach, Tom Coughlin, throwing his headset in disgust and tearing into his dumbfounded rookie punter; the blocked tacklers lying on the field like soldiers. Setting aside regional partisanship, you don’t root for the man carrying the ball to be tackled at moments like this. You stop breathing and root for the near-miss. Averted danger is the essence of football.

  Averted danger, deep play, the tense coexistence of primitive impulses and modern restraint—all delivered to the comfort of your living room in HD. What more could any sports fan ask for?

  But what’s been most troubling about football’s recent concussion crisis is the realization that the dramatic narrative that unfolds on the gridiron may not be the whole story. What’s unsettling is our lingering sense that the drama and the danger may continue on, unresolved, long after the clock has run out and the season has ended and players we cheered on have long retired. When instant replay is not enough and postmortem brain scans are required to complete the picture and conclude the drama, is it still play?

  Chapter Eight

  Nothing New Under the Sun

  When it’s played the way it’s spozed to be played, basketball happens in the air, the pure air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams.

  John Edgar Wideman

  James Naismith had a deadline. Fourteen days to create a new sport that would sweep America within a decade, defy the limits of race and gender, provide a fast track out of poverty, generate $4 billion in annual U.S. revenue, and within a century be played by 200 million people worldwide.

  Invent basketball. Two weeks. Go.

  The expectations, of course, weren’t quite so ambitious when Luther Gulick, director of the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, tapped the 30-year-old Naismith to help with a challenging gym class he was leading. Soon after arriving at the school as a student in 1891, Naismith, a Canadian-born theologian turned phys-ed instructor, was recruited to deal with a class of 18 future YMCA administrators—“the incorrigibles,” as they’d been dubbed. The school had been established just a year earlier to train young men in the fundamentals of starting and operating YMCA centers across the United States and internationally.

  Their course of study required just one hour of gym class every day. In the fall, that meant a mixture of indoor calisthenics and some outdoor football. In the spring there was baseball to keep things interesting. But through the long, gray months of the New England winter, the men, most of whom were pushing 30, were trapped in a dark gym, 65 by 45 feet, doing military marches and Swedish calisthenics and playing endless games of sailors’ tag.

  Naismith felt their pain. “The trouble is not with the men but with the system we are using,” he told his professor. These men were used to playing team ball games and competitive sports and needed “something that would appeal to their play instincts.” What was needed was a game that would be “interesting, easy to learn, and easy to play in the winter and by artificial light.”

  Go for it, Gulick replied, in so many words. You’ve got until Christmas break.

  Under the gun, Naismith, an accomplished athlete, spent the first 12 days experimenting with the sports he knew to meet Gulick’s vision for success:

  . . . a competitive game, like football or lacrosse, but it must be a game that can be played indoors. It must be a game requiring skill and sportsmanship, providing exercise for the whole body and yet it must be one which can be played without extreme roughness or damage to players or equipment.

  First, he tried a form of touch football, but these were men who lived for the scrum and loved to tackle. “To ask these men to handle their opponents gently was to make their favorite sport a laughing stock.” Next up was soccer, but windows were threatened, clubs and dumbbells were soon flying off the wall, and the game quickly degraded into a “practical lesson in first aid.” Indoor lacrosse proved even more dangerous, given the cramped quarters and lack of stick-handling skills. “Faces were scarred and hands were hacked,” and another game got tossed aside.

  Naismith was dejected. With just two days left, he was preparing to admit defeat when he recalled a psychology seminar where Gulick had waxed on about his theory of invention, borrowing from a biblical passage from Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun. All so-called new things are simply recombinations of the factors of things that are now in existence.”

  So he began, methodically and obsessively, to break down the elements of popular games, examine them in isolation, and look for ways to recombine them.

  His first brilliant decision? The game had to involve a ball. All competitive team games used a ball, so his must as well. But what kind of ball—small or large? Games with small balls, like baseball, cricket, and lacrosse, he noted, also required sticks, which made them harder to learn and more expensive to take up—characteristics that didn’t meet the needs of the YMCA. So he settled on a large ball, like the ones used in rugby or soccer.

  Next, he considered why football, the most popular large-ball sport of the time, couldn’t be played indoors. Naturally, it was because you couldn’t have players’ faces repeatedly mashed into the gym floor. And tackling, he reasoned, was necessary in football because players were allowed to run with the ball and had to be stopped . . .

  “I’ve got it!” he recalled later of the eureka moment when he stumbled upon the essential, unique premise of the game. The player in possession of the ball would not be allowed to run, but would have to pass or bat it to a teammate. Great, so far, but if that was the whole point of the game, he reasoned, it would be little more than a game of “keep away,” which he knew wouldn’t hold the interest of the incorrigibles. These men needed to be able to score goals, compete, and win.

  Having neither time nor the patience of his subjects to waste on testing his ideas, Naismith played out experiments in his mind. “I mentally placed a goal like the one used in lacrosse at each end of the floor.” He quickly dismissed the idea, fearing that such goals would make the game too rough.

  That’s when he remembered a quirky childhood game he played behind the blacksmith shop at Bennie’s Corners, Ontario, called Duck on the Rock. It involved putting a small rock, or “duck,” on top of a large boulder as the target, with each player standing 20 feet back behind a line launching their rock to dislodge the duck. The best way to do this and still retrieve your rock without getting tagged was to toss it in an arc.

  “With this game in mind, I thought that if the goal were horizontal instead of vertical, the players would be compelled to throw the ball in an arc.” And if the goals were put up high enough, the defense couldn’t simply swarm around the goal but would have to secure possession earlier by stealing a pass.

  It’s tempting to think that, as some have alluded, Naismith might have drawn some remote inspiration from ulama, where, following one set of rules, the Aztecs and Maya knocked the ball through an elevated stone ring to score. He could, plausibly, have read John Lloyd Stephens’s popular account 50 years earlier of discovering the ruined ball court in the ancient city of Chichén Itzá or seen artist Frederick Catherwood’s drawings of the crumbling stadium and its ornately carved rings. But there’s no evidence
he ever did. And a good thing too, perhaps, or we might be sacrificing losing teams at half-court today!

  Day 13 ended and Naismith went to bed dreaming of the game he was about to transfer from his head to the hardwood. “I believe that I am the first person who ever played basketball; and although I used the bed for a court, I certainly played a hard game that night.”

  The next morning he went early to his office, grabbed a soccer ball, and began looking about for something to use as a goal. He sent the building superintendent, Mr. Stebbins, off to the basement to find some boxes, but Stebbins returned instead with the now-famous peach baskets, sparing us the fate of “boxball” and setting us down the path to the swish, one of sport’s most sublime sounds. He tacked the baskets to the balconies on either end of the gym—which just happened to be at that magical, dunkable height of 10 feet—posted a sheet with 13 rules to the bulletin board, and prepared to make history.

  History was, at first, none too pretty. The 18 men scrambled and grabbed for the ball, fouls were committed, faces were scratched. “It was simply a case of no one knowing just what to do,” said Naismith. This was not yet, and wouldn’t be for decades, the aerial ballet of pivot plays, jump shots, and the crashing of boards. In fact, for the first four years or so there weren’t any boards to attack, not until the goaltending of fans sitting in the balcony became enough of a problem that backboards became standard equipment. When a basket was scored, a rare and heroic act at the time, the referee had to climb a ladder to retrieve the ball or would release it with the pull of a chain.

  There was no limit to the number of players, with some teams fielding as many as 50 men spread out the length of the court. “The fewer players down to three,” wrote Naismith in his first description of the game in 1892, “the more scientific it may be made, but the more players the more fun, and the more exercise for quick judgment.” And there was no strategy or plays to set up other than passing continuously until a player was freed up close to the basket. When plays did begin to emerge, they were as often a creative workaround to poor gym conditions as the product of any strategic genius. The first players to “post up,” for example, did so around two steel posts fortuitously placed on the floor of an old YMCA gym in Trenton, New Jersey.