Vacation season

The Packerscreed, by David Benjamin (11/7/17)
Vacation season

“My life, as I know it, has been taken away from me.”
— Nick Buoniconti, brain-damaged former Dolphin linebacker

PARIS— Like Bob, in the film What About Bob?, I’m taking a vacation from my worst mental illness — namely, the Green Bay Packers. My vacation officially started when Viking linebacker Anthony Barr rolled over Aaron Rodgers and broke his collarbone, thus ensuring that the Lombardi trophy will not return this year to Titletown USA.

Of course, just like the movie, this is a tough vacation to sustain. I am, after all, a Packer addict. The psychiatrist in the movie, played by Richard Dreyfuss, struggled mightily to take a vacation from his most persistent patient, Bob, (Bill Murray). But Bob kept showing up, pestering and praising him, making friends with his family and teaching Siggy how to dive.

It helps that I’m in Paris now, where this week’s Monday Night Fiasco didn’t air here ’til 2:30 am Tuesday. I didn’t wait up. But just yesterday, walking along rue St. Jacques, I passed Pierre Louvrier’s Wide Open Spaces Bar. I’m 4,028 miles from Green Bay but here, in my neighborhood, is an official Packer bar, adorned with that familiar “G,” decked out in green and gold. Even worse, whenever I check the news on my Mac, the computer remembers what I like. It thrusts upon me the sports sections of the Madison and Milwaukee papers. It entices me with Packer headlines.

I haven’t clicked a single link, but I know that Rodgers fled for a while after surgery to California, that Brian Bulaga has a brand-new injury, that Mike McCarthy has renewed his endless, feckless lifelong dream to Establish The Run. How do I know this? I’m an addict. I’m susceptible to a contact high.

Or low.

I know I won’t stay away. I’ll by mainlining by December. But I won’t regret the time off, even if Mike somehow actually Establishes The Run with his stable of run-of-the-mill running backs, even in the preposterous event that backup Brett evolves suddenly into the second coming of, well, Brett.

I need the time off. I need to think about the big picture. I need to recall the decline and fall of pugilism.

Most football fans born since, say, 1960, have no idea that boxing was once the king of American sports, that boxing cards were primetime TV fare on Wednesday and Friday nights, that your average ten-year-old boy could name the contenders in every division from flyweight to heavyweight.

Boxing receded steadily from public favor for many reasons, including its rampant corruption and sleazy image. One contributing factor is that the ideal outcome of every bout is a brain injury — a knockout. In an affluent nation where mothers — more and more — guide their children’s recreational choices, the sweet science was doomed as a mass passion. Its last great practitioner, Muhammad Ali, spent a couple of brain-ravaged decades as a mute, shuffling ghost of the gorgeous young god he had been in the ring.

Long before the decline of boxing, football almost suffered a similar fate. Like boxing, football is a collision sport. In 1905, those collisions were crippling and killing a shocking number of young athletes. Nineteen recorded fatalities, from football-related head trauma, broken backs, destroyed kidneys and other causes prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to demand major changes in the game — else he would support its abolition.

Those changes in rules, gear and game strategy — particularly the legalization of the forward pass — “opened up” football and allowed it to evolve in relative safety to its current status as America’s pastime.

But one of those changes now threatens the game. The introduction of the plastic helmet in 1940 triggered an escalation in body armor that has reached its dangerous zenith. The year-round conditioning that has sculpted a race of massively muscled heavyweights measurably faster, stronger and — most important — bigger than their forebears, even 20 years ago, is turning every level of football into a series of head-on Cadillac crashes.

Just as Ali’s tragedy punctuated boxing’s retreat, Chris Borland — the 49er linebacker who quit the NFL after one season to save his brain from repeated concussions — might be football’s canary in the coal mine.

This season, the NFL has lost its best players on offense and defense, Rodgers and J.J. Watt, to surgery. A sport that makes a habit of eating its young is bound to suffer. The steady exodus of kid athletes from football to soccer has nothing to do with soccer’s innate appeal. Soccer is a namby-pamby frolic in which you can’t use your hands, nobody ever scores, grown men lie sobbing on the grass, and a tie is considered a respectable outcome.

Soccer has risen because the moms of America, especially white moms, are afraid of football — with good reason. They see J.J. Watt leaving the field on a motorized stretcher. They see Davante Adams’ mouthguard and helmet flying through the air. They don’t all read the sports pages, but they’ve read about Darryl Stingley, Mike Webster, Aaron Hernandez and Junior Seau. They’ve even watched an NFL player beat up his fiancée in an elevator.

Like boxing, American football teeters on the brink of becoming a Third World blood sport — not in this generation, but perhaps in the next. Unless…

The NFL must take charge. The league has finally acknowledged the gruesome frequency and growing threat of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). But there’s more to be done. Neither Rodgers’ nor Watts’ injury was head trauma. Size, speed, strength, body armor and rock-hard polycarbonate helmets shaped like bullets are more appropriate to Roman gladiators (who expected to get killed) than to suburban kids who just want to play ball.

The NFL has the money to carry out a massive study of the injury factors that threaten the game, from those rigid, unforgiving helmets and all that body armor, to conditioning practices, weight training, flexibility, drugs and medication, hydration, diet, physical therapy, technology, rules, schedules, youth football — the works.

I know that there are solutions — ways to reduce, not eliminate, serious injuries. I just don’t know what they are.

The league has the money to find out — and change the game as dramatically as it changed in 1905. But it so far lacks the will. As long as fans fill stadiums, pay all those ripoff seat-license fees, buy all the gear and swallow the corporate propaganda, Roger Goodell and his merry band of plantation owners won’t have to tend seriously to the health of their players or the future of a truly great sport.

It will take us, people like me, to recognize that disastrous injuries aren’t just ruining one Packer season, but the game itself. It will require us, the loyal and the faithful, to take a vacation — on principle — from our addiction, long enough that the rich and mighty will feel our absence in their hip pocket.