The child soldiers of football

by David Benjamin

“I think that they’re making a terrible mistake and they’re injuring children’s brains. It’s the second child abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.”
— Denny Doyle

MADISON, Wis. — There’s a visionary in Cincinnati, although some consider him a crank, named Denny Doyle, who’s trying to convince the Catholic Youth Organization to stop sponsoring tackle football. A former youth football player himself, Doyle — who’s 78 — had to give up the sport he loves after suffering several concussions. He argues that organized team football, coached by the sort of Vince Lombardi wannabes who infest children’s sports, is dangerous.

He’s right.

It’s about the helmet.

For children whose skulls are still hardening, whose bones are still growing, whose ligaments are still gummy, dewy and new, the football helmet is a weapon of imminent destruction. When I see little kids on a football field all uniformed up and harking to a half-dozen apoplectic dads screaming about pad levels and “setting the edge,” I take note of the way the little boys’ heads tilt beneath the weight of their helmets. Each kid is a sort of bobble-head doll, his fragile cortex teeter-tottering on a skinny spring. I’m reminded of child soldiers whom I’ve seen in newsreels, noodly-armed little boys clutching Kalashnikovs and meekly obeying the commands of violent grownups whose grievances, beliefs and fanaticism they cannot begin to understand.

Football commentator Vic Ketchman has often stated that the biggest player safety issue in football is the helmet, which evolved from a leather shell intended (ineffectually) to protect players from head injuries into a polycarbonate guided missile, harder than a bowling ball and able to shred muscle and cartilage into hamburger with a single well-directed blow.

One of the reasons I wrote a “fictional autobiography” of my boyhood at the turn of the Sixties was to chronicle an era we have mostly forgotten, when kids populated the fields, playgrounds and sandlots of smalltown Wisconsin without the bane of adult supervision. I wrote about “workup” and two-line soccer, choose-ups and being the last kid picked told to “go long.” I wrote about how a bored boy could occupy the biggest lawn in the neighborhood, tossing around a scuffed football and how, after a while, enough kids would materialize, choose up a couple of teams and play uninhibited “tackle” ’til it was too dark to track the flight of a wobbly forward pass. I wrote about how we came away banged up and stepped on, runny-nosed and scraped but otherwise whole, unharmed and pleasantly weary.

In all those backyard games, we wore nothing but jeans and sneakers and a warm shirt that tended to accumulate grass stains and separated seams. Although we tackled and clawed, we shared, implicitly and unanimously an instinctive reverence for our skulls. Here’s how I explained the kid football ethos on page 282 of The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked:

“… The only fixed rule we ever observed was no equipment. Every now and then, a kid would proudly sport a set of shoulder pads his big brother had worn for high school football or a plastic helmet his idiot father had bought him for Christmas from Montgomery Ward’s. We’d tell the kid he either dumps the paraphernalia or he doesn’t get into the game. This bias against gear wasn’t because we were chicken. We expected to get torn up, bashed or bruised when we played football, because the honor of the game required that each kid’s only weapon was his flesh. All the gladiatoria of organized football — the pads, the helmets, the cleats and gloves — were not, to us, protective. They were the tools of cowardice. One kid with pads and helmet was like a drunk driver in a school zone. He could break your arm, bust open your skull — kill someone — and come away unscathed. No fair…”

Not long after those free-and-easy days, a generation of meddling grownups noticed us out there, bumbling around with the ball, running and throwing and piling harmlessly on top of one another. They resolved to horn in and straighten us out. They were mostly hoping, I suspect, to see their offspring reprise the glories they experienced on the high-school gridiron — or to attain glories that Dad only watched from the bench or the bleachers. A million kids were outfitted with armor, cleats, jockstraps and exoskeletal headgear — lethal weaponry — and recruited as soldiers into the child army of suburbia.

All the expense and equipage is, if you look closely at this paternal crusade, is an exercise in futility. As athletes, the vast majority of these overdressed little kids whose uniform numbers are bigger than their heads, won’t amount to a hill of penalty flags. On any given youth football team, there are only two or three boys big enough, strong enough and sufficiently swift and nimble to progress upward to the high school varsity. Beyond that, there might be one kid on a half-dozen high school teams who merits a college roster spot. Then, among the 4,000 colleges in the USA, only about a hundred send one or two players every year to the National Football League, where the average lifespan is less than three years.

Along the way toward that improbable goal, thousands of kids’ football “careers” will be aborted by wrecked knees, unhinged shoulders, shredded ankles, damaged kidneys, cracked ribs, broken bones and scrambled brains. Most of this life-altering damage will be effected by impact with helmets.

Bodies heal. Even brains — more or less — survive the subdural ping-pong of organized ball. But the unspoken tragedy symbolized by those helmets, pads and spiffy uniforms is not the lost potential of an injured kid who’ll never play again. It is that the kid has never really gotten a chance to play at all.

I mean, play.

Not practice every day. Not accept “assignment” to a position (offensive lineman, defensive back, special teams). Not get a haircut and observe the dress code. Never answer to a forty-year-old bully with a clipboard.

When I was in eighth grade, a bunch of Franklin School kids assembled once every autumn week on a grassy meadow at the end of Waunona Way. We were uncoached. One of us ended up on a high-school team. The rest were just kids. Our equipment was the ball. Our goal lines were marked by trees at one end and a gravel pile at the other. Our sidelines were the woods. The grass was too long. We could see each other’s faces. We played a game up to five touchdowns and then started over. Every kid, even huge Herbert Roth, handled the ball. We never heard a whistle. We never marched off a penalty. We kept it up ’til, dark, finished with a celebratory pigpile and then rode our bikes home to supper.

On other fall days, there were other fields and yards where we chose up and thumped away at one another. We ran, we threw, we caught, we blocked and tackled, we fumbled and scrambled, intercepted and stumbled. Sometimes we made up “plays,” mostly we just winged it. Once, we kicked the ball into the lake and one of us had to wade into the water and rescue it. We scored touchdowns and forgot every score. No kid ever led with his head, and nobody, ever, got hurt.

It wasn’t work. It wasn’t purposeful. It had no career potential. It was barely organized. We had no spectators. No grownups involved. No grownups allowed. No game plan. No advice. No timeouts. No harm, no fouls, no cheating, no crying in football. We just played.

Played.