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My football career lasted nearly twenty years.
I scored my first touchdown at nine years old, got my bell rung as they say—but don’t say anymore—and went on to play quarterback for the Cyclones, the Florida Atlantic Owls, the Ouachita Baptist Tigers, and eventually the Carlstad Crusaders, a semi-pro team in Sweden.
Then I coached high school ball for five years. In my first two seasons, I won over twenty games. In my last three, I lost twenty—and then I got out.
There was a reason. My wife and I had our first child, and if you know nothing else about being a football coach, know this—it’s time-consuming. Depending on the time of year, I’m talking seventy-hour workweeks—that kind of consuming. So yeah, I got out because I was about to be a daddy, and I figured to do it right, I needed more time.
My wife and I still have the memories, and the pictures, though most of them are packed away in the attic. And I still love the game. I miss it too, like all my coaches always said I would.
Football is just different from other sports. There’s no such thing as a pick-up football game. It just doesn’t work without the electricity of a Friday night, or the pageantry of Saturday afternoons.
My playing days are over; I’m officially an armchair quarterback, but my newfound freedom has given me the gift of time: time to be a dad, a better husband, and also time to do things like this—to write.
But with writing comes recollection, and the more memories I dredge up, the more I start to worry. A fear is growing. Like all the times my head bounced up off the grass and the lights went out and I stumbled back into the huddle and called the next play, added up to something. What exactly, I’m not sure.
So that’s where this column comes in, a place where we can tackle some of the biggest problems surrounding the game we love. Questions like:
Is football really the most dangerous game? What about MMA? Or even soccer?
Should college athletes get paid?
Friday Night Tykes?
My plan is for us to dive into those questions together—crack ’em open like doctors are doing those retired NFL dudes’ skulls—and see what we can find. (Those doctors? They’re finding “tau,” a tar-like substance which is an early indicator for CTE.)
The point is to find answers, truths in the middle ground, something you can arm yourself with the next time the nightly news flashes the latest concussion headline, or you have to decide whether or not to let your nine year old join the tackle football league.
As I write this, there are two California lawmakers working to pass a bill that would make it illegal for any child to play tackle football until high school.
That’s just the sort of topic I plan to examine in this column. Coming from a guy who’s taken a fair share of shots to the head, there’s no telling where we’ll end up. Maybe we’ll tackle those California lawmakers next week. Heck, if we have time, we might wrestle with gun laws, and parenting, and how maybe—if guys took more time to be fathers—those two things could work together toward a better America.
Check back to see which path we wander down, or if somehow, the paths converge. Until then, remember: always audible your protection away from the running back, and don’t forget life is a lot like football—it’s just a game.
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This post was originally published on couriernews.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
Eli, as far as CTE, I’m convinced my many head traumas have been largely neutralized in their long term impact by meditating. If you haven’t already, consider spending some time learning to be still, physically, just sitting. Quiet body, quiet mind. There are neural connections which link intentional, all- out physical collisions of any sort. The sport doesn’t matter as you point out. It’s the mental space of willingness to experience physical damage to our selves and others that keeps us from being mentally present. The many moments I sought approval from others for dominating others with physical violence became… Read more »