The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (15 page)

Basis teachers channel the enthusiasm usually found on football fields into academic conquests. On the day of Advanced Placement exams, students at Basis Tucson North file into the classroom to “Eye of the Tiger,” the
Rocky III
theme song. In 2012, 15-year-olds at two Arizona Basis schools took a new test designed to compare individual schools' performance with that of schools from around the world. The average Basis student not only outperformed the typical American student by nearly three years in reading and science and by four years in math, but outscored the average student in Finland, Korea, and Poland as well. The Basis kid did better even than the average student from Shanghai, China, the region that ranks number one in the world.

“I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis cofounder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”

In a column published in 1927, Roy Henderson, the athletic director of the University Interscholastic League, a public-school sports organization in Texas, articulated the challenge of keeping sports and academics in balance: “Football cannot be defended in the high school unless it is subordinated, controlled, and made to contribute something definite in the cause of education.”

The State of Texas announced in May that the Premont Independent School District could stay open. The district has a lot of work to do before its students can feel the kind of pride in their academics that they once felt in their sports teams. But Ernest Singleton, Enrique Ruiz, the teachers, and the students have proved their ability to adapt. Nathan, the onetime quarterback, started college this fall, as did Mariela, the cheerleader—and, as it turns out, the valedictorian. This fall, Premont brought back a volleyball team and a cross-country team, in addition to basketball, baseball, track, and tennis. But for now, still no football.

FROM
SPORTSONEARTH.COM

 

M
ARIETTA, GEORGIA
—His name is Parker. Everyone called him Tank. In his first season of youth football, he made two boys cry. Knocked three boys out. He was four years old, going on five, big and strong for his age. A bobble-headed bulldozer. His mother didn't mind. She was too busy cheering.
Boy, get out there and hit somebody!

Besides, Monet Bartell was the one who signed her son up.

“My husband wanted him to play chess,” she says.

Her husband, Melvin Bartell, concurs. The three of us are having dinner. It's August. Another season is about to begin, and I'm here to answer a question: should your child play football? The answer, of course, is complicated, because the question is complicated. It's hard to know where to begin. What to believe. Who to trust. How to weigh the risks against the rewards. I'm hoping Monet can help. Only now she's asking
me
for help.

“Do I want my son to play football?” she says.

A long pause. Melvin is silent. Monet lets the question hang. Her father, Mel Farr Sr., played in the NFL for seven seasons. Her uncle also played in the league, as did both of her brothers and a number of cousins. Before Parker was even born, Monet had his life mapped out: play football at UCLA, and then play in the NFL. Just like her dad. Just like her brothers, Mel Jr. and Mike. Such was the plan. It did not include chess. And then one day in 2011—around the same time Parker first put on a helmet and shoulder pads—a relative wanted to talk. About the problems in his life. The problems in his head. Dark, desperate thoughts. He was done with football—had been for years—but scared that football wasn't done with him.

“Have you heard of CTE?” he said. “I believe that is what I am suffering from.”

Monet had heard a little. Not a lot. She knew it was a disease, a bad one, and that it happened to other people. She started going online, searching for answers, for help. She read about concussions. Suicides. Lawsuits. Brain bleeds. Blows to the head. Former football players suffering from depression and memory lapses, cognitive and emotional dysfunction, weird neurological diseases with hard-to-pronounce names, like
chronic traumatic encephalopathy
and
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
She learned that helmets protect the skull, not the brain, and that even boys as young as Parker could suffer lasting damage. She found herself sitting in the stands at the youth league championship game, chatting with another team mother. Both had a choice to make, and the choice was harder than ever before.

Would their sons continue to play football?

Earlier that season, Parker had leveled another boy. He earned a personal foul. Monet remembered the moment, how proud she felt as her son skipped back to the sideline.

Mommy! Mommy! I made a kid eat dirt!

“I sat back and said, ‘Wow,'” she says. “What if I'm the parent of that other kid?”

 

Football is fun. And football means eating dirt. That's the trade-off. Always has been. The game is inherently dangerous, rooted in violence and physical domination, hitting and tackling, knocking your opponent on their ass before they do the same to you. Football breaks bones, shreds ligaments, ruptures internal organs. Occasionally, it kills.

And yet for just about forever, the harm has seemed manageable. Perfectly acceptable. A reasonable price to pay for both Friday Night Lights and weekend tailgating. Because bones heal, and ligaments can be fixed. Deaths are horrific, but freaky and rare. Week after week, season after season, the sport teaches life lessons, rallies communities, provides excitement and entertainment for millions, inspires military flyovers and breast cancer awareness drives. It helps define American masculinity and pays NFL commissioner Roger Goodell's $29.5 million salary. At the youth level, most players walk away from the game with fond memories and without serious, lasting harm; for parents and society alike, football's rewards largely have outweighed its risks, so much so that even in an era of helicopter parenting and school safety zones, more than four million American children play high school and youth football.

Because of brain damage, that calculus is changing.

 

Scott Hallenbeck is sweating. Profusely. Like a human lawn sprinkler. I can't blame him. It's an early November morning in Washington, DC, and the Aspen Institute's “Sport and Society” program is hosting a roundtable discussion on youth football safety and the sport's future. The NFL's top lobbyist is here. So is the head of the players' union. There are journalists and academics, lawyers and school officials, coaches and scientists.

Almost everyone is a parent.

Sports concussion expert Robert Cantu proposes that children under age 14 not play tackle football, largely because both their brains and bodies are still developing and therefore more vulnerable to serious injury. This puts Hallenbeck in a tight spot. He's the executive director of USA Football, the NFL's national youth arm. His day job involves telling America why its children
should
play tackle football, the same way his 16-year-old son does.

“I think we all recognize there are challenges,” Hallenbeck says. “We're all looking for ways to try to create a better and safer environment for parents and players. I also hope that we're in this to provide accurate and whenever possible evidence-based data for parents. I think we have to be careful certainly not to scare parents.”

Too late. A recent Marist College poll found that roughly one in three Americans say that knowing about the damage concussions cause would make them less likely to allow their sons to play football. Earlier this year, a
Washington Post
survey of more than 500 NFL retirees found that less than half would recommend that children play. According to the National Sports Goods Association, tackle football participation has dropped 11 percent between 2011 and now. The National Federation of State High School Associations reports decreasing football participation numbers since 2008–2009. And according to ESPN's
Outside the Lines
, Pop Warner—the nation's largest youth football program—saw participation drop 9.5 percent between 2010 and 2012. Even President Obama has expressed doubts about letting his hypothetical son play the sport.

Still, fear is not the problem. Physics and biology are the problem.

Reliable youth sports brain injury statistics are hard to come by. A USA Football study of almost 2,000 youth football players reported a concussion rate of 4 percent; however, non-industry-funded research suggests that concussions are chronically under-diagnosed and -reported. Meanwhile, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons estimates that between 4 percent and 20 percent of college and high school football players will sustain a brain injury during the course of one season. The Institute of Medicine reports that football consistently has the highest concussion rate of any high school sport (11.2 percent), and that the concussion rate in prep football is nearly double that in the college game (6.2 percent). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has labeled sports concussions “an epidemic,” reported in 2011 that roughly 122,000 children between the ages of 10 and 19 went to emergency rooms annually for nonfatal brain injuries—and for boys, the top cause was playing football.

This is no coincidence.

Football isn't NASCAR. It's demolition derby. The collisions aren't accidents. Head trauma is baked into the game. Boston University researchers estimate that the average high school football player absorbs 1,000 blows to the head per season. In a pair of studies, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest researchers recently found that seven- and eight-year-old boys received an average of 80 head hits per season, while boys ages nine through twelve received 240 hits. Some of the impacts were 80 g's of force or greater, equivalent to a serious car crash.

Now consider the human brain. It's essentially a blob of Jell-O, floating inside the skull like an egg yolk. Getting hit in the head—or just experiencing a sudden change in momentum, like the kind that comes from a blindside tackle—can cause the brain to stretch, warp, and collide with the bony inner surface of the skull. This produces damage. The damage can be structural, akin to a cracked microchip in a laptop computer. It can be metabolic, like the same computer suddenly losing its electrical supply. Some damage is obvious, visible from the sidelines. Other damage is subtle, almost impossible to detect, even for trained experts in a clinical setting.

With adequate rest and recovery, most concussions resolve themselves in a relatively short period of time. But other damage—such as neurodegenerative diseases and severe cases of postconcussion syndrome—never does. Current research indicates that damage can be cumulative; that getting hit in the head repeatedly is worse than getting hit once or twice; that both concussive and subconcussive blows are dangerous; and that getting hit while recovering from a previous blow or concussion is particularly risky. There currently is no definitive causal link between youth football and long-term neurodegenerative disease. Yet depending on duration and severity, brain damage can mean missed games. Missed classes. Learning disabilities. Changes in mood, memory, personality. It can permanently alter who you are, and who you have a chance of becoming.

Three years ago, Purdue University researchers compared brain scans of concussed and nonconcussed high school football players. They found changes in brain function—evidence of damage—in both groups. The results were stunning, so much so that the researchers initially thought their scanners were broken. The changes appeared to subside in the off-season. However, the researchers still don't know what that means, or if those same players' brains suffered lasting harm. In a subsequent study, they found that high school players exhibit brain function changes long before they have recognizable signs of a concussion—and that the more hits a player endured on the field, the more their brain function changed.

“No brain trauma is good brain trauma,” Cantu says. “We're not paranoid about it, but when you can reduce it—or every chance you get to eliminate it short of stopping something completely—it's a good thing.”

Should your child play football? Start with a simple fact: no helmet can prevent any of the above.

 

As a child, Monet didn't worry about what football helmets can't prevent. She enjoyed what the sport could provide. The game took her father, Mel Sr., from a home without indoor plumbing in segregated Beaumont, Texas, to his first drink of cold water from a refrigerated fountain on the UCLA campus. He parlayed his standout career with the Lions—two Pro Bowl selections and the 1967 Rookie of the Year Award—into an off-season job with Ford, later building a network of car dealerships that eventually became one of the largest black-owned businesses in the U.S.

“When I went to college, I shrunk my first comforter,” Monet says. “Because I didn't know how to do laundry. I had never bothered to learn. That's when I realized I grew up rich.”

Monet grew up with money, and she grew up with football. Lions running back Billy Sims was a frequent guest at her family's suburban Detroit home. Hall of Famer Barry Sanders showed up to watch one of her high school plays. Dad had a box at the Pontiac Silverdome. Monet was there with him for every Lions home game. When her brothers played at UCLA, Monet would get out of school on Friday afternoons, hop on her father's plane, and fly to wherever the Bruins were playing. When her brother Mel Jr. played for the Los Angeles Rams, she went to the American Bowl in Germany, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I had pieces of it,” she says. “I can't find them. That's how carefree we were. It's all a blur. We were always at a game. Every single weekend.”

In high school, Monet played tennis. It was a choice made out of chromosomal necessity. Her uncle, Miller, played 10 seasons in the NFL and the American Football League. Cousins Jerry Ball and D'Marco Farr also played in the NFL. When Mel Sr. met Monet's mother, Mae, he told her that he wanted 11 sons. An entire football team. Some of Monet's earliest memories are of her father coaching her brothers in Pee Wee football. Dad was a drill sergeant. Every morning, he ran the boys through backyard agility exercises. He would sit in a sled and have his sons drag it up a large hill. On the sidelines, he wore a leather visor and pork chop sideburns. He smoked Kool Milds. The Birmingham-Bloomfield Vikings went undefeated. Didn't give up a single point. Monet was a cheerleader—and again, it wasn't her first choice.