The Science of Getting Dinged
by Dan Sadicario
Those in the running-back and receiver positions have it just as bad as the linemen. You run up field towards linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties who are often leaving their defensive zones for a running start at you. So each play becomes a chaotic joust where two teenagers start 10–15 feet apart and then start to run directly at each other. There’s a 50% percent chance that the first things to collide, no matter what training we are given, are our helmets. In a full-blown sprint in my direction, the 160-pound safety is now 300 pounds of momentum. We called it “getting speared” or “getting your bell rung” or “getting dinged.” I would get a helmet-to-helmet hit so hard that I time travel into the future straight to where I’m on the ground, looking up at a clear, blue sky.
The football helmet is one of the greatest symbols of irony of the late 20th and early 21st century. One of many markers in our society where we are provided a wonderful illusion of safety. And it relies on a misconstrued premise: helmets protect your brain. But they don’t. They protect your skull.
As you careen towards the defensive player, the brain sits in its spinal fluid like riding in a car without a seat-belt on. The sound of the hit is an almost reassuring, pleasing plastic pop, but inside, the force sends your brain bouncing back and forth against the bony wall of the skull. The first hit of the brain to the skull wall is called a coup and the ricochet to the other side of the brain is a countercoup. What you see is a white flash accompanied by the sound of an electric zap that ends with a strange crinkling sound like saran wrap being pulled apart. The brain has the same texture and consistency as jello, so as the brain gets knocked back and forth, parts of the brain slide over each other, causing arm-like axons to tear away from the cell body and die. In the process, they spill out neurotransmitters that just float around, lost at sea among the structures that survive, and this process of death occurs unwittingly for hours, sometimes days after the initial hit.
Not just one or two plays a game, but nearly every single play, your head is zigzagged around inside the skull for these non-concussion-level head injuries, a series of brain bumps that eventually cloud the mind like low doses of radiation. Another. Then another. Then another. Eight times during that march on offense. 25 times during that game, 134 times over all eight games that year, and the kicker, during practice: thousands of times. Thousands per year, nine years, starting in fourth grade, and all this even before even going off to college. You think nothing of it because — and here’s the hilarious irony — your brain contains millions of nerves except not a single one that feels pain. So you just play on with your blurry vision and feel like a warrior.
