Dad, would you still play football?

My dad died at 56. He suffered a massive heart attack on a Saturday afternoon and never woke. He was my best friend and mentor. His grin put you at ease while his heart made you feel welcome. You left his presence believing more in yourself. He made you laugh.

Dad played 17 years of tackle football, including four for the University of Michigan and seven as a Denver Bronco. Football was his purpose, not just his passion. The sport did not define him, but it made it easier for his life to have definition.

It seems CTE is everywhere in the news. Dad had it — Stage 3—and suffered the way others have. It feels, too, that football is outflanked by its attackers.

While still alive, I asked Dad if he would play football again. Was playing worth the limps and operations? The daily pain and self-medication? The warped body?

Dad always said yes.

I write often about the game, the benefits and perils I experienced firsthand. Despite loving football, I question it because I’m still questioning my dad. In my memoir, To Dad, From Kelly, I ask Dad again if playing football was worth the price he paid. The answer remains the best I can give to make sense of this football question.

Lytle Would Play

I always marveled at my dad’s hands. If I looked hard enough, I could imagine them in their prime, one powerfully clutching a football and the other jabbing at an opponent in his path. In real life, though, I saw his hands as a gateway for suffering. His bloated and arthritic fingers pointed in ten directions. Each one carried a combat story from his days playing football.

I watched Dad labor to get through each day for almost three decades before he died. I can remember him trying to stand. He’d push himself off a couch or chair, make it halfway, and falter. His knees would wobble and silent screams would seem to wail from his eyes. He’d brace himself against a headrest or nearby table and finally stand. I’d watch, then forget. The most familiar sights are the easiest to ignore.

As Dad’s life neared its end, the sport he loved had reduced this once celebrated athlete to limps and winces. But Dad never mentioned the pain; complaining wasn’t part of his makeup. Besides, I don’t think he felt he had any right to grumble. As a boy, he had dreamed of playing professional football, and he had realized his dream. By his own admission, he accepted the costs with a single regret: that his myriad injuries kept him from reaching his potential and forced his retirement before he was ready to say goodbye.

Now, with his life abbreviated at the age of 56, I wish I could ask Dad one more time if he still believed all the treatments, operations, excruciating mornings, prescription drug dependence, and even his early death remained the acceptable collateral damage for an athletic goal achieved. Would Dad accept the same deal he made with football’s devils if he knew the real outcome?

To understand my dad one needed to recognize that his life had a singular mission. Growing up in Fremont, Dad told his parents and two sisters that he would play professional football. To him, this pronouncement wasn’t a boast but a fact. He charted a course to the NFL, and he prepared himself to endure whatever abuses and sacrifices were necessary to achieve it.

In playground basketball games against older neighborhood kids, he wrapped ankle weights above his shoes, believing they would strengthen his legs enough to withstand the punishment of the career he envisioned. Later, in junior high school, he started lifting weights and running sprints with the older players on the high school’s varsity team. He craved the satisfaction that came with challenging the bigger, stronger, and faster high school kids.

“Couldn’t get enough of it,” Dad told me years later. “All I wanted was to keep practicing. Every day, hell, every minute. I loved football, Kelly.”

People doubted his abilities. Find another dream, they said. You’re too small, too slow, or too white ever to play in the NFL. But Dad refused to listen. “I didn’t care,” he said. “Nothing was stopping me. Nobody knew how hard I would work to get there. Nobody realized how much I had to play football.”

I wonder if the same obsession would consume Dad if he knew how life would dead end. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Football chose Dad as much as he chose football. He loved the sport as a parent loves a child, unconditionally.
High school, college, and NFL teammates praised Dad. Throughout my life, I heard their stories about how he persevered through injuries and dedicated his body to the team. Legendary Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler called him one of the toughest players he had ever coached, saying that Dad absorbed abuse while playing like an “ugly outsider trying desperately for the last spot on the team.”

Following Dad’s memorial service, I heard from several former Michigan players that Coach Schembechler judged future generations of Wolverines by their willingness to pry their battered bodies from the training room table for another grueling practice. To coax players off the injured list and onto the field, the coach would often say, “Lytle would play.”

After Dad’s death, his teammates echoed this sentiment in their tributes, many calling Dad the best teammate they ever had. Others stated they had never played alongside a tougher man. At Michigan, Dad might have been an All-American and Heisman Trophy finalist, but self-sacrifice is what lingered as his most respected trait.

The question I have is whether the toughness that earned him the admiration of coaches and teammates was worth it. I want this answer because I saw unrelenting suffering become the cruel counterpart to his earning such compliments.

Whether the result of pride, masculinity, his passion to succeed, or a combination of all three, Dad believed that reaching his football goals required a full-speed charge through any obstacle. If finishing a game meant sprinting back to the huddle for a series of plays that he might not remember, after enduring a collision that his body and brain would never forget, he willed himself to the task. If the chance to play depended on receiving another painkilling injection to mask burning joints, he let the doctor jab the medicine into his body. Knees, toes, or shoulders, Dad didn’t discriminate. He welcomed every shot with a smile. The shots brought him closer to returning to the field.

Football’s stranglehold on Dad demanded that no alternatives existed. Many years after he retired, he remarked that he still longed for the camaraderie of joining his teammates in the locker room, laughing while having their ankles and wrists taped before a game or practice. Despite the carpenter’s set of screws and pins inserted into his body, he craved one more play. It seems that no roadblock could have stopped his life from colliding with football’s seductive force. The game gripped him as nothing else in his life ever could.

With success, however, came consequences. By the time he died he had an artificial left knee, an artificial right shoulder, persistent headaches, a mind that had begun to distance itself from reality, vertigo, and carpal tunnel so severe that it stripped all feeling from his hands as he fought to sleep at night. Time and age faded the scars slicing through his arms and legs, but his spoiled joints and pained gait remained. When Dad died, his body was a junkyard of used parts, a collection of leftovers from a sacrificial offering to his pagan god. Teammates and opponents praised his determination, but our family now lives without someone whose body failed him too soon.

I never felt for a sport, job, or anything, really, even a measure of what Dad felt for football. He worshipped the game and grieved without it every day following his retirement. Perhaps it’s unfair for me to question his devotion since it isn’t something I can completely understand. Before passing, he told me on countless occasions that he accepted his physical suffering because the toll came with playing the game he loved. I suppose that in his eyes, the desire to reach the pinnacle of his sport meant nothing without a willingness to punish and stretch his body across the goal line to achieve it.

For a long time, I agreed with his perspective. But everything Dad had said about accepting the pain he collected from football changed for me on November 20, 2010. A heart attack too powerful for his body to overcome became his final reward for the toughness admired by fans. On the day he died, his daughter lost her father, his wife became a widow at 55, and I lost my best friend. In the aftermath of his death, I question whether Dad would still choose football if someone had warned him of the consequences. Except I’m sure I know the answer.

“Yes,” Dad would say. “All I want is one more play. And maybe one more after that.” Then, he would smile.