The Odyssey of a Football Story
On opening day of college football season in 2015, I wrote an op-ed piece that wasn’t intended for anyone outside the small circle of friends and other fledgling writers who had started following my first efforts. At the time, I was in Blacksburg, Virginia, with my wife, and we were spending the weekend with our oldest son, who was just starting his sophomore year at Virginia Tech. It was early Saturday morning, and we had just sat down in the Continental Divide Lounge inside the Inn at Virginia Tech to have breakfast, when someone turned on a big screen television and we were suddenly hit with the cacophony of ESPN’s College Gameday.
Having stopped following football for many years up to that point for various reasons, I wasn’t prepared for the Herbstreit/Corso onslaught to disrupt our perfect morning; I had no idea it was college football opening day. I just wanted to have a nice, peaceful breakfast with my wife. But college football and those who make a living from it invaded our moment.
The whole episode goaded me; was there no place I could go to avoid this annual, collective spasm of addiction to the modern gladiator spectacle? Apparently, on that crisp morning in the Blue Ridge foothills, there was not.
And so, I started to write. I told the truth, unsparingly and unapologetically. And a few days later, Sports Illustrated called and told me they wanted to run my article. It was published on September 23, 2015, and it’s a date that will live in infamy for many of my friends and even people in my family, because, to the everlasting lament of some of them, it unleashed a beast inside me that I had for many years somehow managed to keep pent up. It was the writer inside; the voice inside.
No; it was the conscience inside.
I told the truth, and telling the truth felt very good; it was a very cathartic experience.
Today, four years on from Sports Illustrated publishing the original piece, if there is one single sentence in the article I would change it would be this one: “Football was good to my father and me. No question about it.” It would be changed to: “Some would say football was good to my father and me, but with decades of hindsight I would disagree. The toll it took on his life, not just in physical terms, and the resultant impact it has had on our family, is just too high when compared to the brief and fleeting benefits it may have provided.”
Indeed, one of the best articles ever written on the same subject — football and the mostly unwitnessed after-effects on former players, sometimes tragic — came out that same day on SB Nation, written by Jeremy Collins and entitled, “The Reckoning: Football, Love, and Remembering Paul Oliver.” I highly recommend it to your consideration, wherever you stand. I’m very proud that Sports Illustrated put my story out the same day.
One of the reasons I was told by the people at SI that they wanted to pick up my article and publish it was because very few former players speak out. And that is the truth, even today. It’s sort of heretical for one of the “initiated” to ever speak negatively about the game. There’s a surprisingly strong sort of pressure that exists just beneath the surface to not do so. But by 2015, I didn’t care anymore if I offended anyone. By that time, my father was suffering from serious issues related to his football career, and I couldn’t suppress things any longer.
The reason I look back over all of this each year is because I’d like to think it encouraged former players to realize that they aren’t alone; I had several former teammates contact me to say they read the SI article and were relieved that other people were experiencing similar issues. “I thought I was the only one going through this,” was a common refrain. This in turn encouraged them to actually tell someone else about it, and if necessary, to seek help and treatment. This is a much more widespread and common issue with former football players than anyone realizes, and if you aren’t someone close to it, you cannot possibly identify with it. But men being men, we are raised and conditioned to hold things inside; “real men” do not talk about their issues you see. So I wanted to break through this shell and do two things, initially: (1) I wanted to confirm for others what was emerging in medical circles and the media and tell people that there was a problem, and (2) I wanted to somehow help former players and family members of players to acknowledge they might have a problem, to start talking about it out in the open, and to seek help when and if necessary. And now, four years later, this is starting to happen more and more.
Since then, I have continued what I now consider a mission. I followed up the SI piece with several other articles addressing the head-trauma crisis in football. In one in Sports Illustrated’s The Cauldron, I questioned why some NFL owners — even after the league finally acknowledged a link between football and CTE — continued to deny any such link. In my piece, entitled “When It Comes To Head Trauma, The NFL Just Can’t Keep From Shooting Itself In The Foot,” I set forth the eerie similarities between the way Big Tobacco for decades denied any link between cigarettes and lung disease and the way the NFL denied any link between head trauma in football and neurological disease, including sometimes using the same law firms and public relations groups.
In “Voices in the Wilderness,” I pointed out the strange paradox between, on one hand, the public and media’s recent acknowledgment of the impact of football on former players — including neurological disease, decreased quality of life and lifespan, and sometimes, suicide — and the apparent surface-level lip service they pay in response. One day, a reporter would write what apparently seemed like a serious recognition of the issues, then turn around the next day and write another piece still glorifying what he had just called a “gladiator spectacle.” That article was prompted by a frightening play in which Carolina Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly started crying uncontrollably on the field after striking his head making a routine-looking tackle. I opined that what we witnessed there was an example of what is called “pseudobulbar affect,” which can occur simultaneously with concussion and other forms of head trauma. But again, that incident — for all the hand wringing and dire-sounding platitudes by the game’s announcers — was all but forgotten within only a few days.
And the week before opening day last year, I penned “The Death of an American Game,” in which I predicted the slow, certain fall of football from mainstream popularity and that eventually, it will be a shell of its former self. I explained that, first off, it’s not just concussions that are killing football. People suffer concussions in other sports. The common element is that concussions can happen when athletes collide at speed. The problem is, there has been a poor and desperate spin by football proponents to group soccer and other sports into the head trauma discussion to save football. But they can’t. That’s because what makes football different from all other sports is the way the game is designed to be played: Increasingly bigger, stronger, and faster human bodies crash into one another at high rates of speed with bone-jarring impacts. Sure, this can happen in soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, and other sports. But that’s not the way those sports are designed to be played and it’s not what happens on every single play, as with football. And when you have high speed collisions like this, heads inevitably get in the way. As a result, fewer and fewer kids will play football, and the game will wither from the bottom up. This has been confirmed as things move forward and fewer and fewer kids sign up each year.
And on opening day of this college football season, I published my latest, “Bring in the Gladiators,” in which — among other things — I challenged football fans to look themselves in the mirror and decide whether the “game” is a product worth investing in when the evidence shows that professional and college football are nothing more than billion-dollar industries that use up young men and cast them aside when they have outlived their usefulness.
Some people have asked me if that is a bookend to the original Sports Illustrated article, and my answer is no; I have just begun my mission. A small handful of people who took the article as a personal affront to their pride have attempted to make the argument that football was, in fact, good to me, and that since I went on to graduate from college, enter law school, graduate, pass the bar, serve my country in the military for over 20 years, and start a writing career, that this is all some kind of evidence that the science and I are wrong. I guess their argument is that if there is really a link between football, head trauma, and long-term neurological diseases like CTE, then I am evidence against that, as if every person who ever played football and sustained concussions should end up the same way, with multiple neurological disorders, violent behavior, a train-wreck of a life, and on the worst end of it, suicide. “If this is all real, then what happened to you, Glen? Why has your life been different from those other guys? How have you been able to do all this other stuff after football?”
And my answer is this: Whatever I’ve managed to do in my life after football was not done with the help of football; it was done despite football. I overcame football. Many former players never do.
Words can be powerful. They can heal and they can destroy, notwithstanding what we were all taught when we were little about “sticks and stones.” And words, the spoken and the written, can effect change; changes in mindsets, attitudes, and perspectives. Changes in hearts and minds. I don’t really know if I was consciously thinking about any of this when it was published on September 23, 2015, but the feedback I have received since then leads me to conclude that maybe — if ever so slowly — change is happening.
Glen Hines is the author of three books that make up the Anthology Trilogy — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.
