Paige One: Youngsters, Football and Concussions
Now that baseball season is officially over, our thoughts and eyes turn to the NFL.
Can the Jets go all the way with a swagger and can the Giants avoid another finish with a stagger?
While this is going, youngsters are playing Pop Warner and Flag Football all across the country.
While I truly am enjoying my youngest son's first year in Flag football – he's turning out to be a real Darryl Lamonica "Mad Bomber" at QB – I wonder if Pop Warner is the right thing for the kids under the age of 10.
Face it, we all laughed when the great linebacker Lawrence Taylor stated he "wanted to hit the quarterback so hard that a snot bubble came out his nose."
Yeah, I did also.
Then I got to seeing more and more of those God-awful, brain-rattling hits on TV and I started to wonder about the young kids playing football.
Grown men can make a decision to play pro football and all the violence that is associated with it because of the money they can make.
So many athletes go to college, not to get an education, but to prep for the pros.
Why?
The "cha-ching" is the thing if you are good enough to play pro sports.
Little kids playing Pop Warner may want to play football and their fathers may want them on the peewee gridiron, but the kids are doing it because their fathers want them too.
What kid really wants to practice five days a weeks for three hours a day to learn a West Coast Offense at the age of five?
I flashed back to all the former pro football players I've interviewed who now move slowly, need various replacements for their joints, all in the name of football.
I remember interviewing Hall of Famer Alan Page of the Vikings, who just won reelection to the Minnesota Supreme Court. His pinkie (I can't remember which one) was bent at a right angle.
I asked him, sheepishly, if he was going to get it fixed, he said that he had waited too long to do anything about it.
Then I saw the youngster from Rutgers, Eric LeGrand, become paralyzed from the neck down and I thought of my almost date with serious injury playing football.
The year was 1970. My high school, Taft in the Bronx, didn't have a football team so a bunch of us played in the Buddy Young League, named after one of the first black men to play in the NFL.
I was a 5-foot-8, 130-pound defensive tackle (stop laughing) and we were playing an exhibition game somewhere upstate New York.
On this one particular play, our opponent was running the ball straight at me.
Remarkably, I shredded the blocker and went to make the tackle. In my haste, I didn't feel the blocker get his hand caught under my face mask and rip off my helmet.
It was just one of those things.
Seeing me without a helmet, the running back lowered his head and hit me smack under my right eye, knocking me backwards. I landed on my back looking at a clear, white sky.
When I tried to get up, all I could move was my head – a little bit – toward the sky.
One of my teammates told me to get up … but I couldn't move, couldn't move my arms, and couldn't move my legs. I guess I was concussed.
I know now that I was experiencing a stinger where you go numb all over.
At 16, nobody had told me what a stinger was and I was starting to get scared.
When that same teammate told me the coach was coming, I got up. He was a Lombardi type, so maybe I was more scared of him than I was of the injury.
The funny thing was, I put my helmet on and went back to work.
We lost the game and during the next practice at Macombs Dam Park – the current home of the New York Yankees – I was moved to strong-side linebacker.
The combination of playing poorly in the next game, failing multiple subjects and the lingering thought of lying on my back, not able to move, told me the NFL didn't have a place for little old me..
I made the right choice and I hope parents think it over carefully about their kids, with bones and brains still growing, playing the sport of football at too early an age.
