Oregon Humanities

Modern Gladiators

Football has changed a lot—maybe too much—over the past fifty years.

Rich Wandschneider

Football grew up as I grew up. As a small boy, I read the sports pages and listened to the radio, wanting to be a baseball catcher for the New York Giants like my local Minnesota hero, Wes Westrum. In high school, I played football and idolized Otto Graham and Johnny Unitas. I played in college, too, though it was a small college without scholarships or even a phys ed major. But by my sophomore year, my football friends had graduated, and I discovered rugby and hung up my helmet. The sport alone was not enough to hold me.

Football’s nineteenth-century roots lie in rugby and soccer. The sport was imported from England, modified by the Ivy League—the rules were often different from campus to campus—and gradually codified, professionalized, and distributed across the country. Sports historians generally agree that football replaced baseball as “the American game” sometime in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I’ve come to think that football replaced baseball as television replaced radio in our lives: baseball has slower pacing, the game played in innings rather than timed halves. But football, with its violent action and constant adaptation to television’s advances—instant replay, color commentary—was a perfect fit for the then-new medium. Football and television met, embraced, and traded hot dogs and the seventh-inning stretch for beer commercials and spectacular, often violent bursts of action punctuated by huddles, time-outs, commercial breaks, post-play analysis, and multiple-angled instant replays.

And the result of this encounter is that in fifty years, college and professional football has gone from being a sixty-minute game played by 150- to 200-pound athletes to a commercial enterprise staffed by 250- to 350-pound specialists who run, throw, block, tackle, rush, defend, punt, kick, or run back-punts and kicks for a few plays and then sit on the sidelines until their numbers and specialties are called again. These huge players live in fancy training rooms, eat prodigiously, and run very fast and hit very hard. They are good at what they do, and watching them can be addictive for me even now.

As a 160-pound high school lineman in the late ’50s, I wore one of the first single-bar helmets available. As a 190-pound college lineman, I learned to “spear block” with my helmet before that practice was outlawed. Now bars and helmets are designed by scientists to cushion impact, and rules are constantly changed to limit helmet-to-helmet contact. But heads still ring, and research shows that the brain damage of concussions—even when separated by weeks and years—is cumulative and that the continuous helmet-banging of huge linemen can produce dementia just as surely as the big hits taken by lighter players can.

Medical carts routinely take players off the field, commentators lament the boy from a humble background stopped in his success, helmet technology and brain research continue, and programs (like the one at Oregon State University) retrain and rebuild three hundred–pound monsters who didn’t quite make the big time or who are done with it and are going to fat and diabetes as two hundred–pound human beings.

I wonder how far it will go. A seven-foot quarterback throwing over four hundred–pound linemen? Four hundred–pound tacklers colliding with three hundred–pound runners? American gladiators killing and maiming each other in front of stadium-suite millionaires and
television-viewing beer drinkers, making the bet that they can cram all their living into a few rich years and be in the shrinking percentage that keep their brains and health into old age?