Category Archives: MLB

Billy Chapel, Farewell Tours, For Love of the Game, Hero Worship, Mariano Rivera, MLB, New York Yankees

Please, No Mo

The greatest closer of all-time left the mound at Yankee Stadium last night.
Finally.
Though I can easily be described as the exact opposite of a New York Yankees fan, I tip my cap to Mariano Rivera. Truly a gentleman, one heck of a pitcher, who quite possibly threw the most disgusting, disturbing and unhittable pitch we’ll ever see.
A baseball wasn’t meant to do that, as many have said, but the fact that Rivera threw that cutter for nearly 20 years with such consistency and success is what is most astounding. Rivera is without question the greatest closer in baseball history – both in the regular season and the post-season. And you can certainly tip your cap to Rivera for coming back after blowing out his knee last year. He wouldn’t let it end that way, and returned to save 44 games this season.
It’s remarkable, it’s a great story and Rivera a great player.
But…

About this farewell tour, one that, frankly, was wildly mishandled and represents just another chapter of our sad downturn into hero worship. It represents the media’s massive stranglehold on our society and how said hero worship says more about us because we let it happen than it does about the players who seem to pull the “no, stop it, well, OK, tell me how much you love me” act.
Lost in the sentimentality of last night, the gushing Twitter hashtags, the overarching media slobber fest, the genuinely great moment when Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte came to take him off the mound, the tears, the emotion, was the fact that this wonderful moment had already been overdone and overblown before it even actually happened.
When Rivera announced this would be his last year, you probably could have predicted this would happen. Endless stories, standing ovations, tributes in every city for the last six weeks of the season. I don’t so much blame Rivera – we did this mostly ourselves. But Mo was a party to it, never said to stop, and soaked it all in.
It was a obvious he enjoyed it – and who wouldn’t? An entire year of everyone, including your arch rivals, showing you the love? It’s the ultimate ego trip.
Yet I remain wildly disappointed in us for the whole charade. What happened to us? Why is it a lead story that the underachieving and eliminated Yankees contemplating playing Rivera in centerfield against the hapless Astros this weekend? What about the exciting playoff races still happening? What about the Pirates making the playoffs for the first time since 1992?
1992!
You know what a fun, feel-good, easy story to write about that is? But baseball was overshadowed by Rivera’s farewell campaign. We’re a cult of personality, for sure.
And I can’t help but note that Todd Helton, perhaps the best player in Colorado Rockies history, retired without much fanfare as well this season. The difference? He waited until almost the very end of the season to do it. They held a modest ceremony and gave him a horse.
I texted a friend: “Why is Helton getting a horse?”
His response: “No idea. Maybe some connection to his Tennessee roots? Maybe he has a horse farm? We’ll never know because it might interfere with the great Rivera Farewell Tour.”
And he’s right. I’d never argue that Todd Helton reached Rivera’s level of performance or had the same impact on the game. And I get it – Rivera being one of the most recognizable Yankees is a lot different that Helton being the most recognizable Rockies.
But my goodness, this year has been nearly all Mo all the time. Goosebumps at the All-Star game, standing ovations, farewell ceremonies the last month in several cities. Campaigns demanding you recognize him as a hero, talk radio conversations about why he is or is not worthy of hero status. Stories about his legend growing each day, about him never sharing his true secret to the cutter, but helping other pitchers with the finer points. Practically every major paper and magazine in the country ran a story about it.
ESPN has a “Follow the Farewell” sub-page. AT&T allowed you to send him goodbye messages. The San Diego Padres gave him and his family beach bikes. Rivera barely pitched against the Padres during his career, or at Petco Park.
Good grief.
A little much, is it not? In a world of snark and constant criticism, I must stand apparently alone in my belief we’re gone overboard on the Mo Mania. Searching Google for a solid 15 minutes did not yield many results that showed any – even remote – criticism of Rivera’s farewell tour. In fact, one of the few a I found was from a newspaper…in Ottawa, Canada.
So perhaps this is falling on the angry deaf ears of folks who see nothing wrong with it. Perhaps I’m just a very old soul trapped in a still somewhat young man’s body. I just find the whole thing to be missing a shade of tact and a smidge of humility.
That’s not all on Rivera, either. We do this hero worship thing quite well. Yet Mo still did the 650 interviews and 400 posed pictures (all estimates) for TV, radio, newspapers, web sites and magazines. You can’t blame the guy completely for enjoying it a little bit, or a lot.
But I think I would have respected it more had Rivera pulled a Billy Chapel and just signed a ball telling them he was done. No fanfare, no big production, just riding off into the sunset and moving on.
Instead, the year-long goodbye left Thursday as somewhat anti-climatic. And you run the risk of it becoming a joke, which while Rivera seemed to avoid, others have not. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar got blasted for his retirement tour in 1989, Brett Favre and Michael Jordan mocked slightly – but mainly because they came out of retirement.
Sadly, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig announced over a year in advance – much like NBA Commissioner David Stern – that he would be leaving. Are they expecting the same – or even half – the farewell?
George Strait is doing it in country music, like so many musicians and bands before him. I mean, I get it, you want to give people a chance to say thanks for the talent and entertainment, but after a while, the novelty wears off and you’re just staring at someone who appears like they don’t really want to leave the stage, like they just want to hear the really, really loud cheers and feel that emotion.
Which makes it actually less so. The longer we have to say goodbye, the easier it becomes.
Let me repeat, I respect Rivera’s career, his impact on the game and what he did off the field, as well. But this…well…aren’t we just a tad embarrassed? Maybe, for once, life should imitate art. Even a somewhat hokey baseball movie disguised as a romantic comedy from 1999 got it right.
Please, fellas, from now on, just tell them you’re through.

For Love of the Game.



Standard
Derek Jeter, Drew Storen, Ed Reed, Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, MLB, NBA, NFL, Peyton Manning, Ray Lewis, Steve Nash, Tim Duncan, Tom Brady

The Grind


Here’s to The Grind.
Or more importantly, here’s to the ones who went through it and excelled in it.
Because you can survive The Grind, but it changes you forever. If you don’t know what The Grind is, quite simply, it’s the torturous side of sports. The pain, the hurt, the injuries, the travel, the hard work, the rehab.

It’s the nights in an empty gym while your friends go out on dates. It’s the sunny afternoons of summer spent in batting cages, on dirt fields under a blazing sun, while others soak their feet in a pool. It’s the mildly grotesque smell of a weight room, which you strangely learn to embrace. The Grind is the scars, the rock hard calluses on your feet and toes, the lack of hair on your knees from floor burns.

And there’s a secret to it, that only the best of the best learn, which is simply that The Grind cannot be beaten, it’s barely survived and at your best, you simply manage and muddle your way through it.
The Grind is the journey, and it’s rarely understood by those who merely watch.
We are about to embark on a period over the next few years where some of the best in their profession – of all time – will step away from The Grind and reach The End. They survive it, embrace it and succeed in it.
The first comes Sunday, as Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis will retire – win or lose – following the Super Bowl. Whatever you think of Lewis as a person, or how the media lovefest has gone a little overboard the past month, considering, you know, this, it doesn’t change the fact that Lewis is indeed a warrior and a throwback NFL player along the lines of a Butkus or a Singletary. Ultimate competitor, passionate, and perhaps most of all, maximum effort at all times.
And he lasted 17 seasons in the NFL, a place where brain damage and physical disability are rampant after retirement. In 2011, a study found that the average NFL career was 6.86 seasons, a major league baseball player, 5.6 years, and in the NBA, ballers can expect to last on average 4.8 years.
That’s not very long. And that’s because of The Grind.
As spectators and as fans, we see the glitz, the glamour, the fame and the money of professional sports. And never mistake that they are well-paid. But few, very few, make it to The End. The Grind often ends it for you.
It becomes less and less about the money, but more and more about the legacy and about a unique competitive drive few can understand.
Within the next few years, many other outstanding, Hall of Fame caliber NFL stars could be joining Lewis: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Randy Moss (again), Tony Gonzalez and Ed Reed. Each of these players changed the game, impacted it in some significant way and broke records. Each will be a Hall of Fame player. Heck, maybe Brett Favre will finally hang ‘em up, too.
In baseball, guys like Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodriguez, Ichiro Suzuki (basically, the New York Yankees roster) and David Ortiz will call it quits. And in the NBA, there’s this list: Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, and Steve Nash. All are winding down MVP-heavy, record breaking, Hall of Fame careers.
We’ve watched, we’ve enjoyed or hated them as members of rival teams, but we don’t know a thing about them, really. And we don’t know about The Grind.
Some of these athletes have been playing professional sports that span over three presidents – the second term of Bill Clinton, all of George W. Bush’s years in the White House and now, with Barack Obama beginning his second term as commander-in-chief. Cell phones weren’t heavily used, Justin Timberlake was in a boy band and we still feared the Y2K bug.
Just think, where were you in 1996, when Ray Lewis and Kobe Bryant started their NFL and NBA careers, respectively?
Simply put, the world has changed, but many of these guys haven’t. Think of what they’ve endured? To start, I think of how my story is 1/100th of theirs.
I am a has-been, former high school hoopster, and tried to play college ball at the D-III level. In my early 20s, I played pick-up ball a couple nights a week for a few years, didn’t do anything for a few in the middle and then played Y-League ball on Sundays for eight weeks, once or twice a year, for three years. Didn’t play again for awhile and now, over the past four months (in much better shape finally), I’m playing once a week again.
Keep in mind that fact – that I’m 33, haven’t spent the last 15 years in a 6-to-8 month season, traveling, maintaining, playing two games in three nights, back-to-backs or doing a West Coast road trip.
But I played. I’ve had my version of The Grind.
Frankly, I hurt more than I’d ever admit verbally, mostly in the mornings. And that’s mainly because I don’t want to be a whiner, a complainer and partly because those around me can’t understand.
In the winter, due to way too many ankle sprains, my feet just plain ache. They pop and crack constantly. They’re typically always cold, unless the calendar is between May and August, due to poor blood flow and bad tendons and ligaments. My wife shudders when my feet brush her leg and says they feel like ice cubes.
My back hurts, my left shoulder slips out of socket occasionally if moved the wrong way, or slept on for too long, from three separations. After diving for a loose ball once and landing on my elbow, I basically split my elbow cap into four or five pieces of bone. I’ve played with what amounts to a black and blue golfball on the side of my foot – several times and on each ankle. I’ve played in an Aircast, a shoulder harness (that I wouldn’t wear except for one practice), and routinely stuck my legs from the calf down into 5-gallon buckets of ice water.

Twenty minutes in, 20 minutes out. After pulling them out, with my feet still a blue-ish purple color, I’d do ABCs with my feet, then, plunge them back in for another 20 minutes of torturous cold that cannot be described, only experienced.

Once, I got 12 stitches in my calf after diving for a ball and landing on the jagged metal edge of a bleacher – but I didn’t notice my sock was covered in blood for nearly two minutes. And I didn’t notice that muscle and fat from my calf were slightly exposed from the gash.
But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
The Grind can give you an adrenaline high, a natural charge from competition that you can’t really replace, a euphoria that you’ll spend trying to replicate. The Grind can hurt. I’ve got friends with knees that have been repaired or scoped three, four, five times. Herniated and or bulging discs in their back. Some have addiction to pain killers, to alcohol, to Tylenol, Advil or nicotine.
I’ve done it, too. They are simply numbing agents to offset The Grind and its effects.
And our stories – especially my stories – are literally nothing but a drop in the bucket of those mentioned above. Think of the amount of needles endured just to play. Lewis is coming back from a torn tendon in his arm that he suffered in October. Imagine that rehab. Surgeries and pins placed into bones. Kobe flew to Germany to have a controversial surgery on his knee, where they put new blood platelets in, because The Grind had made his bones, well, grind.
And that’s just before they are done.
At some point, though, it ends. And that’s when the mental aspect, not just the physical, begins. An identity crisis, or sorts. Who are you without (insert sport name here)? Some, like me, only did it for 12-15 years. I thought I had a hard time. Guys like Kobe, Duncan, Jeter, it will have been for 25 or 30 or more. You don’t remember a time when it didn’t revolve around the game. Your life is defined by it, you are who you are because of it.
The younger you are, the less painful the transition I imagine. Those who get it and did it, no matter what the level, have their demons related to giving it up or losing it. And it’s harder to understand for those around them. The competitiveness is wired into you, somehow, perhaps before birth or at a young age and you can’t turn off will and desire.
It cannot be replaced. The beast cannot be fed with desk jobs or investments, or even announcing and analyzing games on TV. Some do well with post-sports life, like Larry Bird, others, like Michael Jordan, not so much.
Some don’t want The Grind, which is when they get The Filter. That’s why they quit their high school teams, to go out and do their thing. They date. They party. They grow their hair out and spend their summers in flip flops, going to concerts and pool parties. There are more who wave it off after they get to college. Not worth it, too much. Or they don’t play as hard. They quit diving for loose balls or line drives in the gap, quit chasing down receivers 15 yards downfield. The funnel gets tighter the higher you go in the sporting ranks.
Until we are left with the few you can survive all The Grind has to offer. Twenty or more years, from childhood on, of aches, pains, missed dates, failed relationships, lost friendships over wins and losses, the travel, sleeping in chairs, living in training rooms with ice wrapped around every limb, doctors, surgeries, and rehab.
The Legends, they’ve been hurt, too, far worse and for far longer than many of us can even comprehend. Broken feet, torn ACLs. Dislocated this, that and parts in between. Peyton’s neck, Brady’s knee, Kobe’s knee, Jeter’s ankle. Paul Pierce was nearly stabbed to death. These are just the big ones, the ones that we know about. We don’t know anything of all the nicks, bumps, scraps, twists and turns. Banging into bodies, diving on the ground, on the floor. Flying from city to city, sleeping in cycles of naps on planes and buses.
At The End, if you’re lucky, you got a few rings to show for it.
This weekend, I heard rising star and young Washington Nationals pitcher Drew Storen speak. He was encouraging many in the audience, who were young baseball players, to focus each and every day on getting better at one little thing, and how, over time, it adds up to make a big difference.
But he also spoke of The Grind. What he does never changes. There’s just more of it. The same way he played the game at 11, 15,  or 17 is the same way he plays today. He gets just as excited – still gets that rush – to strike someone out, to make them look foolish, like he did his neighborhood friends as a little kid.
“Just more people watch now,” Storen joked.
They watch, but they can’t know. It’s a lonely place, The Grind. Going through it, only few understand. And the further your go with it, the fewer people that know what it feels like. That’s probably why it’s so hard to let it go.
Lately, I have been writing pieces about the moral side of sports, of society and how we view these events, and what’s right and wrong. But you think of it from this lens, of these outstanding few, of The Grind, and you think how many shades of gray enter into someone’s logic and rationale.
I may not agree with the PEDs, with the personal life or off court issues, but I can see why they are there. Why taking something to give you an edge is a tempting devil on your shoulder.
There are not many left after a dozen, 15 or 17 years. So very few can survive that long. That’s what makes these guys special in a sporting sense. We rarely get them, and when we do, they often have baggage near The End. Scars unseen they hide from the world, because frankly, the world can’t understand. It’s too cut and dry by that point for them.
Other times, it’s simply a numbing agent, a way to survive, to press on. Many started out, like Storen, chasing it. And as life often does, so many are filtered out over time. These guys aren’t like us, which is why I’ll tip my hat to them all, no matter who they are, simply because The Grinders reached The End.
And I hope and pray for the beginning of the rest of their life. 
Standard
Barry Bonds, Baseball Hall of Fame, Major League Baseball, Mark McGwire, MLB, Performance Enhancing Drugs, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Steroid Era

No Hall Pass


Here are your 2013 Major League Baseball Hall of Fame inductees, those who had careers that catapulted them to Cooperstown:
(Insert sound of wind, crickets or picture tumbleweed drifting through the Old West).
That’s right, no one was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year, the first time since 1996 that’s happened. The lack of inductees – technically, there were three, but they all died in the 1930s and were elected by the veteran’s committee – means that it’s the first time since 1960 that the induction ceremony will include no new or living honorees.
If this isn’t a condemnation of performance enhancing drugs and the era of 1990s and early 2000s, I don’t know what is. The names are there: Mark McGwire,
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa. 
They are all floating out there, names as big as their arms and thighs and heads in the baseball world. 
The stats are there, too. Home runs, strikeouts, hits – record shattering accomplishments litter their resumes.
But something else is there, too.
The asterisk, the black mark, the whispers. The performance enhancing drugs.
I had a friend tell me recently that he didn’t care about the steroids. He wanted the juice dripping off the ball. If someone wanted to ‘roid out for his entertainment and smash the ball 500 feet to provide good theater, even if it wrecked the man’s body or health, then so be it.
And really, I’m not sure I care about that, either. Granted, health is an issue – but it’s their bodies, it’s their decision, it’s their long-term health. Who am I to tell them what they can and cannot do?
I’m much more concerned about how we view this as fans and mothers and fathers. We spend all of our time telling our children to work hard, then we allow others to cut-corners in life on the path to success and riches? If that’s a jealous comment, then fine, though it’s not intended to be.
Someone once asked me if I could have taken a few pills or injections back in high school that would have turned me into a D-1 college basketball player and future NBA star, would I take it. My answer was and remains: no. I want to always know what I did or didn’t get was solely based on my own merits. We’re already fighting advantages in sports and in life. Some people are smarter in general, others more methodical. Some are fast, some are slow. Short, tall, strong, lean. These can all be used as advantages and disadvantages.
The best are the ones that maximize what they have, they rise to the top. If you have a Hall of Fame, it does imply these are the best, the ones to strive for and mimic and be like. They are the standard.
Who wants that standard mixed with performance enchancers? Many would argue that why wouldn’t you want to improve your performance, in whatever realm you do it? I’ve got no problem with supplements and vitamins and flu shots – things that prevent and fill in gaps I can’t get from food. Optimal nutrition. New ideas in the realm of sleep, rehab, surgery and nutrition are all good.
But if you’re in a controlled group where 50-60 percent of the people are doing one thing and 40-50 percent are doing another, that taints your sample and your results. How can you compare the two? How do you know, specifically, who was doing what?
Steroids don’t allow you to hit the ball, that still takes practice. But it does allow you quicker bat speed – not in a natural way. HGH doesn’t make you better, it just helps you recover from injury faster than the other guy.
But we’re not even really debating all that today, are we?
The question is, what to do with those that we know or suspect did use these drugs and enhancers? Do we place them among the other baseball legends who accomplished their now broken records without those items? What does it say about us – and more importantly – to our young athletes if we do?
The criticism of the writers for failure to elect anyone is so misguided. Attacking the system and who votes and elects members is diverting attention away from the real conversation.
Which, essentially, is simple. You can keep the money you made entertaining us, the fame given by us and all the trophies you were awarded, but you will not be permitted to be forever remembered and represented as a standard-bearer of what we want our athletes to achieve. 
Forget separate wings of the Hall, the conversation about the character clause. I don’t care if half the players in the Hall of Fame were jerks, they didn’t disrespect the game itself. You did. If Pete Rose doesn’t get in for gambling on baseball, you don’t get in for cheating your peers in baseball.
Barry Bonds wants us to turn the page, to stop being angry. OK, we have. Now what? Well, we just sent you the message: Go away.
It’s that simple, we’ll move on when you move on. You’re not getting in.
We won’t forget you, but you won’t be remembered with a bust, either. 
Standard
concussions, Dave Duerson, Dr. James Andrews, Matthew Broderick, Mike Shanahan, MLB, NFL, Robert Griffin III, Steven Strasburg, Washington Nationals, Washington Redskins

Sometimes, There Are No Winners


Here’s where we start: 60-year-old men who can’t walk, can’t turn the lights on inside their home and can’t stand the pain to the point that some commit suicide.
If that doesn’t grab your attention, I’m not sure what will. Maybe phrases. Brain damage. Multiple reconstructive surgeries. Cognitive breakdowns. Early onset dementia.
These are the real, live dangers of playing football for a sustained period of time in one’s life. Is it worth it?
How can a schlub like me proclaim to have that answer? I can’t, frankly. But the fundamental fact is that across America, mothers and fathers are struggling with how to take the new information on player safety and mesh it with what is best for our sons.
I have three boys. The oldest plays travel football for a good school system. The coaches are fantastic. The medical staff in our community is top notch. And the same could be said for the NFL. The Washington Redskins have Dr. James Andrews – yes, that Dr. James Andrews, he of renown surgical fame.
And Robert Griffin III is still hurt this morning and we’re still pondering if he should have been playing at all.
Part of this is our fault. As fans and media, we eviscerated Jay Cutler two years ago for not playing in the NFC Championship game against the arch-rival Green Bay Packers with a knee injury. We encourage gritty, tough, manly behavior in sports.
But I have to ask, is it manly to eat through a straw, have recurring headaches and forget your own name by the time your 55? Is it manly to walk with a gimp, hunched over and have knees and hips replaced in your 40s?
It’s an interesting dichotomy, to pair the decision of the Washington Redskins to play Griffin over the past month with the city’s baseball team, the Washington Nationals, polar opposite decision to rest the arm of their prized franchise player, Steven Strasburg. The Nationals faced backlash, including from me, for resting him during the final month of last season, just as the team was in the playoff race. And as the Nationals advanced into the playoffs, they refused to budge: Strasburg would not be pitching until 2013.
Strasburg fought this decision, but ultimately accepted it. Griffin, according to both he and his coach, was asked multiple times about staying in the game Sunday against Seattle. He played.
He got hurt.
As Griffin said in his postgame comments, and as other former players point out all the time, you take the risk of injury any time you step on the field. It is not a variable. It’s there. With baseball and basketball – heck, with walking down the street – the risk of injury is all around us. It’s just significantly less possible to get hurt walking down the street than it is playing baseball. Likewise, the gap is roughly the same between baseball and football.
It doesn’t make Griffin more of a leader or a man to play through pain. Or maybe it does to those other players, because they are doing it, too. Football is a different sport, with its own set of protocols and guiding principles. I enjoy what leadership and experience my son gets from football. But can he find it or learn it in other, less dangerous ways?
If this is where we are as a culture and society of sports fans – that a man is measured solely by pain tolerance and his ability to run around on one leg and fight through injury to lead his team – then we’ve advanced no further than the time of gladiators in ancient Rome.
We should be better than this by now. We’re an advanced race of people, with thousands of years of information at our fingertips. We speak of logic, yet confusingly do not show any on certain things.
Remember the 80s flick, WarGames? Matthew Broderick was caught hacking into a sophisticated computer system that interacted with you (basically, what we have now). At the time, this advanced system learned from itself. Eventually, it learned that Global Thermonuclear War could not be won, under any scenario, and eventually just asked to play chess (after scaring the pants of nearly everyone with security clearance).
I’m not suggesting we all just play chess. To be certain, there’s something endearing about the leadership qualities of Russell Crowe or Russell Wilson, when they keep going. You want to instill perseverance. As a father, I know I do. We love it in America when people keep pushing and going despite the odds, despite the injuries, despite the repercussions.
But you have to look at the culture we – all of us, fans, players, coaches, media – are creating. Is there truly a way to win this game when more and more former players end up not winning at the game of life? Substance abuse, violence, suicides; these are not things I want for my boys. I don’t want them to end up like Jim McMahon, who’s forgotten more about his professional football career than anyone who went by the name “Punky QB” ever should.
Griffin’s injury hasn’t sparked new conversation around head trauma or concussions, because it was his knee.
And this goes beyond giving his team the best chance to win over the backup. Was it best for him? Maybe not. Is it his choice or the teams? Perhaps both, in some way. Yet a friend of mine, who’s had five knee surgeries, three of which were of the reconstructive nature, commented how Griffin’s knee buckling didn’t, uh, look good. He would know – my friend’s injured knee came from football.
How will Griffin’s knee hold up over time? That’s not just the concern of the Washington Redskins or fans of RGIII or the NFL. That’s Griffin’s concern, too. And maybe he’s fine with it. He’s a grown man and has signed a contract to go between those lines each week. If he chooses to play on an injured knee that could lead to major obstacles in the ways he lives life after football is his decision in almost all ways.
And you know what’s ours? What we allow our sons to do, the generation of young boys between the ages of 6-13 who really can’t do anything if we don’t allow them to play.
It’s striking that so many former players have said they weren’t sure if they would allow their boys to play football. Kurt Warner caused a stir when he said he’d prefer his sons not play and nearly retired a year before he actually did when his teammate, Anquan Boldin, suffered a nasty concussion in a mid-air collision going after a ball Warner threw. Tom Brady’s father said he waited until he was 14 until he allowed one of the league’s greatest quarterbacks to play the game. All-pro linebacker Bart Scott said he plays football so his son “won’t have to” and Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw, who won four Super Bowls with the Pittsburgh Steelers, said if he had a son he wouldn’t allow him to play.
It’s the totality of what we see – it won’t go away. Our gut instinct and reaction tell us that something is off. From former players struggling to cope (like Junior Seau or Dave Duerson) to current ones who struggle, too, we’re getting an all too clear picture of the vast differences between modern football and the game that was once played.
They are not gladiators, and this is not ancient Rome. Commendable, endearing and manly as it may be, it’s brutal and barbaric for us to ignore or subconsciously enjoy their suffering.
Are they well paid? Most certainly. But that money will be gone to prescription drugs and doctor appointments between the ages of 40 to 75. If they make it that long.
It’s one thing to watch it all unfold. It’s another to willingly and openly subject my own children to it. We’re supposed to learn from things. And I frankly can’t decide what I will do with my youngest two boys or how long our 10-year-old will play.
Because football is becoming more and more like a modern sports version of Global Thermonuclear War.
The only way to truly win is not to play. 
Standard