Are you ready for some football? Really ready?

Sunday, August 27, 2006 By JOHN M. CRISP SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE Football is an excellent game, spectacular and exciting, and thousands of men and boys are getting ready to play another season. But let's face it: The game has become too rough. I started thinking in these outrageous terms just after Sunday, April 10, 2005, when Al Lucas said good-bye to his wife and 1-year-old daughter, and suited up with the Los Angeles Avengers of the Arena Football League to play the New York Dragons. Within hours, Lucas was dead, killed by a spinal injury sustained during a kickoff. The teams and fans were shocked, but the real surprise is that this doesn't happen more often. Modern professional football is a fast, rough game played by very big men. The spinal column, on the other hand, is a delicate, complicated piece of machinery that, in an X-ray, appears to be much too fragile to withstand the impacts it suffers on the football field. The toll Usually it does, though. Although almost 1,000 football players have been killed since 1931 as a direct result of the game, males between 15 and 24 are still much more likely to die while driving automobiles than while playing football. Furthermore, the game has become considerably safer since 1976 when rules changes prohibited players from using their helmets to make initial contact with other players. Although about four players still die every year as a direct result of playing football and others are paralyzed, for the average player, fortunately, death and paralysis are still slim statistical risks. But other much more common injuries last a lifetime, as well. Forty years ago, my own modest football career came to an abrupt end one evening in my junior year in high school when the opposing center, a big boy named Ronnie, put his shoulder against the side of my left knee, which had been firmly planted to make a tackle. Torn anterior cruciate ligaments occur in many sports, but the speed and violence of the opposing forces, as well as the basic architecture of the human knee, make football players particularly susceptible to this injury. My ACL was destroyed and considerable damage was done to the cartilage that cushions the bones, but after an operation, my knee recovered enough to allow me to run track in college, to play racquetball and to ride a bicycle across the 1,747 miles from Los Angeles to South Texas. Still, the knee was never the same. I'm telling this story not because it's unusual, but because it's common. The careers of the best football players, the professionals, are often cut short by injury, but football's professional elites reside at the peak of a pyramid of considerable carnage and suffering. It begins in the peewee leagues and builds through college, casting players aside all along the way. In terms of their whole lives, might these young players be better off if they were encouraged toward sports that permit a lifetime of participation, rather than football, which often results in injuries that limit later activities? John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.