I worry
about a lot of things, including ones that don’t concern most people.
I worry
that global temperatures are rising while sperm counts are falling. I worry
that honey bees are going extinct and that rising seas will bring the Pacific
Ocean to my Scottsdale door. I worry that in four million years the sun will
explode and wipe out the earth.
What’s
that you say? That last thing won’t happen for four billion years? OK, I feel better,
but just a little.
I also worry
about more here-now matters, like about the players in the National Football
League. I worry that some of them are getting their bells rung so often that it
will take a pistol shot to stop the clanging. I worry that the pummeling they receive
weekly in season will turn them into old men in middle age. And—finally and simply—I worry that a lot of
them are too, uh, darned fat.
Chances
are that—of the above-mentioned three items—you, too, worry a bit about the
first two. The effect of concussions at
all levels of the game has been football’s biggest story of the last year, and
anyone who’s known an NFL player knows that the muscular-skeletal complaints he
has in his 30s don’t show up in most men until they’re on Medicare.
The part about weight, though, is largely
ignored. That’s odd because the increase in footballers’ size has been the most
obvious trend in the sport—or probably in any sport—of the last 30 years. According to one on-line piece I saw (which I
believe because I did similar comparisons when I was working), NFL rosters had just
three players weighing 300 pounds or more on opening day in 1980, but by 1990
the number had climbed to 94. In 2000 it was 301 and in 2009 it was 394. By
that progression it’s certainly over 400 now and maybe near 500.
Almost all of those very-big guys are linemen,
but the size race also has spread to other positions. Linebackers used to weigh
in the 215-230-pound range but now 240-250 is more likely. At 230 pounds Jim Brown was a huge ball
carrier back in the day, but he’d be about average now. In 2007 the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft was
JaMarcus Russell, a 270-pound quarterback out of LSU. Yeah, he was bad, but I’m
just sayin’.
The
need for size has been dictated by changes in the game, especially the
offenses; at both the pro and major-college levels offensive football has moved
from run-pass balance to an overwhelming emphasis on the pass. This means that
offensive linemen function mainly as obstacles between their quarterbacks and
opposing pass-rushers, and have little use for the speed afoot the position
used to require.
Football
terminology has changed to reflect this development--when offensive line play
is discussed today one hears about “quickness” rather than speed. What’s valued now is the ability to stay in
balance with short, rapid steps to combat the various angles at which defensive
linemen attack. OLs still run 40-yard dashes in tryout camps, but that’s pro
forma because they almost never run that far in games. A more apt test would gauge
their dancing ability.
Evolution
doesn’t work nearly fast enough to produce the giants modern football demands
on both sides of the ball, so most of today’s behemoths are made, not born.
They get that way through a combination of intense, year-round weight lifting
and huge meals that often include dietary supplements, and sometimes include steroids. Thirty years ago this process started in
earnest in college. Today it often
begins in high school.
The iron is pumped because muscle weighs more than
fat, but it alone won’t suffice to create Frankenjocks. While about 2,500
calories a day are enough to nicely sustain the average American man, footballers’
intakes run from about 5,000 a day to 8,000 or 10,000. You don’t get boosts
like just by adding a dessert or drinking a milkshake with lunch.
“Eating with us [he and his
linemates] got to be a kind of game. We’d have two entrees each at dinner, and
sometimes three,” Jay Hilgenberg told me for a story I did on him. He
added: “We didn’t eat until we were full, we ate until we were tired.”
Hilgenberg was the center on the Chicago Bears’ 1985
Super Bowl champion team. If you add about 25 pounds at each level of his
development, his story is typical of today’s linemen. The scion of a family of
U. of Iowa centers (“we played catch back-to-back and bent over,” he joked) he
left high school at a strapping 217 pounds. That wasn’t enough to play in the
Big Ten, so through diet and exercise he gained 18 pounds before enrolling in
Iowa City and added around 15 more before he was graduated after a distinguished
varsity run.
Two-fifty was too small for the pros and the
6-foot-3 Jay wasn’t drafted out of college. He added 15 more pounds on his own,
wangled an invitation to Bears’ camp, and made the team, playing at between 270
and 280 pounds for most of his 13 seasons in the NFL. That was about 50 pounds
above his “natural” weight by most calculations. His career ended in the spring of 1994 when
he suffered a heart attack at age 35 while lifting weights in his basement. The
first thing he did upon getting out of the hospital was go on a diet.
Heart attacks at 35 are rare even
for overweight jocks, but premature health problems aren’t; various studies
have shown that ex-NFL players are considerably more likely to die before age
50 than are males in the general population.
In 2009 the American College of Gastroenterology
reported that because of their weight footballers run a higher risk of
incurring diabetes or heart or liver disease than a group of professional
baseball players it included in a 224-athlete study. It noted that while an
active life style generally is a health asset the footballers’ “sheer size
overwhelms the positive effects of exercise.”
I like football, you like football,
and the players like football, so don’t expect much about the sport to change
to satisfy worriers like me. Still,
players can change their individual courses.
I refer specifically to Alan Page, one of my
sports heroes. He was one of the best NFL defensive linemen ever, 250 pounds of
rompin’, stompin’ dynamite who terrorized offenses for the Minnesota Vikings in
the late 1960s and ‘70s. In his 30s, though, he got tired of filling his
mirror, stopped gorging and started running for exercise, and shed 30 pounds.
The Vikings objected to his new regimen and cut him in 1978, but the Bears
picked him up. He played 3 ½ more seasons in Chicago at his new weight, and did
quite well as I recall.
Not every player is as strong
minded as Page, a lawyer who’s now a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
Not as good on the field, either. But if
he could get off the gravy train others might, too.
It’s possible.
