Another
National Football League season is here—goody-goody—and as usual I’ll be
spending an inordinate amount of time watching it on the tube. I’m hard-pressed
to explain this. Basketball players are better athletes than footballers and the
numberless hours I spent on Chicago’s softball diamonds gave me a mental and
visceral connection to the parent sport of baseball. By contrast, as a
too-little kid I steered clear of the “F” sport, my participation pretty much limited
to autumn games of "touch" in the alley behind my Paulina Street home.
In
recent years I’ve also developed moral qualms about football. Beyond a doubt
it’s a gladiatorial sport that requires players to roll the dice with their
health. I tell myself they’re volunteers, and adult pros accept the risks they
face, but I doubt if many make the choice with the full understanding of what
could be in store for them. Neurological injuries caused by the game’s
incessant head butting are the main danger; a recently reported survey of 3,500
retired NFL players, average age 53, showed that 12% said they were suffering
with “severe” cognitive issues, and 25% said they had symptoms of clinical depression
or anxiety. That probably understates the true extent of the situation, because
self-reporting usually minimizes such things and neurological damage can
manifest itself many years after the causative blows.
On top of that is the damage to
bones and joints that football brings. Rare is the NFL player who hasn’t gone
under the knife at some point as a high-schooler, collegian or pro, and
multiple surgeries are the rule for veterans. Mark Schlereth, who spent 12
seasons as an offensive lineman with the Washington (then) Redskins and Denver
Broncos (1989-2000), underwent 29 operations, 20 on his knees (15 left, five
right) and the rest on his back, shoulders and arms. A connoisseur of such
things, he’s said “If I could take back the back surgery, I’d take another 20
knee surgeries instead.”
Joint injuries generally aren’t
life-threatening, but even when corrected surgically they tend to get worse
over time. Joints that have been injured are more prone than others to
arthritis and other ravages of age. I recall seeing Dick Butkus, the
personification of football ferocity, hauling himself around stiff-legged 25
years after his playing days ended. As a result of his football injuries he has
a metal knee replacement, and other surgeries left one leg 1 ½ inches shorter
than the other.
But while brain and joint damage
stem from the nature of football and, thus, are inevitable, another important football
health issue isn’t. I mean the sort of intentional obesity to which some players,
especially linemen, subject themselves. In brief, most of those guys are too
fat, and have to be to keep their jobs.
There was a time when a “big man” playing at
or near his natural weight could have a fine NFL career; the starting O-Line of
the 1965 Green Bay Packers, a great team by any measure, consisted of center
Ken Bowman, guards Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston and tackles Forrest Gregg and
Bob Skoronski, each of whom weighed in at between 230 and 250 pounds. Today, they’d
have to buy tickets to get near an NFL field at those weights.
As late as 1985 300-pounders were
considered freakish in football; remember the fuss when William Perry, a
defensive lineman nicknamed “The Refrigerator” for his blocky build and love of
food, debuted with the Chicago Bears at that weight? It turned out he was a
pioneer. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the average weight of starting
offensive linemen in the league jumped from 254 pounds in 1970 to 277 pounds in
1990, to 309 pounds in 2000 and to 315 pounds today.
The reason for the increase is
simple: the bigger a lineman is the harder he is to move. Some of the increase
may be muscle, but most is fat. One study I came across reported that the
average body fat of an NFL lineman is 24.8%, 0.2% short of the clinical
definition of obesity. That was about twice the body-fat average of players at
the other positions.
Football players work hard and
maintaining their weight is about as much trouble as gaining it. A case in
point was Joe Thomas, a perennial All-Pro offensive tackle in his 11 seasons
with the Cleveland Browns, ending with his 2018 retirement. He played football in high school at about 240
pounds, bulked up to 300 at the University of Wisconsin, and added about 25
pounds more as a pro. His 6-foot-6 frame enabled him to do that without loss of
mobility, but it was not without effort. A piece last year on overweight football
pros on the ESPN.com website described his typical daily playing-days menu
thusly:
Breakfast—Four
pieces of bacon¸ four sausage links, eight eggs, three pancakes and oatmeal
with peanut butter.
Lunch—Pasta
with meatballs, cookies and “a salad maybe.”
Dinner—A
whole deep-dish pizza, a sleeve of Thin Mint Girl Scouts cookies and a bowl of
ice cream.
On top
of that came a couple of daily protein shakes and between-meals and bedtime
snacks. “If I went two hours without eating I’d want to cut off your arm and
eat it,” he told the ESPN reporter. “We got weighed on Mondays and if I lost
five pounds my coach would give me hell.”
Fun it
wasn’t, he continued, saying he “crushed Tums” nightly but still had constant
heartburn, and gulped various pain meds and anti-inflammatories to cope with
his aches. In the first two years of his retirement he began eating and
exercising “like a normal human,” threw away the meds and lost 60 pounds. “The
health benefits were amazing,” he exulted.
The
other side of the coin is grim, as personified by the abovementioned Mr. Perry.
His weight crept up throughout a nine-year NFL career (1985-94) and kept climbing
in retirement, eventually nearing 450 pounds. He lost most of that later, but
not in a healthy way. Now, at age 58, he’s in a wheelchair, suffering from
diabetes and circulatory issues, among other things. One only can hope that the memory of the
cheers he received in his prime eases his current condition.
The NFL’s
unhealthful fatter-the-better regime could easily be halted by the league establishing
an upper limit on weight. Olympic freestyle wrestling did this in the 1980s
after huge men, such as the 400-pound American Chris Taylor, had come to
dominate the heavyweight division by size alone. A top weight limit of 130 kilograms (286
pounds) was put into effect for the 1988 Games and by 2021 it had been adjusted
to 125 kg (275). That’s big enough,
dontcha think?
