TOO FAT

 

               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?