If Brian Westbrook’s vision isn’t too blurry, and the fog shrouding his consciousness isn’t too thick, the shaken Eagles running back might want to thank Joseph Mason Reeves.
Reeves was also a football player, a genius athlete noted for his tendency to be both headstrong and weak-headed. His teammates called him “Bull”, though he was often too dazed to hear them.
A small tackle on the 1893 Navy team, Reeves’ unsavory duty was to lash out at opposing flying wedges with deadly efficiency—literally, on occasion.
In retrospect, “headfirst” was probably a reckless strategy, considering that ballheads like Reeves’s didn’t yet have a helmet. In what was the infancy of the sport, players truly believed that they could protect their heads simply by growing their hair out.
Few cut their hair in season. Many suffered concussions.
Reeves, who like Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, IL, must have had fine hair. He was knocked out so often that late in that 1893 season, a Naval Academy doctor warned him that the next one might result in death or “instantaneous insanity.”
While deaths weren’t uncommon in an era of soccer so brutally violent the sport nearly committed suicide, the insanity was something else. The prospect of a nutty naval officer at the helm of an American battleship, the first of which was under construction at the US Navy shipyards, was not something the academy superintendent could tolerate.
So even though the fourth annual reunion with the Army was next on the Navy’s calendar, Capt. Robert L. Phythian summoned the 21-year-old to his office. “Reeves, good man,” he told the senior, “I cannot in good conscience allow you to play in the next game with Army.”
But Bull Reeves, who, though he did not recognize the danger of persistent head injuries, foresaw the value of carriers, possessed the wit of a future officer. The future admiral sought out an Annapolis shoemaker and asked him to create a moleskin headgear.
The result looked like something Attila the Hun might have worn to a looting party, as conical as it was comical. Even so, the strange-looking device satisfies Phythian. Reeves staged a 6-4 Navy victory and the football helmet was born, though it wouldn’t be required for nearly half a century.
In the decades since Reeves preserved his status as a player and presumably his sanity, helmets have undergone constant and considerable change. Doctors, trainers, engineers, pilots and coaches have all tried to perfect them. Straps were added, then padding. In the late 1940s, the shift from leather to molded plastic began. Masks were soon incorporated and later air cushion devices.
Today’s state-of-the-art helmets are as shiny, sleek and attractive as sports cars. They cost hundreds of dollars each. They are effective marketing devices, with tens of thousands sold annually not only to teams, but also to collectors and obsessive fans.
And yet, as the problems Philadelphia’s Westbrook, Washington’s Clinton Portis and at least a dozen other players have endured this season illustrate, head injuries continue to be a major headache for the NFL.
By the league’s own estimate, there are 120 to 130 concussions per season, a number that a recent Associated Press poll suggests may be well underreported. “Guys today are a lot bigger, a lot faster than they used to be,” said Sam Huff, a Redskins broadcaster and former linebacker. “The game is violent and always will be.”
That reasoning doesn’t help much in a hyper-litigious age. So commissioner Roger Goodell recently ruled that no player who suffers a concussion will be allowed to return to action. Players are also under increasing pressure to stay out of the game after their injury.
“Once withdrawn during a practice or game,” the Goodell memo states, “the player should not be considered for return to soccer activities until completely asymptotic, both at rest and after exertion, have a neurological exam normal, normal neuropsychological tests, and has been cleared to return by both his team physicians and the independent neurological consultant.”
The conundrum facing soccer in this health-conscious era affects the very nature of the sport: how do you remove violent impacts from a violent impact sport? With better helmets? Hard penalties? Strict medical policies?
So far, neither of those options has done much to quell the epidemic. Baseball, if it wanted to, could simply eliminate by law its most violent aspect, beanballs. Basketball has been successful in policing deflected elbows and lane muggings.
Hockey is probably the closest to soccer among the four major sports in its propensity for head-shaking shots, but on ice they don’t take place as regularly.
All the NFL knows at this early stage of what is becoming, for the league, an increasingly ugly topic anyway, is that something must be done.
In addition to Goodell’s new edict, a Players Advisory Forum was formed, headed by Tony Dungy. Its purpose is to gather information on hot topics from players across the league and feed it to Commissioner Roger Goodell. He has already called on helmet manufacturers to come up with a safer design. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. “The players continue to be an invaluable resource in providing guidance and insight on a wide range of programs and policies,” the commissioner said in the statement announcing the formation of the committee. “Tony’s experience and knowledge of working with players make him an ideal leader.”
The committee will almost certainly discover what a recent survey by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research found. That study revealed that 6.1 percent of the responding players had Alzheimer’s disease, dementia or some other memory disorder. That’s five times the national average for men his age.
The numbers were even worse for the NFL’s youngest alumni. Those between the ages of 30 and 49 reported getting these diseases at a rate 19 times the US average.
A subsequent Associated Press survey of 160 current NFL players revealed that half had suffered serious head injuries, and that many had concealed that fact from their teams.
Much of the blame, of course, can be placed on the peculiar physics of soccer. Big, physically gifted linebackers and defensive backs shoot like missiles at each other. Helmets, designed to protect, often become dangerous projectiles when struck in the back, pelvis, and sometimes other heads by players.
Less noticeable, but just as insidious, even the biggest linemen regularly butt heads in steel cage battles of the pits.
And running backs and receivers who dive for extra yards are often kneed to the head, as Westbrook was, by rushing defenders. Not surprisingly, these repetitive seizure acts can have a dangerous cumulative effect.
According to a recent New Yorker magazine article, researchers believe that most of these affected former players have a neurological disorder called CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the result of repeated brain trauma.
Autopsies discovered varying degrees of CTE, the magazine said, in the brains of Steelers Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, who was a homeless inmate when he died; Andre Waters, the hard-hitting Eagles safety who, severely depressed, killed himself with a bullet to the head; and Justin Strzelczyk, the only Steelers lineman who was killed while driving the wrong way on a freeway and crashed into a truck. at 90mph.
If football players were to retire after their first serious head injury, experts say they would likely experience fewer problems in the future. But unfortunately, there wouldn’t be many players left to form a league.
Virtually every NFL player, at some point in their career, has been knocked unconscious during a game or practice. Too many don’t reveal the depth of their problem because they fear losing their position. Dungy, for example, told a radio interviewer that he had done exactly that. And after Westbrook suffered a concussion earlier in the season, he missed two games, came back and suffered a concussion again.
The New York Times reported that Pittsburgh safety Troy Polamalu had suffered six documented concussions since high school. The total was three for Steelers quarterback Ben Roethligsberger, who missed a game recently after being knocked out.
How many will end up as Steelers Webster and Strzelczyk?
“It’s not that he’s just lost cognitive abilities,” Douglas H. Smith, professor of neurology at the Brian Center for Repair and Injury at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “but he’s also increased the chances of having a problem. worse later in life.” Right now, the NFL can’t think of a worse problem.