The Culture of the big hit

From the Bleachers

I remember it like it was yesterday.

After being convinced to come out for the football team my senior year of high school, I lined up as a wide receiver for my first full-speed scrimmage. It had been a while since I’d played organized ball, but I was arrogant. After all, I was the captain of the basketball and baseball team. How tough could football really be?

My first action came on a crossing route. As I sprinted through the teeth of the defense I saw that the ball heading my way was leading me a little too much, so I began stretching out for a Randy Moss-like catch.

And than the lights went out.

I didn’t see a white light, so I had to assume I wasn’t dead. But when feeling started to come back, I almost wished I were. My chest felt like I had been hit by a wrecking ball traveling roughly the speed of light.

This assessment wasn’t far from the truth. Fletcher Terrell, a close friend of mine and a freakish athlete headed to the University of Minnesota on a football scholarship, smiled and looked down at my glazed-over eyes.

“Hey white boy!” he said laughing, clearly amused at his ability to send me three yards in the opposite direction I’d been running. “You OK?”

At the heart of the popularity football currently enjoys in the American culture is the big hit.

As Sports Illustrated reporter Tim Layden writes: “Everything in football begins with the big hit and flows from there, like blood pumping from a beating heart, feeding limbs and organs.”

In other words, it is the rock upon which football has been built.

You can talk about the masterful scheme and improvisation of a Peyton Manning led offense. You can talk about the breathtaking speed of Reggie Bush. But the fact remains: These players are scheming and running to avoid getting mashed into oblivion by a group of 300-pound men who can bench-press pickup trucks.

If people were really that interested in game-planning and an intellectual prowess they’d watch chess. Not even baseball, American’s most popular sport for the majority of the 20th century, stands a chance against football.

Why?

Baseball players still aren’t allowed to hit each other with bats. How lame is that?

Football has become an emotional outlet for many Americans. For most people watching football, in the stands or on TV, is exciting, it’s violent, it’s visceral, and it’s freakin’ awesome.

It is Roman citizens watching gladiators in the coliseum—minus the whole death thing.

Watch any football movie—from Remember the Titans to The Waterboy—and it’s not the complexity of the play’s that make the best shots, it’s the slow-motion, over-dramatized hits.

My coworker explained her enjoyment of football this way: “I really like that noise they make when they crash into each other—it sucks you into the game when they make that big ‘huhh’ noise.”

But what many people in the stands and watching on TV don’t realize is how much speed and power is actually compressed in the “huhh” sound of a big hit.

“Unless people have played themselves, I don’t think they realize what the impact is like,” said Polson head football coach Scott Wilson. “When people are watching from the stands, I don’t think they realize what kind of punishment the body is taking.”

Football is not a war—although some coaches like to use that metaphor—because nothing is war except war. But there is a certain amount of analytic similarity. Football is based upon the notion of physically overwhelming your opponent, knocking him into submission and imposing your will while you march down the “field of battle.”

And consider this: There is a medical staff and ambulance required to be on the field for every NFL game. Most high school football games require, at the very least, a doctor onsite.

How many jobs require that?

And the thing is, it’s completely necessary. It has become commonplace to see injuries in football games. Mostly it’s groin pulls and sprained ankles, but occasionally, as was the case with Buffalo Bills reserve tight end Kevin Everett, the big hit can result in nearly dying and doubt about ever being able to walk again.

And mounting evidence, reported on by the AP and Sports Illustrated, has pointed to serious brain damage caused by concussions from big hits, which can lead to depression and, in some cases, suicide.

More and more, we’re realizing the medical repercussions of the big hit.

But will any of this change our love for it?

I had a better chance at catching that football.