It definitely wasn’t Tagovailoa’s night. On September 12, against the Bills, with three interceptions under his belt, he decided to run to get a first down, after which, instead of executing an elegant slide on his behind as experienced quarterbacks do, he dive head first. His skull then collides with the plastic armored chest of marauder Damar Hamlin. Concussion, his fourth in five years, to stick only to officially diagnosed traumas.
Sad sight to see him return to the sideline, head down, reminding everyone of the famous sequence from 2022 where, after being hit, he got up, staggered after a few steps, then fell back to the ground twice rather than once, before being examined and sent back to play to end the match. Four days later, he left the stadium on a stretcher.
This stunned quarterback is now on the sidelines and the Dolphins, whose aerial offense scared everyone, scored a big three points last Sunday against Seattle. To those, as numerous as they are well-intentioned, who advised him to take preventative retirement to protect his gray matter, the 26-year-old pivot replied that he had every intention of continuing, but that the neurologists would have their say.
For this young man, football undoubtedly represents a passion, it is his life. He was the future Dan Marino. Are we reasonable when we live a passion? Roughness is inherent in football, but after the sporting career there is still a long stretch of existence, and what could be more precious in the world than a brain? That’s the whole problem with concussions in sports: liking what hurts you.
The other problem is that diagnosed concussions are probably just the tip of the iceberg. We have just learned that Brett Favre has Parkinson’s syndrome. This living monument is 54 years old, almost half of which (1991-2010) spent being rushed, chased, run into and crushed to the ground by 300-pound men as a starting quarterback in the NFL. During his long and glorious career, this iron man, who played 297 consecutive games as a starter (a record), will have suffered so many shocks that the announcement of his Parkinson’s disease cannot help but evoke the Mohammed Ali’s glassy look punch-drunk » of recent years.
“Concussions happen all the time,” Favre once confided in an interview. “You get tackled, your head hits the field, you see flashes of light or you hear a ringing in your ears, but you’re able to play. » (Quoted by Stéphane Cadorette in THE Montreal Journal.)
In an enlightening text sent to me by a reader and former footballer, entitled Football: a story of love and yellow lightsit is also a question of these flashes of light that we see dancing “after a solid helmet-to-helmet”. The phenomenon, a reader told me, is known to all football players, and it even seems that one can become vaguely addicted to it. This reader thus speaks of “the euphoria which took hold of [lui] after each contact inflicted. “My yellow glows rhymed with ecstasy and pride. After a dozen of these pyrotechnic appearances, I stopped counting. »
Faced with this account of a minor league football experience dating back around thirty years, I, who write this column in the middle of the twenty-first century, in a society that has made physical and moral security its great obsession, I feel like I’m swimming in taboo. When I was a kid and my father told us that all the boxers had ears shaped like cauliflowers from eating punches on their noggins, we wore a surprised smile before going to put on our own boxing gloves at the basement.
As with so many other ailments discovered and named over the past 50 years and the end of the carefree world of my childhood, we can no longer plead innocence in the face of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE. My former football player: “I traded in undiagnosed concussions for adult life. […] I came to the conclusion that my short football career, punctuated by these repetitive ballets of yellow glows, had contributed to my depressions. Despite this fragile certainty, I felt like a traitor who denounced his best friend. »
Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, Aaron Hernandez: so many NFL players who ended their lives and whose brains were subsequently dissected revealed a state of cerebral degeneration. Which obviously does not excuse the three murders for which Hernandez, who frequented bosses, had to answer before the courts.
Of course, one can kill or sink into depression without ever lining up around an oval ball, and Jack Kerouac would no doubt have become an alcoholic and written On the road if he hadn’t had his skeleton shaken as a running back at Columbia University. But the cause and effect link is now well established.
The referees now protect the quarterbacks better, we have banned blows to the head and helmet-to-helmet tackles, but football will remain an inherently virile sport and it is perhaps even for this display of cathartic virility that we remain die-hard fans of this complex and brutal game. Joseph Facal, in his column in the aforementioned daily, talked about his guilty pleasure: a small glass of scotch before an NFL game. I understand exactly what he means.
We still have to ask ourselves the biggest question: would I let my son or daughter play football?
We know Barack Obama’s response: “I should think about it long and hard. »
Let’s think about it a little.
Novelist, independent writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.