Remembering Uncle Nick and the risks of sport -

Recent news stories about injuries and young athletes started me thinking about the parents.

The parents who stand or sit along the sidelines, awed by the prowess and the effort of their young, even as they anticipate the collisions, even as they cringe in the split seconds before impact.

It also got me thinking about my Uncle Nick.

He was a good football player. And football killed him.

My mom's side of the family lived in a big stone house in Guelph, Ontario. We'd take the train up from Chicago to visit. I was 3 years old the last time I saw Nick, so I don't remember much.

There was a ride on his shoulders in my grandmother's kitchen. And a walk along the river that ran behind the house. There were ducks, it was springtime, and there was blue in their wings.

But that's about all I remember. After college, Uncle Nick tried out for a local pro team, the Kitchener-Waterloo Dutchmen.

It happened in a tackling drill. He made the tackle — halfbacks played both offense and defense in those days — and he hurt his head and went down.

The doctors thought he'd die in a week. But he surprised them and lived for three years. It wasn't really a life. He was in a coma, unconscious, for all that time. My grandfather was running the Olympic Pool Room then, and in the afternoons, he'd sit at Uncle Nick's bedside at the hospital.

"Father's Long Vigil Is Over," was the headline on Uncle Nick's obituary. The story went on to say that before the injury, the coaches "would have certainly" signed the young man to play the season. He was 24 when he died.

Football — and all sports, for that matter — were de-emphasized at our house when I was growing up. My mother couldn't abide it on the TV. She wouldn't rant. She'd just quietly walk in and turn it off, and we knew.

They had me working after school and on Saturdays at my father's supermarket. Other times, I'd find refuge in the library. My friends played ball. But my parents did everything they could to keep us away from sports.

Then came adolescence, and I begged and pleaded and cried and did everything I could to get them to let me play at H.L. Richards High School in Oak Lawn.

It took a year, but I wore them down. Uncle Nick was dead about seven years by then. The 1970s had begun, with families being ripped up by political differences, drugs and the war in Southeast Asia. So my parents signed the football papers to save me from the hippie life.

"And I was terrified every day for the next four years," my mom said the other day. "But what could we do? You demanded to play."

The coaches started me out as a running back, but then moved me to the offensive line, right guard. I was 150 pounds soaking wet, and my head usually came up to the middle of the defensive tackle's chest. I was most definitely not a star.

But our legendary coach, Gary Korhonen, made me a starter, and I aggravated the poor guy for years by refusing to crouch down in the huddle. I was so short that I figured no one would ever see me if I crouched.

I loved football. And part of my mind still aches for the game. But it's the practices I remember most. And in games or practices, what stands out are the high-impact collisions. That was the fun.

When you're a teenager, you're immortal, and there's nothing like the hitting. You don't think about the parents watching you with their hearts in their mouths. You don't think about risk, or your Uncle Nick. You don't think about your mom remembering her little brother.

There is no time to think. The impact comes with silence just before contact, and is as irrational as it is beautiful. And the hunger for it is why they play the game. It is why men would still fight each other in the ring even if prizefighting were outlawed.

The hunger for it is a wordless thing, and DNA does not respond to reason.

"It's a contact sport," said a young quarterback in a Tribune story about concussions. "If you don't like contact, you shouldn't be playing."

But football has changed, because the rules were changed to put more offense into it, stoking the action and making the bookies happy.

And to pump up the offense, to encourage more passing, the offensive linemen have been transformed. They're now converted basketball power forwards with great swaths of meat on them. There is no quick trapping to speak of, no blocking below the waist, and so the defensive linemen keep getting bigger. And all that force is directed against the body of the quarterback — the player the rules were designed to protect.

It's become a circle of carnage.

Because I've switched and have become a soccer fan now, devoted to the beautiful game, I'm sure that many of you will call me blind, or a weakling, perhaps even a communist, for not loving football.

But these days, all I can see are the ruined bodies, the planned mayhem in the game.

And I think of Uncle Nick, and of the parents on the sidelines.

jskass@tribune.com

via chicagotribune.com

Posted via email from Brian's posterous