Robofootball: Doublespin

“Thank you again Dr. Mendoza for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us once again,” Senator Lenny Wilson orated from the central and highest chair on the Senate judicial committee. It was more of an informational hearing about the NFL termination decision as opposed to any trial, far from any executioner-style interrogation since the decision on banishment had already been made, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the NFL Players Association in their class action lawsuit. Several federal judges had already upheld the decision as a part of the CDC and OSHA’s constitutional mandates concerning disease and safety. It might not even make it to the Supreme Court if the NFL owners decided to file bankruptcy and thus, end the NFL on its own. There was still a good deal of legal flack coming from colleges and high schools that had to be dealt with, perhaps at the highest level if necessary.

Had this hearing been any sort of official legal proceeding, Lenny would have excused himself given his current no-longer-secret relationship with Isabelle. He sat far enough away that not one noticed the subtle furtive looks, along with the infrequent but darting occasional eye contact between the two that held more meaning than a casual business or professional relationship. Their relationship still had that newness to it, and he liked the way she looked too, all business, formal, long gray skirt, white blouse, simple hair style that had been down to her shoulders, and black-accented jewelry to match her gorgeous hair. She might have dyed it black to conceal the gray but it was well done professionally, and well, to Lenny, she just looked good, damn good. She always smelled good too, what was it, some hard-to-find perfume, Wings it was called. It was once popular a couple of decades back, and he wasn’t sure if he was smelling a faint whiff of it now or from memory. She was becoming his little Izzy and he looked forward to another sleepover this weekend and breakfast in bed.

“I am happy to be here and have prepared another statement, and have some video footage too.”

“Please proceed,” Lenny nodded professionally.

Isabelle turned to an assistant and nodded, “Please proceed Penny.”

The young intern, tall for a girl at 5’9” with long dark brown hair and an angular business face, slid a thumb drive into a computer that played on a projection screen.

“The first exhibit is a special 40-minute video produced by the NFL that was mandatory for all current players to see. It shows a series of 9 hits of which 6 are plays that involve direct helmet-to-helmet contact. The most common appears to be that of a defender, generally a player in the secondary like a corner, safety, and linebackers who have dropped back into pass coverage, launching themselves at a defenseless receiver. A few of the forthcoming hits are hard but considered legal since they were not led with the helmet. Thank you Penny, you may go on to the next set.” Penny closed the NFL file and clicked another.

“Next is a series of slides that we spliced together to illustrate damaged brain tissue of those who have suffered direct head-to-head collisions. Even with the use of helmets, you can see the tissue damage highlighted in red as opposed to the normal fleshy light pink in this picture.” Penny was keeping up just fine, matching the images precisely to Isabelle’s narrative.

“Dr. Mendoza,” Lenny interrupted. “If we could somehow eliminate helmet-to-helmet collisions, in your opinion, could this save the sport of football?” They had had these discussions in private and it was almost rehearsed.

“Football is by nature a violent sport and defenders are taught and coached to be nothing less than vicious predators, seeking out their prey in forms of ball carriers, quarterbacks, and receivers. Ironically, I used that very term, “vicious predator” with NFL management and player personnel, and the players actually cheered, relishing that title. I feel some sympathy for defensive players as they often complain that they are just doing their jobs, what they were trained to do, and that they are unfairly maligned and singled out for discipline and fines far more than their offensive counterparts.”

“How so?” Senator Margaret Leahy broke in as she was on the committee and a long outspoken critic on the violence in football. She was a much happier woman these days, because about the only question in her mind, was when football was going to end for good, at all levels, for all eternity.

“Things happen quite fast on the field,” Isabelle answered. “I think most of us can agree that the sport has changed over time. Wouldn’t you agree Senator Wilson that the evolutionary advances have brought on both bigger and faster players?”

’Yes mam, without a doubt,” Lenny stated, “The speed of the game does seem to increase at every level too.”

“Yes, our research has indicated that too, but some of the violence and even death has been inherent to the sport since its very beginning. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt made a statement after a rash of deaths coupled with severe injuries prompted a halt to what was then college football. He said and I quote,” Isabelle shuffled her note cards around, “Football is on trial. Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it. And so I called you all down here to see whether you can agree to abide by both the letter and spirit of the rules, for that will help.”

“He was addressing a group of college presidents in order to change the rules in an attempt to make the game safer,” Isabelle added.

“You still didn’t adequately answer me as to why you think defensive players are singled out more,” Senator Leahy unkindly reminded.

“I am sorry senator, but I was getting to that in a roundabout way. With the increased speed of the game, things happen so quickly that it is impossible to avoid helmet-to-helmet contact, which in turn, generally serves as the most frequent form of brain tissue damage and concussion. When a would-be tackler aims at a ball carrier’s chest or midsection, the offensive player often jukes, dekes, or ducks to avoid contact if I have my technical jargon correct,” Isabelle smiled and met Lenny’s eyes at the same time, “The end result in many cases is direct helmet-to-helmet collision, and the defender, despite good or honorable intentions within the rules, is penalized and even fined unfairly in my opinion. It is simply the inherent nature of the game and the opinion of the CDC is that you can’t legislate the violence out of football even though the NFL management believes that you can.”

“Thank you Dr. Mendoza,” Senator Leahy smiled encouragingly. On a personal level, he agreed with Isabelle and the CDC and it never hurt to have a senator or two supporting your cause.

“This next series of video shots are a little grainy, but quite graphic, and they occur at all levels of football, from pee-wee to junior high school to the secondary level, and college.” She nodded to Penny who was already clicking on the appropriate folder.

“Here’s a 7-year old from Texas breaking his collar bone after being tackled. Next is a 12-year old from California taking a helmet to his bare knee. The knee was so severely shattered that he will be equipped with a prosthetic device for the rest of his life, just to be able to walk.” Lenny shook his head at that one as he could relate before Isabelle continued.

“This next one is particularly graphic and was a Top 10 You-Tube sports hit for 2018 though it just happened last November. The snap casing on the helmet of this 17-year old boy from Michigan was determined to be broken, that’s why it slipped off easily when he was hit by one defender. Even the speed of the game is evident here for at the moment the boy loses his helmet, another defender comes in, and, though the 2nd defender appears to be aiming for the boy’s chest, the boy’s head dips just enough to cause a helmet-to-head collision. As we speak, the boy is still in a coma. The next few represent cases where college players were hit so hard in the head that they either suffered concussions or severe spinal cord injuries that have resulted in paralysis for some.”

Senator Leahy took her eyes off the screen, removed her glasses to wipe them, and then said, “Can you tell us more about how the NFL has responded to inquiries made by the CDC?”

“About all the NFL has done over the years is to have made some minor almost meaningless rule changes in regard to reducing injuries. They increased the fines though $10 or even $15,000 is not going to bankrupt a star player who makes millions, and they tend to suspend a player a game or two for a particularly brutal hit, but it has done nothing to reduce injury or brain trauma to players in general. In fact, we have seen an increase every year in brain trauma related injuries despite infrequent rule changes. The NFL has contributed some token amounts to various hospitals including $1 million to the Boston University School of Medicine’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy; nevertheless, the research center has largely come to the same conclusion that we have at the CDC; that basically, there is severe brain trauma suffered by nearly all football players over time. The longer they play, the more extensive the brain damage.”

Isabelle paused, motioning Penny once again for a file change before continuing. “To this point, I have been focusing more or less on tackling and the injuries suffered to receivers, ball carriers, and quarterbacks. Although helmet-to-helmet contact is supposedly illegal in tackling, it is not so in ordinary blocking. Players along the line of scrimmage routinely knock heads and one can easily see evidence of this by examining the helmets at the end of a game. There will be gouges, scratches, creases, dents, and a lot of paint from the other team’s colors. A good deal occurs during running plays and running backs rarely get tackled in short runs without some sort of contact to the head.”

“My own inquiries to the NFL,” said Senator Leahy, “Regarding head injuries,” she paused and shuffled some of her own papers, “Ah, here it is. I have one letter regarding helmets and how they are so technologically advanced with carbon fibers, padding, plastic composites, and what not, that spinal cord injuries have virtually been eliminated in football, and that they supposedly reduce concussive forces as well. Care to comment on that Dr. Mendoza?”

“Yes, we have released our reports regarding helmets. They are certainly better than the days of leather and cheap plastic and indeed have reduced both skull fractures and spinal cord injuries; however, our research indicates that they do not reduce concussions.”

“Really?” Senator Leahy was feigning keen interest as she put her glasses back on. She was well aware of the limitations imposed by helmets.

“Often, a concussion does not result from a direct blow to the head, but more from the whiplash affect common in car injuries. When the head is snapped front-to-back or side-to-side, the gelatinous mass that makes up the brain bounces off the inside of the cranium regardless of external protection. The most troubling is the cumulative trauma suffered from lesser hits that are not recorded or even qualify as concussions. A study by Purdue University a few years ago at Jefferson High School indicated that all high school players suffered some sort of cognitive disorder after playing football. The Purdue researchers filled 23 high school helmets with accelerometers and gave them MRI’s and other cognitive tests before the season began. At the end of the season, all players suffered some form of visual impairment as well as further brain damage revealed on subsequent MRI’s.”

“My final set of slides,” Isabelle went on as Penny efficiently opened a new file titled, ‘Autopsies,’ “Reveals the autopsied brains of deceased NFL players who died before the age of 60. Note that many of these players were never diagnosed with a concussion throughout their long careers.” Isabelle rose from her seat and used a laser pointer to illustrate such things as erosion, blank spots, and corrosive creep along the frontal lobe.

Senator Margaret Leahy was smirking in a most arrogant way. The entire reason that she had pushed for one last information hearing was to give the lawyers one last round of ammunition for the Supreme Court, but the deed was done with the bankruptcy filing by the NFL owners. It had taken her well over two decades to get the sport banned, but in that time, she had gained a national following and grass root support, primarily from mothers who had their boys broken, maimed, or even killed on the field that was little different from war-time casualties. There is no stronger bond that that of mother and child, and Margaret Leahy played on that feeling countless times in not only recruiting new members to her cause, but full organizations, groups an chapters of her own personal MAFIA nationwide over time. NOW and MADD had been on her side and her MAFIA had grown to rival them in terms of membership.

Like MADD, it usually took a tragedy to bring awareness to the problem. It was not exactly the kind of mafia that the Licavoli’s and Verlucci’s would have aspired to, but there was an incredible amount of power in numbers. As a U.S. Senator, when Margaret Leahy conservatively asked for 100,000 MAFIA to march in 2016, she got 500,000 and the half million women descending on the capitol grounds gave her enough political clout to push a bill through Congress for a vote on the banning of football in America. When the bill failed, she had already had her irons in the fire with the CDC and OSHA.

For over two decades, her various bills on the banning of football were never attached to any other legislation as is often done to get something passed as part of a compromise or bribe for a vote or two. When one finally did make it to vote, it was soundly defeated. Out of 433 House members, 40% would be women by 2020, and 6, 7, or 8 votes in her favor early on were turning to 60, 70, and 80. Once she realized that she would never get the necessary vote in her lifetime, she had to seek an alternate solution.

There were still too many men about the water cooler, conference rooms, lobbies, and so forth, and all they seemed to talk about was sports, especially football. Even in Congress, betting ran rampant. At times, it was maybe just a wager of Washington apples against Michigan cherries. The little betting pool bracket sheets even found their way to her office no matter how she railed against them using all the fire and brimstone of a Baptist preacher on crack mixed with caffeine. She fired her last male intern for attempting to solicit another in her office during the NCAA basketball tournament. Employing blatant gender discrimination, she only hired female interns from that point onward.

Senator Margaret Leahy could be quite bipolar in her dealings with people. She could be an awesome force in your corner if she supported your cause or if you supported hers. On the flip side, she could be devastating and outspoken if she didn’t like you or your cause. For issues that didn’t concern her, she readily voted along the Democratic Party line, and, unlike most members of Congress, she displayed some integrity in not catering to special interest groups unless she believed in their cause, or if it supported her own. She did have standards even if they were of her own creation.

Her attacks on football were 3-fold. Her first tack was to sponsor bills that had as much chance as an air conditioner in Hell. She changed winds and solicited the CDC and OSHA, successfully combating the problem from both a disease and safety standpoint. Dr. Isabelle Mendoza unwittingly became one of her greatest allies when she started publishing what became known as the Mendoza Reports, fantastic research employing all of the latest advances in science, MRI’s, scanning, EEG’s, statistics, autopsies, and on, and on. She was a woman too. Both the short term or one time injury like a broken bone or something even more serious like a blow to the spinal cord, as well as the long term effects of decreased brain function, dementia, and Alzheimer’s were all prevalent in the CDC reports.

The damaged caused by football was immense, much like a disease that men were dying from, not unlike whooping cough, small pox, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, AIDS, West Nile fever, or any other plague that descended on man since the beginning of time. In Margaret’s view, for a safer and better society, one that was meant to advance in a positive direction from an evolutionary standpoint, disease must be eradicated, and football was disease. OSHA too was of some benefit to the cause, particularly with their research branch called the National Institute of Occupational and Health or NIOSH. It was originally going to be called the National Occupational Safety & Health Institute of Technology, but the letters for the preceding acronym didn’t work out well.

OSHA’s job was to protect workers from injury by setting up safety standards, enforce proper use of personal protective equipment depending on the job like hoods and fire resistant gloves for welders, proper fall protection for those working at heights, respirators for those painting, an oxygen supply for those working in confined spaces, full body suits for hazmat duty, etc. With the help of NIOSH’s research and the CDC, OSHA came to the conclusion that paid football players were not being properly protected by the equipment on hand. Ordinarily, employers who were cited for unsafe practices paid fines and agreed to institute corrective measures. They could fight and tie up disputes in courts like the NFL had been doing for countless years, but there was invariably a judgment day. The NFLPA readily used these findings in their own class action lawsuit to great benefit; had the NFLPA realized that the sport was in danger of collapsing, they may not have pressed so hard.

The NFL however was losing on several fronts. The Congressional hearings were taking its toll, the CDC and NIOSH research reports were killers, the grass roots MAFIA or Mothers Against Footbal Injuries Assocation established by Senator Leahy continued to grow in leaps and bounds, and the media in nearly every state, county, and city of significant recordable size had some sort of local story connected to a football injury. The You Tube video footage of Jess Robinson from Michigan was one of the most violent and devastating caught on film. With decades of statistics in place, there were no outliers or isolated events, just a good deal of hard core data, and though stats could be skewed, there was just too much data to form accurate and credible conclusions when it came to injuries. One or two concussions were an anomaly and meant very little, but 100,000 was nothing to sneeze at.

Another area in which the NFL failed to address was OSHA’s concerns regarding adequate personal protective equipment for the workers, namely the players. The helmets didn’t prevent concussions, padding didn’t stop bruising, and exposed areas still resulted in broken bones. As Margaret Leahy had been advocating for years, there were only two basic conclusions, either accept the violence that is celebrated in the sport, or abolish it, and her crusade pointed to the latter. In her opinion, the game doesn’t simply cause injury, it is the very definition of injury. It is an occupational hazard that at times leads to tragedy. It is full of blood & guts not unlike the gladiatorial games held in Roman arenas 2,000 years on the past, or a modern day demolition derby without the cars.

The NFL’s days of appeals, reworking contacts, grudgingly adding a few more funds to player retirement accounts and health benefits, adjusting rules, and so forth, were not enough to save the sport. The dominoes had fallen and when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the players in the class action suit, the end had arrived. It would be a moot point for the NFL some months later when the official ban based on the findings of the CDC and OSHA, was upheld. It would have a devastating effect too on colleges and high schools around the country as 2018 was declared the last official and legal year for any organized football in America with human players.

Like Ralph Nader who once had the power to force automotive companies like Chevrolet to discontinue the Corvair and likewise with Ford and the Pinto, primarily due to safety issues, Margaret Leahy had garnered her forces and destroyed the NFL along similar lines. The players union had simply wanted more money, reparations for injuries to the players and to the families of those who had died before their time. Margaret supported them wholeheartedly to the point that the class action suit became so big, that it was somewhat of a relief to the owners when they declared bankruptcy, dissolving rather than pay. The rich seldom like to part with their money, earned or not.

“When I played football, I never set out to hurt anyone deliberately – unless it was, you know, important, like a league game or something.”

Dick Butkis