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ALMOST
EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT, teens across Oregon watch with excitement
and, increasingly, concern, as their classmates compete
on the field.
On Sept.
28, six days after Beaverton High quarterback Kris Tyacke
was paralyzed, two other players went down: Joshua Carlson
of Milwaukie High School bruised his spinal cord and Curtis
Owens of Klamath Union High School lost feeling below his
waist. The next evening, Wilson High School's Brad Dexter
was taken to an area hospital after landing on his neck.
All three later recovered.
Tyacke
remains in serious condition at OHSU. Goe was transferred
to the rehabilitation unit at Legacy-Emanuel Hospital last
weekend.
During
the week
of Oct. 1, the lead safety story on the National Football
League's high-school website (www.nflhs.com) was "The Truth
About Acute
Turf Toe."
FORMER
PHILADELPHIA EAGLES STAR DREW MAHALIC (above) questions
whether the causes of catastrophic high-school football
injuries are being seriously addressed." There's almost
a denial of how dangerous the sport of football is."
On Sept.
30, The Oregonian stressed how "rare" catastrophic
football injuries are, citing a figure of fewer than 1 per
100,000 players. That statistic understates the game's true
risks by at least 50 percent.
On its
website, KOIN-TV referred to Kris Tyacke's paralysis as
"the breaks of the game."
Early
last century, President Theodore Roosevelt--a hardcore advocate
of sports--almost issued a ban on football, due to deaths
directly tied to the nascent game.
"I THINK
THESE INJURIES are the real dark side of football," says
OHSU neurosurgeon Randall Chesnut (above), who operated
on both Kris Tyacke and Justin Goe. "Even if they're a statistical
glitch, it's a wake-up call."
In 1999,
a Texas jury awarded
$11.4 million to a San Antonio-area high-school player as
compensation for permanent brain damage suffered while wearing
a helmet manufactured by Riddell Sports.
Nationally,
basketball is the second most popular high-school sport
with 541,000 players; track and field is third at 481,000;
baseball is fourth with 452,000; and soccer is fifth at
330,000.
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Sidebar:
Weight Limits? We don't need no stinking weight limits! Former
St. Louis Cardinals pro-bowler Neil Lomax broke the rules
of youth football last season.
It's shaping up to be an extraordinary year for football
in Oregon. Not since the 1960s have both the University
of Oregon Ducks and the Oregon State University Beavers
been rated among the NCAA's premiere college teams, ranking
number 7 and 19, respectively, in this week's Associated
Press poll.
And in NCAA Division 1-AA play, the Portland State University
Vikings are rated second in the nation.
But long after those teams' inevitable bowl appearances
are filed away in the memories of students and alumni alike,
the fall of 2000 will be best remembered for the life-altering
injuries suffered by three Portland-area high-school football
players over the span of two weeks, as well as serious injuries
to three other Oregon high-school players.
The first of the young men, Kris Tyacke, was injured Sept.
22. During the first quarter, the co-quarterback of defending
4-A state champion Beaverton High School swept to his right
and cut upfield. There the wiry blond was pegged by a player
from Glencoe High School. It was a clean hit, and the defender
reached down to help the junior quarterback to his feet.
Tyacke did not move.
When his father came to his side moments later, he said,
"Dad, what if I'm paralyzed?"
Oregon Health Sciences University neurosurgeons spent eight
hours that night trying to keep Tyacke from such a fate.
But the initial magnetic resonance image had shown a shattered
fourth vertebra and a spinal cord so badly beaten and swollen
that the surgery turned into a technical exercise of clearing
away bone fragments and fusing his vertebrae together so
that he might one day hold his head up.
Kris Tyacke, 17, remains on a mechanical ventilator and
will never walk again.
The following Thursday, Justin Goe, a junior varsity player
at Rex Putnam High School in Milwaukie, crashed into an
opposing player headfirst and suffered a subdural hematoma.
Upon arrival at OHSU, he was near death. The pressure on
his brain was so great that when Randall Chesnut, his neurosurgeon,
drilled a burr hole through his cranium, a stream of blood
shot back and splattered his surgical scrubs.
The next Friday, Matt Murray, a fullback at Castle Rock
High School, bled into his brain after his head was struck
with an opposing player's helmet; he remains in serious
condition at Legacy-Emanuel Hospital.
Both Goe and Murray face unpredictable recoveries, although
last Friday Goe was able to stand with the aid of two physical
therapists, brush his own teeth and speak in short sentences--an
astonishing preliminary recovery.
There is no doubt that this smashmouth game has always
been hazardous. But that knowledge is usually tempered with
the belief that football does more to produce solid citizens
than it does permanently handicapped ones.
Despite the attention lavished upon professional and college
football, high-school football is truly America's game,
one that draws thousands of people to Friday-night showdowns
in cities like Valdosta, Ga., Tyler, Texas, and Beaverton,
Ore.
Yet this current bad streak of injuries throws into relief
the controversial nature of the game at the high-school
level, not only because of those who are troubled by the
sport for predictable enough reasons, but also because of
equally passionate countervailing voices.
Sometimes, however, the voices come from unexpected quarters.
Christopher Achterman, an orthopedic surgeon at Legacy-Emanuel
Hospital, has seen his share of sports injuries, yet he
says, "All things considered, football is a pretty safe
game."
But a man who played the game at its highest level isn't
convinced.
"There's almost a denial of how dangerous the sport of
football is," says Drew Mahalic, who played linebacker for
the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1970s and is now president
of the Portland Oregon Sports Authority. "How many more
kids need to get hurt before we look hard at this and do
everything possible to prevent these kinds of injuries?"
Despite the ascendance of soccer in the past 20 years,
football remains the most popular high-school sport and
the fastest growing.
In 1999, 1 million young high schoolers pulled on 5-pound
helmets, bit down on mouthpieces and adjusted cups, an increase
of 2 percent over 1998, according to the National Federation
of State High School Activities. With 13,908 players in
Oregon, football is more than twice as popular as high-school
soccer.
Besides being the nation's most popular high-school sport,
football is far and away the most dangerous. While the injuries
to Tyacke, Goe and Murray are anomalies--statistically,
only once every four years should such an injury occur locally--they
point to football's Achilles' heel: catastrophic injuries.
Those are the injuries that kill, paralyze or cause permanent
brain damage. Between 1982 and 1999, there were 624 such
cases directly attributable to high-school sports. Of those,
439--70 percent--came from football, according to data from
the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Each year, either directly or indirectly, an average of
11 young men are killed playing the game and another 21
either are paralyzed, suffer permanent brain damage or endure
such serious neuro-skeletal damage that their recovery--like
those facing Goe and Murray--is nasty, brutish and long.
Just how dangerous is football compared with other high-school
sports?
Since 1982, 1.8 per 100,000 high-school football players
have either died or suffered direct catastrophic injuries
playing football. Soccer's rate is 0.32, or 18 percent that
of football.
"Now you know why I won't let my sons play football," says
Linn Goldberg, director of OHSU's sports medicine division.
"I don't think anybody is going to try to hide the fact
that football is the most dangerous high-school sport,"
says Bruce Howard, a spokesman for the National Federation
of State High School Activities, high-school football's
sanctioning body.
For evidence of the permanency of the game's injuries,
you only need to look to Clackamas. That's where Richard
Austria now lives in a house specially fitted with ramps,
hand rails and a computerized entertainment center.
In 1985, Austria was the junior class president at Gresham
High School. But he was under extreme "peer pressure" to
play football like the other popular young men, his father
says. His parents didn't like the idea, but they relented.
On Oct. 1 of that year, Richard collapsed after being hit
in the head during a football practice 14 days before. He'd
been wearing a helmet with faulty padding, which the manufacturer
had neglected to recall.
Neurosurgeons at Adventist Medical Center managed to save
his life. But they told the Austrias that their son would
never walk or talk again. Six months later, Richard was
able to walk. The following May, on Mother's Day, he bleated
out a weak "Mommy."
The Austrias sued Bike Athletic Supply and in 1987 were
awarded $11.4 million, then the largest monetary judgment
in Multnomah County.
Now 31 years old, Richard lives with his parents, who'd
planned to spend their retirement years traveling. He doesn't
need to go to therapy anymore; there's a small gym in the
house, which Richard uses one and a half hours a day. But
still his parents drive him to a rehabilitation hospital
each day so he can be near his only friends; his high-school
friends don't come by the house or call. His parents take
him on long drives, too, to keep him entertained. And when
they happen to pass Gresham High School, Richard turns his
head and says, "That stupid football."
Despite the cases of young men like Richard Austria and
Kris Tyacke, the high-school game is far safer than it was
in 1970, when 23 young men died as a result of injuries
directly tied to the game. Those were the days when coaches
taught their players to take down an opponent by sticking
their helmet in their opponent's numbers--face tackling--or
by spearing them in the back. High-school players during
the early 1970s aped the death stare and helmet-to-the-spine
hits of defensive backs like the infamous Jack "Assassin"
Tatum of the Oakland Raiders.
In 1976, the national federation wrote new rules for high-school
football that banned using the head as a weapon, in an attempt
to trim the numbers of young men who were killed or paralyzed
each year. Now, there are approximately 75 percent fewer
catastrophic injuries annually, even though high-school
football has 67 percent more participants than it did 25
years ago.
But a number of intelligent people are still deeply troubled
by the consequences of the game.
While the national federation's 1976 rules changes have
remained unaltered, they are not always obeyed. In fact,
since 1976, the federation has seven times been compelled
to issue warnings to state sanctioning bodies to do everything
possible to keep the head out of football. Just this summer,
it issued the warning again, one which the Oregon School
Activities Association passed on to the state's high schools.
"There seems to be a desire to punish an opponent, and
that desire is oftentimes driven home with use of the helmet,"
this year's warning read.
Jerry Deihl, assistant director of the national federation,
admits that nationally more players are trying to make dramatic-looking
hits on the field by using their helmets to hit opponents
and that his group "needed to pull the reins in."
That might not be enough to satisfy Tim Treible, a Portland
orthopedic surgeon. "The intent in football is often to
drive an opponent's head into the ground," he says. "Football
is inherently dangerous, and I wouldn't let my child play."
But Treible goes even further. He refuses to work as a
doctor at football games because he'd "be complicit in supporting
a sport I think is inherently dangerous."
The danger in high-school football isn't so much being
killed (the odds are 1 in 300,000, less than the 1 in 250,000
odds of being killed in an airplane crash) or permanently
disabled. Many see the game's real dangers as being played
out on any game day from August to December. During those
months, it's not unusual for local emergency rooms to see
boys in grass-stained pants limp in with sprained ankles
or come in to have broken wrists X-rayed and then set.
Many critics of the game say its real problem is that a
generation of young men are taking creatine, androstenedione
and perhaps even steroids.
But it's clear that one of the game's most widespread dangers
is concussions. Each year, 100,000 players at every level
of football, including high school, take hits to the head
and pass out, experience blurred vision, headaches or vertigo,
or fall to their knees and vomit, according to a study published
in Neurology--and that's considered a conservative
estimate. Most neurologists and sports commentators have
questioned the sanity of Steve Young and Troy Aikman for
playing after experiencing a series of concussions.
Many neuroscientists believe that one concussion should
be the limit; the chances of permanent brain damage, such
as that suffered by Muhammad Ali, are too great.
Still, because there is no scientific consensus on precisely
how many concussions are too many, sanctioning bodies and
high schools across the nation have not substituted their
own common sense for that medical breach. As a result, there
are no rules on the high-school level to prevent a player
from suiting up after numerous concussions.
One local football proponent finds such reasoning to be
flawed.
"If a player has a second concussion, then their career
should be over," says Achterman, the Legacy-Emanuel orthopedic
surgeon.
Yet even knowing the game's downside, it's difficult to
stand on the sidelines at Wilson High School and watch its
varsity team go through a full-contact practice without
feeling your pulse quicken.
Why do these young men play what seems to be an outdated
game, one that won't get them a free ride in college or
even, given Wilson's losing season, very much glory in high
school.
"We're family," says Jason Rubenstein, a 17-year-old linebacker.
"I wasn't friends with these guys before I started playing,
and now we are all very close."
Even adults, with a much longer view of the world, see
football's merits as outweighing its risks. Unlike basketball,
hockey or baseball, which are more individual games, a successful
football team is dependent on the talents of an entire team--offense,
defense and special teams. In essence, football is the mold
from which future good citizens--ones with an intuitive
grasp of how to function in a democracy--are poured.
"Football provides a kind of microcosm in which kids can
preserve the values and mores of a community," says Frank
Smoll, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington
and an expert on youth sports. "This can carry over into
everyday living theoretically."
One of the more striking local examples of an intelligent
parent who's evaluated the risks of the game and decided
that it's best for her son to play is Barbara Johnson, a
Portland businesswoman. Her son, Zack Fischer, a varsity
defensive lineman at Lincoln High School, suffered a concussion
during a game on Sept. 15. He left the game feeling as though
he were about to vomit; his parents took him to an area
hospital, where a computed axial tomography scan showed
no internal bleeding. The next day, his parents bought him
a $140 helmet, one they felt was better than the Portland
Public Schools' standard-issue Riddell. Zack returned to
practice three days later.
"I'm not going to stop him from playing," Johnson says.
"First, he wouldn't pay attention: It's what he wants to
do. For him it is worth the risk."
She says the game is a good teacher of cooperation and
subsuming individual demands to the good of the team. But
she's still on edge when all 5-foot-8 and 170 pounds of
her son takes the field. "I try not to watch," Johnson says.
"I go work at the snack bar."
But she does say she's troubled enough by the injuries
to Tyacke and company that if her son suffers another concussion,
she'll ask him to stop playing.
In no person is the conflict of high-school football better
embodied than in Drew Mahalic. The head of the local sports
authority played at the University of Notre Dame under the
legendary Ara Parsegian and on the school's 1974 national
championship team. The following year, he was a prominent
member of the Fighting Irish's ill-starred Rose Bowl team,
which lost a national championship to the University of
Southern California in what is still considered the greatest
college bowl game played.
Mahalic remembers well the summer of 1978, when the risks
of pro football were splashed across America's consciousness.
He was a linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles. During
an exhibition game that year, Oakland Raiders safety Jack
Tatum rendered New England Patriot receiver Daryl Stingley
a quadriplegic with a perfectly legal--and perfectly vicious--hit.
It was literally the hit heard 'round professional sports.
In its wake came rules changes in the National Football
League designed to limit injuries. It was a long way from
the early 1960s, when New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle
was photographed on his knees at mid-field with blood pouring
down his face after suffering a concussion during a championship
game--and the image was considered an acceptable proof
of manliness.
For Mahalic, Stingley's lesson was clear. "I did neck exercises
365 days a year," he says.
Yet despite the six serious injuries in the Portland area
and five recent deaths nationally, there have been no calls
to reexamine football's place in high-school sports. So
coded is the game into America's genome that such talk would
amount to cultural heresy.
Like many others, Mahalic points to equipment as being
the game's weak link.
"With the technology we have, you can't tell me that there's
not a way to build equipment that takes most of the major
risk away," Mahalic says. "If it becomes cost-prohibitive,
then you have to decide to pay the price or send kids out
onto the field with less than they should have."
"All you can do is make the safest equipment possible,
if we're going to tolerate the game," says Jim Pippin, a
Lake Oswego lawyer who represented the Austrias and has
assisted other lawyers in legal actions against helmet manufacturers.
"If we have to put kids in moon helmets, then so be it."
"Maybe we end up with a helmet that doesn't look pretty,"
says Mahalic. "But are we out there for the sake of the
kids or to make kids look good for a photograph? It's like
accidents at a major intersection: How many people have
to get hurt or die before they put in traffic lights?"
In effect, the question is the same as it's always been:
What price high-school football?
WEIGHING
IN ON YOUTH FOOTBALL
Thousands of Portland-area youngsters are not waiting for
high school to play football.
Instead, they're joining an ever-expanding youth football
movement, at its most aggressive in the Tualatin Valley
Youth Football League.
When middle-school programs were dropped in the early 1990s,
the TVYFL stepped into the void in 1993. Now, there are
155 teams with 4,700 players, ranging from the third- and
fourth-grade league to "varsity" players in eighth grade.
Each age group has strict weight limits to keep larger
players from harming smaller rivals. Before each game, wearing
everything but their helmets, players step on a scale to
ensure that they are within weight requirements. To date,
the weight limits have kept the league free of the kind
of serious injuries seen in high-school football.
But sometimes, coaches' competitive instincts overwhelm
player safety.
One of the most prominent coaches in the Tualatin Valley
league is Neil Lomax (pictured), a former Portland State
University star quarterback, who went on to play for the
St. Louis (and later, Arizona) Cardinals.
Lomax coaches a Lake Oswego youth football team on which
his son was the quarterback last season. Prior to one game,
coach Lomax was nabbed trying to get around the weight limit.
For the weigh-in, he had substituted the regulation shoulder
pads his son usually strapped on with lighter-weight foam
pads so that he would come in under the weight limit.
Caught by a league official, the younger Lomax weighed
in again with regulation pads and was found to be overweight.
Lomax was suspended for two games, and the Lake Oswego
league paid an unspecified fine to the Tualatin Valley league.
Lomax did not return WW's requests for comment. --PD
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