Around HereBy Leo CoughlinI am a lifelong sports fan and spent a good part of my early life in this business as a ball writer. When I was little kid, football was my favorite sport. My hero was Barry Wood, captain of the 1931 Harvard football team. As a sports writer I had the privilege of being in the company of Bear Bryant, Wally Butts, Bobby Dodd, Tom Landry, Joe Namath, among a host of others. That luster has faded. What we have been subjected to in the past couple weeks, building ever higher and stronger up until last Sunday, is absolute foolishness; a frenzy fed by some media. The Super Bowl does not have the magnitude of importance devoted to it by publicity. When you boil it all down, it really is not important. Except: Lots - lots, lots, lots - of people are making a living off the National Football League. We really need to take a look at it. While all is rosy and dollar blooming on the upside, we need to look at the tragedies that are a by-product of the NFL. While all the hullabaloo goes on, there are unbelievable victims of what has become, increasingly, high-powered vicious violence. There is no room, in all the pages of this newspaper, to cite the bad stuff. On top of that, it is kept very quiet. It has to be because there are too many people making a living off this modern version of the Roman games. While this nation drifts in desperate straits, bread and circuses divert the populace from the disaster that impends. Too strong? Not really. At the time of his death, John Unitas, regarded by many as one of the all-time great quarterbacks, worked at bringing attention to the many permanent physical disabilities that NFL players had suffered. He had lost the use of his right hand, which was horribly disfigured. One of his teammates, John Mackey, suffers from severe dementia believed to have been caused by head injuries playing in the NFL. Or take Reggie Harrison, Steelers' running back. He says he had eight concussions playing. He says his memory recovery is so bad that at times he can't remember his name. He participates in the program at University of North Carolina devoted to the malady. In a recent report he said, "They'll tell you I'm one of the worst cases that comes." He also deals with a host of injuries to his back, knees, hip and shoulder. Just recently, a story out of Ft. Lauderdale, related how Anthony Munoz, a member of the Hall of Fame, said that in his time the deciding factor in whether an injured player stayed in the game was "utterly ambiguous." "As long as a bone wasn't sticking out, you went back in," he said. Recently, the NFL has taken concussion injuries more serious after years of minimizing the long-term damaging effects of that kind of injury. The genius of Pete Rozelle going back 50 years ago and the continued clever and super marketing have brought the NFL to where and what it is today - probably the most successful business (outside of pornography) on the face of the globe. This is how smart the NFL is, as one glaring example, that no one ever seems to pick up on. And that is that it pays nothing for the development of its basic pool of talent. That is, while major league baseball has the expense of minor leagues to bring talent along, the NFL pays nothing for its minor leagues - college football. After all is said and done, what is eminently clear from this corner are two things 1. The Super Bowl is over ballyhooed. 2. It is one of the more unimportant events in our life. There, I've said it and I'm glad.
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