By Mark Vasto
Syndicated Columnist
Battle of the Acronyms
Growing up as a kid (is there any other way?), the biggest fears I had in life now seem absolutely absurd.
You see, I was born into an era of five-channel television. You had your big three — ABC, NBC, CBS — and then two or three stragglers that showed nothing but reruns and live sports. And the old reruns ruled.
The reruns were mostly a cavalcade of extreme violence or predicaments. The Justice League would battle the Legion of Doom every Saturday morning; Godzilla would level Tokyo every Sunday morning. Superfly Snuka, Andre the Giant, Rowdy Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan would rule the afternoons. I watched kung-fu fighters avenging the dishonor of their sister or mother before church.
Thanks to Wile E. Coyote, I had an inordinate fear of anvils falling from the sky and Acme in general, since it seemed to supply all his faulty weaponry. I used to worry that somebody would tie my sister to train tracks or that a hike through the woods would somehow end up with her falling into quicksand with no ape men to save her, because ape men were not indigenous to our area.
But without doubt, the biggest fear I had was instilled by my parents. If I wanted to climb a tree, my mother would tell me to get down because I might fall and “bang my head.” My father would amp up the terror, warning me that I would “crack my head open.”
Well, times have changed. The only time I’ve ever seen an anvil was at Colonial Williamsburg, and apparently modern science has cured the scourge of quicksand. Thanks to the UFC, you can watch kung fu without having to make it about a battle over your favorite aunt. Yet, a serious battle looms in American sports. The NFL has literally cracked its head open.
A recent study confirmed what we all most likely knew: 99 percent of the brains donated to science by former NFLers showed signs of serious chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a disease that causes early-onset dementia and a host of other things associated with brain function. It is the direct result of taking numerous hits to the head.
Nobody is shocked by the findings. We’ve known that football and fighting cause damage to the brain. Muhammad Ali couldn’t even walk up the stairs at the 1996 Olympics. No, now the fear is that we’re going to lose our game. Participation is key in sports. It is hard to fill roster spots when nobody will play, and after this CTE report, really, parents have to be afraid for their kids.
Luckily, this is nothing new. In the early days of football, the late 1800s, a Harvard coach came up with a formation designed to decimate Yale.
Based on ancient military strategy, the wedge simply meant that everyone on the offensive team would grip each other’s uniform in a V formation, their ball carrier safe behind them. The problem was that the wedge often singled out lone defenders with a half-ton of momentum, and that actually killed people.
It got to be such a problem that the president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, got involved. Rather than see football go, he was instrumental in changing the rules of the game so that it exists to this day. That’s why they carved his face into a mountain.
If we put our heads together, football can be saved. We just need to be careful and not crack our heads open.
Mark Vasto is a veteran sportswriter who lives in New Jersey.(c) 2017 King Features Synd., Inc.