THE PRICE WE PAY FOR THE THINGS WE DO

It’s kind of sad to say that I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often, but I am:

Former NFL defensive lineman Al Lucas died Sunday from a presumed spinal cord injury sustained while trying to make a tackle for the Los Angeles Avengers during an Arena Football League game, the team said.

The last death to occur during a professional football game actually happened before I was born, as the article points out:

Detroit Lions receiver Chuck Hughes died of a heart attack during a game on Oct. 24, 1971. Hughes entered the game late in the fourth quarter and ran a deep route over the middle. As he headed back to the huddle, he collapsed. Team doctor Richard Thompson tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate Hughes on the field and the game was finished in silence.

So now, I guess we all wait for the House Committee on Governmental HyperintrusionismReform to call the big brains of the AFL in for hearings, in the hopes of preventing future inevitable tragedies.

Mind you, Al Lucas’ death certainly qualifies as “tragedy.” He was only 26 years old, married with a young child. And I’m fairly sure the AFL’s pension program isn’t quite as good as the NFL’s (though, since Lucas did have some NFL experience, he may qualify for their benefits). But let’s be careful not to go too far with this. One on-field death in almost 34 years does not make professional football an unusually dangerous sport. In fact, you could argue that, since the violence of football is well-known, football equipment is probably the most over-engineered of sports protective equipment.

What is perhaps less well-known is that football players try to wear as little of that equipment as possible. I was astonished, when reading former NFL defensive lineman Tim Green’s book The Dark Side of the Game, to learn that most NFL players don’t even wear jockstraps, let alone cups. Every ounce of weight saved is a few thousands of a second in extra speed. In a game where such a small margin can be the difference between making a play and missing it, it’s not surprising that players would decide that the small risk of injury from wearing minimal protective equipment is outweighed by the maximal risk of unemployment if you’re constantly getting burned on a fade route.

But that’s their decision to make. We’ve decided that football players are our gladiators; we lift them to the highest places and pay them dizzying salaries for playing 16 games a season. So we shouldn’t be surprised if young men all across the country decide that they’ll take big risks to have a shot at that great reward. It’s sad to see somebody paying the ultimate price for what is, of course, “only a game.” But to the people who play it, it can be so much more than that.