Author:
Gregory Taylor
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Date Posted: 15:54:33 10/10/14 Fri
>Another column taken from the paper -- this time
>touched up a little bit to take out some of the local
>angle. For the benefit of international readers, I
>should point out that I'm talking about American
>football, not what we Americans call soccer but which
>the rest of the world calls football.
>
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>
>I hate to tell you this, but sooner or later we’re
>going to lose football.
>
>In saying this, I don’t mean losing a football game. I
>mean lose football as a sport, both on the local and
>national level. We’re not there yet, and it may not be
>soon, but we’re going to lose the sport sooner or
>later. The seeds are there, they just haven’t reached
>full growth yet.
>
>Last week there was a rather histrionic article in
>Time magazine about a kid who died from a brain
>injury while playing football. That article showed
>pretty clearly which way the wind was blowing.
>
>Now, I don’t want to imply that the death of this kid
>isn’t a tragedy for him, his family, his friends, his
>teammates, and his school, because it is. But it would
>have been just about as big a tragedy if he’d been
>walking down the street and a car ran off the road to
>hit him. After all, the kid was playing football. He
>and his family should have known that there was a risk
>to it -- a relatively small risk, to be sure, but a
>risk. If he and his family hadn’t been willing to take
>that risk he shouldn’t have been on the field in the
>first place.
>
>Among other things, the article was, of course,
>calling for more and better head protection, which is
>to say thicker, more expensive helmets filled with
>exotic, high-tech materials. But the real intent of
>the do-gooder, nanny busybodies is to kill off
>football by whatever means, fair or foul.
>
>Oh, it won’t come all at once, by some big piece of
>omnibus legislation from congress before the
>congresscritters get back to their real business of
>stabbing each other in the back and trying to get
>their sticky paws in the federal till. They are smart
>enough to realize they may lose votes if they try
>that. No, it’ll be buried in small print somewhere in
>seventeen hundred and seventy-six pages of regulatory
>agency enabling legislation.
>
>But what that means is that football is going to be
>nibbled to death by ducks, a little bit here, a little
>bit there. Shorter games. More rules. More
>restrictions. More expensive helmets. This little bit
>or that little bit of safety gear -- it’s only a
>couple of ounces, but an ounce here, an ounce there,
>and all of a sudden the kids are wearing another
>thirteen pounds of gear.
>
>When I was a kid, if we wanted to go somewhere, we
>hopped on our bikes and went. There are places where
>you don’t seen many kids on bikes these days because
>this or that or the other niggling law means that they
>have to wear helmets, elbow pads, knee pads, and so
>on, and so on. The kids don’t want to bother with all
>that jazz. They’d just as soon stay home and play
>their video games. The same thing is happening with
>football.
>
>And then there are the idiots who say that kids
>shouldn’t be allowed to feel inferior because of
>losing at a sport. Everybody should be the same,
>everybody should get a medal. (You think I’m being
>sarcastic, don’t you? Think again. These are the same
>morons who came up with “no child gets ahead” -- er, I
>should have said, “no child left behind.”) Oh,
>football is all right, they will probably say -- so
>long as no one keeps score. Eventually they’ll
>hammerlock some regulatory agency, and the do-gooding
>nannies will win another round from the rest of us.
>
>A little bit here, a little bit there, and it all adds
>up. It will slowly become more troublesome and less
>fun for a kid to play football, and many will say “Why
>bother?”
>
>Don’t fool yourself. It’s happening. There’s a good
>reason that the local team only had twenty-four kids
>at photo day this fall. I remember times when there
>were twice that many. Oh, yeah, there are a lot of
>reasons for that, but they all add up to the same
>thing.
>
>In time many small schools won’t be able to support an
>eleven-man football team. Maybe they’ll have to go to
>eight-man football -- which is growing in popularity
>because a lot of small schools can’t support
>eleven-man football any more. Then, maybe six-man
>football. Then, well, somewhere along the way, someone
>will say, “Why bother?”
>
>Let’s not even get into the subject of insurance
>costs, other than to say that insurance companies are
>in the business to know when they can get away with
>increasing rates.
>
>Need I point out what happens to the college and pro
>sports when there's no longer a high school feeder
>system?
>
>The time will come when some kids will be out in a
>park or vacant lot or back yard someplace, throwing a
>ball around and having fun, when some busybody
>neighbor calls the cops and complains because it’s
>illegal for kids to be playing football.
>
>Eventually the only football games may be by classic
>football re-enactors, just like there are small groups
>today that re-enact baseball played by old-time rules.
>It’ll probably be played by touch or flag rules
>because people will have forgotten how to tackle and
>block. There may even be cheerleaders wearing classic
>short skirts and happy attitudes. People will say,
>“They must have had fun back then, but wasn’t it a lot
>of work for what they got?” and “Boy, I wouldn’t want
>to do that.”
>
>We will have lost something important, not just
>football, but in spirit.
Google Sayreville New Jersey football for a look at what happened to a team that seems to have had some "athletes" like Spearfish Lake's.
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