The Modern Knight Errant

This chapter examines the rise of organized American tackle football for high school and college students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sport became most prominently associated with white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant students at elite colleges and universities. Early safety debates turned on whether football’s physical dangers were uncivilized and “brutish,” or whether exposure to its risks fostered American ideals of civilized manliness. These ideals were in turn intertwined with dominant understandings of race, gender, and national identity. School administrators and other leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, saw football as preparing boys for future business and military leadership. As a consequence, they contended that the sport’s perceived violence was civilized and conferred moral benefits upon players. By the early twentieth century, football was firmly established in elite American colleges and expanding at the high school level.

Introduction

Questions about the safety of youth tackle football, its intimate association with American schools, and its existence as a form of entertainment for adults are as old as the game itself. This book examines the history of debates over the safety of youth football—not only changing medical understandings of the sport’s health effects but also the social and cultural attitudes that shaped those understandings. With its focus on safety debates, No Game for Boys to Play provides a bridge between sports history and public health history, examines the values and beliefs animating the development of one of America’s most popular activities for boys, and considers how football’s effects on children’s bodies came to be framed as a matter of public health and well-being.

Controlling Hazards

Since the Great Depression, schools and sports administrators had chosen to manage football’s financial risks by focusing primarily on improving insurance schemes. Large athletic insurance programs offered families and schools a greater degree of financial protection against the risk of football injuries. The development of these programs also influenced football injury epidemiology. Mid-century research using large scale insurance data pointed to the limitations of protective equipment in preventing injuries. Doctors and researchers’ efforts to “save football” in the face of this evidence represented a broad cultural investment in preserving the sport among the experts responsible for protecting youth health. By the early 1960s, the most influential sports and research organizations had zeroed in on setting standards for football helmets as the most important technological strategy needed to control the sport’s hazards.

We Are Not a Nation of Softies

Although the Great Depression limited funding for athletics, New Deal programs helped build infrastructure that contributed to making football a ubiquitous sport in high schools across the United States. With the end of World War II, high school football surged in the context of increasing prosperity, high school attendance, and suburbanization. Football’s expansion to increasingly include pre-pubescent children renewed critiques of the “big business” aspects of the sport. The participation of younger children also fostered a new range of concerns about physical injuries, as well as the emotional pressures of competitive collision sports for elementary and middle school children. Yet calls for limits on tackle football were ultimately obscured by the political and social culture of the Cold War. Football safety concerns were discounted as the anxieties of overly protective mothers. From the claims of coaches to the promotion of competitive sports by American presidents, tackle football was widely celebrated as a physically and morally beneficial sport for boys.

Epilogue

Contemporary debates over head injuries in youth football are at a crossroads, with competing framings of the risks of traumatic brain injuries resulting in significantly different potential responses to addressing the sport’s risks. The prevailing framework, shaped in many ways by the NFL and other sports organizations, suggests that improved adult supervision, return-to-play guidelines, better helmet design, and other similar strategies can sufficiently address the risks of youth football. An alternative interpretation of the scientific evidence on sub-concussive hits, however, indicates that the full-body collisions associated with tackling carry inherent risks of brain trauma that cannot be substantially reduced. The cultural values and meanings attached to youth football inform these contemporary debates, as well as the possible future of America’s most popular sport.

It’s All We’ve Got

Increased media coverage of college and professional college shaped beliefs about the benefits and risks of youth football. The importance attributed to high school football in schools and communities contributed to the expansion of football at the little league level. Football among elementary and middle school children increasingly served as a feeder system for the high school level of play. In addition, the appeal of future access to social and financial resources, including the hope of landing a college football scholarship and a potential professional career, became increasingly prominent in the latter half the twentieth century. The possibility of accessing higher education through football influenced how parents and players weighed the risks and benefits of the sport at the high school level and younger. The ways football improved perceived access to higher social standing and higher education contributed in part to the changing racial demographics of tackle football, particularly with the increasing involvement of African American athletes. Meanwhile, sportscasters’ glorification of “big hits” fostered celebration of football’s dangers even as sports organizers claimed both educational and physical benefits for the youth sport.

A Clear Conscience

In the late 1960s, longstanding criticisms of the lack of football helmet standards became complementary to broader calls for product safety research and regulation. Several non-profit voluntary standards associations formed by engineers and scientists began devoting attention to protective football gear. Ultimately, however, a new organization funded by sporting goods manufacturers proved most influential in establishing football helmet standards. The industry’s influence was connected to changing legal principles that made it easier to sue manufacturers for harms caused by consumer products. The sporting goods industry sought to limit its liability by framing prevention of football injuries as the responsibility of individual players, parents, and coaches. The industry’s rush to develop and adopt helmet standards ironically occurred in the context of significant scientific uncertainty over how to effectively test helmets.

Your Men Can Smash Through

By the mid-twentieth century, the unusually large amount of protective gear involved in tackle football became inextricably tied to the sport’s collision nature. Pads and helmets symbolized the sport’s dangers and, it was believed, conferred the protection necessary to render such an aggressive game feasible. Football equipment advertisements aimed at children promoted ideals associated with particular forms of twentieth century American masculinity. Banishing fears, and inspiring confidence and toughness, would enable boys to “smash through” their opponents. The embrace of manufacturers’ contributions to enhancing safety equipment was far more widespread than cynicism about the influence of financial motives. Most sports administrators contended that investment in top quality equipment clearly signified a program’s commitment to safety. Yet some doctors and engineers continued to question how much protection even the best equipment might afford the players who collided with one another on the gridiron.

This Is Your Brain on Football

A decline in severe football injuries and fatalities after the 1970s helped make it possible for another concern to come into focus: that trauma to players’ brains, even if it did not result in death or catastrophic injury, might still constitute a serious medical problem. In the early 1990s, the National Football League (NFL) found itself under scrutiny after a spate of high-profile head injuries among its prominent athletes. In response, the league formed a committee on mild traumatic brain injury that not only minimized the severity of concussions among NFL players, but also influenced perceptions of risk at the youth football level. Yet in the late 2000s, several factors contributed to making football-related brain injuries at all levels of the sport a topic of national debate. These included autopsy findings in deceased NFL players, retired athletes speaking out about their medical problems, extensive media coverage, and an emerging framing of football-related brain damage as a public health concern that had been covered up by the NFL.

The Rough and Tumble

Whether a child’s death or injury associated with playing football could in fact be attributed to football was a crucial question in evaluating the sport’s risks. On a technical level, doctors debated such issues as whether heat strokes that athletes suffered while playing in hot weather constituted a direct or indirect injury. More broadly, doctors, coaches, parents, and sports supervisors debated whether certain risks were unique to the particular nature and techniques of football, or simply inherent to the “rough and tumble” of an active childhood. Putting football’s risks in context often involved comparisons to other activities, from driving to boxing to playing baseball. As doctors sought to identify ways to minimize the dangers, their beliefs in the sport’s social benefits shaped their interpretation of those dangers. The conceptualization of football injuries as a medical issue was deeply tied up with ideological, moralistic, religious, and nationalistic beliefs about the role of youth sports.