If you participate in contact sports, you will be injured.
Unavoidable.
Men and women suffer and live with the results of playing sports.
The manner in which injuries are dealt with have changed. (Oh really? Ya think?)
“Rub some dirt on it.”
Not just an expression, but many an old-school coach’s philosophy to minor injuries (the dirt was to soak up the blood).
Broken bones? Sports history is saturated with stories of overcoming pain and injury to the brink of risking one’s life.
For what?
In American high school football, I competed for the lowliest team in the league. I was in the deep south when the school bussing-segregation issue broke and overnight, our rural high school went from the state 1A division (for small schools) to the top 5A division because three-thousand students had been added to our school rosters.
There was one big problem, however.
I know I might sound a bit like the 2000 movie Remember the Titans, but not quite.
See, there was NEVER a time, at least the year I was there, that the blacks and whites got together.
Ever.
So, the same little slow, undersized team that only managed to win five games the year previous to us, was the core of our team to go up against the big boys.
See, I wasn’t blessed with blazing football speed, like the elite athletes possess, so I compensated with fearlessness.
Talk about stupid.
This meant that, in a sport where injuries, some life-long could occur, I had to hit even harder. The only way to inflict pain that would wear down my opponent was to make everything hurt.
I blew out my left shoulder completely, and eleven surgeries done at a naval base including four transfusions, left me with limited use, to say the least for the rest of my life.
It didn’t have to be that way.
Mr. Dumbass here thought that it was more important to save face and ruin my body at age fifteen than to use my head and go get the attention I needed to repair my shoulder.
I was playing middle linebacker and I, of course, was hit and delivered hits, on every play. My shoulder would pop out of the socket on every play and I would have the defense huddle around me while my friend Ren, the safety, would pop my arm back into the socket. It hurt like hell but I was not about to see anyone see me hurt, not only the coaches, and opposing players, but my big brother.
And I did this for a team that lost every game we played and our ONLY claim to fame we had the whole season, was to hold the eventual state finalist team from Sumter, South Carolina, and their quarterback and eventual Super bowl winner Freddie Solomon, to six points.
At halftime.
We had managed to score on a long bomb to our wide receiver who got past their safety and scored one of the only touchdowns we scored all season. When we made the extra point, you would have thought we won the Super Bowl, such prohibitive underdogs were we. Since it was the final play of the first half, the shock on the crowd resulted in several thousand quiet voices, and our small ragtag bunch of supporters whooping it up to high heaven.
Seriously, that was the headline in the sports section the next day
HALFTIME SCORE: Hillcrest 7 Sumter 6.
I think we end up losing something like 45-7 or something.
Man, was that dude fast. He was an option quarterback and once he got the corner he was gone… He would go on to play for the San Francisco 49’ers.
Now it’s about concussions.
I no doubt, suffered several concussions, even as early as Pop Warner football where I would lower my head at cost to life and limb to hopefully deliver a blow, not to stop my opponent, but to injure them (bonus points if they had to be helped off the field). This would make my big brother and his high school teammates howl in support.
What did you do if you got hit so hard, say, sandwiched between two helmets and blood starts coming out of your ears?
“Rub some dirt on it.”
Stay well.
