Writer Still Loves Football Despite Pain of Game

On the play in which Alabama linebacker Dont’a Hightower suffered a season-ending knee injury a few weeks ago against Arkansas, I cringed and felt his pain as I watched the game on television.

Hightower was hurt on a sweep play when Arkansas guard Mitch Petrus lowered his helmet near Hightower's left knee, sending the Tide linebacker airborne. According to NCAA rules, it was a legal block.

Hightower tried immediately to get up and could not, ultimately being helped off the field before being carted back to the locker room.

Two days before Hightower’s injury, I was working around the house, tripped over a piece of furniture and hurt my left knee. I tried to get up too, but couldn’t. Ultimately, I crawled across the floor into another room and hoisted myself into a recliner with assistance from my wife.

My injury was not as serious as Hightower’s. He suffered ligament damage and after surgery was expected to be out 3-4 months. I sustained a ruptured quad tendon and also tore some other muscles around the knee. I had surgery Oct. 2 and my expected recovery time is listed as eight weeks.

A friend of mine asked me what I was doing with a football injury at my age. I am 52.

It’s kind of funny actually. As a boy, I didn’t play on a football team because I was afraid to get hurt. The thought of broken bones scared the bejabbers out of me. And anyone knows you can’t play football scared of getting hurt because that’s what happens when you play scared. You have to play the game with reckless abandon, without fear.

I remember one time we were playing some sandlot tackle football and a guy picked me up and dumped me on my shoulder and neck. I got up and walked home without saying a word. I didn’t want any of my friends to know how much pain I was in.


The possibility of getting hurt playing football is the reason I gravitated to baseball in high school. (That's me in the photo to the right fielding a ground ball when I played for Carver High School in Montgomery, AL). You can get hurt playing baseball, but at least you don’t have somebody trying to take you out on every play.

With football players becoming bigger, faster and stronger and everybody on the field looking to make the big hit that winds up on video highlights, I understand why some parents don’t want their sons playing football.

They sign them up for soccer (or some other sport) instead. But soccer is not as violent as football. The only thoughts of serious injury soccer players have come from riotous spectators in certain parts of the world.

Perhaps, that’s why soccer has never quite caught on in the United States. We like the violent aspects of sports. That’s why ultimate fighting and mixed martial arts have replaced boxing as the brutal sports of choice in America.

I love football. As I recover from my knee surgery, I’m watching more games than ever to past the time. And every time there’s a violent collision, I flinch because some player could be seriously injured.

It’s the nature of the game.

(Top photo by Mark Almond/Birmingham News)