For two months after that exhibition, nicely into the raft of video games the NFL says depend, Stingley remained hospitalized, paralyzed from his neck down, in a hospital south of Oakland not removed from the place Tatum — who later titled his memoir “They Call Me Assassin” — waylaid him. And for a lot of that point, as Sarah Pileggi wrote in a 1983 Sports Illustrated profile of Madden, the coach was a every day customer to Stingley’s hospital mattress. Madden’s spouse, Virginia, too. They’d drive the hour-and-a-half or two from the Raiders’ base north of Oakland to the hospital the place Stingley realized that his situation would by no means change. He’d be a quadriplegic for the remainder of his life.
Madden, who died in December 2021 at 85, retired on the finish of the 1978 season. Stingley died at 55 in his hometown of Chicago in April 2007.
And in between Madden’s retirement from teaching and Stingley’s dying, Madden turned the face and voice of the NFL. Through his broadcasting, he captivated the general public as professional football’s greatest fan. More considerably, by way of the video video games with which his identify turned synonymous — referred to as Madden NFL now, 5 a long time later — he turned the sport’s most-influential impresario.
Who is aware of how most of the estimated 184 million NFL followers grew up on Madden video games, together with variations within the early Nineteen Nineties the place a participant might get laid out by a sort out and — when you can think about it — scooped up by an ambulance? The cartoonish scene is rather like the one which so distressed Madden in 1978 and will have moved him to go away the sidelines, and the one which traumatized the nation Monday evening after Buffalo’s Damar Hamlin collapsed on Cincinnati’s subject and needed to be resuscitated earlier than an ambulance might ferry him to a hospital.
Nonetheless, most of us, like Madden after witnessing Stingley’s harm, will all however get well from our shock, our nausea, our indignation, our moralizing, and tune in once more. Starting this weekend. We’ll even watch with heightened curiosity as Cincinnati and Buffalo return to separate fields. Those have been the groups pitted towards one another when Hamlin was felled making a sort out that apparently induced cardiac arrest, after which a collective plea to droop the competition and, in subsequent days, to not resume the sport in any respect. The league heeded each sentiments, for the primary time.
But we’ll be again, regardless of.
No matter that what bothered Hamlin was the most recent reminder that professional football is greater than a contact sports activities; it’s a collision sport wherein hits will be so violent that its gamers’ lives are at stake with practically each snap. No matter that we realized within the early 2000s that the human head-on collisions within the sport triggered a mind harm referred to as persistent traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, that may set off reminiscence loss, confusion, despair, violent outbreaks and suicide. No matter that we’ve lengthy identified that the sport has left a legion of strolling wounded former gamers hobbled, if not disabled, by too many accidents to joints and too many surgical procedures to restore them.
No matter that the sport has been unfair to the Black males who’ve come to predominate it by treating their neurological harm as lower than their White teammates primarily based on a rubric referred to as race-norming, based on the racist premise that Black males’s cognition is inferior. No matter that the league is dealing with a class-action lawsuit led by a former Black head coach, now an assistant, Brian Flores, alleging the league, and several other groups specifically, discriminate towards non-White head teaching aspirants in hiring practices.
As a fan, I’m not struggling the bodily and mind harm. But am I not complicit by tuning in each weekend, Monday and Thursday? Is my fiending not a part of the issue?
I managed to quit boxing, about 10 years in the past. But that was due to one more corrupt determination in a bout, not due to the abject brutality of the game. Not as a result of I used to be haunted, as I ought to’ve been, by one of the crucial memorable interviews I’ve ever performed. It was with mid-‘90s super featherweight champion Gabe Ruelas months after he TKO’d Jimmy Garcia, who died after struggling mind accidents in the course of the bout. I keep in mind Ruelas saying that after he determined to return to the ring, which was the one business for which he had employable abilities, it was laborious to coach, as a result of he noticed Garcia’s face in each pace bag, heavy bag or sparring associate he punched.
I’ve had relapses with boxing, however by no means with professional football. Because I’ve by no means quit it.
I didn’t quit it whereas watching a former NFL participant who turned a pal turn into one in all a number of dozen retired gamers to be bothered with ALS, that incurable and deadly neurodegenerative illness that football gamers are four times more likely to develop than different grownup males. Steve Smith died simply earlier than Christmas 2021 and his widow, Chie, who cared for him in his decline so lovingly, decried even louder the vicious toll of the sport.
I didn’t quit it that January 2009 afternoon in Pittsburgh towards the top of the AFC championship sport, when Steelers defensive again Ryan Clark appeared like Tatum as he crashed into Ravens running back Willis McGahee with such a thud that it resounded behind the sealed home windows of the press field and rendered a raucous stadium silent. McGahee was supine together with his arms clenching. Clark was slowly rolling to his aspect. Clark was helped off the sector by teammates. McGahee was carted off like Stingley, however he survived to stroll and play one other day.
“When Damar Hamlin falls to the turf, and when you see the medical staff rush to the field, and both teams are on the field,” Clark stated the opposite day on ESPN the place he retired to as an analyst, “you realize this isn’t normal. You realize this isn’t just football.”
This weekend, when most of us return, you’ll notice football is greater than a pastime. It’s an addiction.