Terry Dossett
There is no such thing as a safe football helmet.
No matter how hard manufacturers try to make them, they continue to fail miserably.
There is no such thing as a safe football helmet!
Years ago, in the late 1950s, equipment manufacturers came up with a revolutionary device guaranteed to provide the ultimate in safety to professional, college, and high school athletes everywhere. It was called the facemask.
Players soon learned it was an excellent way to bring a runner down. Indeed, they were handles large enough to grab onto and threaten various injuries, including broken necks. Facemask penalties on the field are now being enforced by umps and referees but, still, they occur quite frequently.
True, the sport has come a long way, compared to the days of the leather or sometimes cardboard helmets!
Helmets in the 1960s from Wilson were of hard plastic, but with significant innovations such as stiff padding around the entire inside surface of the plastic, while other models from Riddel opted for a so-called suspension system, which had far less padding but cradled the players’ heads with a web of straps. The helmet was much lighter, but by the estimation of linemen, they were very loud. Noises extraneous to the helmet were magnified to the point everything sounded like a gunfight inside a 55-gallon drum. One well-placed slap over the earhole on a Riddel helmet could burst an eardrum.
Equipment manufacturers such as Schutt Inc. are working diligently to make helmets safer for our kids. But as long as coaches tell their players to spear tackle, hitting the runner straight on with the faceguard, head and neck injuries will continue to be a huge part of our violent national pastime. As long as coaches tell their players to block with their heads, injuries will continue right and left.
Football had been a large part of my life; indeed, playing college ball compared to high school ball was quite an education. In high school we played for fun. In college we were employees, expected to sacrifice our bodies for the glory of the university. A severe neck injury ended my college career. When the assistant coach came in my hospital room to tell me the news, he informed me my injury was severe enough that the docs recommended me not playing again. He also informed me they were taking my grant, another name for scholarship. After all, he said, we have to get someone in there who can produce! I was a starter at center and they didn’t need me anymore. What a valuable lesson in life!
Moms and dads, please urge your kids to play games they can enjoy the entirety of their lives. They may resent you for it now, but thank you for it later. After all, I can’t find 21 other guys my age who want to get together on a Saturday afternoon and beat the stuffing out of one another.