Donnellon: Concussions and the inconvenient truth

ON SATURDAY, Houston Texans running back Tyler Ervin left in the second quarter of a 34-16 loss to the New England Patriots after suffering what was later diagnosed as a concussion. Earlier, in Seattle's 36-20 loss to Atlanta, Seahawks tight end Brandon Williams suffered one and Luke Willson was evaluated for one, too.

Once in every NFL game, it seems, a player is checked for a concussion. Some leave. Some return. No one knows what other players, if any, might have suffered undiagnosed ones, each blow to any part of the body, especially the unexpected ones, unavoidably jarring the brain from its stem connecting to every significant human function.

This happens in those spectacular open-field collisions that draw us to the game like gnats to a lamplight. It happens in the short gains too, and in the hand-to-hand combat of the trenches, where the collision of helmets takes place on virtually every play. We wince, we groan and we exult in all of it, all the while maintaining an intellectual distance between our morality and its brutality.

"If I knew back then what I know now," Bo Jackson told USA Today late last week, "I would have never played football. Never . . . "

Jackson played four seasons of college football and baseball, followed by four seasons of pro football and eight seasons of professional baseball. A hip injury ended his football career and severely curtailed his baseball career as well, but he was, in so many ways, the most amazing athlete we have ever seen since Jim Thorpe.

But he insists he wouldn't be if he was born 20 years later. "The game has gotten so violent, so rough," he said. "We're so much more educated on this CTE stuff (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), there's no way I would ever allow my kids to play football today.

"Even though I love the sport, I'd smack them in the mouth if they said they wanted to play football."

OK, a little counterintuitive there. But you get his point. So does Frank DeLano, the high school coach in my hometown of Haddonfield, N.J., who has won three Group 2 state championships and been to the final six times over 15 years of coaching, yet never fails to remind my 5-7 son that, as the freshman team quarterback back on one particular Saturday in October of 2007, he was the program's only winning quarterback that day.

Frank gets it. Until he started having kids himself, he was the high school basketball announcer, was an enthusiastic assistant baseball coach and is now his 8-year-old daughter's softball coach. Think of the stereotypical high school coach so often depicted in movies. He's the opposite.

So when he says, "My 4-year-old is going to be a kid in a couple of years who will put a helmet on," I don't dismiss it any more readily than Jackson's future plans for his own kids:

"I'd tell them, 'Play baseball, basketball, soccer, golf," said Jackson. "Just anything but football."

I think about what Eric Lindros said to me the other day about what he would tell his own son Carl, now 2, should he want to someday play the same sport in which his father's career, and uncertain future, were shaped by concussions - but that ultimately identified him, with his induction into the Hall of Fame last November, as one of its all-time greats.

"Depends on what he wants to do," said Lindros, who played in the sold-out alumni game Saturday. "I won't base it any other way. It solely depends on what his intentions are, what his desires are, what his ambitions are. It depends what sport, what activities he wants to do. Who knows what he'll want to do?"

This from a man who has spent much of his post-career advocating safer measures in hockey. But then again, so has DeLano for high school football. In a state championship game in 2011 that Haddonfield eventually lost by eight points - breaking its 20-game winning streak - he pulled his own star running back early in the third quarter after a teammate told him the kid "just wasn't right."

Diagnosed later with a concussion, the kid went on to a stellar college career and earned an engineering degree.

"We're not a billion-dollar industry like the NFL," said DeLano. "But we've been doing impact testing on our kids for the last 12 years. It's such a shared responsibility between the coaches, the players on the field, the medical field. And the way these kids are taught techniques compared to when I was a player. I understand: You look at Junior Seau and all these people have died and all the CTE stuff. But I also think education has changed over this."

Truth is, no team sport is safe when it comes to head trauma, as I learned from my daughter's basketball-playing concussions, or my own decades earlier. I don't think I have any lingering effects from those hits or several others I could mention. But I don't know about 10 or 20 years from now. I have no idea, for example, if my father's late-life dementia was all hereditary or a nurture/nature cocktail. But neither option insulates me, or comforts me.

"I wish I had known about all of those head injuries, but no one knew that," Jackson said. "And the people that did know that, they wouldn't tell anybody."

They're telling us now. What they know. And more frightening perhaps, what they don't. The real questions now are to what degree we want to listen, and to what degree we are willing to change the sports we have grown up playing, mimicking, and loving.

@samdonnellon

Columns: ph.ly/Donnellon