[Jack Tatum hitting Darryl Stingley, August 12, 1972]
Today, I’ll watch the Super Bowl, begrudgingly.
When it comes to football, I am a purist. It was all downhill after 1978 when the NFL limited hits on receivers downfield. Not to mention adding two extra games (14 was fine) and two extra playoff teams (8 was fine). I didn’t even like it when overtime was added in 1974.

I still remember reading this book back in the day. In ’74, the NFL adopted overtime and it was all downhill for purists. [From David Kramer’s collection]
The other day, I re-read Kevin Cook’s The LAST HEADBANGERS: NFL FOOTBALL in the ROWDY, RECKLESS ’70s. As much as I soaked in the nostalgia for those great dynasties — the Dolphins, Vikings, Cowboys, Steelers and Raiders — I realized one reason football seemed more exciting back then was because it was more violent.
As described by Cook, in that era, NFL gladiators playing to what seemed the point of death in Roman forums watched remotely by millions, was not just part of the spectacle but The Show itself.
Players today are bigger and stronger, but especially before 1978, every play was hand-to-hand combat. As Roger Staubach said. “If you look at tape before 1978, you’ll see guys pounded downfield on every play. Just erased.”
Today, you’ll see cameras zoomed in almost to the follicle. What you won’t see are pileups or scrums that could draw blood on any play. Like the Wild West sans sheriffs, the Bengals’s Reggie Williams described plays that whistles apparently didn’t stop:
It was hell in pileups. You’d grab the ball, but with both hands on the ball you can’t protect your eyes, so somebody’s gauging your eyes. The Raiders had pileups down to a science. They’d knee you in the nuts to get the ball. And that’s when all your biceps curls and leg curls pay off. You go into a fetal position — “head and ass in the grass,” its called — and wrap both arms around the ball. You move the ball down through all those arms in the pileup, down under you nuts where nobody can get it.
Nor will the cameras see what Roy Blount saw 30 years ago on the hands of the Pittsburgh Steelers:
On the backs of their hands and their knuckles, many had wounds of a kind I have never seen on anyone else. Fairly deep digs and gouges which were not scabbed over so much as dried. Like old sores on horses.
And the hits without penalties. Like when “Hit Man” George Atkinson leveled and concussed Lynn Swann in the 1976 AFC Championship.
And, Jack Tatum, who wrote later of himself, Call Me Assassin, who left Darryl Stingley paralyzed in an August 1978 exhibition game.

New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley lies motionless on the field after colliding with Oakland’s Jack Tatum, at Oakland Coliseum in Oakland, Calif., in this Aug. 12, 1978 file photo. (AP Photo)
And those black and white photos of Tatum knocking off helmets where we can imagine a head snapping free. And another where the ball could be the soul leaving a man’s body.
Looking back, I am glad I was ignorant of the crippling damage the gladiators — whose sense of invulnerability (according to Cook) was fueled by “rat turds, steroids, and rudimentary HGH mixed with horse testosterone’ — were inflicting upon themselves and by extension a Brighton teenager who now tells students violence is not a solution.

According to the website: “It should be noted that this small, grainy picture is the ONLY picture on the internet of Jim Kelly getting carted off the field during the 1996 playoff loss to Jacksonville. It’s almost like Jim Kelly and his Illuminati cohorts have conspired to suppress any photographic evidence of this event. If I was Jim Kelly, I’d want this picture erased from the Earth too. As great a Quarterback as he was, dazed and concussed on the back of a golf cart was a horrible, horrible, way to go out. He deserved better.”
But I’ll watch today. Not surprised if Manning ends his career the way Kelly did in 1996. But when the season ends, I will have had my fill of gladiators.
As seen in On Yogi Berra and Dale Berra and the 1973 World Series and Willie Mays. And my father. and 30 years ago when George Brett won the World Series (And Morganna the Kissing Bandit/, I am really baseball guy. In baseball I don’t have to worry whether some man is getting CTE to liven up my chilly winter Sundays.
In the summer, I umpire baseball and softball. And, just as importantly, play in the Sunday Pick Softball Game at the Brighton Twelve Corners Middle School (below). In a few short months, come join the Boys of Summer (no horse testosterone allowed).