HJNO Nov/Dec 2023

beings, still do love to watch violence, but we don’t necessarily all want to participate in things that really hurt. In boxing, the box- ing glove was created to prevent the hitter from breaking their hands and hurting when they hit the person. They weren’t created to protect the hit-ee. Then the next sport, the next entertain- ment that occurred with blows to the body repeatedly, was American football. Now, there were also rugby and other football codes out there where there was violence, but then what happened was American football started becoming more and more tackle-focused, and players started dying on the field from skull fractures, frommajor brain trauma because their heads were not protected in any way. These weren’t the intentional hits or the routine plays. It was just because it was such a violent game and there was tackling, and people got their head smashed without any protection at all. So, the football helmet was created by brilliant human beings who could create such a thing. We used our intellect to cre- ate something that would protect us from dying on the field because if we didn’t, President Roosevelt would’ve stopped the game of football because it was so terrify- ing that people were dying. Something had to be done, so the helmets were created — the big plastic helmets and the face mask in the 1950s — and that allowed people to hit their heads without feeling the pain, and it protected against skull fractures, which is fantastic. But because it then allowed people to continue to play, and it made it so people didn’t feel the pain when they got hit, and it made the fans feel like, “Oh, it’s much better to watch now because how could they get hurt with those helmets on?” It was in the late 1950s and early 1960s that helmets became routine and then required. Then it wasn’t until the 1960s and early ‘70s that we brilliant, intellectual humans decided to have our children start putting on those helmets and play orga- nized football on a regular basis and hit their heads over and over and over again. And even though children learn when they touch a stove to not touch it again, kids don’t learn that their brains are getting hurt and to not hit their heads again because they’re wearing the big plastic helmet that makes them not feel the pain of their head getting hit. Our brains don’t have any nerve end- ings. We don’t feel pain from our brainmov- ing around. But we would feel pain if we hit our heads against someone or fell down over and over again, so those helmets got bigger and big- ger and bigger through the years, but they hadn’t done anything to protect the brain frommoving inside the helmet. Perhaps all they did was to allow people to hit more fre- quently, harder, and it allowed the fans to think that everyone was getting safer and safer, so they could hit harder and more fre- quently. And that was what was expected. Those hits — the big ones and even some of the less wild ones — can frequently result in a brain injury that causes symptoms and signs with the most frequent of those symp- tomatic injuries being a mild TBI or a con- cussion, and that has become the focus over the last 15 years or so by the NFL, in part, because they know that they can do some- thing about it. They can teach new tech- niques. They can change some of the rules. They can assess them; they can count them; they can create concussion protocols. And everyone’s going to believe that brain prob- lems from football are being taken care of, when, in fact, the bigger, life-changing prob- lem is not the concussion. It’s all of those subconcussive or non-concussive injuries that a player receives thousands of times perhaps through a career. And we’re not “... helmets got bigger and bigger and bigger through the years, but they hadn’t done anything to protect the brain from moving inside the helmet. Perhaps all they did was to allow people to hit more frequently, harder, and it allowed the fans to think that everyone was getting safer and safer, so they could hit harder and more frequently.”