Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Sports of The Times

For Filmmaker, Game’s Danger Trumps Thrill

Bob Carmichael, who played major-college football and once worked for NFL Films, now believes the game is too dangerous.Credit...Nick Cote for The New York Times

BOULDER, Colo. — In the mid-1970s, Bob Carmichael was a fast-rising man at NFL Films, a lieutenant in the young empire that was the National Football League. A former major-college football player, he helped produce those gloriously rich tapestries of athleticism; the long, slow spirals set against azure skies; the leaping, twisting grabs by receivers; and the thunderous hits.

It was the sounds that haunted his sleep.

On the sideline, as he shot his film, he heard knees crack, shoulders splinter. Helmets and heads recoiled, one off the other, and off ice-hard turf. (He watched a receiver get hit and go limp in the air. He saw a cornerback fall to the ground and convulse.)

“That was 40 years ago,” he noted. “All that has happened is that guys are much bigger, much faster, today.”

Somewhere along this road, Carmichael became a heretic. He directed and produced “Football in America,” an Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary, making him one of the first to question the hold of this violent sport on our culture and psyches, not the least his own and mine.

“As football moves into the 1980s, a fundamental question must be answered,” Carmichael’s film noted. “Will it continue to accept widespread and lifelong injury as part of the game?”

As the N.F.L. sails toward the third decade of this century, that question feels no less morally urgent. I came to football as a child, intoxicated with the mop-haired Joe Namath. The babes, the cool, the arm: so ’60s. Like Carmichael and many other American men, I can reel off my favorite teams and their hit squads: Minnesota’s Purple People Eaters, Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain, the Jets’ New York Sack Exchange, with Joe Klecko and his Iron Age rages toward the quarterback.

I dug the artistry and the savagery, too.

What I celebrated renders me queasy now. Boston University says it has found chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., in 90 of 94 brains of deceased N.F.L. players it has examined. There is scientific debate about precise cause and effect with this injury, and legitimate questions have been raised about why many players do not get it. But the prospect of slipping your middle-age mooring and floating out into a soupy ocean is uniquely unsettling. When brain disintegration is visited upon a 27-year-old — as it was on the former Giants safety Tyler Sash, who died in September from an accidental overdose of pain medications and was later found to have C.T.E. — it is a horror cubed.

It also does not delimit the concern.

The brilliant Detroit Lions receiver Calvin Johnson, known as Megatron, recently let it be known that he might walk away from the game, leaving millions upon millions of dollars on the table. His career is a M*A*S*H listing: He has sprained his anterior cruciate ligaments, fractured his ribs, hyperextended his neck, broken three fingers on a single play, and played out a season with a partially torn posterior cruciate ligament.

Video
bars
0:00/3:31
-0:00

transcript

Ken Stabler and C.T.E.

The family of Ken Stabler, the former Raiders quarterback who died in July at age 69, speaks about his life and the effects of C.T.E., which was diagnosed posthumously.

tk

Video player loading
The family of Ken Stabler, the former Raiders quarterback who died in July at age 69, speaks about his life and the effects of C.T.E., which was diagnosed posthumously.CreditCredit...Al Messerschmidt/Associated Press

He took a lower back injury and said it still hurt a year later. “I was taking Vicodin twice a game just to get through the game,” he said in 2007.

He will face a lifetime of discomfort.

Marvelous athletes are gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area for Super Bowl 50. Von Miller, a Broncos linebacker, is a 6-foot-3 predator with a gymnast’s balance and a ballerina’s footwork. The Panthers’ Cam Newton cavorts and hurls those surgical passes; joy is unmistakable. (Peyton Manning, with his four neck operations and the life of pain that is likely ahead, is another matter. Respect gives way to an involuntary cringe and the hope that this fine athlete will finally have the sense, win or lose, to walk away.)

Some years ago, my son Aidan badly wanted to play football. My wife, Evelyn, and I refused, and neither of us harbored a second thought. On Wednesday morning, I read my colleague John Branch’s painful, honest story on the last days of the former Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, and wondered again. (I note that while Stabler’s concussion-driven dementia was the saddest of his injuries, other football scars had left him nearly homebound for 10 years.)

Is this defensible?

On the way west, I took a layover in Boulder and drove down snow-shrouded streets to Carmichael’s handsome home and production and film studio, set almost within the shadow of the Flatirons. I put that question to him.

Carmichael is 68, with blue eyes and the lean body of a mountain climber and a Hawaiian surfer. The white scar from reconstructive surgery he received after a hit he took his sophomore year at the University of Colorado still snakes around the nob of his knee.

“The team doctor came to me and shut the door and said: ‘Bob, I just spent four hours putting your knee back together. Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but take my word: Walk away from this game.’ ”

Carmichael had a high pain threshold. In more than a decade of youth, high school and college football, he cracked his sternum and tore neck ligaments and a rotator cuff. After a concussion, a week of headaches followed. A different doctor asked: Do you want to play?

“I thought, hell yes!” Carmichael said. “I’d rather die than not play.”

That sophomore year, however, he heard the advice differently. To be injured had been to be shunned. On Sunday, the coaches had the injured players wear American Red Cross-style jackets. (That Colorado team endured 14 knee operations that year.)

Carmichael quit football, fell in with mountain climbers, and never looked back. Still, the University of Colorado team had been a fine one, winning the Bluebonnet Bowl, and he remained close to his brothers. They returned for an on-field reunion. They were in their early and mid-30s. Several could not climb the stairs out of the hallway unaided.

“We were torn-up old men,” Carmichael said.

His decision to make “Football in America” was a definitive step away from that world. It was filled with piercing quotations from the likes of Alan Page, a magnificent football player and then a judge in Minnesota and prescient critic of football’s culture. “We, as players,” Page noted, “have to come to grips with what we are doing to each other.”

In the documentary Tim Brown, a fine old running back, said: “I’m going to be a cripple for the rest of my life. I don’t think there is any way this game is that valuable.”

Carmichael was shunned afterward, and he was fine with that. He detests the macho, the violence done to men, the lack of guaranteed contracts for professionals and the young college men who wind up torn and discarded.

The University of Colorado is building a Taj Mahal of an athletic facility, with advanced medical and physical therapy centers for these young men.

“The irony of an institution of higher learning investing in a sport that cripples young minds is breathtaking,” Carmichael said.

And yet, and still, he admits that football exerts its dark spell. His girlfriend, who has heard him talk eloquently of football’s violence, will find him watching a Saturday afternoon game or a Sunday pro clash.

He read a few weeks ago of Sash’s death, and it hit him. He had played the same position as this kid; they were the same size, 6 feet, rangy and fast. Had he not blown out his knee, he might well have played more years and taken more concussions.

“My injury just might have been the luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Carmichael said.

Will he watch the game on Sunday? He shook his head. “I don’t know how to reconcile this game with modern times,” he said. “I know too much. I can’t.”

He walked me to the door. I stepped into the cold darkness, snow piling on box elders and cottonwoods and pines. The next morning, I’d fly west to the Super Bowl to interview and watch the best athletes in the world rip and pull and whack at one another with artistry and violence.

The dilemmas, my hypocrisies even, are packed like a suit in my luggage.

Email: powellm@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: For Filmmaker, Game’s Danger Trumps Thrill . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT