Tua Comes Back
During the game against the Arizona Cardinals Tua took off on a scramble for a first down and slid, safely, without letting anyone near him. The crowd let out an uproarious cheer, the loudest pop of the day (especially as the Dolphins would go on to blow the game at the end). At first I was happy. It should be a happy thing, right? The franchise guy is back, and he did the move everyone begs him to do. But it felt…dark. Here is a guy getting the loudest stadium cheer of the day because he didn’t slam his head into a player and get concussed. That’s dark. That’s actually rather depressing. We are cheering on a guy for doing something normal because he has a history of alarming head trauma and just came back from a month absence after suffering another horrific concussion when he didn’t slide. It just feels bleak.
There was a post online recently that mentioned that we seem to have reached a sort of acceptance stage regarding head trauma. I agree. We have. When Tua went down against the Bills earlier this year we had another loud outcry for a day of countless people calling for Tua to retire. Former players like Bart Scott confessed that he retired due to weird head symptoms he did not like. Lots of fans, including Dolphins fans, talked about how they didn’t want to watch Tua do this to himself. He has a family. Football is just a game. Let it go, take care of yourself. It was just lip service. Just the usual discourse that dominates headlines for a day and then vanishes. I didn’t even bother doing a comic or real mention about it at the time. Tua was never going to retire from this. I’m honestly surprised so many people thought he might. If Tua is going to retire due to head trauma, it’ll be far down the road or he will have to get way more fucked up first.
McDaniel mentioned during Tua’s comeback that he saw many doctors and none of them told him to stop playing football. That feels like a very specific sort of phrasing to avoid the question. We don’t know exactly what doctors he saw. We don’t know what tests were run. I’m guessing they all told Tua that he can play football. He probably went into every meeting asking if he can still do it, and those doctors probably told him sure. The irony is the human body probably shouldn’t play football period but that’s a dark fact that every single one of us pushes to the side every day so that we can enjoy it.
I think a lot of players are just accepting of it. I think most fans, even with the Tua thing, are honestly just accepting of it. No sport comes without risks. The insidious nature of brain trauma is how invisible it is, and how long-term it is. Tua looks fine. He probably feels fine. If there is damage in there, he’s young and healthy enough that it’s likely invisible. We can’t diagnose a lot of brain problems like CTE on living patients yet. Brain trauma is like radiation damage. It might be years before you see the effects and by then it’s too late. That’s why he’s going to need to get way more fucked up before he considers retirement. It’s so easy to push to the side. Players are doing it even if they understand the risks. Fans like us are doing it because none of us are going to be watching Tua when he’s retired, 50 years old, struggling to remember things, having splitting headaches, and acting out of character. We just enjoy these guys in their prime and forget about them once they are off the team on gameday.
I hate getting depressing like this because I genuinely love this dumb sport but I think we all need to just have the occasional sobering reminder about the reality of it so we don’t let ourselves become too accepting of the problems. I’m happy the guardian caps are starting to be worn by certain players (ironically not Tua, even though his teammate De’Von Achane had a minor scare and immediately started using it). The Guardian cap looks stupid as hell and I hope they can make better helmets to replace it’s uses, but if it helps out there, we need more of it. If any of you watched the Manningcast a couple weeks ago with Ed Reed you’ll probably remember when he spent the entire time sounding exactly like a guy who spent his whole career launching himself like a missile at other men, and then he went off on a giant deeply uncomfortable rant about the guardian cap while the Mannings tried desperately to change the subject and get him off the call. I know Ed Reed is not alone in his opinions. It’s bleak.
I wish Tua the best in his return and I hope to fucking god he keeps his head safe so we can keep watching him for a long time.
There was a recent video on an air traffic control YouTube channel where a pilot didn’t sound right to the controller. The controller told the pilot that he sounded hypoxic and the pilot protested that he felt fine. Controller ordered him down to 6,000 feet (well below the ceiling of where atmospheric air has enough oxygen). After getting some oxygen, the pilot sounded different but kept protesting that he didn’t feel different. See also why you always put your own mask on first: https://youtu.be/kUfF2MTnqAw
I have a relative who desperately needs hearing aids. They’re fine on the phone but hear almost nothing in person. This was a real problem recently when they had an extended hospitalization and couldn’t hear anything that the medical staff was telling them but never explained that their hearing was bad. The medical staff chalked up their inability to remember what they’d been told to failing mental faculties and almost made it so they couldn’t go back to living alone.
All this to say that it’s often really difficult for people to accept that they may not be operating at full capacity, even when people are trying to help them change their situation to accommodate the new reality. Until we see a massive culture shift, especially in sports, we will always have more people choosing to put themselves in harm’s way like this. 🙁
This. We as a society (I’m looking at you ‘Merica) have this notion of sucking it up and rolling up your sleeves. We sacrifice our health, happiness and stress levels to being overworked. Mental and physical health should prioritize jobs, as should family. Asking for help should be applauded. We really need to make huge shifts away from the toxic work culture.
And (in Tua’s case) you’re putting up with this toxicity and bodily harm for the benefit of who? Miami Fans? The same ones who would just as quickly cheer against you and make you public enemy 1 if you played for one of their rivals? Your family? You already signed a massive contract with TONS of guaranteed money. Your family is going to be wealthy for generations. Your own glory? Ask Mick Tingelhoff how he felt about getting inducted into the Hall of Fame….oh wait, you couldn’t because he was non-verbal at the time because of years of head trauma finally catching up with him.
Jim Tyrer is probably the classic depressing case of head hits and hof
I don’t think we will ever be free of injury issues in popular sports as long as we have human nature. Inescapably, we like playing contact sports. 130 years ago, college students played football for no money or fame even though they knew other players were dying of skull fractures. We like contact sports. We see Marshawn Lynch run through the entire Saints defense and want to do it ourselves. I love that football is getting more pads but it won’t survive if we say the NFL needs less contact, and then something more dangerous (probably MMA) will become more popular in its place.
I really do think some guys love the game so much that they will give anything, including their future health, to play in the top league. There are a few guys in it for the money, but they’re rare. You don’t see too many players make obvious Deion Sanders-esque “business decisions” on the field. The millions of dollars are definitely part of it, but a lot of guys like Tua go back out there because football is their lives and they would retire to no life if they left the game.
This is why I stopped watching the NFL 8 years ago and haven’t watched a single single minute since. I was a huge NFL fan for decades – watching 3 games every Sunday, obsessing over my Fantasy team, attending a few games in-person. But sometime around 2016 all the injury stuff got to me, with the CTE studies and the Will Smith movie and Aaron Hernandez and Junior Seau. I just realized what Dave said above: no human being should ever play football.
For a while, I could be like Dave: soberly remind myself about the damage, and then go back to enjoying the games. But after 2016 I just could not. I would turn on the NFL and just see pain and suffering and it was depressing to watch, rather than exciting. I can still watch MLB and see more excitement than carnage, but the NFL just has the wrong ratio for me nowadays.
I’ve also come to see high school football as straight-up Child Abuse. In a generation or two, we will look back on something like Friday Night Lights and recoil with the same revulsion as when you see pregnant women drinking & smoking on 1950s TV (or Mad Men). We will look back on kids playing football and think, “What the hell were all these idiot adults thinking?!”
The only way I stay connected to the NFL anymore is through The Draw Play. Even though I haven’t watched a single snap in 8+ years, I still enjoy Dave’s humor and his criticisms which come through the comics.
Anyone who isn’t a pro wrestling fan needs to familiarize themselves with the story of Chris Benoit. I can’t think of a more nightmarish example of what repeated head trauma can do to someone and cause them to do to others. This, more than anything else, is what I fear happening eventually with men like Tua. And yet even in that horrific scenario, people will shrug and say, “How could we have known?” as if this has never happened before. The NFL will make a few token changes, but in no time flat, we’ll be right back to teams quietly giving their star QB smelling salts like the Bills did with Josh Allen a few weeks ago and suffering no repercussions for it.