Playing Football As If It Were Rugby (which it should be)

EACH AUTUMN, all across America's fruited plain, high school football photographs festoon slender newspapers; youthful, innocent faces grinning confidently. The handsome high school player beaming from my local newspaper eagerly looks forward to the season, and to playing both offense and defense, because in both situations he'll be the one doing the hitting, he says. There was a time when American football involved blocking and tackling; now, it involves hitting. Hitting is blocking and tackling with as much brute speed and force as one can muster, the more the better. It is playing with a vengeance, playing to hurt people, tackling with the rock hard helmet instead of the arms and legs, and it is the way football is played at all levels. but it wasn't always that way. There was a time when we blocked and tackled; now, we hit, and hit as hard as we can. As our culture has become more extreme and violent, so has our most popular sport. The result is an epidemic of severe injuries to current football players, and mental and physical disabilities among retired football players. The way the sport is played now, its very difficult, and debilitating, to play very many years. Most players are done after high school, to the betterment of their health. The answer, of course, is to return the sport to its origins: rugby. And apparently football coaches across America are starting to do just that. They are, rumor has it, starting to study rugby, and to encourage the return to traditional body tackling, designed for efficiency rather than violence. In rugby nobody wears a helmet or pads, and the sport is sufficiently exciting and violent, but relatively free of serious injuries. Our American football, exciting though it is, has lost its way, and has become too violent, with way too many, way too hard hits, and, not coincidentally, too many missed blocks and tackles. When we do things in a reasonable way, we nearly always improve them.