Football's Occupational Hazard

Chuck Mercein sat on the Yale bench last Saturday, his thigh so swollen from a massive hemorrhage that he could only hobble. As he watched, Harvard held his team and his replacement at fullback, Pete Cummings, without a first down for the entire fourth quarter. Yale lost, 18-14.

Quarterback John McCluskey was running the Harvard offense. McCluskey, too, had spent much of the season on the bench, slowed by a painful hamstring pull. He had also been forced to watch the Crimson attack flicker and die, as the team was shut out by Dartmouth and Princeton.

"If only we stay healthy," the coaches pray, and with good reason. A few strategic injuries can turn a team's strength into weakness, and ruin a promising season before the first game. A team fights a constant battle to protect its players against physical damage.

The most important element in the treatment of injuries, said Jack Fadden, trainer for the Harvard football team and the Boston Red Sox, is professional medical attention. Coaches and trainers, he said, are simply not qualified to judge who should play and who should not.

Not Enough Doctors

Fadden blames most of the football deaths that occur annually on faulty medical supervision. Rather than an inherent defect of the sport, fatalities are the fault of teams who neglect to have their players examined for physical defects, for weaknesses that could prove deadly in a sweltering late August workout or a jarring tackle.

According to Fadden, the greatest advances in the prevention of injury have been in improved equipment. New, lightweight plastic pads have been developed for the thighs, hips, shoulders, and kidneys which distribute the blow without weighing the player down. Two-way stretch fabrics, spectacularly successful in ski pants, find a more practical use in football. They allow uniforms to be tailored to hold the pads snugly in place and prevent them from sliding.

Another protective device is the elastic tape with which the trainers swaddle each player before he goes out on the field. Taping the ankles has allowed teams to switch from high-topped shoes to the lighter lowcut variety. The most common injuries occur to the joints most difficult to support with tape: the knee and ankle.

Tricky Knees

Knee inuries are particularly difficult to treat because they are hard to diagnose. Harvard tackle Neal Curtin, hurt in the Massachusetts game, remained in limbo for weeks before he was found to have an torn alignments his knee and not a more serious cartilage damage.

An injured limb is not only painful; in addition, it atrophies from lack of use and, weakened and vulnerable can easily be reinjured. Fadden estimated that it would take at least a month for the swelling in Mercein's thigh to subside, but even more time would be necessary for the Yale star to recondition himself for another sport. Fadden's own system is to build up the damaged leg until it is stronger than the healthy one, before pronouncing the player recovered.

One variable in the recovery of a football player is his ability to absorb pain and continue playing. McCluskey, even after his leg was healthy enough for running, couldn't get the pain out of his mind and was ineffective until the Brown game. End Paul Barringer, with hamstring pulls in both legs, still managed to play effectively. Fadden emphasized that this ability to stand pain has nothing to do with toughness; either a player has the ability or he doesn't.

There is still much to be done in the field of protective armor for the football player. Helments, for instance, are difficult to improve. Even with modern, lightweight materials, a "crash-proof" helmet is still too heavy to wear, Suggestions are legion; one bizarre idea was to cover the outside of the helmet with sponge to cushion the impact. "But the beauty of it is that manufactures are working in cooperation with doctors," Fadden said.

End High-Arm Block

Fadden also proposed a rule change: outlaw the high-arm block. A blocker can ram his forearm or elbow into an opponent's face despite the protection of the mask. Cage masks which leave no opening wide enough for an elbow are fine for linemen, but backs, who need more visibility, are forced to use the conventional double or single bar variety. If high-arm blocking were illegal, Fadden believes that there would be no need for the face mask at all.

But despite all the efforts of equipment designers, doctors, trainers, and coaches, deaths do occur. A Penn junior varsity lineman, Al Buder, broke his leg in a game against Harvard. The fracture seemed to be normal and not at all dangerous, but a sudden embolism, or air bubble, developed and a week later Buder died.

But football is a contact sport, and pain and risk are an integral part of the game. It is the job of the trainers and the doctors, as well as the equipment designers and the coaches, to alleviate the pain, reduce the risk, and assure that cases like Al Buder's are as few as is humanly possible.