Lament for Ray Easterling*

Just killing time with our eyes to the skies
Waiting on Science our Savior
                                               --Chagall Guevara, "Murder In the Big House"

You knew, if you decided to play football extensively, your body was going to pay a price.

The examples were out there.  Earl Campbell, once the most punishing running back in the league, barely able to walk.  But it wasn't as though football was the only sport that exacted a physical toll on its participants.  Baseball pitchers who could no longer lift the pitching arm to comb their hair, basketball players with incredibly painful knees, hockey players with more dental work than teeth.  But you knew, if you decided to play football, you would pay a physical price.

Nobody told you that you'd lose your mind, or could.

Of course, on one level, you had already lost your mind, just to play the game, or perhaps given it away.  Don't think.  React.

Don't ask questions.  Just get along. (Ask Jonathan Martin.)

Don't be too smart.  Fit in.  (Ask Chris Kluwe.)

Again, nothing you couldn't experience in any locker room in any sport.  Possibly taken to greater extremes in the football locker room, if only because of the sheer numbers compared to other sports, but unique only in degree, not kind.

But nobody told you that you'd lose your mind.

That you would lose your mind and your quarterback, your fellow cornerback or linebacker or center, wouldn't.  How is this fair?  You worked as hard as they did.  Harder, even.  You were the one who wasn't quite as fast or wasn't quite as big, so you had to hit extra hard, hustle extra hard, play with even more reckless abandon.  You had to go twice as hard to be half as noticed.  And now, this, while that other guy keeps making even more money by being on TV and talking about football.

Nobody told you that the family you never got to know while you were playing would end up being strangers to you before you got to see the children grow up.  Nobody told you that, even as your fingers were growing too gnarled to tie your shoelaces, you'd also forget why you were putting on your shoes in the first place.

You are asked if, knowing what you know now (when you can remember), if you would do it all again.  You say yes.  Of course you say yes.  You do remember the cheers, the crowds, the thrill.  That much you remember.  That is the only thing that is real anymore.  All else is a fog, a shade that comes and goes, as fixed as a mist and as graspable as a shadow.  Good days, bad days.

What do we owe these who lost their lives, if only slowly, by timed-release manslaughter?

What do we owe the Tony Dorsetts and Mark Dupers, who now know that their own brains are also corrupted in like manner, whose own memories are uncertain and being lost, who forget where they're driving to and how to get there mid-trip?  Surely we owe more than a GPS and a suicide hotline?

Maybe, at some point, we shut the hell up.  The word is used here very theologically; the hell of self-justification, the hell of denial, the hell of saying "it used to be worse in Teddy Roosevelt's day," the hell of thinking it's only a few (as if one isn't too many), the hell of thinking "I am only one person so it doesn't really matter."  Building more and more walls between us and the God we claim to worship so that God can't see us adoring these other gods, doing our damnedest to avoid thinking about it that way, or thinking of how many of you have been consumed so far.

Maybe we quit uttering blithe nonsense about how technology will fix the problem, newer and better helmets will save the day, and we can go on in our mindless adoration of the violence and flash without having to think about this.  No technology will save you now.  Technology might make clear what happened to you, and might rescue you just a little for your loved ones, who can at least take whatever meager solace comes from knowing that that wasn't really you.  You are gone, beyond the salvation of any new helmet, your memory paid off by a league following the moral compass of Big Tobacco (deny deny deny, pay off what you can't deny).

Maybe we utter a Prayer of Confession.  Merciful God, we have sinned against you and your children in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and done, and done and done and done and continue to do… .  We keep on consuming it, if not in the stadium itself then at home in front of the wide-screen idol, fortified in our rituals with buckets of junk food and beer.  We don't believe we can be redeemed, and we don't want to be even if we can.

But maybe, at some point, if we have some humanity about us, for you and your fifty-some brothers we know lost for the entertainment of others . . . maybe we mourn.


*Note: Ray Easterling played for the Falcons back in the '70s, when I was growing up in middle Georgia; he lived most of his life in Richmond, where I live now, until killing himself in 2012.  That's why his name was chosen for this lament; any number of other names could have been used, and no particular biographical claim is intended.