How it happened that I stopped watching football

Since the three or four of you who read this blog have put up with my repeated if sporadic outbursts of commentary on football and its potentially fatal perils, it seems only fair to give some explanation of how I came to stop watching the game.
It's actually a fairly recent development.  Until a little more than three years ago I still watched college football.  I had fallen away from the NFL game in a rather gradual fashion -- first taking a pass on the Super Bowl, then losing interest in watching any of it -- somewhere in the initial stream of trauma-related suicides of former players.  For whatever reason it was the suicide of Andre Waters that set me on the course away from the NFL.  I'm not sure why it was him; he wasn't a player to whom I had known any particular attachment.  It might partly have been the knowledge of his reputation as one of the harder-hitting defensive backs in the game; if he had been so dramatically affected by CTE, it was clear that it wasn't just those who received the punishment that were at risk, but those who dealt it out as well.
At any rate, the NFL gradually dropped from my sports-viewing habits, but I held on to college football.  I'm sure that in part I was convincing myself that the danger must have come from the extended years of playing beyond college, therefore watching college games was o.k., or some similar form of rationalization.  While living in Lawrence we actually attended a number of games of the University of Kansas football team.  This was partly because it was frequently cheap -- this is KU, remember, where as good as the basketball team is, the football team is that bad.  We could get tickets as low as $15 a day or two before the game because, well, they were desperate to sell.
After moving to Richmond, we chose not to pay for cable television, which meant that watching games on Saturday afternoon (or all throughout the Thanksgiving weekend, for example) was no longer so easy.  It happened that Florida State, the only alma mater in my background that played football, had a big matchup on the schedule against the University of Oklahoma that fall, and I decided to seek out a sports bar and allow myself to watch this game.
Oklahoma had beaten FSU badly the previous year and this was to be a test of whether FSU was going to be any better this year.  It was apparent pretty quickly, as I recall, that some things hadn't improved.  FSU's primary quarterback was running for his life from the Oklahoma defense.  Still, the game remained close, in contrast to the previous season's blowout.
At one point FSU was close, close enough to try a pass play into the end zone.  The receiver was, if I recall correctly, double-covered, but nonetheless made a game effort, but the hit he received knocked the ball loose.  The pass fell incomplete, and both players went to the ground.
Only the FSU receiver (his name might have been Kenny Shaw, or something similar?) didn't get up. The cliches started to sound about his having his bell rung, and the training staff was quickly onto the field, but it was quite a while before the receiver could finally be taken off safely.
Before all the reaction set in, in the instant after that play, before I had a chance to think or react or be on guard, the thought flashed into my mind:

I wonder how many years of brain function he just lost.

As quickly as possible I paid my bill and left.

Kenny Shaw's in there, somewhere.

For all I know the receiver was fine, and for all I know he got back into the game later.  It mattered little.  I was to horrified to continue.  Not that I had had such a thought, but that the thought was not out of order, in my mind.  And even without having had a course in Christian ethics yet, I was quickly persuaded that I couldn't do that.  If that was what the sport had become, for eighty former players or forty or twenty or two, I couldn't do that.  
About a year ago the satirical site The Onion, which is always at its best when there's an uncomfortable ring of truth in their fake headlines, came up with one that mined a similar vein.  I just beat them to it by two years, and without any intention to be funny.
So, that's how I got to be where I am.  There will be more to say on the subject, by smarter people than I to be sure.  Meantime, I will continue to struggle with the ethical and faithful implications of it all.

Note: here's a video of the play. By any definition I know it seems to be a legal hit, as the contact involved did not seem to be helmet-to-helmet as far as my eye can see (though it's close).  I'm not sure that there is any relevance to that fact where the larger question is concerned.