More susceptible or not, it's hard for someone who never played a sport like football or hockey to conceive of being hit hard enough to have one's spleen ruptured.
While there have been incidents of deaths of college football players due to in-game or in-practice injuries, including Derek Sheely's death due to a brain injury sustained in practice at Frostburg State University in 2011, more attention seems to flow towards the deaths of players still in high school. These players are still teenagers. There is something that much harder to cope with for many people, even though it's not as if college football players are that much older.
These things do not happen often. While I've seen many horrifying injuries on television across many different sports (including a scary injury to Stephen Pisciotty of the St. Louis Cardinals just last night), I can only remember seeing one scary injury situation in a live event in my lifetime.
September 26, 1980
The game itself was extremely un-memorable. Dublin won 10-0, and unlike the game recollected here, I couldn't tell you how Dublin scored to save my life.
It was a home game, so the band was settled down in our usual position in the home stands, at the south end zone. There were advantages and disadvantages to such a position; if the action was happening at or near that end zone, we were in prime position to enjoy it and respond with the fight song as needed. On the other hand, if things were happening at the opposite end of the field, we might be the last to know.
At any rate it was late in the fourth quarter and Dublin had Jones County pinned deep in their own territory. Dublin's defense managed to sack the opposing quarterback, or at least we assumed that was what happened based on the crowd reaction and the fact that no football came flying out of the backfield and no runner burst out with the ball. We may have played a quick cheer or possibly a snippet of the fight song to celebrate.
Then nothing happened.
And nothing continued to happen.
As I remember, the crowd between us and that far end of the field was standing, so we in the band really couldn't see what was going on. Apparently, though, the Jones County quarterback hadn't gotten up after the sack, and in fact stayed down until he was taken from the field by ambulance.
This is the first such serious on-field injury I can recall seeing live (and five years before the Joe Theismann Monday Night Football injury that everybody remembers). What I remember most vividly is having no idea was going on. Unlike the television viewer who may benefit from a sideline reporter's information in such a situation, we in that stadium had nothing to go on except that ambulance, which was always present at games, actually being forced into use (which I had not seen before).
The other memory that hangs on came after the fact; whether after the game (which was actually called off with a little under two minutes left in that fourth quarter) in the band room, or possibly the following Monday back at school. By this time word had come that the injury that had seemed serious at the time was not going to be debilitating, and that the Jones County quarterback would recover. One of my bandmates, I think, captured the bizarre quality of the situation in a joke of sorts (what follows is a rough paraphrase):
"oh, man, is this guy going to live? is he going to walk again? this is awful..." [mimicking adult voice] "He's O.K." [back to normal voice] "wow, we really put a hit on that guy! we really pounded on him..."
We cheer for the hit, until somebody doesn't get up from it.
The cliche has far too much truth for our comfort:
It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.
And sometimes they take a long time to get up...
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