Here we are again, at crunch time: football is back
The Big Ten conducted its annual football kickoff meetings last week, 26,371 fans attended a Bears practice Friday night in Soldier Field, and high school teams are preparing to report for duty.
King football is back, from coast to coast and broken nose to turf toes.
It's only August, but the crack of the bat already is giving way to the crack of the back.
NFL game officials are meeting with teams to emphasize regulations designed to keep players in one piece for at least a couple of snaps.
You know, like the rule prohibiting the type of helmet-to-spine collision that paralyzed defenseless Patriots receiver Darryl Stingley in 1978.
Oakland Raiders safety Jack Tatum, who died last month, applied that hit during a preseason game. Less than two months later he came here to play the Bears and was the subject of the first of my nearly 6,000 columns for this newspaper.
After all those years and printed words the NFL still is futilely trying to limit the damage.
The Raiders were nasty back then, and Tatum was as nasty as any of them. His 1980 book titled "They Call Me Assassin" was pretty accurate.
My take on Tatum was that he also was a victim, albeit differently than Stingley was.
The point was that coaches conditioned Tatum since childhood to make that sort of hit, which was legal at the time on receivers roaming the middle of the field.
Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel was quoted as saying after Tatum's death, "We have lost one of our greatest Buckeyes."
Tatum's violent methods simply were football being football and still are, judging by the NFL still having to tweak the rules for safety purposes.
Tatum wrote in one of his three books, "I was paid to hit, the harder the better." The only difference today is players are paid better.
Concussions comprise the most prominent ailment now. The league finally is studying them and experimenting with precautions, yet the more things change in football the more they stay the same.
Players work out most of the off-season now, lift weights, eat better, shed tons of body fat and overall become fine-tuned tackling, blocking, running, jumping, throwing, catching machines.
Yet more than three decades after Jack Tatum paralyzed Darryl Stingley, carcasses routinely will be hauled off the field on carts with torn bodies and twisted brains.
The only way to protect NFL players from this cruel game is for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to shut down the league until working conditions are improved. But that isn't going to happen, is it?
Today's Jack Tatums are taught to not lead with their heads and to not take liberties with exposed receivers, but less because it's dangerous than because their teams will be penalized.
The object still is to whack each other hard enough to inflict pain, if not injury. Those of us who cheer football from the stands and glorify it from the press box need to be reminded occasionally what we're cheering and glorifying.
The younger that boys start to play football and the longer that men continue to play it, the more chance they'll at best walk with limps as they age and at worst forget their names sooner than later.
OK, now let's all go ahead and enjoy the crashes and crunches of a new season.
mimrem@dailyherald.com