Football can really jar our sensibilities

The images from the NFL conference championship games were stunning Sunday.

Troy Polamalu's interception return for a touchdown. Larry Fitzgerald's TD catches. Fluttering confetti signaling the end of the Cardinals' long wait to play in a Super Bowl.

Oh, yes, and Willis McGahee lying on the ground.

If those others were on the left side of the hyphen in my love-hate relationship with football, McGahee was on the right side.

Actually, the Ravens' running back was on the wrong side.

Anyway, isn't it funny how you can love and hate football all at once? Or how I can?

Late in the fourth quarter of Baltimore's loss at Pittsburgh, McGahee caught a pass and then caught hell. A combination of Steelers safety Ryan Clark's helmet and shoulder left McGahee sprawled on the Heinz Field turf.

Leading up to the Steelers-Ravens game the rhetoric emphasized that these teams don't like each other. But more than that we heard that these defenses are two of the hardest-hitting in football.

Then there was a pall over the stadium in the aftermath of the McGahee-Clark collision, as if there was no cause (collision) and affect (pain).

Players from each team stood over McGahee, wishing and hoping and praying that their worst fears were unfounded.

McGahee was attended to by enough medical personnel to bring the dead back to life. Meanwhile, Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, a devastating tackler himself, knelt near the sideline with head bowed.

The stadium p.a. system blared Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Willy and the Poor Boys." Presumably this Willy wasn't meant to be mock that Willis - but in football it's difficult to tell what people are thinking.

I mean, doesn't Ray Lewis ever consider that those hits he plants on opponents might leave one paralyzed or worse?

Don't fans who adore this sport ever consider that a victim might never get up after they cheer one of those helmet-to-helmet crashes?

Don't members of the media - yes, including me - ever consider that one day from one of these games we'll be writing an obituary instead of a game story?

OK, that's pretty dramatic, but it is what I increasingly wonder after watching a ball carrier and/or tackler be slow getting up.

I used to be one of the spectators in the crowd applauding a tackle like Clark's. I'm still a sports writer glorifying this cruel, nasty, vicious sport.

But more and more I think about football's theory of relatively: Those harder and harder hits potentially leading to guys taking longer and longer to get up.

McGahee's body was immobilized, lifted onto a stretcher, rolled off the field and taken to a hospital.

Then the game resumed as if nothing happened. The despondent Ray Lewis and others returned to trying to separate runners from the ball and their senses. The crowd went back to being entertained by the physicality of it all.

News arrived early Monday morning that Willis McGahee was "neurologically intact" and would fully recover. "Neurologically intact," has replaced "X-rays negative" as the two most cherished words in sports.

But what happens if during the Super Bowl in two weeks the diagnosis isn't as -?

Er, maybe we should just go back to conveniently ignoring that image.

mimrem@dailyherald.com