No one had a clue. Not his coaches. Not his teammates. Not even his mother, looking on from her usual spot in the grandstand.
On a foggy November night four years ago, Drew Rickerson found himself wandering around the sidelines of a football field in Sequim, Wash., a city of 6,600 on the state’s Olympic peninsula. He was 15 years old, playing quarterback for the Sequim High varsity football team in the final game of the regular season, a week away from the state playoffs. He also was struggling to speak, dazed and disoriented, hardly able to drink water.
Minutes earlier, Rickerson had been on the field, rolling out to the right, taking on an opposing linebacker. The two collided, their helmets smashing together like bowling balls. Rickerson suffered a concussion, his brain slamming against the inside of his skull. He should have been evaluated, gone to the hospital, right then and there. A second hit could have caused more brain damage. Killed him, even. But no one had a clue. And so he stayed in the game, for a total of nine additional plays, throwing for a touchdown and running for another, the latter a 23-yard weave though multiple defenders, Russian Roulette in shoulder pads.
Rickerson flipped the ball to an official. He staggered toward his team’s bench. Felt funny. On the sidelines, he stared at the overhead lights. Shapes became blurry; noises, jumbled. Four times, he sat down, stood up, then asked his coaches if he could sit back down. He dropped his helmet, picked it up, dropped it again. Over and over, he squirted water from a bottle over his shoulder, thinking it was going into his mouth. Nobody noticed. No one had a clue. Not until the game was over, when Rickerson and his teammates turned to face the grandstand. As the young men sang the school’s fight song, Jean Rickerson finally got a good look at her son’s face.
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Usually, he would be smiling.
«She saw nothing,» Drew says. «No life. I was blank. We went over to the ambulance. I don’t really remember anything after that.»
Football has a problem. The game harms the human brain. The danger is acute at the professional level, where large men smash each other for large sums of money; the hazard is less publicized, but greater still, at the high school and youth level, where an estimated 4.8 million children — sons, nephews and little brothers, most between the ages of 6 and 13 — batter each other’s heads for fun, for the sheer giddy sake of sport. Once upon a time, we called football-induced brain damage getting your bell rung. We treated it with smelling salts. We kept on playing, kept on loving our Friday nights. Times change. The deaths are real. The damage no longer can be ignored. We are starting — at long last — to get a clue. Ours is an era of enlightenment, of concussion awareness, which is another way of saying risk management. Stories like Rickerson’s — and other stories that are much, much worse — have spurred reform. A collective effort to make football safer. We pass laws. Change the rules. Better identify and treat the victims. Lower the odds of catastrophe. We still love Friday nights. Only looming beneath the well-meaning correctives is a darker, more troubling question, one with grave implications for the sport and the children who play it, for every parent looking on from a grandstand: What if awareness isn’t enough?