David Michael Miller
I am the worst dad in the world. At least that’s what I thought my son, Tyler, believed when I refused to let him play tackle football in fifth grade.
Throughout middle school and the first couple of years of high school, Tyler would casually mention how so-and-so (or so-and-so’s dad) told him he would make a decent wide receiver or safety: trim, muscular, quick.
I agreed yet stood my ground. Tyler was too small, I claimed. A lot of kids in his class played football, but he was the only one who qualified every year to compete at the Wisconsin Swimming State Championships. That was cool, right? A football injury could end his swimming success, as well as bench him in Little League and sideline him on the basketball court.
Tyler wasn’t afraid of a little pain. In fact, he swam competitively with a broken wrist in fourth grade and pole vaulted for Sun Prairie High School with a fractured foot. His pain tolerance, I realized, was even higher than my anxiety level.
Maybe I was overprotective, but I had my reasons. For years — dating back to before Tyler was born — I covered the business of athletics for a trade magazine, and my beat was youth sports and high school sports. I helped the National Alliance for Youth Sports and the National Federation of State High School Associations advocate for greater concussion awareness at the local level long before the mainstream media took up the cause — and a good 15 years before Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who inspired the 2015 Will Smith movie, Concussion, likened youth football to child abuse.
Omalu is the guy who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive, degenerative disease similar to Alzheimer’s that is caused by repeated blows to the head. CTE goes undetected until death. In July, Dr. Ann McKee, an Appleton native, UW-Madison graduate and neuropathologist who is director of Boston University’s CTE Center, reported that CTE was detected in 110 of the 111 former NFL players’ brains donated to research.
Granted, it’s not fair to compare the high school game to the professional game. But concussions weren’t the only reason I kept Tyler off the football field.
Every time a high school football player died in practice or at a game — from a savage hit, heatstroke or something else — I had to write about it. And even though I’m not on that beat anymore, I can’t stop paying attention. Earlier this month, Joshua A. Mileto, a 16-year-old from Farmingville, New York, was killed when a 400-pound, 10-foot-long log he was carrying above his head at a conditioning camp at New York’s Sachem East High School fell and hit him in the head.
That specific tragedy raises questions about coaching competence, and I realized that the odds of my own son suffering a catastrophic injury — be it from a late hit or a freak injury — were slim. But, I imagine, so did the parents of those young football players who died.
I’m not the only parent like this. President Barack Obama, father of two daughters, famously declared in 2014, “If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football.” Dyan Hes, a pediatrician and founder of Gramercy Pediatrics in New York City, won’t let her kid play, either. “I see too many patients with concussions,” she told the New York Post last year. “My biggest fear is that he will get a concussion, and it will interfere with his brain development, his studies and his enjoyment of other sports.”
And while overall high school sports participation during the 2016-17 school year increased for the 28th consecutive year, according to a recent announcement by NFHS officials, participation in all types of high school football (six-, eight-, nine- and 11-player) dropped by more than 25,500 between 2015-16 and 2016-17.
By the time Tyler was a junior in high school, he’d given up on playing organized football, and I thought my worries about him suffering a violent sports injury were over. Then, on May 22 at the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s Madison Memorial Regional track and field meet, my son attempted to clear a height of 12 feet, 6 inches in pole vault. He miscalculated his vault and landed squarely on his butt in the vault box — the only spot without padding.
I rushed over to Tyler and saw his eyes rolled back into his head. He was trying to sit up in the box, leaning to the left toward his coach, who arrived to tend to Tyler even quicker than I did. My son couldn’t breathe, and he was making guttural sounds that terrified me. It was a sports parent’s worst nightmare.
In that moment, I recalled all those conversations the two of us had over the years about football. I also remembered my wife’s concerns about Tyler taking up pole vaulting as a freshman and hurling himself over a bar several feet in the air. Was this somehow karma — the universe’s way of saying, “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d let him play football”?
Tyler fractured three vertebrae and chipped a fourth that day, and he spent the summer in a back brace. Multiple doctors told us Tyler’s lucky he’s not paralyzed. He’s back in the pool, now, training for his senior season of high school swimming, and he’s talking about vaulting again in the spring. “I already broke my back,” he reasons. “How much worse can it get?”
Spoken like a fearless teenager — one who no longer wants to play football but isn’t going to let the uncertainty of another potentially debilitating injury hold him back.
I’m learning a thing or two from him.
