By now, football's concussion crisis is well known: every year brings
headlines of our Hall of Fame heroes behaving erratically and dying
young. But did you know that several kid players across the continent
drop dead every year before a single ball is snapped -- just from
extreme conditioning drills directed by all-powerful coaches? Without
Helmets or Shoulder Pads takes the conversation about football and
public health to a new level with investigations of the sport's
underreported worst tragedies and their cover-ups, at major
universities, obscure junior colleges, and high schools. These add up to
a kind of quiet pandemic -- a socially induced one enabled by our thirst
for spectacle and by a skewed vision of masculinity.
Here are the shocking stories of young men who get struck down by
exertional heatstroke and other causes sometimes not even acknowledged
(such as the sickle cell trait syndrome that afflicts many African
Americans). When the worst happens, the football world simply buries the
evidence, pays off victims' families, and moves on.
No matter how much we enjoy America's most popular sport at elite
levels, this book makes the case that it belongs out of our public
schools and off our public fields.
