Someone Should Care

Football is a dangerous American sport killing our boys and no one cares. Tim Green is a smart college guy who graduated with high honors and also was a football hero. Now he can hardly function. He spent 8 years sacking quarterbacks for the Atlanta Falcons and managed to study and get a law degree in the process too. He went on to spend a decade in the broadcast booth for FOX Sports and now he can hardly speak. He also wrote books of which six of them became bestsellers. Tim Green seemed to be the man who could do anything and now he can’t do most things thanks to the toll football took on his brain.

Yes he has ALS the disease that eventually takes over you completely where nothing functions but you are still alive. He knew it was going to happen when he wrote years ago a book called The Dark Side of the Game in 1996. Here we are almost 30 years later and the deadly sport is bigger and more popular than ever in America. No one cares. He wrote then that you can’t go through one season without football doing serious damage to your body but yet he allows his sons to play the game. He doesn’t even care.

The men notice the disease when they start to have a problem picking up a coin on a table, simple things you would normally take for granted. The entire atmosphere of the “game” is toxic. The players still use their head as a weapon, heads still collide helmet to helmet and even when they congratulate each other for a play well done they tap each other on the head. In 2016 he was 52 years old and the rapid decline started to happen that now he can’t do just about everything including speak. There is no cure and you literally can’t do anything but wait for death.

ALS stands for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease because Lou was a famous baseball player who played for the Yankees and had it too  80 years ago. And we learned nothing about prevention. Even the brilliant author and physicist,   Doctor Steven Hawkins died from the debilitating disease. You would think that even when famous brilliant guys die from a preventable disease people would take precaution and stop the stupid violent sport. No one cares. The National Football League is thriving and huge expensive stadiums are still being built everywhere even in Las Vegas.

ALS destroys the nerves in the muscles eventually making it impossible to move, eat and even hard to breathe without a machine to pump air into your lungs. Yet you are still alive without the ability to walk, speak or breathe on your own. Often tough football kind of guys have no interest in doctors, treatments or sympathy. Apparently no one else cares either. Even at the big games like the Super Bowl when a guy gets injured it is shrugged off as just a delay of game till they drag the body off the field. The hundreds of thousands of people who see the game just take the time to go get more snacks and really could care less. There is another victim suited up on the sidelines to take the injured player’s place.

Most ALS guys are given 2-5 years to live after being diagnosed. Tim has 5 kids and is married for 30 years. There are new drugs that can slow the progression for a while but it is a fatal disease. Tim doesn’t even have any regrets. Tim has written 38 books and wrote his last book of 300 pages   using a smart phone using his thumbs. He can’t use his thumbs anymore so he is writing book number 39 with technology and his eyes. Someone should care more and eliminate football. Yeah I just said that.