Seniors: Watching the Super Bowl, and remembering

As the Super Bowl of football draws close, this aged fan chooses to remember three young men who, during the same weekend some 40-plus years ago, gave their lives to their sport.

The names: Leslie Pitts, Sam Wortham and Tom Jennings. On high school playing fields in central Florida, Illinois and Texas, these young men, already leaders and role models, sustained head injuries that proved fatal.

“This is a story every parent should know and, perhaps, never forget,” I wrote for Good Housekeeping magazine. After explaining how statistically football was safer than driving an automobile, my piece continued:

“Good-looking and manly, all three were filled with ambition. Each was sensitive and purposeful. Each was dedicated to football and, for teenage boys, was unashamedly religious.”

I traveled to Titusville, Fla., and then to Orangeville, Ill. I interviewed family, teammates, coaches and doctors. I stood in a cow barn with Les Pitts’ father, witness to this parent’s tearful recitation; in Florida I learned, “Football was all inside Sam Wortham. He didn’t even want water at timeouts. He couldn’t wait to get back to the game.”

At St. Anthony’s Junior Seminary in San Antonio, football was considered integral to the missionary philosophy: “I know of nothing that develops tough mental discipline the way football does.” This is what Father William Davis, coach, told the 200 boys, or missionary students: oblates. When Tom Jennings, a tackle, fell to the ground and went into convulsions, people throughout the small stadium “naturally fell to their knees in the soft grass, and they prayed.”

“It was the most moving demonstration of faith I have ever witnessed,” Father Davis said later. Nonetheless, Tom Jennings, hospital coma patient, would die three days later.

“High school football is dangerous,” a neurosurgeon told me. “It is exceedingly difficult to protect the head of a moving football player.” And, a member of the Medical Aspects of Sports Committee added, “The high school boy is still in the Batman stage; he is highly suggestible and so exposes himself to injury...trying to match the performance of the professional he sees on television.”

(Aside: The New York Times recently did an extensive series on high school football injuries, reporting how “a concussion is often the player’s secret.” The player with headaches nonetheless is afraid to tell the coach, for fear of losing his position. The president of the American College of Sports Medicine states: “Poor management of players’ concussions isn’t just a football issue, it’s a matter of public health.”)

Now, a small confession, followed by an editorial message: In what today seems a separate lifetime, I played nine seasons of football, through high school, small college (Middlebury) and one year in the Army, in Japan. I sustained bone fractures (a wrist and a small bone in the jaw), numerous sprains and a painful dislocated shoulder, yet missed only one college game.

I believed then, along with Father Davis of St. Anthony’s, that schoolboy and college football were significant, even incomparable, molders of youth. Unquestionably, the game is a stern disciplinarian, and the experience of team play can be an important learning experience.

Today, I am grandfather to a lone grandson and, at age 9, Zane Lindeman of Pasadena, Calif., shows no inclination, or desire, to play schoolboy football. He is a baseball boy — and for this I am especially grateful.

Some day, when he is ready, I might show him my article, the one that begins, “Each death was reported in a single paragraph in The New York Times...They had been very young men. Now all three were dead...not in a crash on the highway, but as a result of playing high school football.”

Lastly, I mean to enjoy the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, as will that grandboy Zane. During halftime, perhaps, I’ll pause to remember an October weekend in 1965 when Les Pitts, Sam Wortham and Tom Jennings met the unkindest of fates, and three promising lives were ended, tragically.

GRAY NOTES: Quote of the week: “Sixty is the new 40; dead is the new alive.” Comic Woody Allen said it, in TIME magazine...Jack LaLanne, at 93 still the “Godfather of Fitness” says: “Exercise is king, nutrition is queen. Put them together and you’ve got a kingdom!” (toyourhealth.com)...Fact: Rx drug errors harm 1.5 million Americans every year. Reason: 95 percent of the three billion prescriptions issued are handwritten. Result: 7,000 unnecessary deaths every year. Obvious message: be watchful, always (Parade magazine)...Fact: one in four people over 65 suffers some hearing loss. (Source: Federal Drug Administration)...Fact: 53 percent of those 50 and older hold an unfavorable view of drug companies. Imagine?...Author Garrison Keillor tells parents and grandparents: “Read ‘Moby Dick’ to your kids at bedtime. Two minutes and they’ll be asleep.”