Ever since my father was diagnosed just before Christmas with advanced dementia -Alzheimer’s Disease, although none of my family can bring ourselves to call it that - it seems a floodgate has opened in his mind.  If I look at him, I can almost see the words flying out of his head like some weird alphabet soup.  There go his grandchildren’s names, and look, quickly, there goes the word for glass – he called it ice the other day, after he somehow managed to shatter his oven door and swept up shards of what he can no longer name.  He cannot tell me how it happened.

“What did you eat tonight,” I asked him and he struggled to describe something white that he put butter on.   “A potato?  Was it a potato?”  

“Yeah, I think so, yeah that’s what it was,” he said with a laugh and I had to get up and leave the hospital examining room just off the ER with an abrupt, “Be right back, I’ve got to stretch my legs.”

We weren’t at the ER at 11:00 p.m. on a recent evening for him, however.  My mother was brought in by the EMS after she fell.  We were waiting for the doctor.

I needed a distraction.  I'd left my house in a hurry and had almost brought my just-opened beer and an extra in my purse, but since I’d be doing most of the talking, I figured that might not be such a good idea.  I also forgot to bring a book or magazine, and it was looking to be a long night.

If we were at the swanky new hospital in suburban Dublin, I’d no doubt have my pick of the latest issues of O, Real Simple, People, Time, and probably even Architectural Digest and Metropolitan Home.  But we were on the city's west side where things are a little less…refined.  Nothing wrong with that, other than the dearth of reading material.  I'm right at home here and besides, once the new casino’s built just down the road I’m sure that’ll class things right up.

As I cruised a surprisingly empty ER waiting room, all I could find was a November 01, 2010 issue of Sports Illustrated.  Ugh.  I loathe sports.  All of them, except for ladies’ figure skating.   But it was either that or all the free copies of Columbus Apartment Guide a homeless person could possibly want.  SI would have to do.

I flipped through it. Not surprisingly, the theme was football.  There was also a smattering of baseball plus a picture of some horse named Zenyatta at the end.  Zenyatta.  Wasn’t that the name of a Police album?

If pressed, I can find beauty in other sports.  A pitcher’s windup.  The jaw-dropping spectacle of a slam-dunk.  A well-timed soccer goal.  But football is different.  In skimming a sports article, certain words always jump out.  Strength.  Crushing.  Dominance. Aggression.  Violence.  And hitting, always hitting.  Sportswriters and coaches and announcers can analyze it to death, trying to elevate it to something it can never be.  It’s a hitting game and whomever hits hardest is best.  When you reduce it to its most elemental state that’s all it is.

To my delight, the centerpiece article wasn’t an analysis of another game.  It was a medical article called “Concussions:  The Hits That Are Changing Football,” by Peter King.  It was an in-depth look at repetitive brain trauma, a common and accepted part of the game.   I knew I should go back to my parents but I couldn’t, not just yet.  I sat down and started to read.

For the past three years, Dr. Ann McKee, one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject, has been studying the brains of deceased football players.  What she’s found is that repeated hits to the helmet can cause hundreds of tiny brownish triangular bits of a toxic protein called tau, which chokes off cellular life in the brain.  She calls it “incredible chaos in the brain.”  It has a name - chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) - and the end result is often dementia, ALS and depression.  It seems to be unique to football players.  She says she’s never seen the disease in any person who doesn’t have the kind of repetitive head trauma that football players do. 

She's also found evidence of CTE in the brains of deceased college and high school players; this is troubling because the damage seems to start early and doesn't have to be from a concussion.

High school football players acting as control subjects showed evidence of mental impairment in a clinical test that was meant to compare concussed to non-concussed athletes.

The results of Dr. McKee’s studies may cause changes to the game but not because the players are worried.  When players from all 32 teams were shown a video produced by the NFL  that showed nine big hits, six involving helmet-on-helmet contact that will result in discipline from the league office, the players got mad, booed and threw things at the screen.

When questioned about possible regulations against hitting,  Cowboys linebacker Keith Brooking was quoted as saying “It’s what makes the game so popular.  People love the battle!  People love the violence!”

Suddenly the term “bobblehead” took on a whole new meaning for me.

I’d left my dad alone long enough.  As I walked back to the room, I thought about him and wondered what his brain looked like.  I tried to picture the clumps of amyloid plaques forming in his brain, taking over, not unlike an offensive football formation moving relentlessly down the field toward the end zone.  

I thought of him and football and my head hurt.  For most of his working life, he stood at a machine, sometimes for 12 hours a day (he never turned down overtime, even on weekends).  Never complained once about it even though he developed a permanent case of tinnitus from the noise and his legs and back hurt all the time.  He was –is – a good man, a kind man, who always put his family first.

For all my dislike of the sport, I suddenly realized I might have something in common with the men who play it.  In the heat of the game, they look mad.  Fierce.  Ferociously angry.  I guess you’d have to be, to muster that kind of rage, the kind that allows them to inflict some of the crippling, life-threatening injuries that happen on the field.  I was feeling a little angry myself. 

Then I thought of those dumb players and how sorry they’d be someday, some of them winding up like my dad except at a much younger age.

By the time I got back to the room where the doctor was talking to my uncomprehending father, I was so mad I felt like I could tear that hospital down with my bare hands and I wondered if maybe hearing the deafening roar of the crowd and getting to do an inane little victory dance once a week might not make up for an awful lot.