What Kind of Father Lets His Son Play Football?

There’s no longer any avoiding the question. We all know now just how dangerous the game can be. So, do you let your kid risk it all—his health, his brain—just because he wants to play? One dad explains the excruciating call he made.
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Cait Oppermann
The Decision, Part One

I am on the phone with the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the number one voice in American culture advocating for The End of Football. We've just dissected the game's risks and liabilities and the dangers of repeated head trauma when I ask him this:

“What would you say to me if I told you I was gonna let my son play football?”

A pause.

“Well, I'd never tell any parent what they should or shouldn't do…,” Malcolm politely, Canadianly, stammered.

“It's okay,” I say, “really. Just tell me what you think.”

“I'd say I think you're crazy.”


By the time Gladwell told me I'd have to be insane to let my 8-year-old son play tackle football, I'd heard it a lot. I'd had many similar, if less informed, discussions since Wyatt had started asking me about playing it—every single day—a few months earlier. When I first mentioned to a friend at work that I was considering letting him play, she said, “Well, I sure hope he isn't any good.”

And then, one Saturday at a potluck in my suburban New Jersey neighborhood, a few moms overheard me tell another dad I was conflicted about the decision. The moms chimed in, totally supportive. They didn't understand why I'd worry at all. Their kids play and they love it. I should definitely sign Wyatt up.

I was psyched. Finally, some love and support for the youth game, and I didn't even have to cross the Mason-Dixon Line to find it. But then I was confused. I asked the moms: Wait, you're not gung-ho fourth-generation Bama alums tailgating outside the Iron Bowl, you're gluten-free yoga moms who pack carrots for snacks…and you're not sweating the concussions and stuff?

Screeeeeech!

Yeah. No. They were definitely sweating the concussions and stuff. So much so, in fact, that they'd automatically assumed we were all talking about flag football. When they realized I meant tackle, it was like I'd just said I'd been teaching my son how to handle a loaded AK-47 on a roller coaster I'd built myself out of jagged scrap metal I found at a Superfund site. No one actually called me a monster out loud, but I think that's just because they were speechless. One mom excused herself, got up, and walked out of the kitchen. They were shook. So was I.

Honestly, the fact that I was caught off guard by any of these reactions makes no sense at all. For one thing, I'm alive and read the news. But it goes far beyond that. As GQ’s head of fact-checking, I've been responsible for the accuracy of several in-depth articles about football's concussion and CTE crisis, including a deep dive into the decline and suicide of Junior Seau, who shot himself in the chest, leaving his rotted brain for docs to study, and another story that was the basis for the Will Smith film Concussion. I know professionally—for a fact!—that playing football can lead to brain damage. So, knowing and believing that, how could I not rule it out as an activity, not only in general but for my own damn son? What did I expect people would think if I let him play?

Somewhere in my lizard brain, I loved the game more than the facts. That's part of it, I admit. But there were also other reasons. As a former player myself, maybe I thought I had a special appreciation for the risks and rewards of playing football, and that this knowledge would help me protect my son. I also knew that for a boy like Wyatt, who is not unlike the kind of boy I was at his age, there are dangers in not playing football, too.


Weighing the dangers for his son, Wyatt, the author sized up the risks of playing—and the risks of not.

Cait Oppermann
A Dad’s Notes

It's not like I ever said, “Hey, Wyatt, if you want to be someone I admire, please play football.” But he can tell. Kids see things.

One Sunday night when Wyatt was 3, I went to the basement, poured myself a drink, and sat down to watch the Giants game. A minute later, Wyatt walked downstairs, freshly bathed, hair parted to the side. He pulled up a chair, pilfered a few of my chips, and slammed down his sippy cup—loud enough to make me look. Then he gazed up at me, guilelessly smiled, and said, “FOOTBALL!”

That was the first time it really sank in what “role model” means to a 3-year-old, which is basically: Do everything he does. It forced me to take a quick inventory of the behaviors I model for him. Every Sunday, I drink and eat and watch the games. I don't bet, play fantasy, or listen to sports radio, but I care. I get caught up. Frederick Exley best summed up a relationship with football like mine in A Fan's Notes 50 years ago: “Perhaps it was no more than the force of a forgotten childhood. Whatever it was, I gave myself up to the Giants utterly. The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.”

Football hits me directly in the as-yet-scientifically-unverified spot on the human male hippocampus that temporarily suspends cognitive brain function and overwhelms men with the dopamine-like feelings of sentimentality, triumph, and joy, regardless of the carnage. I'm well aware of the fact that when it comes to the NFL, the owners and the league exploit the players (and the cities they bilk for tax breaks to build their ridiculous coliseums) and that the NCAA doesn't really give a crap if a lineman for Auburn studies, or graduates, or is living a healthy life at 40.

The players, though: These guys are real heroes to me. Their discipline and courage, their tenacity. It's admirable. Football is a uniquely demanding sport, both mentally and physically, especially on the offensive side of the ball. People say it's militaristic, and it is. There's nothing free-form about it, like basketball or soccer. There's not a huge emphasis on individuality. It's a team game. It starts with studying a thick playbook crammed with X's and O's, and then remembering them even when you're exhausted to the point of nausea. Each play is a series of orchestrated collisions. Your fingers get jammed between helmets on the line. After plays, you end up on the bottom of a pile under ten guys stepping on your arms and legs. You can't breathe.

The physicality of the game appeals to Wyatt. That's how he is. Tactile, visceral, an 80-pound (and growing!) wrecking ball of kinetic energy and loose wires. When we wrestle around on the carpet, he giggles in an electrifying way that should be recorded and used to define “giggle” on Dictionary.com. When we play football in the yard, he wants to get tackled. He laughs his little ass off when I wrap him up and bring him to the ground. He's comfortable in the chaos, and when he isn't running around like a wild man, there's something a little unfulfilled in him, like a dry match.

He needs activity. Constantly. But his heart is boundless, too. Parents come up to us all the time and tell us how kind he is to their kids. That's because Wyatt still lets himself see the best in people. But that'll change. Someday (soon) he'll see me and the rest of the world for what we really are, and that's a tough hit to stomach. Could football help him? Could it toughen him up? Get him ready for life? What had it done for me when I played? And just as important: What did it do to me when I quit?


A young Dawg with his uncle Matt (left) and his father, the author; right, with his grandfather “Pop” Zaleski.

My big brother, Matt, played, and because he did, I wanted to. So my dad persuaded the coaches to let me start at 8. But even though I was the youngest kid on the team, there wasn't a helmet big enough to fit my oversize head. I had to get one from a friend of my dad's who worked in the athletic department at Rutgers. We ate drive-through burgers one night, then drove to the campus to pick it up.

It was a size 8, big enough for a man, solid white and so cool. But even cooler was the time spent one-on-one with my dad. He was an undercover cop and never around much before that season. But he dug football. He played in college and loved watching his eldest, his namesake, play. He even borrowed police surveillance equipment to film the games for the team. You could hear him on the tapes: Great play, MattHEWWW!

The big concern in those days wasn't concussions—it was breaking your neck. My dad always made us wear neck guards (white foam U's that went between the helmet and shoulder pads and were supposed to keep your spinal cord from snapping). I felt his care in his seriousness before each season, when he'd secure the guards to our shoulder pads and together we'd fit our plastic mouthpieces, Mom boiling the water, us biting down hard to mold them to the shape of our still-coming-in teeth.

Before football, things were much worse in our house. The fighting was intense. I can still remember waking up in the middle of the night, hearing the shouting and screaming and telling myself it would never be like this when I had kids. Then I'd hear what sounded like a scuffle or something being thrown across the room, and I'd be convinced that someone was about to grab a gun. My dad always had one around, like an iPhone.

Back then he'd be gone days at a time. He was working organized crime and vice and on some federal narcotics task forces. He was a good man, a good cop, but he'd seen things, and his moral lines had gotten blurred. This was New Jersey after the Newark riots, the Mob heyday. A lot of his fellow cops had served in Vietnam and brought that back with them. One cop friend died while “cleaning his gun.” That's what they called it when a cop killed himself and the force wanted to bury it so his family would get the benefits. Dad saw all that. It fucked him up.

Meanwhile Mom had to hold things down at home with her sons, now 5 and 8. She'd signed up for a normal life. Married the only son of a distinguished guy, the chief of police. She's a college-educated young woman. She's from a nice home. Her dad's a union rep, never worked with his hands. Now her husband's got braids and runs with a biker gang for days on end? She can't call him at work, can't ask him to pick up milk on the way home or how his day is. She has no idea what he's doing. Doesn't know when he's coming back. Or even if. When he does show up in the middle of the night, their conversations explode into drunken rage. Finally, one night, Mom grabs us and throws us in the car in the dark, she's leaving. No one knows where we're going, what's coming next.…

And then it stops. It's hard to remember what changed, exactly. But the scary shit passed. It was like hearing a bird chirping in a tree the morning after a terrifying, house-shaking electrical storm. First, Dad was gone awhile. Then he came back, right around the same time my brother first started playing football. After that, he was around more in general. Especially for the games. Sundays. Holy days. He was around all day. There in the morning, sometimes even the night before.

I can hear Mom and Dad in the kitchen as I lace up my pants with the thigh pads and knee pads already inserted. Next I tie my own white cleats (the good ones, my first Ponys, not fake leather from Payless). By the time I'm in full uniform, everything snug, green and white, an Edison Falcon, I'm on the lawn tossing a ball, unable to even wait for the game to start playing. Soon we're at the field. Silver bleachers and an announcer's booth shelved above green grass lined with white yard markers and orange pylons. God's chessboard. Mom works the concession stand. Dad's in the booth, camera on a tripod, his beard, cap, and army field jacket cutting a Serpico figure. Way to go, Lucas!… Good hit, 65!

All there. A family. Sometimes we even came in one car.

Practice could suck. First it was surviving the heat during summer sessions. Doing gut-busters and holding them as long as you could. By the end of the season, it was about toughing it out in the cold. You'd put your hands in your pants to keep them warm between plays. Some kids even pissed themselves on purpose because it was warm and there were no breaks or bathrooms.

The tackling drills were my favorite part: Two lines. Facing each other. Whistle blows. Boom. It got to the point where we'd deliberately try to knock each other out, losing the memory of the moment between impact and hitting the ground, seeing only white, then black. You wake up seconds later on the ground, alight with an illicit joy of something between boyness and madness.

We had three seasons together as a family: my brother and I practicing, playing, practicing, playing; my mother schlepping us to and from practice; hitting Roy Rogers on the way home. Dad there for the games.

The summer before the last season, my mom lost her job. We went and stayed at my grandmother's house near the beach in Point Pleasant. It was the only time in her life my mom ever had a tan. We spent a month in the surf while she scanned the want ads in the paper.

My dad was on the job working stakeouts but came down one weekend. (They sent us to the store, and when we came back they were in bed together.) At the end of the summer, Mom found a new job and we went home and had our best and last season together.

Soon my mom met someone at work. By then, my dad had become involved with someone else, too. It was over.

We moved in with my dad. My brother started at a new high school and joined the football team. I would have had to join a new team, but I told my parents I didn't want to. I did it to hurt them, I told myself. But it was also true that I didn't have the courage to try out. I didn't think I could do it on my own, without my family.

My brother kept at it and eventually earned a partial scholarship to play at a small college in Pennsylvania. The day he pulled away from our house in my dad's old 280Z, I watched my father cry for the first time in my life. He shook his head and looked at me and said, “I just hope I did enough.”

Matt played only one more season; then he quit. After a year full of injuries and violence (on and off the field), and heavy drinking, he was lost and well on his way to addiction. Football hadn't been his salvation. In fact, when I first told him I was thinking of letting Wyatt play, it was clear he didn't support the idea. The damage he had suffered playing noseguard and center for the better part of a decade had had a lasting impact on his physical and mental health and could easily be part of the reason he's struggled with alcohol. (He is now sober.)

I had lost two very big parts of my life, football and family. And I remember wanting to go back in time to before I quit, to still be on that path I thought was my birthright. With my brother off at college and none of my old friends around—no football team, no structure—I had no identity and even less self-discipline. I was drinking and smoking anything I could get my hands on. I got into fistfights. I was cutting a lot of classes and hiding out at one of my divorced parents' empty houses. I definitely wasn't over their breakup, and I was squandering my youth getting wasted and doing stupid shit, which eventually turned into illegal shit. When I got arrested driving a technically stolen car—it was my dad's, but I took it without telling him and was still a year away from getting my driver's license—I sobered up a bit.

I also thought, Maybe I would benefit from five two-hour practices a week in a setting where I am not only allowed but encouraged to hit someone my own size as hard as I can. I missed the game and the person I thought I would be by then.

And so, I worked out all summer before my junior year. I biked 30 miles a day, swam the ocean religiously, rigorously, ate a lot of salad. But in the end I chickened out. I kept it a secret that I even still wanted to play, and with no one pushing me to do it, it was easy to just “forget” to go to the tryout.

I always wondered what I'd really given up when I quit playing. Did I lose my true self? Did I waste my potential? I wanted Wyatt to have a chance to play, not because I wanted him to be like me but because I was afraid he might turn out like me. And I couldn't let that happen, even if it meant maybe putting him at risk on the field.


Cait Oppermann
Cait Oppermann
The Decision, Part Two

As the months passed and the season grew closer, I kept tabling the football discussion, hoping maybe Wyatt would drop it. That never happened. Every day, as we'd drive home from school or wherever, he'd ask:

“Hey, Dad, did you sign me up for football yet?”

“Yeah, I don't know, buddy. You really want to play?”

“Yeah.”

“What about flag football?”

“No. I want to play tackle. That's real football, right?”

“Kind of, yeah. It's hard, though, you know? And you can get hurt.”

“Yeah, but I'll have a helmet, right?”

I was afraid we might both want the same thing—for him to play—too much for me to make an honest choice. I think Wyatt could sense some of that, too. But it's so confusing for a kid. How is he supposed to understand that there's this insanely popular sport that his dad loves that's totally available to play but also dangerous as fuck? That can't be true. Why would it exist if it hurts people? It's like the way kids just don't get smoking cigarettes. To them, cigarettes are bad for you, it's dumb to smoke, the end. What they don't yet realize is how so-called adults make bad choices all the time.

The weather got warmer, and as I drove home from work I'd smell grass and grill smoke in the evenings, flooding my brain with those familiar signifiers of youth and summer and football season's inevitable commencement. Wyatt kept pressing (“The uniforms are cool. Do I get to keep the jersey?”) and I kept stalling.

I started driving him home along different routes—the ones without the lawn signs advertising youth-football registration. I'd skip over TV channels that might have a game on. I stopped wearing my Giants hat on weekends. But Wyatt wouldn't let up, constantly probing, in his 8-year-old way, for new paths into the discussion. Just picking at my defenses.

“Dad, you played real football, right?” he asked once when his grandfather was visiting and we were setting up to play Madden on his PlayStation. “And Uncle Matt? And Pop? I wanna play 'cause you guys did. And I'm old enough. So you have to let me.”

My dad was quiet.

“Look.” I told Wyatt. “I don't have to do anything but be your dad.” Something my dad's said to me before.

“Other kids are playing.”

“That's up to their dads.” Eventually I punted. “Let's just play this game for now, and I'll think about it, okay?”

“Fine. I'm the Bucs.”

“I'm the Giants.”


Cait Oppermann

Making a decision like this for someone you love is a big part of what parenting is. Can I watch a PG-13 movie? Can I have another cookie? Can I play a sport that could leave me in a wheelchair? Or worse?

Life is risk. A coin toss. As parents we do everything we can. Safety locks and car seats. All of it. But we know we can't control everything, even as we try to. We have to teach them to swim 'cause we can't be in the water with them all the time. Someday we really won't be around. What then? What now? Can I let my boy take this risk, knowing it will make him stronger as long as it doesn't kill him?

There were months of deliberation.

I couldn't argue with any of what I had learned or heard. The head of the local youth-football program, who seemed slightly peeved at having to answer all the safety questions over and over again, couldn't argue, either, when I asked him about the risks, even though many of the coaches have their own sons in the league and no one was taking anything lightly. My wife grilled the coaches, too, but by then she'd told me that this decision was ultimately going to be mine, as Wyatt's father and someone who played.

Finally, in late July, after arguing with myself about it for months, after pretending fairly convincingly that I did not actually want him to play, after making up and then changing my mind dozens of times; after the amateur self-analysis and one particularly disquieting dream in which Wyatt is at the playground and keeps hitting his head on the monkey bars; after a few long heart-to-hearts with my wife, and a million conversations with Wyatt, I honestly decided it was just too weird not to let him play.

Do we really live in a post-football world? Is it a dead sport walking? A ghost game? Gladwell believes lawsuits will eventually end the game at the youth level: “The NFL can settle lawsuits until kingdom come. There's no room for error, economically [on the youth level]. You give a school district a $2 million judgment against them, they stop playing the game.”

That future has a way of feeling a long way off—especially from where I sat last fall, watching as Wyatt took up the game on a field in Rumson, New Jersey. The first few nights of practice were mostly just about getting used to the pads, the heat, running with a five-pound helmet on your head. Then it was actually learning the game, the rules, the techniques. Then, getting past his fears of contact and getting hurt/hurting someone else.

I haven't gotten past the fear part, myself. I know that if he gets hurt in a way he can't recover from, it will be my fault. But as I watch him play, I also begin to believe that this is what Wyatt needs to grow up. The things video games and your favorite kindergarten teacher and Sesame Street don't teach you. Discipline. Competition. Courage under fire.

Wyatt's coach is ex-army, having enlisted after 9/11. He's a leader and a good influence. And he and the other coaches and the league are taking some precautions to try to mitigate the risks. For instance, the boys can't have any contact until they've gotten ten hours of practice under their belts. Plays are whistled dead whenever there is a loose ball. And there are fewer kickoff returns, so no one can come running full speed down the field and clock another kid in the head.

Still, this remains not just a contact sport but a combat sport. Anytime there is any contact to the head, including whenever another boy slaps Wyatt's helmet playfully or play-fightingly or while playing, I want to take him off the field immediately and never come back. I feel like Jerry Maguire watching Rod Tidwell. All our eggs are in this basket, shaking around out there on the field.

To answer my friend's question: No, he's not good. The older kids who've been playing awhile are ahead by a pretty big margin. But he's gotten immeasurably better in just a few short months. And of course I want him to be good, to get better, to keep playing, even if I sometimes hate myself for it.

He's got potential, for sure. More than talent or ability, what I see is effort. He's pushed himself on the football field more—far more—than he ever has doing anything else.

Every night when they'd break, he'd run to the sideline to get water: “I did good, right, Dad?” or “Did you see me block that guy?” or “He stepped on my hand!” I'd hold his helmet, listen, tell him, “Go get 'em, Wyatt. You can do it.”

All season he's been eating like a horse. Before and after practice and games. Piles of eggs and chicken and pizza. I haven't taken him to Roy Rogers, but I would if there were any in the area. He's also been sleeping like a rock every night. He carries a football with him everywhere now. We've played more catch in the past week than we have in the past year, and he's been playing pickup at school and with the neighbors. He's taken to wearing a Gerald McCoy jersey.

He plays mostly offensive and defensive tackle. Right in the scrum. He's strong, got good legs, and he's had a decent rate of success beating the boy lined up against him. He had his best game against a local rival, a game my brother showed up to unexpectedly. When Wyatt saw his uncle Matt in the crowd, he appeared to gain three vertical inches. (My dad came to a game, too.) With his uncle watching, Wyatt repeatedly put the kids opposite him on the ground, drawing a double-team more than once, and when called to duty on the offensive line on short notice on a goal-line play, he lined up and blocked as the team scored a game-tying TD.

The next week he had a game an hour from home, on a dirt field near where I'd grown up, a more working-class area. It was the third game in a row that Wyatt's team, which was entirely white, played a more racially diverse team. Sadly, these games are the only time these kids from different towns and backgrounds ever share the same field. Our boys were outplayed and got beaten pretty bad that day. It was the low point of the season, a shutout. One of our starters, a tough kid named Rory, hit his head on the ground hard during a tackle. He was taken out of the game, dazed, and examined by EMTs before his mom took him to the ER to be evaluated. (After a follow-up doctor's visit ruled out a concussion, he returned to practice two days later.) Standing on the sideline, Wyatt watched it all play out instead of the game, and it was clear he understood it was serious. The kids know about concussions.

Near the end of that game, Wyatt lined up against a bigger, older kid. (Some kids were as much as 25 pounds heavier and two years older.) The kid put his hand through Wyatt's face mask and brutally shoved him onto the rock-hard ground. On the next play, the last play of the game, Wyatt faced that kid again, and damn it, he held his own. Stood him up. Was not moved backward. Soon afterward he was in our car on the way home, dirt still on his forehead, tears streaming down his cheeks as he exorcised his frustration and anger with the boy, the pressure he'd put on himself and felt from his teammates and coaches.

The season would eventually yield an unofficial 5–3-1 record. (Technically they don't keep score at this age, but believe me, everyone, including the kids, knows the outcomes of the games.) Before the last game of the season, five or six dads and I finally stumbled into a discussion about the risks of the game. Concussions. CTE. Brain trauma.

One dad described an injury another one of his kids got playing flag football, when he ran full speed into another boy and collided head to head.

“I mean, you get two kids, a hundred forty pounds each, boom. Someone's getting hurt.” We traded a few war stories about our own playing days. General yuks about bashing ourselves into all manner of things growing up. Finally, it got to where one dad even said, “I've never seen a serious injury [in youth tackle football]. I swear the pads actually slow them down so they can't hurt each other.”

And with that statement, our little bubble of self-deluding bullshit, our hamlet of Wishful Thinking, went poof. Another dad reminded us of Rory, the boy who had been examined by the EMTs and had gone to the hospital after his head hit the ground. We looked around uncomfortably.

“I made a deal with mine,” said another dad. “He gets two [concussions] and he's out. Can't play anymore.”

I realized we each had an answer for ourselves. A bargain we'd worked out, a rationalization, a crossed finger, a little wish or a prayer. We all knew we couldn't protect them all the time, and that we may be putting them at unnecessary risk. I think that's part of why these dads and I were always there. Every game. Practices. Watching. If we're there, we seemed to be telling ourselves, they won't get hurt. Or if they do, at least we'll be there to help. At least we'll feel some sense of control over the uncontrollable.


The Rumson–Fair Haven Dawgs air it out against their opponents from Asbury Park, New Jersey.

The Coin Toss

I get the stupidity and naïveté in trying to correct the mistakes of my childhood through Wyatt. I get the irony of the fact that I hated myself for quitting football even though quitting might have saved me. And I know Wyatt's not here to give me a second chance at any of that. But maybe my second chance is helping him with his first.

Malcolm Gladwell is right: I'm out of my mind to let my son play football. I know what the game can do to you, to him. But I also know what it can do for him. And sure that's cliché, but so are all sports stories and it doesn't mean it's not true. How do some parents abide their sons/daughters enlisting in the military? Or becoming police officers? And how is “sometimes in life you have to fight” not a cliché, too? But sometimes you do. We all do.

Before the last game of the season, Wyatt got into a fistfight with the coach's son. The kid had been hazing Wyatt a little all season, and it finally got physical. He and another boy charged Wyatt, and Wyatt took a punch in the face. Then he stepped forward and landed some of his own. I jumped in to break it up, and the coach and I made the kids shake hands. Then they palled around together on the field the rest of the afternoon.

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I'm not sure Wyatt could have handled that kind of conflict—and its resolution—before football. He stayed under control, didn't panic, didn't run away. He stood up for himself, fought his own battle. He wasn't bothered by the roughness of that moment. And when the fight was over, he was able to just let it go. In the process, he truly earned his place on that team and the respect of his teammates and coaches, himself, and yes, his dad. I told Wyatt then and more than once that season (and before we ever signed him up) not to play for me. He always told me the same thing: He's doing it for both of us. I wanted to believe him. I still do.

Someday Wyatt will ask me why I let him play. And what will I say? I'll tell him I love him, of course. I'll tell him I did my best to be a good dad, even though I didn't always. I'll tell him I wanted him to be more than I am. That he already is. That being his father is the biggest accomplishment of my life. But I've failed at that sometimes, too. And that all I ever really did right was not stop trying to be there for him, on the sidelines of his life, cheering like an idiot, hoping to God it would last forever, or only for one perfect season.

And then he'll know why.

Luke Zaleski is GQ' s research director.

This story originally appeared in the September 2017 issue.


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