6. I think you may have your holiday shopping done, but if not, and if you’re around a bookstore today, look for “
Collision of Wills,” a book by Jack Gilden on the rocky relationship between Don Shula and John Unitas in the sixties. But it’s about more than that—it’s about football in the sixties too. I had Gilden on my podcast recently, and he read a passage from his book about Vince Lombardi and his nonchalant approach to concussions (according to former Packer center Bill Curry), that really slapped me in the face:
In his second year Curry played in a preseason game against the Steelers. He was kicked in the head with a blow so violent, he dropped to the grass as if gunshot. In fact, he had just suffered another severe concussion. He attempted to regain his senses and continue playing, but when the quarterback signaled for the ball, Bill failed to snap it two times in a row.
After the game he wasn’t even capable of dressing himself. His wife had to be called to the locker room to put his clothes on for him. Later that night, at a team dinner, Lombardi checked on Curry’s heath by asking a series of questions.
“Curry, do you know where we are?”
“No, sir,” Currey answered.
“Do you remember how you got here?”
“No, sir. I sure don’t.”
Curry, who won the game?”
“We did, Coach.”
“Good!” Lombardi screamed, and everyone erupted in laughter at the sight of an intelligent young man reduced to the state of an advanced geriatric patient by a serious brain injury.
Two days later Curry still had a “splitting headache.” He was sitting in the locker room holding his head when Lombardi walked in and ordered an assistant coach to take the young player out on the field in full pads. Ray Nitschke, one of the most feared men in football, was already outside waiting for him. The two were instructed to smash each other at full speed, over and over.
7. I think that gives me second thoughts on the legacy of Lombardi. To be clear,
this is the remembrance of one man, Curry, and the other man, Lombardi, is not here to address this story. And if Curry was concussed at the time, it’s certainly possible that his memory of the events has been affected. Also, head trauma was not treated with the gravity it should have been then; we know that now. But man, that is a tough thing to read about Lombardi. No matter how you feel about him, he did have a great run coaching the Packers, and that story is disturbing.‘
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I mean, he had a bigger emotional reaction to the Patriots not ‘re-signing’ Brandin Cooks - who wasn’t a free agent - and the closure of a NYC restaurant than he did to this fucking story about the legendary, mythic Lombardi. To boot, he suggests that the story might be a figment of Curry’s imagination.
What a tour de force of Peter Kingness today’s column is.