re: #296 Joe Bacon 🌹

I was raised in Western Pennsylvania where Football is the national religion. Every boy is expected to try out for the team. It goes so far as for parents to hold their sons back from starting school for a year to give them an advantage.

Dad pushed me to try out for football. Well I did show up for the team tryout and a guy’s head hit my ankle at the wrong angle and fractured it.

Dad looked at the doctor bills, shook his head. Other guys goofed on Dad because I didn’t make the team. Instead I got into chess and bridge and became pretty good at both of those. Actually won a bunch of bridge tournaments paired with the football coach’s wife when I was in high school.

Started Pitt in the fall of 1973 with Tony Dorsett. Now I see Tony suffers from brain damage and is confined to a wheelchair. Makes me think I lucked out turning to chess and bridge.

There there are the number of disability claims I’ve take from professional athletes…especially bodybuilders who abused steroids and wind up with degenerative arthritis, live cancer, kidney failure, heart failure…

Football does provide a ladder for upward mobility for low income boys who otherwise would have no chance of going to college and scoring a high income job, but the reality is that vast majority of them don’t make the NFL and many don’t even earn a degree.