I love pro football so it pains me to write this. But obviously it doesn’t cause me nearly as much pain as the players suffer.

It’s essentially blood sport. The game is great for spectators, but not so much for the participants.

I can remember when I was in eighth grade and the guidance counselor asked us to write down what we wanted to do as a profession and I put down “professional football player.” At the time, it didn’t matter to me that I was on the 105 pound football team, which meant that I tipped the scales at less than that. That was what I wanted to do when I “grew up.”

Well, in many ways I’m glad that didn’t happen. The average career of a professional football player is less than four years. I read the other day that despite all the money players make, one in six NFL players goes bankrupt.

Last week Aaron Hernandez was found guilty of murder. That can’t be good for the game that many people think has surpassed baseball as the national sport.

And there was the recent domestic abuse scandals that rocked the game.

Defections

Chris Borland of the San Francisco 49ers recently retired at the age of 24, one year into a promising career.

Borland made his choice after speaking with concussion experts and former players.

Borland was the fourth player at the age of 30 or younger to retire in the week that he announced, although none of the others specifically attributed their retirements to head trauma injuries. The other three include Patrick Willis, Jason Worilds and Jake Locker.

Concussions

Concussion is a change in how the brain functions, in how it works. It’s not a structural injury so much as it’s a functional one.

A TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) happens when the brain bounces around and twists in the skull, stretching and damaging it.

What many people may not realize is you can have a brain injury without losing consciousness. And, even if a brain injury doesn’t show up on a CT scan, you may still have a concussion.

Just Say No

Athletes and former athletes who wouldn’t want their sons to play football include:

LeBron James – a professional basketball player who spoke out about football recently. Lebron said “Only basketball, baseball and soccer are allowed in my house.” When asked whether his decision was because of the health dangers to football, he replied “Yes.”

Brett Favre – He has made his thoughts about the physicality of the game known. He said “In some respects, I’m almost glad I don’t have a son…”

Troy Aikman- He would know. He’s had 7-8 concussions in his career.  He said “If I had a 10 year-old boy, I don’t know that I’d be real inclined to encourage him to go play football in light of what we are learning from head injury.”

Jeremichael Finley- in 2013, he took a violent hit on the field. Afterwards, his five year-old son said to him, “Daddy, I don’t want you to play football anymore.”

Terry Bradshaw – former Pittsburgh Steelers star quarterback, now a broadcaster, once said on the Tonight Show, “If I had a son today, and I would say this to all our audience and our viewers out there, I would not let him play football.”

Drew Brees- still an active player, played for a team that spent a year battling Bountygate. He said “It’s obviously very serious stuff.”

Kurt Warner – Super Bowl winning quarterback of the St. Louis Rams, said the idea of his sons playing football “scares me” and he thinks the risk of injuries is serious enough that his preference would be that his boys not play.

This is not a complete list of players with concerns about head injuries.

Signs of concussions

Some signs of concussions include:

• Difficulty sleeping
• Headaches that get worse
• Weakness, numbness or decreased coordination
• Repeated vomiting
• confusion
• and there are others

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A cognitive evaluation may be performed and the person may check out fine, but then 15 minutes later they’re not. Or, as Emmitt Smith says, 15 years after their playing career is over will really tell the story.

The bottom line is parents should know the signs and symptoms of concussion. For example, does their child often get headaches?

Parents are concerned. Pop Warner, the Little League of football, was down 10% over the past two years.

Many people think Borland’s retirement is the beginning of the end for football.

The game is at a crossroads.

Last week I posted about college basketball, baseball, golf and running. Are there any other sports? I never used to think so. But of course there are! For instance, there’s bicycling. And you thought I was going to say football.

My bicycling career has not been all that illustrious. When I was in high school, I rode my bike over to my friend Joe Zangari’s house in Havertown, PA. It was before the ADA law which made it mandatory to have all curbs wheelchair accessible. I remember I tried to “jump” a curb on Haverford Road in Ardmore, PA to get out of the way of traffic and I wiped out. Got road rash – which I think is better than road rage.

As I recall I had a 5 speed Schwin Sting Ray bike that my parents paid a lot of money for. My friends at the time were either jealous or unimpressed because they intentionally left me in the dust when we went on road trips. I ended up selling the thing to my friend’s brother after his father talked me down in price. It was my first real lesson in business. I’m sure I wasn”t dealing from a position of strength. And when I wa s in college I got hit by a car while riding a new bike.

Over the last 5-10 years, in what seems like every spring, I would get the bikes out (my wife’s and mine), take them to the shop and have them “tune em up” for about $120 or so. Then I might ride it once or twice the rest of the year. It was a waste. It reminded me of how a college friend of mine and I used to get our fishing licenses, go on opening day and then not go again until opening day the following year.

What has changed
Now cyclists ride not on sidewalks but on main roads with the traffic. The equipment is a lot better and everybody wears a helmet. And helmets have gotten lighter, even in the last 5 years.

And “back in the day” there was no Google. So you actually had to ask other people questions, regardless of how stupid they (the questions, not the other people) were. I usually felt like my questions were so dumb, so they often never got asked.

This year
Instead of paying $120 to the bike shop this past weekend, this year I thought I would do something different and work on it myself.

The first thing I had to do was put air in the tires. I found out there are Presta valves and Schrader valves. I discovered I knew very little about Presta valves, so I learned about them on the internet (thanks YouTube).

And what do you do with screeching brakes? How do you stop that horrendous noise? Well, I learned how: 1) wipe the rim with rubbing alcohol, 2) If that doesn’t work, clean the brake pads. 3) If that doesn’t work, use fine grade sandpaper on the brake pads. 4) If all those things don’t work, replace the brake pads. Fortunately, it appears as if it only took me three steps instead of four before the issue was resolved.
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Then it was on to the second bike. I had to replace the inner tube on it because it wouldn’t hold air. And, fortunately, we had an unused tube in the garage, still in the box. It even had the proper valve. Everything else pretty well checked out with the second bike.

Time to ride.

Not quite.

I noticed my helmet was swimming around on my head. I later found out new ones range from about $40 to about $250 and the only real difference is in how light they are. I’ll have to think about how much I want to spend.

Finally, after all this, I went to the bike shop under the guise of buying a kickstand. I really just wanted to look around the shop without being pestered into buying something. I thought perhaps they would throw the bike up on the rack and look it over and I could get some advice. And, sure enough, they did. And I got some advice for the price of a kickstand. Twelve dollars sure beats $120.

Questions I still have:

Can you ride a bike the wrong way down a one-way street? Is that legal?

Do I have to wait for the light to change at intersections?

How do I do a “wheelie” on a full size bike like I used to do on a 20 inch bike?

Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think I want to know the answer to that last question – given my prior track record.

Twenty-One year old Jordan Spieth made history yesterday as he was the first golfer ever to go nineteen under par during play at the 79^th Masters in Augusta, Georgia. He finished at eighteen under for the tournament and won by four strokes.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/golf/mastersaugusta/11531967/Jordan-Spieth-10-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-21-year-old-Masters-champion.html

Spieth shot 64 & 66 the first 2 days. He held off Justin Rose and Phil Mickelson, who had also battled each other at the U.S. Open at Merion in 2013. Rose eventually won at Merion but neither he nor Phil could catch the elusive Spieth. Jordan was the first to go wire to wire in 39 years.

The Masters, which was broadcast to 200 countries around the world, is the first of four major golf tournaments during the course of the year. The others include the U.S. Open, The British Open and The PGA Championship.

The tournament got under way when Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus hit ceremonial first tee shots at 7:40 am on Thursday.

The old guard made their presence known but the next generation is officially here

Tiger Woods, who showed signs of his old self, injured his wrist hitting a ball that was resting on a tree stump. He popped the bone back in his wrist and kept on playing. Ben Crenshaw played in his 44^th – and last – Masters, having won it twice but not since 1995.

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Their “backup singers” include Ricky Fowler, Hunter Mahan and Hideki Matsuyama. There appeared to be a lot of young patrons 18 and younger at the event.

Spieth showed some teeth

According to “linguist” Nick Faldo, Spieth is German for speedy and successful. Jordan showed a lot of poise during all four rounds.

Spieth, who seemed very self-conscious about his receding hairline every time he took his hat off, is from deep in the heart of Texas (Dallas) and is a huge Cowboys and country music fan. One Texas legend (Crenshaw) stepped off the stage and another one stepped onto it.

Spieth has some interesting people in his life. His grandfather is an orchestra conductor. His father does not play golf but played baseball at Lehigh University. His sister Ellie, who is Jordan’s hero, has special needs.  And his caddie is a former sixth grade math teacher. The golfer said he saw his family and friends next to the 18^th green and that calmed him as he sealed the victory.

Spieth left the University of Texas early so he didn’t get his bachelor’s degree. But now he has his Masters.

I’m not going to run in the Narberth Run to beat Cystic Fibrosis this year. There’s no doubt it is for a great cause. The truth is, I didn’t start training early enough. It will be held two weeks from tomorrow. Anything you can do to support the event would be appreciated.

https://vimeo.com/76925567

I did run a marathon at age 50, but I’d been training for the event for almost 3 years. The seed was planted in the summer of 2005. I’d planned to do it that fall, so it would just be a matter of picking the date and doing it, I figured. I spoke with a friend who had run a number of marathons, and told him my plan. Fortunately he didn’t laugh at me (at least not out loud). He told me that it would be very hard to train for an event that I believe, at the time, was less than 3 months away and then “just do it.”

I’d run a 5k race at the end of that summer. It was my first race in over 20 years. I’d run a 5k or two decades before, but none since then. I’d even run a half marathon around that time (1983 or so). But back then I was in my twenties.

Training

Then, after training at a distance of about 5k to five miles, one day when I was out in San Francisco, not only did I run those incredible hills, but I also ran about 11 or 12 miles, all the way from Union Square down to the Golden Gate Bridge and through Golden Gate Park. It was too much and I pulled something. So I hung up my running shoes for the year.

The next year I ran more sensibly. I worked my way up in races from a 5k to a 5-mile to a 10k to a 10-mile and then finished off the summer by running in the Philadelphia Distance Run, a half marathon, which I ran in mid-September. After that I retired from running for the year.

Then, in 2007, I had more ambitious plans. I started running at the beginning of the year, training just about every weekend. The day I ran 16 miles for the first time, I felt very beat up. My hip, my knee and my back all hurt. I’d suffered setbacks before but gotten over them. All of a sudden, seven weeks from a marathon I’d registered for, my prospects for my running in it looked pretty grim.

With a scheduled half marathon coming up in two weeks, I joined The Bryn Mawr Running Club. The “guru” there, Bob, devised a plan for me to continue to train for the marathon, but I was dubious. The plan called for my taking a weekend off, then doing the half marathon the following weekend, then 10 to12 miles the week after that, 18 miles the following week, 10 to12 the week after that, then 20, then two final weeks of 10 to12 mile runs, all supported by a half hour of running during the week.

Well, it must’ve worked because I felt like I was ready for the big day when it arrived.

Marathon weekend

Because all the nearby hotels were full of runners, volunteers and their families, my wife and I, plus our two dogs had to stay about 40 minutes away. I grabbed a ride from our hotel and rode in with two schoolteachers from upstate New Jersey. They were each running the half marathon, which, I soon found out, most of the 6000 runners that day had registered for. I figured that of those 6000 runners, only about a third ran the full marathon and some ran it as a relay team.

Race day
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The weather on the day of the race was ideal for running. It had drizzled early in the morning, but stopped. The temperature was in the 50’s with a mild breeze. The sky was overcast, not too cool and not too hot.

The origin of the marathon is quite interesting. The modern Athens marathon commemorates the run of the soldier Pheidippides from a battlefield at the site of the town of Marathon, Greece, to Athens, in 490 BC, bringing news of a Greek Victory over the Persians. Legend has it that Pheidippides delivered the momentous message “Niki!” (victory), then collapsed and died.

As the (New Jersey) race started, hoodies and other outergarments started flying over the sea of humanity to the sidelines. The horn blew and we were off, some more ambitiously than others. The scenery was actually quite pleasant, much better than I’d expected. It was almost all flat, except when we ran on a bridge that went over a causeway, which was lined with a myriad of boats. Although crowd support was certainly adequate, I tried not to get too caught up in it. I wanted to run my own race and stay focused.

As the great Yogi Berra said, “90% of the game is half mental.” Because I ran the first half in less than two hours, I thought I was going to break four hours. Although that wasn’t my goal, I thought I’d go for it anyway. So I picked up my pace a little at around the 14 mile mark. In retrospect, this turned out to be a mistake. I think I got a little greedy.

I felt okay until until around mile 18 or 19. It’s well known that many marathoners “hit a wall” around that distance. Although I never felt like I hit a wall per se, I struggled pretty much the entire last quarter of the race.

Along the way, I saw quite a few walkers, a number of people off the road (including one guy who appeared to be vomiting), several on stretchers and various other versions of self-inflicted human suffering. I must say it was quite a phenomenon.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t experience Pheidippides’ fate, but it certainly was no walk in the park, either. In the New Jersey marathon on Sunday, April 29, 2007, in Long Branch, New Jersey, I crossed the finish line in 4:16:25. However, because there were approximately 6000 runners, I didn’t get to the starting line for almost 5 minutes after the race started. So, the computer chip I wore around my ankle (as did everyone else) registered my time at 4:12:17.

The aftermath

I came in 795^th overall, 576^th out of 1020 men and 56^th among 120 in my age category (50-54 years old). I ran the first half in 1:54:59 and the second half in 2:17:19. It was my first marathon.

There were some interesting signs along the way. A lot of “Run, (runner’s name), run” signs. One I liked was “Earn Your Shower.” I will say the shower and hot tub afterwards was one of the most pleasurable things I’ve ever experienced in my life.

Which brings me to my favorite sign, which, I must say, choked me up a little. It said something like “Running shoes $78; gym fees $120; Gatorade $3; being cancer free for 5 years: priceless.”

I’ve been a lifelong Phillies fan. Can you tell from the picture? I can remember being about six years old (not sure exactly how old I was in the photo ) listening on my back patio to games between the Phillies and the Cubs. Or the Washington Senators. Or perhaps the Houston Colt 45s. I distinctly remember (Mr. Cub) Ernie Banks’ name being mentioned with reverence. Roberto Clemente, too. And Don Demeter and Johnny Callison for the Phillies.

Well, years have come and gone and another baseball season is upon us. Many players have become coaches or managers or passed on to the dugout in the sky. Many of the stadiums as well as the grass they played on are history. Some of the parks have gone from real to synthetic and back.

I believe only Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium are still around from the early 60s. I miss those old shrines like Candlestick Park, Forbes Field and Connie Mack Stadium.

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I was thinking about this on opening day (Monday). My friend Hugh cut his arm with a utility blade while opening up a bag of fertilizer. Required 10 stitches. He told me about it the next day. He, too, was bleeding Phillies red.

I’m not expecting a whole lot from the Phils this year, but, as long as they finish ahead of the Mets, I’m okay with it. Play ball!

This is my initial blog post.

I will be posting here often.

Therefore, you’ll be hearing more from me.
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In other words, stay tuned.

About the Author

Frank Felsburg is an author, publisher and entrepreneur. He can be reached via email: frank@spokenandwrittenwords.com or mobile phone: 484.680.0962.