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Players grunt, coaches yell, and pads and helmets crack, creating a frightening symphony of future early-onset dementia.
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Nate Jackson (Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile)
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I am meat, traded to the highest bidder: the only bidder. Fine, I’ll be your meat. I’ll be whatever you want me to be. Just give me a helmet.
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Nate Jackson (Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile)
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Halfway through practice I stand on my own with my helmet in my hand, trying to catch my breath after a series of scout team plays. A voice startles me. —You’ll get used to it. It’ll take a few weeks but you’ll get used to it. No one realizes how bad the altitude change is until they get here.
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Nate Jackson (Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile)
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What was this? Putting aside their famous metallic-blue colors for a day, the Cowboys wore dark blue jerseys with white numerals, white pants, and white helmets with dark blue stars on the sides—their uniform from the early sixties, when they were a pitiful expansion team rather than one of the most popular sports franchises on the planet. The Chiefs wore white pants, bright red jerseys, and bright red helmets with the state of Texas outlined on either side—their attire from when they were known as the Dallas Texans of the American Football League.
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John Eisenberg (Ten-Gallon War: The NFL's Cowboys, the AFL's Texans, and the Feud for Dallas's Pro Football Future)
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This attachment has endured through the years and withstood a steady helmet-slapping of cognitive dissonance over whether I should know better than to keep following this sport as closely as I do. Scary research on posthumous football brains has been as impossible to miss as the testimonials from still-living retirees about the sad state of their bodies. (To wit: “My life sucks,” Jim Plunkett, then sixty-nine, told the San Jose Mercury News in 2017. “Everything hurts.”) If you love football, you get good
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Mark Leibovich (Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times)
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Rugby is great. The players don’t wear helmets or padding; they just beat the living daylights out of each other and then go for a beer. I love that.
Joe Thiesmann – American NFL commentator and Washington Redskins Football quarterback legend.
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Connor Murphy (Rugby Tries and Knock Ons: Tales of a college rugby player in New England and the game that gave birth to American football)
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The armor makes it more violent. It’s a dangerous sport because of the armor. The helmets are made of hard plastic and metal and that allows you to use your head like a spear.
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Nate Jackson (Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile)