Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa aims the ball during a practice session at the team's training facility in Miami Gardens, Fla., on Oct. 23.Marta Lavandier/The Associated Press
When the Miami Dolphins announced that oft-concussed quarterback Tua Tagovailoa would be returning as soon as this weekend, his teammates went beyond the usual welcome back.
“I missed him so much,” said receiver Tyreek Hill. “Almost made me cry having him in the [practice] lineup, having him call all the plays, having him direct the offence. Like, just hearing his voice.”
This isn’t the way you talk about a colleague you last saw at the office five weeks ago. It’s how you talk about someone you expect to die.
In the past two years, Tagovailoa has had three concussions resulting in multiple games missed. Each has become more infamous than the last.
As a result, Tagovailoa, a 26-year-old father of two, has achieved a macabre superlative. He is the athlete most likely to be killed on the job.
After the last head shot, plenty of former players told Tagovailoa through the media that he should consider quitting. The key word is “former.” No current NFL participant or coach suggested cutting bait. There are two tribes in sports – the people doing it right now, and the ones who used to do it – and only one has opinions that matter.
We’re now just over a decade from the beginning of the concussion wars. People called it a concussion controversy, but it was never that.
For a controversy to thrive, you need good guys and bad guys. The concussion story was chock-a-block with antagonists – willfully ignorant executives, indifferent teams, compromised medics – but there was no protagonist.
No current player whose word carries any heft has spoken out on the topic. It was a morality tale with plenty of victims and no heroes. As a result, people didn’t care. They proved it by watching more football than ever.
So what the past 10 years has mostly been about is figuring out how to reintegrate maiming as part of the entertainment.
Obviously, talking to people like adults was out of the question. Football hasn’t done that since the classic intros of NFL Films – guys flying through the air as though they’ve been thrown out a seventh-storey window.
Instead, the NFL addressed its customers like children. The first instance of this was the blue tent.
What is the blue tent but a regular bit on Sesame Street or Today’s Special? It’s an enchanted place where players go to get better after they’ve had their head snapped back 90 degrees by someone running at them at 30 kilometres an hour.
What happens in the blue tent? No one knows. But once you come out of it, you’re fine. Until you’re 40 and your legs don’t work so good.
If the blue tent won’t fix it, then everyone kneels down and waits for the magical golf cart to arrive and take you to safety. Even guys who’ve suffered compound fractures understand that the etiquette is to wave assurances or – if restrained by a neck brace and backboard – flash a thumbs up as they leave. That way, no one feels guilty about forgetting about you and moving on to the next play.
The trick was convincing all the grown-up boys and girls who watch football that whatever terrible thing happens, it’s not their fault.
Guilt, and not anger, has always been the crux of this. People know that by watching football (or hockey) they are contributing in some small way to the crippling of other humans. That frisson is part of why they watch, but they don’t want to feel bad about it. Post-concussion awareness, the NFL’s main job hasn’t been stopping concussions, which is impossible. It’s been removing that guilt.
The first stab at this – ‘What problem?’ – was a legal gambit. Now that they’ve lost all the lawsuits they’re going to lose, leagues are on to the next phase – ‘Why would the decisions you make be anyone else’s fault?’
Tagovailoa is an optimal human trial for this approach.
He’s already earned about US$70-million playing football. When you put three things together – more money than anyone could spend in one lifetime + a skull like a cracked egg + the extreme likelihood of getting it cracked again – it’s clear what Tagovailoa should do.
The NFL did its part. It put him in the blue tent and on the magical golf cart. It’s given him many months off to think about it. It’s already made him fantastically rich. But he’s determined to go his own way. So whose fault is that?
This is a harder sell if we’re talking about some backup strong safety who’s broke now that he’s too badly injured to play again. The poster boy for this change needs to be someone who’s famous, rich and should know better.
Everybody in football is rowing in the same direction on this one. Tagovailoa’s own teammates are reinforcing the new concussion rubric – you broke it, you bought it.
“I’ve been telling him, ‘Hey, you need to work on sliding,’” said Miami running back Raheem Mostert. “We all joke around and laugh, but on a serious note, he knows that he has to protect himself a little bit better and moving forward, only he can control those things.”
The terms of engagement are set. When Tagovailoa is grievously injured again, the guy who hit him won’t be to blame, nor the NFL, nor anybody watching. It’s 100 per cent on him. Only he can control those things.
Tagovailoa plans to be back under centre on Sunday against the Cardinals. He’ll get a big hand when he takes the field. He will either be a little bit better about sliding or he’ll be back in the ICU or somewhere worse.
However it turns out, he will have been amply rewarded for the risks he took. When he was most vulnerable, football and football fans were there to support him in making his own choices about his own body. So some good will have come of it.