No Game for Boys to Play Debating the Safety of Youth Football, 1945-2015
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No Game for Boys to Play Debating the Safety of Youth Football, 1945-2015 Kathleen Elizabeth Bachynski Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Kathleen Elizabeth Bachynski All rights reserved ABSTRACT No Game for Boys to Play: Debating the Safety of Youth Football, 1945-2015 Kathleen Elizabeth Bachynski Tackle football has been one of the most popular sports for boys in the United States since the mid-twentieth century. This dissertation examines how debates over the safety of football for children at the high school level and younger have changed from 1945 through the present. After World War II, the expansion of youth tackle football leagues, particularly for pre- pubescent children, fostered a new range of medical and educational concerns. Yet calls for limits on tackle football were largely obscured by the political and social culture of the Cold War, including beliefs about violence, masculinity, and competition. A broad range of groups and individuals were involved in debating the safety of youth football throughout the remainder of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. These groups included doctors, coaches, educators, lawyers, engineers, parents, athletes, journalists, and sporting goods manufacturers. Their arguments over the risks and benefits of youth football involved not only the sport’s effects on physical health, but also on social and emotional well- being. By the 1970s, researchers were applying injury epidemiology methods to studying key mechanisms involved in football injuries, while a broader consumer product safety movement contributed to the development of the first football helmet standards. Football equipment not only remained a primary focus of football safety debates, but often symbolized safety itself. Sporting goods manufacturers largely succeeded in framing the issue of football safety as a matter of individual responsibility. The social position of children and their communities shaped debates over the risks and benefits of football, including the sport’s spectator nature. By the early twentieth-first century, concerns about football-related brain injuries at all levels of the sport emerged as a topic of national debate. New medical findings and the reporting and advocacy of journalists and former athletes contributed to increasing awareness of brain trauma in the sport. Debates over the appropriate policy recommendations to make in the context of uncertainty over youth football’s long-term consequences have persisted since 1945 through the present. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures…………….……………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements………….…………………………………………………………………..iii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER 1 We Are Not a Nation of Softies: Growth of Youth Football from the Progressive Era to the Cold War…………………………..13 CHAPTER 2 The Duty of Their Elders: Doctors, Coaches, Parents, and the Framing of Youth Football’s Health Risks, 1950s-1960s….64 CHAPTER 3 Such Hazards Must Be Controlled: Epidemiology, Equipment, and Helmet Standards, 1960s-1970s………………………………117 CHAPTER 4 High School Football is a Costly Sport: Sporting Goods Manufacturers, Insurance, and Responsibility for Injury, 1950s-1980s………177 CHAPTER 5: It’s All We’ve Got: Community, Education, and Youth Football………………………………………………...…226 CHAPTER 6: This is Your Brain on Football: The Framing of a Concussion Crisis……………………………………………………………270 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………328 i List of Figures FIGURE 1. Ypsilanti, Michigan, High School Football Team, 1908............................................16 FIGURE 2. Holt High School Football Team, Holt, Michigan, 1929...........................................19 FIGURE 3. Mal Stevens Signing a Football For Two Girls, 1939................................................73 FIGURE 4. Football Injuries by Age, Security Life and Accident Company...............................74 FIGURE 5. Number of Accidental Deaths Due to Football, Metropolitan Life, 1965................100 FIGURE 6. Opening Day, Pop Warner Football, c. 1966...........................................................110 FIGURE 7. Two Young Boys Trying on Football Helmets and Pads, September 1965.............130 FIGURE 8. Visual-Field Impairment Related to Football Headgear and Face Guards...............143 FIGURE 9. Sample of CPSC In-Depth Case Reports of Football Injuries.................................157 FIGURE 10. Fitting of Protective Football Equipment...............................................................173 FIGURE 11. Stitching Footballs, Draper-Maynard Sporting Goods, c. 1900-1910....................179 FIGURE 12. Leather Cutting Room, Draper-Maynard Sporting Goods, c. 1900-1910..............180 FIGURE 13. Total Sporting Goods Sales, 1958-1969 (in billions of US dollars).......................185 FIGURE 14. Rawlings Advertisement for Football Equipment, 1959........................................189 FIGURE 15. October 1955 Cover of Boys’ Life Magazine........................................................192 FIGURE 16. Top 5 Activities by Gross Accidents, New York State, 1958-1959.......................204 FIGURE 17. Coach Dave Vannicelli with King of Prussia Indians............................................243 FIGURE 18. King of Prussia “Injuns on An Engine,” 1963.......................................................245 FIGURE 19. Lincoln-Larimer Panthers, December 1969...........................................................261 FIGURE 20. Structural Changes to Primate Brain Following Concussion.................................280 FIGURE 21. Football Head Impact Exposure Data.....................................................................313 FIGURE 22. “This is Your Brain on Football,” New York Daily News Cover, 2016.................321 ii Acknowledgements This may be the most enjoyable portion of the dissertation to write. I am deeply indebted to more people than I can name. Without their wisdom, generosity, care and support, I could not have completed this project. I am grateful above all to my extraordinary committee: David Rosner, James Colgrove, Betsy Blackmar, Ron Bayer, and Jennifer Hirsch. The commitment they showed to my doctoral education at every stage was exceptional. I am particularly thankful to David Rosner, my sponsor, for giving me the immeasurable gift of the opportunity and freedom to follow my intellectual interests. James Colgrove, my committee chair, provided every possible guidance and insight an advisee could ask for, from how to write a dissertation proposal to how to carefully fine tune chapters. Similarly, every time I met with Betsy Blackmar, from preparing for orals to discussing how to structure this project, I left her office feeling empowered and supported as a young scholar. The origins of this project can in many ways be traced back to Ron Bayer’s course on public health ethics, where I became increasingly fascinated by the adoption of protective helmets in sports as well as the limitations of this equipment. From encouraging me to turn that first class paper into a journal article, to helping me imagine this project from start to finish, Ron’s office door was always open. Jennifer Hirsch offered me many key insights into the importance of gender and sexuality, and encouraged me to think in new ways about these essential themes in the study of sport and health. I could not imagine a committee more supportive of both my academic and non-academic pursuits—with several committee members even attending a music performance I participated in on campus. I cannot begin to repay what I iii owe to all of my committee members, other than hoping that one day I might be able to serve as such a mentor to others. The Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health has been a wonderful intellectual home. In addition to my committee members I am immensely grateful to Merlin Chowkwanyun, Amy Fairchild, Dave Johns, NiTanya Nedd, Gerry Oppenheimer, and Kavita Sivaramakrishnan for their generosity and advice on many sections of this dissertation. The faculty members of the Department of Sociomedical Sciences have been incredibly supportive of my work and intellectual development throughout my doctoral education, and I am fortunate to have received multidisciplinary training from such a remarkable group of experts in such a range of fields and methods. I am also grateful for the intellectual and financial support I received from Columbia’s Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention. This included opportunities to share my work with injury prevention experts, as well as the support of a R49 CE002096 grant from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Center for Injury Epidemiology and Prevention at Columbia University Medical Center. I am especially grateful to Dr. Guohua Li for his many generous insights, and to Barbara Lang for the fantastic administrative support she offered. I am very thankful to Connie Nathanson, Peter Messeri, James Colgrove, and Adrienne Ball, with whom I worked on a WT Grant Foundation-funded project throughout the course of this dissertation. The opportunity to work on this research not only help me to pay my bills throughout the course of this dissertation, but also introduced me to sociological research methods and helped me think in many new and important ways about my own project. I am also iv very