Editor's note: This article was originally published in November 2022. Thomas Lake's views on football have not changed.
cnn
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On Saturday afternoon, as third-ranked Georgia played top-ranked Tennessee in the game of the year so far in college football, I wasn't watching.
In years past, I would have been on the couch with my brother, eating pizza and wings, yelling at the TV. Instead, I hopped in the minivan with my wife and kids and we headed to Zoo Atlanta.
We arrived a few minutes before the start, when many people were leaving. Who goes to the zoo during the Georgia game? It turns out that we do it together with an Amish family, the women in bonnets and the men in straw hats.
It was a warm, cloudy afternoon, with yellow leaves falling from the pecan trees. A zookeeper told us that there are 100,000 muscles and tendons in an elephant's trunk. I texted my brother to apologize.
“I miss you,” I wrote. “This is just something I'm trying.”
There were lions on a rock, all brothers, we were told, and two were asleep, and the third was standing on the edge of the rock, and was still roaring. It was a lonely sound. We move away but we continue to hear that distant and lonely roar.
I could imagine the sound of the crowd, the brass of the band, the beat of the drums, the feeling that I was part of something, a joyful participant in one of our nation's last unifying rituals. A sport both uniquely American and inherently violent.
I still remember when Tim Krumrie broke his leg. I was eight years old watching Super Bowl XXIII at my grandparents' house, and Krumrie, a defensive lineman for the Cincinnati Bengals, took a step in the wrong direction while trying to make a tackle and suffered a compound fracture. They showed the replay on television and we saw the leg break again.
The game continued. The game always continues. That was the lesson I learned when I was 8 years old. Nothing will ever stop the game.
My brother and I were watching two years later when Bo Jackson, one of the greatest athletes of all time, dislocated and fractured his left hip during a playoff game against the Bengals. Jackson's football career was over, but the game was not. The Raiders won.
Later that year, Detroit Lions offensive lineman Mike Utley broke his neck when a Rams player fell on him. Although Utley gave a thumbs up as he left the field, he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life. The game continued. The Lions won 21-10.
We continue looking. Our teams were the Georgia Bulldogs and the Atlanta Falcons. I clenched my jaw. I gritted my teeth. I screamed. There was also that deep, guttural sound, that command that came up most often in those moments when the other team's quarterback had the ball, eluded our defenders, and looked about to throw or run for a score.
“COME ON!” I would growl. “Get it!”
It was third-and-goal, the game was tied, and Washington's Robert Griffin III was racing toward the end zone. But the Falcons got him. Linebacker Sean Weatherspoon lowered his shoulder and slammed Griffin's head into it. “Legal hit, good hit, great play by Sean Weatherspoon,” said one television analyst. Griffin left the game. Suffering a concussion, he was too disoriented to know the outcome. The game continued. The Falcons won.
By then, it was 2012 and I knew what football could do to a player's brain. Former Bears quarterback Jim McMahon was just 53 years old and already showing signs of dementia. His former teammate Dave Duerson, who suffered from blurred vision and memory loss, fatally shot herself in the chest at age 50. Postmortem tests showed he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a rare brain disorder that appears to be caused by blows to the head.
The NFL reached a $765 million concussion settlement with more than 4,500 former players and developed a new protocol to detect and treat concussions. The game continued.
Year after year, I told myself I was going to quit. And then September came and I couldn't stay away. “COME ON!” I snarled at Georgia defenders chasing Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa during the national championship game in 2018. “Get it!”
He was caught on the first down, forcing a 16-yard loss, but he got up. On 2nd and 26, he threw deep for the winning touchdown. My son cried.
In September, while playing for the Miami Dolphins, Tagovailoa was tackled to the ground by Bengals lineman Josh Tupou. I found out later. It was a horrible sight. Tagovailoa lay on his back, his fingers stiff and crossed at odd angles, an apparent sign of a brain injury. The game continued. The Bengals won.
This time I wasn't looking, because my trial separation from football had finally begun. I had been inching towards this decision for a long time. When the Bulldogs' Lewis Cine hit Florida's Kyle Pitts so hard in a November 2020 game that I thought one or both of them might be dead, I turned off the television to protect our children.
Even after that, I kept watching until early 2022, when I finally saw the Bulldogs win a championship. It seemed like a good time to leave.
Saturday afternoon at the zoo, while the Georgia-Tennessee game was going on, I saw a green anaconda motionless in shallow water. I learned that spitting red cobras can shoot a stream of venom into the eyes of an enemy several meters away. My son didn't seem to miss soccer. He was captivated by reptiles. I was there but not really there. Back outside, we heard the lion roar again.
Text messages piling up on the phone in my pocket, running commentary on the game, sharp and funny observations from people I knew and loved about events I wasn't aware of. Yes, I felt regret. No, I didn't check the score on my phone.
We left the zoo and headed to Shake Shack. I walked in and looked ahead, avoiding the game on the suspended televisions, although I did catch a flash of Tennessee orange in my peripheral vision.
At this point it was already clear. As much as I missed football, football didn't miss me. One week in October, the five highest-rated television broadcasts were either NFL games or pre- or post-game shows. The game would continue. Old players and fans would leave and new ones would replace them.
Somewhere there were Tim Krumrie and Bo Jackson, Mike Utley and Robert Griffin, men who walked off the field and men who were carried off on stretchers. They were sacrificed for me, and perhaps for you, in this country's most popular form of live entertainment.
We drove home and I went to my office to start writing. Through the window I could see that it was getting dark. More yellow leaves fell from the pecan trees. The room was very quiet. It was almost 6:30 and I didn't know the score, or who was winning, or who, if anyone, was broke.
