So you mean to tell us that it'll take 120+ years for the first on field death
As long as professional sports provide poor blacks with an outlet to instantly better lives...Football isn't going anywhere
No I'm saying within the next 10 to 15 years a hit will kill someone on an NFL or Division 1 field, and that will be it for football.
http://grantland.com/features/profe...-revisiting-al-lucas-death-eight-years-later/
Football’s Worst Nightmare
Eight years ago Al Lucas was killed from an on-field hit during an arena football game. How would a similar tragedy today affect the NFL?
by ROBERT WEINTRAUB ON APRIL 16, 2013
Roger Goodell and I have the same nightmare. In it, an NFL player is killed during a game.
Unlike the Commish, who was revealed to have this fear (the NFL and Goodell both disputed the assertion) in a
recent profile in
ESPN The Magazine, there is nothing figurative about my bad dream. It attacks my sleep periodically, usually in the summer rather than during football season, as if my subconscious is reminding me just how much the NFL means to me.
The doomed player in my nightmare isn’t one of my beloved Cincinnati Bengals. He wears a generic dark jersey that could be any team’s uniform. He is catching a pass, so he’s probably a wide receiver, though because I can never make out his number I suppose he could be a tight end or a running back. He jumps for a high throw, and as he comes down he is blasted on either side. One defender hits him high, one defender hits him low.
And then he’s literally ripped in half by the force of the hits. Right after this point, I always wake with a start, bile rising in my esophagus.
I relate this gruesome glimpse into my subconscious because I know precisely when the dreams began. It was eight years ago, when a professional player — a former NFL defensive lineman — suffered a fatal spine injury on the field.
His name was Al Lucas and he played defensive tackle for the Arena Football League’s Los Angeles Avengers. He died on the hard carpet of the Staples Center eight years ago this week, on April 10, 2005. He was 26 years old. No, he wasn’t torn asunder by opponents. Instead, a relatively unremarkable collision took his life. Nothing about it was unique to arena football and its roller derby–esque format. It was the kind of routine collision that happens thousands upon thousands of times at every level of the game across the country, from spring practice to summer hell week to autumn glory.
And that scared me most of all.
Footage of Lucas’s death does not exist on the Internet. NBC Sports, which held the AFL television rights, had its cameras elsewhere that Sunday afternoon, leaving the visual record of the game in the hands of a couple Fox Sports West cameramen shooting from the end zone. A friend of mine who works for HLN found additional video in the Turner digital vault, a contemporary report on the incident filed from the Fox affiliate in Lucas’s hometown of Macon, Georgia. When he showed me the tape, I steeled myself for an image as graphic as my nightmare.
But it happens too quickly, lost in a sea of bodies, for me to realize that I am watching a man die.
The Avengers were hosting the New York Dragons that Sunday afternoon. Lucas played special teams in addition to defensive line, so there he was after a first-quarter L.A. touchdown, hauling his 300 pounds downfield on kickoff coverage. Less than five minutes had run off the clock, and many fans were still finding their seats as the play unfolded.
In the video, Dragons kick returner Corey Johnson heads up the left side, with teammate Mike Horacek directly in front of him, running interference. Lucas, wearing no. 76, ducks low to get past a blocker and collides with both Horacek and Johnson at about the 15-yard line, well clear of the Arena Football League’s sponsored dasher boards.
Johnson’s knee and upper thigh smash into Lucas’s head at precisely the wrong angle. It certainly appears to be a harmless encounter. “I didn’t see or hear anything that was different than what I’ve seen a million times,” Avengers coach Ed Hodgkiss said at a press conference the next day.
But Horacek knew something was wrong. On the video he lands heavily facing upfield, then whips his head around as though he heard Lucas cry out, or worse. Johnson was too stunned to notice Lucas, the swirl of the hit and the crowd creating a white noise that blotted his senses. “The impact was just … unbelievable,” Johnson says today, letting out a big sigh. “I was upended, I felt this heavy direct blow, and I was pretty shook up, and gimpy.”
1
The previous week, Lucas had gone down and stayed down in a similar position — on his back, arms up high on his chest — and the only thing he hurt was his pinkie finger. So there wasn’t much worry when Lucas was slow to get up. Some even joshed him a bit for going down so easily again. “I told him to suck it up and let’s go,” lamented teammate Greg Hopkins the next day. “But it wasn’t the same scenario.”
The Staples Center fell silent. L.A. team doctors ran out to attend to Lucas, not realizing he was taking his final breaths.
The first clue this was worse than a regular injury was when team doctors removed Lucas’s facemask from his helmet. Neck and head injury protocol required the medical team to immobilize him, and that made the process easier. The macabre tableau probably looked familiar to many fans. Lucas was backboarded and hoisted onto a stretcher. Other players formed a prayer circle. A motorized cart came out to wheel Lucas to a waiting ambulance, which rushed him to nearby California Hospital Medical Center.
The crowd gave Lucas an ovation as he was taken from the field. But there was no thumbs-up in response.
The coroner’s office would later determine the cause of death as blunt force trauma to the spinal cord. It’s a disquieting diagnosis, since the entire sport essentially boils down to blunt force trauma — to the spine or the head or the knee or any other vulnerable body part. In this case, the cervical vertebrae that protected the parts of Lucas’s spinal cord adjacent to the skull were demolished, and the cord’s connection to the brain was fatally compromised. Technically, Lucas was still alive while sprawled on the field, but once Johnson’s leg struck Lucas’s head and neck, it was only a matter of time before he would die.
It has become a cliché in these tragic accounts to proclaim the fallen athlete some sort of saint. Well, this story isn’t going to buck that trend, because everyone agrees that Al Lucas was a hell of a guy.
They are running out of things to dedicate to him back in Macon. There is a scholarship fund in his name,
2 and his old Little League field is now named after him. A few weeks ago, on a blustery March afternoon, the field house at Northeast High School, Lucas’s alma mater, was renamed in his memory. “It’s something we always talked about, being honored in this way,” says his brother, Lenny Lucas. Surely he didn’t mean posthumously.
They called him Big Luke, a no-brainer nickname for a kid who wore size 15 shoes at age 13. He got to his adult height and weight, 6-foot-1 and 300 pounds, while he was still in high school, but it was a softer three bills, not yet hardened by a collegiate weight lifting regimen.
Big Luke was a dominant defensive force at Troy State when the Trojans were still in Division 1-AA, just before they moved to the big leagues and began recruiting stars like DeMarcus Ware and Leodis McKelvin. Lucas was good enough to win the Buck Buchanan Award,
3 given annually to the best 1-AA defensive player, as a senior in 1999. But when he went to the NFL combine, the Cincinnati Bengals team doctor found that Lucas’s left leg was incrementally shorter than the right, causing his legs to bow ever so slightly, and this convinced teams not to draft him.
The Steelers brought Lucas in as a free agent. His father, David, told me that Al outplayed Pittsburgh third-round pick Kendrick Clancy throughout the preseason. “We drove out to see him play in Dallas,” David says, “and he was bustin’ those motherfukkers.” But Pittsburgh had invested money and organizational ego in Clancy, and that gave him an advantage that Al Lucas’s solid play couldn’t overcome.
Carolina picked up Lucas when the Steelers cut him loose. He was a rotation tackle for two seasons with the Panthers, recording more than 30 tackles, including a sack. He had his moments in the league, most of them violent. “I saw him bend Orlando Pace backward and mess up his knee,” says Al’s older half-brother, David Jr. “Al hit Ricky Williams so hard he drove him back five yards and gave him a concussion.” But after the 2001 season, he was cut again and went home to Macon.
It was a tough time for Lucas — for the first time in his life someone had told him he wasn’t good enough at sports. His father convinced him to take up karate to increase his flexibility, and Lucas helped coach back at Northeast High. But there was a void. “He was sitting around the house moping,” David remembers.
Then the Arena Football League called. The Tampa Bay Storm needed a lineman, and David pushed and prodded his son to accept their offer of $3,000 a game. “I think they gave him some more money under the table, to be honest with you,” David says with a certain pride. Whatever the inducements, Al joined the team with the season under way and transformed the Storm defense. In a league devoted to tumult, he brought order. Tampa Bay won the 2003 Arena Bowl and Al became a hot commodity. Los Angeles offered him a three-year deal to move west, which he did in 2004.
“He absolutely loved the Arena League because of the close contact with fans,” says Al’s widow, De’Shonda Lucas. She started dating him after they took middle school Spanish together. She fell in love with his sense of humor — Al wore a lime-green suit to their junior prom. They were married in July 2004, just after Arena Bowl XVIII. By then, the couple already had a daughter, Mariah. She was just more than a year old when Al ran downfield to cover that kick at the Staples Center.
After Al Lucas was removed from the field, the game continued. Everyone present realized Lucas had been severely hurt, but official word of his death wasn’t given to the players or coaches during halftime.
AFL commissioner David Baker hadn’t planned on arriving at Staples Center until late in the third quarter that day. He was watching his son, then-USC star tackle (and current Atlanta Falcon) Sam Baker, practice at the L.A. Coliseum that afternoon. But Lucas’s severe injury forced him to leave early. He arrived at the game just before halftime, and with no official information at hand, Baker let the teams play the second half.
Johnson remembers being told in the Dragons locker room that Lucas would be OK. “It was horrible,” he says today. “It was really disrespectful. We were lied to, and we should never have played on.”
But Baker told the media the day after Lucas’s death that the Avengers, from owner Casey Wasserman
4 to Coach Hodgkiss to the players, said they had wanted to continue, and he was merely honoring that.
With about five minutes left in the third quarter, Avengers team doctor Luga Podesta called with the news: Al had been pronounced dead at 1:28 p.m., Pacific Standard Time.
Baker now had to decide if the teams should play the fourth quarter. He allowed the game to finish. The Avengers won, 66-35. Staples Center was full of kids, as it often was for AFL games, and Baker didn’t want them to discover over a public-address announcement that a player had died. “The decision was entirely mine,” he told the press.
5
The teams learned of Lucas’s fate in the locker room. The fans were left to discover what had happened on their own. Many suspected something was amiss when the postgame autograph session, a league staple, was canceled for the first time anyone could recall.
“I went home and hugged my son,” Baker said at the time.
David Lucas, who had just lost
his son, was tracked down by a local TV crew in Macon. When asked for his reaction, Lucas broke down and wept uncontrollably.
". Men have always been around, but u will not notice them if you are heterosexual.
when I was growing up we had to do an organized sport or other physical activities for every season
