Then the trio repeats: “Blew out both Achilles.” “Separated shoulder.” “Broken collarbone: Tape it up and back in the game.”
Playwrights KJ Sanchez and Jenny Mercein based the play on interviews with former professional football players, their families and their fans. They took on the brutal culture of football and the growing controversy surrounding concussions –- and tried to square that with their own fandom.
“We started to talk about how many conflicted feelings we had about loving the game, now understanding the significance of the damage that the game does,” Sanchez says.
In the early 2000s, more and more retired football players began reporting symptoms of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Others were showing personality changes, rage and depression: signs of a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. A diagnosis can be confirmed only post-mortem, by examining the dissected brain.
“When this information started coming out, I was like, ‘Wow. This is something I might have to deal with later on,’ ” says Dwight Hicks, who spent six years playing defense for the San Francisco 49ers in the early '80s, and now portrays a retired football pro in the play. “It wasn’t scary. Until some of the prominent players, guys that I knew, some of the guys that I played against, started to have this problem.”
The play picks up where investigative journalism and research journals leave off, delving into a cultural conversation of what it means to be a football fan, and what the game says about America, in light of emerging science that reveals lasting brain damage from repeated hits to the head.
Intense Conversations About Violence of the Game
Sanchez says this is not the first time football has confronted this identity crisis.
“There have been intense conversations about the violence of the game, the brutality of the game, and the safety of the players,” she says. “Through every generation, we knew what the risks were.”
Throughout the play, there are breaks in the narrative where the cast recites historic milestones and debates. Sanchez based these on archival documents and news articles.
“1869! Rutgers and Princeton play the first college football game!” one actor says, while the chorus marches to John Philip Sousa. “1892! William ‘Pudge’ Heffelfinger gets paid $500 to play and professional football is born!”
In 1905, 19 players died playing football. The president of Harvard at the time, Charles Eliot, wanted to banish the game.
The Eliot character declares, “Today’s football is a boy-killing, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport!"
Then, Teddy Roosevelt, president of the United States, steps into the debate.
“The bruising nature of football instills manly virtues and builds strong bodies, when with each passing day America risks becoming less rugged and virile," says the actor playing Roosevelt. "Surely we can minimize the danger without having to play the game on too ladylike a basis."
One American response to saving the game was to improve the protective gear players wore. But Sanchez says making better helmets is part of what led to more serious injuries.
“Because the better the helmet, the more invincible the player,” she says. “You are more likely to turn yourself into a human javelin."
She wrote a team physician into the play to explain how these head injuries happen. CAT scans of brains flash on a video screen behind her.
“What happens is, the brain, it’s almost like a yolk inside of an eggshell,” she says. Even with the protection of a helmet, “the yolk is still going to hit on one side of the shell and then the opposite side of the shell.”
It’s the buildup of those smaller subconcussive hits that leads to lasting injuries.
“So a better helmet does not keep your brain from sloshing around inside of its skull,” Sanchez says.
Every holiday, Sanchez and her husband watch highlight reels of the best football plays. At various times in her life, she has rooted for the Green Bay Packers, the New England Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys.
“One of my first girlhood crushes was on Tom Landry,” she admits, laughing, “which says way too much about me.”
Questioning Fans' Responsibility for Players
After Junior Seau, a beloved San Diego Charger, committed suicide in 2012, Sanchez’s reckoning with the game began in earnest. While writing X's and O's, she and collaborator Mercein began to ask themselves whether they, as fans, had some responsibility for the players, and for the fate of football.
They created a table of fans at a bar who appear in scenes interspersed throughout the play, asking each other what will happen to football.
“If football goes away,” ponders one fan.
“It’s not going to go away,” her friend interrupts.
“My family, we don’t go to church … football is our way of being part of something bigger,” she says. “I have to admit I’d be lonely.”
They question the violence of the game. How violent it needs to be in order to be entertaining. And what they really get out of the violence.
“I think I watch it for the moment not when the guy gets knocked down. But rather the moment he gets back up,” the fan says. “I think I need to remember we can get back up.”
After the play runs in theaters, Sanchez plans to take it to colleges and high schools. She wants to start conversations like these in the community, especially among young people who will decide whether to play or not, and how much of their future they want to bet on football.
