Real Football - Thoughts on Eric LeGrand

When you go to a football game you go for a lot of reasons.  You go for the tailgate and the atmosphere.  You go to complain about the insanely overpriced amenities and cheer on your team with your friends.  Yeah, you go for all that nice stuff but, if you're being honest, you go to watch unreasonably-sized men hit each other with great force.  And while you know deep down that you're watching a potentially dangerous spectacle and know that injuries will happen, you never expect to see what we saw on Saturday.  

For the first time ever, even with all the bad wins and ugly losses, we wish we hadn't gone to the game that will not only be remembered at the first college football game at the new Giants Stadium but the game "where that Rutgers kid broke his neck."  That kid was Eric LeGrand and this is how we remember it.

Things started just fine.  Despite an appearance by the infamous Meadowland winds, the tailgate was good (homemade pizza) and after a first-half which threatened to set the program back to the days when Army was a national title contender, Rutgers finally scored a touchdown immediately after the teams switched ends to start the 4th quarter.

With Army's 17-3 lead cut to 17-10, the sparse crowd finally woke up and after Rutgers quickly scored again to tie the score, we were at full throat.  As the team lined up for the ensuing kickoff, the crowd implored them, not quite literally, to annihilate the kick returner.  We even heard ourselves say "Hit 'em! HIT 'EM HARD!!"  They obliged as Legrand, the senior defensive tackle contributing on special teams, unleashed a vicious hit, audible from our seats some 70 yards away in the opposite end zone, sending the crowd into even a bigger frenzy.  We loved it.

The thing about big hits is you always worry about the hittee, not the hitter.  The hitter is the one who is prepared, the hittee is the one who is supposed to be in danger.  With that in mind we immediately looked to see if the Army player was ok and were impressed with just how quickly he got up and jogged off the field.  As long as he was ok, we could keep cheering without guilt.  Then it happened. 

A Rutgers player, the aforementioned hitter, was down, his legs stiff.  We figured he'd just knocked himself cold.  The players quickly motioned the trainers onto the field and in what seemed like 30 seconds the cart (no, not the cart, the cart is never good) and the backboard came out (even worse).  Soon they loaded him onto the cart and LeGrand's parents, who were sitting no more than 10 rows in front of us, were escorted onto the field.  As they drove off, the crowd cheered reflexively, not realizing that we hadn't received the always reassuring "thumbs up." 

Moments later the game restarted, the crowd was rocking, and Rutgers completed their comeback, winning in overtime.  We all left happy.

As we walked out, we had a fleeting hope that LeGrand was ok but probably imagined he'd have a great story about how he once hit a guy so hard he knocked himself out.  Never did we imagine that we'd just witnessed one of the worst moments in sports.

As everyone now knows, LeGrand broke his neck and lost all feeling below his neck.  What we soon realized from watching the replays was that the stiff legs weren't a sign of someone knocked out but rather a man struggling to get up off the turf before realizing that he couldn't, awake and likely fully aware of what was happening.  Awful, just awful.

The weird thing about it is just how retroactively chilling it is.  We surely didn't realize at the severity at the time but watching the replays makes us sick to know what we witnessed.  It kinda shakes you up.  We'll send our thoughts and wishes (the Persnickety Project is largely atheistic, we don't pray) that he makes a recovery but ultimately we, like everyone else, will get over it and cheer the next big hit.  That's what people do. 

After this episode and then watching guys like DeSean Jackson get almost murdered during Sunday's games, we wonder who will be at the game when someone actually gets killed on the field.  We hope its not us.  We'd hate to have to try to get over that one.