Bill Curry grew up playing football at College Park High School, before enrolling at Georgia Tech and then playing in the NFL for 10 years, winning three championships. As a player or coach at Tech, Alabama, Kentucky and now at Georgia State, he has seen how concussions have been diagnosed and treated over the years, starting from the “shake-it-off” attitude when he was a young man and experienced his first concussion, to the serious approaches taken today. In a first-person account, he talks about how treatments have changed.
The changes are so drastic you can’t even imagine the difference.
I had several concussions, two were pretty serious. One in high school in which I was looked at by our family doctor, who was also our team doctor, in College Park. I was allowed to return to the game and was pretty much incoherent the whole time, according those who remember. I don’t remember it.
That was our senior year. They had a great running back. We had a head-on collision. I was goofy the rest of the night, but turned out OK.
In the NFL, I got a concussion in an exhibition game with the Steelers one night in Green Bay. I didn’t remember my name or where I was. That was a Saturday night. When I got to work Monday morning with a severe headache, there was no doctor. I was told to get dressed in full pads and go down to the practice field with Ray Nitschke and engage in full-speed Oklahoma drills. That’s what I did.
I guess it was a test of courage to see if I was still willing to stick my head in there before the last cut. That’s just the way it was done. I’m not blaming anyone. I’m a grown man. Nobody made me do it.
Today, with a concussion of that severity, a guy would be kept out for at least two weeks with all the modern tests run. We would have a baseline printout with what his EEGs looked like. Until he got back to that baseline he wouldn’t be allowed to get back to vigorous exercise. If he has symptoms he couldn’t play. That happened to us several times last year. It will happen more and more, and it saves lives.
I was lucky to get through mine without serious consequence. Thank goodness things have changed.
We laughed about it in high school. It was a joke. “Look, so and so’s got the blind staggers.” Then a few plays later he would go and make a tackle. It happened all the time. Who knows how much damage we did all those years?
You can argue if it’s hurting football by cutting down on head-to-head collisions, but it’s helping the students, and that’s what we need to be doing.
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