NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects

[LesBaker]

The story about Brown was great.

And that pic of Warner is so awesome I can't even describe it. The photographer got a once in a lifetime shot right there.

 

[Prime Time]

Simon Bruty/SI :: Josh Merwin/Creative Culture-ID for SI (inset)

The Arthroscope: The Little Tool That Saves Careers
Billy Sims tore his ACL and never played again. Adrian Peterson did the same and won league MVP a year later. The difference was the arthroscope, sports medicine’s most important innovation of the past 50 years
By Jenny Vrentas

Editor’s note: This is the seventh in The MMQB’s series NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects, commemorating the 95th season of the NFL in 2014. Through the start of training camp in July, The MMQB will unveil one long-form story on an artifact of particular significance to the history of the NFL, accompanied by other objects that trace the rise of professional football in America, from the NFL’s founding in a Hupmobile dealership in Canton in 1920 to its place today at the forefront of American sports and popular culture.

Billy Sims ran through defenders. He launched himself over them. Once, he karate-kicked one squarely in the face (it was legal at the time). He was the Lions’ great running hope before Barry Sanders, whetting Detroit fans’ appetite for seeing a guy in a No. 20 jersey racking up 1,000-yard seasons.

Then came Oct. 21, 1984, a road game at Minnesota during Sims’ fifth NFL season. He switched shoes several times during warmups, struggling to get comfortable on the Metrodome’s artificial turf. Turns out, the turf was the only thing that could stop him that afternoon. It was another 100-yard day for Sims, who took his 22nd carry midway through the third quarter. The play was a handoff around right end, and his right leg—the one he’d previously thrust like a black belt—got stuck. It twisted as he got tackled, cueing an explosion inside his knee joint.

“Will I miss the rest of the game?” Sims wondered at the time. He didn’t make it back onto the field that day, or ever again. At age 29, his career was over.

“Had it not been for that injury, not to brag, [but] I might have had the chance to make the Hall of Fame,” Sims says today. “Had the technology back then been like it is now, I probably would have gotten a few more years. But, I didn’t.”

Recently, Sims has had good reason to consider the hypothetical. Another running back came along—you may have heard of him—with almost identical credentials: a son of Texas, record-setter at the University of Oklahoma, first-round pick. Adrian Peterson also tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee during his fifth professional season.

Sims’ injury was career-ending. Peterson’s was the prelude to his 2,000-yard MVP season in 2012. No two football injuries are the same, but there is one big difference between these two cases: The use of the arthroscope.

* * *

The instrument itself is relatively simple: a thin tube about the size of a pencil, with a magnifying lens and a light source. The arthroscope is not much more than a foot long, but its impact on the NFL has been much grander. “The biggest revelation in sports medicine in the last 50 years, no question,” says James Andrews, the orthopedic surgeon whose clinic in Gulf Breeze, Fla., is a hub for many of pro football’s top players.

The arthroscope is small, but its affect on sports medicine has been anything but. (Josh Merwin/Creative Culture-ID for Sports Illustrated/The MMQB)

Since the arthroscope came into use in North America in the mid-1960s, the game has changed. Players routinely get “scoped”—now part of the lexicon for even casual fans—to have injured joints examined or cleaned out, sometimes returning to the game in as quickly as two weeks. A generation of specialists for knees, and pretty much every joint, has been spawned. A torn ACL can now be repaired in 63 minutes, and today’s athletes usually do not wonder if such an injury will be career-ending, but rather how they can return like Peterson, who was back on the field and en route to a rushing title nine months after his injury.

This didn’t happen all at once, of course. The arthroscope at first drew skepticism from some of America’s top surgeons, who wondered about the value of plunging a metal probe with a light bulb at the end into an injured knee joint. That’s how the early versions worked. Surgeons had to lean over to peer through the eyepiece, and there was the risk of the bulb short-circuiting or, worse, shattering inside the knee.

Masaki Watanabe is considered the father of modern arthroscopy. The Japanese orthopedic surgeon took advantage of electronics and optics industry booms in his country post-World War II to create a reproducible model. The conduit to North America was Robert Jackson, an orthopedist from Toronto who traveled to Tokyo to study with Watanabe in 1964. He returned with the No. 21 Arthroscope his teacher had developed—No. 21, because 20 models had preceded it.

“And that was the first time it was ever really seen here,” says Andrews. He caught the wave at the right time, as did Russell Warren, Giants team physician and past surgeon-in-chief at Manhattan’s Hospital for Special Surgery. The fact that both men are among the top surgeons treating NFL players today is more than a coincidence. They were finishing their residencies and going into practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and were among the early group of American surgeons to get their hands on an arthroscope. The next step was figuring out how it could best be used.

Joints had been something of a black box, but the arthroscope shined a light—literally—on the interwoven anatomy of ligaments, tendons, cartilage and the shock-absorbing menisci. In the 1970s, the instrument was simply used for diagnosis. Surgeons worked their way up to repairing injuries arthroscopically, with the scope and other instruments inserted into joints through small external incisions.

Monitors can show everyone in the operating room what the arthroscope is seeing. This surgeon is looking at the inside of an artificial knee. (Josh Merwin/Creative Culture-ID for Sports Illustrated)

“There was a guy in Salt Lake City who started trying to do surgery, taking out simple things, loose bodies; then he started trying to take out meniscus tears,” Warren says. “I remember flying out there. He cut one off, and the thing disappeared in the joint. Couldn’t find it. He looked around for 30 minutes. Finally, he gave up.”

Lanny Johnson, a surgeon in Michigan and one of the pioneers of arthroscopic surgery in the U.S., offered fellow orthopedists some advice in those days: “You probably have to look at 50 knees through an arthroscope before you have any idea what you are looking at, and at least 100 knees before you should attempt the most simplistic surgical procedure.”

Fiber-optic light cables replaced the bulb at the end of the arthroscope in the 1970s. Around the same time, video cameras were attached to the eyepiece of the scope and hooked up to a television monitor, so the view inside could be broadcast to everyone in the operating room. The scope was also linked to a “fluid management system,” a fancy way of saying pump, by which sterile saline solution could be cycled through the joint to give the surgeon a clear view inside—better than the previous technique of injecting fluid every so often with a syringe.

Arthroscopes became reliable, and then routine, and then invaluable, underscoring a frank reality of NFL history: The career outlook for players after injury has depended, largely, on the decade in which they played.

* * *

Adrian Peterson sometimes gets a dose of perspective while walking through an airport. It’s happened more than once: An older man who played football in another era will spot the Vikings running back and congratulate him on his remarkable return from knee surgery. Then, the stranger will share his own experience.

“He’ll pull up his pants sleeve and show me the scars on his leg. They’re like seven, eight inches long, on both sides of the knee; looks like Frankenstein,” Peterson says. “I’m thinking he broke everything, his shin bone and knee cap, had a total knee replacement. He’ll say, ‘No, this was ACL and MCL tears, like you.’ ”

Sims averaged 85.1 rushing yards per game over a five-year career. That’s ninth-best all time among players with 50 or more games played. (Richard Mackson for Sports Illustrated)

The NFL was established in 1920, and for at least the first five decades, doctors didn’t know how to fix the ACL. They didn’t really even know the importance of that pinkie-sized piece of tissue that connects the femur to the tibia and allows athletes to cut and jump. Warren examined Frank Gifford well after his 13-year Giants career ended in 1964, and was surprised to feel looseness in one of the Hall of Famer’s knees—the telltale sign of an ACL tear. “He said, ‘Well, I used to just cut differently,’ ” Warren recalls. “But ACLs ended a lot of careers, because most guys can’t do that.”

The arthroscope changed the way injuries to most joints are treated, from the knee to the shoulder to the elbow to the ankle. But the first changes happened with knee injuries, the leading cause of missed time for football players.

Those “Frankenstein” incisions Peterson has seen in older players used to be par for the course in knee surgery. Step two was dislocating the kneecap to move it out of the way. The only way into the knee at that time was to fillet it open, but slicing through inches of flesh traumatized the surrounding muscles and brought infection risk. Patients had to stay in the hospital for a week (today, it’s an outpatient procedure) and the leg was encased in a cast for six to eight weeks, resulting in stiffness and muscle atrophy that was sometimes permanent (today, they leave in a brace and can begin rehab the next morning). Once the surgeons were inside the joint, it was a bit of a guessing game.

Damaged parts were either taken out or haphazardly mended, wreaking the kind of havoc that stole once-in-a-generation talents like Bears legend Gale Sayers. His career ended in 1972, at age 29, after ligament damage and surgery to both knees forced him to call it quits. Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden wrote in 2010 about the remnants the surgeon found when Sayers needed a left knee replacement thirty-some years later: no ACL, almost no cartilage, a chunk of his tibia sawed off and an MCL that had been sewn or stapled.

The arthroscope, in contrast, gave surgeons a way into joints that was only about 4.5 millimeters long—the diameter of the tip that is used for knee and shoulder surgeries. The scope enters the joint through one so-called poke hole, giving the surgeon a view inside, and other instruments are then inserted through additional tiny incisions to do work, like a mechanical shaver that bites away and suctions out damaged tissue. The last frontier was refining techniques to do minimally invasive reconstructive surgery, like replacing a torn ACL with a graft, with the aid of the arthroscope.

The view from the arthroscope on the TV screen in an operating room looks a bit like an underwater dive to a shipwreck, with saline solution rushing through the joint and flakes of debris from the injury floating around. That analogy is apt: Arthroscopic surgery is equipment being plunged below the surface to explore the damage and see how it can be cleaned up or fixed.

When Sims’ injury happened in 1984, surgeons were still trying to master the “fixing” part for ACL surgery. “It was at that cusp,” says Robert Teitge, the Lions’ team physician at the time, who operated on Sims. “We didn’t have complete confidence we could do everything [arthroscopically].” The arthroscope was used to assess the damage inside Sims’ knee and take out loose cartilage. But the ACL still had to be replaced with an open procedure, through an incision a few inches long on the top of his right knee (the kneecap, however, no longer had to be dislocated). Sims recalls the surgery taking seven hours.

Sims’ injury was more extensive than just an ACL tear, and he would have faced a challenging road back even today. He also had a torn lateral collateral ligament and significant damage to the meniscus and the articular cartilage that cushions the bones. But today, the most critical part of his surgery—replacing the ACL—would have been completed arthroscopically, meaning a smoother, more accurate and less invasive route to placing the graft in his knee. And, perhaps, a different end result.

“I was going to try to give it a go and come back, but it was too painful to run,” says Sims, who today devotes his time to his Billy Sims BBQ franchise. “With my running style, I knew I wasn’t going to be satisfied with that. I dove over the top a lot, pushed off on that leg a lot, cutting low. You just don’t change your running style and be successful as a running back. So, I knew it was time to hang it up.”

* * *

The biggest revelation in sports medicine in the last 50 years is still no panacea. No instrument has eliminated a surgeon’s fundamental challenge: duplicating the body’s normal anatomy.

“You’ve got to remember,” Andrews says in a refreshing moment of frankness, “there’s nothing that can’t be made worse with a surgical procedure.” But with the arthroscope, there are a lot more things that can get better.

Consider: Giants quarterback Eli Manning had arthroscopic ankle surgery on April 10 to debride, or clean out, the joint after a high ankle sprain suffered in December, and was back on the practice field in late May. Other proof: The rigorous medical vetting process of would-be NFL players at the annual scouting combine now passes more than 90 percent of players who have had an ACL injury while playing, Warren says; in the early 1980s, before ACLs could be repaired arthroscopically, about 85 percent of players who’d had an ACL injury were flunked.

Peterson’s knees. He tore the ACL and MCL in his left knee in December 2011. (Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated)

Peterson’s leap from ACL injury to MVP has become the stuff of legend, which risks making this major surgery seem less so. He has his scars, like where his ACL was created from cutting out the middle third of his patella tendon, and he endured many miserable Minnesota winter days until his body’s natural healing ability and his rigorous work ethic started to make a difference.

But this statement is without hyperbole: By the end of that 2012 MVP season, Peterson was running with an explosiveness he wouldn’t have been able to regain so quickly—or at all—if he’d had an open knee surgery that sliced through his muscles and tendons. With arthroscopic ACL surgery, Peterson was able to squeeze the quadriceps muscle above his injured knee in his first rehab session the next morning.

In another era, the 1960s, 1970s, or even the 1980s, what would his outlook have been? “Not so good, probably,” says Andrews, who performed Peterson’s surgery. “A good athlete like that may have been able to compromise and make some adjustments and still be competitive, but it certainly wouldn’t be as good of an outcome as you have today.”

Earlier this year, Peterson and Sims were side by side at an autograph signing in Chicago. Sims signs memorabilia pretty much only for his playing days at Oklahoma, and not for his time in the NFL. He shared his experience with Peterson, really just to congratulate him. Peterson, who spent his collegiate career chasing Sims’ Oklahoma records, coming up 73 yards short of his career rushing mark, couldn’t help but ponder.

“I always think about guys who had their careers shortened by knee injuries, especially great running backs. Billy Sims. Gale Sayers,” Peterson says. “If his career wasn’t shortened, what could he have done? It would have been spectacular.”

And therein lies a simple inspiration for Peterson to make the most of his place in history. He already has more than 10,000 yards toward Emmitt Smith’s NFL career rushing mark—and the chance to keep chasing.

 

[Prime Time]

Read all articles by clicking link in titles....
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John DePetro/The MMQB

ABC’s Monday Night Football Yellow Blazers

Courtesy of Dallas Cowboys

AT&T Stadium Video Board

John DePetro/The MMQB

The Telegram Detailing the Ollie Matson Trade from Chicago to L.A.

John DePetro/The MMQB

Deion Sanders’ Bandana

John DePetro/The MMQB

The Wonderlic Test

John DePetro/The MMQB

Single-Bar Face Mask

Pro Football Hall of Fame

Joe Namath’s Knee Brace

Courtesy of Coca-Cola

Mean Joe Greene’s Coca-Cola Commercial

Courtesy of the NFL

The Herschel Walker Trade From Dallas to Minnesota

Todd Warshaw/Getty Images

He Hate Me’s XFL Jersey

Pro Football Hall of Fame

George Halas’ Stool

 

[CodeMonkey]

Fantastic post. I love these. There was a really good NFL exhibit at the Missouri history Museum last year that included many things of this nature. My favorites are the things from the bygone days like the old contracts and the nose guard (below) and etc.

 

[CodeMonkey]

And how I wish I could've seen Bronko Nagurski play football...

 

[DaveFan'51]

AP

Artificial Turf: Change From the Ground Up
A godsend to the game’s future when it arrived in the ’60s, the concrete-like plastic surfaces eventually became a nightmare for players and a destroyer of careers. The new stuff’s more forgiving, but purists still prefer the real thing
By Tim Layden

Editor’s note: This is the second in The MMQB’s 10-part series NFL 95: A History of Pro Football in 95 Objects, commemorating the 95th season of the NFL in 2014. Each Wednesday through the start of training camp in July, The MMQB will unveil one long-form piece on an artifact of particular significance to the history of the NFL, accompanied by other objects that trace the rise of professional football in America, from the NFL’s founding in a Hupmobile dealership in Canton in 1920 to its place today at the forefront of American sports and popular culture.

It was the summer of 1969 when they sent Dan Dierdorf out to start digging a grave for his hips, his knees and his spine. Nobody understood this at the time, least of all Dierdorf. He was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Michigan, a big kid from Canton, Ohio, 6-foot-3 and more than 270 pounds, and he just wanted to play football.

In the previous autumn he had earned a starting position on the offensive line in the final season before Bo Schembechler took over the Wolverines from Bump Elliott, and Dierdorf wouldn’t surrender that spot for three years and 25 victories. Then he would play 13 more seasons in the NFL, all for the St. Louis Cardinals, and play so well that he would be voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, one of only 19 offensive tackles so honored. But this was before all of that.

In that summer of ’69, Dierdorf was given a job by the Michigan Athletic Department. It was authentic work—day labor for real money. Dierdorf and some other members of the football team were sent to the floor of Michigan Stadium as members of a work crew assigned to tear up the natural grass field. They ripped up sod in giant panels, loaded it onto trucks and delivered it to various grass-needy locales around Ann Arbor.

When they came back to the stadium, another job awaited: Unrolling giant spools of pale green carpet to replace the grass. The new surface was called Tartan Turf, manufactured by 3M as a competitor to Monsanto’s Astroturf, which had come into use two years earlier, for use on the baseball field in the Astrodome. The Big House was among the first major football stadiums to replace natural grass with artificial turf, though the practice would become epidemic over the next several years.

After helping install the new turf at the Big House, Dierdorf played three seasons on it, and another 13 on the hard surface at Busch Stadium as a Cardinal. (Bentley Historical Library :: Herbert Weitman/WireImage.com)

By September, the Wolverines were playing games, and occasionally practicing on the Tartan Turf. And initially, Dierdorf didn’t entirely dislike it. “It tore up your skin if you fell on it,” says Dierdorf. “But as an offensive lineman, you were guaranteed to get good traction on every play. On pass plays, you really liked the fact that you could drop back and plant, and your foot was never going to slip. From that point of view, you kind of liked it. It was sticky and reliable. I never thought for a minute about what it might be doing to my body.” Dierdorf stops and returns to the more ominous truth of his present-day life: “Who knew?”

Who knew that Dierdorf, 64, would be telling this old college story four and a half decades later, in March of this year, eight weeks after he was hung upside down for 11 hours of surgery to rebuild his spinal column, aided by the insertion of three metal rods and 32 screws. Both of his knees and both of his hips had been replaced, as of six years earlier, yet his legs had withered from a tackle’s tree trunks to a distance runner’s pipe stems because of nerve damage in his spine.

The back surgery had left Dierdorf 2 ½ inches taller, nearly restored to his full height after years of stooping further toward the ground, yet he would need months of physical therapy to teach himself to walk again. In January, Dierdorf retired after 31 years of broadcasting NFL games on television because his body could no longer withstand weekly air travel (he has since taken a job broadcasting Michigan games on radio; the travel is far less demanding).

And he is certain that much of this physical damage was caused by endless hours of football on artificial turf, beginning with the first season in Ann Arbor and continuing for a decade and a half. After he left Michigan’s Tartan Turf, Dierdorf played games and also practiced four days a week on the unforgiving first-generation AstroTurf at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis.

When the baseball Cardinals needed to work out, the football Cards would rope off a rectangular section of outfield carpet and proceed, rather than missing a day on the rug. This went on until 1987, four years after Dierdorf’s retirement, when the Cardinals moved to Arizona and the lush natural grass of Sun Devil Stadium. “It wasn’t so much playing games on artificial turf; it was all those practices,” says Dierdorf. “If you count training camp, [it was] probably 10 practices for every one game.”

Understand, Dierdorf isn’t asking for sympathy or assigning liability (beyond his own), and he isn’t damning the game to which he gave his limbs. Quite the opposite. “Football is a tough game, and you pay a price for that,” says Dierdorf. “But I don’t want anyone to misinterpret my feelings. I love the game of football. If I could go back, I would do everything over again.

“But in hindsight,” he says, “I sometimes sit and think about how different my life would be right now if I had been drafted by the Raiders or the Chargers [both teams with natural grass fields, then and now]. I wouldn’t be the cripple that I am now. I’m not feeling sorry for myself, and I’m not blaming anyone. I just wish it was different. The Cardinals didn’t say ‘Let’s put this artificial turf in so we can cripple our players.’ For a little while, the league had a love affair with artificial turf. Who knew what was happening? Nobody knew.”

* * *

It is impossible to know with any certainty the exact role artificial turf played in Dierdorf’s—or any player’s—physical breakdown. Long-retired players suffer not just from the surface that lay beneath their feet, but from the collisions that impacted the rest of their bodies. How the blame is apportioned is anybody’s guess. Yet Dierdorf’s is the extreme version of a common narrative from players in the 1970s and ’80s. “I don’t’ know anybody who likedplaying on the artificial turf that we had back then,” says ESPN analyst Herman Edwards, who spent all but one of his 10 seasons in the NFL on the notorious carpet at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. “It was like playing football on concrete.”

This much is not up for debate: Players disliked early turf, they dislike modern turf a little less. Nearly all of them prefer grass.

Yet the story of artificial turf’s impact on the history of the NFL is writ large and far more complex than simply damning the early version of a product that remains in wide use. “It’s been a love-hate relationship,” says Andrew McNitt, professor of soil science and director of the Center for Sports Surface Research at Penn State. “There is a traditionalist in all of us that really wants to see games played on natural grass.

But in 1970, the state of the art and science of growing natural grass was way behind where it is today. Along came artificial turf. Coaches raved about how great it was. Then there was criticism. Then there was a lot of positive talk with the development of the [current] artificial turf, and now a little bit of criticism again.”

Yet in a more artistic sense, artificial turf is a canvas on which some of the most significant moments in the history of the NFL are painted and preserved forever. The undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins played their home games on Poly-Turf in the Orange Bowl. Franco Harris plucked the Immaculate Reception off the artificial turf of Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh in December of that same season. Lynn Swann acrobatically pulled Terry Bradshaw’s passes from the Florida sky in Super Bowl X, the last football game played at the Orange Bowl before it went back to grass in 1976.

Edwards picked up Joe Pisarcik’s muffed handoff at Giants Stadium in the Miracle at the Meadowlands in 1978. Lawrence Taylor implored his Giants teammate to “get out there a like a bunch of crazed dogs” on that same Meadowlands turf. Buddy Ryan’s “46” Bears ran roughshod over the NFL while playing home games on artificial turf at Soldier Field. Buffalo’s K-Gun offense, the Rams’ Greatest Show on Turf and the Patriots’ unbeaten 2007 regular season all were turf-based. Seven Super Bowls have been played on the plastic at the Superdome in New Orleans, more than any other venue.

So it’s true that the game does not always remember the rug fondly, but the rug is stitched deeply into the story of the game.

* * *

In 1964, Chemstrand, a subsidiary of the Monsanto Corporation installed a synthetic surface called Chemgrass in the fieldhouse at the Moses Brown School in Providence, R.I. It was almost coincidental that synthetic turf landed in professional football four years later. “The developers of the original synthetic turf system most probably did not envision their creation to be on the playing fields of professional sports,” wrote McNitt, Thomas J. Serensits and John C. Sorochan in a chapter devoted to artificial turf in the 2013 textbookTurfgrass: Biology, Use and Management.

“After the Korean War, the Ford Foundation determined that military recruits from rural areas were in better physical condition than those from urban areas because [the latter lacked] safe, suitable places for children in cities. To address this problem, synthetic turf was developed….” (It’s impossible to miss the irony that a surface reviled by many for its punishing qualities was originally conceived for safety).

In 1966, Chemgrass was installed in the Astrodome for baseball (because the light through the roof panels, some of which were painted over to reduce glare, proved insufficient to sustain live grass) and summarily renamed AstroTurf; two years later the Houston Oilers—then a member of the AFL—moved into the Astrodome and became the first professional football team to play on artificial turf.

A year later the Eagles began playing on artificial turf at venerable Franklin Field, and in the spring of 1970, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle told a gathering of businessmen in Chicago that he expected every team in the NFL to be playing on artificial surfaces “within a few years.” The league seemed to follow his cue: Five teams went to synthetic surfaces in 1970 and five more in 1971. By the beginning of the 1976 season, 16 of the 28 teams in the NFL were playing on first-generation artificial turf of some variety, a number that would peak at 17 in the 1984 season.

There were practical reasons for the embrace of plastic grass. In 1976, there were seven so-called multi-use stadiums in the NFL, facilities like Three Rivers, Riverfront (Cincinnati) and Candlestick Park (San Francisco) that shared time with baseball teams. (There is just one dual-use venue now, in Oakland; it has grass.) Artificial turf was a godsend for groundskeepers who couldn’t sustain or grow suitable natural grass. “Now we can sod a field and play on it the next day,” says McNitt. “That was not the case in the 1970s.” Still, most of the early synthetic fields were made up of green carpet glued to asphalt. They were undeniably hard, and none worse than The Vet in Philadelphia, with its wasteland of seams and bubbles, lying in wait to snag unsuspecting visiting players.

“There was one spot, I think it was where the pitcher’s mound was,” says former NFL defensive back Eric Allen, who played for the Eagles from 1988 to ’94. “It was hollow underneath. You would run across there and it would be, like thump, thump, thump. Guys were wary of coming there and playing against us, because the field had such a bad reputation. I would walk around during warmups and talk to the [opposing] wide receivers—‘You better watch out, there are some rough spots out there’—you know, just trying to get them to slow down and think about it.”

On Oct. 10, 1993, Wendell Davis of the Chicago Bears wasn’t thinking about it at all. He was a sixth-year wide receiver who had been drafted in the first round in 1988 after catching passes for more than 2,700 yards and 19 touchdowns in three seasons at LSU. Davis worked his way into the Bears’ starting lineup in 1989 and two years later led an 11-5 playoff team team with 61 catches for 945 yards and six touchdowns. He followed that up with 54 catches in ’92 and came to the Vet in ’93 with 12 catches in the first four games of that season.

It was the 71st game of his professional career and his first trip to Philadelphia. He liked playing on grass, such as at in the lush stadiums of the SEC (where even Alabama and Florida each had artificial turf for a time), but he didn’t hate artificial turf, either. “I felt like it made you quick,” says Davis. “Made you feel faster.”

He had caught three passes that day for 38 yards when he lined up across from Eagles corner Mark McMillian in the third quarter and then burst off the line. “Simple back-side post route,” says Davis. Bears quarterback Jim Harbaugh threw to Davis, but the pass was high and behind the receiver. “I planted my feet, turned my body and jumped,” recalls Davis. “Then I heard two pops and landed flat on my butt. I looked down, and my kneecaps were up in my thighs. I thought, You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Davis, then 27, had ruptured both patella tendons leaping off the Vet’s carpet. It stands as one of the most horrific injuries in NFL history. He is 48 years old now, and recently moved from California back to Chicago; his son is a college football player. He is not by nature a bitter man, or given to accusatory rhetoric. “The way I moved that day,” says Davis, “I think my injury could have happened on grass. But I will say that was a very hard surface. No cushion at all.”

Long before Wendell Davis went down there had been blowback from players over artificial turf. As early as 1973 the NFL Players Association had asked for a moratorium on the installation of artificial turf. Yet injury data was—and remains—scarce. The most exhaustive study was conducted from 1980 to ’89 by John Powell, a researcher and athletic trainer at the University of Iowa. “Overall, there is a tendency for AstroTurf to be associated with an increased risk for knee sprains and MCL [medial collateral ligament] and ACL [anterior cruciate ligament] injuries under very specific conditions,” Powell wrote in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. But he also wrote, “It may be that participation on AstroTurf is the most important of all risk factors or it may be well down the list of importance.”

* * *

Yet Davis’s injury has come to be regarded as the tipping point for old-school artificial turf. It was almost unique in its damage—Davis never played another down—and it took place on what was acknowledged as the worst surface in the league. Still, change occurs slowly in the NFL, and it wouldn’t be until 2004, 11 years after the Davis injury, that the league was entirely cleansed of first-generation artificial turf.

The last gasp came in the 1999 season, when the St. Louis Rams, called “The Greatest Show on Turf” for their offensive explosiveness under coordinator Mike Martz and quarterback Kurt Warner, won the Super Bowl. That team went 8-0 on the indoor rug at what was then known at the TWA Dome, and, says Martz, benefited from the speedy surface in executing an aggressive downfield passing game that often required Warner to hold the ball much longer than in most systems. “We would all love to see games only on grass,” says Martz. “But on that old surface, guys could come out of cuts and change direction exceptionally fast. It was definitely a factor.”

Even then, movement away from the original design of artificial turf was well underway. By the middle 1990s, a form of artificial turf that utilized longer plastic fibers held upright and cushioned by crumb rubber infill was in production. According to NcNitt, Serensits and Sorochan, the first such field was installed at a Pennsylvania high school in 1997, and two years later at the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium. (Visitors to that field would inevitably dig into the fibers and roll the little pieces of rubber between their fingers, soaking up the newness of it all while fighting the urge to get downright giddy). The surface was viscerally softer. Currently 13 of 31 NFL stadiums are fitted with artificial turf, and all are some variety of infilled surface.

FieldTurf and similar next-gen surfaces employ rubber pellets, sand and other materials to soften the field and make its response more grass-like. (Pascale Simard/Bloomberg News)

Still, players overwhelmingly prefer natural grass. In the last survey performed by the NFLPA, in 2010, 69.4 percent of NFL players said they preferred natural grass to any form of synthetic surface. In a survey released by the NFL in 2012 and measuring games played from 2000 to ’09, knee and ankle sprains were shown to be 22 percent more common on FieldTurf than on grass and ACL sprains 67 percent more common. (McNitt, however, points out that lower-extremity injuries are not so simply assigned to the playing surface. “It’s the surface and the shoe,” says McNitt. “Footwear companies are making much, much more aggressive shoes.” On occasion the shoe will stick, and the knee or ankle or hip will move, often with catastrophic results).

The southernmost NFL stadium with artificial turf is Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium, which opened in 1998 with natural grass but in 2003 converted to infilled synthetic turf because the grass field deteriorated badly late in the autumn. This occurred not because of cold weather, but because the field received too little sunshine. “Modern stadiums are being built higher, to get fans closer to the field,” says McNitt. “That’s created a problem in getting sun to the playing surface for any significant length of time during the day.”

Brian Billick, who was the Ravens’ coach at the time of the conversion, says, “All our players would have preferred grass, but not the grass that we had at the end of the season.”

* * *

So plastic grass remains an active chapter, if an evolving one. Last fall Wendell Davis took his son on a recruiting visit and walked across a modern artificial turf surface. “So different,” he said. “So much softer.” He felt as if he was walking on a pillow. The old stuff is a part of his life. “A part of who I am,” he said. “Always will be.” A part of the NFL, too. A thin slice of hard, green carpet spread across the history books, and a lesson learned.

What’s been lost? More scenes like this one, when the 49ers and the Browns had a field day in the mud at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium in 1974. (Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated)

This shot, of the muddy field at Cleveland, reminds me of the 'Good 'Ol Days' when Football was played any-time, any-were! I personally miss it!!