Knock-knock-knocking at concussion's door | MARK HUGHES COBB

I played several more years of touch football than full tackle. Flag/touch rewards skill, speed and evasive quickness, the ability to spot and analyze patterns of moving people on a field.

High-end football doesn't neglect those skills, of course. Ask David "The Deuce" Palmer, all 5 feet 9 inches and 165 pounds, or the more sturdily built yet adaptable artists such as Julio Jones, Amari Cooper, Shaun Alexander, Derrick Henry, Damien Harris, Mark Ingram, Eddie Lacy and Trent Richardson. Their explosive elusiveness turned them very extremely dangerous, added to bull-like strength. And was it just a pair of years ago we saw Najee Harris and Devonta Smith crafting high-speed aerial ballet game after game?

Yet none were going anywhere without 300-pound lineman punching holes, creating opportunities, fighting off other 300-pound plus players. And that's where it becomes a whole new bruising game.

I'm on the Reluctant Brute Squad. (RIP André René Roussimoff, my giant). Larger than average, fairly strong, but for some odd reason, don't enjoy beating on folks, or getting beaten by them. I'd rather run wild on open fields, trying to make everyone miss.

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It's that loner inside a team sport thing. Or maybe I just missed a pro dodgeball calling.

My lack of beat 'em up mojo infuriated many a coach, because Strong? XL? Hit somebody! As Zevon and Letterman taught: There's always room for a goon.

I would get stopped — Grabbed. This was long back, pre-sensitivity training — by coaches on my first days in any new school — pre-college, I attended six different institutions, changing schools eight times; my parents were dedicated to shuffling us wherever they thought we'd get the best education — and TOLD I'd be playing.

Which clashed beautifully with my anti-authoritarian streak, one of the few attributes thicker than my upper body.

They envisioned planting me on a line, hunched over and grunting, hulking up to deliver beat-downs, though those are none of my favorite things. Picture the red-faced coaching-shorts-sporting morons from "Dazed and Confused," jacked up to 11. I left two programs due to manic, violence-hungry jockheads.

My one truly great football coach — not just at understanding players, but winning while doing so — gave me a shot at running the ball, after seeing me serpentine-weave during recess, in a game of touch. With better dodge 'em than bump 'em skills, deployed for gold on a screen-right play that always went for long yardage, Coach Kelly didn't try to slot me back into any line. I enjoyed football again.

But for that one drill, where at the end of practice, I'd take the ball and run into, not around, the first guy in a line. Then, whether I ran him down, or fell over in a pile, I'd get up and do it again, amen. That gauntlet included everybody else on the team. Not a huge number, 30 or so, but still, many rivers to smash.

It wasn't that I couldn't play beat 'em up. I just didn't dig it.

In childhood, we'd played sans pads, mostly two-hand touch, but sometimes tackle, though that meant "Wrap up the runner so he can't continue to gain."

I recall once proudly taking down our hilarious Stonebridge neighbor Chip Owens, who was several years older, at least a foot taller, and 100 pounds heavier, by tangling up his legs, making him trip over me, a poisonous vine strangling oak-tree roots.

Worth it.

Chip laughed as he tumbled to the dust, because even as a high school football standout, he was a cool guy, nice to oddballs. Gave me my first collection of Poe short stories, and cassettes of "School's Out" and "Aqualung." More than a lot of folks, including some family, and most coaches, Chip saw me.

I'd play flag in sixth grade for a team that went 10 and 1, then as part of a college intramural team, where I won my frat 50 cases of beer by intercepting a pass and scoring the only TD, one game, and then again after college, both for my newspaper's team and in an adult flag-football league, down in Fort Walton Beach.

It was playing flag, sixth grade, that I sustained my only serious knock. We didn't wear padding, much less helmets. A much-bigger kid from the Panama City team ran me over — though I did grab one of his flags, so "Nyah" — knocking me back so swiftly my head bounced off the ground.

I remember seeing his forearm rising toward my face, a blatantly illegal move. Then blackout. I blinked out a few seconds, then walked off to be "checked out" — someone looked in my eyes to see if I was more cuckoo than usual — and returned a minute later.

A year after, full-contact, I laid out a guy so hard his maroon helmet left a bloody-flaming streak on my white one. We were running a drill called head-ons, where the guy with the ball and the guy who wished to tackle him lay on their backs, five yards apart, waiting for a whistle-signal to jump up and attack. Tackling dummies — not un-clever players, but stuffed bags — laid boundaries. Sound insane? Oh, that's only because it was.

Adrenaline would spit and blaze like a blast furnace; inhales would heave. It's a fearful place, lying on your back, head toward eventual direction, unable to see anything but August sky, waiting for a whistle — the coaches were drama queens; they'd play out tension longer than Frank N. Furter — and knowing that ninth-grade starting back would be barreling straight at you, a large-for-the-age but still rookie-to-tackle seventh grader.

With fear-driven speed, churning Cobb-fam tree-trunk legs, I hammered him.

Practice stopped, startled by the cracking sound. Folks popped up and turned our way, like Bambi smelling smoke. Coaches went nuts. In a joyful way.

Yay?

Luckily, he got right up. We talked, and like the dude whose front teeth I knocked out at home plate my senior year at Tuscaloosa Academy — bringing down the ball from a high throw, I tagged him in the kisser with my catcher's mitt, knocking him backwards into a concussion, one that required two snaps of smelling salts to revive — he reassured me: He knew it was a "clean shot," an accident.

But that "accident" was caused by purposeful head-on collision. In practice. Against someone I had no reason to dislike. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Helluva nice guy, pal of my big brother Scotty, who played until multiple knee and leg injuries forced him out of contact sports.

According to a 2017 Boston University study on donated brains of 202 deceased gridiron athletes, 99% of NFL players, 88% of Canadian Football League players, 64% of semi-professional players, 91% of college football players, and 21% of high school football players had suffered various stages of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

It's a progressive, degenerative brain disease found in folks with a history of repeated head trauma.

And of course football isn't the only thing that can cause CTE: boxing, MMA, ice hockey, downhill skiing, wrestling …. And of course, just like the over-proliferation of guns, nightmarish re-distribution of wealth since Reaganomics, and horrendous exploitation of the working class, we are not going to do a damn thing about it, because money.

Even in cases of mild CTE, doctors find depression, anxiety, disinhibition, memory loss, and other mood and behavior impairments. How different might I be now, sans childhood head-ons? As someone who's experienced varying doses of the symptoms above …. I'm curious.

What did I achieve playing football that I couldn't have done as well, or better, in say, theater, or dance, or by playing in bands? Never been hurt more than muscle strain from repetitive stress on a stage, although my dancing has been known to become the cause of Grievous Bodily Harm in others.

They call it swing for a reason, folx. Be warned. Feet will fly.

I'm rather fond of my brain. I use it often. Daily, even. If I could travel back? No way I'd play full-contact, nor would I let anyone I love play.

Life's as full of dangers as earth is rife with gravity, sure. But why pile onto your burdens?

Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Kids' games probably shouldn't involve full contact, head-on drills