‘Give Obama an “F” For His First Public Words on the Football Concussion Crisis’ (full text)
March 8, 2012Record Day of Traffic at Concussion Inc.
March 9, 2012
One of the cool things about the new ebook medium is instant errata: the author can go right into the electronic file and correct mistakes in the “first edition” of the book. That’s what I’ll be doing later today with OUT OF MY HEAD: My Life In and Out of Football by George Visger. (Have no fear, those of you who have already bought the book; those corrections are listed at the bottom of this post.)
George, whose scrambled memory is his calling card, originally wrote that his Colorado University football team played in the Rose Bowl. He meant to say Orange Bowl. On this score, George got no help from his editor. I’ve been known to misplace my keys five times in a single day. Someone told me that when you reach ten times, it is officially dementia.
One erratum tells a recursive tale that could only have come from the extraordinary life of George Visger. Discussing the injury in his first game with the San Francisco 49ers, which would lead to his condition of hydrocephalus and the insertion of a shunt to drain excess fluid in his brain, George recalled having gotten “earholed” by a tight end for the Dallas Cowboys, whom he identified as Jay Saldi.
But it turns out that the blocker in question was not Saldi, but Doug Cosbie.
The reason Visger knows this is that he has been talking lately with Cosbie, who now heads one of several documentary crews working on films about aspects of the National Football League traumatic brain injury saga.
George: “I was so rattled, for more than 30 years I’ve been saying it was Saldi who hit me. Doug Cosbie sent me the DVD of the game, which shows he was the one who hit me. When you look at the hits, they are nothing out of the ordinary. The broadcaster mentions that Doug threw the block that sprang Robert Newhouse for the TD on my concussion play.”
The crack staff of Concussion Inc. will try to post the video in the near future.
Irv Muchnick
GEORGE VISGER EBOOK ERRATA:
- [page 17 of the PDF version] Played in the Orange Bowl (not the Rose Bowl).
- [page 21 of the PDF version] Blocked by Doug Cosbie (not Jay Saldi).
- [page 31 of the PDF version] Wife Kristi and kids are staying with her mother (not “her parents”).
OUT OF MY HEAD: My Life In and Out of Football, by George Visger and Irvin Muchnick, is available on Amazon Kindle for $2.99 at http://amzn.to/znZui, or as a PDF file by sending $2.99 via PayPal to paypal@muchnick.net.