If you didn't know better, you might have said Steve Young looked pathetic on the bench, rocking back and forth, over and over for 15 minutes, clutching his helmet, pushing away the hands trying to coax it from his grasp. He put the helmet on his concussion-clouded head for a minute, shutting out the truth, noises from the doctor and trainer and all the other people who insisted on being sane.
He looked even sadder when a cart finally drove him off the Astrodome field, his head drooping to one side, his eyes fixed on a place far, far away. All around the lower deck were 49ers fans, standing and waving farewell to their quarterback, the MVP turned absentee.Prevailing wisdom says his body has begun to weaken, 35 years adding up to a bum shoulder, a sore groin muscle and far too much time wearing baseball caps on the sideline. On Sunday, the Oilers hit him in the head and he had to leave again, only three plays into the afternoon.
But this wasn't more of the same, another sign of decay. Young's head has not become vulnerable with age. It remains in football prime, harder and crazier than average, so rugged that it submits itself to the possibility of being rendered mushy.
This is the Catch-22 of the game. Normal people would never play in the NFL.
"Sometimes people who are concussed do things that aren't rational," James Klint, the 49ers' team doctor, said when asked why Young refused to surrender his helmet.
But if a blow to the head sends the mind on a dozen simultaneous field trips, why did Young's thoughts find their way home? He wanted to play football, a desire that resides on his brain stem.
The doctor said no, absolutely no. Brent Jones, Young's teammate and friend, came over to persuade the Semiconscious Stubborn One.
"They had to call in a heavy hitter to get him to give up his helmet," Jones said.
Jones has seen concussions and experienced them. "If you play this game long enough, you're going to have one," he said.
Concussions happen to 22-year-olds. They happen to 35-year-olds. They disable without discriminating.
Two years ago, Troy Aikman's brains were rearranged. On the sideline, he was asked the usual questions. "Where are you?" typically leads off. "Henryetta," he said, citing his Oklahoma roots. No one thought he was finished. He took a hit. It's part of football, a routinely horrifying part.
Young got hurt when he rolled out and held the ball stubbornly, looking for yardage rather than simply looking out. Oilers linebacker Micheal Barrow leveled him, slamming into the helmet with his shoulder pads. The officials eventually said the play never happened. If anyone was revealed as a dinosaur in this incident, it was the men in black and white.
Before the play, an extra Houston player took the field. The Oilers tried to call time out, but the snap went off. A penalty flag fell. The officials would ultimately rule that Houston should have received the timeout, that the play had, in fact, been blown dead.
In the confusion, most of the Niners never heard a whistle, but several suspected a problem.
Guard Ray Brown saw the officials scrambling around, out of position. "I just grabbed my guy (defensive tackle Henry Ford) and held him to make sure he didn't get to the quarterback," Brown said.
He and several teammates were annoyed that the officials did not step in and aggressively halt the play. Even Barrow said: "That play should never have happened."
But the Niners also had to be frustrated with themselves when they saw Young on the turf, unable to move. "We've got to protect the quarterback," running back Derek Loville said, exasperated.
Lately, San Francisco quarterbacks have sustained damage at an alarming rate. Their birth dates seem irrelevant to their health.
The 35-year-old had to leave the Astrodome in an ambulance. His 26-year-old backup, Elvis Grbac, paced the sideline, recovering from a week-old shoulder injury. The 25-year-old third-stringer, Jeff Brohm, took a bad hit and reclined for a few extra unnerving seconds.
Neither of the youngsters looked haunted, though. They didn't rock their bodies on the bench, as if cradling their careers. Klint said that Young was frustrated then, dejected when the cart took him off the field. Young could not speak for himself. He dragged his body onto the team bus quickly after the 10-9 victory.
Jones said he looked better by then, closer to coherence. For the first 30 seconds after the blow, Klint said, Young couldn't talk. His eyes remained open, but he did not respond to anything around him, a condition the doctor described as "transiently unconscious."
Eventually the quarterback would answer "Houston" at the appropriate moment. "But it was a little foggy," the doctor said.
Young understood that he had just been hit. Other details remained fuzzy. He couldn't stand steadily without help. In the second quarter, he went to Methodist Hospital for evaluation, including a CAT scan. By the third quarter, he had returned to the 'Dome, where the doctor told him to remain off the field and watch the rest of the game on television.
Concussions are rated on a scale of 1 to 3. Klint said that Young's was about a 2. He said Young might play next week.
"It looked really bad," Jones said, "but you can see something positive, too. We won, and Steve got to rest his groin for next week."