BLACKBURN stalwart Tony Parkes is the latest former player to remind us football carried hidden health dangers right up to the mid-1970s. And still might.
His daughter, Natalie, announced this week that the 70-year-old is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease — and the most likely cause was her dad’s repeated heading of a heavy leather football.
And if you think the old balls you might still find among rejected toys in the loft, or deflated somewhere in a box in your garage, are no more than innocent reminders of the clobber of another age, then think again.
When fully pumped up and after 15 minutes on a muddy pitch, they became a heavyweight punch to the head, repeated over 90 minutes nearly as often as, say, Mike Tyson, could thump you.
Parkes would no doubt have told you that as a midfielder he got off lightly; it was the central defenders and centre-forwards whose job it was to endure regular punishment.
I am told they never complained. Football, they would repeat, is a tough game.
And it wasn’t 90 minutes once or twice a week, either.
The skills of heading have always been practised for hours at training, although to the best of them they were also instinctive.
How often Dixie Dean — who scored many headed goals in the 60 he got for Everton in the 1927-28 season — had balls chipped over to him in training, I don’t know.
But it would have been a lot.
A handsome bronze statue of Dean outside Goodson Park shows him holding a ball in his right hand.
Look at that ball. It is made up of large, stitched panels with a neat lace to hold it together.
The joke was, apparently, that Stanley Matthews used to cross with the lace goal-side so his Blackpool and England team-mate, Stan Mortensen, wouldn’t cut his head.
Dementia and football weren’t linked, either, when John Charles, a peerless header of the ball, was excelling for Leeds, Juventus and Wales in the 1950s and ’60s.
After ‘The Gentle Giant’ died in 2004, his widow, Glenda, suggested he suffered from dementia.
She said recently: “John had a mark — slightly raised on his forehead, in the centre — and that was from heading the ball.
“It’s got to have some impact, hasn’t it?”
Glenda admitted it would have made no difference if John had known his senses could have been affected, as he lived for football.
The same might have been said about West Brom’s Jeff Astle, whose death 18 years ago was said by a coroner to be due to “industrial injury” — in his case, repeated small blows to the head.
That rang alarm bells in the worlds of football and medicine.
But, hopefully, progress from all parties will lessen the need for remedial action in the future.
No longer are footballs practically as heavy as the object the bronze Dixie Dean carries.
Once made from the rump of a cow, the finest balls today are synthetic, the work of scientists rather than craftsmen.
They’re waterproof, rounder, lighter and free of stitches and a lace.
You’ll not blink in pain when you head one and the even better news is the chances of Alzheimer’s — put in a recent survey at five times likelier in old footballers than the average — will surely be reduced.
We should also welcome an FA coaching guideline to restrict heading for under-18s in training.
The survey drew no conclusions about younger players, except to point out footballers generally had exceptional health through exercise and a good diet.
But that is small comfort for players of yesteryear.
