The Blue Tent

Normally, a piece like this would begin with a recent example of the subject at hand, which in this case is the Blue Tent that haunts the sideline of every NFL game like a pop-up mausoleum. I’m not trying to be cute or meta here; there are simply too many recent examples of players being injured in some potentially gruesome but not immediately visible way to choose one to illustrate the influence that this little plastic tent has had on the football-fan experience. In this year’s AFC Championship game two players, New England Patriots linebacker Robert Spillane and Denver Broncos wide receiver Pat Bryant, went into the tent to be examined with a bum ankle and a hamstring injury, respectively. Announcers tell audiences that a player “is in the Blue Tent” as naturally as informing them a player just rushed for three yards or dropped a wobbly pass. The Blue Tent is inevitable.

The tent itself is a bare-bones examination room where team doctors can evaluate injured players on the field instead of having to trudge back to the locker-room facilities. The walls flip up quickly like a giant slinky made of tarpaulin, giving the player and the medical professionals a plastic cone of privacy away from the cameras and fans. It kind of looks like one of those mobile cabanas that people bring to the beach with a leather-coated table in the middle. Some injuries on the playing field are immediately clocked as traumatic enough for a player to be carted off the field and driven into the underbelly of the stadium so they can be examined in full. The Blue Tent is for the in-between injuries, bad enough to leave the field but not so bad that they need to go straight to the hospital. Players often jog to the tent even if they’re nursing a bum ankle or got hit in the head on a tackle so they can get the whole theater over with and return to the game.

The tent has only been around since 2017, when the NFL was in the middle of a PR crisis related to the number of retired players suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). One study that year found that the brains of 110 of 111 former NFL players had CTE, which is not the ratio you want to see if you’re a league official who’s trying to convince everyone that having your brain bashed in over and over again is not that big a deal. The disease itself is immediately apparent from looking at the brain scans from that report. If the cross section of a healthy brain looks like a slice of thick cauliflower, then a CTE-afflicted brain looks like its florets and stalks have been whittled down. The whole thing is riddled with holes and engorged ventricles and damage to the frontal and temporal lobes, all of which can lead to severe mental health issues and behavioral problems. Several legendary NFL players who committed suicide and later had their brains examined by researchers were found to have CTE; Aaron Hernandez, an exceptional tight end who played for the New England Patriots and was later found guilty of murdering his friend Odin Lloyd in 2013, had a particularly severe case. Hernandez was 27 when he killed himself in prison by hanging himself with bed sheets.

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I’m not alone in thinking of the Blue Tent as a fig leaf covering the fact that the NFL is a perpetual meat grinder for the human body. The average length of an NFL career is about three years, with many players cut loose and forced to find something else to do. Blitzing A-gaps or being able to run perfect skinny post routes aren’t really transferable skills, though. It’s tough to imagine being just 25 and having the entire trajectory of your life from when you were eight years old playing Pop Warner football ending as unceremoniously as getting laid off from—or by—Deloitte. The Blue Tent lets us ignore all of that by running interference for the league. These players are being taken care of in there, and you can go back to enjoying the game.

I understand the depth of that attachment. My football career stopped after high school, but I still remember the full-body ecstasy of laying someone out. Form tackling someone felt like two bodies being fused together in violence, in ways you didn’t know they could meet. In Don DeLillo’s End Zone, the protagonist Gary Harkness calls the slow-motion replays of NFL games “a series of lovely and sensual assaults.” And there is something quite physically awakening about it all. You find out quickly if your body enjoys brutality or wants to run in the opposite direction. I played long enough and hard enough to have gotten lit up a few times myself, and on several occasions walked off the field with double vision and a crushing headache, my legs carrying me toward the sideline because that’s where I was supposed to go even if my brain was half a step behind. There were no blue tents, of course, so I was back out there on defense a few plays later, still hungry to hit something. I couldn’t get enough.

“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it,” Harkness’s coach Emmett “Big Bend” Creed says in End Zone. “Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.” The acceptance of that pain is inherent to the modern sport, and perhaps it’s why I still find it so gruesome and so intoxicating to watch. The next play may lead you into the Blue Tent or down the tunnel to the end of your career, but the fear of being overtaken or forgotten overwhelms those anxieties and flushes them from your system. It’s a valuable, propulsive ethic for players, and one that keeps the league’s gaudy ratings climbing. Eventually, though, the body runs out of gas. The hits pile up and archive themselves in broken bones and severed ligaments and withered brains. The risk is worth the pain right up until the minute it isn’t.

Photo credit: NFL