The Passion of Kosta Karageorge

Kosta Karageorge, a 22 year old with everything in front of him, is dead. No matter what you hear or what you read, including this gibberish, that’s all that really matters.

In case you didn’t know, he is  - or was – the senior walk-on for Ohio State who killed himself last week. Here are some details.

This is fucked up. Obviously. A few years ago I wrote a thing when Junior Seau shot himself. You might be able to find it in all that mess off to the right. You might not. I’m not even going to look for it because it doesn’t really matter what I wrote, just that I felt compelled to write it in the first place. Because here I am, writing virtually the same thing about Kosta Karageorge.

This was a kid with a history of concussions who shot himself. It’s impossible, in this day and age, not to make a link between the two. That’s fucked up and gruesome, but, well, here we are. And how do we deal with that? I don’t know. That’s the only honest answer I can give you.

Football is a brutal, dangerous sport. Unless you’re totally living in denial, you’ve wrestled with that reality over the past couple of years. I mean, how could you not? The stories of old dudes all fucked up are everywhere, and when I say old, I’m talking 50. This is not supposed to happen. And it’s especially not supposed to happen when you’re 22 years old.

And before we wrestle with the whole concussion thing, let’s take a moment to really let that sink in. This was a 22 year old on the verge of graduating from a major university, with a lifetime ahead of him that was probably looking pretty damn good. Being a football alum at a power school is sort of like being in a version of the Illuminati. You’ve got connections great and small, and rabid fans will throw you a job just so they can pant at you and take frequent bathroom breaks to “work off” their mania. This is a dude who had a lot going for him.

And yet, his story ended with people finding him literally dead in a dumpster. Jesus Christ. Just take a second to imagine things from his perspective. Look at what he wrote to his mom in that link up above:

“I am sorry if I am an embarrassment, but these concussions have my head all fucked up.”

That is heartbreakingly awful. This is a dude with seemingly everything going for him who had his brain so twisted that he apologized to his own mother because he thought he sucked, then apparently climbed in a dumpster and shot himself. Speculating in these sorts of cases is an awful thing, but sometimes it’s the only way to really humanize it, you know? And it’s hard not to speculate, given the symbolism, that this poor dude literally thought he was a piece of trash. I mean, he climbed into a fucking dumpster and then killed himself.

That doesn’t happen unless your brain is seriously fucked up. And, apparently, Kosta’s brain was fucked up in that way that has become sadly all too familiar to us.

Concussions suck. They are awful and a butt. I got a concussion when I was 12. I flipped up off of a skateboard and landed on the sidewalk face-first. I went home and vomited violently all over the damn place. I felt like I was dying. I had a solid headache for a month after. My mom took me to the hospital where I was diagnosed with a “mild” concussion. Well shit, I can’t even image what a severe concussion is like then.

And I really, really can’t imagine what getting concussed multiple times must be like, or how it fucks with you, especially when you are under constant pressure to “shake it off” and get out there and perform. Apparently, it’s enough to climb into a dumpster and kill yourself.

The problem a lot of us are wrestling with is how we deal with the fact that, as fans, we root for and enable a sport that is responsible for these sorts of things. At least if you’re not a complete ghoul. Of course, it’s not just football. Virtually every contact sport, from hockey to even pro-wrestling, is dealing with this right now. It’s just that football is the true national pastime, and so it’s going to be the one everyone focuses on. That’s just life in the fast lane, yo.

And what’s really scary, I think, is that Kosta Karageorge wasn’t some old burnout who couldn’t take it anymore after a lifetime of getting his head slammed into by giant hill beasts had turned his brain into something approximating pudding. No, he was a walk-on who never played in a game and had only been on the team for one year. And still, he apparently suffered multiple concussions. Yes, he was on the wrestling team before then, but unless they were practicing tombstone piledrivers and chairshots to the head – always a possibility at Ohio State – I’m going to go ahead and say that his concussion problem was probably football related.

And now he’s dead and if you’re a fan, how do you deal with that? Well, some will flip out and claim that watching football at all is “problematic” and that everyone who does so is an irresponsible ghoul with blood on their hands. Others will get pissed and defensive and claim that everyone should shut up because FOOTBALL FERGODSAKES FOOTBALLLLLLLLLL and pretend that concussions are a conspiracy made up by the Illuminati and aliens in order to make us softer as a people so that we’ll be more inclined to cooperate when the invasion comes.

These are both obviously dumb and reactionary, but hey, that’s absolutism for you. Of course, that’s just how we deal with everything these days – by turning it into a binary debacle in which you have to pick a side and then blindly support said side. God even knows what sort of ugly carnage would unfold now if the “less filling” vs. “tastes great” beer commercial debate of yore was unleashed upon us.

And the really sad thing about this is that this sort of binary argue-about-everything bullshit means that this will just become more grist for that particularly loathsome mill, and it will get caught up in the news cycle, and a couple of months from now everyone will have forgotten it and will all be arguing about whether that farting dog from that Taco Bell Super Bowl commercial is racist or not. And that’s particularly obnoxious here because you know who’s not going to forget? Kosta Karageorge’s family and friends. His poor mom is going to go to sleep every night for the rest of her life with the image of her baby boy climbing into a fucking dumpster and shooting himself, obliterating his face so much that the only way the cops could identify him was through his tattoos.

That is really ugly, but I want you to see it that way. I want it to be humanized so that you can’t just shrug and move on to the farting dog. You will anyway, but shit, at least try. But that doesn’t mean that you have to be reactionary about it either, you know? It may be hard to believe given the state of our interactions, but human beings are highly complex creatures with the ability to hold two opposed, often contradicting, thoughts and ideas in their heads at the exact same time. It’s okay to be worried about this and think we have to figure something out while still being a fan. It’s okay. You’re not a monster, you’re not a hypocrite, you’re not an enabler. You’re a human being, trying to make sense of an insensible world.

I’ve been reading the book The Last Headbangers by Kevin Cook, which is about football in the 1970s and the wild spirit warriors who played it. Naturally, it’s pretty insane. These dudes were fucking nuts. They were all taking steroids, popping pills, uppers and downers, lefters and righters, goofballs and gallantballs, and the whole Raiders team was being shot up with horse testosterone and injecting primitive HGH from human cadavers. Saying it was fucked up doesn’t even begin to describe that shit.

But they did it, and they also beat the shit out of each other on the field. I’m talking knocking each other out with plaster casts, playing with concussions so bad that they were essentially knocked out on their feet, and other gruesome details. And most of them did this for $30,000 a year, not the millions we’re talking today. They basically killed themselves for football. Hell, the Raiders Hall of Fame center, Jim Otto, had to have so many surgeries after he retired that the nerves in his leg were destroyed, so he had the doctors amputate it and replace it with a prosthetic with the Raiders logo on it. That’s both completely insane and completely badass. And, well, there it is in a nutshell.

It’s completely insane and completely badass. It’s okay to recognize both aspects. It’s okay to celebrate one while trying to figure out how we get a handle on the other. Because it’s not okay that a dude like Kosta Karageorge is dead. There’s no reason for that shit. But we’re adults and adults can handle the dichotomy of hating that while also admiring a maniac like Jim Otto.

I don’t know the answers. Nobody does. I mean, on the one hand, I can sit here and tell you that adults make their own decisions and that if these dudes want to kill themselves for the glory of fucking football then, hey, go with god. But on the other hand, you have stories like this, in which studies show that kids playing football show brain changes even without getting concussed all the damn time. That’s scary shit. And you can’t really rationalize that. And you shouldn’t try.

The only way forward, as with all things that make us uncomfortable, is by simply acknowledging that they exist and that there is no reason for it. There is no defensible reason why Kosta Karageorge had to be found in a dumpster with his face blown off. There is no defensible reason why Junior Seau had to call his spirit horse. There is no defensible reason why middle-aged men are wandering around like senile 90 year olds, broke as hell from all the medical bills. It’s abominable and ugly and gross and any other word you want to use for it.

But football is fun and exciting and you aren’t going to stop watching it. That would be its own sort of denial. You have to be able to accept that you love and enjoy a sport that has consequences for the people who play it. That doesn’t mean you need to whip yourself or wear a hair-shirt or bray like a jackass to anyone who will listen about how your noble sacrifice to quit watching will change everything. That just makes you an egomaniac. You aren’t helping anyone or anything. You’re just assuaging your own dumb miserable guilt.

Cheer and celebrate these dudes because they are out there making a choice. And then when they’re done, cheer and celebrate them getting help. Cheer and celebrate and encourage the NFL, the NCAA and everyone else to do anything and everything they can to get at least a fraction of a handle on this. Turning away out of some sort of self-righteous indignation isn’t going to help anyone or anything. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you adopt an absolutist position here either way. The only way this gets better is if we come to terms with ourselves and our own fandom and then go from there.

Look, I’m just a jackass gibbering on the internet. I don’t have the answers. If you ask me what the solution to any of this is, if you ask me if I have a good reason why Kosta Karageorge had to die, then there’s only one thing I can tell you: I don’t know. I don’t know, and neither do any of you. And that’s the only honest thing any of us can say about this. And that’s how this conversation has to start.