Football is rough?

Did anyone else realize that football is a violent sport prone to injuries? I knew this but apparently the folks at ESPN showed up late to the dance. All the talk lately, especially since the Saints' Bounty-crap, has been about the violence in the NFL. Junior Seau's recent suicide has folks speculating that it could be attributed to the hits he took on the football field. I ain't no doctor so I'll stay away from the Seau stuff. I will say, however, that I find it hard to believe athletes in the NFL don't know the risks they are taking. I realized during third grade recess that football (and tackle-tag) was one of the roughest sports a human being could ever play. It didn't take long to figure it out, either. Gilbert Burch slung me to the ground and I hit my head so hard I saw stars. They were white, by the way. I tried to tackle Johnny Belin and the sucker stiff-armed me in the face. He had about two fingers in my mouth and another five or six were jammed up my nostrils. I know that's a lot of fingers from one stiff-arm but, hey, I was a kid and that's what it seemed like at the time. Anyway, it didn't take long to separate the kids at Hermitage Elementary into two groups - boys that played football at recess and the boys who didn't. I played football because I liked it. Others didn't play because they didn't enjoy the pain that came with the sport. That is the point. Football is a sport that centers around pain and punishment. Who can dish it out and who can take it? For these athletes to try to sue the NFL for injuries occured during the course of a football career, I have to ask - how did you not know what you were getting yourself in? These guys knew the risks they were taking. But, at the time, the size of those paychecks outweighed any possible future damage to the bodies or brain cells. Now that the body is broken and the checks have stopped, they want to file a lawsuit and pretend they didn't know the sport was so dangerous. Well, boo-freaking-hoo. Unless these guys skipped the third grade and went straight to the NFL, I ain't buying it.