If you don’t know about the movie “Leatherheads” filmed in the Upstate last year, you must have been living in a cocoon. It was all over the media. Now, with the movie opening in this area in April, we are again reliving that time. The stars, George Clooney and Renee Zellweger, came back to town and everyone is excited again.

The name of the movie comes from the helmets worn by football players back in the 1920s and 1930s.

Football has a checkered past. At its beginning in the late 1800s, no one wore protective pads at all. Several players were killed playing the game and it was deemed so dangerous that President Taft called a national conference to determine whether or not it should be banned or if more restrictive rules would make it safe to play.

I once wore a helmet like the one Clooney wears in the movie. No, I didn’t play football in the 1920s and 1930s. I first entered the fray in the mid-1950s. However, when you are the last player on the team you tend to get the last helmet issued and when the equipment budget is limited that helmet generally is a relic of an earlier era. I can testify that the leather helmet fit just like another skin on top of the head, helped with concussion not at all and provided very little protection for anything else.

Helmets have gone through an interesting evolution over the years. The ones you see today are engineered to handle concussion, to protect in ways that helmets of earlier times could not. There was a time when face masks were not worn. That rule was added in the 1950s. The padded helmet was in vogue in that era and by the 1960s Riddell came out with a “suspension” helmet that was a great improvement. An interior suspension apparatus was fit to your head so that the helmet couldn’t twist sideways and leave you unprotected.

Unfortunately, the by-product of the suspension helmet with the face mask was that you could push the face mask up or down and bring the hard plastic of the helmet in contact with the back of the neck or the bridge of the nose. It was an unusual practice or game when several players did not end up with a bloody cut on the bridge of the nose.

I was in Chicago several years ago working with a group of bankers. When we took a break I walked over to one of the men and asked him who he played football for. He was immediately surprised and asked how I knew. I told him the Riddell helmet scar on the bridge of his nose was unmistakable. Sure enough, that is where it came from. The nose scar was painful enough but the back of the neck was the really vulnerable point. Several deaths occurred before the helmet was modified to protect those two key points of contact.

The National Football League has been holding hearings on the damage professional football players have received playing the game. Well-known players of earlier eras like John Mackey and John Unitas received injuries that left them badly crippled or mentally impaired in their later years.

Safety in sports is a key issue. Every year we hear that several young athletes are killed or badly injured playing in one sport or another. Is the danger of participation great enough to outweigh the benefits of participation? We sincerely hope not.

However, there is no substitute for a well-trained coach who understands the issues related to heat prostration, water intake and athletic injuries. The universities teach our coaches well in the X’s and O’s of the game but parents know that the physical well-being of our young people is way more important.

Incidentally, if you would like to identify the old football players in the community, look for the Riddell scar on the bridge of the nose. It is a dead giveaway.

Anderson resident Mark Hopkins has been president of three institutions of higher learning, including what was at the time Anderson College. He travels around the world as a consultant on higher education.