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Football has always been violent. In the early days of the game, they didn't wear hard helmets. They wore soft helmets, which were just designed to protect the ears. In the '40s and '50s they began to introduce hard helmets, which provided much more protection against things like skull fractures.

As a physician, I'm somewhat an advocate of patients. How come, before Mike Webster, no NFL player was told or knew that there was an intrinsic risk of brain damage from playing football?

A child who plays a game of football for one season without any documented concussion - several months after that season, if you subject his brain to sophisticated psychological testing and radiological testing, functional MRIs, there is evidence of brain damage.

I was really just too small for football.

Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

I don't understand American football at all. It looks like all-in wrestling with crash helmets.

Often there are players who have only football as a way of expressing themselves and never develop other interests. And when they no longer play football, they no longer do anything; they no longer exist, or rather they have the sensation of no longer existing.

If Tiger Woods had played football, he would have been a quarterback.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I remember when your average NFL player would come to the sideline, spit out three bicuspids, Scotch-tape his humerus together and get back out there.