Gareth Southgate Quotes

He played football too long without a helmet.

When people say that you kind of just get - you know, just feel like a little buzzed or dazed or had your bell rung - they consider that a concussion. I wouldn't. But if that is considered a concussion, I would say any football player at least records 50 to 100 in the course of a year.

[Referring to Jack Kemp:] … a football player who has played too much without his helmet.

He [Gerald R. Ford] played too much football with his helmet off.

I've rung my bells so many times, especially back in the day when chair shots to the head were legal. My goodness, I took so many of those.

I've been concussed I don't know how many times, yeah it's taken a pretty good toll on the body.

I would bet you that even though people think I absorbed an inordinate number of head injuries, I'd say relative to the number of guys who have played this game, I would say that my head injuries were relatively small.

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

Athletes, coaches and parents today are increasingly aware of the danger of concussion, and this awareness influences decisions about buying new and reconditioned football helmets.

When I played for the Steelers and I got my bell rung, I'd take smelling salts and go right back out there.

I'm sure there were concussions galore back when we played, but the doctors would just say, 'Shake it off,' or something like that... or 'Come on, you got to be tough... get back in there.' I see so many guys who played pro football in their 50s now who are so debilitated from having played it.

I want to leave this sport with a little bit of my brains left.

I went through my entire athletic life as a basketball player with only minimal physical setbacks, the worst being a couple of brain concussions, one in a college game in 1948, the other in 1954 while playing in the Eastern League, from which I recovered without permanent damage.

When you have a fighter who's been punched a lot and been knocked out a lot of times, they're not going to be able to recover. They're going to look like they were knocked out.

I've got my bell rung, and when I first came in the league, the term wasn't 'concussion,' it was 'getting dinged' or 'had your bell rung.' So I had my bell rung a few times.

The game can be quite dangerous when you look at certain injuries, especially head injuries.

While we know, on average, that certain positions experience more repetitive head impacts and are more likely at greater risk for CTE, no position is immune.

My brain is - essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player's brain, right?

We've now found CTE in former NFL players who played every position except kicker.

I've been wrestling since I was 18 years old. And within the first five months of my wrestling career, I'd already had three concussions. And for years after that, I would get a concussion here and there, and it gets to the point that when you've been wrestling for 16 years, that adds up to a lot of concussions.

It makes common sense that children, whose brains are rapidly developing, should not be hitting their heads hundreds of times per season.

Sometimes I wake up and I think, where did my memory go? But at the same time, I signed up for it. Football has been like that for a long time, for ages.

In boxing, you've got CTE from head trauma constantly.

If chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Surely someone in the history of football had thought to look for dementia pugilistica. Unlike boxers, football players wear helmets, but a helmet can't fully protect the head from damaging impact.

One of the wonderful things about wrestling, to me, is that you can protect people who have had head injuries.