Head games

 You always hurt the ones you love, or so they say, but there's no instruction manual for what to do when the ones you love hurt you back. And there's for damn sure no chapter on how to stop loving them.

Tua Tagovailoa could sure use that chapter about now.

The Miami Dolphins quarterback's brain got shaken and stirred again the other day, and now he's on injured reserve for at least the next four weeks. When he comes back after that -- if he comes back after that -- remains to be seen.

This is, after all, the third concussion of Tua's career, and they haven't been minor ones. At least one left him twitching grotesquely on the field. Little wonder, then, that this latest hit to the head has a whole lot of folks on the internet and in sports media suggesting maybe it's time Tua began looking for another line of work.

He only has one brain, after all. And what we know about concussions, despite the NFL's once-fervent efforts to deny it, is that concussions have a cumulative effect. The more you sustain, the more susceptible you are to sustaining them, and the greater likelihood that you wind up a mumbling wreck tortured by demons only you can see.

It's an immeasurably sad way to go, and we've seen it too many times. And no one wants to see it happen again down the line with Tua.

The sticking point, of course, is football itself, and how hard a thing it is to walk away from once it sinks its claws in you. Among the ones you love, it's the one you love more intensely than any other, and it's also the one that just as intensely doesn't love you back. 

Football is glory and brotherhood and the sort of shared sacrifice that makes that brotherhood impenetrably insular. If you're a part of it, it's impossible not to understand it; if you aren't a part of it, it's impossible to explain.

And yet always it will demand explanation.

Because, see, the other part of football is it hurts you. Hurts you every day. Hurts you really bad sometimes. Hurts you when you get out of bed in the morning, and when, if you're lucky, you sink down into sleep at night.

And still you play. And still you want to play, even when it's beyond reason you should.

Once upon a time, for instance, 49ers defensive back Ronnie Lott had part of his mangled pinkie finger amputated so he could stay on the field. Rams defensive end Jack Youngblood once hobbled through the playoffs on a broken leg. And Steelers DB Rod Woodson once suffered a season-ending knee injury he refused to acknowledge was season-ending, because he rehabbed so ferociously he made it back to play in the Super Bowl that season.

Normal people, outsiders, can only shake their heads at such things. I used to shake my head every time I heard a collision that sounded like two semis hitting head-on, or walked into a postgame locker room strewn with discarded tape and whatever else held the players together.  

Field hospital post-Gettysburg is what it was. Minus the amputated limbs, of course.

And now, here's Tua Tagovailoa, facing not amputation but possibly truncated cognitive function. Corporate prerogatives being what they are in the modern NFL, you want the Dolphins to declare him a sunk cost. You also want them, out of simple compassion, to tell him to consider what his life will be like when he's 50 or 55. 

But right now he's only 26 years old, and 55 is light years away. And football is still what football is to 26-years-olds who are mega-skilled at it: A game that makes you love it even as it takes a piece of you here and a piece of you there, and maybe your future just for the hell of it.

Plays head games with you, in other words.

In this case, quite literally.