Super Bowl Sunday should be a day George Visger looks forward to celebrating each year.

After all, our nation's apparent new national pastime was the game he played at the highest level. In fact, Visger was a member of the 1981 San Francisco 49ers, the team Joe Montana led to the franchise's first Super Bowl championship.

Visger, a 6-foot, 5-inch, 275-pound defensive lineman, didn't get the chance to take the field at Detroit's Pontiac Silverdome that cold January day against the Cincinnati Bengals.

He was on the injured reserve list, after undergoing a knee operation — and later the first of nine brain surgeries he has endured after a career of banging heads with some of the best football players in the country.

But his battle with the short-term memory loss, seizures and anger management issues so often connected with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) has caused the 52-year-old Grass Valley resident to essentially shove aside the game he so loved — especially when it comes to his son following in his football footsteps.

Ten-year-old Jack likely won't get a choice in the matter, as George and his wife, Kristie, came to an agreement after a brain scan that showed such damage that his doctors were wondering how the former football star found a way to function as well as he had since he stepped off the gridiron.

“Walking out of there, my wife said ‘Jack will not play football,'” Visger said earlier this week. “And I've told him ‘Hey buddy, you know what? I can't argue with your mom.'”

Concussions, or “getting your bell rung” as they called it early in Visger's playing days, is common in the game of football. And whether they are on the rise, as many suspect due to the bigger, faster and stronger players hitting the field and each other these days, or whether they are detected more prevalently due to increased awareness, one thing is certain: The dangers of repeated concussions is clearly a conversation in which the sports world is currently fully engaged.

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Take a look at the California Interscholastic Federation's website (www.CIFstate.org) and you'll see the state's governing high school athletic association has taken a topic that once was joked about by players and set it squarely on the table to ensure everyone knows that concussions are no laughing matter.

The CIF's site is flush with information for coaches, parents, athletes, schools and health care providers. Fact sheets describing symptoms of a concussion and the dangers of returning to action too soon after suffering one are readily available to anyone who cares to read them.

Studies across the country are throwing an all-out blitz at the problem, and as more information becomes available, many programs at all levels are applying the lessons learned, including Nevada Union High School.

“It's a hot topic in the news, because it's a hot topic in the medical field,” said NU coach Dave Humphers. “We have a policy that's been longstanding when a player gets injured in any way — concussions or injuries with another part of the body. Players have to be cleared by a doctor to return to play.

“Our kids are very fortunate because we have an entire medical staff on the sideline with us. They look at the tracking of the eyes, the dilation of the pupils and a number of other tests to determine if it's a concussion or not. And if the doctors determine a player can't play, Jamie Wise, our trainer, will take away his helmet, if he thinks the kid would try to go back in.”

Humphers, whose two sons played at the varsity level last year, said his youngest boy, Hank, sustained a concussion during his freshman season. But whether it's his son or someone else's, it's a serious issue.

“We work awfully hard to make a huge commitment to football, but it pales in importance in terms of wanting our kids healthy,” Humphers said. “I feel really good about our protocol, having doctors make the call, and the information that's available on this.”

It's information that former local players Visger and Kevin Brown, who played wide receiver at the University of Idaho and in NFL Europe, said parents should read and make decisions on whether their own child should play the game and at what age they should start.

“Parents should do the research,” said Brown. “Educate yourselves to make a decision on [your] own personal preferences, but also pay attention to [your] kid and their injuries early on.”

Brown, 40, who served as an assistant coach at Humboldt State and at Nevada Union after his playing days ended, remembers the days when teammates thought it was funny when someone got their “bell rung” and had trouble remembering the game they just played.

“It was a different time altogether with that,” he said. “The old joke was when the coach would hold up three fingers and ask you how many you see, if you said ‘four' they'd say ‘that's close enough, get back in there.'

“Compared to back when I was in high school, though, it's night and day when it comes to how much more attention is given to concussions. It's way better. One hundred percent better than it was 20 to 25 years ago.”

Out of the dark

Visger wishes he had the kind of information that's now available to players back when he was lining up for the University of Colorado Buffaloes or the 49ers.

But he didn't and now, he says, he's paying the price for it.

Visger said he suffered his first concussion way back when he first strapped on the shoulder pads, during his third season of Pop Warner football in Stockton. It was also the first time a blow to the head had landed him in the hospital, although just for overnight evaluation.

He's suffered countless other concussions since and more hospital stays than he'd likely remember.

Another concussion came on the very first play of his first game with the 49ers, a 45-14, week-six win over the Dallas Cowboys in '81. Visger, who was originally drafted by the New York Jets in the sixth round of 1980 NFL draft, had signed with San Francisco just five days before taking the field as a 49er.

“It was in the first quarter and on my first play I just got ear-holed,” as a tight end crashed back on a block, Visger said. “I went through 25 to 30 smelling salts through that game, trying to get my head cleared. But you didn't go out of the game. You never miss a practice, you never miss a game. I mean, that was the mentality. I played games like that throughout college, high school and every level.

“You just power through things and, you know ‘suck it up' and all that b.s. you learn in football. ... If anybody had told us that by the time we were 40 that we might not be able to remember how to get home from the store, I'd have said the hell with it.”

After six years of fighting with the 49ers in court over his health care coverage and enduring a wide variety of pharmaceutical prescriptions, along with the numerous surgeries — maintaining a shunt that allows fluid that builds up on his brain due to scar tissue to drain through a tube to his abdomen — Visger said he's finally starting to feel like “I'm getting back to my old self.”

But first he went through a “dark period” where he lost his job as a wildlife biologist, after finishing his degree despite his CTE brain injuries.

Along with headaches and having difficulty remembering routine things, Visger said he became “quick-tempered” and developed anger management issues.

“I really didn't realize how much it had impacted my life and my family,” he said.

In recent years, though, through various new treatments — including short stays in hyperbaric oxygen tents — Visger said he's made some real progress in healing — and even with the game itself, although his son will likely never be allowed to play.

“I am not anti-football,” he said. “I'm not telling anyone to do — or don't do — anything,” said Visger. “I just know what I'm telling my son to do.”

When is too early?

“It's a really tough decision for me,” Kevin Brown said. “It's tough because now he's expressing a real desire to play.”

Brown's son, Freedom, showed quite an arm for a 6-year-old and he's got quite a partner with whom to play catch in a former pro wideout for a dad. But when he'll actually hit the field in full-contact youth football is something Brown and his wife, Dr. Lezley Brown, a family practitioner with Sierra Care Physicians in Penn Valley, continue to discuss.

“For me, it's a two-fold thing,” Brown said. “On the injury side, he's still young and you see collisions, even though they might be in their first, second or third years. I'd rather hold off until he gets a little more stout and his body grows a bit.

“Also, it's about him getting burnt out. By the time you get to high school, where it starts to pick up in competition and expectations, and all you put into it, I don't want him to get burnt out on it.”

Brown said he sustained five or six concussions between playing at the high school level and a couple of seasons of playing pro ball. And, he said, there were times when he might have suffered a concussion, but not severe enough to be held out of games.

“I was kind of hardheaded myself, not wanting to come out of games,” said Brown, who lives at Lake of the Pines and owns Epiphany Sports Marketing. Brown also serves as a vice president of the Northern California chapter of a retired NFL players association.

“I don't mind (Freedom) playing football if that's his passion,” added Lezley Brown. “I think it would be good to get him exposed to the game and the dynamics of the game in flag football or something like that first.

“For me, it's a developmental thing and not having as many injuries so young. A good percentage of (concussions) we see are sports injuries, usually football, but we also have injuries from falling off playground equipment.

“We do see them with young kids and we do see football injuries with young kids. I'd never want my son to go through that at a young age and then have 10 of them by the time he was 22.”

There's no question Kevin Brown still loves the game, even the hard hits he took while catching passes over the middle. The only question that remains for him as a parent is how soon he would allow his son to do the same.

“Actually, it's the collisions and hard hits, that part of the game, that I love and miss, as well,” he said. “But that's the debate I'm having with myself and with my wife. He's just starting to express interest and wants to play.

“It's a personal decision. I'd just tell parents to get informed and make sure they know all the things that can happen.”

To contact City Editor Brian Hamilton, e-mail bhamilton@theunion.com or call 477-4249.