I grew up playing football, but I won't let my kids play it

• I'm from the Midwest and grew up with football everywhere.
• I also played football when I was in high school — and broke some bones doing so.

As a red-blooded, Midwestern boy born into Generation X, I grew up eating, sleeping, and breathing football. I vividly remember, at age 10, watching the San Francisco 49ers hammer Dan Marino and my beloved Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl XIX.

I loved to play, too. I sweat, bled, and broke bones between the lines in high school. I nearly walked on with the local Big Ten program, but I wound up covering the team for the school paper. I grew into a career as a sportswriter, and, to my delight, I was handed the keys to the kingdom: press-row seats covering college football and the NFL for national publications.

So years later, when my own boys — spoon-fed fantasy football, Sunday Ticket, and all the lore of the game that I could pass down to them — came bounding into my basement office one day to ask whether they could join a youth football league, my answer should have been as emphatic as an end-zone dance.

Instead, I surprised even myself. "I'm sorry," I said. "But no."

I would knock heads and see stars

As a kid, I watched games with my dad, tossed wobbly spirals to buddies in the backyard, and relished every autumn Friday night I got to stick my cleats in the grass and my shoulder pads into some other pimply teenager.

Every so often, though, it wasn't my pads doing the sticking. I can recall one occasion when, with our school facing its cross-town rival, I wound up in what amounted to a one-on-one smackdown with the opponent's safety, each of us chugging full speed at the other, play after play — and too often colliding helmets-first.

Knock heads, see stars, rinse, repeat. It was all part of the game, right? And I couldn't get enough of it.

Even now, I distinctly remember the all-day anticipation of game night, the full-body tingle I felt before every snap, and the primal gratification of a clean, lungs-emptying hit. Didn't I want my boys — my athletic, red-blooded Midwestern boys — to experience the same gridiron thrills their old man once lived for?

It's my obligation as their dad to keep them safe

As it turns out, no. By the time my kids were old enough to begin participating in organized sports, the curtain had begun to be pulled back on the game — and what we saw was ugly. Rampant head-impact injuries, concussions, and a degenerative brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Better helmets, contact-dampening rule changes — none of it could fully remove the blunt force from the game.

Many former NFL players, we learned, were being greeted in retirement by titanic physical, mental, and emotional struggles, which a growing body of research increasingly associated with CTE. A raft of former NFL tough guys — Andre Waters, Ray Easterling — were suddenly killing themselves. Dave Duerson shot himself in the chest so that his brain could be studied after his death. Junior Seau ended his life similarly. Jovan Belcher, while still an active player, fatally shot his girlfriend before taking his own life.

Of course, not every NFL player winds up with CTE. And though it has been found in a vast majority of those tested, not all of them turn to violence or self-harm. Still, many suffer from debilitating symptoms. And the risks start well before a player turns pro.

CTE has been found in college and high-school players. The latest research paints a grim picture: Experts commissioned by the National Institutes of Health recently found that "every additional year playing football was associated with 15% increased odds of a CTE diagnosis and, for those with CTE, 14% increased odds of severe CTE."

When the film "Concussion" was released in 2015, we saw it as a family. Based on the real-life findings of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who is credited with discovering the link between CTE and NFL players, the movie left an impression on my boys.

I don't know that they fully absorbed the narrative in that moment, but I used it as an opportunity to help them understand why I had declared the game off-limits. "It's my job — it's my obligation — as your dad to keep you safe," I told them. "I wouldn't let you walk into traffic. And I wasn't going to let you play football, either."