Kids bounce. They have rubber bones.
Take a fourth-grader that’s 4-foot something and weighs 40 pounds and the strength in the growing bones can handle a lot of rough and tumble. But you take that same kid and extrapolate him to a 6-foot, 200-pound grown man and you’ve got a lot more stress on those bones just rolling out of bed in the morning. The bounce goes away and the creak sneaks in.
The pounding a kid takes has a lot less poundage to it than a grownup. Kids leap, jump, spring, tumble, crash and fall and all on purpose. Most adults try and avoid all those things, unless you’re paid what they pay a pro football player. I’d risk a pretty good tackle at this point for $10 million a season. Just give me extra time climbing out of that bed in the morning.
Looking for places
Kids seek out places to bounce. When was the last time you climbed a tree or rode a bicycle across the front yard, or for that matter built a plywood ramp to jump it off of?
Kids take the normal wear and tear of bike crashes, tripping over roots and jumping out of trees in stride. They play football in the backyard without pads, and basketball tournaments are held on the rough asphalt of driveways instead of the smooth hardwood of a court. There may be scraped knees, but it takes a bit of doing to break that arm or leg.
I should know, I’ve broken a foot, fractured an ankle and broken a hand, and each of those was when I was young and rubbery and could have bounced if I hadn’t jumped out of such a high tree, landed wrong on concrete after a leap in the air or tried to stop my tumble down a hillside by putting my hand out to catch myself. Those were extreme examples where I found the limits of the old rubber bones.
The miracle
There are about 1,700 pro football players in the U.S. For the kid count, there are around 1.8 million kids that play football. That’s the most contact sport there is, but there are still plenty of crashes in baseball, basketball and soccer, full-speed crashes without pads but with the addition of a soccer ball that’s kicked at you at probably (well, it feels like it anyway when it hits you in the face unexpectedly) 300 mph.
There are a number of injuries in these sports but the miracle is actually how few there are. Going to a high school game of any type and odds are there will be crashes like a rainy day at NASCAR but the odds are also that no one will get hurt bad and certainly not break something. Thanks, rubber bones! Add to that all the backyard sports and you get a lot of kids playing with just a handful ending up hurt. It’s a miracle of anatomy, a built-in safety factor so little ones can grow up to be big ones.
Looking back at all the rough and tumble play we enjoyed when a kid, and all the things we did that involved being in dangerous situations for the sake of fun, it’s a miracle everyone in elementary school through high school isn’t walking around on crutches. We sought out the dangerous for the thrills and for the peer pressure of going the other guy one better. Riding a bike down a steep hill? I’ll do it faster and more reckless than you and then what are you going to do about it? (Outdo me the next time down, of course!)
I’ve crashed on bikes many times and usually without wearing a helmet, but I’ve never had a broken bone. One crash I did bang myself up enough to warrant an X-Ray of my ribs but nothing was cracked, just bruised. Most times it was strawberry patches on the knees and palms of the hand. One time I was riding down a hill and didn’t get the brakes working in time and crashed into bushes. The good news is the bushes cushioned my fall. The bad news is the bushes were a briar patch. Bones safe and sound but my suit of skin had enough holes in it that if people were inflatable I’d have popped like a balloon in a cactus patch.
I played tackle football in the backyard “stadiums” of numerous houses around town, including my own. In all that time I think there was only one fractured kid. And all those years without pads. Add to that my halcyon days of rec center football with pads and the worst thing I had was the wind knocked out of me when someone head-butted me in the old breadbasket. But nothing broken.
Another backyard sport that not many folks think of was our own championship wrestling association. Especially around middle school we would watch our TV “wrastlin’” heroes and then go outside and duplicate what we saw. All that was needed was a trampoline to simulate a ring. And back then there weren’t nets around the trampolines, so plenty of us got bounced out at some point. We either landed down in the middle of the springs on the side or sailed completely off and hit the ground. Again, after years of wrestling matches with good guys versus the bad guys I don’t recall a single broken bone. Bruises and pulled muscles, yes, headaches from jumping on a trampoline for hours nonstop, yes, but no breaks.
Emboldened
One of the things about not breaking anything for the most part is you start to believe it will never happen. That emboldens the kids to push even further into the realm of action adventure. When a bicycle crash, a hard tackle or a bounce off the trampoline only leads to an adrenaline rush and plenty of laughs from the onlookers, fear of a broken bone just doesn’t develop.
And even though I did have breaks myself, there were so many times accidents failed to lead to anything serious that it bolstered my belief that “That’s not going to happen again.” And among my friends I was the one breaking things, holding the record for most times on crutches. All those other times I bounced.
We even came up with obscure ways to crash and bang. Another influence on us, like wrestling on TV, were kung fu movies. Martial arts movies really caught on in the ‘70s and so were relatively new to us. We’d try and copy what we saw on those movies from Hong Kong. We knew enough to do it the “stuntman” way and not go for full contact, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t flip and fly down the hallway, or that there weren’t accidental karate chops to various parts of the opponent’s body or that forearms didn’t whack into each other. It was mostly a lot of “hi-yahs!” and contactless kicks but there was enough action to fill an actual “flying fists” movie.
Everyday events
In addition to all the sports play and the movie and TV acting out there was just the everyday accidents that happen to kids who have yet to truly learn about how physics and gravity actually work. There were leaps from ladders, falling over in chairs and, for me, slipping and falling backward in a boat and slamming my back into the deck. The air got knocked out of me but the spine and shoulder blades remained intact.
Another danger was just flat out running too fast. I don’t know how many of us would run down a steep hill and achieve a speed at which we couldn’t keep running. Gravity took over and the speed down was faster than the legs could operate. This frequently ended up in some type of face plant but I can’t think of a time this led to anything broken.
What about the bones I do know that got broken? With me it was one foot from jumping out of a tree, an ankle when I jumped off a roll of carpet in someone’s carport and landed wrong on concrete, and lastly a broken hand when I fell snow skiing the icy white stuff that passes for snow in North Carolina. That was in high school.
I know of two contemporaries who broke legs from being hit by cars, both crossing the street in front of a car. My dad broke his wrist playing basketball. He was going up and the other guy was coming down. A buddy broke his arm playing tennis somehow. That seems an odd sport to break anything except your tennis racket when you lose. A buddy broke his shoulder during a backyard game of tackle football. And a classmate broke his nose when someone slung a ball bat backward after a hit. That’s but a handful of breaks compared to the couple of hundred friends I have and the literally countless events that could lead to a break if it weren’t for young, growing bones that have some give to them.
The older you get the more careful I hope you get. Those bones start getting hard and then brittle, and just because they say old folks are in their “second childhood” doesn’t mean the bones got the memo.
Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in video and film production.