COLUMN: Deleted from the box score

By Josh Callahan Oji Perkins doesn't remember much of his Saturday afternoon, but I remember too well. Perkins and I both remember him catching the kickoff and running up the field. I remember the tackle. He only remembers the ambulance. That was 15 minutes after the crushing helmet-to-helmet blow he took from a Penn coverage player just looking to make a routine play. The play was more than routine, it caused a fumble which gave the Quakers great field position and a chance to cut even further into Bucknell's dwindling lead. The Quakers' coverage team left the field to a chorus of cheers from their teammates, a couple hundred fans and to my celebration muffled by the press pass hanging around my neck. The Bison coverage team left the field one man short. Oji Perkins lay motionless near his sideline, his face buried in the natural grass field at Christy Mathewson stadium. He looked like a rag doll, balled up and orphaned on the grass. Perkins didn't move for two minutes. When he finally began to regain partial consciousness, it took a dozen trainers and staff members 15 minutes before they were comfortable immobilizing his head and torso and loading him into the ambulance. Doctors at the Evangelical Community Hospital in Lewisburg, Pa., ruled it a third-degree concussion because Perkins had remained unconscious for more than one minute. The senior from Orlando, Fla., is out from football for at least six weeks, and that's only if he stops showing signs of amnesia. More likely he is done playing for good. Injuries of this severity have a funny way of disappearing from a game. Everyone who witnessed the spectacular impact sped off to a parallel world as soon as they saw Perkins down, and everyone snapped back into their stadium chairs as soon as the ambulance pulled away. Ten thousand people could not have made less noise while Perkins writhed on the ground in a shocked and frightened state after he regained partial consciousness. I probably made more noise than anyone by opening the door to the press box and walking outside into the top row of the stands. Everyone was fixated on the scene below them, afraid to look at the person sitting next to them. The 15 minutes Perkins spent down on the ground became its own independent scene, totally detached from the action before and after the play. Once he left the field to the traditional polite applause, the teams and the fans carried on with the game as if what had occurred was nothing more than a fumble. No one mentioned Perkins in post-game interviews, and his injury didn't appear in the game statistics differently than any of the other half dozen kickoff returns. And there's nothing wrong with that. People get hurt. Not just in football, but everywhere. Except for the requisite period of stunned disbelief, most would prefer to relegate the scene to a vague and unidentifiable memory. That's why nobody made a sound. Dialogue places a person at the scene, makes him a witness, forces the memory to become permanent. Not talking means that you are watching a movie. By removing him from the field, the ambulance provided the crowd the opportunity to engage in the habit of out of sight, out of mind. Oji Perkins' 6'1'', 159-pound body was not ready to be sent crashing into Dreamland. Our two-inch eyes were not ready to watch what we saw. So we can pretend that we didn't by erasing it from records. It didn't happen. No. 3 got up and ran to the sidelines after fumbling. Or at least that's what it said in the box score. Because no one wants to know that the same sort of thing could happen to them. Because a 250- pound football player running at full speed isn't that much different than a car barreling down the road. So we sent Oji Perkins to deal with his headache, and we went back to watching football.

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