Tape It Up and Get Back Out There: The Brutal Reality of Sports Injuries Before Modern Medicine

Walt Garrison, the Dallas Cowboys fullback, once said that his teammate Roger Staubach could have played through a nuclear attack. He meant it as a compliment. In the NFL of the late 1960s and early 1970s, playing hurt wasn't just expected — it was the definition of being a professional. The culture was so embedded that players who asked for time off were viewed with something close to suspicion.

This wasn't just football. Across American professional sports, the approach to injury was shaped by a combination of medical ignorance, cultural stoicism, and an almost complete absence of the tools we now take for granted. The result was a generation of athletes who endured things that, by today's standards, would be considered genuinely dangerous — and who often paid for it quietly, years after the cameras stopped rolling.

What the Trainer's Room Actually Looked Like

The team physician of the 1960s was often a general practitioner — a local doctor with a relationship with the club, not a specialist in musculoskeletal medicine or orthopedic surgery. Sports medicine as a distinct field barely existed. Athletic trainers were skilled, often experienced, and deeply committed to their players, but they were working with limited tools and limited knowledge.

The standard response to most soft-tissue injuries was a combination of ice, compression, and tape. A lot of tape. Ankles were wrapped so tightly before games that players described them as feeling like casts. Knees were braced with whatever was available. Pain was managed primarily with two things: aspirin and, increasingly through the late 1960s and 1970s, cortisone injections.

Cortisone became a kind of miracle solution in those decades — a way to reduce inflammation quickly enough to get a player back on the field before the swelling had really settled. Teams used it liberally. Players received injections into knees, shoulders, hips, and elbows with a frequency that would alarm any modern sports physician. The short-term effect was real. The long-term consequences weren't well understood, and in many cases, weren't thought about at all.

The Painkiller Culture

Then there were the pills.

Amphetamines were widespread in professional baseball through the 1960s and into the 1970s — used not just for performance, but to help players push through fatigue and minor injury. In football, painkillers were dispensed in trainer's rooms with a casualness that would be unthinkable today. Players have described being handed pills before games without always knowing what they were taking, and without anyone suggesting that playing on a damaged joint might be making the underlying injury worse.

This wasn't malice. It was the accepted culture of the era, reinforced from the top down. Coaches valued toughness. Front offices valued availability. The player who could be on the field on Sunday, regardless of what his body was telling him, was the player who kept his job.

And so they played. Pitchers threw on torn labrums. Running backs carried the ball on fractured ribs. Linemen pulled themselves off the turf after concussions — then called "getting your bell rung" — and lined up for the next play.

What We Know Now That They Didn't Know Then

The MRI machine changed everything.

When magnetic resonance imaging became widely available to sports teams in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, it did something the old trainer's room couldn't: it showed exactly what was happening inside a joint or a muscle without cutting it open. Suddenly, teams could see a partial ACL tear, a stress fracture, a labral injury — and make informed decisions about risk.

Modern sports medicine built on that foundation rapidly. Platelet-rich plasma therapy, arthroscopic surgery, load management protocols, GPS-tracked training volumes, sleep science, nutrition optimization — the care available to a professional athlete in 2024 would be unrecognizable to the players of 1968.

A current NBA player diagnosed with a Grade 2 hamstring strain enters a carefully structured return-to-play protocol managed by a team of specialists: a team physician, an orthopedic consultant, a physical therapist, a strength coach, and often a sports psychologist. Their progress is tracked daily. Their workload is monitored. The decision to return is made collaboratively, with imaging and functional testing guiding every step.

In 1971, the same player probably got some ice, some tape, and a conversation that lasted about four minutes.

What Was Lost, and What Was Gained

It's tempting to look back at the old approach as simply barbaric — and in some ways, it was. The long-term health costs paid by athletes of that era have become clearer over time. Chronic joint damage, painkiller dependency, the devastating toll of undiagnosed and untreated concussions — these are real, documented, and serious.

But there's a more complicated conversation sitting underneath the obvious one.

The modern approach to injury management has, in some cases, extended careers and preserved long-term health in ways that genuinely matter. It has also, in the view of some coaches and former players, produced a culture that is occasionally risk-averse to a fault — where players sit out games for injuries that a previous generation would have run off, where "load management" has become a source of genuine frustration for fans paying to see star players compete.

Neither era got it entirely right. The 1960s athlete was often pushed past the point where his body could safely go. The 2024 athlete sometimes has the opposite problem — a support system so cautious that the threshold for sitting out has moved considerably.

What's certain is this: the athletes who played through torn muscles and broken bones in front of sold-out stadiums, sustained by cortisone shots and sheer will, were doing something remarkable. Whether the system around them was helping them or simply using them is a question worth sitting with.

Were we ever here — at a place where toughness was the only medicine available? We were, and not as long ago as it might seem.