By JOHN M. CRISP

Scripps Howard News Service

Once I was acquainted with some rugby players. Rugby is a distant cousin of American football. Rugby is a full-contact sport, with a reputation for tough, hard-hitting play and brutal tackles. But rugby players dress for the game like soccer players, with no pads or protection beyond, sometimes, mouth guards and leather helmets to prevent cauliflower ear.

A rough game played by tough guys. Yet the rugby players of my acquaintance, all of British origin, did not enjoy playing with Americans who had taken up rugby after having grown up playing our brand of football. Why? Because behind the protection of high-tech helmets, shoulder pads, hip pads, knee pads, and so on, young American boys learn to think of their bodies as invulnerable missiles to be hurled sacrificially at a target without consideration for the consequences.

Therefore they never learn how to protect themselves or their opponents.

At one time football players were taught to tackle from a controlled, balanced stance, leading with the shoulder pad in a low attack, and using their arms to wrap up the runner and bring him down.

Tackling may still be taught that way, but players learn a different lesson on TV. In a recent Associated Press article by Eric Olson, Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy says that he cringes to see the hard, high hits that tacklers execute on ball carriers in the modern game.

As Gundy puts it: "These guys now are taking shots from the waist up. ... They see it on the highlights, they see it on the 'big hits of the week,' and I think it encourages more players to try to tackle high."

If we really were interested in making football safer for the players, we would provide them with less protection, rather than more, which might encourage their natural instinct toward self-preservation to take over, much as it does in rugby. Unfortunately, there's a problem with the premise. I suspect that the genie of violence in football is already out of the bottle and he's unlikely to return quietly. Football is an excellent game, but the modern American version takes an expensive lifetime toll on too many of its players. Each year a few die and a few are paralyzed. Many more incur injuries that never entirely go away.

Still, what good American would prefer to watch a game of rugby?

John M. Crisp teaches in the English Department at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.