Charlie Mahoney for The New York Times
Dover High School players at a practice this month. The Green Wave, who are having a losing season, have been playing football for more than 100 years and are big in the community.
DOVER, N.H. — The agenda for the Oct. 1 school board meeting did not call for anything particularly exciting. But during a segment called "Matters of Interest," Paul Butler, a retired doctor and relative newcomer to the board, floated an idea: end the football program at Dover High School.
Speaking in his soothing, deliberative tone, Butler said, "I'm beginning to believe, from what I've read of the literature, that as governors of the school district, we have a moral imperative to at least begin the process of ending this game in Dover."
Butler is a retired surgeon, with no specialty in neurology. But he had followed the growing evidence of the peril football poses to the brains of the people who play it. Butler had no beef with football, for he had played it in high school and in college.
He was, he said, just trying to frame the question of the future of football in the most practical of terms, drawing upon the implications of the class-action lawsuit filed in June against the N.F.L. on behalf of more than 2,000 former players alleging that the league did not adequately warn them of the evidence about the dangers of repeated head trauma and concussions.
Butler warned his fellow board members that if city officials did not end football at Dover High, "the lawyers will do it for us" someday.
The next morning, Butler said, he attended a weekly 7:30 a.m. medical conference at Wentworth-Douglas Hospital, where he was a general surgeon until retiring in June 2011. By the time he and his wife had made the drive down to Arlington, Mass., to baby-sit grandchildren, he was being sought for television interviews. His comments to the board, it turned out, had been reported in the local newspaper, Foster's Daily Democrat.
By day's end, Dover's school board chairman was forced to issue a statement denying the city had any plans to end football at Dover High. Even so, Peter Wotton, the school's athletic director, had a news truck parked outside his house.
"Our brain is really who we are," Butler said in an interview last week. "In this society, in this time, if your brain has been altered, you have been fundamentally altered."
Small Town, Big Interest
Without exactly meaning to, Butler had inserted Dover — about 70 miles north of Boston, a community of roughly 30,000, and a place with a history dating practically to the Mayflower —into the middle of a 21st century culture war.
Foster's Daily Democrat came out firmly opposed to the notion of ending football. "Here in New Hampshire — as in 38 other states — a law has been passed to mandate precautions be taken any time there is an indication of a head injury in any sport," an editorial in the newspaper read.
The football program at Dover — the team is known as the Green Wave — is big in the community. But so too are soccer, lacrosse and ice hockey — all sports in which players are vulnerable to concussions and other head injuries. Wotton said that 8 of the 68 students who played varsity, junior varsity or freshman football last season sustained concussions. But there were also five concussions in girls' basketball, nine in boys' lacrosse and four in cheerleading, he said.
"I appreciate his concern," Wotton, sitting in his office last week, said of Butler. "This might end up being a good thing in the end. It's just a semipainful way to get there."
Butler is not the first school board member in the country to risk proposing what for many seems heretical. Last June, a member of the Council Rock School Board near Philadelphia said that it was "no longer appropriate for public institutions to fund gladiators." Rush Limbaugh used the comments as further proof that, as he had said on an earlier broadcast, football's future was under attack from liberal "pantywaists who want to try to take the risk out of everything in life."
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