League of Denial (54 page)

Hoge used his role as an NFL analyst on ESPN to criticize those who would question the dangers of football. When former quarterback Kurt Warner, who led the Rams to victory in Super Bowl XXXIV and won two MVP awards during a 12-year career, said he would prefer that his sons not play football, remarks similar to those made by former greats such as Bradshaw and Carson, Hoge publicly attacked Warner as “irresponsible” and “uneducated.”

Some people seemed to be lining up on both sides of the debate. Cantu, another original Dissenter, now was serving as a senior adviser to the NFL concussion committee. At the same time, he
dispensed paid advice to the lawyers suing the league during a February 2012 strategy session in Philadelphia. When the NFL found out about his appearance, league officials sent a warning letter to the lawyers to stay away from Cantu because he worked for them. After discovering Cantu’s conflicting roles, the lawyers for the players decided he was tainted as an expert witness and backed away.

The lawsuits, including the first one filed by Jason Luckasevic and his colleagues, had been consolidated into one “mass tort” involving nearly 6,000 former players or their families. That included Bubby Brister, whose long-ago concussion with the Steelers led to the
creation of ImPACT and neuropsychological testing in the NFL. It also included the relatives of Junior Seau. Twelve days after the NIH announced that Seau’s brain was riddled with CTE, his family sued the NFL. The Seaus alleged that the league “deliberately ignored and actively concealed” the risks of chronic brain damage “from the players, including the late Junior Seau.”

By the time the two sides appeared in court in April 2013 for a hearing on the NFL’s motion to dismiss the case, Luckasevic and the others
had given way to David Frederick, a Washington superlawyer who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, the former star halfback. The NFL was represented by Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general. Both men had argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court. It didn’t escape notice that the NFL’s chief outside counsel, Covington & Burling, was a veteran of the tobacco wars, one of two law firms—the other was Shook, Hardy & Bacon—that served as “
guiding strategists” for Big Tobacco. Before taking over as commissioner, Tagliabue worked as the NFL’s lawyer for the powerhouse firm, but it’s not known whether he played a role in the tobacco strategy. After retiring as commissioner, he returned to Covington & Burling, where he serves as a senior counsel as part of the firm’s Strategic Risk and Crisis Management Team.

For decades, Covington & Burling’s lawyers
directed litigation, public relations, and opposition research against those who warned against the dangers of smoking. The firm served as the first legal counsel for the Tobacco Institute, which produced industry-friendly research. It helped draft a more lenient liability law, coordinated denials about the dangers of secondhand smoke, and subsidized tobacco-friendly scientific witnesses who were referred to as
“whitecoats.” In 1987, after the surgeon general concluded that secondhand smoke caused cancer and respiratory disease, Covington & Burling partner John Rupp famously told a group of tobacco executives they were “in
deep shit.”

Now, in the looming brain wars, the NFL’s insurers were warning that the league could face $2.5 billion in damages if it lost its battle with the players. After a federal judge ordered the two sides to mediation, a settlement was announced just one week before the start of the 2013 season. The league agreed to pay $765 million, plus legal fees that were expected to run another $200 million. It was seen by many as a victory for the NFL. There would be no public vetting of what the league knew and when it knew it. No Paul Tagliabue testifying in open court about why on earth he had appointed a rheumatologist to lead a concussion committee. No Dr. No. And that $765 million? It was widely regarded as chump change. As Kevin Mawae, the former president of the NFLPA, tweeted: “NFL concussion lawsuit net outcome? Big loss for the players now and the future! Estimated NFL revenue by 2025 = $27 BILLION.”

It had been three years since the NFL’s chief spokesman had said it was “quite obvious” that football-related concussions “can lead to long-term problems.” No one from the league had uttered a word about that since.

In December 2012, Goodell gave a lecture at the Harvard School of Public Health. He was introduced by the dean, Julio Frenk, who noted that the dangers of secondhand smoke were first identified at Harvard. For 37 minutes, Goodell hit on the NFL’s new talking points: Safety is its number one priority; concussions are not confined to football; the league has made rule changes to reduce concussions and is promoting “independent and transparent medical research.”

The commissioner emphasized the need to rely on “science and facts, not speculation.” He cited a recent study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) debunking the myth that NFL players had shorter life spans than the general population. He did not, however, note another NIOSH study suggesting that NFL players were four times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As he ended his day at Harvard, Goodell took a few questions from the media before being whisked away.

“Is the league’s position clear that football has the potential to cause long-term brain damage?” he was asked.

The commissioner hit replay: “What we are doing is making sure that we do everything to make sure that the game is safe. Those conclusions have to be drawn by the medical community.”

Seven months later, as training camps prepared to open for the 2013 season, incoming rookies attended a three-day symposium staged by the NFL. On the second day, Cleveland Browns team doctor Mark Schickendantz gave a presentation about health and safety. In a 2011 incident that drew national attention, Schickendantz, an orthopedic surgeon, was among the medical professionals who cleared quarterback Colt McCoy to return to action without receiving a sideline concussion test, despite taking a brutal helmet-to-helmet hit from Steelers linebacker James Harrison. Now, Schickendantz was educating the 2013 rookie class about the dangers of concussions. According to a story in the
Washington Post
, he said, “It’s never an insignificant injury.… Don’t
hide it.” He discussed the league’s new assessment protocols, including the addition of independent neurologists on the sideline.

But as he wrapped up his presentation, Schickendantz told the young players, “Right now, we’re learning a little bit more about long-term brain damage.” And he added, “No direct cause and effect has been established yet.”

Jim Otto wears a silver-and-black sleeve with the Oakland Raiders’ logo over his prosthetic right leg.

Otto played center for the Raiders for 15 years.
When he first arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1960, he was still carrying around the leather football helmet he had worn at the University of Miami, which couldn’t find a plastic one big enough to fit over his size 8 head. Back then, Otto was just 205 pounds and had been passed over in all 20 rounds of the NFL draft. Only the Raiders, the eighth and final team cobbled together to form the American Football League, the newly created rival of the NFL, gave him a shot.

By the time Otto retired, in 1974, the two leagues had merged and the modern NFL had been born. Otto had established himself as one of the finest offensive linemen in the history of the game. “Double O”—his nickname and his number—was the ultimate Raider, at one point starting 210 straight games. He came to see himself as a
descendant of the Roman gladiators and “proudly wore the scars of a gladiator.” When his helmet cut
a gash in the bridge of his nose, he let the blood trickle down his face and smeared it on his jersey. Off the field, Otto was a pleasant-looking man with a crooked smile and a shock of blond hair that he grew longer with the times. On the field he was terrifying: He seemed to age 10 years just cramming the helmet onto his head. Wayne Walker, the Detroit linebacker, said peering through Otto’s face mask was “like
looking at a gargoyle.” Otto got his bell rung so often playing center, his legs churning like pistons as he drove his head into his opponent, that his teammates chanted
ding, ding, ding
when he staggered back to the huddle. By the time he was 28, Otto’s teammates were calling him “Pops,” partly out of deference to his seniority as an original Raider and partly because of the quickening destruction of his body. He
titled his autobiography, written with
Oakland Tribune
columnist Dave Newhouse,
Jim Otto: The Pain of Glory
.

Otto’s retirement ushered in an era he referred to as his “
middle-aged horror show.”

He got his first artificial knee two years out of the game. His shoulders were replaced. Doctors fused and re-fused the vertebrae in his back. His knees caused him a kind of perpetual torment: The replacements wore out or failed to take; horrible infections developed. By the mid-1990s, Otto’s right knee had been replaced six times, his left knee twice.

In 2007, doctors concluded that Otto’s right knee would
probably end up killing him. They decided to remove his leg below the thigh. On the first attempt, they failed to catch all of the infection and decided to amputate further, taking off another chunk of his thigh. Otto spent most of the year in a Salt Lake City hospital. The pain was unbearable: He cried and begged for stronger medication, which made him delusional. He saw people dancing outside his window. One night he woke up and became aware he was standing naked in the hallway on his remaining leg. Another time he fell between the toilet and the wall and screamed in vain for help. Doctors strapped him to his bed, and monitors were assigned to his room. His wife, Sally, brought a plaque that said “Miracles Happen,” and Otto believes that’s what saved him. The plaque now hangs in the bedroom of their sprawling ranch-style house in Auburn, California, on the way to Lake Tahoe from San Francisco.

At 75, Otto is still blessed with an ornery resilience. “If I had a leg, I’d still be out kicking ass,” he said one afternoon. He experienced “tremendous” headaches that felt like someone had hit him with a bat. “I had a spike go through here just a minute ago,” he said at one point. Like dozens of other players, he was getting treatment for his brain injuries at the Amen Clinic in Southern California, which he thought helped. People had approached him about joining the lawsuit, but he refused. As he wrote in
Jim Otto: The Pain of Glory:
“I’m not a wimp-out. Nobody told me I had to play every week. So I’m not going to sue my former team like other retired players. I’m simply not made that way.”

“I take responsibility for everything that happened to my body,” he said, falling into a chair in his den one afternoon. When Otto first began
in professional football, he made $300 a game. One of his first Raiders paychecks bounced. The NFL, he said wistfully, is “the greatest success story ever in sports. I mean, I would have played for a pat on the back and a bottle of Budweiser after the game and a sandwich, you know? The only thing I’m regretting is that nobody in the NFL has even recognized the fact that I’ve lost my leg. Nobody has even called me. Someone could have said, ‘Boy, Jim, I’m sorry that happened to you.’ ”

Otto grew up in Wausau, Wisconsin. His father ran deliveries for a meat company and operated the Tidee Didee Diaper Service with Otto’s uncle. Otto had viewed football as a means of recognition for a poor boy—“little Jimmy Otto really cleaned somebody’s clock”—an escape from the harsh northern Wisconsin winters and the life he foresaw for himself as a welder.

When Otto was established in the NFL, he made a trip back home to rural Wisconsin. One day a high school player came up and introduced himself. He told Otto that he was from a little town near Rhinelander, about an hour north of Wausau. He said he wanted to be just like him. The boy was small for a lineman, stocky and blond. He could have been Otto’s little brother. The boy asked Otto for some tips and told him that he, too, planned to play in the NFL someday.

“Great, I’ll be looking for you,” Otto said.

Now, several years later, in one of his final games as a Raider, two of Otto’s linemates, Gene Upshaw and Art Shell, started razzing him.

“Mr. Otto! Oh, Mr. Otto, there’s somebody looking for you!” they said.

Upshaw and Shell pointed over to the opposing sideline. A player was trying to get Otto’s attention. It was the same boy, now dressed in black and gold.

“Mr. Otto! Mr. Otto!” yelled Mike Webster. “I made it!”

Mental illness has the perverse effect of silently transforming the very identity of the people it afflicts. This book wouldn’t have been possible without the help of dozens of NFL families—players, wives, parents, children—who agreed to share their painful stories with us. To them we extend our heartfelt thanks. We are especially grateful to Team Webster—Pam Webster, Colin Webster, Garrett Webster, Brooke Webster, Sunny Jani, Bob Fitzsimmons, Charles Kelly, and Jim Vodvarka—who spent countless hours recounting the life and death of Mike Webster, recognizing that, even more than his Hall of Fame career, Webby’s greatest legacy may be to advance the search for the truth about football and brain damage. A special thanks to Julian Bailes for sparking the idea for this book.

We are especially grateful to our wise and courageous editors, Dwayne Bray and Chris Buckle, our colleagues at
Outside the Lines
and ESPN.com’s Enterprise/Investigative unit, and others throughout the empire. Particular thanks to Greg Amante, John Barr, Willie Weinbaum, Dave Lubbers, Arty Berko, T. J. Quinn, Vince Doria, Jena Janovy, Patrick Stiegman, Rob King, Don Skwar, Tim Hays, Bob Ley, David Brofsky, Steve Vecchione, and, yes, even Carolyn Hong. Special thanks to Greg Garber, Craig Lazarus, and Christine Caddick, who described the origins of their early reporting and provided critical material; and to Peter Keating, who did the same. Chad Millman plied us with contacts from his fine book (written with Shawn Coyne):
The Ones Who Hit the Hardest: The Steelers, The Cowboys, The ’70s, and the Fight for America’s Soul
. Rayna Banks gathered enormous amounts of archival material that proved critical, as did Simon Baumgart, Jenna Shulman, and Lindsay Rovegno. Chris Mortensen graciously emptied his bulging electronic Rolodex for us, a gift that kept on giving. Shaun Assael kindly dug out some of his old reporting and provided material and insights.