Concussion Inc. (23 page)

So if you believe in taking responsibility for “every other kid,” go organize in your community against ­helmet-wearing tackle football — at the very least until high-school age. (If you let your own kid play peewee football, you should be charged with child abuse.) It's hard to go up against Jock Culture, which you'll be watching in its full power and glory on Sunday. Then again, it's hard to go up against the banks and the war machine, too. It's time, in other words, to occupy football.
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3 February 2012..........

Comes now the NFL with a PR blitz out of the school holding that the best defense is a good offense. Sunday's Super Bowl telecast will include a 60-second NFL “public service announcement” recapping the history of its bold efforts to make football safer.

Credit the
Business Insider
website with noting that the NFL last year
censored
a Super Bowl commercial from Toyota that tried to address the concussion issue. The abrupt U-turn “shows the NFL is worried about losing the ethical debate over whether it is right to allow youngsters to play a game that requires them to hit each other with their heads.”

These are heavy-duty days for my trusty barf bucket. The last edition of CBS's
60 Minutes
had correspondent Steve Kroft lionizing Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner. Quite obviously, full access to Goodell was a booby prize to one of the league's broadcast partners in its off-year in the Super Bowl rotation. This year, the big game lands on NBC, where we can look forward to seeing whether the ace announcing team of Al Michaels, Chris Collinsworth, and sideline reporter Michele “Scoops” Tafoya can again distinguish themselves as possibly the last viewers in the country to call a concussion a concussion — as they were back in September on the Sunday night of Michael Vick's “neck injury.”

Last week we had several New York Giants caught bragging that they had targeted Kyle Williams, the goat of the 49ers' loss to the Giants in the conference championship game, because they were aware of his history of concussions. That was an example of a gaffe — classically defined as the misdemeanor of openly stating a truth that was supposed to remain tacit.

The question I want to ask is why we have a society in which the son of a major league sports executive, Chicago White Sox general manager Ken Williams, continues to risk lifelong brain injury, early dementia, and death-in-life. I think the answer has something to do with the glory and folly of the American sports dream machine, which refuses to discriminate on the grounds of race, creed, or color, so long as you're willing to have your cerebral neurons stomped into seaweed. This also helps explain why our current president, also African American, has made his No. 1 sports policy priority the abolition of the Bowl Championship Series, evidently on the grounds that the descendants of slaves, along with the rest of us, don't have enough college football games in December and January. Ah yes, “American exceptionalism.”

The most important non-football subplot of Super Bowl hype week has been the organized labor demonstrations in Indianapolis protesting Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels' signing of union-busting “right to work” legislation.

“War on workers is the real Super Bowl in America,” Harvey Araton, a
New York Times
sports columnist, wrote on Twitter. Nice piece of pith. I doubt that Araton's bosses would deem fit to print an 800-word development of this theme.

Though '60s nostalgia and its supporting demographic bulge still take up a lot of sentimental space, we may be living through even more momentous times today; as part of that package, Sunday's spectacle warrants more than a strong sniff. I wonder what will become remembered as the American empire's Masada? When will be our equivalent of the Edict of Milan?

One thing's for sure: the Coliseum is alive and well, and that ain't no flabby metaphor. It's a phenomenon playing out in real time right in front of our eyes … with Al, Chris, and Michele as our cheerful guides.

11 March 2012..........

Gregg Doyel of CBSSports.com has one of those death-of-football contemplations. “What would be the tipping point?” Doyel writes. “I can imagine it.”

A popular player — I'm thinking of a particular guy, but don't want to name him — gets destroyed by a hit to the head and has to retire, then lives his death right before our eyes. You think it can't happen? It already has, with Webster and Mackey and more, too many more. And it will happen again.

I can imagine the day when a U.S. politician makes like John McCain in 1996, when McCain took on the UFC, only this time the politician decries football as “human cockfighting.” I can imagine the day when a handful of high schools stop offering football for safety reasons, liability reasons, even lack-of-interest reasons.

I can't imagine the death of football, no.

But give me another decade or two. Ask me again.

Here's how I put it in the introduction to my ebook
UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero
:

As footballers of all ages, and at all levels of informed consent, continue to get maimed and killed for our uninterrupted
panem et circenses
, the problem with high-minded commentary is that it is all too high-minded. Sure, we don't know what the concussion tipping point will be. But I, for one, have a vision of what it
could
be: for example, a three-time champion quarterback murdering his supermodel wife on the 50-yard line at halftime of the Super Bowl — and taking out the intermission song-and-dance act along with her.

Of course, just to ruminate in such a fashion is deemed in extremely poor taste. By contrast, one presumes, the natural ebb and flow of today's violent sports spectacles combine the visual splendor of Rembrandt, the wit of Molière, and the compositional brilliance of Shostakovich.

Now cue the song “Dueling Banjos” from the movie
Deliverance
.

12 March 2012..........

While the mass and class actions of disabled NFL veterans grab the headlines, the keys to chop-blocking Football America's out-of-­control popularity and participation will happen in the youth and high school leagues. The sweet spot is the coming cluster of cases on behalf of victims of death and catastrophic injuries in games sanctioned by public school districts. It won't take many of them before the stewards of these taxpayer-supported institutions take a hard look at the viability of this particular “enrichment program.”

I've pointed to the Ryne Dougherty case in New Jersey, since that one zeroes in on one of the most important fault lines of “concussion awareness”: death from a second traumatic brain injury following a return-to-play decision involving the use of the vaunted but criminally overemphasized ImPACT “concussion management system.” But a case in my state, California, may have beaten the Dougherty suit to the edge, as they like to say in this sport.

The family of Scott Eveland, 22, has settled with the San Marcos Unified School District for close to $4.4 million. As a result of a head injury sustained during a Mission Hills High School game in 2007, Eveland is permanently confined to a wheelchair. He can communicate only by having someone support his elbow while he types on an iPad.

As part of the settlement, the district admits no responsibility, yadda yadda yadda.

14 March 2012..........

Last Saturday, the
San Francisco Chronicle
's Bruce Jenkins wrote a column that I would describe as consistent with his philosophy of “Football is war — get over it.”
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The exchange below followed. I give Jenkins credit for responding honestly, though I believe mistakenly. Too many of his sportswriting brethren either don't think about the subject at all, or, when they do, try to have it both ways.

[Muchnick to Jenkins]

I would like you to reflect on the concussion crisis and tell my blog's readers why you believe football at the youth and public high school levels remains medically, financially, legally, and morally sustainable in light of what we have learned about traumatic brain injury.

Your column is useful in several ways: as a piece of nostalgia, as a deflation of the PR-driven hypocrisy of the NFL regime, and as a description of football's essence. I am not, however, asking you whether professional head-hunting linebackers or bounty-­bearing defensive coordinators should be disciplined by the commissioner. I am asking you whether this sport can continue on its present course of participation and popularity. My own view is that it cannot. Middle-class kids, by and large, no longer box, and as awareness and lawsuits penetrate, neither will they play football.

In a previous exchange, you first responded, essentially, that nothing would change because football prowess has always been a chick magnet (I paraphrase only slightly). Then, when pressed, you said you'd have to think about it more.

Have you thought about it more? And what do you think? Some sports columnists prefer not to get involved in social issues, and I appreciate that. But this is not about the playing of “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch, or the meaning of Pat Tillman. It is about the direct impact of your commentary beat on public health.

[Jenkins to Muchnick]

I believe the increasing awareness will reduce participation to a degree, largely through parents' input, and I have no problem with that. I was a decent athlete growing up, and I played just about every sport BUT football. It's a crazy way to go unless you're fully committed to the nature of the game. The sport will not die, however, and I'm not sure it will even suffer a significant loss in participation. As I follow youth sports in my area (Half Moon Bay), I see countless boys who either play the game or wish they were good enough to make the team. As my wife put it so well, “Men go to war” (she was talking about the A's-Giants ­territorial-rights issue), and an awful lot of boys seek out contact sports. For years, it was widely believed that boxing would die out as a sport, but it won't, for the rest of time, because there will always be guys who want to beat the hell out of each other — because it's fun, because they have nothing else going in life, because they want to take out frustration. I'm on the side of common decency, but I don't see major changes in the game of football down the line, as far as popularity or participation.

I have never argued that football “would die out as a sport.” With that in mind, the way boxing has not become extinct — but rather, and significantly, declined — seems to make my point, not Jenkins'. Everything about his boxing model (most especially the way it skews by class) reinforces this.

Football as a brutal spectacle of undeniable primal fascination? Yes, of course. Football as the national hearth? No possible way, once the seeds of concussion awareness finally get around to sprouting a full-fledged “Mothers Against Drunk Football.”

A taxpayer-funded school system on the outskirts of San Diego is out nearly four and a half million bucks. This is dough that could have gone to football safety or to a new line of cheerleader uniforms or to swimming or girls' lacrosse or the jazz band or the dance troupe … or even (gasp!) to teachers and libraries.

We also know that there's a lot more litigation where the Eveland case came from, and that these heavily lawyered tussles at the Pop Warner and prep levels — and more important, the circulation of their underlying narratives — are what will drive American sports reform. As a football nation, we can bathe only so long in bathos and war games and maimed linebackers and running backs being wheeled out to the 50-yard line at halftime of the homecoming game to drink in the affection of the crowd.

26 March 2012..........

In a better world, the news media would show a hundredth as much interest in the killing and maiming of kid athletes as they do in whether the New Orleans Saints can still compete for next year's Super Bowl despite the suspension of their bounty-busted coach, Sean Payton.

Alas, Scott Eveland, the Southern California teenager who was paralyzed for life four years ago — leading to a recent $4.4 million settlement between his family and the San Marcos Unified School District — isn't on anyone's fantasy team. The only place Eveland belongs is in the dystopian literary vision of
The Hunger Games
.

So let's move the courtroom chains from disability to death, and let's take the parameters beyond pedestrian ambiguities in medical advice and administrative oversight. The next frontier of football litigation involves specific issues surrounding the ImPACT “concussion management system.”

Call it legal fig leafs and their discontents.

In September 2008, Ryne Dougherty, a linebacker for Montclair High School in New Jersey, suffered concussions in back-to-back games, yet was cleared to return to play. The next month, another hit caused a fatal brain hemorrhage. He was 17. In 2009, the Dougherty family sued both their son's personal physician and the Montclair school district in state superior court. That lawsuit is still in the pretrial and discovery phases.

Though the Dougherty story touches on ImPACT, it does not neatly fit what I believe may become a classic fact pattern of these cases: an athlete who is explicitly cleared through the use of a second ImPACT neurocognitive test and goes on to suffer a disabling or fatal further injury.

Of course, even when that happens — I consider it a matter of when, not if — we can be confident that if ImPACT is named as a defendant or if a defendant school district tries to draw it into the case to share liabilities, the company will mount a defense that the software was not to blame, but rather the imperfect way it was applied.

Even so,
Dougherty v. Montclair
is an interesting opening volley for this coming flurry of multimillion-dollar litigation. I believe “avalanche” is not a hyperbolic predictive word. For all we know, there are many such underreported cases already in the pipeline.