Concussion Inc. (26 page)

(There is not a word about Toradol, the addictive drug that has been criminally over-prescribed by NFL doctors so as to mask both orthopedic and neurological injuries.)

Harvard's kitchen-sink methodology, with a cohort of 1,000 guinea pigs at exorbitant cost, has the rest of the research community not only steaming with envy, but also howling with derision. According to the
Boston Globe
, a matched control study of the 100 healthiest and 100 sickest participants will be carried out at 26 sites — approximately
eight patients per site
. This pencils out to an annual cost-per-patient of nearly $50,000. Maybe lab technicians and tenure-pimping assistant professors will be getting two-way taxi fare every day.

The NFLPA isn't stupid. Well, it is stupid in the sense that its definition of members' best interests is crabbed and thoroughly ­private-spirited. But DeMaurice Smith, executive director of an empire of collusion, knows where his nest is feathered. If you're keeping the temperature of the football public, you can tell that there was more real outrage over Robert Griffin III's knee injury than there was over Jovan Belcher's murder-suicide.

The Harvard study announcement, however, comes at a moment of hopeful counter-signs. With measured words and good timing, President Obama has finally said out loud a few words that might persuade some of America's parents to begin the process of commencing to think about the possibility of considering whether they should weigh discouraging their sons from eliminating extracurricular options outside of football. (In response, Alex Boone of the San Francisco 49ers, who must be on everyone's short list for NFL father of the year, told Scott Ostler of the
San Francisco Chronicle
, “If my son wants to play, he can do whatever he wants. He's his own man.”)

Also in the past week, the Centers for Disease Control's National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety sent letters and fact sheets to all former NFLers who played for at least five years during the period 1959 through 1988. The CDC reported brain and nervous system disorders at three times the rate of the general population. (Lou Gehrig's disease and Alzheimer's were individually four times higher; Parkinson's was about the same.)

Who will carry the day? The slick elites at Harvard who just fleeced dumb jocks out of $100 million to build a bridge to nowhere? Or the creaking wheels of government in its role of protecting public health and safety during Obama's second term?

31 January 2013..........

A hundred million bucks! Folks, that's not a research grant — it's a line item in the budget of a sovereign nation with designs on developing its own hydrogen bomb. It reminds me of the Corleone family's nine-figure gift to the Catholic Church in
Godfather III
.

“Scorcher,” said Paul Anderson, editor of the
Concussion Litigation Reporter
, commenting on my commentary. Thanks, Paul. You and others know that I always try to execute Mother Nature's grand plan for burning away old forest growth.

We've all come a long way, baby, since Chris Nowinski and his Boston University Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy three years ago got panned in some circles, including this one, for accepting $1 million from the National Football League. Frankly, there are lots of people who have worked longer and more effectively than me on this issue, and Nowinski is near the top of that list. With some additional perspective, we should concede that he was savvy enough to pocket some of Roger Goodell's loose change, but persistent and resilient enough to stay on the attack in his own way. Though still dissatisfied with the strength and consistency of the statements emanating from Nowinski, Dr. Robert Cantu, and their sister Sports Legacy Institute, I have no question that, in speaking out against pre-teen tackle football, they're going a lot deeper than most similarly invested critics. These include, most especially and disappointingly, the female sports blogger community, which continues to nibble at the “NFL Evolution” carrot instead of mobilizing a principled Mothers Against Drunk Football movement.

Nowinski and some journalists, notably Patrick Hruby, are also putting traumatic brain injury at the center of the debate over the unpaid mercenaries who stock the rosters of college football — the NFL's zero-cost farm system.

Over the past 24 hours, I have been bombarded with requests to target this or that conflict in the NFLPA's heavy petting with the prettiest girl in academia. (If the players' union is A.J. McCarron, then Harvard is Katherine Webb in tweed.) For the most part, I decline such invitations. Yes, NFLPA president Domonique Foxworth is enrolling in the Harvard Business School, and his wife, Ashley Manning Foxworth, went to Harvard Law. And as retired Chicago Bears quarterback Bob Avellini points out, Bears owner Michael McCaskey taught for a while at a certain well-known institution of higher education in Cambridge (“Our Fair City”), MA. None of this establishes anything more than we already know about Harvard's enormous influence on Wall Street and Main Street; it is the same reason the bestselling book in China is a primer on how to groom your kid to get accepted there for undergraduation admission. How many U.S. Supreme Court justices didn't come out of Harvard, Yale, or Columbia law?

Did I forget to mention that Chris Nowinski is both a Harvard alum and a former WWE wrestler? Chris didn't. But before anyone gets started — no, Domonique and Ashley's wedding planner, Sara Muchnick, is not related to me, so far as I know. (Though who can say precisely what went down in those 19th-century Pale of Settlement shtetls … )

The far more interesting story on Foxworth (who himself is rehabbing an ACL knee injury, the better to underscore the point that Harvard is expected to use its windfall to dilute any swift and purposeful study of traumatic brain injury) is the one of his dashed hope to succeed the disastrous DeMaurice Smith as executive director of the NFLPA. Smith has spent the past year with his mind barely on the store as he hobnobbed in the nation's capital in search of landing a new job, before the growing evidence emerged of the incompetence and corruption at the union, on his watch and for his gain.

As that great academician-satirist Tom Lehrer sang in his composition “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”: “Impress them with our prowess, do!”

6 February 2013..........

Kevin Guskiewicz — MacArthur genius fellow to the world, “Dr. No Junior” to us — has pulled out the culture war/gun control rhetoric.

Despite being a MacArthur GF, or maybe because of it, Guskiewicz can't stop making embarrassing statements in defense of football. In a new quote in
Education Week
, this intellectual titan stoops to the rhetorical level of “football doesn't kill people; it's people who pull the trigger on football who kill people.”

Well, OK, let's not put words in the mouth of “Dr. No Junior”:

Guskiewicz cited recent comments made by President Obama regarding the safety of football, but respectfully disagreed with the president. He expressed optimism that “we can find a way to make the game [of football] safe,” noting that two of his three children participated in football this past fall.

“There's no evidence that football makes people stupid,” Guskiewicz said. “There is evidence, however, that people make football stupid.”

I think this passes for wit in Guskiewicz World. Someone at the University of North Carolina public relations office should take this dude aside and explain that it's not words that make people appear stupid. There is evidence, however, that words stupidly strung together sure do.

One of the tactical conundrums of the future-of-football debate is whether to play the culture-war card. The idea, supposedly, is that you present the most neutral, clinical, non-ideological facts in support of the proposition that we shouldn't devote so many public resources to the spectacle of kids beating each other's brains in, and let them speak for themselves. The celebrated obstructionism of “geniuses” like Guskiewicz, who plays to the grandstands and the yahoos, shows just how hard that is.

31 March 2013..........

Now that the NFL and its trickle-down entities are in limited hang-out mode — to borrow the Nixonian term — official authorities like Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, co-chair of the league's Head, Neck and Spine Injury Committee, are sustaining verbal hernias in public. The litigation deluge means they have to disclose. But
defensive
litigation mode means they have to qualify, question, play to the inner skeptic in us all. And hope that no one applies that skepticism to the messenger as well as the message.

Last week the
New York Times
reported on the fact sheet, covering epidemiological findings with regard to various neurological disorders in the ex-player population, which was mailed out by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The newspaper leaked the nugget that an unnamed doctor-expert affiliated with the NFL had advocated removing chronic traumatic encephalopathy from the fact sheet, on the grounds that the phenomenon was “not fully understood.” Thus, Lou Gehrig's disease, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's made the cut; CTE did not.

Ellenbogen, plowing upfield to his right — always to his right! — and with his head up — always with his head up! — endorsed this approach. “We've got to be careful because CTE is a pathological diagnosis,” he said. “We know that exists. That's been proven forever. What's important about this study is, if I played sports and had concussions, what's my chance of getting these?”

Note the rhetorical stutter-step: CTE has “been proven forever.” But that was just health talk. Now we're talking about the real stuff: risk management. What are the numbers and at what threshold are those numbers actionable?

The NFL, enabled by the people my friend Matt Chaney calls “yaks,” would like us all to forget, thanks to collective spiritual memory disorder, how recently and grudgingly it has conceded the existence of “proven forever” CTE. The question of research focus “was surely discussed by every football official with a clue by 1986, whether of league, union, or NCAA, then inexplicably dropped from a Johns Hopkins University study that initially planned a control group of college football players,” says Chaney.

And nearly two years ago, Chaney was still hammering at the carefully circumscribed parameters of epidemiological studies of footballers.
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Soon the banks for study of the effects of traumatic brain injury–heavy occupations will have bigger surpluses than our national petroleum reserves, and Harvard University will be $10 million into its $100-million fleece of the National Football League Players Association to tell us what we already know, what has “been proven forever” — just not yet in Harvardese.

Football's golden age is over. Yaks like Ellenbogen remind us that golden ages end at the height of their popularity, revenue, television ratings, national obsession; and when smartly managed, they don't plummet. Those numbers can hold, desperately, conterintuitively, self-deceivingly, for quite a while. Silver ages have long shelf lives.

8 August 2013..........

Public health takedowns of the football industry are in the works, both on film and in print. Maybe some day, and if we're lucky maybe very soon, American sports culture will be blessed with anti-football movement spearheaded by Christian Rightists and headquartered in one of the states of the Old Confederacy, or at least one of the counties of Pennsylvania somewhere between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. “You may say I'm a dreamer …”

Ah, but Concussion Inc. is a world of ever-shifting alliances and treacheries. A neurologist at Loyola University in Chicago, Christopher Randolph, is out with a study casting doubt that football players show mental decline distinguishable from the general population: “We still do not know if NFL players have an increased risk of late-life neurodegenerative disorders. If there is a risk, it probably is not a great risk. And there is essentially no evidence to support the existence of any unique clinical disorder such as CTE.”

One of the contributors to the study is the University of North Carolina's football-first Kevin Guskiewicz, whom I have taken to mocking as “Dr. No Junior.” The MacArthur Foundation, inexplicably, gave Guskiewicz one of its “genius” awards — which in this case must be a genius for simultaneously homing in on the zeitgeist while propounding research that gives comfort to the already comfortable.

By contrast, previously I've spoken highly of Randolph for tearing to shreds the quackery (my word, not his) of Dr. Joseph Maroon, neurosurgeon to the Pittsburgh Steelers and the superstars of WWE, and his fellow witch doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who have foisted on public school districts and parents of youth athletes across the country the for-profit ImPACT “concussion management system.”

See what I mean about alliances? I ask you not to hold Randolph's current lunacy against his previous bullseye on ImPACT and its cousin “How many fingers am I holding up? What day of the week is it?” software “solutions.”

Paul Anderson, the sharp attorney who edits the
Concussion Litigation Reporter
, has noted the extent to which mere dubiousness, no matter how reasonable or reckless, becomes an exalted scientific and rhetorical commodity as the football industry manages what shapes up as its long, slow decline.

“Let the manufacture of doubt begin in earnest,” Anderson tweeted in response to the Randolph-Guskiewicz news.

18 August 2013..........

It's time for more than left-handed compliments to ESPN's
Outside the Lines
on the football traumatic brain injury story. Today the investigative unit's Steve Fainaru, John Barr, Mark Fainaru-Wada, and Greg Amante have the down-low on the National Football League's founding concussion guru Dr. Elliot Pellman — a quack with an offshore medical degree and no neurology credentials, whose renewed and continuing prominence in NFL advisory circles can't be killed with a helmet-to-helmet hit.
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