Concussion Inc. (3 page)

Alan Schwarz of the
New York Times
was one of the keynote speakers, and I don't begrudge Schwarz his victory lap as the granddaddy of mainstream concussion crisis coverage. Also, Schwarz was witty, informative, and well prepared with a solid multimedia presentation. I was fascinated by audio clips of two of Schwarz's earliest (2007) interviews with key figures. In one, the late National Football League Players Association president Gene Upshaw disclaimed a link between football and early cognitive decline — even as Schwarz politely pointed out that an NFLPA-funded study by the University of North Carolina said otherwise. In the other clip, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had the nerve to blow off the concussion problem by mentioning a head injury his brother once sustained in a swimming pool.

The other keynoter, Hall of Fame defensive back Ronnie Lott, reprised his decades-old sensitive assassin shtick. I count myself among the minority who are thoroughly weary of this routine, which comes complete with weepy and inapt parallels between his blood sport and the traumatic brain injuries and wanton death of military exercises. In other words, the entertainment of football and wars to protect our sovereignty and freedom are equivalent, and we're supposed to be OK with that, even sentimental about it. Pat Tillman, the football player turned post 9/11 army volunteer who got killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, apparently is fungible enough to be exploited by every conceivable agenda.

Lott recalled the 1989 paralysis of his 49ers secondary mate Jeff Fuller. I recall it, too: I was at Stanford Stadium that day reporting my cover story on Joe Montana for the
New York Times Magazine
. That was the day the media relations staff herded us down to the field with four minutes left because of changed post-game interview logistics (the game had been shifted from Candlestick Park after the big earthquake). Standing on the sidelines, I had close-ups of half a dozen car wrecks per play … all during garbage time of a game whose result had long ago been decided. For me, it was the day the football music died. I was 35 years old and ready to define adulthood for myself.

In the course of clichéd encomiums to the late coach Bill Walsh, Lott bragged that the 49ers offensive linemen “were real good at” crack-back blocks: sadistic blind-side shots behind the opponents' knees. Of course, Lott would do it all again, at the stroke of a stroke. But of course, he would do so
repentantly
— this time he'd practice “safe football.” It's so important to save football from itself — for it is only by means of this precise outlet for mitigating phenomena such as “childhood obesity” (have you looked at a “run-stuffing” defensive tackle lately?) that America's boyly boys can be transformed into manly men. Some of us feel otherwise, that the process can be achieved in multiple ways — for instance, by teaching boys (and girls) to use their heads, including to think.

Lott concluded his stem-winder with a wish list for all youth football players, including and especially in the ghetto from whence he came: brand-new helmets and pads every year, a sideline athletic trainer, baseline neurocognitive tests starting the day they were weaned from mama's breast, and a municipal ambulance service on standby to cart off quickly every kid whose brain matter gets mooshed or spinal cord cracked. The Santa Clara Sports Law Symposium offered no platform for the point of view that the proponents of “concussion awareness” and “safe football” don't even bother to put forth back-of-the-envelope projections of what this would cost our society and whether it would be worth it.

The lunchtime presenters were Jack Clark, the legendary Cal rugby coach, and Jim Thompson, the cloying CEO of an organization called the Positive Coaching Alliance. These two gentlemen flashed the infamous video of jackass Rutgers basketball coach Mike Rice's verbal and physical abuse in practice. The publicity from the
Saturday Night Live
Melissa McCarthy spoof of the footage would get both Rice and Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti fired. Clark and Thompson shook their heads and earnestly agreed that this is
not
positive coaching.

From the buffet line, I was recognized and allowed to ramble for a minute about a contemporaneous and much worse coach outrage: the widespread sexual and physical abuse of swimmers at the University of Utah by coach Greg Winslow. The difference was that nobody cared and Utah athletic director Chris Hill, after covering up for Winslow for years, wasn't canned. (An “independent review” of the cover-up, commissioned by the university trustees, concluded that Winslow should have been fired a year earlier, for being a boozer.)

I might as well have been speaking in Serbo-Croatian. Thompson thanked me and moved right along to such questions as whether girls start crying more quickly than boys when coaches yell at them.

In a subsequent email, Thompson told me, “I had not heard about the [Winslow] case. We most often focus on high school and youth sports so I don't keep up with college sports in general.”

That doesn't explain the session's theme of Mike Rice, a college coach. Nor does it explain why the Positive Coaching Alliance seems to have zero knowledge, much less a position, on the Catholic Church–level problem of sexual abuse of far too many of the 400,000 youth by far too many of the 12,000 coaches in USA Swimming.

Admirably, Tom Farrey's panel tried to lock on the question of how much it would take for public high schools to get out of the football business.

My first criticism here is a quibble. Though Farrey correctly used the recent NFL settlement as his hook, his cite of the fast-following Dougherty family $2.8 million wrongful-death settlement with their high school in Montclair, New Jersey, missed an opportunity to talk about not just liability costs, but also the dubious effectiveness of preventive measures. The Dougherty case includes facts about the school district's incipient use of the ImPACT concussion management system, developed by the ever-reputable medical director of the WWE, Dr. Joe Maroon.

More Dougherty-style lawsuits are sure to follow. Baseline testing is a key component of the pie-in-the-sky state-by-state concussion awareness mandates, the so-called Lystedt Laws, which NFL lobbyists love because they shift the football industry's public health tab completely onto the back of the public sector. If ImPACT and all the other nice-sounding measures don't do the job anyway, then what are we talking about here, besides continuing mass delusion?

The other basic flaw of Farrey's panel is that he talked about the cost side for schools only in terms of lawsuit exposure, insurance premiums, and equipment. But Farrey did press panelist Mike Pilawski, the athletic director of Saint Francis High School in Mountain View, to disclose the total “nut” for the football program. Pilawski finally said around $80,000 — an obviously low-ball number, as it didn't account for insurance, facilities maintenance, and other line items not charged to the athletic department budget. Moreover, Pilawski acknowledged that as a private school, Saint Francis has a lot more flexibility to subsidize football than a public institution does.

Perhaps next year the Santa Clara conference can give us a public high school athletic director, tasked with providing real and transparent answers to these questions. And in order to give that presentation time, maybe the organizers can scale back on the blathering of the Positive Coaching Alliance.

..........

1
See Dave Pear's blog,
davepear.com/blog/2011/09/second-annual-santa-clara-law-sports-law-symposium/
.

DAVE DUERSON AND OTHER DISCONTENTS

22 February 2011..........

The gruesome decades-long underground American saga that is the football concussion crisis has never gotten in our faces quite like the story of the suicide last week of one-time National Football League man of the year Dave Duerson.

How many levels are there to the news that Duerson, at age 50, put a gun to himself but not before texting his family that he wanted his brain donated for research on the brain-trauma syndrome now known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy? Let us count them. It begins with the fact that he shot himself in the chest — perhaps with supreme confidence that by avoiding his head and leaving intact his postmortem brain tissue, he would be confirmed as (approximately) the 21st diagnosed case of CTE among former football players.

Duerson is the latest casualty of a sport that has evolved, via training technology and industrial design, into a form of gladiatorialism whose future human and economic viability is questionable. The
New Yorker
and the
New York Times
have started assessing this cultural phenomenon with their own brands of competence and Ivy League restraint. From the closeted gutter of pro wrestling, where all the same venalities play out with less pretense, I'm here to tell “the rest of the story” — such as how the same corrupt doctors who work for the NFL also shill for World Wrestling Entertainment, and how it's all part of the same stock exchange of ethics for profits and jock-sniffing privileges.

I would not be hasty to label Duerson a “victim”; for most of his 50 years, he was personally driven to make particular professional choices. But the thing that fans, parents, people still haven't wrapped their minds around is the magnitude of the toll on the Dave Duersons at the amateur level, and below the age of consent, via a nationally unhealthy system of dangled glory and riches.

And with Duerson, there's a wrinkle that takes journalistic and governmental investigations of this public health issue into its murkiest waters yet.

Duerson was not just a leader of the record-setting — and skull-crunching — defense of the 1986 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears. He was also a member of the six-person NFL committee that reviewed the claims of retired players under the league's disability plan and the so-called 88 Plan, a special fund to defray the costs for families in caring for players diagnosed with dementia.

Don't look for this last point to be prominent in Duerson retrospectives. We can count on quotes from fellow ex-NFLers about how scary it all is, and we can count on further details on Duerson's bankruptcy and collapsed personal life, but we're not likely to get into the 88 Plan files he was helping process.

When news of Duerson's death broke, but before the suicide details emerged, the NFL was first out of the gate with a statement of condolence. It's in keeping with a strategy of triangulation that has been its hallmark ever since it became apparent that research articles in clinical medical journals such as
Neurosurgery
— literature largely written by NFL-paid doctors, including the Pittsburgh Steelers' Joseph Maroon, who is also medical director for WWE — consciously lowballed the evidence on CTE for many years. The
Neurosurgery
reverse-hype also deftly promoted for-profit diagnostic stopgaps, such as Maroon's ImPACT concussion management system and the Riddell helmet company's “Revolution” model. The latter is now the focus of a Federal Trade Commission investigation undertaken at the request of Senator Tom Udall.

The league recently launched a website, NFLHealthandSafety.com,
1
with exquisite timing and calculated transparency. The site touts the NFL's $20 million in funded research, without examining exactly what that $20 million has bought.

The site's media center also links to important stories in the news. As this article was being published, the top one was “Debate arises concerning use of helmets in girls' lacrosse” (
New York Times
, February 17). Well, let's see how NFLHealthandSafety.com covers Dave Duerson's suicide. Let's see, for example, if it links to this story.

23 February 2011..........

One of the coldest aspects of the Dave Duerson suicide is its recursive irony: Duerson served on the National Football League committee that helped process disability claims of families of retired players, including the “88 Plan,” which defrays the medical bills of victims of dementia.

Even if Duerson's golden life and career had not deteriorated to the point where he was himself one of the disabled, and even if he hadn't plummeted into the financial bankruptcy so common among sufferers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (the devastating disease for which his brain will now be tested), becoming intimately involved in the paperwork of the heartbreaking cases of his ex-colleagues must have been profoundly depressing.

The scenario reminds me of the constant stream of funerals and memorial shows for dead fellow wrestlers Chris Benoit found himself attending five or so years ago, until he himself snapped.

History — if not, in the nearer future, our courts of law — will have much to say about the NFL's response to evidence that its product was killing its talent and, by its enormous commercial and cultural influence, spreading brain trauma through the American sports superstructure like a weed.

Dr. Bennet Omalu named the disease CTE but he didn't invent the problem of epidemic head injury. That was for others before him to reveal — or ignore.

Information on the 88 Plan itself is at
NFLPlayerCare.com
. Earmarked for ex-players with dementia, the plan was inspired by the case of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey, who is now in his late sixties but has had severe cognitive problems, culminating in dementia, probably for a decade or more. The “88” refers to Mackey's uniform number with the Baltimore Colts; in the original concept, dementia benefits were to be capped at $85,000 per claimant, but in honor of Mackey it was upped to $88,000. The program started in September 2007.

As Alan Schwarz reported in the
New York Times
, Dave Duerson had a “testy exchange” with former UCLA and Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman Brent Boyd at a 2007 Congressional hearing. Boyd said his clinical depression was the result of cumulative football hits. Duerson disagreed.

That is a very interesting addition to the Duerson narrative in multiple respects. When the work of the NFL disability committee began, Duerson could have been a voice who, either generally speaking or in particular cases, was overly sympathetic to the league's company line in his interpretation of claims, and that, in turn, could have led to guilt and exacerbated his depression as his own symptoms accelerated. Again, the instruction of the Chris Benoit experience: near the end of his life, Benoit, who had always defended the wrestling industry's hyper-macho credo, found himself resignedly agreeing with disgruntled colleagues who unloaded with him about their unconscionable working conditions.

Brent Boyd is on the board of directors of a former players' advocacy group called Dignity After Football (DignityAfterFootball.org). I am trying to reach Boyd for comment.

24 February 2011..........

The Dave Duerson suicide has ricocheted through the media as a wake-up call on the American sports concussion crisis. But one of Duerson's chief adversaries over the years — retired Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman Brent Boyd, himself a concussion victim and head of an advocacy group for disabled ex-players — has a different perspective.

In a lengthy telephone interview on Wednesday night, Boyd portrayed Duerson as a management lackey — full of bluster about the player disability claims he helped adjudicate on an NFL committee, generally hostile to players' interests, and out of control at a 2007 Congressional hearing that explored these issues.

Boyd began our conversation by extending sympathy to Duerson's family. “No matter what my differences were with Dave, this is a terrible tragedy, and family comes first. My heart goes out to his loved ones,” Boyd said.

But Boyd held little back in his criticism of Duerson's post-­career NFL work. Specifically, Boyd added much detail to a
New York Times
story this week, which reported:

Duerson … joined the six-man volunteer panel that considered retired players' claims under the NFL's disability plan, in addition to the 88 Plan, a fund that has assisted more than 150 families caring for retired players with dementia since its inception in 2007. Duerson read applications, testimonies, and detailed doctors' ­reports for hundreds of players with multiple injuries, including those to the brain that in some cases left players requiring full-time care. He had to vote on whether these people received financial assistance.

In 2007, two Congressional committees held hearings into whether the disability board was unfairly denying benefits. Duerson testified before the Senate Commerce Committee alongside Brent Boyd, a former Minnesota Vikings lineman whose depression and cognitive impairment had been ruled unrelated to his playing career, therefore warranting significantly lower benefits. It is unknown how Duerson voted on Boyd's case. He did get into a heated exchange when Boyd, then 50, asserted that his condition — and that of other players with dementia — was caused by football.
2

Boyd's NFL disability claims date all the way back to 2000; his litigation of the league's denials of his claims is now at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

With respect to Duerson's role, Boyd said, “The
Times
said it is not known how Duerson voted on the committee in my case, but the answer is pretty obvious. At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing and at the NFL committee meetings, he repeatedly denied the evidence of my medical condition and accused me of being a faker who was trying to grab benefits to which he wasn't entitled.”

And that wasn't all. At the Congressional hearing room during an intermission, according to Boyd, Duerson initiated a verbal confrontation with older retired players Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish. Huff, a Hall of Fame linebacker with the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins, and Parrish, an accomplished defensive back with the Cleveland Browns, were pioneers in the development of the NFL Players Association in the 1960s. Both became outspoken critics of the union under the leadership of its long-time president, Gene Upshaw, who died in 2008.

Boyd: “Duerson was spewing profanities at Huff and Parrish. He said, ‘What the fuck do you know about the players union?' He was acting like he wanted to fight them physically. That wasn't too smart with respect to Huff especially. He looks like he could still play.”

Boyd said Duerson landed a spot on the NFL disability committee after his company Duerson Foods — at one point a major supplier to McDonald's — went into receivership in 2006. Duerson was appointed by Upshaw. (The committee consists of three owner representatives and three named by the union.)

Duerson “liked to talk and talk about what an expert he was on ERISA [the Employment Retirement Income Securities Act, which governs employee benefit plans],” Boyd said. “But he was constantly misquoting and misrepresenting the law. He didn't know what he was talking about.”

Boyd, a Southern California native, now lives and struggles with his health and finances in Reno, Nevada. He played for the Vikings from 1980 to 1986. In his Congressional testimony and elsewhere, Boyd has spoken movingly about his bouts with headaches, depression, and chronic fatigue. On several occasions he has been homeless. Like Duerson has been, Boyd fears that he will be determined after his death to have had the degenerative brain disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Boyd founded the first ex-players' advocacy group, Dignity After Football. The tasks of fundraising and website management became overwhelming. Ultimately, he abandoned efforts to register the organization as a 501(c)(3) charity.

“We aren't well equipped to handle and distribute money,” Boyd said, “and ultimately we have come to realize that the task of educating the NFL alumni community is largely complete. The retired players out there understand what has happened to them and what their situation is. Our big job now is to get something done by mobilizing fans and league sponsors.”

Boyd also serves on the board of Chris Nowinski's Sports Legacy Institute (SLI). Like many other players with NFL medical claims, Boyd worries that the group's work might be compromised by its research affiliate, Boston University, accepting a $1 million NFL grant. “When SLI honored [NFL commissioner] Roger Goodell with its Impact award, that really ticked me off,” Boyd told me. “Money can buy anything.”

On Dave Duerson, Boyd summed up, “He spent years denying the concussion claims of other players. Then when the same symptoms started closing in on him, he killed himself. What does that tell you?”

25 February 2011..........