Concussion Inc. (4 page)

Writer Rob Trucks interviewed Dave Duerson, three months before he committed suicide, as part of an oral-history project on life challenges at age 50. Deadspin.com, the provocative sports news site, published an excerpt this week. It's a valuable and timely document that everyone should read.
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I have a number of problems with this piece, starting with the title “You Have to Accept My Pain.” It took some desperate cutting and pasting to make that line the headline of the article. Far down in the interview, we finally get to the P-word:

I do hold myself to a higher standard. I do. But the flip of that is, every one of us has things in their life they regret. For instance, I'm a Trekkie. And it wasn't the series so much as the movies, the Star Trek movies. I remember a scene from one of the latter ones with William Shatner. This guy, Spock's cousin or his brother, he could hug you and take away your pain. And he says, “Come join with me, and let me take away your pain.” And Dr. McCoy and everybody else is like, “Jim, you've got to do this. It's wonderful.” And Captain Kirk tells him, “I need my pain, because it defines who I am.” And so in that regard when people come up to me and they tell me, “Man, I wish I were you,” I tell them in the same breath that in order to be me, you have to accept my pain.

The first reaction to this loopy snippet is “Huh?”

The other is that Duerson's “pain” turns out to be defined as ­second-hand kitsch. That's of a piece with the interview as a whole, which is narcissistic — painfully so. The locutor not only can't seem to take responsibility for something as simple as being a
Star Trek
fan. He also can't take responsibility for having wanted to be a football player, or for his arrest for domestic violence, or for watching late-night TV. We pay no honor to the real accomplishments of Duerson's life — his NFL career and his once-prosperous food-supply business, which employed hundreds — by pretending otherwise. A good guess is that brain damage from thousands of athletic blows had taken their toll.

As a reader with four kids himself, let me just say that it is profoundly disturbing for this man either to have had all along, or to have developed, an active fantasy life based on dying at 42. Death wishes are not admirable things, whether issued from jihadism or from the “Die Young, Stay Pretty” wing of rock and roll.

In addition, as someone who joined my sister in burying our father and mother, respectively seven and six years ago, I find dreadfully self-pitying the way Duerson dwelled on the deaths of parents in his middle age and their old age. That is the circle of life. Now,
parents burying their children
, as is happening with a generation of totally pointless casualties in sports and sports entertainment — that's a different story.

Duerson called his 2005 arrest for beating his wife, which cost him his position as a trustee at his alma mater, Notre Dame, a loss of control “for three seconds.” I don't know about that. The county prosecutor in Indiana filed two counts of battery and two of domestic battery. The police report said Duerson struck his wife and then shoved her out the door of a motel room so hard that she banged against a wall.

Most of the Twitter chatter has centered on Duerson's remembrance that Buddy Ryan, his defensive coordinator with the Chicago Bears, told him, “I don't like smart niggers.” (Ryan denies it.)

In a similar motif, I got an email yesterday from a journalist who read my interview with Brent Boyd and said that Boyd's depiction of Duerson diverged from the journalist's own, which is that of a forceful union guy who clashed not only with Ryan but also with then head coach of the Bears, Mike Ditka. Decades later, Ditka is a vocal critic of what the NFL Players Association has failed to do for disabled ex-players, and the journalist says this is a chapter in a long-running narrative with racial overtones.

My own view is that race is not terribly pertinent to concussion syndrome, except perhaps to the extent African Americans are wildly oversubscribed to the entire sports dream machine. This includes, by the way, the current president of the United States, who upon taking office proclaimed his No. 1 sports priority to be the institution of a college football championship tournament to replace the current Bowl Championship Series. Some of the reasons for the racialization of athletics indeed touch on the great open wound of our national experience. But Dave Duerson's occupational hardships with redneck coaches aren't very illuminating on the subject of brain trauma in gladiator divertissement. He did fine for himself until about five years ago when finances, family affairs, and cognitive function all turned sour.

Recognizing that the Deadspin article is only an excerpt, I emailed author Trucks two days ago, asking if the full transcript and/or audio of his conversation with Duerson would be made available. Trucks did not respond.

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

In covering Dave Duerson's suicide pointedly, I mean no disrespect to the memory of someone who, according to many people who knew him, was a good guy. I never met the man myself. But my research on the murder-suicide of wrestler Chris Benoit and its offshoots has turned me into a lay Ph.D. candidate on the ugly personality changes, loss of emotional control, and sheer cognitive deterioration that are hallmarks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy — from which Duerson, like Benoit and so many others, may be proved to have suffered.

So I have specific reasons for resisting the mawkish sentimentality of much of the Duerson media coverage. That coverage reflects the culture we inhabit. It is also perfectly appropriate for family and friends to be eager to keep his legacy positive. For my money, however, such a legacy must be tied to outcomes.

One such outcome is an adjustment of the record created by Duerson's work for the NFL retirement and disability board. I checked with Brian McCarthy, the National Football League's communication director, and he told me that since the February 2007 inception of the 88 Plan, the joint labor-management disability claims committee has received 170 applications. All but 19 have been approved. Eight applications are pending. Eleven have been rejected.

I am not sure how many of the 11 rejections came during Duerson's tenure on the committee; I assume all or almost all. (An NFL Players Association spokesman did not respond to inquiries.) Out of respect for his sacrifice and in acknowledgment of what, in retrospect, was his diminished competence, these 11 files should be reopened and reconsidered at once.

The same should be done for all non–88 Plan claims on which Duerson deliberated. I believe these would include the claims of ex–Minnesota Viking lineman Brent Boyd. (Boyd's file began in 2000, pre–88 Plan, and may never have referred to that part of the disability benefits program; he claimed football-related mental illness, but I don't believe that included dementia.)

The NFL and NFLPA can litigate to death the question of Duerson's disqualification. Or they can take the high road in at least this narrowly defined area, in return for considerable public good will. On the field, they've instituted replay review for the sake of getting the call right. Today, off the field, the lives of disabled NFL veterans and their families require nothing less.

28 February 2011..........

One truth revealed by the maudlin first round of reaction to the news that Duerson probably had severe brain damage from football concussions — something postmortem study will have to confirm — is that NFL players union contract negotiations do not, in the familiar idiom, simply pit greedy billionaires against greedy millionaires. Rather, they pit
billionaires who know what they're doing against millionaires who don't have a clue.

That's the only logical conclusion I can draw from the fact that Duerson, while losing his Goliath post–NFL career food distribution business, plunging into personal bankruptcy, seeing his house seized by a bank, and getting arrested for beating his wife — all telltale signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy — was being appointed by the Players Association as one of the trustees of a league fund, jointly administered by management and union, to compensate retired players with disability claims.

Who needed a fox guarding the chicken coop when there was a hypermacho-enabling union more focused on the division of the NFL's $9 billion revenue pie than on whether its members worked under conditions that would give them a reasonable expectation of living and functioning past age 50?

No doubt Duerson had the best of intentions for his fellow athletes when he insisted, both on the NFL retirement board and in Senate commerce committee testimony, that ex–Minnesota Viking lineman Brent Boyd's mental illness in his forties wasn't proven to be football related. Duerson pointed out that his own father had Alzheimer's disease in his late seventies or eighties, yet had never played football!

But sincere or not, we now know more than just that Duerson's argument was nuts. He was, too. Cognitively impaired. Of diminished capacity. Lacking responsible judgment. All from the very phenomenon about which he was instrumental in making administrative-legal rulings — a role for which, in retrospect, he was clearly incompetent.

That's why I say enough with the media's Duerson pity party. If his friends and loved ones take comfort that his donated brain will contribute to public awareness of CTE, then by all means give them their soft landing.

But the powers that be in the NFL and the NFLPA? Not so fast. Duerson was no hero. There were already dozens of confirmed cases of CTE, and undoubtedly hundreds of other unreported or ill-reported cases, by the time Duerson put a gun to his chest.

If we're really intent on honoring Dave Duerson, then let's put some substance on his legacy. I have a three-point plan. We can call it the Double D Three-Point Stance.

Reopen all rejected disability claims by retired players.
Even as I write this, I'm sure lawyers are preparing new litigation arguing that the evidence of Duerson's incompetence should invalidate the disability claim rejections. Instead of fighting a legal war of attrition over the inevitable, the league and the union should concede the morally obvious and order immediate “replay review” of these rejections.

Double the 88 Plan's outreach and benefits.
The plan — named for Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey, who wore uniform No. 88 — grants up to $88,000 a year in reimbursement for the medical expenses of dementia victims. At Duerson's funeral on Saturday in Chicago, his son Brock said the family would be setting up a foundation to aid players with mental illness. But hey, let's cut out the middleman here. To date, the 88 Plan has distributed around $7 million. In the NFL and the NFLPA's contract talks, let them take off the table enough crumbs from their $9 billion food fight to double the size of the disability fund endowment and benefits.

Give fans and sponsors ownership of player care.
This is the hardest one for me to talk about in specifics at this point. But nothing will get the league and the players union to take meaningful action until fans pull their heads out of their hero-worshipping butts and start taking responsibility for the human and societal costs of their entertainment. One possible idea: there is much promising research on the efficacy of Omega-3 supplements in reversing or at least slowing brain damage. Fan groups could raise money for distributing free supplies to NFL alumni and pressure beer companies, which tag “drink responsibly” bromides onto their wall-to-wall football telecast commercials, to pitch in, too.

While I was filing this piece, obsessed fans were already turning the page on Duerson and refocusing on the disgusting meat rack that is the NFL pre-draft combine coverage. (Where is Jesse Jackson when you really need him for an observation on how the big-time sports system is just like an antebellum plantation?)

As millions pondered Cam Newton's flexing pecs and stopwatch reading in the 40-yard dash, a report out of Canada said that former NFL and Canadian Football League defensive back Ricky Bell died 10 days ago at age 36. Both Bell's girlfriend and his mother in South Carolina declined to comment on the cause of death.

2 May 2011..........

At a just-concluded press conference in Boston attended by Dave Duerson's ex-wife and their four children, doctors affiliated with Boston University and Chris Nowinski's Sports Legacy Institute announced that the postmortem study of the brain of Duerson, who committed suicide in February, confirms that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He is one of dozens of recently deceased athletes, at least 13 of whom were National Football League players, shown to have had CTE.

I asked the following question:

Mr. Duerson served as a trustee on the NFL committee that reviews disability claims of retired players. A league spokesman told me that a total of 11 claims to the Mackey 88 Plan for dementia-related acute-care expenses have been rejected. There is some additional number of line-of-duty and disability benefits that have been rejected, and many of those also involve brain injuries — a subject that certainly weighed heavily on Mr. Duerson. In light of this new information confirming that he was himself of diminished mental capacity when he participated in these NFL Player Care deliberations, do you agree that there is a moral, if not also a legal, obligation to reopen the files of these rejected claims?

Everyone should view Nowinski's video on his CTE work, “Game Changers,”
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but there is a danger that the NFL's activism in finding a cure for CTE and promoting sports safety reforms is way too little and way too late. That is why I asked the question.

Robert Stern, co-director of the center, replied that his organization was not in the business of telling the NFL how to distribute disability benefits. He also said that the Duerson CTE finding could not be extrapolated to determine just when and how, or even whether, this player and fallen business tycoon came to incur “diminished mental capacity.”