The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (57 page)

CTE has been found in a number of deceased football players, including Strzelczyk, Creekmur, Borich, Waters, Duerson, and Chris Henry, a former NFL receiver never diagnosed with a concussion. Early stages of the disease also were discovered in the brain of Owen Thomas, a 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania football captain who hanged himself, and in Nathan Stiles, a 17-year-old high school player from Kansas who collapsed during a game and died of a rebleed of a brain injury suffered in a previous game.

Because their brains are still developing, children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to brain trauma. A recent Virginia Tech study measuring head impacts among seven- and eight-year-old football players found that some hits generated more than 80 g's of force, equal to the blows delivered in college football.

“I think that in 10 years we're going to look back at this and say, ‘Whoa,'” says McKee, who has examined thousands of brains over 26 years. “The public only knows some of the evidence. It's overwhelming. And as it accumulates, it's impossible to deny.”

 

Austin Trenum showed no signs of CTE, none of the telltale clusters of dark brown spots on slides of stained pinkish brain tissue.

The sport damaged his brain nonetheless.

At a 2009 congressional hearing, Ann McKee presented a summary of her work, acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of former football players seem perfectly healthy. She then asked: Do we expect that 100 percent of cigarette smokers will develop lung cancer? Do we expect 100 percent of children who play with matches or even chainsaws will get hurt?

Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, said that parents and players already know football is dangerous. He said government involvement would mean “the end of football as we know it” because the sport would end up becoming “touch football.”

Such are the terms of an ongoing national debate over football's safety and long-term viability, an argument that has intensified since the May suicide of popular former NFL linebacker Junior Seau. Mismanaged concussions can cause permanent harm and death. But even players who never have a concussion are at risk of developing CTE. How much is too much?

McKee is no abolitionist. She grew up in Wisconsin rooting for the Green Bay Packers. Her favorite player was Willie Wood, a D.C. native now suffering from dementia. Her two older brothers played the game. She doesn't want to end football; she wants to save the sport from itself. Three years ago, she ran into a group of players from her daughter's high school at a doughnut shop outside Boston.

“So,” McKee asked, “you guys know anything about concussions?”

“Oh, yeah,” said one of the boys. “I've had five.”

“I've had seven,” said another.

“It was a badge of honor,” McKee recalls.

For years, McKee loved attending prep football games. Not anymore, she says. You just don't know what will happen.

 

The room remains as it was. A lacrosse helmet. An SAT prep book. A half-empty pack of gum. All on a desk. Austin and his friends mugging in a photo booth, young and happy and full of life, the snapshots tacked to a mirror. Clothes are piled on the closet floor, the bed unmade. Sometimes Michelle will come upstairs and lie down, just to feel her son's blanket.

Downstairs is a bathroom. When Austin was in the hospital, doctors working to save his life, Michelle tried to make a deal with God:
I'll rip out the bathroom, make it bigger. Austin can be a vegetable and we'll take care of him. Just let him live
.

“But I knew,” she says, her voice trailing off.

The first months were the hardest. Gil, a senior engineer at SAIC, went back to work. The boys were in school. Michelle, a stay-at-home mom, would lie on the living room couch—the family's golden retriever, Biscuit, at her feet—and sob. Before Austin's death, she had been outgoing, involved in the community, digging up local land-use records and political campaign contributions to lead a successful fight against a planned rock quarry. Not anymore.

She withdrew, felt vulnerable, couldn't be around people who didn't know Austin. She threw herself into spy novels, then science fiction, sometimes reading for seven hours a day. She had once favored Anne Tyler and Pat Conroy, selections from Oprah's book club. “But I couldn't read those,” Michelle says. “Nothing with mothers and kids and emotions.”

When children take their lives, parents blame themselves. Michelle wondered why she'd gotten on Austin about his homework; Gil wondered why he'd let him do homework in the first place. A grief counselor told Michelle it would take a year for the guilt to pass. “Even I have trouble sleeping sometimes,” says Patti McKay, the Trenums' close friend. “I think about what Gil and Michelle saw. I don't know how they sleep. I can't imagine living with that.”

Michelle still watched football, but not in the same way. She winced at every big hit, noticed that concussed players almost always fell with their forearms extended away from their bodies, a reflex scientists call “the fencing response.” She began investigating sports concussions and teen suicide, spending hours online, reaching out to military and academic experts.

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked suicides, but they didn't correlate those deaths with recent brain trauma, never mind athletic participation. Nor did anyone else.

Michelle befriended Dustin Fink, an Illinois-based athletic trainer who runs a concussion blog. Fink's anecdotal evidence suggested that boys who played both linebacker and running back were at greater brain-trauma risk. Michelle made a spreadsheet, one she still maintains, logging every instance she could find of high school and college football players killing themselves: name, age, position played. She saw a pattern.
Linebacker. Running back. Linebacker. Running back
. Just like Austin.

 

Two football helmets rest on a table. One is black, matte and battered, with an orange mouthpiece wedged in the facemask. The other is reddish and gleaming, decorated with a skull and crossbones and a breast-cancer-awareness sticker. Two gashes run down the front.

The first helmet belonged to Austin. The second belongs to Walker.

Michelle pushes them together. “This,” she says, “is how it happens.”

It's a Saturday, exactly one year after the weekend of Austin's death.

Cody finished the previous Brentsville High football season, then quit. He didn't say why. Walker continued to play for a youth squad, fullback and linebacker, same as Austin. Gil and Michelle didn't want to overreact, give in to emotion, cocoon their son in bubble wrap. Besides, Austin always took such pride in Walker. The boy loved to hit, so much so that he bragged about it:
Mommy, that kid is a baby. He cried, and I didn't even hit him that hard
.

Walker wore a special chin strap, rigged with accelerometers that measured the force of every blow he absorbed. If built-in software deemed any hit powerful enough to cause a head injury, three green LED lights on the chin strap would flash red. While Walker was making a routine block, his head whipped sideways. Red lights. His coach pulled him off the field. Two sideline nurses checked him out. Dizzy and frightened, he cried.

“My head,” he said. “My head.”

The Trenums followed Gioia's instructions. They made Walker rest. They took him to a Sunday-night bonfire—a memorial for Austin—but didn't let him run around with his friends. On Monday morning, a neurologist diagnosed Walker with a concussion. Sensitive to light and sound, he was held out of football practice and gym class for a week. One week after that, he was back on the field, Michelle looking on.

“You're so calm,” one of the other mothers said.

Michelle wasn't. Watching football on TV was bad enough. This was worse. Also, the chin strap. It was supposed to make things easier, safer. But the lights kept turning red, once when Walker hadn't even been hit. Michelle made him sit out the entire game. Walker fumed, said he wouldn't wear the device again. Michelle sent the faulty chin strap back to the manufacturer, got a replacement, then sent that one back too. More red lights. Was the problem a bad battery? Water leaking into the electronics? Was the problem football?

Michelle wasn't watching her son. She was watching the lights, waiting for green to go red. She worried about punch-drunk football players, the blows adding up over time—wondered if Walker's concussion was God's version of a yellow flag. It was all too much.

Michelle Trenum kept coming back to the same question.

“If you're that worked up,” she says, “then what are you doing letting your kid out there in the first place?”

 

Losing a child, Michelle says, is like jumping from one train onto another headed in the opposite direction. In an instant, you're barreling away from everything you once knew, farther and farther with each second.

Brentsville High has a scholarship in Austin's name. In their living room, the Trenums keep a large photo of Austin, sweaty and beaming, coming off a football field. On the ceiling above the kitchen table is a spot with his fingerprints, smudged and faded, where he and his brothers once liked to test how high they could jump. “I sometimes think we can never repaint that,” Michelle says. There's sadness in her eyes—green like Austin's—and pain.

“I love football,” Gil says. “I loved watching the kids play. But it's not the same anymore.”

Twelve years ago, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman retired after suffering the 10th concussion of his Hall of Fame career, the result of a vicious hit from Washington Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington. Aikman since has become a successful broadcaster, a man who owes much to football. After the Super Bowl in February, however, he said that the sport was “at a real crossroads . . . If I had a 10-year-old boy, I don't know that I'd be real inclined to encourage him to go play football in light of what we're learning from head injuries.”

Michelle showed Walker the comment.

“I don't think I want you to play football,” she said.

He was upset—for a moment.

“Can I play another sport?”

Gil and Michelle are not against football. They don't judge others. But they've made their decision.

“As a mother,” Michelle says, “I'm a lot more relaxed watching basketball.”

WRIGHT THOMPSON

FROM ESPN: THE MAGAZINE

 

Part One

 

B
EFORE YOU JOIN
Urban Meyer, who is walking toward the exit of the Ohio State football office, there's a scar you need to see. A few years ago in Gainesville, his middle child, Gigi, planned a celebration to formally accept a college volleyball scholarship to Florida Gulf Coast University. It was football season, so she checked her dad's calendar, scheduling her big day around his job. As the hour approached, she waited at her high school, wanting much, expecting little. Some now-forgotten problem consumed Meyer, and he told his secretary he didn't have time. He wasn't going. His beautiful, athletic, earnest daughter would have to sign her letter of intent without him. Meyer's secretary, a mother of four, insisted: “You're going.”

Eighty or so people filed into the school cafeteria. Urban and his wife, Shelley, joined their daughter at the front table, watching as Gigi stood and spoke. She'd been nervous all day, and with a room of eyes on her, she thanked her mother for being there season after season, year after year.

Then she turned to her father.

He'd missed almost everything.
You weren't there
, she told him.

Shelley Meyer winced. Her heart broke for Urban, who sat with a thin smile, crushed. Moments later, Gigi high-fived her dad without making eye contact, then hugged her coach. Urban dragged himself back to the car. Then—and this arrives at the guts of his conflict—Urban Meyer went back to work, pulled by some biological imperative. His daughter's words ran through his mind, troubling him, and yet he returned to the shifting pixels on his television, studying for a game he'd either win or lose. The conflict slipped away. Nothing mattered but winning. Both of these people are in him—are him: the guilty father who feels regret, the obsessed coach who ignores it. He doesn't like either one. He doesn't like himself, which is why he wants to change.

 

Meyer strolls through the Ohio State football parking lot with his 13-year-old son, Nate. Years from now, when Urban either succeeds or fails in remaking himself, he will look back on these two days in June as a dividing line. On one side, the past 18 months of searching, and on the other, the test of that search. In the car, he turns right out of his new office, heading some two hours north. There's vital business at hand, which requires him to leave the football bunker on a summer afternoon.

Road trip!

“All right, fun time today,” he says, amped and smiling at his son.

Fun? Smiling? Urban? There's gray in his brush cut, weight back on his hips. The radio in the car, as always, is tuned to 93.3, the oldies station. “I Got Sunshine.” Tomorrow he will meet with the 2012 Buckeyes for the first time, beginning the countdown to the first practice, the first game, the first loss. Today he's driving to Cleveland to take Nate to an Indians game.

In front of him is a second chance. Behind, there's his old dream job in Florida, which he quit twice in a year, and the $20 million he left on the table, unable to answer the simplest of questions:
Why am I doing this?
During the break, he studied himself for the first time in his life, looking for a new him or maybe trying to get the old him back—the person he was before a need for perfection nearly killed him. At least he can laugh about it now. During one of his many recent visits to a children's hospital in Columbus, he told a group of nurses on an elevator, “My wife's a nurse.”