Moving On
It’s easy to focus on the travails players face when football’s over, but we shouldn’t overlook success stories. Many players navigate the end of their careers without a hitch. There are countless attorneys (e.g., Brad Culpepper, Kellen Winslow, Larry Williams) and several MDs (e.g., Steven Brooks, Patrick O’Neill, James Kovach [who also has a law degree]) among NFL alumni, who moved more or less seamlessly from one career to another. Others hitched small businesses to the NFL wagon and successfully rode their notoriety immediately from one venue to another. As one ex-player noted, “A lot of guys got their shit together right away.”53
But why do some drift while others move forward? Sports sociologist Jay Coakley suggests that retirement for elite athletes is not an inevitable source of stress or trouble. He outlines social structural factors that variably influence the transition out of sport.54 As previously noted, Coakley suggests that players deeply entrenched in the bubble—those with limited real world experience and few outside associates—may have trouble dealing with retirement. Coakley also suggests that the likelihood of retirement problems increases for athletes who don’t cultivate alternatives in their lives. The unique circumstances of NFL players and their “greedy” institution heightens this challenge.55
Of course, many players actually capitalize on their unique NFL backgrounds to propel them toward post-football goals. For some, it’s just a matter of jump-starting their lives: “The first month or two when you’re not working is OK. After that . . . ‘Man I gotta do something, I’m bored. Sitting around the house watching SportsCenter gets old.’”56 So what did this former Carolina Panthers linebacker do? He got off the couch and went to dental school. The intelligence and initiative that made him an NFL stalwart translated well into his next professional enterprise. Another former player recalls how he got his life rolling: “I said . . . I’m not comfortable with the couch, so let me go see what Plan B is. I’ve got a degree. What do I want to do? . . . I got a guy that’s in my close circle that owns a mortgage company, and I went to work for him. I got my license and all that stuff.” Within two weeks, he was on the job.57
Some argue that players from the “old school” were more apt to get on with their lives immediately because they didn’t have enough money to sit back and take stock. It’s likely that financial necessity was a more significant motivator “back in the day,” but it’s probably simplistic to say that old-timers simply got on with their lives out of financial necessity. Many had plans and purpose. Consider the path taken by James Sutton, an All-Pro defensive back from the 1970s:
Football wasn’t going to last forever, and I made a point to graduate from college. I got a degree in education, so I knew I could always teach. I always said a person without a goal is a person without a vision, but in sports, you always have to have something to fall back on, because I think it is like one out of every 450,000 high school football players are going to make it into the pros. . . . Well the transition wasn’t that hard because during the off season, I taught school. . . . I was what they called a long-term sub. . . . I did that for 17 years. . . . I was not teaching school for the money. Because they are the lowest paid salary jobs that have the most influence on a kid. . . . They can mold, shape, and develop kids in any shape, fashion, or form, so I enjoyed teaching. I had a calling all my life to work with kids, and so it was one of the ways that I could actually give back, and make a little money. . . . It was a transition that wasn’t that hard. It felt strange the first year until I hit myself in the head and said, “Hey you are no longer a football player. Let it go. It’s time to move on.”58
No Perfect Exit
Was George Koonce right when he said there was no perfect exit? An occasional player disagrees. When asked why he retired at age 29, while seemingly on top of his game, legendary running back Jim Brown replied:
Football is one part of your life. After nine years, I wanted to do other things. I had prepared myself. I graduated from Syracuse University in four years. I went to the service as an ROTC second lieutenant. I worked for Pepsi Cola for nine years when I played and I knew I wanted to go into a high-profile profession, so I got into movies. So, it was not hard at all for me to leave at 29 years old, MVP of the league, and the last two years of my career we played for the championship. Now, why would I stay there and keep getting hit when I could be with Raquel Welch, Stella Sevens, and Jacqueline Bisset?59
Brown’s story, however, is an exception to the rule. There’s a long list of players who return to the game after leaving or being forced out. Brett Favre, Junior Seau, and Reggie White come immediately to mind. Their struggles to hang on underscore the extent to which players don’t want to be evicted from the bubble. They’re desperate to leave on their own terms, even if they embarrass themselves in the process. Brett Favre’s ongoing retirement soap opera—with repeated retirement announcements, coy courtships with new teams, and triumphant returns—shows a man trying to postpone the inevitable while working fervently to leave when, where, and how he wanted. It’s as if Favre was trying to simultaneously “retire” while he was still livin’ large from the seat of his tractor in Kiln, Mississippi, continuing to be larger than life, even as NFL life slipped away.
Some players are more graceful as they exit the stage. Donald Driver, longtime Packers favorite and teammate of Favre’s, retired after the 2012 season. The team held a dignified and moving press conference which turned into a national media event. Driver was widely praised for both his sterling career and his poised exit. In June 2013, Driver hosted his annual charity fund-raising softball game. Over 9,000 people—the equivalent of nearly half the population of the town of Grand Chute, Wisconsin, where the event was held—cheered Driver for 25 minutes as a Green Bay street was named after him. The mutual love and respect was moving. And yet, that very afternoon, Driver, perhaps unwittingly, hinted at a lingering pipe dream. “I’d be in shape,” he ventured. “At the end of the day, if they called, I’d be willing to play. If not, I’m done.” Was Driver channeling Brett Favre? The perfect exit, it seems, still had an escape hatch.60
4
A LIFETIME OF HURT
Retired NFL Players Endure a Lifetime of Hurt
—Washington Post1
No aspect of players’ football lives is more debilitating, controversial, or paradoxical than injuries and their consequences. The media strike a frightening chorus: “The NFL is killing its players and the league doesn’t care.”2 “Most pro football players face a future of disability and pain.”3 “Retired NFL players experience living hell.”4 At the same time, other sources proclaim—as Sports Illustrated put it—“NFL players, in general, live longer” than their American male peers, and there’s evidence that they’re in better health than their non-player counterparts in many respects.5 Even more strikingly, we read that “former NFL players . . . are overwhelmingly happy they played in the league, including more than 85 percent of players who suffered at least five major NFL injuries.”6 Player after player culminates his story of NFL mayhem with the same surprising refrain: “I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat!”7
In recent years, the NFL has undertaken massive rule changes to curb violent hits and combat disabling injury, yet players overwhelmingly say the league is going too far.8 “I understand that they want the sport to be safer,” laments All-Pro safety Troy Polamalu. “But eventually you’re going to start to take away from the essence of this game and it’s not really going to be the football that we all love.”9 In spite of all they know about the prospects of disabling injury, players say they don’t want to be protected. It’s a tough man’s game, and they want it that way.
No doubt, football is violent and dangerous; that’s part of its appeal. But it’s also part of the enduring mark it leaves on players. NFL Sundays—but also practices and workouts—clearly jeopardize players’ health. There were more than 30,000 injuries in the NFL from 2002 through 2011, including nearly 4,500 in 2011 alone.10 That’s more than two per act
ive player. While some of these are fleeting, and recovery is complete, there’s hardly a player who leaves the game without painful reminders of his violent past. Ninety-three percent of former players missed at least one game due to a major injury, and over half report suffering three or more major injuries during their NFL careers. Eighty-six percent report that they underwent orthopedic surgery as a result of a football injury.11 A substantial majority of ex-players said that injury played some role in ending their careers.12
If the surgical scars aren’t reminder enough, nine out of ten former players wake up each day to nagging aches and pains that they attribute to football. About eight in ten report that the pain lasts most of the day. Among younger retirees aged 30 to 49, one third say their work lives are limited in some way by the aftereffects of injury. Retired players are much less likely than their age peers in the general population to rate their health as excellent or good, and nearly 30 percent of NFL retirees rate their health as only “fair” or “poor.”13 Even though mortality rates among former players are lower than the general population, in many other respects, it’s a grim picture. Many former NFL players are damaged goods.
The Concussion Crisis
In August 2013, the NFL reached an out-of-court settlement with over 4,500 former NFL players who sought damages stemming from disabilities brought on by head injuries suffered while playing in the league. The players alleged that the NFL had willfully concealed information, circulated significant misinformation, and obstructed research indicating that players put themselves at severe risk of chronic brain disease by playing pro football. The NFL agreed to pay up to $765 million to fund medical exams, concussion-related disability compensation, and a program of medical research into brain injuries. Payouts would extend over 20 years, with 50 percent coming in the first three. The agreement explicitly states that the settlement in no way represents an admission by the NFL of liability or a concession that the plaintiffs’ injuries were caused by football.
The settlement actually extends beyond those players who filed suit, and covers all 18,000 of the league’s retired players, quadrupling the number eligible to receive compensation. Players can opt out of the settlement, thus declining compensation but retaining their right to pursue further legal action. All retired players or their families are eligible for compensation if they can show severe cognitive injury or impairment related to NFL football, but players who died before 2006 (and their families) will be excluded from benefits. The settlement caps payments at $3 million per individual for dementia, $4 million for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and $5 million for Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or another severe cognitive impairment. At the time of the provisional settlement, there appeared to be at least 300 cases of former players who would qualify in the highest compensation categories.14
While the NFL admitted no legal liability, the settlement is a tacit admission that the NFL has actively prevented players from knowing the full extent to which they were inviting chronic brain disease by playing in the NFL—information vital to making informed decisions about their long-term physical and mental health.15 The NFL’s shameful complicity in suppressing information about the consequences of concussions and its attempts to thwart scientific research into concussions and their aftermath were further unmasked by media exposés such as the 2013 book League of Denial and an accompanying PBS Frontline documentary of the same title.16 There’s little question that brain injury is a much more serious problem than the NFL has wanted to admit.
Momentarily setting aside the controversy over concussion research at the heart of the lawsuit, what’s most remarkable in this scenario is the sheer number of former players claiming significant brain damage from playing in the NFL. More than 4,500 living players maintain that they have symptoms of football-related brain damage. That’s nearly a quarter of all living NFL alumni. A 2013 Washington Post survey found that around 90 percent of former players indicate that they suffered at least one concussion while they were playing. Of those who did, two thirds say they still experience symptoms.17 The NFL Player Care study—commissioned by the NFL itself—asked alumni respondents if they had ever been “diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.” While relatively few reported such diagnoses, comparisons with age peers in the general male population are shocking. Older retirees (50 and older) are five times more likely to report such diagnoses (6.1% to 1.2%), while younger alums (30–49) are 19 times more likely (1.9% to 0.1%).18 Moreover, neurodegenerative mortality among a 1959 through 1988 cohort of NFL players was three times higher than that of the general population, and the mortality rate for this cohort due to Alzheimer’s disease or ALS was four times higher.19 While these data don’t say that football wreaks havoc on all players, they clearly suggest that former NFL players are dramatically more likely than the average man on the street to suffer from long-term brain damage.
Every NFL player has his “bell rung.” These shots to the head are likely to cause concussions. They leave players momentarily stunned, disoriented, “seeing stars,” feeling woozy. The most pronounced symptoms may pass in a few minutes, but headaches, impaired vision, memory loss, or cognitive “fuzziness” may persist. Nevertheless, most players simply “play through” the symptoms, getting back into action as soon as they can.
The medical definition of a concussion is a bit more ominous. It’s a brain injury caused by a force transmitted to the head that results in a collision between the brain and the skull that surrounds it. When someone takes a jolt to the head, the brain bangs around inside the skull case. The collision sets off organic, neurological, and chemical reactions that alter the brain and disrupt its functions. There’s a wide range of possible symptoms: loss of consciousness, memory loss, slowed reaction times, cognitive impairment, drowsiness, headaches, irritability, and emotional fluctuations. Some people even go temporarily blind. Most of these symptoms, however, resolve spontaneously.20
No two concussions are alike. Some are more serious than others, and some may persist for days, if not weeks. NFL players have “shook off” the effects of concussions since the game began. There are countless stories of players having their bells rung, but playing on, not knowing what they were doing, and remembering nothing afterwards. In one memorable instance, Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman was “dinged”—kneed in the head—during the January 24, 1994, NFC championship game. Aikman had played well and the Cowboys beat the 49ers, but Aikman ended up in the hospital with a concussion. He couldn’t remember anything about the game.21 Steve Young, a contemporary of Aikman’s and a fellow Hall of Famer, was once asked about how many concussions he suffered. His reply: “You mean official ones? . . . An official one is when you’re knocked out and carted off the field. But I get dinged all the time and just continue to play. We might dumb down the playbook a little bit, but I couldn’t count those.”22 Jim Otto, Hall of Fame center from the AFL and NFL, probably took as many hits to the head as anyone.
I’ve had over 20 concussions myself. . . . There were so many times that I would walk off the field and my eyes would be crossed. Did you ever have that happen to you? Get hit in the head so hard your eyes were crossed? You sit there. It’s strange; it’s really strange. Or what about if you had amnesia for two days? When you looked at your wife and you didn’t know who she was, like, who’s this chick? And you couldn’t remember. You got hit in the head, and you had amnesia.23
Eventually, Aikman, Young, Otto, and hundreds of others whose bells have been rung snap out of it—more or less. For generations, that meant that they were good to go. But part of the recent concussion controversy has centered on exactly what happens over the long run when the brain is jarred enough to produce concussion symptoms.
By his own count, Mike Webster, Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs from 1974 to 1990, played in 300 games, going back to high school, without missing a single game. He reckoned he’d shown up
for 890 of a possible 900 practices in the NFL. He’d knocked heads literally tens of thousands of times in the “pit” of the offensive line. Within a few short years of his retirement, Webster’s everyday aches and pains became severe. He battled hand and foot afflictions. His teeth began to fall out. In addition to physical deterioration, many friends and associates noted that there was something wrong inside his head. He couldn’t sleep. He became paranoid and behaved erratically. His speech was scattered and disjointed. His memory failed repeatedly. He lost his balance. He took on a vacant look—no emotion, no affect. His cognitive functioning slipped. He was “beat up” and “discombobulated,” according to his doctor. Ultimately, Webster became socially dysfunctional. He couldn’t hold a job or live normally in the company of others. His family couldn’t cope with his erratic behavior and his wife divorced him. He simply wasn’t the man they had loved and grown up with. He came to rely upon Ritalin to maintain momentary focus, but eventually abused the drug and began forging dozens of prescriptions. His life became the horror story of an unbalanced, erratic transient.
Finally, Webster, with the assistance of a team of friends, doctors, and attorneys, filed for NFL disability benefits, presenting testimony from four physicians to establish that Webster had disabling brain damage due to his play in the league. The NFL, however, dragged its feet. The Retirement Plan Disability Board insisted on a fifth handpicked “independent” neurologist. When he agreed with Webster’s doctors, the NFL finally granted Webster “total and permanent” disability benefits. The league’s explanation for the decision included an extraordinary admission: “[Webster’s] disability is the result of head injuries suffered as a football player with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Kansas City Chiefs.” This concession would become even more significant when subsequent concussion litigation arose.24
Is There Life After Football? Page 12
