Is There Life After Football?

by James A. Holstein

  But it’s not only about the money. Like many other players, former NFLPA president and Pro Bowl center Kevin Mawae is disappointed that the NFL hasn’t admitted culpability. “[Fans] see $765 million and they think it’s a windfall for the players. It’s great for . . . the guys that would fall in the category of needing immediate help,” he says. “But it’s $700 million worth of hush money that they will never have to be accountable for.” Anticipating future litigation, Mawae argues that the NFL hasn’t had to disclose damaging information it has withheld for years. He calls the settlement a “pittance,” a relative “drop in the bucket.” “The league won,” he laments.42 Former Packer Dorsey Levins, another plaintiff, also wanted an admission of liability, but acknowledges the need for immediate help: “When a guy [with symptoms of CTE] calls me and says, ‘I’ve called the NFL five times. I can’t get a response. My head hurts all the time. And if I can’t get help, I’m going to take care of it [end his life].’ I couldn’t sleep. What do you say to a guy like that?”43

  In the larger health picture, where do former players stand in the wake of all this? Many are suffering the aftereffects of hits to the head. Some are enduring the ravages of CTE. There’s some financial relief on the way, but it’s not as much as it appears at first glance. Some players may receive several million dollars, but the average payout is going to be far less. Perhaps the most chilling insight to come out of the concussion crisis is the realization for players that many of them may be looking down a very bleak road to a future of mental decline and disability. They wonder if it’s already happening. Upon hearing of Junior Seau’s suicide and the speculation that it was CTE induced, Steve Young pleaded with his friend and former teammate Gary Plummer. “Please, bro, tell me there’s more to it than just the concussions, tell me that please.”44 Every former player who’s had his bell rung is probably asking the same thing.

  The Battle Scars of a Gladiator

  In the fourth quarter of game six of the Green Bay Packers’ 2013 season, tight end Jermichael Finley caught a pass over the middle and was leveled by a perfectly legal hit by the safety coming over to help out in coverage. He couldn’t get up.

  My eyes were wide open. I was very conscious, but I could not move. I looked my teammate Andrew Quarless directly in the eye and whispered, “Help me, Q. I can’t move; I can’t breathe.” The scariest moment was seeing the fear in Q’s eyes. I knew something was wrong, but his reaction verified it. That really shook me up. I actually had feeling in my legs, but I couldn’t feel much else. . . . I was a little panicked, I couldn’t breathe.45

  Finley survived the incident, apparently dodging a life-threatening injury. He was able to walk and move his arms within a few hours. He’d avoided a serious spinal cord injury—no fractures, no herniated disks. Just a bruised spinal cord. While his career is in serious jeopardy, Finley is far more fortunate than Darryl Stingley, Mike Utley, or Dennis Byrd, who all ended up permanently paralyzed from similar blows.

  Unfortunately, dramatic injuries are a way of life in the NFL. They don’t call them “Bloody Sundays” for nothing. Head injuries aren’t the only grave concern. Painful acute injuries to every conceivable part of the body put hundreds of players on the disabled list each year. Surgery is routine for most players. Pain’s a part of the game plan. And it doesn’t stop when players get out of the game. As Jim Otto put it, injuries are the battle scars of the NFL gladiator. At age 45, George Koonce has his fair share of scars:

  My back has been bothering me. My lower back. It’s excruciating. I can barely get dressed in the morning. I had seven surgeries when I played. I had both shoulders redone and my right wrist and my knee. I tore my ACL right before the Super Bowl and they had to go in two other times to fix things up after it was reconstructed. I’m not complaining, but I have pain in my joints all the time. My shoulders, my back, my knees. I can only raise my arm so far. I was fortunate to play nine years in the NFL, but now I’m feeling the effects of it. But I’m in better shape than lots of guys.

  Koonce’s story is all too common. “I hurt like hell every morning when I wake up,” says former linebacker Darryl Talley, now age 52.46 Fifty-one-year-old former wide receiver Jamaal McDaniels can’t even make it to the morning: “My whole body hurts. I wake up in the middle of the night in pain. . . . All my joints just start aching. After all that pounding . . . over time, it adds up.”47 Even relatively young retirees report aches and pains far worse and more often than their age peers in the general population. Eighty percent of NFL retirees aged 30 to 49 report severe pain lasting most of the day.48

  The ultimate gladiator, Jim Otto, may be the “poster boy” for the NFL’s walking wounded—although there were times when he literally couldn’t walk. Not only did he suffer a host of concussions, but the rest of his body was beaten to a pulp along the way. It’s the other lasting injuries, not the hits to the head, that plague him the most these days. He’s had 74 football-related surgeries. He’s had multiple joint replacements: his right knee six times, his left knee twice. His body is riddled with arthritis, and he has debilitating back and neck problems. He’s fought off three life-threatening bouts of infection in his artificial joints. During one six-month span, he didn’t have his right knee joint because he had to wait for an infection to clear up before another artificial knee could be installed. Eventually, the leg was amputated. Once Otto nearly died on the operating table and he’s had heart surgery to deal with the many infections that ravaged his legs. Now 75 years old, Otto has been fitted with a $40,000 carbon fiber leg with a microprocessor knee that’s decorated with a Raiders logo. Otto remains remarkably upbeat about his situation, making light of his limitations and near disasters. He jokes about once falling down in the Raiders office complex and not being able to get up for hours until someone eventually found him. Despite being severely handicapped, Otto says he wouldn’t change a thing if given the opportunity to do it over again.49

  How does this happen to so many players? Couldn’t they see it coming? Couldn’t they have sat out a few more games or retired a year or two sooner? Perhaps, but most players simply consider pain and injury as part of the job—something they accept and endure. Like so many others, George Koonce took great pride in playing through pain.

  Week eight against the Detroit Lions, I hurt my shoulder. Tore it up pretty bad. I couldn’t even raise my arm. The doctor said it would require surgery. The team said I could opt out and go on IR right now, or keep playing. Doctor Reynolds [a pseudonym for the team physician and orthopedic surgeon] said, “George, you can’t make it any worse. You can get injections before the game and you should be fine.” It was a no-brainer to play because I wanted to be a part of the team. I wanted to help the team win. I played through a lot of pain. I got shots before every game and during halftime for eight weeks. It was my decision, but you know that everybody wants you to play. Some guys had agents who might tell them, “You need to take care of yourself, you need to get healthy and see another specialist.” But I never opted out or got a second opinion, and I was probably operated on five times during my stay in Green Bay. You hear about sucking it up for the team? That’s what we did. Sometimes the guys might talk about a player who is on the injured list and doesn’t seem to be hurt that bad. It depends on the person. If it was a Reggie White, a Leroy Butler, a George Koonce, the guys know no matter if their name is on that injury list, no matter what might be hurt, those guys are going to play.50

  Koonce’s willingness to play hurt highlights a clichéd but powerful maxim of the NFL: There’s a big difference between being hurt and being injured. Koonce heard it from coaches, teammates, and team officials:

  Everybody knows that it’s one thing to be hurt and another thing to be injured. We’re all hurt, almost all the time. Now, if a player is injured—like with a broken leg—he can’t play. But if he is hurt—muscle pulls, cuts and bruises, broken fingers, that sort of thing—he can play through the pain.51

  Despite the official party line stressing pl
ayer well-being, players know they are expected to “suck it up” and play. They’re lauded for their strength, loyalty, bravery, and recuperative powers when they bounce back in short order, but they’re under great scrutiny while they’re on the sidelines. Everyone expects them back, sooner rather than later. All-Pro tight end and noted “tough guy” Rob Gronkowski, for example, broke his forearm in a game November 18, 2012. He rushed back into action for the Patriots’ December 30 game with Miami to catch two passes, one for a touchdown. Two weeks later, he refractured the arm in a playoff game versus Houston, ending his season. Before the 2013 season, Gronkowski underwent four surgical procedures on his forearm, plus another on his back. By all appearances, Gronkowski was injured, yet willing to tough it out. But when he wasn’t in the opening day lineup in September 2013, controversy swirled, with the media constantly questioning the timing of his return. By October, there were widespread reports of teammates asking why Gronkowski wasn’t playing on Sundays. While the Patriots’ organization repeated that Gronkowski would return to the lineup when he was medically cleared for action, the atmosphere around the situation clearly implied that many in and around the Patriots’ camp thought Gronkowski was dragging his feet and hurting his team by not playing. The point is not whether Gronkowski was indeed too injured to play, but that he was under tremendous pressure to accelerate his return—even in light of his extensive injuries and the calamitous result of his earlier attempt to come back “too soon.”52

  Under these circumstances, players don’t need to be forced back onto the field. They force themselves. Suffering from a serious back injury, Joe Jacoby, a 13-year veteran lineman, recalls collapsing in pain in his bathroom at home. He couldn’t get up. Committed to playing through pain, however, he returned to the lineup that week, only to find himself spending three days in a hospital, in traction, shot up with cortisone. “I wanted to keep playing, even though I was hurting. I felt like I was letting down the team,” recalls Jacoby. “You’ve been brought up that way since high school. It’s ingrained in you. I had a wife. I had a family. A business I was starting. But I kept hearing those little things in the back of my mind: You’re letting your team down.”53

  Players aren’t naïve about the game’s dangers. They know what they’re doing. “Seventy times a game you run into a human being as big as you are. They say that’s like a traffic accident,” says Curt Marsh.54 Hakeem Chapman enriches the analogy: “You ever been in a head-on car crash? It sends a shock down your whole body. Well, I played a dozen games for 14 years and practiced hundreds of times. Not all my hits were head-on crashes, but there were plenty of those. The others were just like getting sideswiped. But they all smack you around. So I been in 14 years full of car crashes. That was my job. [Sarcastically:] Great job!”55

  “What is that?” asks Marsh. “Fourteen hundred traffic accidents a year?” It can add up to a 20,000-car-crash career.

  Much of the long-term damage from football seems to sneak up slowly and incrementally. “The cumulative effect of what you did for a living is really not shown until age 40 to 45,” says Bruce Laird, 62, who played safety in the NFL for a dozen years. “Guys try to stay active, play golf, tennis, work out. But all of sudden, you’re around 45, you start waking up going, ‘Man, my shoulder, my hip, my knee.’ Then seriously by 50 to 55, it’s constant pain everywhere. I can’t stand very long. I can’t walk very far. My neck is compressed. Arthritis is killing your shoulders. Everything.”56

  Today, Joe Jacoby has trouble walking on damaged ankles, but that’s the only exercise his body will tolerate. “Some days the back gets unbearable,” he says. “[The pain is] really deep in the lower back and goes down to my left buttock and hamstring. Sometimes it gets so bad it hurts my nuts. There’s pain down my left leg now. My left foot has been numb for two months. The bone’s pressing on the nerve. Too many years of abuse.”57 In 1996, linebacker Tommy Jones took a solid hit and went down with a “stinger”—a common injury in the NFL. It’s usually a fleeting neurological injury, a “pinched nerve” in the neck that sends sharp burning or stinging pain, numbness, and weakness down the arms. All players get them at one time or another. Fifteen years later, the stingers caught up with him and he ended up having disk fusion surgery. His entire left side is now atrophied. Pain spreads across his upper body. He can’t lift anything with his left arm. His torso is like that of a man 20 years older. He’s virtually disabled at age 42.58

  Perhaps the most cogent commentary on the long-term health consequences of football is that former players are “old before their time.” Even those who left the game in relatively good health end up suffering from bodily deterioration relatively early in life. Brandon Gold was known as a fitness “freak” during his playing days. Indeed, he still is. Working out constantly, he was “ripped.” Muscle and Fitness magazine named him “the best physique in pro football.” Now, at age 42, after nine years in the NFL, Gold wakes up in pain, sometimes hardly able to move. Seeking an explanation for the pain, his doctors put him through a full-body MRI. “What kind of car accident were you in?” they asked, not knowing of Gold’s football career.59 It was eye-opening for Gold, who works as a personal trainer, with a clientele that includes quite a few “seniors.” “I’m able to help a lot of 60- or 70-year-old people, because literally, I completely understand how they feel with injuries and how they recover because . . . I kind of have the same kind of issues. So it is a joke with them about how I am going to feel when I am 60, but it is kind of scary saying that.” “I’m 40 years old, going on 65,” echoes Roman Oben, an ex-lineman. “God knows what I’ll feel like when I’m actually 65 years old.”60

  Collateral Consequences

  It’s not just the aches and pains. Physical difficulties often translate into functional disabilities. NFL alums are notably more likely than their age peers in the general population to have difficulty climbing stairs; standing for long periods of time; stooping, bending, or kneeling; reaching above their heads; grasping small objects; lifting and carrying ten pounds; and pushing or pulling large objects. This is particularly true of younger alums (30–49 years old) who are up to five times as likely to have these problems as their non-playing counterparts.61

  Functional disability often restricts former players’ ability to earn a living. Not many players are financially set for life; they still need sources of income. But 15 percent of younger NFL alums report that they are unable to work as a result of football-related disabilities. This compares to six percent of similarly aged men in the general population who claim they are unable to work.62 NFL retirees are also far more likely than their age peers to report limitations on their ability to work.63 That’s where Tommy Jones, now 43 years old, finds himself. His neck injuries and their aftermath have made everyday tasks so painful that it’s a challenge to find a job that his body will allow him to pursue.

  Right now, I wouldn’t be able to have a job where I had to lift a lot. I even have a problem with the job that I’m in now [enrollment advisor for an online university]. It requires me to sit in front of the computer, calling students all day, leaning, switching between different program screens, typing, leaning forward a lot. . . . Now, after the surgery, the pain has intensified in a different area, and now I still can’t sit down for more than like an hour at a time. I have to stand up and walk around. So, it is affecting me being able to sit down for periods of time without my shoulder and arm going numb and having sharp nerve pain in my back.64

  There are hundreds of others in the same boat, relatively young men unable to sit or stand for more than an hour at a time, literally hobbled in their attempts to hold down routine jobs.

  This spells financial disaster for some former players, but some may get relief from the NFL concussion settlement. Flying quietly under the radar, however, is another remedy thousands of former players are seeking through the State of California worker’s compensation law. Under California statutes, players who played as few as one game in the state are allowed to pursue i
njury-related disability claims. Claimants are evaluated by doctors and, if they’re judged to be disabled, they may receive financial compensation as well as medical-care benefits. Most players who stick around the league for several years eventually play a game in California, so the state has become the “disability venue of choice” for retired athletes in recent years, with thousands of former NFL players filing claims.

  By some estimates, former NFL players could recoup as much as $1 billion by way of nearly 4,000 workers’ compensation claims pending in California. Hundreds of players have been awarded disability benefits by going through the entire hearings process, but it’s clear that players are taking a “fast track” similar to that pursued in the concussion settlement: take substantial, quick settlements while foregoing more lucrative payoffs that would involve extended time and possible litigation. If a player presents a legitimate case for football-related injury and subsequent disability, he’s entitled to a cash disability award plus an award of lifetime medical care related to the injury. Cases are adjudicated by an administrative judge, not a jury. Winning cases have typically resulted in permanent disability awards ranging from $40,000 to $100,000, paid over six years, plus the lifetime medical-care award. The vast majority of former NFL claimants, however, opt for cash settlements between $150,000 and $250,000, but without the medical insurance. That means trading lifetime medical care for more money right now. While the settlements are substantial, realistically, the up-front money won’t cover the expenses associated with the long-term medical and surgical needs of many former players.65 For some, it’s a hard choice. It’s not easy to forego a six-figure cash settlement when there are bills to pay, but a knee replacement in today’s medical market can cost between $23,000 and $70,000. A hip can run anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000, with most hospitals charging in the $50,000 to $100,000 range.66 As a result of his football injuries and 13 subsequent major surgeries, Dave Pear, for example, has run up medical bills in excess of $600,000.67