by Vicki Mayk
For my parents, Freda and Steve Jarmulowski, with love and appreciation
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE April 2010
CHAPTER 1 Game Changer
CHAPTER 2 Birth of a Viking
CHAPTER 3 Suiting Up
CHAPTER 4 In the Middle
CHAPTER 5 Football Boys
CHAPTER 6 Thundercats
CHAPTER 7 Penn Pals
CHAPTER 8 Football Family
CHAPTER 9 Playing Through the Pain
CHAPTER 10 Testimony
CHAPTER 11 Divine Providence
CHAPTER 12 Changing Their Minds
CHAPTER 13 But Not Forgotten
Epilogue
Bibliographical Note
Acknowledgments
Notes
Owen Thomas after the University of Pennsylvania Quakers’ victory against the Crimson of Harvard University on November 14, 2009, at Harvard Stadium. (Photo © Mickey Goldin)
PROLOGUE
APRIL 2010
THE BRAINS ARRIVE, usually by special courier, invariably packed in ice, to Dr. Ann McKee’s lab at the VA-Boston University-Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank. The containers in which they are shipped could be mistaken for the ones used to ship prime steaks. Brains, however, are softer than meat in the market. More delicate, more gelatinous. Researchers pressed for a description of a brain often liken it to the popular fruit-flavored dessert that jiggles.
McKee, director of Boston University’s CTE Center and chief neuropathologist for the Brain Bank, never forgets that they belonged to human beings, people who lived, were loved, had hopes. Most of the brains delivered to her share something in common: they belonged to people who played sports in high school or college, or professionally. Most often, they belonged to men and boys who played football.
McKee speaks freely and informally to the people who visit her office and lab. She has a directness that probably can be traced back to her Midwestern roots growing up in Wisconsin. The directness is underscored when McKee makes eye contact with her bright blue eyes. Sometimes that gaze is muted by her oversized glasses. But when a visitor comes to her office at the VA, the glasses are likely to be sitting on her desk, somewhere amid the stacks of papers and the towers of stained slides. A white lab coat covers her shirt and slacks. She’s one of the foremost researchers—the leading CTE researcher, the one most frequently associated with the disease. CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a progressive degenerative brain disease caused by repeated brain trauma. The trauma can be in the form of powerful blows to the head that cause concussions. It also can come from other jarring blows that cause the brain to rattle within the skull like an amusement park bumper car. Such blows are sustained by soldiers exposed to bomb blasts in combat and by football players, soccer players, hockey players, boxers. Researchers assessing traumatic brain injury in sports call this second category of trauma subconcussive hits. While such hits are not powerful enough to cause a full-blown concussion, in 2010 researchers began to realize that they were enough to do the damage that can lead to CTE.1
CTE is characterized by a buildup in the brain of a protein called tau. Brains are made up of 90 billion neurons, which relay signals through long fibers called axons. When the axons are jarred, they can break, releasing toxins. That’s when a concussion occurs and with it often comes a host of symptoms: headaches, confusion, fatigue, blurred vision, problems with sleep and mood. Time and rest are required for the brain to recover.
Unlike the more obvious symptoms of concussions, which appear relatively quickly, CTE symptoms burgeon over time. Tau protein supports microtubules found in the axons, the brain’s signal carriers mentioned earlier. When the microtubules come apart—because of concussions or repeated jarring blows to the head—the tau protein is dislodged and begins to clump together, breaking down communication between neurons. Eventually, brain degeneration results and the condition known as CTE can occur—causing memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, for some, dementia. Once underway, tau buildup never stops. Insidiously, it continues to grow, even after an individual stops playing football or hockey or any other activity that may have caused the initial damage. The presence of CTE can be confirmed only after death, by researchers like Ann McKee.2
McKee’s obsession with CTE can be traced to 2003, when she performed an autopsy on a seventy-two-year-old veteran who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease fifteen years earlier. Under her microscope, she saw patterns of tau protein in a totally unfamiliar pattern. There was no evidence of the beta-amyloid plaques that are present in Alzheimer’s patients. The veteran turned out to have been a boxer. Two years later, in 2005, the same strange pattern of tau showed up in another patient. A call to his family revealed he, too, had been a pugilist.3
McKee was recruited to head CTE research at Boston University in 2008, a year after Dr. Robert Cantu, a neurologist, neurosurgeon, and leading concussion expert, and activist Chris Nowinski, PhD, founded the Sports Legacy Institute and created the center’s precursor, the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. The institute would later become the Sports Legacy Foundation, with a goal of raising awareness about the dangers of concussions, particularly among young athletes.4
No longer encased in a skull under a thatch of flaming red hair, a brain arrives at McKee’s lab. McKee doesn’t know about the red hair. What she does know is that this was the brain of a college football player. He was in his early twenties. He committed suicide. Any more details could prejudice her work, she says.
The brain belonged to Owen Thomas.
McKee’s lab has detailed procedures for dealing with specimens. When Owen’s brain arrives, it is weighed, photographed, and visually inspected for evidence of trauma or disease. It’s then preserved with periodate-lysine-paraformaldehyde, referred to as PLP, a solution preferred by McKee and her colleagues because it keeps the brain tissue a bit softer than do other preservatives used in labs. Samples are taken from twenty-eight separate areas of the brain. The rest of the brain is frozen for future investigation, while the samples are sent to histology technicians, who dehydrate them and embed them in paraffin wax. The process makes them easier to slice. The technicians use a special tool called a microtome that slices extremely thin sections of tissue for study. How thin? Thinner than you can imagine. Twenty microns. That’s the width of a human hair. The slices are mounted on slides, which are each stained from two to six times with antibodies that will reveal the target proteins that will confirm the presence of CTE.
It’s late in the day when McKee turns her attention to Owen’s case. The late afternoon sunlight has already ceded to evening. Twilight touches the Boston streets outside. She likes working after hours, when she’s the only one in the lab. “A lot of times, you get into your zen of looking at the case,” McKee says. “It’s quiet; it’s very meditative for me, as I’m looking through the case.” That night, she expects she’ll be able to hurry through. It should not take long with a subject this young.
In the silence of the lab, she looks at tissue from Owen Thomas’s frontal cortex under the microscope. She is shocked at what she sees. “Repeatedly in his brain, over and over, I saw areas of abnormalities that I’ve never seen except in association with CTE,” McKee says.
The buildup of tau protein she sees is everywhere, with twenty areas of Owen’s brain affected—twenty areas where tau protein would continue to grow over time if Owen had lived. McKee and her colleagues assign different levels—called grades—to indicate the severity of the disease, with grade 1 the lowest level, with least incidence of disease, and 4 the highest. At just twenty-one, Owen Thomas already had grade 2 CTE, th
e most advanced level found to date for a football player at his age.
When McKee is done examining Owen’s brain, she drives to her home in suburban Boston, deeply troubled. How could this be? How could someone so young commit suicide? How could someone so young have this degree of disease? She thinks of her own son, Graham, then almost the same age as Owen, and what his loss would mean. After arriving home that night, she’s unable to sleep. She watches a documentary on HBO about a young man who commits suicide.
Ann McKee is haunted by Owen’s case and by the loss of his young life. A decade later, she will continue to be haunted. She remembers Owen Thomas no matter how many other brains come under her microscope.
“That case, I’ll never forget. That was life-changing,” McKee says without hesitation. “There are certain cases and certain moments that really alter your perception of things. And that certainly was the case with Owen Thomas.”
CHAPTER 1
GAME CHANGER
THE PARKLAND HIGH SCHOOL stadium in Orefield, Pennsylvania, tops a hill like a crown on the head of a king, its lights casting a glow that blocks the stars. The weather had turned colder by mid-November—not frigid, but pleasantly cool in the fifties. Perfect football weather, more than one person remarked as they ambled into the stadium. Some toted square plastic seat cushions to soften their perch on bleachers. A few brought blankets to guard against the evening’s chill.
This is football on a Friday night in suburbia, played in a community where acres of farmland north and west of the city of Allentown, Pennsylvania, have slowly yielded to become acres of homes over the decades. Within the Parkland School District’s seventy-two square miles, housing developments with names like Green Hills and Orchard View Estates recall the plowed fields that gave way to the houses. Among Parkland residents, the kind of house you live in becomes a kind of economic calling card. The kind of house you live in defines your socioeconomic group.
Parents giving their child’s friend a ride home after the football game might size up the family’s financial status as soon as they pull in the driveway. If the residence boasts a polished oak front door opening into a three-thousand-square-foot luxury home on a half-acre or acre lot, it’s likely that it’s owned by one of the doctors who practice medicine at Lehigh Valley Hospital, or by a lawyer, or maybe by a researcher at Air Products and Chemicals. An annual household income of six figures or more is indicated. If it’s a more modest home—a split level, ranch, or maybe a twin home in a development like Schnecksville North—it’s probably owned by someone with a more modest annual income. A teacher, perhaps, or someone moderately successful in sales. Maybe a professor at one of the area’s half-dozen colleges and universities. Youngsters who are dropped off at their home in Lil Wolf or Green Acres—two large mobile home parks in the school district—or at an old house that has been divided into apartments clearly come from families with more modest means. The children who live in those houses also are more likely to be among the 27 percent of the district’s 9,400 students eligible to receive a free lunch.1 All of the children from all of these houses meet in Parkland School District’s classrooms and on its athletic fields. The parents—whether traveling in a BMW SUV or a used Chevy—come together on nights like this for football. Success in football or other sports and academic achievement are the accomplishments most prized by a majority of Parkland’s parents.
The crowd gathering at the stadium climbs onto the bleachers, the banter building to a hum of anticipation, reflecting that this is more than a routine game, more than just another contest under the Friday night lights. The Parkland High School Trojans are facing Easton High School’s Red Rovers in the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association District 11 finals. The game decides who moves on to compete in “states,” the single-word shorthand for the state championship. The Trojans, coming off an undefeated season, have already bested East Stroudsburg’s Cavaliers 21–7 in the first round of postseason play.2 Such a season makes it easy to forget that Easton has a history in playoffs against Parkland, a three-game winning streak that in other years has crushed the Trojans’ hopes of postseason glory.
The Trojans have every reason to think this year could be different. Their 2006 season included six shutouts against many of the Lehigh Valley’s toughest and most respected teams. Parkland’s offensive and defensive lines are filled with veteran players, many of them seniors who have been starters since they were freshmen. They include starting quarterback Marc Quilling and offensive tackle Mike Fay. For the rest of their lives, Quilling will remember Fay as more than a friend: throughout their high school years, Fay was the one protecting Quilling’s blind side, keeping him from getting pummeled as he went out for a pass. It’s the kind of relationship that makes playing high school football more than a game. It’s a brotherhood with relationships as solid as those formed by soldiers in the trenches of war. In its own way, even on this amateur level, that is how this sport is viewed: as a battle, replete with terms like blitz and bomb to describe the play. It’s no accident that this team is called the Trojans, honoring some of history’s most storied warriors.
Head coach Jim Morgans, who has spent more than thirty years coaching high school football, has seen his share of winning teams. If you include his time playing the game before he became a coach, he’s spent over forty years of his life focused on football. When he came to Parkland from coaching at his alma mater, Allentown Central Catholic High School, two years earlier, he realized that he had an exceptional group of players. Yes, many were talented athletes, but Morgans saw their success as a result of other attributes.
“They were a very tight-knit group, a very tight-knit team,” Morgans says. “They understood the meaning of team. Their personal goals were put behind team goals.”
He explains that a commitment to team goals includes a willingness to commit hours to grueling practices and a strength and conditioning program that requires players to lift weights before school starts at 8 a.m. It means that no player is focused on his own accomplishments to the detriment of his teammates. Morgans has no doubt that this shared commitment has brought his team success, that it’s helped bring them to this playoff on a Friday night in November 2006.
The stadium is filled with the cacophony of warring marching bands playing fight songs, cheerleaders chanting, the crowd cheering. A few fans have already paid an early visit to the refreshment stand, manned by the Parkland Football Booster Club and parents of marching band members. Anyone nearing the stand, separated from the end zone by a running track, is drawn by the irresistible mingled scents of popcorn, grilling hot dogs, and coffee. A sudden fanfare draws the attention of everyone to the field.
Parkland’s team enters the stadium in their gray and red uniforms, breaking through an oversized paper banner, big as a bedsheet, held by members of the cheerleading squad. It’s emblazoned with messages urging them to victory: “Go Trojans,” “Wreck the Red Rovers,” “Make it 12–0.”
Moments after the kickoff, it is clear that things are going wrong for the Trojans. The Red Rovers are outplaying them, shutting down their defense and blocking their scoring attempts, play after play. As halftime approaches, the crowd on the Parkland side of the field has grown quiet, eyeing the scoreboard in disbelief. The undefeated Parkland Trojans are down 14–0. On the bench, players are visibly shaken.
But for one of them, defeat can only come after a fight.
On a fourth-down play, as the Red Rovers are driving to score, one of their receivers breaks free. Suddenly, he is taken out by a bone-crunching hit that seems to come out of nowhere. The tackler, wisps of his shoulder-length red hair visible around the edges of his silver-gray helmet, has the look of a Viking. And that’s how number 31, Trojan team captain Owen Thomas, sees himself. He is a warrior, prepared to fight to the last. No surprise for an eighteen-year-old who counts the film 300 among his favorites. It recounts the story of the badly outnumbered Spartan soldiers who fought to the last man at the Battle of Thermopylae in
the Persian War.
Back on his feet after the tackle, Owen turns toward his teammates, fists clenched, and roars an exhortation.
“Let’s fucking go!”
The playoffs are especially important to Owen. Making it to the postseason is part of his family’s football tradition. Owen’s older brother Morgan, an offensive lineman, had played on Parkland’s 2002 state championship team on his way to earning a place in the school district’s athletic hall of fame. Earlier, his brother Matt, who set a statewide rushing record in 1996, was on a Parkland team that won the District XI title to make it to the PIAA semifinal before buckling.3 Now it was Owen’s turn.
“That hit, you could probably feel it all the way up to the top of the stands,” Trojan offensive lineman Jamie Pagliaro recalls. Pags, as he’s known to his teammates, has a reputation for remembering plays from key games down to the last detail. He will always remember this one. “It was one of the biggest hits I’ve ever seen in my life. After that, we just kicked it into second gear.”
Parkland scores on the next drive and never gives up another point for the remainder of the game. In the fourth quarter, they are ahead 15–14. Then comes a play that Marc Quilling would remember in agonizing slow motion as he replayed it in memory. Faking a pass before throwing to Pags, Marc does not see a linebacker coming from the back who smacks down the ball. The Red Rovers regain possession, but they are unable to score. Then a referee calls a penalty on a Trojan player for roughing the passer. What is normally a fifteen-yard penalty is measured incorrectly, giving the Red Rovers additional yardage. The error puts the Easton team into easy field-goal position, allowing them to hand Parkland a crushing defeat as they win 17–15. Coach Morgans later receives a letter of apology from the PIAA about the officiating mistake that he is sure led to the loss.
