Counting the Days While My Mind Slips Away

by Ben Utecht

  On the day the team cut me, I tried some very light weights again. I don’t remember exactly which weight exercises I did or exactly how much weight I used on each one, but I can tell you that the entire workout didn’t even rise to the level of the warm-ups I did before the concussion. I also jogged a little on a treadmill, but I really wanted to go outside. That’s why I put on a full sweatsuit and went out onto the field of Paul Brown Stadium. My workout consisted of that slow trot diagonally across the field I described above, which was followed by a walk along the goal line to the other side. I ran into a few of my teammates and a couple of coaches out on the field. They all seemed glad to see me.

  After my jog, I went back into the locker room and started toward the weight room. Coach Lewis was walking through the locker room. “Ben!” he said when he saw me. “Hey, it’s great to see you. How’s the rehab going? How’s your family?”

  “Slow, Coach, but I’ll get there eventually. The family’s doing well,” I replied.

  “That’s good to hear. Well, I’ll let you get back to your workout. Keep up the good work and keep getting better,” he said.

  “Thanks, Coach.”

  Forty minutes later, as I pulled my truck out of Paul Brown Stadium, my phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line was not the general manager or team president. No, Coach Lewis called me. “Unfortunately, Ben, we’re going to have to let you go,” he said over the phone.

  Three thoughts immediately came to mind. First, I thought, but did not say, Wait a minute. I thought you guys were going to keep me! The second thought was, How can you cut me? Who cleared me to play? And the third was a question I really wanted to ask but didn’t: Why didn’t you tell me this to my face a half hour ago when I saw you in the locker room? The last one left me with an empty feeling. All of my life coaches had been like second parental figures to me. Now he was just a boss cutting me loose. Any illusions of “family” bonds were now ebbing away.

  I hung up the phone and turned my truck around to go clean out my locker. My ties to the Bengals were now over. Coach Lewis might as well have said, “You’re fired,” because that’s what I was. Cut means out, as in out of a job and out on the street and out of luck if you are injured and unable to seek a job with another team. It also means you have to remove all your belongings and get out. After this day I was no longer welcome in the Bengals’ facilities.

  On my way back into the stadium parking lot I called Karyn and told her what had happened. She was as shocked as I was. Then I called my agent, Chis Murray. “What?!” he said. “They can’t do that. You’re on IR. This isn’t right. They can’t cut you when you’re hurt!”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said, “but they did.”

  When I walked back into the locker room an equipment manager was waiting for me at the door. He handed me a large black garbage bag for all of my stuff in my locker. No one else was anywhere to be found. I stuffed my pads and jerseys and anything else I could take home into the bag, told the equipment guy “Thanks,” and that was that. I may be naïve but this was the first time I realized what kind of business football really is. It’s a great place to be when things are going well and you can perform. But when you can’t, you’re done. I guess I was one of the lucky ones. The average NFL career lasts about three years. I played five and had a Super Bowl ring to show for it. Most guys never get that.

  When I walked into my house, my conversation with Karyn was sad and awkward and something I’m glad I don’t remember. Losing a job is never fun, but I had lost more than that. I was now damaged goods. I couldn’t just go out and catch on with another team, because, in spite of what the Bengals said, I had not been cleared to play by a physician, specifically a neurologist.

  •  •  •

  At the time of my termination, I still had a year and a half remaining on the three-year contract I signed in the spring of 2008. That didn’t matter. My contract was not guaranteed. For me, that meant the nearly $1 million I was to be paid for the rest of the 2009 season was gone, to say nothing of the more than $2 million I was to receive in 2010 if I remained with the team.

  I’ll be honest. Having that much money stripped out of my hands upset me. But what really made me mad was my conviction that under the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) signed by the NFL and the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), the Bengals had no right to cut me because I had not been properly cleared to resume football activities.

  When I was cut on November 18, I had not even seen a physician in a few weeks, much less been cleared by one to resume playing. I had only begun to try certain moderate exercises when the call came. Something was wrong here.

  I called my agent again. The realization that I suddenly had no job and no paychecks to look forward to was starting to set in. “What can we do, Chris?” I asked, desperate.

  “Let me contact the players association and start the process of filing a grievance,” Chris said. He then put me in contact with Tim English, one of the attorneys for the NFLPA who handles cases like mine.

  Tim was just as shocked as Chris. “The CBA is really clear on this,” Tim said. “Paragraph nine of the NFL Player Contract states that any player injured in the performance of his services ‘will continue to receive his yearly salary for so long, during the season of injury only.’ If that’s not you, I don’t know what is.”

  I felt a little less panicked. “So you think this should be pretty much an open-and-shut case?” I asked.

  “There’s precedent, Ben,” Tim explained. “For three decades the standard for these cases requires a player to be sufficiently recovered so as to be able to perform all the usual moves and actions required of his playing position before he can be cleared to play. And you can’t be cut from the team if you aren’t cleared to play. That’s called the Bohannon standard. The Bengals can’t just ignore a standard the entire league has had to live by for thirty years.”

  “Okay. So let’s get the ball rolling to file a grievance,” I said.

  I called Chris again to let him know how my conversation with Tim had gone. “I know the players association attorneys will handle the actual grievance,” Chris said, “but I think it would be a really good idea if you had an attorney of your own to walk through this process with you. I have someone I think you should meet: Scott Hillstrom.”

  “Do you really think I need my own attorney?” I asked. “Shouldn’t the NFLPA be enough?”

  “Talk to Scott,” Chris said, “then you’ll understand.”

  Chris set up a time for me to meet with Scott. I would soon discover this was one of the best things my agent ever did for me.

  After I hung up the phone with Chris I called Dr. Cantu’s office. When I told him what had happened he was nearly speechless. “Who cleared you to play?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “The only doctor I have seen of late was Tom Sullivan, I met with him a week ago.”

  “But he’s not a medical doctor. He shouldn’t be able to make that call,” Dr. Cantu said.

  “There’s a lot that’s happened that seems a little unusual,” I said.

  Five days later, on November 23, 2009, I was reexamined by Dr. Cantu. He told me flat out, “Ben, there’s no way you can return to football anytime soon. I think you can increase the intensity of your workouts, and if you don’t have any symptoms, then we can move you up to stage four; then, perhaps, stage five. But you aren’t anywhere near football shape. If everything went perfect and you had no returning concussion symptoms whatsoever, you are still four to six weeks, minimum, away from being declared fit to return to play. That’s if everything goes in a best-case scenario, and that’s a big if.”

  “Then how could the Bengals declare me ready to go?” I asked.

  “That’s a good question,” Dr. Cantu replied. “However, in my opinion, I cannot clear you to play. And, honestly, Ben, you should think long and hard about ever playing again. There’s just too much risk of long-term complications if you do. And you ha
ve too many other things you can go and do. You’re a young man with a lot of gifts. It’s probably time for you to pursue them.”

  “I appreciate that, Dr. Cantu. Right now I just don’t know what I am going to do. Even though I knew this day was going to come, I never expected it to come so soon. I mean, how many people find themselves at the end of their career at the age of twenty-nine?”

  Unlike the Bengals, Dr. Cantu gave me a specific exercise program to follow. He also suggested I resume using my concussion symptoms journal, especially since I had filed a grievance against the Bengals. A week later I made my first entry:

  12/2/09—As I have been increasing my workout intensity I have started experiencing some symptoms again. I have noticed some short-term memory losses. One in particular was completely forgetting that I had a conversation with my agent about my injury situation and also setting up the time of an important conference call. After a few days I called my agent asking him when and what time are we going to set up that conference call, whereby he responded with concern that I had completely forgotten our in-depth, detailed conversation.

  Along with the short-term memory problems I have begun to experience headaches and increased pressure (11/26, 28, 30, and 12/1) after some of the more intense workouts. I have also been waking up with light headaches. All of this being unusual for me because I have never struggled with headaches until this last concussion.

  I will be calling Dr. Cantu to ask about these symptoms.

  When I called Dr. Cantu he told me to take a day off and back off a little on the workouts. I did. On December 4 I tried doing a light version of the P90X workout I’d used during the off-season. I only did the chest and back exercises, and even then I went at a much slower speed than I had six months earlier. The slower pace didn’t help. About three-fourths of the way through the session I experienced a dizzy spell. I stopped the workout. Even so, pressure built up in my head. By now it was obvious to me that I was not going to have a best-case outcome in my rehab process.

  I did not work out the next day. Karyn’s good friend Melody Gandy stopped by the house to see us. I stayed with Melody and her husband, Dylan, my teammate, the night after I was kicked in the head in the Broncos game back in 2007. Dylan now played for the Detroit Lions, who were in town for a game against the Bengals. Melody, Karyn, and I sat down for lunch and Melody started talking about how nice it was to be back in our home. I sort of nodded my head. It was nice to have her back. This was her first time seeing our house in Cincinnati—at least I thought so. She and Dylan spent a lot of time in our house in Indy.

  “You’ve done a lot since I was here last fall,” Melody said to Karyn.

  Karyn then started talking about decorating and things like that, but I couldn’t follow it. Instead, all I could think was, Last fall? You weren’t here last fall. The conversation went on. The two of them talked about this phantom visit until finally I had to say something. “Melody, when were you here before?” I asked.

  “October, or maybe it was early November. Somewhere right in there,” she replied.

  “In this house?”

  “Yes. You two had just moved in.”

  “Both of you were here?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  I didn’t say anything because the look on my face said it all. “Ben, honey,” Karyn said, “don’t you remember Melody and Dylan coming to see us?”

  “No.” I paused for a moment and scanned every corner of my mind. The memories were gone, completely erased as though they had never been there. It scared me. I’ve always had a remarkable memory. Back in 2005, before Karyn and I got married, she came down to visit me one weekend in Indianapolis. She noticed all my bills were laid out on a table, almost in random order. “How do you keep track of them all?” she asked. “Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s all right here,” I said, tapping my forehead. Now “right here” wasn’t there. I’d had some short-term memory issues since the last concussion, but this was the first embedded memory that had suddenly disappeared. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  In confirming this story with Melody and Dylan for this book, Melody shared with me that after leaving our home that weekend she called Dylan, concerned. She told him, “That’s not the same Ben, that’s not our friend anymore. Something is wrong.” That truth was hard for me to hear.

  Back to that weekend: Once Melody left, Karyn came over to me and wrapped her arm around me. “Ben, are you okay?”

  “No,” I said. “Karyn, I’m scared. I think I made a big mistake playing after my last concussion with the Colts. I noticed some changes after that, but I didn’t pay that much attention to them.”

  “Maybe Dr. Cantu can help,” she said.

  “I hope so.” I paused for a moment, then said, “You know, if any of my team doctors had given me the information Dr. Cantu has given me, I would have strongly considered ending my career right after that hit in the Denver game. I just hope I haven’t done permanent damage to myself by playing last year and into camp this year.”

  “Everything will be all right,” Karyn said.

  “I hope so,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure it could be.

  CHAPTER 19

  SEARCHING FOR DIRECTION, LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

  LOOKING BACK I NOW REALIZE how much I should have known about concussions before I was knocked out on the practice field at the beginning of training camp in August 2009. Concussions had been a hot-button issue for the NFL for fifteen years by the time I suffered my final blow. The league set up a committee to study the subject back in 1994 after a rash of concussions to star players made the problem front-page news. Perhaps the most visible of all came when Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman took a knee to the head during the 1993 NFC Championship Game. His team, the Dallas Cowboys, won the game, but Aikman had no memory of the day. Afterward he didn’t even know where he was.

  Yes, the league set up a concussion committee in 1994; however—and this is something I also should have known—the first chairman of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee was not a neurologist or a neuropsychologist. He was a rheumatologist. (In light of this, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the Bengals sent me to see an orthopedic specialist for my brain injury and not a neurologist.) Not surprisingly, the NFL MTBI committee produced multiple papers that concluded concussions were rare in football, and that they were not a serious problem. Dr. Ira Casson even appeared on HBO’s Real Sports in May 2007 and declared that there was no evidence of long-term problems associated with head injuries in football players. When asked, “Is there any evidence as of today that links multiple head injuries with any long-term problem,” Casson replied, “In NFL players? No.”I

  The same year, 2007, the NFL published a pamphlet for all NFL players on concussions. I really don’t remember seeing one. The pamphlet states, “Q: Am I at risk for further injury if I have had a concussion? A: Current research with professional athletes has shown that you should not be at greater risk of further injury once you receive proper medical care for concussion and are free of symptoms.” The same pamphlet says that current research has not shown a link between more than one or two concussions and any permanent problems. All of this has been documented in the book League of Denial, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and his brother, Steve Fainaru.

  Two thousand seven was also the year I took a blow to the head in the Broncos game. Thanks to the bye week I missed only one game. When the Colts’ neurosurgeon cleared me to play, I went back on the field without reservations. I did not think I was putting my future at risk. Why should I have? The NFL told me that I was not at greater risk of further injury, and that the concussions I had thus far shouldn’t lead to any permanent problems. All of this came exactly five years after Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the brain of Hall of Famer Mike Webster, who played for seventeen years and won four Super Bowls with the Steelers. Iron Mike pretty much lost his mind, and the NFL itself admitted that he suffered brain damage from football.II I d
idn’t know any of that when I returned to play in 2007. I just knew what the team doctors told me.

  And now I discovered that, unbeknownst to me, the Bengals’ neuropsychologist, Tom Sullivan (who is a PhD, not a medical doctor), said I was medically fit to return to play, which opened the door for the Bengals to cut me. Yet it was Sullivan who told me repeatedly that I should consider never playing football again. He warned me that there might be a connection between multiple concussions and a tendency to develop dementia later in life, even though at that time the NFL officially said there was no such connection.III “You should consider retiring,” Sullivan told me multiple times. But the NFL did not consider this threat to my future health to be relevant to my fitness to play. So Sullivan cleared me to resume football activities despite what he had told me. To me, this decision certainly didn’t make any sense.

  In the months after I was cut from the Bengals I continued consulting with Dr. Cantu, one of the leading concussion doctors in the country. Even a month after the 2009 season ended he still had not cleared me to play. That’s why my agent and I filed a grievance with the NFLPA.

  As part of the grievance process, I went to see a neutral neuropsychologist, one with no ties to the Bengals or me. The NFL chose this doctor. I had another appointment a few weeks later with a neurosurgeon selected by the NFLPA. My first visit was on January 25, 2010, with Ruben Echemendia, PhD, the chairman of the National Hockey League’s Concussion Working Group, the NHL’s equivalent of the NFL’s MTBI Committee. Prior to going I talked to Tim English, the NFLPA attorney handling my grievance. Tim fought incredibly hard for justice for me. I also sought advice from Scott Hillstrom, my attorney. Scott helped me be more aware of what to expect during this process, as well as advising me on some questions I should ask the doctors.