Whitey remembers seeing his wife standing over their son as Willie tried to work problems from a second grade math book at the kitchen table. Even those simple exercises were now impossible for a boy who’d been near the top of his seventh grade class before the concussions. Whitey felt a sharp pang in his chest as his son, frustrated and frightened that things would never go back to normal, burst into tears. “What the hell did I do to this kid?” Whitey thought. “I was the father. I was the one who was responsible for keeping my son safe.”
Even when Whitey remembers a happy time—like the day Willie’s memory finally started flooding back a year later—it’s bittersweet. The elation Whitey felt then is tempered by his realization that his son will never be the same as he was before the injuries. Now a college student, Willie still suffers from headaches almost every day. And although Willie caught up academically, Whitey worries that his son may never regain the social ease and self-confidence he once had.
One of Whitey’s biggest regrets is that Willie had to give up the game they both loved so much. To Whitey, football was an indispensable part of becoming a man. It taught him self-confidence and mental toughness. It taught him to stand up for himself and not to be intimidated by anyone. As he explained to his wife, “The lessons I got from competing in sports I didn’t get from any other aspect of my life.”
Those were precisely the lessons he wanted to pass on to their son. Becky wasn’t sure she agreed that football was the only way Willie could learn those lessons, but she had accepted the sport as a fact of her life. Even before Willie began playing tackle football in organized leagues as a seven-year-old, Becky had recognized that he was a “ball kid.” Though naturally worried about his safety, she could at least console herself with the knowledge that he’d inherited his dad’s powerful athletic build as surely as his sandy brown hair. For years, Becky had shown up at all of Willie’s games and had even deigned to join her family for some of those long Sunday afternoons watching the NFL on TV. That all changed the moment Willie failed to recognize the family dogs. After living through his devastating concussion, Becky couldn’t bear to watch another game.
Even for Whitey, football would never again be the same. He and Willie still had fun watching NFL games together, but the hits that once roused Whitey out of his living room chair now made him wince. Worse yet, Whitey no longer enjoyed coaching. He’d always loved working with the younger kids, but now he had to force himself. Any time he saw a kid make hard contact or get up slow or stagger or cry, he’d catch his breath and think, “Oh my God, I hope he’s OK. I hope he’s OK. Please let him be OK.” After one season coaching the team his son once played on, Whitey had to quit. It was just too hard to watch kids getting hurt after what he’d gone through with his own son.
That’s a loss for all the youngsters Whitey could be coaching today. His experiences have given him insight that most coaches lack. The new Coach Baun would be so much more cautious and vigilant than the old Coach Baun, whose philosophy developed while playing football in the ’60s. An All-American linebacker on a small-college national championship team at Wittenberg University, Whitey was a tough guy who considered concussions to be at once a source of humor and a badge of honor. It was a point of pride that nothing could knock him out of a game, not even the hit that had sent him staggering off the field to the opposing team’s sideline. His just-rub-dirt-on-it attitude was reinforced by the macho coaches who’d tell him to “just shake it off” and get back out there. Whitey had learned those lessons well and then passed them on to the kids he coached.
Now, he understands firsthand the dangers of a philosophy that promotes playing through pain, a mentality that champions winning at all costs, a culture that celebrates athletes who shrug off concussions. It’s unfortunate that it takes a personal ordeal to counter what’s become so deeply ingrained in the sport as well as in our national psyche.
• • •
To understand how deeply that ethos permeated American culture, you only had to switch on your TV. In living rooms all across America, millions of fans—many of them fathers and sons just like Whitey and Willie Baun—would gather each week to watch the organized mayhem that is professional football. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether they were reveling more in the thrilling touchdowns or in the crushing hits. That shouldn’t come as a surprise since they’d been programmed for decades to believe that the carnage on the screen was the main attraction. They’d been sold on the violence by everyone involved in the sport, from the National Football League to the networks broadcasting the games.
The networks did their best to boost fans’ taste for brutality. For years, ABC began its Monday Night Football telecast with a video of two helmets—each emblazoned with the logo of one of the teams playing that night in the NFL’s weekly showcase event—crashing head-on into one another and smashing into smithereens. Fox, the youth-oriented network that the NFL partnered with in the early ’90s to keep kids’ attention focused on the sport, aired a promo that featured only brutal hits with a voiceover blaring, “The hardest hits are on Fox!” When TNT added Sunday night cablecasts to cap off a full day of NFL games on the broadcast networks, it ran an ad in magazines and on billboards exhorting fans to “Get in a few late hits.” Another TNT ad was more graphic and grim. It featured a photo of a battered football player seated on the sideline in obvious distress, his mouth covered by an oxygen mask. The sobering image stood in stark contrast with the accompanying words: “Shortness of breath. Nausea. Disorientation. Memory loss. The fun begins at 8 P.M. Sunday night. NFL on TNT.”
Amazingly, that ad was running in the mid-’90s not long after NFL stars like Al Toon and Merril Hoge had been forced into premature retirement by some of the “fun” post-concussion symptoms on TNT’s list. Even after the roster of concussion victims swelled to include bigger and bigger superstars like Hall of Fame quarterbacks Troy Aikman and Steve Young, the crushing hits continued to be celebrated, glorified, and promoted. The networks spliced them together into highlight reels, with ESPN cynically labeling its collection of hits “Plays of the Week.” The NFL itself marketed them not only in hardcore “Greatest Hits” videos but also in farcical “Football Follies” collections, one of which famously set a series of brutal hits to the music of The Nutcracker Suite and was titled “The Headcracker Suite.”
The bottom line: big hits translated into big ratings and big business. The NFL built itself into a multibillion-dollar enterprise and football into the nation’s most popular spectator sport by exploiting a simple formula: marry an inherently violent game with the perfect medium to showcase it. Television not only put fans right on top of the multiple collisions that punctuated every play, but also allowed them to reexperience those crunching impacts over and over from every angle and at every speed through the magic of instant replay.
Before the NFL tied the knot with television, pro football was just a quaint way for local fans in a dozen cities to while away Sunday afternoons between baseball seasons. That all changed in the early ’60s, when the NFL cut its first national network deal to telecast games into America’s living rooms every Sunday and viewers by the millions were treated to a regular dose of football’s violence. Each week, more and more new fans found themselves mesmerized by the sight of ferocious linebackers snapping receivers down like rag dolls and packs of hulking linemen flattening ballcarriers like roadkill.
One of the most enduring images from that transformative era is of a stocky, bespectacled coach in a coat and tie stomping up and down the sideline, barking orders like a general, exhorting his troops to toughen up and to crush the enemy. Vince Lombardi’s approach was neatly summed up by his most famous mantra: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” That philosophy made Lombardi the most legendary of all coaches and transformed a losing team into the most dominant of all dynasties with five NFL championships in seven years. By the time his Green Bay Packers triumphantly carried him off the field for the last time after the 1968 Super Bo
wl, his winning philosophy was accepted not just in the sport but also in the entire culture. His maxims spread from Green Bay’s locker room to America’s boardrooms. Lombardi emphasized the need for toughness, both physical and mental. He preached that pain was an integral part of the game, and he expected his players not only to endure it but also to inflict it. “Football is a violent, dangerous sport,” he asserted. “To play it any other way but violently would be idiotic.”
Coaches striving to duplicate Lombardi’s success adopted his approach and built on it. They routinely sent players back onto the field with cracked ribs, punctured lungs, broken ankles. And fans seemed to accept this as just part of the game. After all, in a society that embraced the football-as-war analogy right down to the sport’s militaristic lexicon, coaches were simply sending platoons of warriors into action. Fans viewed every game as a war and each down a battle to gain ground on the enemy. They expected to see troops trudging off the field caked in mud and blood. A warrior could leave in the midst of a game only if he were carried off on his shield. All of his brothers-in-arms were expected to soldier on, stoically keeping pain and broken bones to themselves.
In that ethos, it’s not surprising that players also kept concussion symptoms to themselves. If coaches were sending guys back into the game with broken bones, they certainly weren’t about to sideline anyone for a little dizziness or disorientation. As far as the fans were concerned, concussions barely existed. Nobody talked about them. Nobody saw them, except on the rare occasion when a player was knocked unconscious and hauled off the field on a stretcher.
Not even the increasingly dangerous nature of the game could open fans’ eyes to the menace of concussions. With players getting bigger, faster, and stronger, collisions were becoming more destructive—and more spectacular to watch. Fueled by advances in conditioning and nutrition, the average weight of NFL players grew by 25 pounds over three decades to 245. More telling, the average offensive lineman ballooned a full 60 pounds to 310. Countless hours in the weight room, coupled with supplements and sometimes steroids, made players stronger. The increase in size didn’t slow them down a bit. On the contrary, thanks to sophisticated training regimens, they actually got quicker.
While the physical makeup of the players was changing, the laws of physics remained constant. Most important on the gridiron was Newton’s Second Law: force equals mass times acceleration. In your typical big hit, that could translate into each player banging the other with fifteen hundred pounds of force at speeds approaching twenty-five miles per hour. An NFL study, in fact, found that players were sustaining concussions from impacts that averaged ninety-eight times the force of gravity.
Making matters worse, players were changing the way they hit. With the advent of high-tech shock-absorbing helmets and better faceguards, players assumed their heads were virtually invulnerable. Emboldened, they began to use their helmets as weapons. Instead of tackling and blocking with their hands and shoulders, they targeted opponents headfirst, using their hard-shell plastic helmets as battering rams. Coaches taught the most effective head-ramming techniques and reminded their players that the point of a brutal hit was not just physical domination but also mental intimidation. By the time rigid polycarbonate-alloy helmets and steel-alloy faceguards became the norm in the ’80s and ’90s, the violence had ratcheted up into outright viciousness.
Much of that was aimed at the most valuable and vulnerable player on the field: the quarterback. Targeted on every down by a horde of defenders under orders to take him out, the quarterback would typically absorb dozens of bruising hits each game. Troy Aikman learned that the hard way his rookie year with the Dallas Cowboys. Two months into what was already a disastrous season, he was slammed to the ground by an onrushing linebacker an instant after releasing a pass for an eighty-yard touchdown. For a full eight minutes, fans watched in uneasy silence as Aikman lay on his back, unconscious and motionless with blood trickling from his right ear. To his agent, Leigh Steinberg, the seconds seemed like minutes and then the minutes like hours. Steinberg was nervous and scared. Here was his marquee client, the one with the Hollywood good looks and the golden right arm that had just earned him the richest rookie contract in NFL history, not even twitching a muscle. Steinberg thought, “We’re not in the Roman Colosseum in the time of Nero. This shouldn’t be about sacrificing our best and our brightest.”
It’s no coincidence that this dramatic scene was echoed seven years later in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire or that the movie’s protagonist is a sports agent who undergoes a crisis of conscience triggered by the concussions that hospitalized one of his clients. That’s because Steinberg was the model for the title character portrayed by Tom Cruise: the agent struggling to hold on to his integrity in a cutthroat business where dollars usually trump ethics. Steinberg was never exactly your typical agent, famously wearing jeans and flip-flops to negotiate multimillion-dollar deals with button-down executives, insisting that all his clients give back to their communities as role models, and worrying as much about their physical as their financial health.
Aikman’s concussion spurred Steinberg into action. Steinberg started lobbying for rule changes that would make the game safer, especially for the many quarterbacks he represented. His efforts were met with ridicule. The doctor advising the NFL on concussion management dismissed Steinberg’s advocacy as “fearmongering.” Football purists accused him of “trying to put a dress on a quarterback.” Even his own clients, worried that any mention of concussion would make them appear weak, complained about his crusading.
While some cosmetic rule changes were adopted to protect quarterbacks from hits with the helmet and hits to the head, macho attitudes remained as deeply rooted as the goalposts. With the big hits getting bigger, more and more players were sustaining concussions. And it wasn’t just the quarterbacks. It was everyone involved in those spectacular head-rattling hits, from the receivers and running backs flattened by the collisions to the linebackers and defensive backs doling out the punishment. The NFL’s own data showed an average of one reported concussion every other game, a stat no doubt dwarfed by the number of concussions that went unreported. If concussions themselves remained an open secret, their ramifications were becoming increasingly obvious wherever you looked: on weekly team injury reports, in boldface headlines about forced retirements, in medical journal articles written by brain injury experts.
All of that, however, couldn’t make even a dent in this old-school culture where machismo can run roughshod over common sense. Players needed to be protected from their own enthusiasm, but coaches and team medical personnel were still dismissing concussions as nuisance injuries. Every week on the NFL sidelines, coaches and team physicians were making return-to-play decisions, and to anyone watching, there seemed to be no logic guiding those calls. Sometimes it was the coaches who would send disoriented players back onto the field against the recommendations of team physicians; sometimes it was the doctors themselves who would clear wobbly players to go back into the game.
Nowhere was that dynamic more obvious than on the New York Jets sideline on a fall Sunday in 2003. Early in the third quarter of a showdown against the archrival New York Giants, Jets wide receiver Wayne Chrebet was knocked out cold by a knee to the back of the head. He lay facedown on the turf, motionless, for nearly a minute. After helping him off the field, team medical personnel hid his helmet so he wouldn’t be tempted to sneak back into the game before he was checked out. Chrebet had already demonstrated time and again that he was a reckless and scrappy overachiever who would try to shake off a concussion and rush back into the fray. Although Chrebet was immediately diagnosed with a concussion, he passed standard sideline evaluation tests of memory and orientation. Early in the fourth quarter, the Jets’ team physician, Dr. Elliot Pellman, pulled Chrebet aside, looked him in the eyes, and said, “This is very important. You can’t lie to me. There’s going to be some controversy about you going back to play. This is very important for you. This is very impor
tant for your career. Are you OK?” Chrebet replied, “I’m fine,” and Pellman sent him back onto the field.
Three days later, Pellman found himself in the glare of the New York media spotlight as he announced his decision to sideline Chrebet for the next game due to symptoms of fatigue, malaise, and headaches that showed up the day after the concussion. It didn’t take long for reporters to put Pellman on the defensive as they pressed him to explain his decision to return a concussed player to the same game in which he’d been knocked unconscious. Pellman made no apologies: “Am I second-guessing myself for returning him to play Sunday? The answer is no. Am I concerned enough for him not to play this weekend? Yes.”
A week later, Pellman had to face the press again, this time to announce that Chrebet would miss the last seven games of the season because of persistent post-concussion symptoms. Once again, Pellman found himself defending his original decision to send a concussed player back onto the field. “Wayne returned and was fine,” Pellman told reporters. “He did not suffer additional injury. If he had suffered additional injury, his prognosis would be no different. At some point, you have to rest on science and intuition. The decision about Wayne returning to play was based on scientific evaluation. As we stand now, that decision made no difference as to what’s happening today.”
What made the Chrebet episode even more remarkable was that Pellman wasn’t just the Jets’ team physician—he was also the NFL’s top concussion adviser. The NFL had picked Pellman to form a concussion committee in 1994 when the high-profile retirements of Al Toon and Merril Hoge at age twenty-nine made it impossible to ignore the issue any longer. Pellman’s only apparent qualification for the committee chairmanship was his experience treating Toon’s concussions with the Jets. His medical background certainly didn’t recommend him for the position. He was a rheumatologist with no training in neurology. He publicly professed his lack of knowledge, admitting that the only concussion training he’d received was the on-the-job variety watching Toon’s career fade into a fog of post-concussion syndrome.
The Concussion Crisis Page 6
