Harry Carson, the New York Giants linebacker of 13 years, had been profoundly affected by Webster’s death. He had flown to Pittsburgh to attend the funeral out of respect for his former opponent and had spent time talking to Garrett, who described in detail his father’s horrific final years. Later, when Carson learned that Omalu had diagnosed Webster with brain damage, he was heartbroken. He partly blamed himself. Carson flashed back to the brutal tactics he had employed to try to neutralize Webster’s incredible strength—how he gathered “all of my power from my big rear end and my thighs into my forearm,” which he unleashed on Webster’s head. “I’m the guy that he would fire off the ball to hit, and I would hit him in the face with my forearm, you know?” Carson said. “And so I was distributing the damage.”
Carson was well positioned as a spokesman for the cause of former players, a distinguished, imposing man still built like granite. He combined the sensitivity of a Manhattan psychoanalyst with the naked violence of the Pit. “I wasn’t known for getting my hands on the ball,” he wrote in his autobiography, Captain for Life, “but I was known for knocking a player’s dick in the dirt if he came my way and I got a good shot on him.” When O. J. Simpson told Carson that no player had hit him harder, “that made my year,” Carson wrote. Carson was so respected by his peers that coach Bill Parcells sent him out alone for the coin toss before the 1987 Super Bowl against the Broncos.
After his retirement in 1988, Carson had been open about his own struggles with depression. He confessed that he once considered driving his car off the Tappan Zee Bridge into the Hudson River. “I’d seen where there were people who would stop their car on the bridge and then jump off the bridge,” he said in an interview for this book. “If you’re on the Tarrytown side, there’s a curve. And I was thinking, ‘What if I accelerated, hit the guardrail, and go through?’ ” Carson found that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to his moods; they simply came over him like squalls. Only after he went to a neuropsychologist and described his symptoms—migraines, mysterious twitching in his arms and legs, sensitivity to bright lights—did it begin to make sense. The neuropsychologist diagnosed him with postconcussion syndrome related to his career.
The diagnosis seemed to liberate Carson. It also awakened him to the devastation he recognized among many of his peers. Carson held a dark view about NFL-style capitalism, how it chewed up and spit out players. “When someone gets hurt, you just find another part,” he said. “The reality is nobody gives a shit about those guys. I mean, their time is over. They don’t bring anything of value to the table. Some people feel like they need to just shut up, go away and enjoy your retirement and that’s it.” Webster’s death, he felt, had been a moment of shame for the NFL, one of the lowest points in the history of the league. The NFL had abandoned Webster to the streets and fought him in court even after he was dead. “I felt like Mike lost his dignity,” said Carson. “That’s the thing with me that is important.”
In 2006, after years of being passed over, Carson was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He delivered his speech without notes. Standing in the same spot in Canton, Ohio, where Webster, a decade earlier, his mind already riddled with disease, had struggled to gather his thoughts, Carson used the occasion to call out the NFL:
When I was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, some people asked me, “Why aren’t you happy about being elected?” Well, I can’t be happy about it until I get one or two things off of my chest, and please indulge me.
As a Hall of Famer, I want to implore the NFL and its union to look at the product that you have up on this stage. These are great individuals. The honor of making it into the Hall of Fame is great, but it was even greater to have the opportunity to play in a league with 18,000 individuals. These are some of the best individuals I’ve ever encountered. We’d get on the field and we’d fight tooth and nail, we’d try to knock each other out, then we’d walk off the field, pat each other on the rear end, and say, “Congratulations, hang in there,” whatever. Those individuals I am extremely proud of participating in a game, and it is just a game, I’m extremely proud to have participated in that game with those 18,000 individuals.
I would hope that the leaders of the NFL, the future commissioner, and the players association do a much better job of looking out for those individuals. You got to look out for ’em. If we made the league what it is, you have to take better care of your own.
Carson’s speech, coming as the first documented cases linking football and brain damage were revealed, added his powerful voice to the growing list of people calling for the NFL to take action. The setting was symbolic. It had been just a few years earlier that Steve DeKosky, the Alzheimer’s expert, had been ignored when he asked the Hall of Fame if he could study players for signs of neurological disease. Webster himself had viewed the Hall as a sick ward for discarded legends. And now here was Carson, one of its newest members, using his induction speech as a platform to “implore” the NFL and the union to do the right thing. As more and more Hall of Famers became mentally ill, their brains and bodies destroyed, the Canton shrine took on a completely different meaning.
Tagliabue had created the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee under pressure in 1994. Now, in 2007, the committee’s body of work—a veritable fortress of denial—was beginning to crumble. Schwarz, who was brought on full-time by the Times shortly after the Andre Waters story was published, was helping to accelerate the process by writing stories that chipped away at the committee’s tortured logic. Schwarz and his editors realized that it was far more than one story: The entire sport was in crisis. Schwarz began to look at it from other angles. In one story, he went back to one of the NFL’s most controversial pieces of research, NFL Paper Number 7, which concluded that returning to play in the same game posed no significant risk and suggested that “it might be safe for college/high school football players to be cleared to return to play on the same day as their injury.” It was an extraordinary statement: The NFL seemed to be prescribing the same aggressive approach for college and high school players, without actually studying them.
Two and a half years later, Schwarz interviewed the authors. Two of the five, Colts neurological consultant Hank Feuer and Cynthia Arfken, an associate professor in Wayne State University’s department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences who was brought on to conduct the statistical analysis, described the paper’s conclusions as unfounded and inappropriate. They hadn’t studied high school or college players, and so there was no basis for those claims. Arfken told Schwarz that the controversial “it might be safe” passage had been written into a final draft without her knowledge. Two other authors, Ira Casson and Dave Viano, the same scientists who had attacked Omalu, acknowledged putting in the provocative statement at the last minute to address, they said, comments by peer reviewers who had asked for analysis of the implications for high school and college players. Viano and Casson said both Arfken and Feuer had had a chance to review the final draft.
Feuer, a charter member of the MTBI committee, told the Times he “would change that sentence; I’d eliminate it.” Years later, in an interview for this book, Feuer offered the same explanation as Lovell about why information he didn’t believe had made it into the paper: He hadn’t read it, only the material that was relevant to him.
Arfken had ended up on the paper entirely by chance. She got a call from Viano one day out of the blue; though they were colleagues at Wayne State, they didn’t know each other. “He called me because my name started with A,” Arfken said in an interview for this book. “He just went down the alphabet.”
Schwarz accurately described this internal split as “the first crack in a united front long presented by the NFL’s concussion committee.” Among other things, the story revealed one of the more insidious aspects of the NFL’s work: its influence over the national feeder system that funneled elite players into the league. The NFL’s science hadn’t taken place in a vacuum. Three million kids between 6 and 14 year
s old played tackle football. There were 1.1 million high school players and 68,000 college players. The NFL’s research had been followed by medical personnel who were making decisions involving those kids.
“That was a major disservice, and it continues to be an ongoing one in conversations I have with parents and coaches and players,” Gerard Malanga, a New Jersey team doctor for several high schools and colleges, told Schwarz. “They will reference back to that article. It creates confusion when there’s increasing clarity on the subject. They say what I tell them about it not being safe to go back in the same game is totally wrong, and they’re backed by the NFL. So they go to a doctor who tells them what they want to hear. It’s happened. Sure it’s happened. And we remain the guys holding our breath that the kid doesn’t get hurt again.”
The MTBI committee’s helmet studies were another example of this trickle-down phenomenon from the NFL’s research. The NFL’s designs on creating a concussion-resistant helmet had been shot down by the biomechanics firm involved in the project. Lovell and Collins both believed the idea was a fantasy. Yet armed with the flawed UPMC study (coauthored by Lovell and Collins), Riddell, the NFL’s official helmet maker, sold about 2 million Revolution helmets, mostly to high school and college players. The company employed an aggressive national advertising campaign that emphasized the Revolution’s concussion-reducing properties, using numbers lifted straight from the Riddell-funded UPMC study—numbers that were both misleading and derived from the flawed NFL research.
Riddell developed PowerPoint presentations to educate its sales representatives on how best to market the Revolution to teams, school districts, and leagues. That material underscored the helmet’s “Concussion Reduction Technology,” which purportedly reduced concussions by 31 to 41 percent, the sales reps were told. At one point, the company sent out a rush mailer making the concussion-resistant claim for its youth line of helmets. The UPMC study had not examined that line. Realizing that the mailer was false, not just misleading, Riddell’s director of marketing modified it by striking one word: “Ground-breaking research shows that athletes who wear Riddell Revolution Youth helmets were 31% less likely to suffer a concussion than athletes who wore traditional football helmets.”
The claims had a major impact on the helmet industry. Riddell was able to sell the Revolution at a $50 premium, which it attributed to the cost of creating the Concussion Reduction Technology and underwriting the UPMC study. One Southern California sporting goods dealer who sold football helmets made by Schutt—Riddell’s main competitor—and other brands said the market for non-Riddell helmets in his region had all but dried up. “We just didn’t sell many helmets at that point,” he said in an interview for this book, asking that his name not be used because he was still in the business. “I think more than anything else, the end user, the dads, were believing what Riddell was saying. And that had a big effect. We were trying to sell the helmets, but if a coach or a dad believes this to be true, they’re going to purchase that product.”
Schutt modified its helmets to stay competitive. Riddell sued Schutt for patent infringement. Schutt countersued for false advertising and deceptive trade practices. A Wisconsin judge ruled in Riddell’s favor. Schutt, the judge wrote, had failed to prove that Riddell’s concussion claims were “literally false.”
“Although the presentations and internal discussions may suggest that sales representatives were trained to mislead, they fail to suggest that representatives were trained to make literally false statements,” the judge wrote.
Do you really understand?
Ted Johnson was a hard-hitting New England Patriots linebacker for 10 years, winning three Super Bowls before his retirement in 2005. When he saw that Andre Waters had been diagnosed with brain damage by Omalu after shooting himself in the head, he decided to tell his own dark story. It was a story both unique to Ted Johnson and now familiar, with echoes of Webster, Hoge, and countless others. Johnson, like Webster, found that he couldn’t function without gulping down huge quantities of stimulants, in his case Adderall. His addiction, depression, and self-loathing frequently confined him to his bed, where he lay in the dark for days. He had migraines and memory loss and felt certain he was losing his mind.
Johnson first told his story in 2006 to the Boston Globe’s Jackie MacMullan, who was about to publish it until Johnson was arrested for assault and battery for pushing his wife into a bookcase. After the incident, Johnson begged MacMullan to delay the piece; she reluctantly agreed, not wanting to take advantage of a man she thought was clearly unstable. What happened next revealed a lot about not only Johnson but also Nowinski, who was intent on exploiting his budding relationship with the New York Times to the fullest. With MacMullan still sitting on her exclusive, she received word that Johnson had given his story to Alan Schwarz and the Times. MacMullan was furious at Johnson, who later told her that Nowinski had advised him to spurn her because the Times would bring “the best bang for the buck.” The betrayal was so audacious that Nowinski’s embarrassed colleagues and Times editors alerted MacMullan, who, after screaming at Nowinski, scrambled to get her own story published.
The two pieces ran on the same Sunday: February 2, 2007. They were devastating. Johnson traced his problems to a concussion he had sustained in a 2002 preseason game against the New York Giants. Four days after the injury, still groggy, he took the practice field wearing a noncontact red jersey. Before a set of running drills, however, an assistant trainer handed him a blue jersey—essentially an order to get out and hit. Johnson knew right away the switch had been made not by the team’s medical staff but by the Patriots’ head coach, Bill Belichick. He feared that if he refused, he’d lose his job and his $1.1 million salary. “I’m sitting there going, ‘God, do I put this thing on?’ ” he said. He added that such intimidation is common in the NFL. “That day it was Bill Belichick and Ted Johnson,” he said. “But it happens all the time.”
Johnson got hit in the head on the first play, leaving him dazed. When he reported the second concussion to a trainer after practice, the Pats sent him to Massachusetts General Hospital.
“You played God with my health,” Johnson said he later told Belichick. “You knew I shouldn’t have been cleared to play, and you gave me that blue jersey anyway.”
MacMullan got hold of Belichick. The coach told her that he and Johnson apologized to each other during the air-clearing meeting. He never denied ordering Johnson to wear the blue jersey. “If Ted felt so strongly that he didn’t feel he was ready to practice with us, he should have told me,” Belichick said.
Rendered in painful detail—Johnson also revealed that he nearly underwent electroshock therapy—the Ted Johnson story read like another real-world counterargument to years of NFL denials. Johnson hadn’t returned to play because the Pats’ astute medical staff had cleared him; his head coach had ordered him to go out and hit. His first concussion wasn’t unconnected to the second; his brain had been primed for further injury. Johnson estimated he’d had as many 30 concussions during his career. Cantu, his doctor, concluded that he had post-concussion syndrome and incipient dementia.
As the voices challenging the NFL proliferated, the league began to respond. It was a little like the scene in Titanic when the ocean liner struggles to avoid the iceberg. The league rushed out a series of new policies. The “88 Plan” was established in honor of John Mackey, the legendary Colts tight end, who was experiencing advanced dementia. Mackey, the former head of the players union, sometimes spooned his coffee, thinking it was soup; was unable to recognize people he had just met; and flew into illogical rages distantly connected to his illustrious career. Mackey wore two rings—one from Super Bowl V, when the Colts scored 10 points in the fourth quarter to beat the Cowboys, and one from his induction into the Hall of Fame. In 2006, when airport security asked him to remove the rings, he became enraged, ran toward the gate, and had to be wrestled to the ground by armed guards, screaming and mumbling: “I got in the end zone!” The 88 Plan, na
med after Mackey’s old number, provided up to $88,000 a year for players with dementia, Alzheimer’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Parkinson’s. It originated with a wrenching three-page letter that Mackey’s wife, Sylvia, had sent to Tagliabue, describing her husband’s condition as “a slow, deteriorating, ugly, caregiver-killing, degenerative, brain-destroying tragic horror.” Dozens of applications soon poured in.
The NFL also adopted mandatory neuropsychological testing—providing more business to Lovell, Collins, and ImPACT—and established a hot line for players to report improper concussion treatment by their coaches or trainers. The policy immediately became known as the Ted Johnson Rule.
The league also reconfigured its concussion committee. Pellman, whose résumé embellishment had been exposed two years earlier, was removed as chairman, although he was allowed to stay on as a committee member. Casson and Viano replaced him as cochairs. It wasn’t exactly a major shake-up: The triumvirate that had steered the NFL’s science for the past 13 years remained intact, just rearranged slightly. The committee added three new members, including Joe Maroon, whom the NFL originally described as a “non-affiliated” doctor. That was quickly amended after it was pointed out that Maroon had worked for the Pittsburgh Steelers for two decades.
There was an odd schizophrenia to the policy changes. The league and the union had created a special fund for players with brain damage while at the same time vehemently denying that football caused brain damage. When Schwarz pointed out this apparent contradiction to Greg Aiello, the league spokesman replied that dementia was a disease that “affects many elderly people.” The NFL’s criticism of Omalu continued. Casson told the Washington Post that Omalu’s work was riddled with “glaring deficiencies” and suggested that he had exaggerated his findings.
League of Denial Page 25
