Batjer, a native Texan, was just completing a 17-year run as chairman of neurosurgery at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. When Batjer got the call from the NFL, it immediately touched a nerve. He reflected back on an experience he’d had two years earlier while watching an exhibition soccer match in Lake Forest, Illinois. During the game, a player was knocked unconscious. After spending several minutes on his back, the player returned to action only to collapse face-first on the turf. Batjer rushed onto the field. He feared the young man was dead.
“I’m a neurosurgeon,” Batjer said as he approached the player, who thankfully was beginning to stir. “This kid is out of here. He needs to get to the Lake Forest emergency room. I’ll drive him. He needs a CT scan now.”
“I’m sorry, Doc, thanks for introducing yourself,” someone told him. “But it’s the coach’s call.”
Batjer and Ellenbogen professed to know very little about the old NFL committee—or “the MB, whatever, TI committee,” as Ellenbogen referred to it—and the contempt it had engendered before its ignominious dissolution. In an interview for this book, Ellenbogen said he had reviewed one of “Elliot Pellman’s articles” for Neurosurgery—Paper Number 14, on biomechanics—but claimed, “I never knew there was a committee.” That statement appeared to be at odds with Ellenbogen’s review, in which he wrote that the authors and “the NFL MTBI committee are to be congratulated on the 14th contribution in a superb series of the analysis of concussions in NFL players.”
The two neurosurgeons got an early crash course in what they were facing courtesy of the House Judiciary Committee. The football hearings the previous October had been so successful, the NFL so thoroughly demoralized, that the committee decided to take the show on the road in a series of forums across the country. One was held in New York. Linda Sanchez and her colleagues appeared slow to accept the legitimacy of the league’s new doctors. After listening to Batjer and Ellenbogen talk about their goals, Sanchez said they sounded “like the same old NFL.” The two men had been on the job two months and felt they were being criticized for not solving the problem. Referring to the recent Deepwater Horizon disaster, Ellenbogen turned to Batjer and whispered: “That’s less time than oil has been spilling into the gulf.”
It was an early indication of the scrutiny they would find themselves under. Ellenbogen and Batjer wanted to ignore the NFL’s recent past, but because of it they wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt—not for a while, perhaps not ever.
“The NFL has had its four stages of grief: denial, more denial, some level of recognition, and now research,” said New York Democrat Anthony Weiner.
The NFL’s previous work was “infected,” Weiner told Batjer and Ellenbogen. Their immediate task was “to mop up.”
Ellenbogen decided the committee had to accomplish something, “one thing,” quickly. Even that, though, would not prove easy. The decision was made to produce a poster warning players about the dangers of concussions—a poster that would replace the NFL’s pamphlet insisting that “current research” hadn’t shown that repeated concussions could lead to long-term brain damage. Ellenbogen said as many as 30 people took part in crafting the new poster, including representatives of the new NFL committee, the NFLPA, and the Centers for Disease Control, as well as several lawyers. The poster they finally settled on was titled “CONCUSSION—A Must Read for NFL Players … Let’s Take Brain Injuries Out of Play.” The poster listed a series of concussion facts and symptoms, and it warned, “Repetitive brain injury, when not treated promptly and properly, may cause permanent damage to your brain.”
Ellenbogen said about the process of coming to agreement on the poster’s language: “It was the most painful thing I think I’ve ever done.”
There was no place for Bennet Omalu in this brave new world. While Nowinski and McKee were soaking up the spotlight, the man who had set the NFL’s concussion crisis in motion was carrying out his duties as San Joaquin County medical examiner, cutting up bodies at the dank coroner’s office in tiny French Camp, California, and moonlighting in the lab he had set up in his garage.
Omalu seemed like a man in exile. His moods vacillated between a self-pitying desire to stay as far away from the NFL as possible and a yearning to be recognized for his historic discovery. One day Omalu would say, “To be honest with you, I really wish I never touched Mike Webster’s brain.” The next day he would rage against all the attention now going to the BU Group, whose members frequently downplayed the significance of his work.
BU’s researchers literally kept a file on what they alleged were Omalu’s exaggerations, primarily his claims that he had discovered CTE. (In fact, Omalu discovered brain damage in pro football players and applied the preexisting term chronic traumatic encephalopathy to the disease.) “Bennet has done a marvelous thing and deserves all the credit in the world,” said Cantu. “My problem with him is that he is not scrupulously sticking to the facts, ma’am. He embellishes remarkably. And that will bring him down.” Of course, some research scientists would soon level the same criticism at Cantu.
Nowinski was no more charitable. Speaking on the popular Dennis & Callahan radio show on Boston’s WEEI one day, he was asked, “What woke up the NFL?”
“I honestly believe having been in the meetings with the NFL last year that it was Dr. McKee,” he said, “because the first pathologist who looked at this work overinterpreted the findings and was not as credible.”
When Jeanne Marie Laskas, a writer for GQ, contacted Nowinski in spring 2009 and asked where she could find Omalu, Nowinski replied, “Oh, he’s not in it anymore,” according to Laskas.
“It sounds like he discovered it,” she said.
“Well, he had a lot to do with it then, but he’s just not in it anymore. He moved,” said Nowinski. (Nowinski later said he told Laskas that Omalu wasn’t doing research with him anymore, not that he wasn’t doing it at all.)
Laskas eventually tracked down Omalu in French Camp. She discovered the “happiest man alive that I was asking” about CTE.
“But Dr. Omalu, I heard you aren’t in it anymore,” Laskas said.
“No! No!” Omalu said, his voice rising. “Dr. Omalu is in it! Dr. Omalu is in it!”
Omalu’s third paper on CTE in an NFL player—Andre Waters—was ultimately rejected by Neurosurgery, even though the diagnosis had made the front page of the New York Times. Omalu believed, without evidence, that this was because the three cases would have represented a series, and Apuzzo, doing the NFL’s bidding, didn’t want to acknowledge they were anything more than random. The Waters paper eventually appeared in The Journal of Forensic Nursing, a fact that was privately ridiculed by doctors affiliated with the league.
But Omalu brought many of his problems on himself. He couldn’t seem to get out of his own way, never recognizing the need to filter. In January 2010, he was invited to speak at the first meeting of a new concussion committee that had been formed by the Players Association. The meeting took place at a Palm Beach resort and drew dozens of current and former players, union officials, doctors, and widows. Hall of Fame defensive end Jack Youngblood stood by with a stopwatch, with instructions to sack any speaker who went over seven minutes.
Omalu droned on for 45 as Youngblood stood by, seemingly helpless to stop the cherubic African researcher. “What happened, Jack, your stopwatch break?” somebody asked Youngblood. Omalu left the crowd numb and murmuring. He again showed the grisly autopsy photos of Webster. “It was like crime photos, like Dillinger, you know?” said Lovell, who attended. “He had no idea how inappropriate that was or didn’t care.” Omalu then proposed that NFL players sit out at least 99 days after a concussion, at which point the players in attendance “started laughing in his face,” said Lovell. Even people originally sympathetic to Omalu’s cause were appalled. “He was just going on and on,” said Guskiewicz. “He put up those pictures of Mike on the slab. That may be very appropriate in a pure medical meeting where you’ve got a bunch
of pathologists or even physicians. But you’ve got players in there. You had former teammates in there. You had some coaches. You had some former wives.”
Guskiewicz thought the event had the effect of further legitimizing BU and confirming some people’s worst fears about Omalu. “I think it exposed him in front of an audience and confirmed what some people had heard about him,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Ah, I’ve heard about this guy. And now I see. Now I understand.’ ”
But some people thought the backlash against Omalu went deeper than his indiscretions and outside-the-box proposals. Certainly, other researchers were unconventional and took provocative stances. Cantu would call for a complete ban on tackle football for children under 14, a recommendation far more controversial than Omalu’s proposed three-month recovery period. And Omalu was vastly more qualified than many people now sitting at the NFL’s table, notably Nowinski.
Even people who didn’t sympathize with Omalu’s views marveled at the swiftness with which he was dispatched. “He got steamrolled,” said Micky Collins, never a huge Omalu fan. “Completely. He was really the first guy that did all this stuff, you know? He got rolled—rolled and put away wet.”
Bailes thought the NFL identified Omalu early on as the league’s biggest threat, a bomb thrower who knew nothing about football and was therefore beholden to no one. That was one reason, Bailes believed, the league had invited him to the Chicago summit to present Omalu’s work but not Omalu himself. “I don’t think they liked the whole scene from the beginning,” said Bailes. “He was perhaps perceived as not mainstream, certainly not an American. It’s like, ‘How can a Nigerian doctor tell us what’s wrong with our sport?’ ”
Harry Carson, the Giants Hall of Fame linebacker, thought Omalu’s marginalization was easy to understand: He looked and sounded different from every person in the medical establishment, the NFL, and the concussion committees. “I think it’s because he’s a black man, I honestly believe that,” Carson said. “And he’s not an American black man; he’s from Africa.” Before arriving in the NFL, Carson had attended South Carolina State, an obscure black school. He saw parallels between his life and Omalu’s. “It was up to me to prove people wrong, and I think with him it’s the same way,” he said. “People will think less of him because of his skin color. And it’s not because I’m black and he’s black. It is because he did the groundbreaking work.”
“This is something that is too big for everybody to not be included,” said Carson. “And when you have an authority like him on the outside looking in when he was the one who provided the information, there’s something wrong with that picture.”
On February 17, 2011, police were summoned to a luxury condo in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, a spit of land north of Miami. The condo, Ocean One, towered over the turquoise water. At 2:51 P.M., the police entered Unit 603. The tenant hadn’t responded to his fiancée’s calls or the building manager pounding on the door. Once inside, officers found the apartment immaculate, the air tinged with the smell of a cigar. The police announced their presence, but no one responded. The officers made their way through the apartment room by room, arriving finally at the master bedroom, where a large man lay nude on top of the bed, a blanket drawn up to his neck, a chrome Taurus .38 Special by his side. The man had a single gunshot wound on the left side of his chest, just below the nipple.
Up to that moment, to the extent that Dave Duerson had played a role in the NFL’s concussion crisis, it was as a lightning rod for many retired players, who saw him as a traitor and a fellow traveler with the worst of the league’s deniers. The former Bears safety had been very much a part of the system. As a player rep on the Bert Bell retirement board, he had turned down numerous disability claims from broken men. Records show that Duerson cast a proxy vote when the board unanimously rejected Webster’s appeal for full benefits in 2003. During the 2007 congressional hearings on the retirement system, Duerson invoked his 84-year-old father’s Alzheimer’s disease as proof that football didn’t cause brain damage.
But that wasn’t the message Duerson was sending now. Before pulling the trigger, he had staged his condo meticulously. On the living room table were assorted clues, “as if someone’s trying to tell you a story in a room,” said Duerson’s son Tregg. There was a copy of Sports Illustrated from three months earlier with a headline on the cover: “CONCUSSIONS.” The word was superimposed over Steelers linebacker James Harrison demolishing a helpless receiver. “THE HITS THAT ARE CHANGING THE GAME … AND THE HITS NO ONE IS NOTICING,” the cover said. Next to the magazine were two identical binders filled with documents from the retirement board’s Traumatic Brain Injury Evaluation Program. There was a DVD case for Trapped: Haitian Nights, a “psychological thriller that delves into the dark world of Voodoo, deception, and the fragility of the mind.” Duerson had laid out all his disability files, as well as documents indicating that he was preparing to file a workers’ compensation claim related to brain trauma. He was scheduled to fly to California the next month to be assessed by four doctors, including a neurologist.
“It was eerie because you almost kind of felt his presence in the place,” said Duerson’s ex-wife, Alicia, the mother of his four children.
Duerson’s family and friends thought it was as if he were trying to explain himself, to make one final plea for understanding. His suicide note ran five typed pages and had the feel of an instruction manual, which some relatives thought fitting, since Duerson was always telling people what to do. The note contained no salutation and was titled
“REFERENCE TOPICS FOR LATER.” Those topics included notes on his finances and possessions. Only a small portion addressed Duerson’s thoughts on how football had destroyed him. It was the only part of the note in all caps:
MY MIND SLIPS. THOUGHTS GET CROSSED. CANNOT FIND MY WORDS. MAJOR GROWTH ON THE BACK OF SKULL ON LOWER LEFT SIDE. FEEL REALLY ALONE. HINKING OF OTHER NFL PLAYERS WITH BRAIN INJURIES. SOMETIMES, SIMPLE SPELLING BECOMES A CHORE, AND MY EYESITE GOES BLURY.… I THINK SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY DAMAGED IN MY BRAIN, TOO. I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW MANY TIMES I SAW STARS IN GAMES, BUT I KNOW THERE WERE MANY TIMES THAT I WOULD “WAKE UP” WELL AFTER A GAME, AND WE WERE ALL AT DINNER.
On the last page, almost as if he had just remembered something he had forgotten, Duerson provided a handwritten addendum:
PLEASE, SEE THAT MY BRAIN IS GIVEN TO THE NFL’S BRAIN BANK.
A week after Duerson killed himself, Time called him “Football’s First Martyr.” That was a stretch. Webster, after all, had died nine years earlier. Andre Waters also had turned a gun on himself, and Justin Strzelczyk had chosen to go up in flames. But the act was chilling. Duerson had shot himself in the chest to preserve his brain for study. The cool preparation and the contrition his death seemed to signal to all the players he had judged harshly spoke to the horror of the disease.
Duerson didn’t seem like a man who had been destined for this, as if anyone were. He had grown up in Muncie, Indiana, a star scholar-athlete who was scouted by the Dodgers and chose to play football at Notre Dame. His father spent nearly four decades working on an assembly line for General Motors. Awed by the machinery, Duerson as a small child would tell his dad: “I want to do that.” “No, son, you want to own that,” his father would say. Duerson made the National Honor Society, displaying great drive and ambition and a meticulous attention to detail that would later seem in contrast to his savage approach to the game.
Alicia met Duerson during his freshman year at Notre Dame, and it was hard for her to reconcile the smart, reserved young man she had come to love with the beast he became on the field. On Fridays before game day, Duerson liked to read Jack Tatum’s autobiography, They Call Me Assassin, in which the former Raiders safety bragged: “I like to believe that my best hits border on felonious assault.” When Alicia went to meet Duerson after the game near the locker room, she was scared of him, wary of coming close. Duerson was irked and confused. “Get over here and give me a hug,” he said. “I was just playing a
game,” he assured her. “I’m fine now. It’s out of my system.”
A third-round pick in the 1983 draft, Duerson became one of the hardest hitters on a Chicago Bears team built around one of the best defenses the game had ever seen. One of Duerson’s closest friends on the Bears was linebacker Otis Wilson. When the two men joined forces on a big hit, they hovered over their victims, barking and howling. The defense became known as the Junkyard Dogs. Duerson, like Tatum, viewed the defensive backfield as a free fire zone. “That was Dave’s thinking,” Alicia said in an interview for this book. “Make them remember the hits and they won’t be coming up the middle that much.”
It didn’t seem to matter if Duerson couldn’t remember the hits as long as they had their desired effect. That was part of the job description: headaches, nausea, “dings,” and, at times, huge gaps in his memory.
“He had a lot of concussions,” said Alicia. “But back then, you know, there was nobody pulling you off to the side. It was just, ‘Shake it off, go back in.’ And I think because there was no real free agency—this is just my opinion—I just think everybody probably tried to kill themselves because you don’t want to not play, then you don’t get the money next year.”
Duerson graduated with honors from Notre Dame and earned a degree in economics. He contemplated running for office someday. He and Alicia saw themselves as a power couple, driven to help others. Duerson ended up playing 11 seasons in the NFL, making the Pro Bowl four times. He served as a Bears player rep and played an important role in the fight for free agency, gaining the trust of Gene Upshaw, the head of the players union. Duerson thought someday he might succeed Upshaw and told people that Upshaw was grooming him for the position.
After Duerson retired in 1993, he started a career in the food industry. He first bought McDonald’s franchises and then purchased a food distribution company called Fair Oaks Farms. He doubled the company’s annual revenues to more than $60 million, according to a story in Men’s Journal magazine that chronicled his rise and fall. Stogie in hand, Duerson looked the part of a successful businessman. He and Alicia were living the high life they had always envisioned for themselves. When they vacationed in Paris, they stayed at five-star hotels, rented a BMW, and flew on the Concorde. Duerson bought a 17-room, 8,000-square-foot house with a four-car garage and a swimming pool in the same neighborhood as Michael Jordan.
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