League of Denial

by Mark Fainaru-Wada

  After one session, a mommy blogger tweeted: “Football and sports are SO good for kids. Don’t let the worry keep your kids from playing sports.”

  Another, quoting Pieroth, the neuropsychologist who works with the Bears, tweeted: “ ‘We need to balance the hysteria of #concussions with the benefits of sports participation,’ says Dr. Pieroth #nflhealthsafety.”

  For years, the PR machine had disseminated the message that concussions were a nonissue. Now the NFL was pouring its resources into the message that health and safety were the issue. All the symbolism of the previous era began to fall away. The image of two helmets crashing together and exploding that preceded Monday Night Football for over two decades was quietly discontinued by ESPN at the request of the NFL. ESPN already had ended its popular Monday Night Countdown segment “Jacked Up!” after the first cases of CTE surfaced in 2006. CBS no longer ran “the Pounder Index,” another pregame segment, sponsored by McDonald’s, in which the biggest hits of the previous week were assessed on a 10-point scale. In January 2011, the league pressured Toyota to pull a commercial that featured a helmet-to-helmet collision between two youth players. Under the direction of Paul Hicks, a veteran of the powerhouse Ogilvy Public Relations, the league crafted a new message that stressed the “evolution” of the sport. The primary vehicle was an interactive website, NFLevolution.com, that highlighted changes in rules and equipment through the decades and a TV commercial directed by Peter Berg, creator of the series Friday Night Lights. The commercial showed a kick return that starts in Canton, Ohio, in 1906 with a runner trailing a flying wedge—a blocking technique later banned because of its destructiveness. The return progresses upfield through time, the rules and equipment changing, and ends with Devin Hester, the Bears return man, scoring a touchdown after breaking a recently prohibited horse-collar tackle. Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis delivers the voice-over: “Here’s to making the next century safer and more exciting. Forever forward. Forever football.”

  This was the new era of the NFL. The game had come a long way. It wasn’t that long ago that a defensive lineman could sheath his forearm in plaster and bash an offensive lineman in the head. Leg whipping was once legal, as was clotheslining and the crack-back block, which ripped apart the knee ligaments of an untold number of linebackers. But the game continued to evolve.

  The commercial, which premiered during the 2012 Super Bowl, featured a number of recognizable greats: Hall of Famer Ollie Matson, who played 14 seasons in the 1950s and 1960s; Rick Upchurch, an electrifying Broncos kick returner in the 1970s and 1980s; and Mel Gray, the great Cardinals wide receiver in the 1970s and early 1980s.

  As the commercial continued to run, Matt Crossman, a writer for The Sporting News, pointed out that Rick Upchurch and Mel Gray were among the thousands of players suing the NFL, along with Ollie Matson’s family. Matson had died in 2011 after years of struggling with dementia. In the end he couldn’t speak. His family donated his brain to BU, where Ann McKee diagnosed him with one of the most severe cases of CTE on record.

  17

  BUZZARDS

  On the afternoon of May 2, 2012, Omalu was hunched over a microscope when his phone started blowing up. He ignored it, but when the calls kept coming, he looked down at the number and answered. It was Bailes calling from Chicago, his voice urgent.

  “What is this? Is everything okay?” Omalu said.

  “Haven’t you heard?” said Bailes. “Junior Seau just killed himself.”

  “Who’s Junior Seau?” Omalu replied, predictably.

  Bailes told Omalu to get on the Internet. Omalu started reading and absorbed the gist of what had happened that morning in Oceanside, California. Seau, 43, one of the finest linebackers in NFL history, had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his beachfront home.

  The implications were obvious. Throughout the country, Seau’s suicide provoked shock and profound sadness in a generation of football fans for whom he embodied the cathartic ecstasy of the sport. Seau was an icon in San Diego, a man whose love of life had seemed as real and unflagging as the sun. But to CTE researchers, Seau’s death carried a different meaning. He had played in the NFL for 20 years, one of just two defensive players—the other was Redskins cornerback Darrell Green—to make it through two full decades. He had made 1,524 tackles, fourth on the unofficial all-time list. He was a certain Hall of Famer. Like Duerson, Seau had shot himself in the chest; his brain was pristine and intact. As concern about the health effects of football spread, attracting more and more prominent scientists, Seau in death was instantly transformed into a rare and valuable research commodity, his brain the most coveted specimen to come along since the connection between football and brain damage became known.

  Omalu, shunned by the NFL and overshadowed by the BU Group, immediately grasped the significance, personal and scientific, even if moments earlier he hadn’t known who Junior Seau was.

  “What do you need me to do?” he said.

  “We need to secure this brain,” said Bailes.

  Others, of course, had the same idea, including the NFL.

  Even the people closest to Seau said they were shocked. His suicide was like peeking behind the facade of the most beautiful building in the world and finding a desert. For decades, there was a fairy-tale quality to Seau’s life, except that it was demonstrably real. Raised in a violent ghetto of Oceanside, 40 miles up the coast from San Diego, the son of immigrants from American Samoa who steeped their children in their transplanted culture, Seau had become one of the most talented and beloved players in NFL history.

  The NFL had never seen anything like him. He was like a new species, a 6-foot-3, 260-pound floating linebacker who ran the 40-yard dash in 4.61 seconds, bench-pressed 500 pounds, and had a 38-inch vertical leap. In college, Seau had played outside linebacker, with his hand in the dirt, but the Chargers moved him inside, and the effect was devastating. He was mentored by Gary Plummer—Plummer played right inside linebacker, Seau left—who had just turned 30 and was blown away by what his new teammate could do.

  Seau sometimes would line up 12 yards deep, “and he’d just fucking blitz!” said Plummer. “He wasn’t supposed to and, you know, bam. He really changed the game. He was a freelancer, and he had such amazing physical tools he could get away with it. A guy like me, no way, they’re going to cut me tomorrow.”

  San Diego fell in love with Seau during his 13 seasons with the Chargers. Part of it was his improvisational talent and his hometown roots, but in large measure his appeal stemmed from an ability to make people feel better about themselves. Seau was loud, playful, and flirtatious, a giant kid who greeted friends and strangers by yelling, “Buddeeeee!” Close friends and family called him June or Junebug. A lifelong surfer, he carried himself with a relaxed confidence, as if he had absorbed the soul of the sea. Seau seemed to know exactly where he came from and what he wanted to give back to the world. He started a charity, the Junior Seau Foundation, to help underprivileged kids in San Diego. During a luncheon for the foundation in the late 1990s, he met a motherly and sweet-natured consultant for the United Way named Bette Hoffman and asked her to help out. Hoffman already had more work than she could handle but couldn’t resist. “Junior’s personality was bigger than life,” she said. “He was so charismatic and so fun and so intriguing. I was used to working with nonprofits; I’d never worked with a football player. But you know, I realized that he had such a compassion for wanting to help the people in San Diego. When he walked into a room, he didn’t have to say a word; you knew he was there. He had this amazing capacity when he was talking to someone; people truly believed that he or she was the most important person in the world.”

  Seau was soon calling Hoffman “Mom” and relying on her to help run his affairs. Together, they built one of the most successful athletic foundations in the country. They also opened a restaurant, Seau’s, in Mission Valley that thrived on his good name. From his humble beginnings, Seau had become an engaged and focused community leader. “I
would show him budgets for every event and for overall projections, and he was just so sharp with those,” said Hoffman. “He would know exactly what we needed to do, how we needed to get there and implement it.” Seau served as auctioneer at the Seau Foundation’s annual fund-raisers. Before the event, he would memorize the floor plan to know where all the heavy hitters would be sitting and then use his smile and charisma to cajole them into making bids. “He was like a son to me; I really considered him one of my sons,” said Hoffman. “He was just so dear, and he was just so sweet.”

  Seau had had a son with his childhood sweetheart and two boys and a girl with his wife, Gina, a former Chargers marketing associate whom he met as a rookie. Before they divorced in 2001, Gina watched the cult of Junior grow in San Diego—from the afternoon when he was a rookie and a woman asked for his autograph while they were out buying milk and cookies to “four or five years down the road and we couldn’t go sit and have dinner without ten, fifteen, twenty interruptions.”

  During the final years of Seau’s career, there were signs that he was changing. Without warning, one day he exploded at his oldest son, Tyler, to the point where the two had to be separated by Junior’s friends. “It never got completely physical, but it was close,” Tyler said. “I’ve never really seen him that angry before.” Seau played his last down with New England in 2009. By the time he returned to Oceanside, where he had bought a $3.2 million home in 2005, the people closest to him could tell he wasn’t right. He seemed totally unprepared for the transition out of football, which was difficult for all players but especially for one who had played almost continuously since his teens. Seau was 40. He had earned over $50 million. But his world quickly began to collapse, financially and spiritually.

  Seau was drinking heavily, according to his friends and family. Hoffman was unable to get him to focus on his restaurants or the foundation, a change she had noticed as far back as 2003, after Seau left the Chargers to play in Miami. Now, when Seau made presentations to potential donors, he rambled and lost his train of thought. He had volcanic eruptions of anger, particularly when he drank. His memory seemed to be fading. One day, his son Jake, a star lacrosse player, had a big game in Torrey Pines. Seau’s daughter, Sydney, called repeatedly to remind him to be there, including on the morning of the game. “I text him 20 minutes beforehand and I’m like, ‘Where are you? They’re warming up,’ ” she recalled. “And he’s like, ‘What are you talking about? I thought that’s tomorrow.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I called you this morning. We talked about this. You need to be here. Get here now.’ ”

  As Seau’s problems grew worse, he withdrew from his family and close friends, going months without seeing his kids. Hoffman became alarmed by his growing gambling addiction, which cost him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. “It just became more and more serious,” said Hoffman, who had control of Seau’s finances. Seau would call her from Las Vegas, sometimes frantic, asking her to wire huge amounts of money to keep him going.

  On October 17, 2010, Seau was arrested on charges that he had assaulted his live-in girlfriend, Mary Nolan. She told officers that Seau had “grabbed her by the arm and shoved her into the wall/dresser in their bedroom.” Seau was released on $25,000 bail, Nolan never filed a complaint, and the case was dropped. But Seau was inconsolable. The morning after the incident, a few hours after he left jail, Seau was driving up the coast when he ran his Cadillac Escalade off a cliff. The SUV careened down a 100-foot slope and settled in the sand near the water. When Gina learned about the accident, she grabbed the kids and drove to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, where Seau had been taken in an ambulance with, remarkably, minor injuries.

  Seau was still in the emergency room when his family arrived. “He just looked so broken, and I mean not just physically,” said Gina, who stayed close with her ex-husband. “His eyes: He just looked so sad and so defeated, this big guy that barely fits on the bed.”

  Seau insisted that he had fallen asleep at the wheel, that the accident wasn’t a suicide attempt. At the time, Gina believed him. Still, she told him it was an opportunity to turn his life around.

  “You’ve got another chance in life,” she said. “You’re very blessed. You lived to see another day. What are you gonna do? You have so much to live for. Our kids are progressing so beautifully. You’d be so proud of them. Get in the game.”

  “You’re right, G,” said Seau. “You’re right.”

  But soon he disappeared again; Gina and the kids found out from TMZ that Seau was back in Vegas just a few weeks after the incident. In January 2011, Bette Hoffman quit as the head of the Junior Seau Foundation. “I was just done; I’d had so much, you know, trying to protect him and cover for him,” she said. “I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I mean, I couldn’t help him. He wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Seau said when Hoffman told him she was quitting. He called her repeatedly, begging her to change her mind. Instead, Hoffman changed her phone number.

  Seau’s daughter, Sydney, decided to stage a one-girl intervention. Sydney was a high school senior, a promising volleyball player with wavy brown curls and her father’s charisma and megawatt smile. She was every bit a daddy’s girl; she worshiped her father and wanted to be around him as much as possible: “He was just a light, that’s how I’d describe him,” she said. That year, Seau had missed most of Sydney’s senior season. She had written an English paper about the void her father had left in her life, and it emboldened her to confront him. “I drove over to his house, and I just told him everything,” she said. “How I wasn’t gonna take a backseat anymore because I was sick of waiting. It hurt me to have to pull so much. It was just hard because I wanted him to want me more than anything. And my whole life was to make him proud and to make him want to see me.

  “He just looked in a straight line and cried and didn’t hug me, didn’t say a word. He just sat on the couch. And that’s what really bothered me. How can I express all of this emotion and you just cry and not even want to console me? Like, that’s not normal. He just told me that he had never really, truly felt love. And I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ But it didn’t change. He was still really distant.”

  Sydney decided to attend USC, her father’s alma mater, “because that’s his second home and I could share that with him.” In March 2012, she, Seau, and Gina drove up to Los Angeles for spring orientation. It was the kind of moment Sydney had yearned for. Her parents had been divorced for 10 years, but they all went to dinner together at the Palm before attending a Lakers game. “He was being such a tease and a flirt, and the waitress came by,” said Gina. “She goes, ‘Oh, you guys are such a cute family.’ I was about to say, ‘We’re not married.’ And he said, ‘Meet my future wife. This is Gina.’ ”

  “Dad!” exclaimed Sydney, laughing.

  Five weeks later, Seau shot himself in the chest with a .357 Magnum revolver.

  Unlike Duerson, Seau hadn’t left instructions for what to do with his brain, and so it was never known if he shot himself in the chest to preserve it. His girlfriend, Megan Noderer, found him on a queen-sized bed in an upstairs guest room after returning from the gym that morning. After calling 911, Noderer pulled Seau to the floor in an unsuccessful attempt to administer CPR. When police arrived, the bed was strewn with bloodstained pillows and sheets, a gray stocking cap, and the gun, which lay on its left side with five bullets in the chamber and one spent round near the headboard. Seau’s cell phone also was on the bed, the SIM card removed, a fact that was never explained.

  Seau was placed on a gurney in a body bag and brought down to the garage. Outside, some 400 people had gathered: neighbors, Chargers fans, news crews, Seau’s extended Samoan family. Inside the sweltering house, Seau’s closest relatives and friends milled around in shock amid his trophies, signed helmets, and game photos. In the late morning, the family decided to open the garage for a spontaneous public viewing. Seau lay on his back, the body bag zipped up to his neck, his head exposed. H
offman bent over and kissed him. “Good-bye, Junior, I love you,” she said. “He just looked like he was asleep on the couch,” said Hoffman, sobbing at the memory. “He didn’t even look like he was dead. I had to wake him up so many times from a nap, and that’s how I said good-bye to him.” For nearly an hour, the tearful crowd filed past.

  That afternoon, Tyler, Seau’s 23-year-old son, was still at the house when his phone rang.

  It was Omalu and Bailes, asking for his dad’s brain.

  If the two doctors were concerned about the unfortunate timing—just a few hours after Seau was carted out of the garage—the feeling was superseded by the urgency they felt. Within a day, Seau’s body would be autopsied; without preparation, his brain might be buried with him or destroyed. More immediately, there was also the competition: Omalu and Bailes knew that Nowinski and the BU Group would soon make a big push, if they hadn’t already, presumably backed by the NFL. They felt they had to move now.

  Bailes, Omalu, and Tyler Seau would remember the call differently. Omalu said: “We introduced ourselves, explained what we were doing, about CTE, that we would like him to grant us consent to examine his father’s brain.” He described Tyler as “very polite” and receptive during the brief call.

  But Tyler said he immediately felt pressured by Omalu. “He was very pushy, and he really wanted me to make a decision that night. He pretty much said that we have to do it now because if it’s not done the right way, we could lose a lot of the tissue and things like that.” Tyler already was under unthinkable pressure; with his father’s death, he had become responsible for a host of family decisions. Quiet and thoughtful, four inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter than his dad, Tyler had played linebacker at Palomar Community College in San Diego and Delta State University, a Division II school in Cleveland, Mississippi. Now he was working in Seau’s restaurant.