Against Football (6 page)

Goodell has made business decisions. He's done just enough—purged the deniers, tweaked the rules, funded research—to allow us fans to pretend that the league gives a damn. He's placed his faith in our capacity for self-delusion.

The second big rationalization in the NFL Fan Survival Kit is that players knowingly choose to incur the game's risks and are paid for doing so. You hear this line all the time on sports talk radio, often in that pitched, contemptuous tone characteristic of men who resent moral contemplation.

Okay. Let's start with the issue of what constitutes informed consent. Here's what seems fair: On NFL Draft Day, Roger Goodell can call the number one draft pick to the stage and give him his jersey and hat. But the commish will also have to hand the kid a waiver, the text of which would be printed on-screen:

A copy of this waiver will be distributed to the draftee's family. They will then be required to watch a brief video of former players, such as the late Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, describing—or attempting to describe—what life is like with CTE. Then the player and his family will be given a week to consider the matter.

That would be informed consent.

Most of those kids would sign. They would sign not just because they're twenty years old and believe they're bulletproof, but because their talent for football is the single attribute
upon which they have been judged for most of their lives. Football isn't just what they do. It's who they are.

NFL players are members of an elite fraternity that knowingly places self-sacrifice, valor, and machismo above medical commonsense. Football is the one major American sport that selects specifically for the ability to inflict and absorb physical pain. (We don't judge baseball or basketball players on how well they can take a hit.) The ultimate badge of honor for a pro football player is not that he play
fair
or that he play
hard
but that he play
hurt.

In January of 2014, ESPN asked 320 NFL players, anonymously, if they would play in the Super Bowl with a concussion. Eighty-five percent said yes. More recently, a linebacker for the Jacksonville Jaguars named Russell Allen revealed the reason for his unexpected retirement: he suffered a
stroke
after being hit during a game last year. Allen refused to leave the game or inform medical personnel because he feared he might lose his starting job.

One of the more despicable arguments put forward by the MBTI committee was that the rigors of football weeded out the weak. Those who made it to the pro level were less susceptible to concussions and quicker to recover from them. The proof of this claim was that so many players returned to the playing field so quickly after suffering concussions, which was a little like claiming that the dangers of black lung weren't that serious because so many coal miners returned to work after bouts of respiratory illness.

What an unbiased examination of the data suggests is
that concussions have been under-reported, under-diagnosed, and under-treated for decades. When doctors describe symptoms to an older player—dizziness, seeing stars—they often identify these as routine. The linebacker Bill Romanowski, by all accounts one of the nastiest players in league history, estimated that by these standards he'd suffered five hundred or more concussions during his career. “I saw stars every day for sixteen years. I saw stars in college.” He was diagnosed with twenty concussions.

The NFL's research wasn't gauging the resilience of players' brains, but the toxic convergence of its own reckless cupidity with the macho culture that prevails among its employees.

What happens to a player who rejects this culture?

Consider the case of Ted Johnson. During his ten-year career, the hard-hitting linebacker helped the Patriots win three Super Bowls. In 2002, he suffered a concussion and briefly blacked out during a pre-season game. He returned to practice four days later, expecting he would wear a red jersey for “minimal contact.” A blue “full contact” jersey was hanging in his locker. Johnson confronted a trainer, who told him there had been a mistake, that he wasn't cleared for contact. Johnson put on the red jersey. Out on the practice field, as the team prepared for a contact drill, an assistant trainer brought him a blue jersey. Coach Bill Belichick had directed him to do so. Johnson was incensed.

Here's where things get truly messed up.

Johnson put the jersey on anyway. Almost immediately, he suffered a second concussion and was rushed to the hospital. When he confronted Belichick privately, Johnson says the coach admitted that he'd screwed up and apologized to him.

Belichick's public response to the incident was considerably different: “If Ted felt so strongly that he didn't feel he was ready to practice with us, he should have told me.”

This is part of what makes Bill Belichick a great coach. He knows how to “get the most out of his players,” which is a kinder way of saying that he knows how to manipulate them. He knows that a tough guy like Johnson would rather risk his health than risk losing face by refusing to put on that blue jersey. “They weren't going to beat me,” is how Johnson put it.

Instead, Belichick got Johnson to beat himself.

Johnson played three more seasons for the Patriots. He estimates that he suffered half a dozen more concussions, though he reported only one of them because he wanted to avoid being labeled soft. He was already suffering from symptoms of neurological damage, which have worsened.

If you follow football, especially in New England, you hear a lot of talk about the so-called “Patriot way,” a dignified, stoic approach to the game. One of its central tenets is extreme secrecy when it comes to injuries. And yet here is how one team official summed up Johnson's medical condition to a
Boston Globe
reporter: “Ted Johnson is a very sick young man. We've been aware of the emotional issues he's had for years. You can't blame all of his behavior on concussions.”

The Patriot Way: When a player receives serial brain traumas trying to honor your code, suggest in print that he is mentally ill.

Of course, it's easy to blame ruthless coaches and venal owners and foolhardy players, and much harder for us to see our own role in all this.

Most football players begin life with limited socioeconomic options. They may love football for its inherent virtues. But they also quickly come to see the game as a path to glory and riches. These rewards aren't inherent. They arise from a culture of fandom that views players as valuable only so long as they can perform.

We might pay lip service to health issues, but we're much less forgiving when the injury report comes out. Scroll through the Internet message boards, or listen to the provocateurs on sports talk radio. A frequently hurt player is not to be pitied, but suspected. In these kangaroo courts, “injury prone” has become synonymous with cowardly or weak-willed. The explosion in steroid use is partly a response to this mindset. The drugs help speed recovery from injuries.

Then again, according to a lawsuit filed in May, scores of ex-players were fed pain pills by team doctors and trainers—the pills were “handed out to us like candy,” in the words of one retired lineman—and pressured to soldier on despite severe injuries. One of the named plaintiffs (there are more than five hundred in all), former Pro Bowl quarterback Jim
McMahon, claims he incurred a broken neck and ankle during his career, never received proper diagnoses, and played through both. Like other former players, McMahon wound up addicted to painkillers, and now suffers from the early stages of dementia.

We worship players for bravery and excoriate them for vulnerability because we wish to see masculine ideals on display. But I think here also of Cicero, who speculated that the loathing for timid gladiators wasn't a function of their diminished entertainment value but the fact that they forced spectators to confront the profound heartlessness of the games.

If you want to know what the current state of the research is on NFL players and brain damage, one of the best people on earth to consult is Dr. Ann McKee, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University and chief neuropathologist for the National Veterans Affairs ALS Brain Bank in Bedford, MA. McKee is the person who cuts up the brains of former players and determines if they have CTE. Because so many brains have been coming in recently, and because (as her titles suggest) she is a very busy person, she is perpetually “about thirty brains behind.”

She believes the gravest threat to players comes from sub-concussive hits, which the NFL's safety rules and concussion protocols won't prevent. The next milestone, McKee predicts, will be when doctors can measure brain injuries incurred during play, and brain disease in living players. “That
will be the defining moment, the one that rewrites the book,” she says. “I don't think we're that far away.” She foresees a day when players entering the NFL will receive a risk assessment for brain damage based on factors such as genetic disposition, the number of years played, position, etc.

The introduction of such innovations would erode the haze of medical uncertainty that has long insulated the league and us fans. Imagine what would happen if word leaked that the top draft choice in 2017 stood a 25 percent chance of incurring brain damage five years into his career? Or if he was revealed to have incipient CTE? Or if fans had to confront not just replays of a superstar being knocked insensate, but a CAT scan showing the damage to his frontal lobes?

McKee is sometimes miscast as the bête noir of the NFL, because she was among the most visible early authorities on CTE. In fact, league executives dismissed her research for years. They've since adopted a kind of keep-your-enemies-closer approach by designating her lab as the league's “preferred” brain bank, and granting her millions in funding.

McKee is also, helpfully, an outspoken fan of the game. Her desk is surrounded by hundreds of slides of brain slices dyed to show areas with a buildup of tau, the cell-strangling protein symptomatic of CTE. Precariously balanced atop one stack of slides is a bobblehead doll of Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback of her Green Bay Packers.

McKee told me if she were a boy she would have played
football, and that she wanted her son to play. “When he got to high school, his dad didn't want him to play because it was too dangerous. I said, ‘You've got to be kidding me.' It was horrifying to me!” McKee laughed. “So he played soccer.”

I asked McKee how she justifies watching the game, knowing its dangers so intimately. “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know where I am. I think it's a really important question. I have, like, these two faces. Right now they're pretty separate. I do watch a lot of football on Sunday.”

In the morgue, a small, frigid room thick with the smell of preserving fluid, McKee lifted the lid of a white plastic bucket. Inside was a brain covered with splotches of dark crimson. “That's a suicide,” explained her colleague, Dr. Victor Alvarez. McKee selected another brain and set it down on her cutting board. It looked like a small, discolored ham. She began slicing it up with a long scalpel.

Most of the brains McKee examines belong to veterans, not athletes. But the second brain she chose was a young female rugby player who had suffered a concussion, then continued to play. After a second impact, she suffered massive swelling of the brain and died. High school athletes are especially susceptible to so-called “second-impact syndrome.”

I was there to talk to McKee about CTE, but the conversation between her and Alvarez and a young assistant named Brian quickly turned to the Super Bowl, which had been played a few weeks earlier.

Brian was a fan of the Denver Broncos, who had been routed. “After the first quarter, I just wanted it to be an
entertaining game!” he said, carefully sliding brain slices into small plastic cases.

“After the first series!” said Alvarez, a Buffalo Bills fan.

At a certain point, I outed myself as a Raiders partisan, and we were off to the races.

It was an odd situation—actually
surreal
is closer to the mark. Even as McKee was dissecting this girl's hippocampus and amygdala and her delicate spinal cord, we were gabbing about football.

Before I left, McKee showed me two large color prints that hung in the hallway outside her office. One showed the brain of an eighteen-year-old football player with the brown spotting that signifies the onset of CTE. The other was a photo of a brain with two ghastly gouges in its frontal lobes, a lobotomy as they were conducted in the years after World War I.

A psychiatrist named Walter Freeman performed nearly 3,500 lobotomies, many of them by pressing an icepick through the corner of the eye socket and into the patient's brain. The procedure was sometimes used to treat victims of shell shock. The press hailed Freeman as a miracle worker. Only years later were his methods debunked. McKee marveled at the public acceptance of such barbarism, and I said, only half joking, that maybe decades from now the public will recoil at the thought that we ever watched a game that could permanently harm a teenager's brain.

“I've started to think it's impossible to change the NFL,”
McKee said. “People think none of this work will change the NFL.”

She seemed completely blind to the irony hanging right in front of her. The ultimate agents of social change aren't researchers like her, but individual fans (like her) who confront the moral meaning of the research, who make the connection between the damaged brains—such as those McKee dissects—and their own behavior.