League of Denial (50 page)

There was always one major difference between the NFL’s brand of art and everything else: “Unlike other forms of popular entertainment,
NFL football is
real
—the players actually do what they appear to be doing—yet at the same time it is a creation of the media, and it generates some of the most powerful fantasies in our culture,” wrote Michael Oriard, a former Notre Dame and Kansas City Chiefs offensive lineman who went on to become Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Oregon State University. “The actuality of football is the source of its cultural power, but media-made images of that reality are all that most fans know.”

The images are seductive yet deceptive. Like war movies, the images soften and glorify the violence to the people who watch. The reality, like war itself, is far different. Those who get close to the NFL battlefield are left in awe of its ferocity and speed, the sheer sound of it, as memorable as giant waves crashing repeatedly on the shore. Andy Russell, the Steelers great, broke into the league as a third-team linebacker in 1963. In his first game, the starter, John Reger, collapsed after a brutal hit and
swallowed his tongue. Reger went into convulsions on the field, like a man having a seizure. The team doctor searched frantically for a tool to pry open Reger’s jaw. Unable to find one, he chipped out his front teeth with a pair of scissors. Blood sprayed everywhere—onto the grass, the doctor, Reger’s white jersey. He left the stadium in an ambulance. A few plays later, the second-string linebacker sustained an ankle injury that also put him out of the game. Thus began Russell’s 12-year career.

Now, for the first time in its history, the NFL needed a new image,
one that instead of glorifying the violence deflected attention from the fact that it was driving men mad. The stakes were obvious. The NFL’s success depended not only on the buy-in of millions of fans for whom injuries were an acceptable and even attractive part of the entertainment but also on the parents who submitted their kids to the Darwinian system that led to the glory, however distant, of the NFL. Maroon, in his burst of candor after examining Omalu’s slides, had summed it up perfectly: “If only 10 percent of mothers in America begin to conceive of football as a dangerous game, that is the end of football.” Or as the
Times
blog had asked, “Is Tackle Football Too Dangerous for Kids to Play?”

And so it came to pass that the NFL found itself reaching out to a new constituency: mommy bloggers.

In the
summer of 2012, Lorraine Esposito, a New York life and fitness coach, mother of two teenagers, and author of a blog that was published on WorkingMother.com, received an e-mail from Clare Graff of the NFL’s Corporate Communications Department:

“As the mother of a little boy and someone who combs the headlines every day, I see all the stories about concussions in youth sports, as I’m sure you do as well,” Graff wrote. “Through working at the NFL, I’ve been lucky enough to interact with some of the country’s most respected neurologists, and I’ve learned a lot about concussions—what causes them, how to spot the symptoms, and how to treat and prevent them.

“We’re inviting parenting/health writers and bloggers to the NFL offices in August, around the time kids head back to school and back to sports. We want to hear what concerns you and your readers about youth sports and injuries, what keeps you up at night, and share some resources with you that may be helpful on the topic.”

Esposito was thrilled to be invited to the “Youth Health & Safety Luncheon” at the NFL’s offices in New York. She was joined by about 50 people like her, mostly influential women who might be concerned about the continuing bad news about football and brain damage. The group was given a tour of NFL headquarters and introduced to the team that oversaw officials. The luncheon featured the commissioner; Scott Hallenbeck, the executive director of USA Football; Holly Robinson Peete, the wife of former NFL player Rodney Peete “and a football mom”; Elizabeth Pieroth, a neuropsychologist and head injury consultant to
the Chicago Bears; and Kelly Sarmiento, a health communications specialist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Goodell spoke to the group about the need to change the culture of football. It wasn’t totally clear to Esposito what that meant, but she found Goodell solicitous, a good listener.

“To his credit,
he really wanted to know,” Esposito said. “I asked him to help me define what this cultural change really is. We started talking about the training and equipment. I said, ‘That’s not what I mean. What’s the culture you’re talking about?’ He said: ‘That is a great question, but I don’t have an answer for you.’ ”

Still, Esposito came away convinced that the NFL was committed to creating a healthier and safer sport.

Similar events followed. Amanda Rodriguez, who blogs under the name
Dumb Mom, said she learned about some “myths that people should know about.… I think that my perception of concussions has changed dramatically. One, I feel like football gets a pretty bad rap as the most dangerous sport. I didn’t realize that kids were being concussed in other sports, especially soccer. We learned about that at the NFL. And most concussions don’t happen in a sport. Kids get concussed riding their bikes.”

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.

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.”