Concussion Inc. (29 page)

Which, of course, brings me to this blog's bête noire
and favorite punching bag: Dr. Joe Maroon of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the NFL, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and ImPACT Applications, Inc. I could fill an ebook with Maroon material not covered in
League of Denial
. Come to think of it, I already did.

But Maroon does get his, too, when he lies about the concussion history of ex-Steeler suicide Terry Long; when he feuds unproductively with pioneer researcher Omalu; when he issues a dingbat endorsement of a supplement called Sports Brain Guard; and when he co-authors the UPMC study that got hyped by the Riddell helmet company and drew the ire of Senator Tom Udall. (Curiously, and unreported by the book, Udall's Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the subject didn't name Maroon — one of many examples of the good doc's Teflon treatment in government investigations and media accounts.)

League of Denial
doesn't mention Maroon's position as WWE medical director, though it recounts the Chris Benoit double murder-­suicide and has an extended passage on the meeting at the West Virginia Brain Injury Institute, arranged by Maroon, at which an independent researcher, Peter Davies, examined Omalu's brain tissue slides and, much to the NFL's chagrin, confirmed Omalu's breakthrough findings.

I am perplexed by the Fainarus' decision to bestow on Maroon a quote bearing the moral of the whole shootin' match: “If only 10 percent of mothers in America begin to conceive of football as a dangerous game, that is the end of football.” Any of a dozen other folks, all with demonstrably superior sincerity, surely said something similar at one time or another, and, worse, Maroon to this day sticks with an outlandish sound byte about how more people die in automobile accidents than on football fields. Oh well. The Fainarus seem less convinced than I am of the centrality of Dr. Joe in concussion cover-up and opportunism, and they have a right to their own conclusions.

Generally, I would describe
League of Denial
as the definitive work on the top-down generation-long strangulation of pertinent brain injury data emanating from the NFL's Park Avenue headquarters. If the worst things I can say about this book are in the mild dissents above — along with disappointment in
League of Denial's
poorly done index — then that is very high praise. As we move forward, other writers will stand on the Fainarus' shoulders and execute the next definitive work, on this sport's bottom-up toxic culture.

..........

1
For a good analysis of Ellenbogen's flawed stance, see “For the NFL, Is More Protection Really the Answer to Its Concussion Quandary?” by Mike Seely of Seattle Weekly, blogs.seattleweekly.com/­dailyweekly/2011/05/for_the_nfl_is_more_protection.php.

2
www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/sports/football/30concussions.html.

3
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ninerinsider/detail?entry_id=92054.

4
host.madison.com/ct/sports/football/professional/article_20a7a8f2-280b-11e0-aca5-001cc4c03286.html#ixzz1VbY5XaoE.

5
www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7376583n&tag=mncol;lst;1.

6
articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-08-31/news/ct-met-rocky-clark-­insurance-0831-20110831_1_medicaid-program-hmo-style-new-­doctors#.TnjzC5mJFhE.email.

7
newsok.com/city-area-player-of-the-week-corben-jones-defense-gets-yukon-back-on-winning-track/article/3610037.

8
This is from a blog at BaltimoreSun.com. The post is no longer accessible online.

9
This Houston Chronicle article is no longer accessible at the news­paper's website.

10
See “Why Are Ray Lewis And ‘Friday Night Lights''s Peter Berg ­Shilling For The NFL On Player Safety?,” deadspin.com/5880953/why-are-ray-lewis-and-friday-night-lights-peter-berg-shilling-for-the-nfl-on-player-safety.

11
www.cbssports.com/nfl/story/17423602/death-of-football-thats-crazy-until-you-start-thinking-about-it.

12
See “Bounties, crushing hits long a part of NFL,”www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/10/SPH51NIKRH.DTL.

13
The full 10-page brief is viewable at muchnick.net/impactfraudclaim.pdf.

14
concussionpolicyandthelaw.com/2012/11/02/impacts-reliability-­challenged-in-court/
.

15
See “Jimmie Giles: Legally Eligible for FULL Disability Benefits,”
davepear.com/blog/2012/11/jimmie-giles-legally-eligible-for-full-­disability-benefits/
.

16
www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/opinion/should-kids-play-football.html.

17
Le Batard: “Jason Taylor's pain shows NFL's world of hurt,”
www.­miamiherald.com/2013/01/13/3179926/dan-le-batard-jason-­taylors-pain.html
.

18
See
blog.4wallspublishing.com/2011/06/23/research-for-nfl-brain-­trauma-sputters-along.aspx
.

19
See
espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/9561661/central-figure-nfl-­concussion-crisis-appointed-years-ago-league-position-commissioner-paul-tagliabue-patient
.

20
(
www.sportsonearth.com/article/47668524/
.)

21
www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2013/08/culture-war-over-football/68464/
.

22
www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/233287.pdf.

23
See “Plagiarism or coincidence? Writer, Wall Street Journal square off,”
www.politico.com/story/2013/08/daniel-flynn-wall-street-journal-­plagiarism-95865.html#ixzz2crLRYvY2
.

24
See the video at
www.wjla.com/articles/2013/08/derek-sheely-s-­parents-sue-frostburg-state-university-over-son-s-death-93210.html
.

25
muchnick.net/hearnletter.pdf
.

26
www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2013/09/family_of_montclair_high_school_football_player_ryne_dougherty_who_died_in_2008_settles_lawsuit_for.html
.

JOVAN BELCHER, BOB COSTAS, AND ME

1 December 2012..........

Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, 25, murdered his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, 22 (mother of their two-month-old ­daughter), this morning at home in front of her mother, then drove to the team's Arrowhead Stadium facility, scuffled with personnel there, and shot himself to death.

Even those who did not know Belcher as either a player or a person extend sympathy to the families and friends of the two dead, and the many traumatized.

In 2009, I wrote the book
Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling's Cocktail of Death
, about the 2007 incident in which WWE's Chris Benoit murdered his wife and their seven-year-old son before taking his own life.

In my short ebook
UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero
, published earlier this year, I wrote: “Sure, we don't know what the concussion tipping point will be. But I, for one, have a vision of what it
could
be: for example, a three-time champion quarterback murdering his supermodel wife on the 50-yard line at halftime of the Super Bowl — and taking out the intermission song-and-dance act along with her.”

In a little more than a month, the Notre Dame football team taking the field for the national college championship game will include a player who, two years ago, was cleared of criminal charges and campus discipline after the suicide of a woman who said he had raped her. The athletic director at Notre Dame, Jack Swarbrick, was previously a practicing lawyer and is a long-time business associate and friend of USA Swimming executive director Chuck Wielgus. In a deposition and to this blog, Swarbrick refused to discuss his advice to Wielgus on how USA Swimming should handle its long-standing coach sexual abuse scandal, on the grounds that such conversations were attorney-client-privileged.

The malignancies of our sports system are metastasizing. The fanboys and girls can continue to make excuses, rationalize, deny this state of affairs. That is what they do best.

The rest of us will face it and do something about it.

2 December 2012..........

The No. 1 question I'm being asked is whether Jovan Belcher had a known concussion history. The short answer: no. The long answer: it doesn't matter. The “known” part would be ambiguous, anyway. The “concussion” part wouldn't reveal the damage caused by the thousands of subconcussive blows endured throughout his football career (and in his high school wrestling career, it must be added).

Only postmortem examination of Belcher's brain tissue could reveal whether chronic traumatic encephalopathy played a part in the murder of Kasandra Perkins, the mother of their infant daughter, ­followed by his own suicide.

But unlike, for example, Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, Belcher pointed the gun at his head rather than his chest before pulling the trigger. (Chris Benoit, the WWE star who was the subject of my 2009 book, hanged himself on his exercise machine pulley.)

So I don't know how much useful brain tissue the technicians at the crime scene and the coroner in Kansas City were able to preserve. I'm guessing that the leading light of the CTE field, Dr. Bennet Omalu, who is also the chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County, California, might have a chance, if he has access, to make at least tentative findings in this area, but they would be controversial. (Omalu tells me by email: “The answer is a bold yes [in the hands of a] skilled forensic pathologist who has vast experience with cases like that. We have been able to perform autopsies on individuals buried for two to three years, and still we were able to examine their brains and derive definitive diagnoses. A gunshot wound to the head, or shotgun wound to the head, should not preclude CTE analyses and/or diagnoses.”)

And now on to what I consider the nitty-gritty, which is not TV show forensic heroics. It's what I call “the cocktail of death” and what Matt Chaney calls “the spiral of denial.” Football's profiteers and their fanboys are playing the old tobacco-style shell game here. As the dramatic anecdotes, buttressing epidemiological data, emerge and accumulate, does it matter whether an individual died of lung cancer, emphysema, or heart disease? By the same token, the Belcher baby and the society that picks up the pieces — literally — of her father's brain and consequences don't much care if her father died of CTE, drug abuse, inchoate mental imbalance, or toxic levels of DirecTV. She's just as orphaned regardless. How about “all of the above”?

The thing about football is that it disables and kills in so many ways that you can't possibly codify all of them, much less produce a consensus pie chart. You just have to exercise some common sense and downsize the industry … excuse me, the
sport
… starting with kids. Let the last holdout child-abusing parents send their little boys out to slaughter in the name of glory, spectacle, and character-building. But not on the public dime.

A further exchange on Twitter, with Dave “@EdgeOfSports” Zirin about corporate media sports murder self-censorship.

Zirin: “Neither Fox nor CBS mentioned the words ‘murder,' ‘Kasandra Perkins' or even ‘Jovan Belcher' in halftime shows. League directives?”

Muchnick: “I can do better than that. NYT's 2300-word profile in 2010 of Senate candidate Linda McMahon didn't include ‘Benoit' or ‘death.'”

3 December 2012..........

Tracking the slow or fast decline of American football, as driven by public health concerns, involves following the science, of course — in addition to following the deaths, the money, and the sound bytes. Bob Costas went all lofty on us last night at halftime of NBC's
Sunday Night Football
while addressing the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide. As Costas would have it, football safety is the background of this story. The foreground is
gun control
. I disagree.

With good timing, a new chronic traumatic encephalopathy study by the Boston research group makes the publicity rounds today. This one has numerosity, 85 donor brains, and Dr. Robert Cantu correctly observes that anyone who still doubts the discrete pathology of CTE no longer should.

When it comes to the risk thing, Chris Nowinski reminds us that predictions are “a gambler's game.” This layman would like to pursue that line for a moment, and again advance the idea that the two interconnected components of traumatic brain-injury study tend to get glibly atomized, when they should be integrated.

One component is the sports injury known as concussion. This is now understood to come in both detected and undetected varieties: observable loss of consciousness as well as less easily identified symptoms. One of the costs of the new concussion awareness has been the evolution of the term “concussion” into virtual catchall status.

The other component of football TBI is
subconcussive accumulation
, with CTE-associated long-term effects. At the far end of this scale, we find dementia and cognitive impairment in ex-athletes who were much too young.

“The dots are really about total head trauma,” Cantu tells the
New York Times
. This leads him to emphasize such things as reduced contact in practices, hit-sensor technology in helmets, and — to be fair to his boldest and most admirable point — recently articulated support of the camp advocating elimination of tackle football below age 14.

But what I'd like to ask is whether the football safety debate properly stops at “total head trauma.” Cantu's colleague, Dr. Ann McKee, summarizes the same study similarly but differently, saying, “If individuals play football —
especially if they have concussions that aren't properly managed
— they can develop areas of brain damage.” The italics are my own, underlining what I think these hard-working researchers themselves might not fully appreciate about the dissonance of their message.

For it seems to me that football serves up more than one TBI problem. There's a “total” problem, in the form of concussions-cum-­subconcussions. And there's an entirely “random” but nonetheless systematic problem, in the form of reported catastrophic injuries and unreported chronic ones. The latter problem is less conducive to hard science. It suggests that this subject is, at root, social — non-­disciplinary, or at least “multi-disciplinary.” No one is lining up to hand out grants for
that
.

The “dots,” in my view, are not some still-undeveloped quotient of hits-per-brain-cell-per-age, as the Cantu crowd maintains. Take a look at the recent interview by
USA Today
of Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, the National Football League's brain-injury co-chair. Ellenbogen spent most of his energy warning against snap visual diagnoses by press box–level consultants or even ad hoc sideline neurologists. He argued that the team medical and training staffs, those with the most knowledge of individual players' baselines and histories, are still the best equipped to manage the fallout of in-game collisions.

Ellenbogen may be right, but my point is that the whole discussion shows how much more artistic than scientific the concussion-­management game is. It leads to the question of whether America's parents are truly,
consciously
prepared to put their son's futures, and broader national male mental health, in the hands of people who, for all intents and purposes, are making up the rules as they go along.

Last night NBC, an NFL broadcast partner, in a halftime segment Dan Patrick had hyped as “must-see TV” (not that he or his bosses care about ratings or anything, mind you), made sure not to go there. Costas firewalled his Belcher civics lesson at gun control. Speaking as someone who has never owned or even fired a gun, I don't think that approach moved the chains. Indeed, it may have had the effect of shortening the shelf life of the tragic weekend news, rather than extending our collective memory of it.

4 December 2012..........

On Monday night, Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III dazzled ESPN's football nation with his ball-handling. But Griffin had nothing on the verbal wizardry of NBC's Bob Costas, who a night earlier, during his halftime commentary on the Jovan Belcher ­murder-suicide, quoted columnist Jason Whitlock's call for gun ­control reform.

In the culture-war fishbowl that is the New York media world (and to mangle a metaphor), Costas became a lightning rod. As new details emerged in the Belcher investigation, the focus was on how Fox News was calling Costas the most horrible person in the world for seeking to trample the Second Amendment and how MSNBC was calling Fox News the most horrible network in the world for calling Costas the most horrible person in the world.

And the NFL band played on.

Costas told the
New York Times
that “the criticisms of his commentary ‘hold no weight with me' because the same people saying that that was an inappropriate time and place to talk about the gun issue ‘would have thought it was fine if they agreed with what I was saying.'”
1

Well, actually, I agreed with what Costas was saying but I don't think his commentary was fine — because it was a diversion from encouraging his audience, in a football broadcast, to think about the likelier far larger role of football in the murder of Kasandra Perkins and suicide of Jovan Belcher.

Even Dave Zirin, the sports editor of the
Nation
, who praised Costas to the skies for having a smidgen of substance (in contrast with Fox and CBS on Sunday football), is saying today on Twitter, “Terrible indictment of media that story of Kasandra Perkins & Jovan Belcher is now a debate about Bob Costas. NFL breathes sigh of relief.”

As Costas's fellow gun control proponent, but one disappointed that he chose the easy and somewhat self-aggrandizing culture war instead of the truly instructive one right in front of his nose, I want to make another point: the Belcher case seems to me a pretty flabby prop for the gun control argument.

I wrote a book about the 2007 double murder-suicide of WWE's Chris Benoit; no gun was involved there. Further, the Belcher reports show that he fired nine shots into his girlfriend, then tenderly kissed her. This was no 10-year-old kid pulling a firearm from the mantle and accidentally discharging it.

All in all, we need fewer reenactments of hardened cable-news crossfire on gun control, and more non-trivial discussion about the elephant in the room: the pistol that went off inside Belcher's brain.

4 December 2012..........

In the past couple of days I've taken some new swings at my friend Bob Costas. I don't want to exaggerate or grandstand by implying that we're close pals. But we are fellow St. Louis sports mafiosi, he has done me some nice turns, and I have great respect for his body of work. On the latter, how could I not? Even if this is prettiest-lady-in-­Siberia territory, it bears repeating that Costas, in terms of communicated intelligence about the world at large, is head and shoulders above his contemporaries in sports broadcasting.