League of Denial (33 page)

Former New York Jets neuropsychologist Bill Barr accused the NFL of cherry-picking data to support its assertion that pro football players recovered quickly and completely from concussions. (
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Ann McKee, a Packers fan and charismatic neuropathologist, became the unofficial spokeswoman for CTE. She came to believe that “most NFL players are going to get this. It’s just a question of degree.” (
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The BU Group (left to right): Bob Stern, Ann McKee, Chris Nowinski, and Bob Cantu. After splitting with Omalu, Nowinski assembled a team that gained international recognition as the leading researchers on football-related brain damage. (
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Kevin Guskiewicz, a University of North Carolina neuroscientist and former Steelers trainer, found dramatically higher rates of depression and dementia in NFL players. He compared the formation of the NFL’s MTBI committee to an airport security breach. (
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Junior Seau, one of the greatest linebackers in NFL history, was a San Diego icon. When he killed himself in 2012, several prominent research institutions engaged in an ugly battle over his brain. (
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Do you really understand?
Suddenly, there were a lot of interested parties posing the exact same question. For years, really, the battle over the NFL’s concussion policies had been confined largely to the pages of a medical journal and the few researchers who cared. People later forgot that the original Dissenters were a vociferous Gang of Four: Bob Cantu, Kevin Guskiewicz, Julian Bailes, and Bill Barr. (The superagent Leigh Steinberg was an honorary member, by virtue of his awareness campaign.) Within those circles, the NFL’s scientific transgressions were certainly a big deal, a source of constant discussion and indignation. But very little of the dispute had seeped out into the real world. Now the number of people openly challenging the NFL was growing by the day. They included reporters from powerful media organizations, especially Alan Schwarz of the
New York Times
and Peter Keating of ESPN; Omalu and Nowinski; and a growing number of prominent former players.

Harry Carson, the New York Giants linebacker of 13 years, had been
profoundly affected by Webster’s death. He had flown to Pittsburgh to attend the funeral out of respect for his former opponent and had spent time talking to Garrett, who described in detail his father’s horrific final years. Later, when Carson learned that Omalu had diagnosed Webster with brain damage, he was heartbroken. He partly blamed himself. Carson flashed back to the brutal tactics he had employed to try
to neutralize Webster’s incredible strength—how he gathered “all of my power from my big rear end and my thighs into my forearm,” which he unleashed on Webster’s head. “I’m the guy that he would fire off the ball to hit, and I would hit him in the face with my forearm, you know?” Carson said. “And so I was distributing the damage.”

Carson was well positioned as a spokesman for the cause of former players, a distinguished, imposing man still built like granite. He combined the sensitivity of a Manhattan psychoanalyst with the naked violence of the Pit. “I wasn’t known for getting my hands on the ball,” he wrote in his autobiography,
Captain for Life
, “but I was known for knocking a player’s
dick in the dirt if he came my way and I got a good shot on him.” When O. J. Simpson told Carson that
no player had hit him harder, “that made my year,” Carson wrote. Carson was so respected by his peers that coach Bill Parcells sent him out alone for the coin toss before the 1987 Super Bowl against the Broncos.

After his retirement in 1988, Carson had been open about his own struggles with depression. He confessed that he once considered driving his car off the Tappan Zee Bridge into the Hudson River. “I’d seen where there were people who would stop their car on the bridge and then jump off the bridge,” he said in an interview for this book. “If you’re on the Tarrytown side, there’s a curve. And I was thinking, ‘What if I accelerated, hit the guardrail, and go through?’ ” Carson found that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to his moods; they simply came over him like squalls. Only after he went to a neuropsychologist and described his symptoms—migraines, mysterious twitching in his arms and legs, sensitivity to bright lights—did it begin to make sense. The neuropsychologist diagnosed him with postconcussion syndrome related to his career.

The diagnosis seemed to liberate Carson. It also awakened him to the devastation he recognized among many of his peers. Carson held a dark view about NFL-style capitalism, how it chewed up and spit out players. “When someone gets hurt, you just find another part,” he said. “The reality is nobody gives a shit about those guys. I mean, their time is over. They don’t bring anything of value to the table. Some people feel like they need to just shut up, go away and enjoy your retirement and that’s it.” Webster’s death, he felt, had been a moment of shame for the
NFL, one of the lowest points in the history of the league. The NFL had abandoned Webster to the streets and fought him in court even after he was dead. “I felt like Mike lost his dignity,” said Carson. “That’s the thing with me that is important.”

In 2006, after years of being passed over, Carson was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He delivered his speech without notes. Standing in the same spot in Canton, Ohio, where Webster, a decade earlier, his mind already riddled with disease, had struggled to gather his thoughts, Carson used the occasion to call out the NFL:

Carson’s speech, coming as the first documented cases linking football and brain damage were revealed, added his powerful voice to the growing list of people calling for the NFL to take action. The setting was symbolic. It had been just a few years earlier that Steve DeKosky, the Alzheimer’s expert, had been ignored when he asked the Hall of Fame if
he could study players for signs of neurological disease. Webster himself had viewed the Hall as a sick ward for discarded legends. And now here was Carson, one of its newest members, using his induction speech as a platform to “implore” the NFL and the union to do the right thing. As more and more Hall of Famers became mentally ill, their brains and bodies destroyed, the Canton shrine took on a completely different meaning.

Tagliabue had created the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee under pressure in 1994. Now, in 2007, the committee’s body of work—a veritable fortress of denial—was beginning to crumble. Schwarz, who was brought on full-time by the
Times
shortly after the Andre Waters story was published, was helping to accelerate the process by writing stories that chipped away at the committee’s tortured logic. Schwarz and his editors realized that it was far more than one story: The entire sport was in crisis. Schwarz began to look at it from other angles. In one story,
he went back to one of the NFL’s most controversial pieces of research, NFL Paper Number 7, which concluded that returning to play in the same game posed no significant risk and suggested that “it might be safe for college/high school football players to be cleared to return to play on the same day as their injury.” It was an extraordinary statement: The NFL seemed to be prescribing the same aggressive approach for college and high school players, without actually studying them.

Two and a half years later, Schwarz interviewed the authors. Two of the five, Colts neurological consultant Hank Feuer and Cynthia Arfken, an associate professor in Wayne State University’s department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences who was brought on to conduct the statistical analysis, described the paper’s conclusions as unfounded and inappropriate. They hadn’t studied high school or college players, and so there was no basis for those claims. Arfken told Schwarz that the controversial “it might be safe” passage had been written into a final draft without her knowledge. Two other authors, Ira Casson and Dave Viano, the same scientists who had attacked Omalu, acknowledged putting in the provocative statement at the last minute to address, they said, comments by peer reviewers who had asked for analysis of the implications for high school and college players. Viano and Casson said both Arfken and Feuer had had a chance to review the final draft.

Feuer, a charter member of the MTBI committee, told the
Times
he
“would change that sentence; I’d eliminate it.” Years later, in an interview for this book, Feuer offered the same explanation as Lovell about why information he didn’t believe had made it into the paper: He hadn’t read it, only the material that was relevant to him.

Arfken had ended up on the paper entirely by chance. She got a call from Viano one day out of the blue; though they were colleagues at Wayne State, they didn’t know each other. “He called me because my name started with
A
,” Arfken said in an interview for this book. “He just went down the alphabet.”