League of Denial (41 page)

Omalu was thrust into an impossible situation: He could testify for the government—and against the man he idolized—or he could refuse and face the possibility of being deported or even indicted.

“I was scared shitless,” Omalu said.

Wecht understood Omalu’s predicament—to a point. “His ass was going to be sent back to Africa; you know the way the feds work,” he said. Omalu understood that Wecht didn’t want him to testify. “He believed I should have sacrificed myself for him,” said Omalu. Feeling like the world was closing in, Omalu quit his job and went into hiding. When the case went to trial, he testified for three excruciating days. Wecht never spoke to Omalu again, even after the trial resulted in a hung jury and the charges were later dismissed.

Omalu eventually landed a job as chief medical examiner in San Joaquin County, California, an agricultural hub about 80 miles east of San Francisco. While Nowinski gained power and recognition through his alliances with Boston University and the
New York Times
, Omalu and his colleagues were scattered around the country. The remnants of
the Omalu Group re-formed as the
Brain Injury Research Institute, a generic-sounding name they all vaguely disliked. The group was based in Morgantown, West Virginia, where Bailes continued to work as chairman of the neurosurgery department at West Virginia University. Fitzsimmons was still putting in 16-hour days in his Wheeling firehouse-office. The Brain Injury Research Institute’s designated brain chaser became Garrett Webster, operating out of the two-bedroom apartment he once had shared with his dad in Pittsburgh’s Moon Township.

There had always been a vampirish quality to the business of CTE. To survive and prosper, the researchers were on a constant search for fresh brains. But with concern about the disease growing, along with opportunities for money and prestige, the competition, now involving two research groups, grew more intense and macabre by the day. On May 25, 2008,
another former NFL player died young: Tom McHale, 45, a 6-4, 290-pound offensive guard who had spent nine years in the league before retiring after the 1995 season. He died of a drug overdose. The story was too familiar: A successful restaurateur after his retirement, a Cornell graduate, at the time of his death the once thoughtful and friendly McHale “was very, very different from the guy I married,” his wife, Lisa, said. “It was like he was a shell of his former self.”

The brilliant smile, the charisma, and the polished presentation all disappeared, replaced by the often vacant and disheveled look of a man who no longer cared. Even more than becoming a football player, McHale had aspired to run his own restaurant. It was his passion, and he loved everything about it, from the cooking to the customers. Then one night, lying in bed, McHale told Lisa, “I’m not enjoying the restaurant business anymore. I think I want to get out.” She couldn’t believe it. The restaurant was “his baby, his brainchild.” Gradually, McHale lost interest in everything. He stopped cooking and no longer went skeet shooting or bike riding. He began to distance himself from the people he loved.

The Omalu Group got to McHale’s family first and made its pitch. Then BU stepped in and “convinced the wife to split the brain in two,” Bailes informed the group in an e-mail. About a week later,
Nowinski called Omalu to suggest that the two groups work together on this case. McKee and Omalu would analyze the tissue and then jointly contact Lisa McHale with the findings before making the announcement together. In
fact, that was the scenario many researchers thought most appropriate. Sharing tissue and conducting independent analyses would help ensure the accuracy of the findings and provide a deeper understanding, especially for a scientific phenomenon that was not well understood.

However, by that point, there was too much bad blood between the groups. No one with the Brain Injury Research Institute trusted Nowinski. When Omalu e-mailed Fitzsimmons and Bailes to ask what they thought about Nowinski’s proposal, Fitzsimmons wrote: “I suggest we do our thing & just disregard Chris.” Bailes quickly agreed. The group moved ahead alone, without informing Nowinski. Omalu, who had set up a small lab in his Lodi garage, worked feverishly to make a diagnosis before his rivals. “I hope we can know the results before the Boston group.
,” Omalu wrote in an e-mail to his colleagues. In another e-mail, he suggested that the Brain Injury Research Institute “may have to plan on how to optimize the utility of the case and possibly announce it before the Boston group.
”

On July 1, six weeks after McHale’s death, Omalu sent an e-mail to his colleagues with the subject line “Thomas McHale, NEWS ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

“THOMAS MCHALE IS POSITIVE FOR CTE,” he wrote.

“Please let us have a phone conference ASAP!! We have to announce this before the Boston group. We also need to inform the family.… Congratulations!!”

Bailes contacted Lisa McHale’s father, David D’Alessandro, a surgeon who had become the point person for the family. He explained the significance of the results. Omalu followed up with his own call to D’Alessandro. But McHale’s family was reticent about going public. “Lisa is still struggling with the diagnosis and it is my understanding that Lisa may be afraid of losing her benefits and rapport with the NFL and probably does not want to upset the NFL,” Omalu wrote to his colleagues. (Lisa McHale said she never spoke to Omalu, and she didn’t recall expressing to her father any fears about losing benefits or upsetting the league.) Omalu mailed her a copy of his report. Lisa was devastated. She hadn’t expected brain damage. Her husband had had no history of concussions. She had thought his brain would be valuable as a “control,”
a healthy specimen to measure against diseased brains. In fact, McHale was sick, his brain riddled with CTE.

Bailes suggested giving the family time to digest the diagnosis. Meanwhile, Nowinski, believing he had an agreement to make a joint announcement, was
trying to contact Omalu. McKee had completed her own analysis and had also found CTE. But Omalu wouldn’t return calls or e-mails from Cantu or Nowinski. Finally, Nowinski contacted Lisa McHale, apologizing for the delay.

“Sorry, but we’re having trouble getting in touch with the other guys,” he said.

“Oh, they called me two or three months ago,” Lisa said.

“Really?” said a surprised Nowinski. “Did they tell you the results?”

“Yes, they said he was positive for CTE,” she said.

“At that point, I said, ‘All right, fine, all bets are off,’ ” said Nowinski. “They broke the agreement.” Among other things, Nowinski thought the Omalu Group had created a potential disaster if McKee had come up with a different conclusion than Omalu had. “If we didn’t find it, it would be very confusing,” he said. “And they wouldn’t return our frickin’ calls. I mean, what can we do?”

Nowinski told Lisa McHale that he believed it was important to
go public with the results. Lisa, whatever reticence she may have expressed previously, agreed.

The plan Nowinski developed would put on full display his gifts as an activist. He proceeded to choreograph a piece of guerrilla theater on the NFL’s biggest stage. He persuaded the McHale family not only to come forward but to make the announcement during a press conference the week before Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa, where McHale had spent most of his playing career.

In addition to Lisa McHale, Nowinski brought in the entire team for the announcement: McKee, Cantu, even Ted Johnson, the former Patriots linebacker. And, of course, Nowinski himself.
The press conference was held at a Tampa Marriott. The turnout said a lot about the level of public interest at the time. Earlier that day, more than 4,000 people had attended the Super Bowl’s annual Media Day. Less than two dozen showed up to hear that another dead football player had brain
damage. But Schwarz was there for the
Times
, as was a reporter for the Associated Press, ensuring that the news hit the wires. A press release announced: “Leading medical experts at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) reported today that nine-year NFL veteran, former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Tom McHale was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma, when he died in 2008 at the age of 45.”

McHale was the sixth former NFL player to be diagnosed with CTE.

There was no mention that Omalu also had studied McHale’s brain and reached the same conclusion. Omalu said he
learned of BU’s announcement on TV. Nowinski and the Boston Group had taken control of the issue and soon would be recognized as the leading authority on football-related brain damage. Omalu and his colleagues were destined to become an afterthought.

The SLI press release also noted that the group had discovered “early evidence of CTE in the youngest case to date, a recently deceased 18-year-old boy who suffered multiple concussions in high school football.”

“This should be a wake-up call, especially to parents, coaches, and league administrators,” said Nowinski. “We’re exposing more than 1 million kids to early-onset brain damage, and we don’t know yet how to prevent it.”

Asked why the NFL had been so lax, Nowinski turned lawyerly: “I think it’s because this is considered an on-the-job injury and it’s a huge liability.” He said he was in Tampa to recruit more players to donate their brains.

“I find these results to be not only incredibly significant but profoundly disturbing,” said Lisa McHale, who would go on to sit on the Sports Legacy Institute’s Family Advisory Board and serve as SLI’s director of family relations. “We don’t want to destroy the game. We want to make it safer.” Even so, she said she was questioning whether she would let her sons, then 9 and 11, continue to play football.

But of all the people who spoke that day, none was more powerful than Ann McKee. In many ways, it was her
coming-out party as a
spokeswoman for the disease. She was a natural: thoughtful, reasoned, believable. She made it seem perfectly natural that on the eve of the Super Bowl, a neuropathologist was standing in a conference room showing slides of a diseased brain to a bunch of sportswriters. McKee pointed out the clumps of tau, the brown splotches that had eaten away at McHale’s identity. This was not the normal brain of a 45-year-old man, McKee explained. It looked like the brain of a 72-year-old former boxer. McKee said she had been looking at brains for more than two decades and that what had happened to Tom McHale was not at all normal.

“I have never seen this disease in the general population, only in these athletes,” McKee said. “It’s a crisis, and anyone who doesn’t recognize the severity of the problem is in tremendous denial.”

Not long afterward, McKee’s phone rang. It was the NFL calling.

McKee would remember exactly where she was and what she was doing when she listened to Ira Casson’s voice mail.
It was that kind of call. She was taking part in a conference at the VA, and when she came out of a session, Casson had left her a message. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what does Ira Casson want?’ ” McKee had never met Dr. No. She hadn’t seen his virtuoso performance on HBO. She hadn’t heard how he had mocked Bailes at the NFL Concussion Summit. And she had no idea that Casson, along with Pellman and Viano, had tried to get Omalu’s work killed. But she had heard enough to be wary. “I knew he wasn’t a friend,” she said.

McKee returned the call nervously. Casson was pleasant and said the members of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee wanted to invite her to New York to present her work. They wanted to view the cases personally. McKee, though intimidated, welcomed the idea; she believed in the work, she knew it mattered, and she loved football. She hoped to convince the NFL that CTE was something it should pay attention to.

As they set a date for the meeting, McKee decided she “needed a little friendly accompaniment.”
She asked if Nowinski could attend, but the NFL refused. “Fine, I’m not coming,” she said. The league relented, though it was suggested that Nowinski not speak during the meeting. McKee also decided to invite
another expert in neurodegenerative
disease, Daniel Perl, the director of neuropathology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a consultant to BU’s Alzheimer’s Center. Perl was a heavyweight; among other things, he was the leading expert on a mysterious brain disorder found only on Guam. He had been fascinated by McKee’s CTE cases. The disease clearly wasn’t Alzheimer’s, and the sheer amount of tau was stunning. Perl found he didn’t need a microscope to see it: He could hold up some of the slides to the light and tell the brains were severely damaged.