Authors: Mark Fainaru-Wada
Not everyone was thrilled with the new arrangement. Bernie Parrish, the retired Browns defensive back, who had pledged his brain to BU, warned that the NFL was trying to buy off the researchers. He wanted no part of it. A year earlier, even before the NFL made its donation, Parrish had confronted Nowinski about this very possibility.
“Look, you can’t do that,” he told him. “Once you accept money from them, they
own
your ass.”
“We would never take money from them,” Nowinski responded, according to Parrish.
Now BU was doing exactly that. Parrish wasn’t happy.
“I want my brain back!” he declared during a follow-up hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. Not long after, he rescinded his pledge to BU.
Guskiewicz, who had savaged the NFL in a commencement speech and later compared Tagliabue’s slapdash creation of the MTBI committee to an airport security breach, was brought on as
a full-fledged member of the new panel, overseeing rules and equipment. From his days taping ankles for the Steelers, Guskiewicz had come far. His groundbreaking work would garner a $500,000 “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation for “major advances in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of sports-related concussions.” Guskiewicz had to think long and hard before accepting the NFL’s invitation. The league had approached him once before, an overture he had perceived as “damage control” to show that the NFL was doing something “without
canning Casson and Viano and admitting we were fools.” Guskiewicz had said no that time, but now Casson and Viano were gone and everything was different, he believed. It was a total reversal. Guskiewicz signed on as an unpaid member of the committee, although he recognized that one of the first questions people would ask was “Did the NFL buy Kevin Guskiewicz?”
For years, the old committee boasted just one neurosurgeon, Hank Feuer of the Colts. It had been just another sign of the NFL’s lack of seriousness about concussions—the virtual absence of the doctors most intimately familiar with the brain. Now the NFL was
appointing brain surgeons to head the new committee. The cochairs were Richard Ellenbogen and Hunt Batjer, respected neurosurgeons with no previous ties to the NFL. Ellenbogen was chief of neurosurgery at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, one of the country’s busiest brain trauma facilities. His specialty was children. Ellenbogen had helped pass the Zackery Lystedt Law, which set strict return-to-play guidelines in Washington State, mandating the removal of any young athlete suspected of having a concussion. The law was named after a middle schooler in Maple Valley, Washington, who had returned to play after a concussion and developed a brain hemorrhage that almost cost him his life. Ellenbogen’s team had performed several surgeries on the boy.
Goodell had recruited
Ellenbogen personally. The brain surgeon was on his way to the emergency room one morning when his cell phone rang. The caller identified himself as the NFL commissioner. Ellenbogen thought it was one of his colleagues or an old friend having some fun with him, so he proffered Goodell an obscenity. Goodell assured him that he was in fact the NFL commissioner and was looking for a doctor to chair his new concussion committee. “I felt like such a dope,” Ellenbogen recalled. He met with Goodell and agreed to take the job.
Batjer, a native Texan, was just completing a 17-year run as chairman of neurosurgery at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. When Batjer got the call from the NFL, it immediately touched a nerve. He reflected back on an experience he’d had two years earlier while watching an exhibition soccer match in Lake Forest, Illinois. During the game, a player was knocked unconscious.
After spending several minutes on his back, the player returned to action only to collapse face-first on the turf. Batjer rushed onto the field. He feared the young man was dead.
“I’m a neurosurgeon,” Batjer said as he approached the player, who thankfully was beginning to stir. “This kid is out of here. He needs to get to the Lake Forest emergency room. I’ll drive him. He needs a CT scan now.”
“I’m sorry, Doc, thanks for introducing yourself,” someone told him. “But it’s the coach’s call.”
Batjer and Ellenbogen professed to know very little about the old NFL committee—or “the MB, whatever, TI committee,” as Ellenbogen referred to it—and the contempt it had engendered before its ignominious dissolution. In an interview for this book, Ellenbogen said he had reviewed one of “Elliot Pellman’s articles” for
Neurosurgery—
Paper Number 14, on biomechanics—but claimed, “I never knew there was a committee.” That statement appeared to be
at odds with Ellenbogen’s review, in which he wrote that the authors and “the NFL MTBI committee are to be congratulated on the 14th contribution in a superb series of the analysis of concussions in NFL players.”
The two neurosurgeons got an early crash course in what they were facing courtesy of the House Judiciary Committee. The football hearings the previous October had been so successful, the NFL so thoroughly demoralized, that the committee decided to take the show on the road in a series of forums across the country. One was held in New York. Linda Sanchez and her colleagues appeared slow to accept the legitimacy of the league’s new doctors. After listening to Batjer and Ellenbogen talk about their goals, Sanchez said they sounded “
like the same old NFL.” The two men had been on the job two months and felt they were being criticized for not solving the problem. Referring to the recent Deepwater Horizon disaster, Ellenbogen turned to Batjer and whispered: “That’s less time than oil has been spilling into the gulf.”
It was an early indication of the scrutiny they would find themselves under. Ellenbogen and Batjer wanted to ignore the NFL’s recent past, but because of it they wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt—not for a while, perhaps not ever.
“The NFL has had its four stages of grief: denial, more denial, some level of recognition, and now research,” said New York Democrat Anthony Weiner.
The NFL’s previous work was “infected,” Weiner told Batjer and Ellenbogen. Their immediate task was “to mop up.”
Ellenbogen decided the committee had to accomplish something, “one thing,” quickly. Even that, though, would not prove easy. The decision was made to produce a poster warning players about the dangers of concussions—a poster that would replace the NFL’s pamphlet insisting that “current research” hadn’t shown that repeated concussions could lead to long-term brain damage. Ellenbogen said as many as 30 people took part in crafting the new poster, including representatives of the new NFL committee, the NFLPA, and the Centers for Disease Control, as well as several lawyers. The poster they finally settled on was titled “CONCUSSION—A Must Read for NFL Players … Let’s Take Brain Injuries Out of Play.” The poster listed a series of concussion facts and symptoms, and it warned, “Repetitive brain injury, when not treated promptly and properly, may cause permanent damage to your brain.”
Ellenbogen said about the process of coming to agreement on the poster’s language: “It was the most painful thing I think I’ve ever done.”
There was no place for Bennet Omalu in this brave new world. While Nowinski and McKee were soaking up the spotlight, the man who had set the NFL’s concussion crisis in motion was carrying out his duties as San Joaquin County medical examiner, cutting up bodies at the dank coroner’s office in tiny French Camp, California, and moonlighting in the lab he had set up in his garage.
Omalu seemed like
a man in exile. His moods vacillated between a self-pitying desire to stay as far away from the NFL as possible and a yearning to be recognized for his historic discovery. One day Omalu would say, “To be honest with you, I really wish I never touched Mike Webster’s brain.” The next day he would rage against all the attention now going to the BU Group, whose members frequently downplayed the significance of his work.
BU’s researchers literally kept a file on what they alleged were
Omalu’s exaggerations, primarily his claims that he had discovered
CTE. (In fact, Omalu discovered brain damage in pro football players and applied the preexisting term
chronic traumatic encephalopathy
to the disease.) “Bennet has done a marvelous thing and deserves all the credit in the world,” said Cantu. “My problem with him is that he is not scrupulously sticking to the facts, ma’am. He embellishes remarkably. And that will bring him down.” Of course, some research scientists would soon level the same criticism at Cantu.
Nowinski was no more charitable. Speaking on the popular
Dennis & Callahan
radio show on Boston’s WEEI one day, he was asked, “What woke up the NFL?”
“I honestly believe having been in the meetings with the NFL last year that it was Dr. McKee,” he said, “because the first pathologist who looked at this work overinterpreted the findings and was not as credible.”
When Jeanne Marie Laskas,
a writer for
GQ
, contacted Nowinski in spring 2009 and asked where she could find Omalu, Nowinski replied, “Oh, he’s not in it anymore,” according to Laskas.
“It sounds like he discovered it,” she said.
“Well, he had a lot to do with it then, but he’s just not in it anymore. He moved,” said Nowinski. (Nowinski later said he told Laskas that Omalu wasn’t doing research with
him
anymore, not that he wasn’t doing it at all.)
Laskas eventually tracked down Omalu in French Camp. She discovered the “happiest man alive that I was asking” about CTE.
“But Dr. Omalu, I heard you aren’t in it anymore,” Laskas said.
“No! No!” Omalu said, his voice rising. “Dr. Omalu is in it! Dr. Omalu is in it!”
Omalu’s third paper on CTE in an NFL player—Andre Waters—was ultimately rejected by
Neurosurgery
, even though the diagnosis had made the front page of the
New York Times
. Omalu believed, without evidence, that this was because the three cases would have represented a series, and Apuzzo, doing the NFL’s bidding, didn’t want to acknowledge they were anything more than random. The Waters paper eventually appeared in
The Journal of Forensic Nursing
, a fact that was privately ridiculed by doctors affiliated with the league.
But Omalu brought many of his problems on himself. He couldn’t seem to get out of his own way,
never recognizing the need to filter.
In January 2010, he was invited to speak at the first meeting of a new concussion committee that had been formed by the Players Association. The meeting took place at a Palm Beach resort and drew dozens of current and former players, union officials, doctors, and widows. Hall of Fame defensive end Jack Youngblood stood by with a stopwatch, with instructions to sack any speaker who went over seven minutes.
Omalu droned on for 45 as Youngblood stood by, seemingly helpless to stop the cherubic African researcher. “What happened, Jack, your stopwatch break?” somebody asked Youngblood. Omalu left the crowd numb and murmuring. He again showed the grisly autopsy photos of Webster. “It was like crime photos, like Dillinger, you know?” said Lovell, who attended. “He had no idea how inappropriate that was or didn’t care.” Omalu then proposed that NFL players sit out at least 99 days after a concussion, at which point the players in attendance “started laughing in his face,” said Lovell. Even people originally sympathetic to Omalu’s cause were appalled. “He was just going on and on,” said Guskiewicz. “He put up those pictures of Mike on the slab. That may be very appropriate in a pure medical meeting where you’ve got a bunch of pathologists or even physicians. But you’ve got players in there. You had former teammates in there. You had some coaches. You had some former wives.”
Guskiewicz thought the event had the effect of further legitimizing BU and confirming some people’s worst fears about Omalu. “I think it exposed him in front of an audience and confirmed what some people had heard about him,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Ah, I’ve heard about this guy. And now I see. Now I understand.’ ”
But some people thought the backlash against Omalu went deeper than his indiscretions and outside-the-box proposals. Certainly, other researchers were unconventional and took provocative stances. Cantu would call for a complete
ban on tackle football for children under 14, a recommendation far more controversial than Omalu’s proposed three-month recovery period. And Omalu was vastly more qualified than many people now sitting at the NFL’s table, notably Nowinski.
Even people who didn’t sympathize with Omalu’s views marveled at the swiftness with which he was dispatched. “
He got steamrolled,” said Micky Collins, never a huge Omalu fan. “Completely. He was really the
first guy that did all this stuff, you know? He got rolled—rolled and put away wet.”
Bailes thought the NFL identified Omalu early on as
the league’s biggest threat, a bomb thrower who knew nothing about football and was therefore beholden to no one. That was one reason, Bailes believed, the league had invited him to the Chicago summit to present Omalu’s work but not Omalu himself. “I don’t think they liked the whole scene from the beginning,” said Bailes. “He was perhaps perceived as not mainstream, certainly not an American. It’s like, ‘How can a Nigerian doctor tell us what’s wrong with our sport?’ ”
Harry Carson, the Giants Hall of Fame linebacker, thought
Omalu’s marginalization was easy to understand: He looked and sounded different from every person in the medical establishment, the NFL, and the concussion committees. “I think it’s because he’s a black man, I honestly believe that,” Carson said. “And he’s not an American black man; he’s from Africa.” Before arriving in the NFL, Carson had attended South Carolina State, an obscure black school. He saw parallels between his life and Omalu’s. “It was up to me to prove people wrong, and I think with him it’s the same way,” he said. “People will think less of him because of his skin color. And it’s not because I’m black and he’s black. It is because he did the groundbreaking work.”
“This is something that is too big for everybody to not be included,” said Carson. “And when you have an authority like him on the outside looking in when he was the one who provided the information, there’s something wrong with that picture.”