League of Denial (7 page)

The players were slow to come around. “Their agents called, their mothers called, everyone called until we convinced them that it was to their benefit,” said Maroon. “If they had a concussion and we went by the previous guidelines, they might be out for three weeks. But if neurocognitively they returned to normal, we might be able to let them go back on the field sooner.”

Twenty-seven Steeler guinea pigs ultimately volunteered after Maroon and Lovell guaranteed that the results would remain private. It was now 1993, and Maroon and Lovell were trying not to offend anyone.
“To be honest with you, I thought it was pretty cool to be nerds and get to do this stuff, to work with athletes,” said Lovell. “We didn’t want to get ourselves thrown out by becoming a pain in the neck.” He tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. A speech pathologist administered the baseline tests during training camp. Lovell kept the data locked in a filing cabinet in his office.

The immediate hope was that the data would be used to help decide when a player was ready to return after sustaining a concussion. But almost from the beginning it went well beyond that.

One of the first guinea pigs was Webster’s former roommate Merril Hoge. He wasn’t totally sure why he signed up. “You couldn’t be forced to do it, and I actually didn’t want to do it,” Hoge said. Like everyone else, he thought that on the spectrum of potential career-ending injuries, a concussion wouldn’t even register. “I mean, I got a helmet on,” he reasoned. But he shrugged and took the test.

In his six years since being drafted, Hoge had learned a lot about the speed and brutality of the NFL. What he hadn’t learned from Webster, he had experienced himself. He found that there was a primitive quality to the pro game: Those who survived ate, paid their mortgages, and supported their kids on football. “No wonder it’s so intense,” he thought to himself. “This is people’s livelihoods.” He was astonished at how nakedly cutthroat it all was. One day at practice, an injured player violated Noll’s edict to keep away from drills. The rule was a not-so-subtle message: If you’re injured, not only are you of no use to us but we don’t want you tainting the rest of the team. The player had wandered too close to the drill, apparently trying to impress the coaches, when Noll spotted him and said: “Go on. Get out of here.”

The player moved closer, not totally comprehending. “No, get your stuff,” said Noll. “You’re done.”

“He cut him right there on the field,” Hoge said.

Hoge made his mind up that he would compensate for whatever physical limitations he had by following the rules and making himself indispensable. He made the Steelers in 1987 as a third-string fullback. His second year he started eight games but led the team in rushing. By his third year, Hoge owned the job. He was the quintessential Steelers
running back—tough, a grinder. He reminded some people of Rocky Bleier, another rugged back who blocked well, caught passes, churned out yards, and, above all, never gave an inch.

At some point in his career, Hoge decided he understood why the rule makers of professional football created the huddle: “It’s a chance for everybody to pause and go, ‘Okay, does anybody want to quit?’ It’s so physically challenging that you need that 35 seconds to revisit” your decision.

One afternoon against the Philadelphia Eagles, Hoge caught a pass and turned upfield when he ran into the linebacker Seth Joyner. The two men had collided on a similar play the previous year, with Hoge getting the better of Joyner. This time the collision triggered a melee. After the two men were separated, Hoge screamed: “I’ll whip your ass, Seth, you punk!” The two players returned to their respective huddles but continued to jaw across the line. Finally, the Steelers were backed up near their own goal line when Brister called for a draw play. He handed off to Hoge, who found himself staring into a human wall. It consisted not only of Seth Joyner but also of Jerome Brown, a defensive tackle, and Reggie White, one of the most feared defensive ends in the history of the NFL.

Hoge thought: I’m gonna fuck them up. I’m gonna hit them as hard as they’ve ever been hit in their life.

He plunged headfirst into the wall. “When I hit, I felt like my internal organs just went out my ass,” he said. “It was like
poof!
”

He struggled to the sideline and sidled up to his friend Tunch Ilkin, the Steelers offensive tackle.

“Hey, Tunch, look around at the back of my pants,” Hoge said. “I think I shit my pants.”

Ilkin at first couldn’t detect anything. Hoge lifted up his jersey.

“You shit your pants,” said Ilkin.

“I played a whole quarter like that,” Hoge said. “We’re in the huddle, and everyone’s like, ‘Gawd, does it stink!’ ”

Hoge thought concussions were the least of his concerns. But he did notice that the effects were varied and sometimes bizarre. One Sunday at Denver’s Mile High Stadium, he ran into Steve Atwater, the Broncos free safety, and found that he couldn’t remember the plays or the
snap count. He went to the sideline to sort it out and suddenly, without warning, burst into tears. He felt humiliated. Only later did Hoge learn that this was another symptom of a concussion: If the area of the brain that controls emotions becomes damaged, people sometimes cry unexpectedly.

Often, the most devastating hits occurred in practice. One day, the Steelers’ first-team offense was playing against the first-team defense, when a play was called that required Hoge to block the strong safety Donnie Shell. Shell weighed just 185 pounds, but his technique was so refined that it was like he turned himself into a tactical missile. When Hoge heard the call in the huddle, he began to pump himself up. He weighed 225 pounds and figured that his greater mass would win the day. “I’m gonna bust that little punk in half,” he thought. Hoge wheeled around end and headed straight for Shell. The two men collided in the open field at full speed.

“When I hit him, it was like a lightning bolt ran right through my body, like I’d been paralyzed and electrocuted at the same time,” Hoge said. “My helmet got knocked off, and literally on the left side I was numb. I couldn’t move.”

Hoge was still lying there when he heard Noll’s voice ring out: “
That’s
it! Now
that’s
how you got to hit him!”

Through his haze Hoge heard: “Run it again!”

In 1994, one year after he participated in Maroon and Lovell’s experiment (and promptly forgot about it), Hoge signed as a free agent with the Chicago Bears. It would not be a long and fruitful relationship.

During an exhibition Monday-night game at Kansas City, Hoge caught a pass out of the backfield and headed toward the goal line. Several defenders closed in, including nine-time Pro Bowl linebacker Derrick Thomas. As Hoge braced himself for the collision, Thomas plowed his helmet into Hoge’s ear hole.

Hoge lay on the turf, motionless. “I’ve never been in an earthquake, but the first thing I thought was, ‘Holy cow, man, the earth is shaking,’ ” he said. “It was shaking so bad I couldn’t get up. I had no equilibrium. I was like, ‘This damn earth won’t quit shaking.’ ” Tim Worley, a former Steelers running back who had come over with Hoge, was one of
the first people to arrive on the scene. “Aw, damn,” Worley said, looking down at his obliterated friend.

Worley was about to motion for the trainers, but then, amazingly, Hoge got up. His brain was on autopilot. It was as if Webster were inside his head screaming: “Get up!” Hoge made it through one more play and then stumbled to the sideline.

“Where are you?” a trainer asked.

“Tampa Bay,” he replied.

Asked why he thought that, since he was standing on the field at Arrowhead Stadium, Hoge said: “Because I can hear the ocean.”

The Bears sent him to the hospital for a computed tomography (CT) scan. At one point, Hoge wandered off and was found in a waiting room three floors up. He had no idea how he had gotten there.

As he prepared to board the team plane that night back to Chicago, Hoge already was thinking about the next game.

“Do you think I’ll be able to play?” he asked Bears physician John Munsell.

“We’ll let you know tomorrow,” Munsell said.

When Hoge arrived at the Bears’ training facility the next day, he looked in the mirror and was shocked. His face was white. His head was pounding “like I had been hit with a bat.” But still he wanted to play even though the next game was also an exhibition. When the head trainer, Fred Caito, informed him he’d have to sit out on Munsell’s orders, Hoge asked if he could call the doctor and try to talk him out of it. The trainer said no.

Hoge came back the next day.

“Did you guys change your mind?” he asked Caito.

The answer was still no. Hoge now set his sights on the season opener, two weeks away. He desperately wanted to play. The Bears, who had just signed him to a three-year, $2.4 million contract, wanted that too, of course. Unlike Pittsburgh, the Bears had neither a neurological specialist like Joe Maroon nor a diagnostic test to measure how Hoge’s brain was functioning. It was all an educated guess as to whether Hoge, chomping at the bit, was fit to play again.

And so one week after Hoge thought he heard the ocean in Kansas City, he rejoined the Bears in preparation for the regular-season opener
against Tampa Bay. Hoge knew he wasn’t right. He still had blinding headaches and sometimes forgot the snap count. “I mean, most people now when I tell them, it’s like, ‘How stupid are you?’ ” Hoge said. “Listen, I didn’t go to school to be a neurological doctor.”

Hoge played in the season opener and three more games after that. Then, on October 2, the Bears took on the Buffalo Bills at Soldier Field. Early in the game, Hoge bent low to make a block. What happened next is a blur. When Hoge reached the sideline, his chin was sliced open and his face mask caved in. A Bears assistant had to pry it off to treat him. Hoge was unresponsive, staring into space, and so the Bears sent him to the locker room.

He was sitting on the training table when he heard someone say, “Man, are you all right?”

His eyelids fluttered, and he fell to the floor. Hoge had stopped breathing; doctors later told him that 20 seconds passed before he was revived.

He was taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in an ambulance. The Bears initially didn’t disclose the extent of his injury, announcing only that he had sustained his second concussion in six weeks and a lacerated chin that required stitches. Hoge held out hope for another quick return. He was released from the hospital the next day and went straight to Halas Hall, the Bears’ practice facility, wearing the same clothes he’d worn to Sunday’s game.
He told a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
that he hoped to play the next week.

In reality, Hoge was in a fog. There were many things he could no longer remember, including his two-year-old daughter’s name. A few days later, he went for a doctor’s appointment and was found wandering aimlessly in a hospital corridor. The doctor, sensing his confusion, asked him: “Who’s the President of the United States?” Hoge didn’t know that, either. By the end of the first week, the Bears were saying that Hoge was out indefinitely. The team sent him to specialists and put him through a battery of tests and scans.

When Hoge realized he wasn’t getting any better, he decided to return to Pittsburgh to see Joe Maroon and Mark Lovell.

The concussion test that Lovell and Maroon had created was designed to assess exactly this type of injury: How badly hurt was Merril Hoge’s brain? Lovell pulled out
Hoge’s baseline scores from the original Group of 27 and administered the exam to Hoge again.

When he saw the results, Lovell did a double take; he had never seen a football player so impaired. It had been almost two weeks since Hoge had sustained his second concussion, but his scores were half of what they’d been a year earlier.

One of the tests, the Wechsler Memory Scale, measured short-term memory in a variety of ways. One involved repeating a random sequence of numbers forward and backward. A year earlier, Hoge had tested in the sixty-first percentile on the backward test and the twentieth percentile on the forward test. This time, he tested in the eleventh percentile backward and the second percentile forward.

Lovell then administered the Controlled Oral Word Association Test, in which the subject is asked to list as many words as possible from a specific category—words starting with the letter
B
, for example. Profanity was allowed. Some players called it the
“Fuck Ass Shit Test.”

Before his concussion, Hoge listed 43 words in 60 seconds. After: 21.

Hoge then took the Trail Making Test, a measure of mental flexibility in which he was asked to connect a set of 25 dots as quickly as possible. He couldn’t complete it.

Lovell showed the results to Maroon. The
neurosurgeon was shaken. It was as if Hoge had run his car into a wall at high speed. Maroon’s first thought was: “I don’t want anybody to die following a football game on my watch.”

He summoned Hoge to Allegheny General. Maroon’s office was packed with Steelers memorabilia, plastic brains, neurological textbooks, and dozens of papers Maroon had written on brain science.