Concussion Inc. (20 page)

CONCUSSION INK (IN OTHER WORDS, MISCELLANEOUS)

10 June 2011..........

Our real national concussion problem is that the NFL is too big to fail. You can see that in the willfully ignored corollaries of the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bennet Omalu.

Omalu is saying that anyone who suffers a concussion should sit for three months, period. The reason is that a concussion, often involving violent head rotation rather than (or in addition to) a blow to the skull, can cause tearing of brain tissue all the way down to the brain stem, and it can take 90 days for brain fluid to return to normal.

Along with others, Omalu also comes very close to calling for an out-and-out ban on youth football. Growing brains should not be subjected to a diet of concussive and subconcussive blows, any more than growing arms should throw baseball curveballs — and the stakes of the former activity are a lot higher. As awareness and reporting improve, I am convinced we are going to see ramifications of traumatic brain injury in American youth going to the root of indexes of academic performance, workplace productivity, and criminal behavior.

This leads to a problem no easier to solve than the ingrained and corrupt ways of Wall Street. There was a time when a heavyweight boxing championship fight could galvanize the land, not just with a million pay-per-view buys but as a truly unifying cultural experience. That day passed, and we became more aware of “punch-drunk ­syndrome” — the forerunner to CTE — and boxing dipped in spectatorship and influence.

In the America of 2011, only football's Super Bowl is a comparable national hearth, blending hard-core, soft-core, and kitsch. Except that now we are learning that football, especially in the steroid era and with the sophistication of industrial training and the might of global marketing, literally involves armies of athletes daily and systematically inflicting CTE on each other.

If we were to eliminate football under, say, age 18 (and is that really what Chris Nowinski means when he talks about “changing how football is played”?), what will happen to the high school and youth leagues that develop skills and grease recruitment to college and the pros? Who will hire the coaches? Dress the cheerleaders? Market the lines of pint-sized blocking sleds and shoulder pads? In
Miracle on 34th Street
, the political advisor to the judge, who was trying to decide whether to declare Kris Kringle insane, ticked off all the categories of Christmas-related constituents who would be up in arms. But Santa Claus is a kindly myth — football is head-delivered death.

And without that intergenerational thread, how will the NFL carnival, with its sexually predatory quarterbacks, its diva wide receivers, its human-missile defensive secondary personnel, remain a national obsession? Especially when the legal bills start piling up. Wrongful death goes for seven figures. As the late Senator Everett Dirksen once observed, a million here and a million there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Such is the crisis of our football economy, whether anyone out there wants to talk about it seriously or not.

22 June 2011..........

In March 2010 the NFL's concussion policy panel, called the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, got a new name and new co-chairs. Now known as the Head, Neck and Spine Medical Committee, it is jointly chaired by Dr. H. Hunt Batjer of Northwestern Memorial Hospital outside Chicago and Dr. Richard Ellenbogen of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Batjer and Ellenbogen replaced the disgraced Dr. Ira Casson and Dr. David Viano, who in turn had replaced the disgraced Dr. Elliot Pellman.

Batjer and Ellenbogen promised a new direction: to sweep out the Augean stable of league head-injury custodians. They have done nothing of the sort. For example, Dr. Joe Maroon remains on the committee.

And last July the two new co-chairs reversed a commitment not to release an ambiguously worded NFL helmet safety study with limited or no value for the broader universe of amateur helmet consumers. In the good coverage of this narrow issue by the
New York Times
' Alan Schwarz, Ellenbogen explained that he decided the study was OK “as long as statements were phrased very carefully.”

Batjer and Ellenbogen — who are supposed to be independent but whose public statements get screened by the NFL office — forged ahead with uncontroversial projects, such as the toughening up of language in posters warning players of the risk of brain injury.

Last month Ellenbogen told the
Wall Street Journal
. “I defer to the guys who are the experts at football: the competition committee, people like John Madden who actually know the game.” (The ­money-grubbing Madden knows the game so well that the new edition of his bestselling video game bows to the new “concussion awareness.”)
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28 June 2011..........

The absolute power of the NFL has corrupted our sports culture absolutely. Since at the very latest 1994, but in reality long before that, the league has been served ample forensic notice that the sport it markets was growing out of human and medical control. These are not ACLs and torn shoulder capsules we're talking about, people; they are the brains of frighteningly large numbers of American males who have participated, in organized fashion and from very early ages, in an activity that is a staple of adult approval and social status.

“Conspiracy” is a tepid term, indeed, for the pervasive self-­delusion that has gripped all of us for years, for decades. The title of one of historian Barbara Tuchman's books says it better:
The March of Folly
. The title of Randy Shilts' chronicle of the AIDS epidemic says it better still:
And the Band Played On
.

We continue to have no evidence — none — that the league leadership grasps this problem at a level more profound than public relations. The new co-chairs of the NFL's concussion policy committee, Drs. H. Hunt Batjer and Richard Ellenbogen, were supposed to be making a complete break with the conflicted and unsavory work of their predecessors when they were appointed last year. Don't make me laugh — it might snap a synapse in my own still barely functioning noodle.

Once the owners' lockout of players is out of the way, commissioner Roger Goodell can get on with the task of loading up the NFL season with more games and more gambling opportunities while he touts the league's total $20 million investment — taxicab money for a $9-billion-a-year industry — in scandalously dependent and controlling research on brain trauma. Before you know it, he'll be as comfortable in retirement as his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, and it'll be the next regime's turn for “catch me if you can.”

In December 2009, a Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver named Chris Henry was killed when he fell out of the back of a truck while stalking his fiancée. Henry was in the circle of bad boys out of West Virginia University and his five-year NFL career was marred by legal scrapes. In June 2010, an autopsy by the West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute found that Henry had the accumulations of tau protein associated with CTE.

Here is what Ellenbogen told Schwarz for a
Times
“news ­analysis”: “I'm really worried that we're going to get to where if you have a challenging personality, it must be CTE — that's really a dangerous way of going. We really need to be careful to parse out the underlying personality issues from the underlying injuries. This is probably just one factor among many that can put someone over the edge.”
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Really on a roll here, analyst Schwarz clucked, “[I]f concussions turned every player felonious, Troy Aikman and Steve Young would be broadcasting games from C-block. Many players later found with CTE managed not to commit crimes.” The
Times
man concluded, “To be truly valuable moving forward, the legacy of the Chris Henry finding will not be to look back and assign blame for players' past acts, but to look ahead at how future behavior among players at all levels will derive from a cocktail of factors — psychological, neurological, societal, genetic, or sometimes, just being a jerk.”

And thus the disclaimer, which could have been tossed off with a phrase, becomes the centerpiece of the analysis.

At least football participants have the excuse of brain tissue deadened by tau proteins. What is the excuse for all us spectators?

1 July 2011..........

You don't have to be an ambulance chaser to know which way the sports-head-injury litigation winds are blowing. The
San Francisco Chronicle
's Kevin Lynch has provided some instructive background on the woes of San Francisco 49ers center Eric Heitmann.

Heitmann, who missed all of last season after injuring his neck and breaking his leg in training camp, will sit out all of 2011, as well, lockout or not, with a ruptured neck disk. Lynch's blog post on the
Chronicle
's website, “Eric Heitmann — victim of the nutcracker,”
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tells “the rest of the story”:

Heitmann's injury is another lasting legacy from Mike Singletary's infamous nutcracker drill. The exercise in which two players clashed into each other and tried to push the other one back, like a pair of mountain rams, resulted in a series of injuries. None more serious than Heitmann's; he felt a tweak in his neck after a nutcracker encounter in last summer's training camp.

According to tackle Joe Staley, Heitmann ignored the injury but was slowed by it. The next day in a team drill, Heitmann broke his leg when he wasn't quick enough to escape a falling teammate. The shattered fibula might have prevented possible paralysis with his vulnerable neck. While recovering from the leg injury, numbness and shooting pain persisted from his neck. When the symptoms refused to abate, Heitmann underwent surgery last month.

In his two-plus years as the 49ers head coach, Singletary convincingly established that he was one of the 25 or so NFL field generals who have no idea what they're doing, rather than one of the seven or so who have a clue. The Heitmann anecdote adds another dimension to the persona that Singletary (a teammate of Dave Duerson on the defense of the Chicago Bears' 1986 Super Bowl champions) parlayed into a career on the Christian motivational-speaker circuit and then in the NFL coaching ranks.

Nor is it reassuring to hear the ballyhooed concussion-awareness culture shift of 2010 did nothing to prevent this men-among-men barbarism.

21 July 2011..........

The National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) has partnered with the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on a “Heads Up to Parents” campaign — described as “a new educational initiative designed specifically to provide parents with the facts about how to protect, prevent, and respond to youth and high school athlete concussions.”

Nice. The problem is that with the concussion crisis in football, parents need more than niceness from officials charged with protecting public health. How can you keep your heads up when they're in the sand?

Someone at CDC seems to have done focus-group work leading to the conclusion that its mission is accomplished if it alerts the public to protecting kids from second concussions. But even assuming the new “awareness” significantly reduces second concussions, this all says nothing about first concussions — or about growing evidence that the problem may not be concussions per se, but rather the repetitive subconcussive blows that are the very air football breathes.

The literature quotes CDC's Dr. Richard C. Hunt saying, “Parents, when in doubt, keep the athlete out of play. It's better to miss one game than the whole season.” Left unsaid is, “It's better to miss one season” or even, “It's better to pass on this particular activity altogether.”

When CDC starts adding value to the debate over eliminating contact football below a certain age, that's when it will be time to start listening to the feds. The rest is blather.

26 July 2011..........

When the NFL lockout ended, the head of a fledgling organization called the Sports Fans Coalition couldn't wait to get its message out. “NFL Lockouts End, Blackouts Won't,” blogged its executive director, Brian Frederick.

Frederick made the same narrow point last September in a piece for
Huffington Post
under the headline “Ahead of Possible Lockout, NFL Owners Giving Big Bucks to Politicians.” Frederick cited research by the Center for Responsive Politics showing the unsurprisingly large NFL lobbying presence in Washington and campaign contributions by NFL owners.

But in case you were wondering, the “blackouts” to which the Sports Fans Coalition refers are not the ones causing early and violent deaths of football players and diminishing the mental health and future productivity of American youth. No, siree. Frederick is talking about the league's policy of blacking out local-market telecasts of home games of teams that didn't sell out their stadiums in advance.

20 August 2011..........