Grant and Cyndy married in 1983 while they were both still in college. “It was everything I’d dreamed of, just an instant connection of love and respect,” Cyndy said. They were both excited when the Baltimore Colts chose Grant as the 161st selection in the 1983 NFL draft. This was the moment he could have left football behind and pursued his longtime dream of a career in dentistry, but the sport’s glory had a magnetic pull. “He kept going back to the game,” Cyndy told me. “There’s a thrill to it. It’s the ultimate guys’ club.”
And let’s be honest: Cyndy was thrilled, too. Like any self-respecting Texan, the brown-eyed blonde had grown up around football. After games, she’d ask Grant about what had really happened in the trenches, and he was elated to relive his anonymous offensive line battles. Being a center and long snapper is not glamorous. It’s a position that meant he banged heads with opponents on virtually every play as a rookie with the Colts, then with the Minnesota Vikings, and, finally, with the Seattle Seahawks. During his near-decade in the NFL, Feasel would have snapped the ball between his legs and then risen to bash helmets somewhere on the order of ten thousand times in games, plus who knows how many times in practices. But he and Cyndy were living an idyllic all-American life: the football player, his beautiful wife, and their growing family.
Cyndy first noticed a disconnect when she was pregnant and Grant hurt his leg in a game. “I wouldn’t have gotten injured if I wasn’t worried about you having a baby,” he told her. Strange: The comment came across as angry, and very un-Grant. Then came the drinking and pain pills. Everywhere he went, he kept a handful of Advil in his pocket. The Percocet prescribed by team doctors helped with the constant pain and helped him sleep. Over time, his heavy drinking progressed into full-blown alcoholism. He retired from the Seahawks in 1993 and got a sales job with a company that made digital X-ray and mammography equipment. He mostly stayed holed up in his home office in Fort Worth answering e-mails, returning sales calls, and drinking Absolut Vodka from forty-four-ounce Styrofoam Route 44 cups he’d saved from Sonic Drive-In.
It was as if Grant was slowly disappearing from their marriage. Cyndy fought the loss. When she came across booze, she’d pour the 1.75-liter bottles down the drain. Grant got a minifridge for his closet, and Cyndy raided that. too. So Grant put his fridge under lock and key. His body deteriorated. His hands shook, so he’d keep them in his pockets, thinking nobody would notice. A psychiatrist prescribed Xanax for anxiety; Grant ground the pills up, mixed them in vodka and finished the hundred-pill prescription in a week.
He became gaunt, his eyes sunken. A doctor said he needed to get to a rehab facility, and soon. He became paranoid, and occasionally physically abusive as well. As Cyndy recalls the situation, the abuse began when he found her snooping in his closet. He feared she was going after his alcohol, so he shoved her to the ground. It only got worse when Grant learned of an affair that Cyndy, distraught in the marriage, had with another man. “I was devastated—my husband had chosen alcohol over our family our entire marriage,” Cyndy said. “Grant would say, ‘You’re a fucking whore.’ He’d say this to our kids’ faces. He’d say, ‘You’ve cheated on me your whole life. You cheated on me before we got married.’ And all I ever did was love him!”
By 2010, seventeen years after his career ended, their marriage had fully come apart. Cyndy was scared of her husband: his anger, his drunk driving, his mental deterioration. At times, though, he was lucid. When he needed a drink, he’d be angry or feisty; moments of lucidity, and of kindness, came when he was hammered. One night, when he was drunk and calm, Cyndy asked if he was going back to rehab. “No, I’m done with it,” Grant told her. “I think I have what Mike had.” He meant Mike Webster, the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center whom Grant idolized. Webster had died in 2002 after a long and terrifying descent—from NFL legend to a bankrupt, homeless, and depressed shell of himself, and able to sleep only after shocking himself with a Taser. Webster’s deteriorated brain became the basis of Omalu’s research into brain damage among former NFL players.
“Did you have a lot of concussions?” she asked him.
“Hundreds.”
Her mind swirled. She walked to the nightstand and scribbled his words on a notepad. Maybe something more was going on here than the anger and confusion of an old ballplayer who missed his football days.
The end of their marriage came in the wee hours one day at 3:00 a.m. They had long ago devolved to having separate bedrooms, and Grant burst into Cyndy’s room, knife in hand. “I just called the police,” he said. Her first thought was he’d done something awful—hurt someone, killed someone—but then she realized the drama was all in his mind. “I told the police you’re trying to kill me,” Grant said. She escaped into a bathroom, locked the door, and called the police. The next day, Cyndy moved into a friend’s townhouse.
Even after the divorce, Cyndy didn’t sever all ties. After learning Grant was in the hospital for cirrhosis of the liver, she’d leave the elementary school where she worked as an art teacher to visit him over her lunch hour. One of the final times she saw him was in a hospital room. He was fiddling with an old flip phone, unable to get it to work. It was a devastating portrait of a broken man, fired from his job, prone in a hospital bed, frustrated like a toddler who couldn’t get his cell phone to work. She crawled in next to him. “I’ve loved you all these years,” she told him. “It just makes me sad how it all ended. I’m sorry, sorry for everything.” And Grant said, “I’m sorry for everything, too.” Not long after, he moved into hospice. He died July 15, 2012, at age fifty-two. The official cause was cirrhosis of the liver.
Grant’s family donated his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation, and doctors sliced it up to determine if something more than a fondness for alcohol was behind Grant’s demise. When Cyndy read the official autopsy report, she was floored. He had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease found in the brains of other former NFL players who’d died relatively young, many from suicide. His brain was one of 111 brains of deceased former NFL players in the study that Dr. Ann McKee, director of the Boston University CTE Center, would later publish in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Of those brains, 110 showed signs of CTE, including Grant’s. His brain had so deteriorated that he was already considered Stage 3 out of a possible four stages. A doctor told Cyndy that Grant would have been virtually “mindless” within a year.
In the simplest of terms, the brain disease that’s upended the sport of football can be thought of as brain scarring, either from big, explosive hits that result in concussions, or from repetitive subconcussive hits that players like linemen—like Mike Webster, like Grant Feasel—receive on every single play. The brain is not fixed in the head. It’s an incredibly complicated piece of human hardware, a spongy mass of tissue that’s six inches long in an adult and weighs three pounds. It’s swimming in cerebrospinal fluid inside the skull. Some areas of the brain can be susceptible to tearing when a force rattles and bangs it against the skull walls. The wrinkles you see in images of a human brain are either ridge-like folds, which are known as gyri, or the crevices between those folds, known as sulci. While CTE has similar outward-facing characteristics as Alzheimer’s disease, the proteins that cause Alzheimer’s accumulate all over the folds and crevices of the brain. In CTE, which is caused by brain cells essentially tearing, bad proteins accumulate deep in those crevices in the brain’s gray matter.
All human brains have something called tau proteins that stabilize connections in the brain. They give structural integrity to pathways that connect neurons, which receive signals from the brain and spinal cord to direct the actions of the human body to axons, the long, slender nerve fibers that transmit the neurons’ instructions throughout the body.
Think of the brain as a functioning subway system whose job is to transport electrical impulses to operate the body. The cell bodies of each neuron are like a subway hub—say, Grand Central Station. The axon, or nerve fiber, is like a subway tun
nel, where electrical impulses are transported away from the neuron. Proteins called kinesin and dynein are like subway cars that transport other proteins from the neuron; like two separate tracks of a subway heading in opposite ways, kinesin goes in one direction while dynein goes in the opposite direction. Inside axon-tunnels are subway tracks. The tracks consist of two things: microtubules, like beams of a railroad track, and tau proteins, the planks holding the track together and stabilizing the beams. Electrical impulses are transported up and down these tracks to run the human body. When the brain is exposed to tearing, more tau proteins are released. And when there’s a massive buildup of tau proteins over time—when the planks that hold together the railway begin to clump together and clog things up—the ability to transmit electrical impulses is diminished. CTE is like a massive traffic backup on the brain-subway.
“Researching a human brain is not a bloody, messy experience,” said Dr. Kevin Bieniek, a neuropathologist at UT Health San Antonio who studies CTE. “It’s a very neat organ, with all these different boundaries and markings in its structure. When you take a step back and think about this piece of tissue I’m looking at was responsible for every facet of a person’s life, consciousness and being, it’s pretty deep stuff.”
Cyndy Feasel didn’t understand the science of her husband’s clogged brain cells. But it was easy to understand the overall picture: Repeated blows to the head had scarred his brain beyond repair.
For Cyndy, the news about Grant’s autopsy was devastating. But at least it was an explanation for the dramatic changes in his personality. In that sense, it was somewhat relieving. Cyndy was grateful to finally put a name to the disease that destroyed her husband, and hopeful the NFL would fight the disease. “There had been no answers,” Cyndy said. “And then the minute I saw the autopsy report, I realized it coincided with every story in my journals, every story that said, ‘Where did Grant go? Where is the man I married?’ ”
Cyndy dove into an Internet dark hole. She learned CTE was brought into the public consciousness by Omalu, who’d discovered a buildup of tau proteins in the brain of Mike Webster, Grant’s football idol. She read Jeanne Marie Laskas’s story in GQ, and she learned Omalu had studied brains of other former NFL players with signs of CTE. Omalu’s second brain was that of former Steelers guard Terry Long, who died at age forty-five after drinking antifreeze; it looked like a ninety-year-old’s brain torn apart by Alzheimer’s. The third brain was that of Andre Waters, who shot himself in the head at age forty-four. The fourth brain was that of Justin Strzelcyzyk, another former Steelers lineman who at age thirty-six, after ranting and raving at a gas station near Buffalo, led a forty-mile chase by police before swerving into oncoming traffic and smashing into a tanker truck. The brains kept coming, and the circumstances were eerily similar: Former NFL players whose lives and sanity quickly deteriorated after their careers ended. Then, they died, often young and dramatically.
Omalu’s original paper, published in 2005 in Neurosurgery with five coauthors and titled “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player,” laid out the science that the kind of repetitive blows to the head that NFL players experience could cause debilitating brain damage.
It would make sense if, on the heels of the article’s publication, the NFL had mustered its considerable forces to fight the disease. Except that wasn’t the case at all. Cyndy was distraught to learn that instead of fighting the disease, the NFL spent a decade or so fighting the research (and the researchers). She read how the league had rejected Omalu’s scientific claims from the start. She learned the NFL’s concussion crisis was like so many controversies in modern-day America, which meant that discussions about facts and science quickly morphed into discussions about politics and money and power.
And then Cyndy Feasel became enraged.
The image of the old, beaten-down, retired football player is nearly as ingrained in the American consciousness as the image of the heroic, virile young gladiator in a suit of pads and a masked helmet. Since the beginning of the game, football injuries were badges of courage. So you had a bum knee or a bad limp? That meant you were a warrior, and this was proof. But brain damage? That was different. How can the brain be hurt by football when these warriors are so armored up with those protective helmets? Cyndy wondered.
Well, about those helmets: The first football helmet was likely invented in 1893 by a midshipman at the United States Naval Academy named Joseph Reeves. The lineman was nicknamed “Bull” because on the playing field he was undersized but overpowering. And Bull led with his head. Navy was about to play Army on December 2, 1893, and a school physician warned Reeves, who had a history of head injuries, that his next head shot could cause “instant insanity,” even death. The academy superintendent barred Reeves from playing.
But this was the Army-Navy game, which was quickly becoming a highlight of the American sporting calendar. Reeves had to play. So he went to a shoemaker and fashioned his own padded moleskin cap. Navy won, and Reeves not only survived the game but excelled later, becoming an admiral in the United States Navy. (That 1893 game, incidentally, nearly led to a duel between a general and an admiral caught up in the hysterics of the rivalry; because of that, the Army-Navy game was canceled for the next five years.)
But the fact that Reeves made it through his final football game without a major brain injury and went on to an illustrious military career is not the point. The point is this: The first indication from a doctor that the contact regularly sustained in football could lead to debilitating brain injuries happened 109 years before Mike Webster’s death, and 112 years before the publication of Omalu’s paper, and 118 years and five months before Junior Seau’s suicide, a paradigm-shifting event that was followed, seventy-four days later, by Grant Feasel’s death, his liver ruined and brain shattered.
In fact, the idea that a brain rattling inside the skull could do long-term damage goes back centuries. The author Jeanne Marie Laskas traces research into brain ailments like CTE to “the Father of Medicine,” Hippocrates, some four centuries BC. Hippocrates called it commotio cerebri, or ailments resulting from “commotion of the brain.” The first to use to term cerebral concussion was the tenth-century Persian physician Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi; he was referring to a brain injury more subtle than the type that could immediately kill you, instead one that made you dizzy or unconscious but that you’d recover from. In sixteenth-century Italy, a physician named Jacopo Berengario da Capri correctly hypothesized concussions were caused by the brain’s soft tissue smacking against the skull’s hard walls. In the early 1900s, two New York neuropsychiatrists named Michael Osnato and Vincent Giliberti found degenerative mental illnesses in patients who’d sustained concussions. This was the first scientific theory that suggested concussions were an “actual cerebral injury,” as the two neuropsychiatrists wrote in a 1927 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association: “It is no longer possible to say that ‘concussion is an essentially transient state which does not comprise any evidence of structural cerebral injury.’ ”
The next year, in 1928, Harrison Martland, the medical examiner in Essex County, New Jersey, coined the term punch drunk to describe symptoms associated with repeated head trauma. He’d been studying boxers who late in their careers started acting strangely—or, as fans derided them, “cuckoo,” “goofy” or “slug nutty.” He wrote of one fight that was stopped because the referee thought a fighter was drunk. The article presumed this condition was mostly limited to boxers: “Punch drunk most often affects fighters of the slugging type, who are usually poor boxers and who take considerable head punishment, seeking only to land a knockout blow. It is also common in second rate fighters used for training purposes, who may be knocked down several times a day.”
Martland’s study posited a direct connection between boxing and brain injuries because nearly 50 percent of the boxers he’d studied came down with these symptoms “if they keep at the game long enough.” In retrospect, aft
er the recent spate of stories of CTE-damaged NFL brains, Martland’s description of “punch drunk” nearly a century ago is chilling: “In severe cases, there may develop a peculiar tilting of the head, a marked dragging of one or both legs, a staggering, propulsive gait with the facial characteristics of parkinsonian syndrome, or a backward swaying of the body, tremors, vertigo and deafness. Finally, marked mental deterioration may set in, necessitating commitment to an asylum.”
While boxing was at that time, in the Roaring Twenties, one of America’s most popular sports, football—specifically, collegiate football—was as well. That same year, 1928, John R. Tunis, the famed American sports author and broadcaster, wrote an essay in Harper’s titled “The Great God Football,” attacking football as “almost our national religion.” It’s stunning that during the intervening decades a deeper connection wasn’t made between the risk of head injuries in boxing and the risk of head injuries in football. A more scientific-sounding name for what had been called punch drunk was coined in 1937: dementia pugilistica. All the research, however, was limited to boxers. Despite the medical concerns, America loved boxing, so the fights went on. In 1943, however, Martland stated this boxers’ disease might also be found in wrestlers, perhaps even in football players.
In retrospect, though, it is remarkable that it took until Bennet Omalu published an article in 2005 for Americans to begin to correlate football and CTE. Football is, of course, a sport we have long worshipped for the exact type of high-impact hits that can contribute to this disease. American sports have long differentiated between “necessary roughness” and “unnecessary roughness.” The unnecessary version was the type of violence that was outside the bounds of good taste, and against the rules of the game. But football’s violence has always seemed of the necessary variety—not freak accidents but a vital part of why we love the game. This is what makes the current situation football’s existential crisis, because the collisions that occur regularly are linked with the development of neurodegenerative brain disease. As Ann McKee, director of the Boston University CTE Center, has stated, “I am wondering if, on some level, if every single football player doesn’t have this.”
Love, Zac Page 8