When Cyndy Feasel learned of the NFL’s response, a denial that started with three NFL-paid doctors demanding a retraction of Omalu’s original article in Neurosurgery—they wrote it had “serious flaws” and was a “complete misunderstanding” of science—she was stunned. Instead of the usual cycle of humans grappling over and being perplexed by new scientific research, the response felt like willful ignorance. This response was far more egregious than new NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue’s comments in 1989, marking the first official NFL statement on the danger of concussions. “This is one of those pack journalism issues, frankly,” Tagliabue had said. “The problem is a journalist issue.”
As CTE research turned into a torrent, it became apparent this was more than a “pack journalism” issue. Yet for years, NFL opposition to Omalu’s findings continued, as the organization deemed his research “preposterous” or “purely speculative.” In a 2007 interview on HBO’s Real Sports, a cochair of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee was asked if repeated concussions suffered in football could result in brain damage, dementia, or depression. He answered no six different times. The NFL promoted dubious science to discount football-related concussion concerns. The efforts to distance football from CTE began to resemble the tobacco industry distancing smoking from cancer.
Cyndy Feasel went through a range of emotions when she learned about the disease found in Grant’s brain: first relieved, then enraged, then determined to take action. She felt it was her duty to speak out. But this was David vs. the ultimate Goliath. She wasn’t just up against the NFL. She was one lonely female voice against an ingrained culture of football machismo that stemmed from an industry worth billions, a giant that was a vital part of American consumer culture and the American education system, that had been part of our national DNA since not long after the Civil War. It blew her away that despite the research about football and CTE, Americans still swore by the sport. It was as if football fans didn’t consider players’ humanity. “We’re still addicted,” she said. “It’s ingrained in our life, in our society at all levels.” Maybe it comes down to this: When we love something so deeply, we justify any number of reasons why the thing we love isn’t so bad.
Cyndy assumed one voice couldn’t make a difference. But certainly, there had to be more like hers. So she wrote a book detailing how CTE ruined her family. Not long after it was published, she got a call from another widow of an NFL player with CTE. “There’s thousands of us out here,” she told Cyndy.
The first-period bell rang at 8:00 a.m. on the second Friday in October 2009, just as Iowa farmers were beginning to harvest that season’s record corn crop. Indianola High School is a large, low-slung, sprawling red-brick building that encapsulates the town’s place in the world: too small to be considered a suburban powerhouse, too big to be put in the same quaint and charming bucket as other Iowa small towns. Indianola is far enough from Des Moines to have its own ecosystem but close enough to be considered as being in the big city’s orbit.
That morning, Indianola’s football players were already in a foul mood. They would be playing Ankeny High School in the evening, one of the biggest high schools in Iowa in a city the United States Census Bureau has identified as the fastest-growing in the Midwest. Ankeny also boasted one of the most successful football programs in the state. Every year Zac had been in high school, his team had been pummeled by that suburban school. But there was reason to think that this time, during Zac’s senior year, might be different. Ankeny was 5–1, but Indianola was 4–2, a strong start for this gritty, tough team shaped in the Easter image.
Cheerleaders made signs for the players’ lockers and brought them cookies. But the signs and sweets didn’t lift the players’ dark, belligerent moods. “We were ready to play the game at 8:00 a.m.,” Zac’s friend, Nick Haworth, recalled. “None of us were in the mood to talk.” The reticence wasn’t just because Ankeny was good. It was more that . . . Well, listen to Haworth: “We just thought they were kind of rich pricks. When they hand out that scouting report and it says Ankeny, a little hair stands up on the back of your neck . . . It was one of those schools that rubbed us the wrong way. They were big jaw-jackers. We were just from a small town. It was almost like we had chips always stacked against us.” Beating Ankeny could be something to relive at reunions for decades. Hell, even if they lost, they wanted the Ankeny football players to feel it in their aching bones afterward.
So of course Zac Easter—senior football player, team captain, the latest heir to the Easter mentality that had developed over seven generations in this slice of middle America—was juiced. It would be his first game in a month, since the concussion that had knocked him out. Zac was still hurting, but he would be fully armored up, a soldier heading into battle. He was wearing that cowboy collar, and now he was outfitted with a special Xenith helmet his father had ordered, which was supposed to reduce the risk of concussion. Zac had passed the concussion protocol before being cleared for the game, but trainer Sue Wilson had no idea that Zac had faked his way through testing. She had no idea he’d been lying to his doctors since summer, when he had that concussion at the camp in Missouri. (It wouldn’t be until the next season that the Iowa High School Athletic Association would give schools a consistent and rigorous protocol treatment for athletes who may have suffered a concussion.)
This is what Zac wrote about how his body reacted in the months after that concussion: “I remember feeling extremely dizzy through out the rest of the season and sometimes I would fall over in the locker room taking off my pads . . . Either the first or second game I got another bad concussion during the game. I don’t really remember much except I didn’t get pulled out of the game until I could barely get up and walk. My buddy Nick told me that at one point I looked at him cross eyed.”
Zac’s parents took him to doctors. They were concerned, sure, but Zac was tough. He could get over a ding or two to the head. And when doctors cleared him, it never occurred to his parents that Zac had simply lied his way through the appointment.
“The truth was I had severe headaches every day and constantly felt sick or dizzy, but the tough guy in me told them I was still totally fine,” he wrote. “I remember leaving some of my classes because I would be feeling sick and sitting there soaking myself in sweat. Around this time is when I started feeling depressed. I felt ashamed that I was hurt and had to sit out. I don’t know exactly what I felt, but this is when I think I started to never be the same Zac Easter. After like 2 weeks I finally got to play in the next game against Ankeny. I remember getting another terrible headache during the first practice back and even my friends noticed that week that I wasn’t as willing to hit as hard and I would actually shy away from contact.”
Zac’s older brother was in the stands, ready to cheer on his two younger brothers, Zac and Levi. Myles Easter II had transferred to Grand View University, a small, private liberal arts school in Des Moines, and played football there; he wanted to get more playing time. One good part of being closer to home was he could make all Zac’s senior-year games. And so he settled into the stands on the chilly October night, greeted old friends, and waited for his brother’s return to the gridiron.
The sun had just set, and the lights shone bright: Friday night lights, what the Easter family lived for. Indianola didn’t yet have a proper high school field, so they were playing at Simpson College as usual. Before the game, Kluver rounded the team up in the old Hopper gymnasium, the same century-old gym with the overhead track where Zac and his brothers used to run around as little boys and listen to their father’s rousing halftime speeches. Before this game, all the players got silent. You could hear a pin drop. That’s how Kluver gets his players to focus. It felt like a meditation, warriors readying for battle, until the players exploded, all shouting and clapping and testosterone, and walked as a team down the steep stairs and toward the gridiron, spikes clicking against concrete in unison.
Zac was fired up. Sue Wilson was not. She planned to keep a close e
ye on Zac. She had been hired in 2005, the same year Bennet Omalu and five coauthors published their paper about his studies of Mike Webster’s brain. One of Wilson’s primary focuses was concussions, and from the moment she set foot on the football field as the new lady in town, coaches and parents and players thought she was just bringing new problems. When she arrived, the worry about violent contact sports causing brain damage was barely a murmur. But by 2009, the murmur was increasing. Justin Strzelczyk had committed suicide in 2004, and Andre Waters had committed suicide in 2006. One month before Zac took the field for what would be his final high school football game, Jeanne Marie Laskas published her profile on Omalu in GQ magazine. That said, Dave Duerson’s suicide would not be for another two years, Junior Seau’s not for another three years. The federal class-action lawsuit by former NFL players against the league would not be filed for a couple more years. If concern at the highest levels was real and increasing, that concern had not yet fully reached Indianola High School.
“During the Ankeny game I remember the first play of the game is when I got my bell seriously rung,” Zac later wrote. “I don’t remember anything form the game except from the game tape and from what friends tell me. I went head to head with the running back at full speed on the first play during a quarter back rollout to try and run him over. I could of ripped through the running back and made a sack, instead I wanted to punish this running back on the first play and get inside his head. Instead he got inside of mine, I never pulled myself out of the game though and Chia [a teammate] told me that during halftime he remembered me trying to take a knee in the locker room and I fell over because I was so disorientated and I couldn’t get back up without a friend helping. Ofcourse I told him I was fine and showed no weakness.”
Myles Easter Sr. was the defensive coordinator, and Zac (No. 44) was a defensive star.
The worst thing immediately after a big hit to the brain is another big hit. And yet, after halftime, there was Zac Easter, walking out of old Hopper gymnasium, his spikes click-click-clicking as he made his way to the playing field. His team was losing, but it was a tough, low-scoring game, well within reach, the type of game that favored Indianola. He needed to be out there with his teammates. For his teammates.
“It wasn’t long during the 3rd quarter when my helmet came off during a play and I guess I hit a guy without a helmet on, head to head,” Zac later wrote. “The next play I shit canned a pulling guard and that’s about all I remember. From what I was told I could barely get up and wasn’t able to walk off the field on my own.”
It happened away from the ball, so the collision that ended Zac Easter’s football career can’t be seen on game tape. “He just smoked this guy who was twice the size of him,” his older brother recalled. “He got up and he was wobbling. He had no clue where he was walking. I was like, ‘Oh shit, this is not good.’ ” Two teammates pulled a player off the ground and dragged him toward Wilson. When she saw his jersey number, 44, her heart dropped into her stomach. Zac’s feet were barely under him.
“Sue, he’s not right,” one teammate said.
Zac didn’t say a word. He sat on the bench and put his head down. He started crying. He could still speak, he could still stick his tongue out, and he wasn’t vomiting. Even though his head was pounding, he didn’t seem in need of urgent medical attention.
Years later, I sat in my basement, watching and rewinding game tape from that night. I saw Zac all over the place, often jumping right into pileups on the field. But on that third-quarter drive, I could tell that number 44 was suddenly missing from Indianola’s defense. Later in the game, at the bottom of the screen, Zac could be seen on the sidelines, arguing heatedly with someone: Wilson, the trainer. She was clutching his helmet. He wanted to go back in. Kluver came over. Zac had his hands on his hips. He was trying to talk her into letting him go back in.
“No way,” she said.
A nearly full moon was rising as the players walked off the field after their 24–9 loss. In the locker room, Zac’s blue eyes drifted into a haze. “A thousand-yard stare,” Nick Haworth called it. Nobody wanted to talk after a loss, especially to Ankeny. Haworth walked up to his friend. “I could tell Zac wasn’t there,” he recalled. “It was like a blank stare. I’m like, ‘Zac? Dude, what’s going on?’ And he said, ‘Nothing, man, I’m all good.’ It was almost like he didn’t want to say too much because if he started throwing words together, he may get exposed. I got my shit packed up. We walked out of the locker room together, and I said, ‘Hey man, we’re going to go see Sue.’ ‘No, man. We don’t need to.’ ‘You’re fucking going with me, and we’re going to see Sue.’ ”
Haworth grabbed his friend’s arm and sat him down on the examination table in the trainer’s office. “Sue, he’s not right,” Haworth said.
Years later, Zac wrote about what followed: “It didn’t take long before I realized something had changed in me. For the few months the headaches were a daily thing and I always felt sick. I started feeling really depressed and lonely. I had lost football and I felt like I was socially off. I stopped going to any high school events and didn’t wrestle that year. Most nights I would sit at home in my basement with the lights off . . . People noticed that I had lost my sense of humor and I would sit in class dead quiet with a blank stair.”
He started cheating in class. He cheated on the ACT test.
“I answered some, but my head was killing me. I also started to get super sensitive and felt sensitive to everything. I stopped being the class goof off and started becoming the quiet kid so I wouldn’t get anyone’s attention. Now that I look back I think it’s safe to say that I just felt miserable because I was never the same person I used to be.”
A month or two after the third concussion of Zac’s senior year, he approached Wilson about being on the wrestling team.
“You’re done,” she told him. “I’m sorry, but I won’t clear you.”
“Will other doctors?”
“I hope not.”
“I’ll never forget the look in Zac’s eyes when I told him that,” Wilson recalled. “I think his exact words were ‘Fuck you.’ ”
“I really don’t even remember much of that year,” Zac wrote. “I mainly only remember the events that friends have since told me about, like how I didn’t do one assignment or test on my own my last year. I literally could not think and felt daily headaches everyday at school or at home. Some days I would go to bed with a headache and severe neckpain only to wake up with it being worse. I felt sick all day long and my girlfriend christinia couldn’t understand why I just wanted to sit at home alone in my dark basement . . .
“I thought about suicide quite a bit back then and I never understood what was wrong with me. I never understood [where] the big strong Zac Easter went or why.
“All I know is that I have never been the same.”
Five
The Coach and the Trainer
I didn’t have to be around him for more than a few minutes to realize that Eric Kluver is a Real Football Man. At forty-six, he is thick, muscular, and barrel-chested. His brown hair is closely cropped in a buzz cut, and his small, steel-blue, close-set eyes cast a penetrating gaze. At the end of summer, Kluver’s face and neck are beet-red like a farmer’s. He’s spent the first part of the summer outside running his landscaping business, and the second part outside coaching football. He’s sitting in his red-brick office in the bowels of Indianola High School. A television is cued up with football tape. A lonely, sunken plaid couch sits in the corner. A whistle hangs from his neck.
If you’re a parent whose son wants to play football, this is the type of man you want to be his coach. He yells—of course he yells; this is football, for God’s sake—but his idle position is that of a nurturing coach and a decent man. He is a father figure who, after he rants at halftime about how the defense needs to maintain focus and not commit stupid infractions that result in penalties, downshifts to a soothing tone and tells his players how proud he is of them. When h
e talks about why he loves coaching, he doesn’t focus on the big wins or the state titles because in a place like Indianola, which has always played bigger and stronger schools, there aren’t an overwhelming number of big wins, and there certainly aren’t any state titles. Instead, he talks about football as the perfect sport to teach young men about life.
Eric Kluver believes football is the best sport to create strong male leaders of high character.
“I don’t know if there’s another sport that prepares you for life like the game of football,” Kluver tells me in his office. “It’s the ultimate team sport. You can be a heckuva player, but if you’re not on all cylinders as a team, you’re probably not going to be successful. The qualities that you learn from the game of football you’ll take with you for the rest of your life. Being on time. Responsibility, discipline, work ethic, being loyal, being a good communicator and a great teammate. Those are all things you have to use later in life. That’s why I feel that playing the game of football, it’s just irreplaceable.”
These words may seem like the clichés you’d hear from any Real Football Man, someone who considers his football-playing years the best of his life and who stays around the game so he can rekindle the excitement from his own glory days. Yet Kluver’s full-throated endorsement of football comes with a deep moral ambivalence. He is simultaneously in a lifelong love affair with the sport while being racked by guilt about what he’s experienced in the sport. Because on three separate occasions, Kluver has experienced the absolute worst that can come out of football. He struggles with his own role in it, specifically in Zac Easter’s death.
Love, Zac Page 9