Concussion Inc.

by Irvin Muchnick

  Perhaps next year the Santa Clara conference can give us a public high school athletic director, tasked with providing real and transparent answers to these questions. And in order to give that presentation time, maybe the organizers can scale back on the blathering of the Positive Coaching Alliance.

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  1 See Dave Pear’s blog, davepear.com/blog/2011/09/second-annual-santa-clara-law-sports-law-symposium/.

  DAVE DUERSON AND OTHER DISCONTENTS

  22 February 2011..........

  The gruesome decades-long underground American saga that is the football concussion crisis has never gotten in our faces quite like the story of the suicide last week of one-time National Football League man of the year Dave Duerson.

  How many levels are there to the news that Duerson, at age 50, put a gun to himself but not before texting his family that he wanted his brain donated for research on the brain-trauma syndrome now known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy? Let us count them. It begins with the fact that he shot himself in the chest — perhaps with supreme confidence that by avoiding his head and leaving intact his postmortem brain tissue, he would be confirmed as (approximately) the 21st diagnosed case of CTE among former football players.

  Duerson is the latest casualty of a sport that has evolved, via training technology and industrial design, into a form of gladiatorialism whose future human and economic viability is questionable. The New Yorker and the New York Times have started assessing this cultural phenomenon with their own brands of competence and Ivy League restraint. From the closeted gutter of pro wrestling, where all the same venalities play out with less pretense, I’m here to tell “the rest of the story” — such as how the same corrupt doctors who work for the NFL also shill for World Wrestling Entertainment, and how it’s all part of the same stock exchange of ethics for profits and jock-sniffing privileges.

  I would not be hasty to label Duerson a “victim”; for most of his 50 years, he was personally driven to make particular professional choices. But the thing that fans, parents, people still haven’t wrapped their minds around is the magnitude of the toll on the Dave Duersons at the amateur level, and below the age of consent, via a nationally unhealthy system of dangled glory and riches.

  And with Duerson, there’s a wrinkle that takes journalistic and governmental investigations of this public health issue into its murkiest waters yet.

  Duerson was not just a leader of the record-setting — and skull-crunching — defense of the 1986 Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears. He was also a member of the six-person NFL committee that reviewed the claims of retired players under the league’s disability plan and the so-called 88 Plan, a special fund to defray the costs for families in caring for players diagnosed with dementia.

  Don’t look for this last point to be prominent in Duerson retrospectives. We can count on quotes from fellow ex-NFLers about how scary it all is, and we can count on further details on Duerson’s bankruptcy and collapsed personal life, but we’re not likely to get into the 88 Plan files he was helping process.

  When news of Duerson’s death broke, but before the suicide details emerged, the NFL was first out of the gate with a statement of condolence. It’s in keeping with a strategy of triangulation that has been its hallmark ever since it became apparent that research articles in clinical medical journals such as Neurosurgery — literature largely written by NFL-paid doctors, including the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Joseph Maroon, who is also medical director for WWE — consciously lowballed the evidence on CTE for many years. The Neurosurgery reverse-hype also deftly promoted for-profit diagnostic stopgaps, such as Maroon’s ImPACT concussion management system and the Riddell helmet company’s “Revolution” model. The latter is now the focus of a Federal Trade Commission investigation undertaken at the request of Senator Tom Udall.

  The league recently launched a website, NFLHealthandSafety.com,1 with exquisite timing and calculated transparency. The site touts the NFL’s $20 million in funded research, without examining exactly what that $20 million has bought.

  The site’s media center also links to important stories in the news. As this article was being published, the top one was “Debate arises concerning use of helmets in girls’ lacrosse” (New York Times, February 17). Well, let’s see how NFLHealthandSafety.com covers Dave Duerson’s suicide. Let’s see, for example, if it links to this story.

  23 February 2011..........

  One of the coldest aspects of the Dave Duerson suicide is its recursive irony: Duerson served on the National Football League committee that helped process disability claims of families of retired players, including the “88 Plan,” which defrays the medical bills of victims of dementia.

  Even if Duerson’s golden life and career had not deteriorated to the point where he was himself one of the disabled, and even if he hadn’t plummeted into the financial bankruptcy so common among sufferers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (the devastating disease for which his brain will now be tested), becoming intimately involved in the paperwork of the heartbreaking cases of his ex-colleagues must have been profoundly depressing.

  The scenario reminds me of the constant stream of funerals and memorial shows for dead fellow wrestlers Chris Benoit found himself attending five or so years ago, until he himself snapped.

  History — if not, in the nearer future, our courts of law — will have much to say about the NFL’s response to evidence that its product was killing its talent and, by its enormous commercial and cultural influence, spreading brain trauma through the American sports superstructure like a weed.

  Dr. Bennet Omalu named the disease CTE but he didn’t invent the problem of epidemic head injury. That was for others before him to reveal — or ignore.

  Information on the 88 Plan itself is at NFLPlayerCare.com. Earmarked for ex-players with dementia, the plan was inspired by the case of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey, who is now in his late sixties but has had severe cognitive problems, culminating in dementia, probably for a decade or more. The “88” refers to Mackey’s uniform number with the Baltimore Colts; in the original concept, dementia benefits were to be capped at $85,000 per claimant, but in honor of Mackey it was upped to $88,000. The program started in September 2007.

  As Alan Schwarz reported in the New York Times, Dave Duerson had a “testy exchange” with former UCLA and Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman Brent Boyd at a 2007 Congressional hearing. Boyd said his clinical depression was the result of cumulative football hits. Duerson disagreed.

  That is a very interesting addition to the Duerson narrative in multiple respects. When the work of the NFL disability committee began, Duerson could have been a voice who, either generally speaking or in particular cases, was overly sympathetic to the league’s company line in his interpretation of claims, and that, in turn, could have led to guilt and exacerbated his depression as his own symptoms accelerated. Again, the instruction of the Chris Benoit experience: near the end of his life, Benoit, who had always defended the wrestling industry’s hyper-macho credo, found himself resignedly agreeing with disgruntled colleagues who unloaded with him about their unconscionable working conditions.

  Brent Boyd is on the board of directors of a former players’ advocacy group called Dignity After Football (DignityAfterFootball.org). I am trying to reach Boyd for comment.

  24 February 2011..........

  The Dave Duerson suicide has ricocheted through the media as a wake-up call on the American sports concussion crisis. But one of Duerson’s chief adversaries over the years — retired Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman Brent Boyd, himself a concussion victim and head of an advocacy group for disabled ex-players — has a different perspective.

  In a lengthy telephone interview on Wednesday night, Boyd portrayed Duerson as a management lackey — full of bluster about the player disability claims he helped adjudicate on an NFL committee, generally hostile to players’ interests, and out of control at a 2007
Congressional hearing that explored these issues.

  Boyd began our conversation by extending sympathy to Duerson’s family. “No matter what my differences were with Dave, this is a terrible tragedy, and family comes first. My heart goes out to his loved ones,” Boyd said.

  But Boyd held little back in his criticism of Duerson’s post-­career NFL work. Specifically, Boyd added much detail to a New York Times story this week, which reported:

  Duerson … joined the six-man volunteer panel that considered retired players’ claims under the NFL’s disability plan, in addition to the 88 Plan, a fund that has assisted more than 150 families caring for retired players with dementia since its inception in 2007. Duerson read applications, testimonies, and detailed doctors’ ­reports for hundreds of players with multiple injuries, including those to the brain that in some cases left players requiring full-time care. He had to vote on whether these people received financial assistance.

  In 2007, two Congressional committees held hearings into whether the disability board was unfairly denying benefits. Duerson testified before the Senate Commerce Committee alongside Brent Boyd, a former Minnesota Vikings lineman whose depression and cognitive impairment had been ruled unrelated to his playing career, therefore warranting significantly lower benefits. It is unknown how Duerson voted on Boyd’s case. He did get into a heated exchange when Boyd, then 50, asserted that his condition — and that of other players with dementia — was caused by football.2

  Boyd’s NFL disability claims date all the way back to 2000; his litigation of the league’s denials of his claims is now at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

  With respect to Duerson’s role, Boyd said, “The Times said it is not known how Duerson voted on the committee in my case, but the answer is pretty obvious. At the Senate Commerce Committee hearing and at the NFL committee meetings, he repeatedly denied the evidence of my medical condition and accused me of being a faker who was trying to grab benefits to which he wasn’t entitled.”

  And that wasn’t all. At the Congressional hearing room during an intermission, according to Boyd, Duerson initiated a verbal confrontation with older retired players Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish. Huff, a Hall of Fame linebacker with the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins, and Parrish, an accomplished defensive back with the Cleveland Browns, were pioneers in the development of the NFL Players Association in the 1960s. Both became outspoken critics of the union under the leadership of its long-time president, Gene Upshaw, who died in 2008.

  Boyd: “Duerson was spewing profanities at Huff and Parrish. He said, ‘What the fuck do you know about the players union?’ He was acting like he wanted to fight them physically. That wasn’t too smart with respect to Huff especially. He looks like he could still play.”

  Boyd said Duerson landed a spot on the NFL disability committee after his company Duerson Foods — at one point a major supplier to McDonald’s — went into receivership in 2006. Duerson was appointed by Upshaw. (The committee consists of three owner representatives and three named by the union.)

  Duerson “liked to talk and talk about what an expert he was on ERISA [the Employment Retirement Income Securities Act, which governs employee benefit plans],” Boyd said. “But he was constantly misquoting and misrepresenting the law. He didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  Boyd, a Southern California native, now lives and struggles with his health and finances in Reno, Nevada. He played for the Vikings from 1980 to 1986. In his Congressional testimony and elsewhere, Boyd has spoken movingly about his bouts with headaches, depression, and chronic fatigue. On several occasions he has been homeless. Like Duerson has been, Boyd fears that he will be determined after his death to have had the degenerative brain disorder chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

  Boyd founded the first ex-players’ advocacy group, Dignity After Football. The tasks of fundraising and website management became overwhelming. Ultimately, he abandoned efforts to register the organization as a 501(c)(3) charity.

  “We aren’t well equipped to handle and distribute money,” Boyd said, “and ultimately we have come to realize that the task of educating the NFL alumni community is largely complete. The retired players out there understand what has happened to them and what their situation is. Our big job now is to get something done by mobilizing fans and league sponsors.”

  Boyd also serves on the board of Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute (SLI). Like many other players with NFL medical claims, Boyd worries that the group’s work might be compromised by its research affiliate, Boston University, accepting a $1 million NFL grant. “When SLI honored [NFL commissioner] Roger Goodell with its Impact award, that really ticked me off,” Boyd told me. “Money can buy anything.”

  On Dave Duerson, Boyd summed up, “He spent years denying the concussion claims of other players. Then when the same symptoms started closing in on him, he killed himself. What does that tell you?”

  25 February 2011..........

  Writer Rob Trucks interviewed Dave Duerson, three months before he committed suicide, as part of an oral-history project on life challenges at age 50. Deadspin.com, the provocative sports news site, published an excerpt this week. It’s a valuable and timely document that everyone should read.3

  I have a number of problems with this piece, starting with the title “You Have to Accept My Pain.” It took some desperate cutting and pasting to make that line the headline of the article. Far down in the interview, we finally get to the P-word:

  I do hold myself to a higher standard. I do. But the flip of that is, every one of us has things in their life they regret. For instance, I’m a Trekkie. And it wasn’t the series so much as the movies, the Star Trek movies. I remember a scene from one of the latter ones with William Shatner. This guy, Spock’s cousin or his brother, he could hug you and take away your pain. And he says, “Come join with me, and let me take away your pain.” And Dr. McCoy and everybody else is like, “Jim, you’ve got to do this. It’s wonderful.” And Captain Kirk tells him, “I need my pain, because it defines who I am.” And so in that regard when people come up to me and they tell me, “Man, I wish I were you,” I tell them in the same breath that in order to be me, you have to accept my pain.

  The first reaction to this loopy snippet is “Huh?”

  The other is that Duerson’s “pain” turns out to be defined as ­second-hand kitsch. That’s of a piece with the interview as a whole, which is narcissistic — painfully so. The locutor not only can’t seem to take responsibility for something as simple as being a Star Trek fan. He also can’t take responsibility for having wanted to be a football player, or for his arrest for domestic violence, or for watching late-night TV. We pay no honor to the real accomplishments of Duerson’s life — his NFL career and his once-prosperous food-supply business, which employed hundreds — by pretending otherwise. A good guess is that brain damage from thousands of athletic blows had taken their toll.

  As a reader with four kids himself, let me just say that it is profoundly disturbing for this man either to have had all along, or to have developed, an active fantasy life based on dying at 42. Death wishes are not admirable things, whether issued from jihadism or from the “Die Young, Stay Pretty” wing of rock and roll.

  In addition, as someone who joined my sister in burying our father and mother, respectively seven and six years ago, I find dreadfully self-pitying the way Duerson dwelled on the deaths of parents in his middle age and their old age. That is the circle of life. Now, parents burying their children, as is happening with a generation of totally pointless casualties in sports and sports entertainment — that’s a different story.

  Duerson called his 2005 arrest for beating his wife, which cost him his position as a trustee at his alma mater, Notre Dame, a loss of control “for three seconds.” I don’t know about that. The county prosecutor in Indiana filed two counts of battery and two of domestic battery. The police report said Duerson
struck his wife and then shoved her out the door of a motel room so hard that she banged against a wall.

  Most of the Twitter chatter has centered on Duerson’s remembrance that Buddy Ryan, his defensive coordinator with the Chicago Bears, told him, “I don’t like smart niggers.” (Ryan denies it.)

  In a similar motif, I got an email yesterday from a journalist who read my interview with Brent Boyd and said that Boyd’s depiction of Duerson diverged from the journalist’s own, which is that of a forceful union guy who clashed not only with Ryan but also with then head coach of the Bears, Mike Ditka. Decades later, Ditka is a vocal critic of what the NFL Players Association has failed to do for disabled ex-players, and the journalist says this is a chapter in a long-running narrative with racial overtones.

  My own view is that race is not terribly pertinent to concussion syndrome, except perhaps to the extent African Americans are wildly oversubscribed to the entire sports dream machine. This includes, by the way, the current president of the United States, who upon taking office proclaimed his No. 1 sports priority to be the institution of a college football championship tournament to replace the current Bowl Championship Series. Some of the reasons for the racialization of athletics indeed touch on the great open wound of our national experience. But Dave Duerson’s occupational hardships with redneck coaches aren’t very illuminating on the subject of brain trauma in gladiator divertissement. He did fine for himself until about five years ago when finances, family affairs, and cognitive function all turned sour.

  Recognizing that the Deadspin article is only an excerpt, I emailed author Trucks two days ago, asking if the full transcript and/or audio of his conversation with Duerson would be made available. Trucks did not respond.

  25 February 2011..........

  In covering Dave Duerson’s suicide pointedly, I mean no disrespect to the memory of someone who, according to many people who knew him, was a good guy. I never met the man myself. But my research on the murder-suicide of wrestler Chris Benoit and its offshoots has turned me into a lay Ph.D. candidate on the ugly personality changes, loss of emotional control, and sheer cognitive deterioration that are hallmarks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy — from which Duerson, like Benoit and so many others, may be proved to have suffered.