But do Cantu and Xenith themselves pass the “Caesar’s wife” test of discouraging even the appearance of impropriety? You decide.
Xenith, LLC is a Lowell, Massachusetts, based company started by Vincent Ferrara, who played quarterback at Harvard in the 1990s and, indeed, lost most or all of one season to a concussion. (He happened to be four years ahead of Nowinski at Harvard.) Ferrara then got his M.D. and, upon finding himself most interested in the business side of health care, his MBA at Columbia.
I am not an expert and I have no opinion on the benefits of Xenith’s helmet model. If it has the potential to prevent injuries and save lives, then great. In a phone conversation with me last Thursday, Vin Ferrara said all the right things about the primacy of education — how no piece of head hardware can substitute for safer playing technique and a smarter athletic mindset.
In a 2007 New York Times story on Ferrara’s company — written by concussion beat writer Alan Schwarz — Dr. Cantu said a good bit more.
Schwarz’s article asserted that the Ferrara helmet’s 18 thermoplastic shock absorbers filled with air “can accept a wide range of forces and still moderate the sudden jarring of the head that causes concussion.” In addition, unlike traditional foam helmet lining, the disks do not degrade after hundreds of impacts, according to laboratory tests.
Cantu told the Times this was “the greatest advance in helmet design in at least 30 years.” He was identified as an informal advisor during the helmet’s development with “no financial relationship with the product.”
In September 2010, Xenith issued a press release announcing it had raised $10.5 million in equity financing. The release cited the marketing inroads of the company’s X1 football helmet. Dr. Cantu was nowhere mentioned.1
However, until very recently — that is, some time past the September round of PR — Cantu was still on the Xenith website (Xenith.com). Ferrara told me that Cantu had asked that references to him be removed several months ago.
By law, Xenith was required to submit paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission about its $10 million financing threshold; the filing became public on February 25. Three days later — a week ago Monday — a spate of articles about Xenith appeared in online versions of Boston business magazines. Citybizlist.com, for example, wrote:
Xenith helmets have been recorded to reduce the risk of concussion by as much as 60%, and players have reported a 70% reduction in the incidence of headaches. Xenith advisor Dr. Robert Cantu, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University School of Medicine and one of the nation’s leading experts in concussion management, called it “the greatest advance in helmet design in at least 30 years.”2
The Boston Business Journal and its offshoots also erroneously reported (and subsequently retracted) NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon’s participation in the Xenith investment group.
Ferrara shared with me his email to the leadership of the National Operating Committee on Standards of Athletic Equipment, in which he said he had “absolutely no idea why anything came out today, and Xenith had no involvement in this whatsoever… . [Xenith’s September press release] in no way mentions concussions, concussion reduction, the NFL, Warren Moon, Bob Cantu, or anything else that is being printed in these recent posts. I have received numerous calls, emails, etc., about these releases, and I am truly baffled as to how this transpired. I have already emailed Jeff Pash [NFL attorney] to inform him of this as well.”
I also spoke last Thursday with Cantu, who reinforced that he has never been a paid advisor for Xenith. “Have I talked with people from that company about their products? Yes. I do that with a lot of companies,” Cantu said. “But I have not received money from any of them.”
I’m not sure what to make of all this. In my experience, business journalists don’t ordinarily have the enterprise to research and publish deep backgrounders with short turnarounds — let alone inaccurate ones — every time a company makes a routine SEC filing.
I also think that, while the root 2007 Times article carefully disclaimed Cantu’s equity interest in Xenith, the story as a whole smells of social networking in the old-fashioned sense — the kind involving Ivy League elites well practiced in planting high-toned hype in the Newspaper of Record. Would a start-up elsewhere located and with a worse-connected CEO have been able to get this kind of ink?
It was wrong for Riddell Helmets, aided by NFL-funded research conducted by Joseph Maroon, to be making the kinds of statistical safety claims now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
It was also wrong for Robert Cantu and Xenith to have gotten mixed up in their own brand of fledgling and unverifiable braggadocio.
As the public witnesses a statistically significant population of athletes dying young, often by their own hands, leading doctors cautiously emphasize how much is yet to be understood about the scope and magnitude of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. I just wish the same doctors would be correspondingly modest about the commercial products designed to mitigate it.
18 May 2011..........
The New York Times and the New Yorker are responsible for elevating the concussion issue from the sports pages to the national agenda. However, in my view, they frame the story inadequately.
The Times would prefer to spur much too gentlemanly an outcome: a reprise of President Teddy Roosevelt’s football reforms of a century ago. The problem is that this sport and associated ones are no longer character-building rituals by Ivy League elites buffing their résumés in anticipation of careers on Wall Street and in other ruling-class institutions. Football today is a global multi-layered mega-industry. The urgency of reducing the human toll of this culture, across all classes and races, exceeds the scope of legislating helmets or any other piece of hardware, or mumbling bromides about changing the way that players block and tackle.
In its January coverage of the controversy surrounding Riddell helmets, the Times quoted Dr. Maroon — co-author of the Neurosurgery article that was the basis for the company’s promotion — as claiming Riddell quoted him out of context. But Maroon was not asked if he ever so complained, in public or in private, prior to the initiation of a Federal Trade Commission investigation of Riddell.
In his January article in the New Yorker, “Does Football Have a Future?”, writer Ben McGrath quoted Maroon as calling the Times’ Schwarz “the Socratic gadfly in this whole mix.” Maroon added, “What we’re seeing now is [a] major cultural shift, and I think Alan took a lot of barbs, and a lot of hits, initially, for his observations.”
26 May 2011..........
Chris Nowinski has done valuable work on the concussion crisis in sports. That work is also limited and flawed.
He is the subject of a profile in today’s edition of the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper of his alma mater.3 Clearly and deservedly, Crimson reporters Emily Rutter and Scott A. Sherman take note of Nowinski’s value. They may not realize that the Old Ivy orientation of their account also reveals his limitations and flaws.
The story has it all: Nowinski’s Harvard and football pedigree; his fascination with and employment by World Wrestling Entertainment — which led to his debilitating, career-ending concussions; and his decision to write a book about brain trauma in sports and start the Sports Legacy Institute.
The revealing passage, from my perspective, was this:
With the help of Alan Schwarz, at the time a freelance sportswriter for the New York Times, he got in touch with publishers.
“I thought his manuscript was great,” says Schwarz, who had written one book on baseball statistics and was working on another.
As I reflect on what I find both inspiring and dissatisfying about Nowinski’s career advocacy, the (obviously indispensable) Schwarz/Times connection is instructive. It reminds me very much of the phenomenon surrounding Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of E
verything, a 2005 bestseller by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
For my money, Freakonomics is a pedestrian book, but my opinion doesn’t matter. In any case, I’m more interested in the process of its creation. Freakonomics grew out of a profile of Levitt by Dubner in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times. The two Steves then decided to collaborate on a book. And get this: the epigraph of every chapter of the book wound up being a quote from Dubner’s Times magazine profile of Levitt.
Talk about a hall of mirrors!
I wish Nowinski the very best, both with his brave personal battle to survive post-concussion syndrome, and his likely as-yet-undiagnosed own case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and with his campaign to spread the word about and temper the brutality of football and other sports.
However, with respect to the latter, I also observe that his voice is skewed, at times even muted, by his ready access to the resources of both our Newspaper of Record and the National Football League (the latter thanks to a $1 million NFL grant to the Sports Legacy Institute’s sister Center for the Study of CTE at Boston University Medical School). You can see it in the increased corporatization of SLI’s message and in the current carefully adumbrated coverage by the Times of football helmet safety and promotion. So much more remains unsaid: the accounting for the tobacco-level scandal of NFL-branded research over the last generation, and the structural solutions we must be devising as a society, outside of willy-nilly litigation on behalf of the many lives ruined and prematurely ended by this system.
Above all, I’m convinced there is a need for more than just Chris Nowinski’s voice on this critical issue.
27 May 2011..........
Today I received the following email, with the subject line “What you don’t know”:
is that all I did — based solely on the public-interest aspect of his message, and long before I was even an employee of the Times — was introduce him to a few people. And they quickly blew him off. He didn’t find a publisher for his book for another 12 months, and completely independent of me.
More importantly, your comparison to Leavitt and Dubner is incorrect, misleading and borderline offensive. (Despite the fact that both of them are friends of mine.) Regardless of how they might have met, those two are collaborators and business partners, and make no bones about it. Your strong implication that Chris and I are either of those two things is something I recommend you correct.
Third, and most serious, your characterization of the Times coverage as “carefully adumbrated” — which, I’m assuming for now that you know, means presented somewhat incompletely in an effort to be vague or misleading. As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. Even if that were an issue, which I know it is not for reasons of which you are totally unaware, you have some nerve casting the entire work that way.
I kill myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem — and even conspiracy — in youth football, cause sweeping changes (some about to be announced) and investigations by the CPSC and the FTC, and you sit back and decide that one small issue you think you’ve found with it makes it “carefully adumbrated”? Wow.
I am not above criticism. But misinformed and careless criticism pisses me off. When you accomplish one-tenth of the good for the world and kids that I — or for that matter, Chris — have on this subject, then you’ll really have something.
— Alan Schwarz.
Schwarz was responding to the item here yesterday in which I expressed discomfort with the amount of space he and Chris Nowinski were taking up in the national concussion conversation (while also pointing out, as I do repeatedly, their deserved credit for raising that conversation to its present level).
At the bottom of Schwarz’s disagreement with me is a difference of opinion on the forward thrust of federal investigations of the National Football League. I will begin by explaining that disagreement from my perspective. If I may say so, the Schwarz account carefully adumbrates it. More on this fatal phrase as we move along.
“As far as I know,” Schwarz says, “your concern with the [Times] coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue.”
Well, that’s one way to read it. Another way is to note that Maroon is a connection that could help push the current probes by executive agencies and members of Congress from their focus on football helmet safety to a wider scope of NFL accountability for a public health tab we are just beginning to tote up. Schwarz is entitled to the opinion — if his opinion it is — that scapegoating helmet manufacturers gets to the heart of the problem. And I am entitled to mine: that the investigations, plural, need to go much higher up the food chain.
I am not sure which dictionary Schwarz consulted for the definition of the word “adumbrate”; nor is it clear whether he ever got his nose out of the air long enough to look at one at all. According to Merriam-Webster, the verb means “to foreshadow vaguely: intimate”; “to suggest, disclose, or outline partially”; to “overshadow, obscure.”
Schwarz says my use of the word means that I think he has presented the story “somewhat incompletely in an effort to be vague or misleading.” I have never speculated as to his intentions. A less malignant interpretation of the phrase carefully adumbrated could also mean that a Times reporter, in contrast to an independent author, journalist, and blogger, lines up his work with certain calculations about the size of his news hole, the number and timing of his investigative angles, and — finally and critically — the internal political demands of the Times editing machine.
Again, it should be obvious that Schwarz’s resources and methods have distinct advantages over my own, as well as less obvious drawbacks. Having clarified as much, let me go on to say that if Schwarz’s interpretive shoe of having been accused of being willfully vague or misleading fits, then he should wear it. Schwarz asserts by fiat that the Maroon link to the Riddell issue is of little or no importance, “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.” I beg to differ, and I also beg Schwarz to enlighten us all on these alleged reasons instead of carefully adumbrating them.
My comparison of the Nowinski/Schwarz relationship to that of the co-authors of the book Freakonomics “is incorrect, misleading and borderline offensive,” Schwarz says. “[T]hose two are collaborators and business partners, and make no bones about it. Your strong implication that Chris and I are either of those two things is something I recommend you correct.”
This is another great example of inflating a barb into a crime. The point of the Freakonomics analogy was not and is not that Levitt and Dubner are ethically challenged. It is that they reside in an echo chamber. This puts their egos in the foreground and their insights in the background. With or without Schwarz’s permission, I will continue to worry publicly that he and Nowinski might be doing something similar.
Speaking of ego, all praise is due Schwarz for spurring the involvement of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. I rather doubt, however, that he’s “killing” himself in the effort. Evidently Times reporters, like the rest of us, employ the occasional figure of speech.
By the same token, your humble blogger is proud to be the named respondent of the landmark United States Supreme Court case Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, the latest step in a 17-year-long public-interest fight. So there, and onward.
30 May 2011..........
In the course of his whiny, egotistical, and largely fact-free email complaint, Alan Schwarz said that, as far as he knew, “your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. Even if that were an issue, which I know it is not for reasons of which you are totally unaware, you have some nerve casting the entire work that way.”
One striking aspect of this passage is that it raised the issue of Dr. Joseph Maroon in response to an item by me that itself did not mention him. Moreover — as anyone plugging t
he term “Alan Schwarz” into this blog’s search engine can confirm — I never frontally criticized the Times for its Maroon coverage (as opposed to exhorting the Times and all media to pick up on my exposure of the fuller context of his work for the National Football League and World Wrestling Entertainment, and to connect it to the Riddell helmet investigation in a way that would make it, in my view, more meaningful).
Once again: I have not once ripped Schwarz for what he has written about Maroon.
On January 13, I wrote:
The New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, whose investigative article last October on the unreliable work of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) helped spur Senator Udall’s call to the FTC, reported that Maroon “disagreed with Riddell’s marketing the 31 percent figure without acknowledging its limitations, and supported Udall’s request for a formal scrutiny.”
Maroon told the Times, “That was the data that came out, but the authors of that study on multiple occasions have recommended further investigations, better controls and with larger numbers. If one is going to make statements relative to the paper we wrote, it should be with the limitations that we emphasized, and not extrapolated to studies that we suggest should be done and haven’t been done yet.”
I went on to document that Riddell had been aggressively exploiting the Maroon-co-authored and NFL-funded study of its Revolution model since no later than July 2008, and wondered why neither the doctor nor the league had raised a peep about it before it became a federal case.
The piece also included this paragraph:
I asked the Times’ Schwarz if he had sought elaboration from Dr. Maroon as to where, when, and to whom he had ever objected to Riddell’s advertising claims exploiting his research. Schwarz declined comment.
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