Concussion Inc.

by Irvin Muchnick

  8 May 2012..........

  In an email, Steve James, director-producer of the film Head Games, told me its funders are anonymous:

  As is increasingly the case in documentaries these days, funding has come from private investors, many of whom commonly prefer anonymity. What I can say is that funding did not come from any sports league, SLI, NYT or the Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. We really are scrambling right now to prepare a version of the film for this showing. So beyond this, you’ll really need to wait until we get our publicist on board.

  Let’s see what Head Games brings to the screen. James, the director of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters, has done sterling work on subjects in which I am not as intimately connected. If his new documentary moves the ball down the field in the concussion debate, his oeuvre will boast a fine new entry. If he limits his story to counterposing those who want to make football safe with those who don’t, he’ll have stalled an important national conversation.

  My reset, in extended bullet points:

  While Alan Schwarz (an associate producer of Head Games) will never die of chronic traumatic modesty, whether he is a self-promoting egotist or a self-effacing genius is just a squabble between a couple of bar mitzvah boys.

  We are not even having this discussion today if Schwarz and the Times hadn’t devoted assets and front-page real estate to it as early as 2007. That ain’t chopped liver.

  Schwarz states repeatedly that his grasp of statistics was a game-changer. His newspaper in an unkind review of the excellent new off-Broadway play Headstrong perpetuates this myth. I think that’s an elitist load. The public health narrative of the boys of America turning their brains into mush in service of their parents’ panem et circenses is not the Bill James Annual TBI Abstract. It is a story best told by classic investigative journalism: cumulative and progressive anecdotes, plus relentless probing of powerful institutions and players.

  Since, oh, let’s say the spring of 2010 — right around the time Schwarz’s Boston pals, Chris Nowinski and Dr. Robert Cantu, started receiving National Football League money — Times coverage has been poor. There has been an assumption that “concussion awareness” legislation is efficacious; there has been bent-knee attention to the ­efforts of the CEO of the same multibillion-dollar corporation that has lied to its employees and the public, across decades, in “peer-reviewed scientific literature”; there has been no heat on the Senate Commerce Committee for its fealty to the NFL and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center lobbying lines. Excuse all this, if you must, on the grounds that the NFL is “too big to fail” and this is about what we should expect from the New York Times. But do me a favor and don’t idealize it.

  14 May 2012..........

  The principal funder of the new documentary film Head Games is Steve Devick, a billionaire music and technology entrepreneur, who co-invented and is marketing a sports sideline concussion tool called the King-Devick Test.

  On the virtual eve of the first preview screening of the movie in Chicago — originally billed as a “red-carpet premiere,” now called a “private sneak peek” — Devick is listed as an executive producer on the film’s website (HeadGamesTheFilm.com).

  According to a knowledgeable source, Devick controls all rights to Head Games. The documentary is directed by Steve James, whose previous credits include the acclaimed Hoop Dreams.

  Among the other listed executive producers of Head Games is Anthony Athanas, a Boston restaurateur who is a friend of Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. Athanas and Kraft serve together on the executive council of the Catholic Schools Foundation.

  A former optometrist, Devick made his fortune developing Platinum Entertainment, a record label, which became a pioneer of digital music transmission systems. He is a trustee of Columbia College Chicago, whose faculty member Bruce Sheridan produced Head Games.

  . . .

  I’m ramping up my knowledge of the origins of and scientific to-and-fro regarding the King-Devick Test, which billionaire Steve Devick is promoting via the Steve James film he underwrote. A good place to start is an article in the October 2011 issue of Philadelphia magazine, “Penn Researchers Study Football Concussions.”13

  The Penn researchers are neuro-ophthalmologists Steven Galetta and Laura Balcer. The Philadelphia story describes their work and their relationship with Devick.

  The piece also includes this grumpy assessment of the King-Devick Test from Boston’s Dr. Robert Cantu, one of the protagonists of Head Games:

  They don’t have any background in concussion research. They don’t have a good feel for what concussions are all about. They talk about finding nearly 100 percent of concussions … We’ll see what the data shows … I doubt it will be able to predict more than 75 or 80 percent of the time. That’s good enough to rule somebody out, but not good enough to rule somebody in [for return to play]. And we don’t want simplistic tests to let people go back in.

  Another researcher, whose views I respect, thinks Cantu “is not wrong” on this point. “There is a lot of interest in both balance and neuro-ophthalmology. We have been looking at these things for years and it just has not proven scientifically reliable,” this source says.

  ..........

  1 The document can be viewed at muchnick.net/xenithpr.pdf.

  2 boston.citybizlist.com/article/vin-ferrara-xenith-raises-105m-safer-­helmet-cbl-0.

  3 www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/26/commencement2011-­feature-nowinski/.

  4 blog.4wallspublishing.com/2011/01/28/brain-expert-omalu-wants-­longer-rest-for-concussed-football-players.aspx.

  5 www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/17/sports/football/20100317_CONCUSSION_TIMELINE.html?ref=football.

  6 “Study: Non-Head Injuries May Impact Thinking Skills,” http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/07/29/study-non-head-injuries-may-impact-thinking-skills/.

  7 The audio and transcript are at www.npr.org/2011/09/08/140297255/nfl-season-kicks-off-with-new-safety-rules?sc=emaf.

  8 Hear it at www.youtube.com/wrestlingbabylon#p/a/u/1/hrXZLpKvAAQ.

  9 The executive summary is at www.sportslegacy.org/policy-2/hitcountwhitepaper/. The full document is at http://www.sportslegacy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Hit-Count-White-Paper.pdf.

  10 sports.yahoo.com/top/news?slug=dw-wetzel_little_league_world_­series_pay_kids_082411.

  11 See www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/opinion/kristof-­veterans-and-brain-disease.html.

  12 See www.headgamesthefilm.com/.

  13 www.phillymag.com/articles/penn-researchers-study-football-­concussions/.

  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 uni
fying 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.”)1

  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.”2

  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,”3 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 fr
om 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.”