Concussion Inc.

by Irvin Muchnick

  There is a sickness in our society, and it has a name: football worship. The symptoms are evident in red and blue states alike, in rural provinces and urban strongholds, in honkytonks and ivory towers, in profit-hungry enterprises and in the vicarious fantasy projections of paying fans and unpaid volunteer coaches.

  This is not a problem that will be solved by bringing the National Collegiate Athletic Association to its antitrust knees, or by paying de facto professional college players something closer to their market value. And it won’t be solved by saying that it exists at Pisspot Polytechnic or USC or Miami or Ohio State … or Penn State … yet somehow not here, right here, where each and every one of us lives. We are all Penn State.

  15 November 2011..........

  Many have remarked that a key to the unraveling in State College, Pennsylvania, was its insularity — a corollary to Penn State football’s lack of accountability. I agree, and I am struck by how that most heinous of criminal patterns — systematic child sexual abuse — seems to attach itself to putative nonprofit institutions (Penn State, the Second Mile Foundation, the Catholic Church) more readily than to for-profit companies. There is plenty of corruption, plenty of ugly practices in the upper reaches of corporate America, but not so much this.

  In that spirit, I sent a message with the text below yesterday morning to Bob Ladouceur, the legendary football coach at De La Salle High School in Concord, California, with copies to Leo Lopoz, the school’s athletic director, and John Gray, the director of communications (for the athletic department, I believe, not the school, though I could be wrong about that). When none of those gentleman replied, I followed up today with the school’s principal, Brother Robert J. Wickman, F.S.C. I will publish any response I receive from anyone at De La Salle.

  To be transparent from the outset, I am a critic of the football system at all levels. I seek your responses to the questions below… .

  By way of background, I know nothing about you or the De Le Salle High School program other than what I have read and heard as a general sports fan and as a consumer of Bay Area news media. I am familiar with your proud record of national-class athletic success, which includes alums such as current National Football League star Maurice Jones-Drew. I recall the tragic story of Terrance Kelly, the De La Salle standout who became an innocent-bystander murder victim in his hometown of Richmond, California, on the eve of embarking on a student-athlete career at the University of Oregon. By far my single biggest source of information is the very long and nice profile of you by reporter Rusty Simmons, which was published on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on October 16 of this year.

  I thought Mr. Simmons’ piece was a weak piece of journalism, and I told him so directly at the time in a polite email exchange. In the course of thousands of words of praise (whose sincerity I do not doubt), he quoted and cited the post–De La Salle life of only one of your ex-players — and that was Patrick Walsh, who has gone on to assume the same job you hold, but at Serra High School in San Mateo. Mr. Simmons replied to my criticism by saying he could have quoted enough Ladouceur protégés to fill a book.

  Here are my questions to you:

  Browsing your website, I was stunned to encounter first these words at the top of the home page: “The public’s perception of what we do or what we stand for is drastically different than what actually takes place. I can imagine that this is probably true for many organizations. This is especially true for our football team. People are constantly writing the local papers questioning the integrity of our program. It’s upsetting in so much that it questions the integrity of school officials and coaches sworn to uphold the ideals of our founder St. La Salle. What’s worse, it completely nullifies the hard work, sheer grit, and determination of our student athletes at De La Salle High School.” What motivated you to say this? (Certainly not, I would think, coverage like that of the Chronicle.)

  In his profile, reporter Simmons wrote that your own playing career had been ended by two serious injuries. I have no idea why he either did not ask you or he chose not to specify your injuries. Can you please do so for me?

  Would you release publicly the budgets of the De La Salle High School Athletic Department and football program?

  As you will see, the focus of my blog is the concussion crisis in football. Please share with my readers the complete record of the Spartans, during your tenure, in the area of traumatic brain injuries. Please also tell us the specifics of how your program has evolved in diagnosing and treating concussions and in formulating return-to-play procedures.

  21 December 2011..........

  Chris Mortensen of ESPN reports that the NFL will employ independent athletic trainers to spot concussions from the press box level and alert the folks at field level. Nice step, comments Mike Florio of NBC Sports’ Pro Football Talk, but they need independent neurologists on the sidelines.

  Excuse me while I refrain from doing handsprings. Professional football players are pros and they have a union. A lousy and corrupt union, maybe, but the jockocrats can do whatever they’ll do. For all I care, they can assign certified morticians to every game.

  The point is that “concussion awareness” steps, such as this latest one, are not reproducible at the feeder levels of American football mania: public high schools and peewee leagues. Most of the participants there shouldn’t be playing Russian roulette with lifelong mental disability in the first place. And those worthies don’t have the dough for independent trainers and independent neurologists. Most of them don’t even have press box levels. Only the morticians, plus the lawsuits flowing therefrom.

  We need a national sports concussion policy. Until we get one, we’ll have an affirmative action program for the billable professionals, both the earnest and the cynical, of Concussion Inc.

  24 January 2012..........

  This week I came across the most heartwarming quote I’ve seen in some time. It was from Dr. Howard Derman, co-director of Houston’s Methodist Hospital Concussion Center. Just as UPMC is the official sports medicine provider for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL and the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League — ­doctors-to-team paid endorsement contracts and all — the Derman group in Houston serves the same function for the NFL’s Texans, Major League Baseball’s Astros, and Major League Soccer’s Dynamo. Methodist Hospital offers young athletes ImPACT baseline tests for $5 a pop, and freely circulates materials on such topics as “Return to Play Defensive Back,” “Return to Play Wide Receiver,” and “Return to the Classroom After a Sport-Related Concussion.”

  Discussing the youth tackle football leagues of greater Houston, in which more than 1,000 kids as young as five play every year, Derman told the Houston Chronicle, “I’m not saying it’s safer to play football as a child [than other activities], but the plasticity — flexibility, in layman’s terms — in the brain is greater in a child, and it has more room to swell. So things we see in adult football players are slightly less of a concern in children.”9

  This might be the most exotic argument I’ve heard yet from the “concussion awareness” crowd: it’s better, not worse, for little kids to get their brains bashed … precisely because they’re still growing!

  Through an intermediary, Dr. Derman has complained. Since Derman marked at the top of his email that it was not for publication, I have emailed him my request for permission to publish it.

  In the meantime, here is my own reply to the substance of Derman’s comments:

  My fundamental response to you is: you gave the quote to the Houston Chronicle; you own it.

  The point of the Chronicle story is that football is safer than cheerleading. Beyond preposterous.

  It is good to hear that you are paid $0.00 by the Texans. Is Methodist Hospital likewise paid $0.00? Or maybe the better question: does Methodist Hospital pay the Texans $0.00? The team’s logo and association are right there on your center’s website (which, incide
ntally, has no non-patient contact info, and no telephone number for media inquiries, that I can see).

  My article did not claim that $5 was an unfair market price for what I have long opined is the unreliable ­ImPACT test. That the true cost is more does not sur­prise me and merely reinforces the argument that football concussion “solutions” will bankrupt our public schools. There is no way every high school football program in the country can successfully execute all the “football safety” mandates of new state-by-state legislation.

  Please call me anytime. I also invite you to email your and Methodist Hospital’s contracts with the Texans, for both medical services and sponsorship.

  24 January 2012..........

  Stefan Fatsis, with whom I haven’t always agreed, has a hell of a strong post in his latest contribution to the Slate-Deadspin NFL Roundtable — a smart fan’s gasfest that I sometimes poke fun at, but not this time.

  [T]he NFL’s chief marketing officer, Mark Waller, [tells the New York Times] player safety is “probably one of the most important topics for casual fans, particularly mothers.” I added the italics, because if Mom thinks football is crazy dangerous, she’s not going to let her son play, and if enough sons don’t play, football loses popularity, and if football loses popularity — you get the picture. Mom may not be reading websites that track catastrophic football injuries, but she will be watching the Super Bowl.10

  I’m also amused by the news that the NFL is about to unveil yet another new safety website, this one focused on the evolution of football rules. I wonder if it will juxtapose contemporary commentary with observations by Dr. Joe Maroon on how you just need to make sure you lead with your shoulder pads when executing the flying wedge. (And maybe Dr. Joe and WWE can lend John Cena, Rey Mysterio, and others to do “don’t try this at home” public service spots.)

  24 January 2012..........

  In college we used to joke, “If I were smart, I’d get good grades.” And if I could write as well as Robert Lipsyte — author, commentator, former New York Times sports columnist — I’d be Robert Lipsyte. Since I can’t, I’m not, but I’m a Lipsyte reader and admirer, which is good enough today.

  Writing for TomDispatch.com in a piece headlined “Four Reasons to Watch the Super Bowl,” Lipsyte neatly straddles disgust and sympathy. The essay isn’t perfect (the take on class warfare seems to me more Jello-like than lucid, and Tim Tebow was not a rookie in 2011), but the takeaway is a gem. It comes right after Lipsyte tap-dances on the Joe Paterno legacy and breaks down how football’s “little insults to the brain” begin early and “add up to catastrophe in middle age”:

  So if you believe in taking responsibility for “every other kid,” go organize in your community against ­helmet-wearing tackle football — at the very least until high-school age. (If you let your own kid play peewee football, you should be charged with child abuse.) It’s hard to go up against Jock Culture, which you’ll be watching in its full power and glory on Sunday. Then again, it’s hard to go up against the banks and the war machine, too. It’s time, in other words, to occupy football.11

  3 February 2012..........

  Comes now the NFL with a PR blitz out of the school holding that the best defense is a good offense. Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast will include a 60-second NFL “public service announcement” recapping the history of its bold efforts to make football safer.

  Credit the Business Insider website with noting that the NFL last year censored a Super Bowl commercial from Toyota that tried to address the concussion issue. The abrupt U-turn “shows the NFL is worried about losing the ethical debate over whether it is right to allow youngsters to play a game that requires them to hit each other with their heads.”

  These are heavy-duty days for my trusty barf bucket. The last edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes had correspondent Steve Kroft lionizing Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner. Quite obviously, full access to Goodell was a booby prize to one of the league’s broadcast partners in its off-year in the Super Bowl rotation. This year, the big game lands on NBC, where we can look forward to seeing whether the ace announcing team of Al Michaels, Chris Collinsworth, and sideline reporter Michele “Scoops” Tafoya can again distinguish themselves as possibly the last viewers in the country to call a concussion a concussion — as they were back in September on the Sunday night of Michael Vick’s “neck injury.”

  Last week we had several New York Giants caught bragging that they had targeted Kyle Williams, the goat of the 49ers’ loss to the Giants in the conference championship game, because they were aware of his history of concussions. That was an example of a gaffe — classically defined as the misdemeanor of openly stating a truth that was supposed to remain tacit.

  The question I want to ask is why we have a society in which the son of a major league sports executive, Chicago White Sox general manager Ken Williams, continues to risk lifelong brain injury, early dementia, and death-in-life. I think the answer has something to do with the glory and folly of the American sports dream machine, which refuses to discriminate on the grounds of race, creed, or color, so long as you’re willing to have your cerebral neurons stomped into seaweed. This also helps explain why our current president, also African American, has made his No. 1 sports policy priority the abolition of the Bowl Championship Series, evidently on the grounds that the descendants of slaves, along with the rest of us, don’t have enough college football games in December and January. Ah yes, “American exceptionalism.”

  The most important non-football subplot of Super Bowl hype week has been the organized labor demonstrations in Indianapolis protesting Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels’ signing of union-busting “right to work” legislation.

  “War on workers is the real Super Bowl in America,” Harvey Araton, a New York Times sports columnist, wrote on Twitter. Nice piece of pith. I doubt that Araton’s bosses would deem fit to print an 800-word development of this theme.

  Though ’60s nostalgia and its supporting demographic bulge still take up a lot of sentimental space, we may be living through even more momentous times today; as part of that package, Sunday’s spectacle warrants more than a strong sniff. I wonder what will become remembered as the American empire’s Masada? When will be our equivalent of the Edict of Milan?

  One thing’s for sure: the Coliseum is alive and well, and that ain’t no flabby metaphor. It’s a phenomenon playing out in real time right in front of our eyes … with Al, Chris, and Michele as our cheerful guides.

  11 March 2012..........

  Gregg Doyel of CBSSports.com has one of those death-of-football contemplations. “What would be the tipping point?” Doyel writes. “I can imagine it.”

  A popular player — I’m thinking of a particular guy, but don’t want to name him — gets destroyed by a hit to the head and has to retire, then lives his death right before our eyes. You think it can’t happen? It already has, with Webster and Mackey and more, too many more. And it will happen again.

  I can imagine the day when a U.S. politician makes like John McCain in 1996, when McCain took on the UFC, only this time the politician decries football as “human cockfighting.” I can imagine the day when a handful of high schools stop offering football for safety reasons, liability reasons, even lack-of-interest reasons.

  I can’t imagine the death of football, no.

  But give me another decade or two. Ask me again.

  Here’s how I put it in the introduction to my ebook UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero:

  As footballers of all ages, and at all levels of informed consent, continue to get maimed and killed for our uninterrupted panem et circenses, the problem with high-minded commentary is that it is all too high-minded. Sure, we don’t know what the concussion tipping point will be. But I, for one, have a vision of what it could be: for example, a three-time champion quarterback murdering his supermodel wife on the 50-yard line at halftime of the Super Bowl — and taking out the intermission
song-and-dance act along with her.

  Of course, just to ruminate in such a fashion is deemed in extremely poor taste. By contrast, one presumes, the natural ebb and flow of today’s violent sports spectacles combine the visual splendor of Rembrandt, the wit of Molière, and the compositional brilliance of Shostakovich.

  Now cue the song “Dueling Banjos” from the movie Deliverance.

  12 March 2012..........

  While the mass and class actions of disabled NFL veterans grab the headlines, the keys to chop-blocking Football America’s out-of-­control popularity and participation will happen in the youth and high school leagues. The sweet spot is the coming cluster of cases on behalf of victims of death and catastrophic injuries in games sanctioned by public school districts. It won’t take many of them before the stewards of these taxpayer-supported institutions take a hard look at the viability of this particular “enrichment program.”

  I’ve pointed to the Ryne Dougherty case in New Jersey, since that one zeroes in on one of the most important fault lines of “concussion awareness”: death from a second traumatic brain injury following a return-to-play decision involving the use of the vaunted but criminally overemphasized ImPACT “concussion management system.” But a case in my state, California, may have beaten the Dougherty suit to the edge, as they like to say in this sport.

  The family of Scott Eveland, 22, has settled with the San Marcos Unified School District for close to $4.4 million. As a result of a head injury sustained during a Mission Hills High School game in 2007, Eveland is permanently confined to a wheelchair. He can communicate only by having someone support his elbow while he types on an iPad.