Concussion Inc.

by Irvin Muchnick

  The NFL is “investigating” the Kris Dielman incident. But the league can’t investigate itself on the question of whether it even gives a damn. For all its outrageousness, the fact that Dielman continued on the field is just another manifestation of the ultra-competitiveness of pro football. They can all say they’ll take measures to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, but inevitably it will.

  That Dielman was on a cross-country flight hours later, however, is something else entirely. Even I know that you don’t get on an airplane in the immediate aftermath of a head injury, and I have none of the medical degrees amassed by such NFL experts as Ira “Dr. No” Casson and Joe “Sports Brain Guard” Maroon.

  Does the NFL care even a little bit about the health of its players? Does anyone else care that the NFL doesn’t care?

  What the general public has yet to grasp is that the pro game is both better and worse on safety than the amateur game. Worse, of course — because it is competitive and dollar-driven to the exclusion of all else. But also better — because it has resources. At lower levels of football, the NFL can only be aped, less competently … by definition, less professionally … off the field as well as on it.

  And that is why youth football is doomed. Having-it-both-ways good intentions will not save lives and protect public health.

  29 February 2012..........

  Kris Dielman retires.

  ..........

  1 deadspin.com/5841793/michael-vicks-head-injury-is-the-nfls-worst-nightmare.

  2 “Vick’s return comes with risks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 2011.

  3 www.healthandfitnessadvice.com/the-healthy-skeptic/there-is-no-such-thing-as-safer-football.html.

  4 See sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/will_carroll/10/17/­michael-vick-concussion2/index.html.

  5 profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2011/10/27/report-kris-­dielman-had-seizure-on-plane-after-concussion/.

  RITALIN — THE NEW GROWTH HORMONE

  18 April 2011..........

  Here’s a story you’ll be hearing a lot more about in six months or six years: National Football Leaguers — followed by college, high school, and youth league football players — soon will be gaming corrupt Pittsburgh Steelers/World Wrestling Entertainment doctor Joseph Maroon’s “ImPACT” concussion management software system by taking the amphetamine-family drug Ritalin before being retested to assess their recovery from head injuries.

  According to one concussion expert I’ve spoken with, this has already started happening at the NFL level. And of course it makes perfect sense. Ritalin is the medication prescribed most notoriously for “hyperactive” kids and sufferers from ADD (attention deficit disorder), with the goal of improving mental focus. Inevitably, professional athletes and their handlers would seize on Ritalin’s ability to mask the fact that they hadn’t entirely “cleared the cobwebs” from recent blows to the brain. (The phrase in quotes was used last week in an admirably candid interview by Fox TV commentator Terry Bradshaw, 62, discussing how concussions during his own Hall of Fame career have proceeded to impair his quality of life.)

  With the assistance of a doc with a promiscuous prescription pad — if not simply a friendly pharmacist who doesn’t need to get too rigorous about the whole script thing — a player who “got his bell rung” can ease the process of identifying whether the diagnostician in front of him is holding up three fingers or four. Which, in more technologically sophisticated form, basically describes the ImPACT program that Maroon and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues have successfully pushed on the sports establishment — aided by authoritative-sounding articles in journals such as Neurosurgery.

  Yet somehow this same class of esteemed researchers went 74 years between the 1928 discovery of dementia pugilistica (“punch-drunk syndrome” in boxers) and that of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in athletes in other contact sports. It took a Nigerian-born forensic pathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu, to come across the latter almost inadvertently in autopsies of retired Steeler Mike Webster and others. Since Omalu wasn’t well connected or sufficiently coached in how far he was supposed to go in his scientific conclusions, his follow-up articles on CTE got unofficially blacklisted from Neurosurgery until very recently.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Maroon — pillar of the community, 70-year-old ironman competitor, supplement huckster — forges on.

  Though I’m hard on Maroon, I am somewhat sympathetic about the shortcomings of ImPACT. People who know a lot more about the subject than I do say it can be a decent tool. “I use it to scare players and their parents when they get complacent about a concussion,” a high school trainer explained to me. “ImPACT does establish a baseline of certain neurological functions, and it has value. But concussion management is still a subjective thing.”

  The problem with ImPACT is that it was overhyped as a solution, at the expense of attention that should have been paid to more central considerations: prevention and unbiased, non-commercialized basic research.

  The result, I fear, is that medical paraprofessionals like this trainer, and all of amateur sports in America, will find themselves in the same pickle with concussions that we already face with steroid abuse. (That’s assuming there is any more such a thing as an amateur sport — which anyone who last week viewed the PBS Frontline documentary on high school football might be led to question.) In recent decades, elaborate specialized cat-and-mouse protocols were set up to test athletes’ urine, but the most ambitious and resourceful among them simply moved on to human growth hormone, which doesn’t show up in their pee-pee.

  Ritalin potentially is the HGH of concussion testing. I didn’t expect ever to find myself typing the words “I feel for Roger Goodell,” but the NFL commissioner has a point when he jawbones for HGH blood testing during collective bargaining with the Players Association. Now, in order to demonstrate responsibility for the health of its athletes and, more importantly, the overall gross national mental health, the league will have to do more than cite the very limited ImPACT system, along with the very limited and inaccurately targeted $20 million in research the league has spent — mostly to bolster the clinical-corporate yes men epitomized by Joseph Maroon.

  20 April 2011..........

  One of the seminal national magazine articles on chronic traumatic encephalopathy — “Game Brain” by Jeanne Marie Laskas in the October 2009 issue of GQ — suggests that the Ritalin trail also extends to the post-career agony of brain-damaged football players.

  “Game Brain” tells the story of the late Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer Mike Webster’s descent into mental illness and homelessness, and the postmortem discovery of his CTE by Dr. Bennet Omalu. In 1997, Laskas writes, Webster met Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer who is now on the board of directors of West Virginia University’s Brain Injury Research Institute: “Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. He really couldn’t remember whom he’d seen or when. He couldn’t remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.”1

  21 April 2011..........

  Today’s column by Alex Marvez, FoxSports.com’s lead NFL writer, confirms our story earlier this week on how Dr. Joseph Maroon’s ImPACT concussion test can be manipulated by taking the drug Ritalin and by other means.2

  The Marvez piece draws from interviews he and former quarterback, and NFL most valuable player, Rich Gannon conducted on their Sirius radio show with brain imaging expert Dr. Daniel Amen and with Ronnie Barnes, the New York Giants’ vice president of medical services. The FoxSports link also embeds Marvez’s earlier video report on Dr. Amen’s work.

  Writes Marvez: “Baseline testing is the crux of the NFL’s new ‘go/no-go’ concussion policy. Any player who suffers a head injury must now pass a six- to eight-minute test that measures such elements as cognitive thinking, memory, concentration,
and balance. Those results are then compared to how the player scored in the preseason to determine clearance for an in-game return.”

  But Amen told him that a number of his player patients have said “they purposely do bad on the testing to start, so if they get a concussion it doesn’t affect them.” Amen also verifies that using Ritalin is another potential form of cheating. “Ritalin will work,” Amen said. “It helps boost activity to the front part of the brain. In my mind, it’s not the first thing I would do to rehabilitate a concussion, but it would be on the list of things to do.” The doctor underscored that this practice is “not approved or a smart thing to do.”

  ..........

  1 www.gq.com/sports/profiles/200909/nfl-players-brain-­dementia-study-memory-concussions.

  2 See “Players could try to beat concussion tests,” msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/NFL-players-could-try-to-beat-concussion-tests-042111.

  OBAMA THE KITSCH KING

  8 May 2009..........

  This is what happens when the president-elect goes on 60 Minutes to promote the creation of a college football national championship playoff. Last week Congressman Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, held a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection on this urgent issue, questioning Bowl Championship Series coordinator and Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford in the opening volley for what Barton is calling the College Football Playoff Act of 2009.

  Among Barton’s pearls of statecraft was this quote: “They keep trying to tinker with the current system and to me it’s like — and I don’t mean this directly — it’s like communism. You can’t fix it. I think they should change the name to the BES — Bowl Exhibition Series — or just drop the C and call it the BS system because it isn’t about determining a champion on the field.”

  There was no word on whether the bill would get stuffed with such pork-barrel measures as improved health and safety standards for “student-athlete” gladiators who are pushed to the limit and beyond in 12-month-a-year training regimens, leading one to croak every couple of years.

  Let’s not even get into whether these unpaid mercenaries are ­entitled to a fair share of the profits that their prime-time spectacles produce for the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its ­members. No, the revenues are reserved for the “educators,” the coaches, and their shoe sponsors. To operate otherwise would be too much like — and I do mean this directly — communism.

  As it turns out, your correspondent knows a thing or two about the ways of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. Two years ago, the then-ranking minority member, Florida Republican Cliff Stearns, weaseled into the wall-to-wall cable TV news coverage of the murder-suicide of pro wrestler Chris Benoit by proposing legislation to force the wrestling industry to adopt Olympics-level testing for steroids.

  Stearns acted after Mark Kriegel, a columnist for FoxSports.com, called for Congressional involvement in wrestling’s pandemic of occupation-related deaths. Kriegel quoted my just-published book Wrestling Babylon, whose appendix listed 89 deaths of pro wrestlers under age 50 from 1985 through 2006 — a list Wrestling Observer Newsletter publisher Dave Meltzer called understated. In his press release and media shots, Stearns cited the numbers from my book, without attribution.

  The crusading congressman soon lost interest in the subject and moved on to the telecommunications subcommittee, though not before making a televised appearance at a show at the Funking Conservatory, a wrestling school run by retired great Dory Funk Jr. in Stearns’ Ocala district. Funk gave Stearns a signed pair of wrestling boots.

  The reformist baton was passed to the chair of the Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee, Illinois Democrat Bobby Rush. Coincidentally, Rush is the only politician ever to defeat Obama, who challenged Rush’s reelection in the 2000 primary.

  Rush huffed and puffed. In November 2007, the congressman promised hearings combining the wrestling issue with the findings in major league baseball’s just-released Mitchell Report. In February 2008, the subcommittee grilled the heads of all the legit major sports leagues and their players’ union chiefs — but not World Wrestling Entertainment chair Vince McMahon, who claimed his lawyer had a scheduling conflict.

  “I am exceptionally and extremely disappointed,” Rush said. “I want to assure Mr. McMahon that this committee fully intends to deal with the illegal steroid abuse in professional wrestling. And we hope he will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”

  It was a bigger sham than WrestleMania. Though the public didn’t yet know, Rush himself had to know that McMahon had already given testimony to another Congressional committee — in a closed-door interview two months earlier with staffers of Congressman Henry Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

  At the time, the lead investigator for Waxman, Brian Cohen, reviewed the ground rules that had been negotiated. “Our intention was that you were able to come in here without having a media circus,” Cohen purred.

  Never one to foster media circuses, Congressman Waxman proceeded a few weeks later to stage an internationally televised hearing to probe, among other things, whether an abscess on baseball pitcher Roger Clemens’ ass cheek was caused by repeated injections of human growth hormone by his estranged personal trainer, Brian McNamee. Clemens heatedly denied this but acknowledged that McNamee had given HGH to Clemens’ wife, Debbie, prior to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit shoot. And the Republic survived the revelation, even if Clemens’ reputation didn’t.

  Getting back to Obama and his high-priority war on the BCS, one of the questions arising from his first 100 days is exactly when, if ever, he will be held to account for his descents into frivolousness and bad taste. He certainly got away with yukking to Jay Leno that his poor bowling scores were like “Special Olympics.” (Obama also, deservedly, has gotten high marks for changing the tone of American foreign policy, and other achievements.)

  Maybe the explanation is that the president is a fox, and his BCS BS is a diversionary tactic to pacify yahoos like Congressman Barton while Obama hits one out of the park with his nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

  Whatever the outcome, this is all about the uses and misuses of kitsch in an epoch of bread and circuses. The brilliant Czech writer Milan Kundera has defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit.” Kundera added, “Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.”

  America’s saving grace, so far, is that our kitsch is bipartisan.

  8 March 2012..........

  The President of the United States has spoken on the football concussion crisis. With the utmost unseriousness. I’m thumbing through my thesaurus for the antonym of gravitas.

  Interviewed last week for Bill Simmons’ “B.S. Report” at Grantland.com, Barack Obama made his obligatory pitch for expanded college football playoffs and his obligatory riffs on the Chicago Bulls and March Madness. Asked about concussions, Obama allowed:

  Concussions is a tough one. When you see what’s happened — I actually knew Dave Duerson and used to see him at the gym sometimes, and [he] couldn’t have been a nicer guy. And when you think about the toll that NFL players are taking, it’s tough. Now, the problem is, if you talk to NFL players, they’re going to tell you that that’s the risk I take; this is the game I play. And I don’t know whether you can make football, football if there’s not some pretty significant risk factors.

  Part of the problem is just the speed and the size of these guys now is — you watch the old tapes from the ’50s and the ’60s — they look like they’re going in slow motion. And now, what, they just had the Combine and they’re talking about some guy who is like 340, who runs a 4.8 —

  In the video, the camera cuts back to Simmons — who has built a superfan persona into a mini-empire — sitting there with a shit-eating grin. No fol
low-up questions on the Congressional hearings that have analogized the National Football League to Big Tobacco; on the dozens of lawsuits by hundreds of retired players; on the journalistically elemental point that we are talking about the prevalence of traumatic brain injury in this sport because it affects millions of American kids at the feeder levels — in the Pop Warner and in our public high schools, where informed consent and risk are a slippery slope toward material decline of gross national mental health.

  B.S. Report, indeed.

  And thanks a bunch, Mr. President, for making sure your fellow citizens know that you rubbed shoulders with the great Dave Duerson, and for not wasting a moment of their time reflecting on the meaning of his suicide after years of denying the reality of the long-term brain damage suffered both by himself and by other NFL veterans whose disability claims he had helped reject while serving on the NFL retirement fund board.

  In 1962, John F. Kennedy threw out the ceremonial first pitch at baseball’s all-star game in Washington. After mugging appropriately for the cameras, he used his broadcast interview to plug the new President’s Council on Physical Fitness. His point was to remind us that, while on this day we were all fans and spectators, the next day we would resume acting as participants in our lives and our futures. In the chief of state’s expression of interest in professional sports, there was at least the faintest hint of a communal philosophy … some care in public presentation … a smidgen of intellectual and moral heft.

  That was then. Obama — along with all the other cardboard-­cutout presidents you and I create — is now. I’ve written about how I believe those who compare this moment in football history with President Theodore Roosevelt’s intervention to spur the banning of the “flying wedge” 100 years ago have it wrong; these critics grossly underestimate the greater influence of football in today’s culture, even as they grossly overestimate the solutions that have been proposed to fix the sport. But as Obama’s useless preening on the concussion issue shows, there’s another reason to be worried. Today, only celebrity-­sniffing hand-wringers need apply for the Oval Office.