by Vicki Mayk
He quickly drove home and burst into the house, shouting the news to his son Matt, who was home. Tom initially could not reach Kathy, who was in a meeting. Morgan was finishing his semester at East Stroudsburg University. He called Morgan’s girlfriend, Brittany, the girl his son would later marry. Tom asked her to break the news to Morgan and stay with him.
Tom and Kathy headed to Penn as soon as she arrived at home. Pulling in at the University of Pennsylvania hospital, they were met by the head of security, coincidentally, a man Owen had recently interviewed for a class project. He arranged for them to park by the ambulances outside the emergency room, avoiding the rigmarole of parking at the massive hospital. “Two chaplains came and talked to us and then the doctor came and talked to us,” Tom recalls. He pauses before delivering a pathetic understatement. “It was a horrible day, a horrible, horrible day.” He does not mention what the medical examiner’s report confirms: that he was the person who identified his son’s body.
Later, Tom recalled the phone call he had received from Owen the day before, in which he talked about being overwhelmed by his approaching exams. “It was a weary voice. A weepy, teary kind of voice. I was exhausted because we had just finished the (United Church of Christ) Penn Northeast Conference two-day gathering and I’d done worship and I was so exhausted on Sunday night and I thought, ‘Should I go down or should I not?’”
There would be an autopsy. It would be a few days before Owen’s body would be brought home for burial. Tom and Kathy headed back to the Lehigh Valley. In the years that followed, the exact sequence of events on one of the worst days of their life would blur a bit. Kathy no longer remembers whether she received the call in the car en route to Allentown or back home on Jonagold Road. But she remembers what the caller—a young man named Chris Nowinski—would ask her within hours of learning her youngest child had killed himself. “Mrs. Thomas,” he would say. “Can we have Owen’s brain?”
CHAPTER 10
TESTIMONY
AT A MUSCULAR SIX FEET, FIVE INCHES TALL, Chris Nowinski is an intimidating presence who towers over most people. It’s the kind of presence that comes in handy on a football field or in the ring as a pro wrestler—both athletic careers that he had pursued in his early twenties. A football player in his high school near Chicago, he went on to play for the Harvard Crimson before graduating from the Ivy League school with a degree in sociology. Although he initially followed a traditional path after graduation by working for a life sciences consulting firm, he decided to explore his interest in professional wrestling, a world that married his athletic talents with an earlier interest in theater. Adopting the wrestling persona of Chris Harvard, Nowinski put his imposing physical presence, coupled with a larger-than-life personality that flaunted his Ivy League superiority with a stream of verbal boasts about his intellect, to work on World Wrestling Entertainment’s Monday Night Raw. Then an opponent kicked him in the head. He ended up with post-concussion syndrome, a debilitating condition characterized by chronic headaches, difficulty sleeping, and memory problems. It ended his wrestling career.1
The concussion would lead Nowinski to his life’s work as an activist raising awareness about the dangers of concussions among athletes—particularly young athletes. He wrote a book about the problem, Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis from the NFL to Youth Leagues. With Robert Cantu, the neurologist who had treated his post-concussion syndrome, Nowinski founded the Concussion Legacy Foundation and the Boston University CTE Center. Early on in the evolving field of CTE research, he took on a role that most would find difficult, or at the very least discomfiting. Nowinski described his role in a 2017 TED talk, in which he introduced himself saying, “Odds are, if you’ve met me in the last five years, I’ve asked you after a few minutes, a bit of an odd question: Can I have your brain?”2
The first time he’d posed the question, it was in a phone call to the eighty-eight-year-old mother of Philadelphia Eagles safety Andre Waters. Waters had shot himself in the head in November 2006 after months of exhibiting signs of depression. Nowinski had sought the brain on a hunch that Waters—who said he stopped counting his concussions at fifteen—had CTE. It turned out Nowinski was right, and soon he was spending his days scanning newspapers and the internet for obituaries of former players and asking bereaved families to donate their loved ones’ brains for research.
By the time Owen Thomas died in 2010, Nowinski had made a lot more calls asking for brains. Although he had never met Owen Thomas, there had been something familiar about his case, something that Nowinski identified with when he learned of his suicide.
Interviewed in the documentary film based on his book, Nowinski remembers hearing about Owen’s death. “For me it was a special case. This was an Ivy League defensive lineman. I was an Ivy League defensive lineman. It was like losing one of our own.”
Owen Thomas officially became part of the football concussion controversy less than six months after he died—and seventeen days before what would have been his twenty-second birthday. Chris Nowinski’s hunch had paid off when he learned of Owen’s death and contacted the Thomas family to ask that his brain be donated to Boston University’s CTE research. His would become a landmark case in the unfolding crisis.
“At that point, most cases had been found in professional football players, and it opened up the idea in a lot of people’s heads that this is affecting just good, nice kids who are playing football for the right reasons, who are also smart and successful,” says Nowinski, who had become CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation that he had cofounded.
The headline in the September 13, 2010, New York Times stated: “Suicide Reveals Signs of a Disease Seen in N.F.L.” The story, written by Alan Schwarz, a writer who had followed the CTE story from its beginnings, recounted that an autopsy of Owen’s brain revealed that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain disease until then linked primarily to professional players. The story outlined the significance of the discovery in two key paragraphs:
Thomas is the youngest and first amateur football player to be found with clear C.T.E., which is linked with cognitive impairment, depression and ultimately dementia. One 18-year-old former high school player who died two years ago, and whose name has been withheld by the Boston University researchers at his family’s request, had only incipient traces of the disease.
Later in the story, perhaps an even more disturbing detail was noted:
Thomas never had a diagnosis of a concussion on or off the football field or even complained of a headache, his parents said, although they acknowledged he was the kind of player who might have ignored the symptoms to stay on the field. Because of this, several doctors said, his CTE—whose only known cause is repetitive brain trauma—must have developed from concussions he dismissed or from the thousands of subconcussive collisions he withstood in his dozen years of football, most of them while his brain was developing.
After the Times broke the news about Owen, subsequent stories appeared on ESPN and in Sports Illustrated; The Los Angeles Times; Owen’s hometown newspaper, The Morning Call; and The Philadelphia Inquirer. The news also was covered on National Public Radio and dozens of other newspaper and television newscasts. The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper, carried a story quoting the Times article, Owen’s mother, and experts at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Brain Injury Research Center.
At the time of Owen’s death, CTE researchers were reluctant to say definitively that the CTE diagnosis meant that the disease was a prevailing factor causing Owen’s depression and subsequent suicide. At that time, Boston University researcher Ann McKee had found the disease in nineteen out of twenty brains of former NFL players—and most of them had far more advanced cases. Still, there was a mounting body of evidence that CTE manifested itself with depression and problems with impulse control—both seen in Owen’s behavior leading up to his death and evident in the very manner in which he took his life. In the years since his dea
th, researchers have begun to establish a direct link between suicide and brain trauma. “Not every case of mental instability is related to physical injury to the brain, but I think we’re seeing more and more that repeated trauma increases the risk for suicide,” Ann McKee said. “There’s military literature now that shows higher lifetime exposure to trauma increases the risk of suicide. So I’m thinking they’re more and more connected. But we need to do a lot more study to make that determination.”
One other striking factor about the discovery of the disease in Owen’s brain stunned McKee and other researchers. The brains in which the disease had been identified by the Boston physicians up until that time had come from former players who had shown signs of severe impairment before their deaths. That impairment had led their families to donate their brains. In Owen’s case, although there was evidence of depression and some impetuous or impulsive behavior for a short time before his suicide, he clearly had been living the active, normal life of a twenty-one-year-old. And yet the disease in his brain was already quite pronounced. McKee recalled, “I found between twenty and thirty of these lesions and most of them were in the frontal lobe. So the difference between stage one and stage two is mostly that these lesions are much more frequent. And in Owen’s brain, as I recall, in practically every section we had some abnormality.”
In July 2010, a poster appeared in NFL team locker rooms, mandated by the league. It’s message, targeting players, was clear: “Concussions and conditions resulting from repeated brain injury can change your life and your family’s life forever.” In September of that year, the NFL gave $30 million to the National Institutes of Health for research into brain trauma.3
The mounting number of cases of CTE among former NFL players would keep the issue alive. And as the evidence about the dangers of the disease among football players and other athletes grew, the significance of Owen’s case also increased.
The battered Parkland football helmet sat on the polished wood table in the US House of Representatives. The helmet was nicked by many collisions sustained in games and festooned with the stars awarded to Owen for valor on the field during his high school football career, including those earned from Coach Morgans as player of the week. Kathy Brearley sat near the helmet that represented one-third of the twelve years her son had played the game.
It was September 22, 2010, just a week after the results of the examination were announced revealing that Owen had CTE. Kathy was testifying before the House Committee on Education and Labor in the third hearing on federal legislation that aimed to reduce and more safely manage concussions in student athletes. She had agreed to testify at the request of Chris Nowinski, Ann McKee, and other staff at the Sports Legacy Foundation.
“If my son Owen was sitting with us today, he would say, ‘Mom, it’s OK. Don’t make a fuss.’ He would cringe at the thought of being the center of so much attention,” Kathy said in her crisp English accent. “Although an excellent wordsmith, Owen would adhere to the unspoken football rule that words are used sparingly. Actions speak for themselves. In that ancient motif of oratory—Athens versus warrior Sparta—today Owen would stand with Sparta.”4
Noting that she only learned about football after coming to the United States in 1982, she shared the details of her son’s death by suicide at the University of Pennsylvania. In less than a hundred words, her voice steady, she described how he had hung himself, then moved on with her testimony. “My first purpose,” Kathy continued, “is to put a human face on the disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy.”
Owen’s untimely death generates a new set of questions to be addressed by future CTE research. He had no known concussions at any time when playing soccer, basketball, baseball, or football. To our knowledge Owen never used steroids or abused drugs or alcohol. He had never been involved in a car accident and had never been hospitalized. He had no history of depression. We have no family history of depression or dementia. Owen never complained of headaches or acted strangely.
The only possible explanation we can see for the presence of CTE is that Owen started to play football at the age of nine. He was a very physical and intense player who threw himself into every sport he played. In precollege football he often played offense and defense and was on the field for much of the game. Maybe he had mild concussions that he never reported—that would be Owen, anxious to return to the game, not a coach pressurizing him. No one could ever pressurize Owen to do anything. Or maybe CTE is the cumulative effect of multiple subconcussions, compounded by some as yet unknown genetic component.5
Her next words reflected thoughts that Kathy returned to often after Owen’s death: because of CTE, her son’s future—if he had lived—would have been radically different than what he and his parents had imagined. Owen would have lived the greatly diminished life faced by hundreds of retired NFL players, grappling with memory loss, depression, and anger, and yet he would never have played a minute of pro football.
“Whatever the explanation, the fact is that we now know Owen—the recipient of his high school’s Eisenhower Award for leadership—faced an increasingly circumscribed future as his brain disease progressed. We would surely have loved and supported him no matter what the cost, but the bright future to which he aspired would have eluded him,” his mother stated.6
Noting that “football is indeed the spirit of Sparta acted out in our own time, a careful crafting of male athletic skill and teamwork,” Kathy went on to tell members of the committee that legislation was needed that would require high schools to protect their athletes while preserving the game. “In speaking out about Owen’s brain disease, it is my hope that parents and coaches will unite to improve the safety of younger players, so football can continue to be a powerful and exciting sport that unites families and communities all across the United States,” she said.7
Pennsylvania congressman Todd Russell Platts praised Kathy for her testimony, telling her, “You’ll make sure we do better for all the Owens out there.”
Owen’s name would again be entered into the Congressional Record a little more than a year later. On October 19, 2011, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on concussions and the marketing of sports equipment. It was an important and timely topic, as coaches, parents, and athletes pondered how helmets and other equipment might ameliorate the effects of jarring hits to the head in many sports, most importantly soccer and football. This time it would be Ann McKee, the CTE researcher who had discovered the condition in Owen’s brain postmortem, who would tell his story, using it as a cautionary tale, responding to those who might think that only professional athletes should be concerned about CTE.
McKee first gave the senators a short course in concussions, traumatic brain injury, and CTE. After outlining her expertise in the field of CTE research (including diagnosing fifty-eight deceased athletes with CTE), she noted two specific cases that she felt dramatically illustrated concerns about CTE. The first was former Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson, who began playing football at age eight and suffered eleven concussions in his NFL career. After retiring from football, he enjoyed a successful career—for a time. McKee continued, “At the age of forty-six, he experienced financial difficulties and the dissolution of his marriage. He became hot-tempered, physically and verbally abusive. He developed memory lapses, mood swings, and piercing headaches. And on February 17, 2011, he killed himself inside his Florida apartment. He left instructions to donate his brain to my laboratory, and my examination showed that he was suffering from moderately severe CTE, even though he was only fifty years old.”8
McKee then cited another case, one that was significant for a different reason. “Another example is Owen Thomas, a defensive end for the University of Pennsylvania who played football since age nine. One day in the spring of 2010, he called his parents and told them he was stressed by school and having trouble with several of his courses. And two days later, he hanged himself in his off-campus apartment.
&
nbsp; “When I looked at Owen’s brain, I saw unmistakable changes of early CTE. In fact, if you compare the brain of Owen Thomas to the brain of Dave Duerson, there was remarkably similar, although milder, pathology, suggesting that if Owen Thomas had lived another thirty years his CTE would have progressed to the advanced stage demonstrated by Dave Duerson.”
McKee would go on to cite subsequent findings, including early-stage CTE found in a seventeen-year-old high school football player who died after returning to play three weeks after incurring a concussion. In concluding her testimony, she stated, “However, there are many things that we do not understand about CTE. We do not understand or we do not know the exact incidence and prevalence of this disorder, even though we now clearly understand that this disease exists, and it is surprisingly common.
“What factors determine who will develop CTE?” she continued.
How many concussions, how many subconcussive injuries, how close together the injuries, how severe, and at what age? All of these are aspects of the disease that are unknown at this time. Importantly, we do not know how to diagnose this disease in living individuals, how to stop its progression, or how to reverse its course. But we can make important changes to prevent this disease from developing in young athletes, and those changes include understanding what a concussion is, recognition of concussion when it occurs, and proper medical management of concussion after it happens.9
Dramatic testimony like McKee’s, delivered in front of Congress, seemed to make little impact on football fans. But the actions of beloved former players kept the head injury issue alive for the public. Late in 2011, former Atlanta Falcons safety Ray Easterling would file suit against the NFL for its deception regarding the seriousness of brain injury. Eventually the suit would be joined by more than 4,500 players. In April 2012, Easterling committed suicide and was subsequently found to have CTE.10 The next month, in May 2012, former San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau shot himself at age forty-three, two years after retiring. Like Dave Duerson, he, too, had exhibited increasingly erratic behavior. Like Duerson, he was found to have CTE.