It was beautiful. All of it. And Bennet marveled at it, the whole time in his mind talking to Mike Webster. Here you go, Mike, look what we did. It was a fabulous feeling of accomplishment. And then the phone rang.
Now he was sitting at his kitchen table with his head cocked to one side, balancing the phone against his shoulder; he was listening to some guy tell him that there was a problem. A big problem.
“Retracted?” Bennet said. “What do you mean they want it retracted?”
“I’m sorry this is happening,” the guy said. He was from the journal’s editorial board, and he was saying three doctors had written a letter to the board demanding that the journal retract Bennet’s work.
“But you don’t just retract papers,” Bennet said. “It’s published! It’s right here in my hands!” His voice was in its highest pitch, a bicycle squeak. “Your board had it reviewed by a dozen or more professionals before it was accepted. We provided revisions. We provided data. The microscopic proof which are the photographs in the paper itself!”
“I know—”
“It’s already published!”
“The demand is pretty forthright. From some notable doctors.”
“Who?”
“I’ll fax you the letter.”
Retracted. You don’t just retract papers. Retraction was something you did if the author was found to be a fraud. Retraction would be a public humiliation.
“It is a highly professional paper,” Bennet said, growing angry, his voice rising. “Written and reviewed by highly respected scientists!”
“We’ll need a response,” the guy said. “I’ll fax you the letter. I’m sorry this is happening.”
Bennet hung up, fired off an email to Hamilton and DeKosky. Help! He did not immediately tell Wecht. Wecht had enough trouble. Maybe Wecht was going to get indicted, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this. Maybe that. For nearly a year everyone at the morgue would live with that crushing anxiety, waiting for the FBI to say something about that preposterous raid, anything, and you didn’t dare talk to Wecht about it because he’d blow. So you put your head down. Avoided Wecht.
Hamilton was upset by the news. A retraction was, yeah, like getting a dunce hat stuck on your head and people throwing pies in your face. It would mean professional ruin. Bennet would never be able to publish again, and Hamilton and DeKosky would probably go down with him. This was ridiculous. They were established names in the field. Nobody gets retracted.
Hamilton said the research was solid, completely solid, and Bennet said of course it was. And then they both took a deep breath and thought: Wait a second. Who are these idiots demanding a retraction?
Bennet stood by the fax machine in his condominium while the pages of the letter came spitting out, single-spaced, six sheets in all. It was longer than the original article. He gathered it and flipped quickly to the end page to see who had signed the letter.
Elliot Pellman, the chairman of the MTBI committee.
The NFL guy?
Ira Casson, also on the MTBI committee.
Oh my gosh, the NFL guys?
David Viano, also on the MTBI committee.
I thought, this football league is coming after me? I just did not understand this football league! I became very nervous and shaky. Why would they write so many words against my work? I believed my work could help them! I did not understand why they would react this way. I was sweating profusely. I reached out for my good old Johnnie Walker scotch whisky. The Scots are the best whisky distillers, oh my gosh! I poured two shots for myself and gulped it down. I sat in the kitchen and I began to read their letter, but by the second or third paragraph, I began to smile. I began to relax. At that moment I realized I knew the subject better than these so-called top physicians. Their understanding of the subject was embarrassingly naive and virginal.
“We disagree,” the letter said.
“Serious flaws.”
“Complete misunderstanding.”
“A serious misinterpretation.”
“A failure.”
In tone, the letter struggled to remain calm, but the subtext was clear: We own this field. We are not about to bow to some no-name Nigerian with some bullshit theory.
The attack against Bennet was that he had misinterpreted his own neuropathological findings. In his calmer moments, Bennet considered the fact that neither Casson, Pellman, nor Viano was a neuropathologist. How can doctors who are not neuropathologists interpret neuropathological findings better than a neuropathologist?
But mostly Bennet did not remain calm.
In the coming days, as he prepared his response, he began to look into and question the integrity of the MTBI committee. It was one thing not to put a neuropathologist on your fourteen-member brain committee, quite another to have the committee headed by…a rheumatologist, as was the case with Pellman (who was also revealed to be Tagliabue’s personal physician, since at least 1997).
Wait, he’s a rheumatologist? They picked a joint guy to lead their brain study?
As a New York Jets team doctor, Pellman was of course on the NFL payroll, as were other scientists on the committee. Were they being bought? Were they even really studying concussions?
Looking back through the literature, Bennet saw that Pellman had put forth unwavering conclusions about concussions and football back in 1994 when the committee was first formed. “Concussions are part of the profession,” he told reporters. “An occupational hazard.” He said it was like steelworkers who get injured; it was something that came with the job. The players knew what they were getting into. And, besides, concussions were temporary.
Bennet wondered if this MTBI committee had been formed to control that same narrative. No big deal. He noted that the committee was churning out papers for Neurosurgery at an alarming rate. One a month for five months in 2005 alone. The research in those papers refuted much of the work that the mainstream scientists who were not on the NFL payroll were doing.
Was this some sort of orchestrated campaign? Even the guy running the journal Neurosurgery—Michael Apuzzo, the editor-in-chief—turned out to be on the NFL payroll.
“Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis,” concluded a 2005 article from the MTBI committee. And if they did sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain, well, look at the statistics, the article argued: the statistics showed that concussed players were able to play again. These statistics, the MTBI committee doctors maintained, proved that the head injuries were simply not that severe. “More than one-half of the players returned to play within one day, and symptoms resolved in a short time in the vast majority of cases,” another article said.
Bennet wondered what sort of rat’s nest he had stepped into. A bee’s nest. A hornet’s nest. In those awakening moments, he hoped that was not the case. He hoped this was not like Nigeria. No, this was America. This was a land where people played fair. This was a land where you did honest work and worked hard and harder still and because of your hard work you earned respect. Linear. Rational. Christian! God had blessed America. That’s what Bennet grew up thinking, and knowing, and that’s why he came, and you don’t just let go of something like that. Letting go meant you were wrong, you had it wrong, you were stupid.
He felt the warmth of whisky down his throat, soothing. He thought about Mike Webster, his body getting wheeled in on the gurney, those hands, that scar on his head, those burns on his thighs from the Taser he used on himself. Was this football league paying scientists to trick people into believing that players like Mike Webster did not suffer brain damage from football? If that was the case, then they knew.
They knew? He refused to believe that they knew. That was un-American!
And yet: They wanted his paper retracted. They wanted to nullify the work of an independent scientist who had stumbled onto undeniable proof. They wanted to silence him.
One paper a month for five months, eventually a total of sixteen papers in Neurosurgery from the MT
BI committee. That was a ridiculous number of papers from one group of scientists, Bennet thought. Anyone would think.
He wondered how to phrase his response to the NFL doctors trying to silence and humiliate him. He would have no trouble defending his neuropathological findings.
But he had something else to tell them, too. Something else for the MTBI committee to consider.
In his refrigerator, in a white bucket. Oh, Prema hated the way Bennet would always stash his brains right next to the milk like that. In the bucket he had pieces of the brain of another dead NFL player who had gone crazy.
—
Terry Long played right guard for the Steelers alongside Mike Webster. He grew up a shy boy in Columbia, South Carolina, helped his widowed mom raise the younger kids by getting a job laying bricks. He went into the army at nineteen, served two years with the Special Forces. He discovered football at Fort Bragg, got good at it, and was recruited by East Carolina University to play offensive tackle. He was short, not even six feet, but at 284 pounds was packed solid as dirt. The Steelers drafted him in the fourth round in 1984, and within a year he was starting on the offensive line with Webster. For five years, six inches away from Webster. They called him T-Bone. He was an affable guy who donated a football scholarship to his alma mater, became close to the legendary Steelers coach Chuck Noll. But six years into his career, something wasn’t right with his head. He got moody. He had started taking steroids—maybe that was it. He failed a drug test in 1991, and Coach Noll suspended him. He took it hard. Way hard. He locked himself in his garage, in his car, the engine running, the carbon monoxide rising, breathing deep. He couldn’t get enough poison in him to do the job. A girlfriend dragged him out of there. He got rid of her, and the next day he ate rat poison. That didn’t work, either. They sent him to a psych ward. By 1992 he was off the team. He got married again, clung to his wife, needed her, clung to her, then turned on her. In paranoid rages, he became violent. She left, came back, left again. A cycle. He became a hermit. But then he would emerge and he would be normal again, charming even. He was a fantastic salesman. He started a lot of businesses. He couldn’t keep any of them going, couldn’t keep his head together, gave money away to anyone who asked. He swung between highs and lows, became impulsive and reckless. He bought a chicken processing plant in Pittsburgh’s North Side. He wasn’t good at processing chickens. Neighbors complained that the Value Added Food Groups building was giving off rank odors from rotting poultry carcasses. Then USDA inspectors came and said the place was in violation of federal regulations. Allegheny County plumbing inspectors came and found terrible sewage problems. Caving in, everything caving in on him. Two months later, the chicken plant blew up. Arson, the feds said, and indicted Long. He said the hell with it. He went home and drank a bottle of Drano. That didn’t work. He got sent back to the psych ward. Then on June 7, 2005, he got a large bottle of antifreeze and drank it all and that’s how he finally killed himself. He was forty-five.
Since his death was ruled a suicide, it fell under the jurisdiction of the county coroner. Bennet wasn’t working the day Long’s body was rolled into the morgue. His colleague Dr. Abdulrezak Shakir did the autopsy. Shakir could have put the brain back in Long’s body, as he did with almost every other autopsy in his seventeen-year career, could have packed it up and sent the corpse off to be cremated or buried. But he didn’t. He knew Terry Long was a football player. He thought about Bennet, his research, his excitement about brains. “Fix the brain,” he said to the technician.
“But—”
“Fix the brain,” he said.
Bennet was thankful for the vote of confidence. He said, “Well, let me see here.” And when the formaldehyde had made the brain firm enough to slice, Bennet pulled Terry Long’s brain out of the bucket and put it on the cutting board and took a knife to the frontal lobe and cut a section about the width of a stick of gum. He did this work at his apartment, outside on the balcony, because Prema hated the smell of formaldehyde. He took slices from the parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. “Look at you,” Prema said. “You are cutting brains on the balcony. Look at you.” She thought: This right here is my future husband in a nutshell, and she took a picture of him.
He packed the four slices into plastic cassettes, put them in his briefcase, and took them up to Jonette at the lab.
“Another one?” Jonette said.
“If you please,” he said.
Same stains, same tests, same routine.
And when Bennet looked in the microscope he found the same splotches, the same tangles, the same tau proteins. “This stuff should not be in the brain of a forty-five-year-old man,” he said. “This is another case of CTE.”
He told Wecht.
“Are you sure?” Wecht said. “A second case? Bennet, are you sure?”
“I am sure,” Bennet said. “It’s right here on the slides, Dr. Wecht.”
And so Bennet immediately began working on a second paper to submit to Neurosurgery, while he was still composing a response to the NFL’s demand that his first paper be retracted. He figured a second case of CTE would strengthen his argument, that the added evidence would encourage the doubters on the MTBI committee to listen to him.
But Wecht, because he was Wecht, said to hell with the scientific community and the whoever-idiots trying to prove Bennet wrong. “I have no patience for that bullshit.” So before Bennet had a chance to finish a draft of his paper about Terry Long for Neurosurgery, Wecht went to his friends in the local press.
“Wait,” Bennet said. A respectable scientist doesn’t go to the mainstream press. A respectable scientist publishes papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
“No, I will not wait,” Wecht said.
The headline on the September 14, 2005, story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was just the kind Wecht liked—exciting, explosive, with Wecht’s name in it.
WECHT: LONG DIED FROM BRAIN INJURY: HAD HEAD TRAUMA FROM NFL DAYS
Oh, no, Dr. Wecht. Please, no, Dr. Wecht.
Wecht did not have a full command of the science when he spoke to reporters, but it was close enough.
“A football helmet gives you an awful lot of protection,” Wecht said, “but you don’t have to be a doctor or an engineer or even a football player to realize that the helmet does not block out all the measured force produced when some 300-pound player with a hand the size of a Christmas ham whacks you in the head dozens of times a game, season after season.”
Locally, a Steelers team doctor was enraged by the headline. Joe Maroon, the neurosurgeon on the Steelers roster, came out with a public statement. Maroon was a major player in the concussion business—and yes, he treated it like a business. He was a go-getter of the highest order. In addition to his post with the Steelers, he was a vice chairman at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, cofounder of the hospital’s Sports Medicine Concussion Program, and medical director of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). He had been front and center on the NFL concussion crisis since the beginning; he had implored Merril Hoge to retire back in 1994 after repeated concussions, telling him he risked permanent brain damage if he continued playing. It was hard to get a handle on Maroon. On the one hand, he probably saved Hoge’s life. On the other hand, he was an adviser to the NFL’s MTBI committee, one of the concussion experts who were saying concussions were not a problem in the NFL. Maroon was endowed with an entrepreneurial spirit. He and a colleague had come up with a computer-based test, ImPACT (Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing), which people could use to help determine the severity of a head injury. He trademarked the test, sold it to the NFL, the NHL, and colleges and high schools across the country, and was making millions of dollars on it.
STEELERS DOCTOR SAYS CONCLUDING FOOTBALL LED TO LONG’S DEMISE IS BAD SCIENCE read the headline that came in response to the Terry Long news. Maroon attacked Bennet’s finding. “I think it’s just bad science to conclude that football caused his death,” he said. He went on to say i
n another article, “The conclusions drawn here are preposterous and a misinterpretation of the facts….To say he was killed by football, it’s just not right, it’s not appropriate.”
Bad science. Preposterous. A misinterpretation of the facts. Apparently that was going to be a charge Bennet would have to get used to. I own this science. I am not about to bow to some no-name coroner with some bullshit theory. Now there was another hornet in the nest Bennet wished he had never stepped into.
Maroon kept at it. He told reporters that he himself had in his possession Terry Long’s medical records and these records proved Bennet’s findings were wrong. Terry Long had never had a single concussion, he said. “I was the team neurosurgeon during his entire tenure with the Steelers,” he said. “I rechecked my records; there was not one cerebral concussion documented in him during those entire seven years. Not one.”
“What the fuck?” Wecht said to Bennet. Wecht knew Maroon personally. Another Rust Belt guy from an immigrant family, rising up. He had his own outsized ego. Wecht knew all about Maroon’s heroic and exciting triathlons; Maroon made sure everyone knew about his triathlons. He was big on self-promotion, a trait that Wecht had no room to criticize him for. But was Maroon right about Terry Long?
“He’s wrong,” Bennet said.
“Are you sure?” Wecht asked. “Bennet, are you sure?”
“Dr. Wecht, I am sure.”
Bennet had Long’s medical records, too. He opened the file, showed it to Wecht. There was a letter in the file, a letter written by Maroon himself, describing one of Terry Long’s concussions.
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