“Holy goddamned Christ,” Wecht said. “Well, you have to tell the newspaper.”
“If you please, I will not talk to the newspaper,” Bennet said.
“Do it.”
“But—”
“Do it.”
So Bennet showed reporters Maroon’s letter detailing one of Terry Long’s concussions. Headlines ricocheted back and forth, Maroon publicly apologizing, then attacking Bennet again. “Fallacious reasoning,” he said of Bennet’s work.
Then Pellman, the chairman of the MTBI committee, jumped in and backed Maroon, launched his own attacks. “Speculative and unscientific,” he said of Bennet’s work.
Bennet did not like feeling that people were angry with him, and yet he himself was becoming angry. He felt the Igbo fire igniting inside him. He felt he was learning something very ugly about America, about how an $8 billion industry could attempt to silence even the most well-intentioned scientist and in the most preposterous ways. A demand for a retraction? An outright denial of the facts? A personal attack on his validity as a scientist?
Father Carmen read the press coverage. “Oh, Bennet, what have you gotten yourself into?” he said to him. “The NFL is one of the most powerful organizations in America. Please be careful.”
A reporter showed up at Bennet’s condo, said he worked for the sports pages, had a few questions. He saw Webster’s and Long’s brains sitting in tubs in Bennet’s living room. “Dude!” he said. “Get these out of your house! Someone could come in and kill you and steal these brains! Do you know what you’re dealing with?”
No, he did not know what he was dealing with. What he thought he was dealing with was a promise to Mike Webster, and to Terry Long. Guys who went crazy and no longer had a voice. He found something in their brains, and he had a duty to tell people.
Onyemalukwube.
He went back to his dining room table and his books and his laptop. He finished working on his scientific paper detailing his findings in Terry Long’s brain. He called it “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part II” and put it in an envelope and sent it to Neurosurgery, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal that did not, in the end, accept the NFL’s request to retract Bennet’s first paper. They agreed to publish this one, too.
—
Then, in the middle of this dark, confusing mess, there came a bright spot. At the time, it felt like the first sunshine of spring. Bennet got a phone call from Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon of considerable renown who had worked for a decade as a Steelers team doctor. He had studied under Maroon. He was a southern guy, from Louisiana, had played football in high school and college, loved football as much as anyone. He was now chairman of neurosurgery at West Virginia University Hospitals. He had known Mike Webster well, was friends with the family. He knew Terry Long, too. He knew brains. He knew concussions. In his lab in West Virginia he was concussing rats, examining the resulting damage to brain tissue. Bailes had experience that touched and intersected and paralleled Omalu’s research in the way of all fascinating coincidences.
On the phone, Bailes introduced himself. He said, “Dr. Omalu, I’m calling to tell you I believe you.”
It was the first time anyone who had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu’s work, had called him anything other than a quack.
“Thank you, Dr. Bailes,” Bennet said. “Thank you very much.”
“Julian,” Bailes said. “Call me Julian.”
Bailes gave Bennet his own understanding of the NFL’s involvement in the concussion conversation—a topic that he himself had been trying for years to keep alive. And the NFL had been ignoring it. Ignoring the recommendations from the American Academy of Neurology, ignoring the research from independent scientists who had been finding evidence of a link between football and long-term brain damage. “A slew of independent researchers,” Bailes said. “We’ve been pounding this issue now for two decades.” They had been warning the NFL that there was a problem, a big problem. They were in effect screaming “Fix this problem!” And the screaming went nowhere, the screaming led to the MTBI committee and all that wasted energy.
“Then you come out with your CTE research,” Bailes said. “And it’s sort of like the whole story suddenly makes sense. You’ve given their boogeyman a name.”
“I was just trying to figure out what happened to Mike Webster,” Bennet said.
“Webby,” Bailes said. “I loved that guy. We were all trying to figure out what happened to him. And T-Bone. Yeah, that’s two. There are more.”
“More?”
Bailes was cochairing a study at the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Study of Retired Athletes. His group had surveyed thousands of retired players, and in 2003 had found that players who had suffered multiple concussions were three times more likely to suffer clinical depression. They reported their finding to the NFL.
“You told them about it?” Bennet said. “What did they say?”
“Flawed.”
Bailes and his team did a follow-up study. This one showed that repeatedly concussed NFL players had five times the rate of “mild cognitive impairment,” or pre-Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, it showed that retired NFL players were suffering Alzheimer’s symptoms at an alarming rate—37 percent higher than the average guy walking down the street. They reported their finding to the NFL.
“What did they say?” Bennet asked.
“Flawed.”
“Geez,” Bennet said.
“Exactly,” Bailes said.
The only experiments that were not “flawed,” according to the NFL, were the ones conducted by their paid scientists, all of which happened to disagree with a growing number of independent researchers.
“And I don’t have to tell you,” Bailes said, “but that’s just unprecedented in science. That would be like the American Heart Association saying, ‘Hey, if it’s not our sponsored research, we don’t acknowledge it or comment on it. Only we can figure out heart disease!’ ”
Or it would be like the tobacco industry in the 1980s—denying that cigarettes caused cancer despite mounting evidence that they did.
It would have been laughable, if it weren’t so irresponsible.
At stake, after all, were people’s lives. Athletes suffering head injuries, pressured by a league and, in fact, a culture that said, Get back in the game! Man up! Don’t ever show it hurts. This was not just an issue for pro football players. It was an issue for college football players, high school football players, all those peewee leaguers who dreamed of going pro.
On the matter of the NFL’s responsibility to the larger sports community, Julian Bailes was a man who could go ballistic:
“Here we have a multi-billion-dollar industry,” he said in an interview. “Where does their responsibility begin? Say you’re a kid and you sign up to play football. You realize you can blow out your knee, you can even break your neck and become paralyzed. Those are all known risks. But you don’t sign up to become a brain-damaged young adult. The NFL should be leading the world in figuring this out, acknowledging the risk. They should be thanking us for bringing them this research. Where does their responsibility begin?
“There was a seminal study published by the University of Oklahoma. They put accelerometers in the helmets of University of Oklahoma players. And they documented the g-force. So we know the g-force for a football player being knocked out is about sixty to ninety g’s. To compare, a fighter pilot will pass out at five or six g’s, but that’s over a long period of time. These football g-forces are just a few milliseconds, very brief—boom! And they found that in the open field, the dramatic cases of a receiver getting blindsided is about one hundred g’s. It knocks them out. Very dramatic, everybody sees it. But the linemen? They were actually getting twenty to thirty g’s on every play. Because they bang heads. Every play.
“Helmets are not the answer. The brain has a certain amount of play inside the skull. It’s buoyed up in the cerebral spinal fluid
. It sits in this fluid, floats. When the head suddenly stops, the brain continues, reverberates back. So when I hit, boom, my skull stops, but my brain continues forward for about a centimeter. Boom, boom, it reverberates back. So you could have padding that’s a foot thick, but it’s not going to change the acceleration/deceleration phenomenon. And a lot of these injuries are rotational. The fibers get torn with rotation. You’ve got a face mask that’s like a fulcrum sitting out here: You get hit, your head swings around. That’s when a lot of these fibers are sheared—by rotation. A helmet can’t ever prevent that.
“And have you seen helmets lately? In the old days, you had this leather cap to protect your ears. That was it. You’d never put your head in the game. You’d be knocked out after the first play! Even in the sixties, the helmet was a light shell. The modern helmet is a weapon.
“So I told the NFL, I said, ‘Why don’t you take the head out of the game? Just take it out of the game! Let the linemen start from a squatting position instead of getting down for head-to-head. Have them stand up like they do on pass protection. So there’s not this obligatory head contact.’
“Nothing. They had nothing to say. Who am I? I’m only a guy who has concussed hundreds of rats in the lab, a player for ten years, a sideline doctor for twenty years. What do I know? Some stupid neurosurgeon.
“Instead of answering anything we bring to them, the NFL is ducking and shooting arrows at us. Criticizing us. Saying our work is a bunch of bunk. They have only attacked us.”
Bailes was worked up. Bennet was worked up. They compared notes, shared their outrage. Eventually, they reached out to another guy who was worked up: Bob Fitzsimmons, the lawyer from West Virginia who had given Bennet permission to study Mike Webster’s brain.
Fitzsimmons’s case against the Bert Bell / Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan was still winding its way through the courts. Still. Three years later. Because Fitzsimmons would not give up. He would fight for Webster even long after his death.
So Bennet, Bailes, and Fitzsimmons formed a team, a kind of brotherhood with a mission: to learn more about the disease, to understand the NFL’s obstinate, perilous denial, and to break them of it.
—
In December 2005 Bennet was on a plane, trying to put all this stuff out of his mind. He had his eyes closed and he was once again glad enough that he was not himself flying the plane; he thought about his childhood dream to become a pilot and smiled. He had noise-canceling headphones on, blasting “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.”
“What?” he said, feeling a jab.
“The dinner cart,” Father Carmen said.
“Oh!”
“You were singing,” Prema said.
“I was singing?”
They were seated together in coach. They were headed to Nigeria to get married, and Father Carmen was in tow to officiate at the wedding. For Bennet it was already overwhelming. So many layers of intersecting thoughts and emotions: his history, Nigeria, his father, his bride-to-be, his priest. On the plane, mostly what he was trying to do was clear his mind of America, to make sure he was not carrying any anger or disillusionment with him over the sea and into the clouds. All the worldliness of the NFL. The stuff he’d stepped into. The other ugliness he found in America. He didn’t want people back home to know about it, the wickedness of corruption, he didn’t want to tarnish the image so many people back home had of the land of milk and honey.
“Africa,” Father Carmen said. “I am going to Africa!”
He had been making this point continuously ever since Bennet and Prema asked him to come along. For him it was the trip of a lifetime, a chance to touch the soil that so many of his parishioners had once touched, or their grandparents had, or their great-grandparents had. The Africans and the African Americans, his whole congregation had ultimately come from that land so far away from his tiny world, his tiny neighborhood in Pittsburgh.
“Africa!” he said, when they landed in Lagos. “I am in Africa!”
Theodore was in baggage claim, pointing and shouting, holding a thick roll of naira.
“You three stand over here!” he barked, and he handed out money to strangers, got passports and visas stamped, got the luggage, and when they got to the car he introduced Bennet and Prema and Father Carmen to the police officer he had rented, a skinny guy with a huge, long gun, and everyone smiled politely and climbed into the backseat. Theodore drove, six hours into the countryside, while Bennet sat motionless watching Nigeria whiz by, and Prema slept, and Father Carmen sat there with Prema’s wedding dress on his lap, saying, “This is amazing, this is beautiful, this is fantastic,” while Theodore pointed and told stories.
The wedding was at a church in Enugu, the city where Bennet went to medical school and where hotels are large enough to accommodate the hundreds of people who came to celebrate. It was a busy church, in a busy city, and weddings were scheduled back-to-back, some on top of each other. Three at once, right before Bennet and Prema’s wedding, and Father Carmen was nervous as he put on his vestments.
“Let’s get started,” the priest in charge of the church said.
“Um—”
Bennet and Prema had not yet arrived. None of the wedding party had yet arrived.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” the priest said. “I do it all the time. It’s a long line. Just start the service and they’ll show up.”
“I—can’t,” Father Carmen said. For heaven’s sake! He stalled. He made pleasant conversation. Get here, Bennet! Where are you, Prema?
At last they arrived. Bennet’s short, solid mom, and Mie-Mie and Winny and Uche in light blue gowns, orange beads, and explosions of blue silk on their heads, wrapped and folded into the headdresses of happiness. Then Oba and Theodore and Ikem and Chizoba in their fine black suits. Then Bennet in his designer tux with a bright red vest and a bright red silk tie done in a presidential full Windsor knot.
Prema appeared like a swan all in white, her hair high off her head, a delicate veil, a string of pearls, a bouquet of red roses.
The church was hot and people fanned their faces with the programs they handed out, and Winny had tears of joy rolling down her cheeks. Mie-Mie and Uche wrapped their arms around their mom, then around Prema’s mom, who had traveled from Nairobi. Afterward, after a formal reception at the hotel and a good long sleep, they all went back to the compound in Enugwu-Ukwu. They gave Father Carmen a gray caftan to wear. “My first caftan!”
Oba sat in his obu saying the prayers over the kola nuts and he wore his high red hat with the feathers. Theodore and Chizoba wore their short red hats, because now they were Obas in training. Bennet did not have a hat. The elders honored Oba for being a man who now had all seven of his children married. That was an accomplishment, and it cemented his status in the village ever more firmly. The men drank cognac and dipped the kola nuts in peanut butter and chewed, while the two-day wedding feast was prepared in the yard behind the house by teams of sweating cooks wearing green smocks. Prema and her mother and Mie-Mie and Uche and Winny and their mom sat in the room beside the kitchen, hoisted their skirts and put their swollen feet up, and laughed and waited for the food to come up from the yard. The cooks in the yard slaughtered a cow and several goats and chopped and chopped vegetables and stirred huge pots of rice over red-hot embers. Hundreds of villagers came to the feast. They brought dancers and drummers, and people threw money in the air, and you could hear the drumming like thunder rumbling over top and through Enugwu-Ukwu for two days.
CHAPTER 10
SCRAMBLE
The Wecht news was an earthquake. WECHT INDICTED BY GRAND JURY, read the headline in the January 21, 2006, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
After a yearlong investigation, a federal grand jury yesterday indicted nationally renowned Allegheny County Medical Examiner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht on charges that he misused his public office for private gain.
The 84-count indictment…outlines charges of mail and wire fraud. The government also alleged that…Dr. Wecht
asked employees of the coroner’s office to perform personal errands for him on county time, including dog-walking, picking up personal mail, purchasing sporting goods and hauling away trash.
Dog-walking? Bennet thought. Trash? He was just returning from the wedding in Nigeria, and the headlines were making him sick. Eighty-four felony counts of piddly shit. Who cares about this piddly shit? Sending personal faxes, misusing mileage vouchers and office stationery. So, he was sloppy. So? It seemed crazy to presume that a guy whose private practice took in more than a million dollars a year would resort to stealing office supplies. But it didn’t matter how crazy it seemed. It was all there, in a forty-five-page indictment.
Wecht resigned from the Allegheny County coroner’s office the same day the indictment came, the end of an era. A guilty verdict on any of the counts could ruin him completely. He’d lose his license and his private practice and his TV appearances and his heroic headlines. A guilty verdict on the more serious counts could mean a twenty-year prison term.
Most people in a situation like that roll over, make a deal. Ninety-five percent of people who are accused of federal white-collar crimes in the United States plead guilty, reach a settlement. But this was Wecht. He would fight. He would spend $8 million defending his name. The FBI would take two years preparing for the trial; they wanted to talk to Bennet about testifying, along with about two hundred fifty other witnesses. Bennet already knew what he was going to say to the FBI. This was his American father. This was the first person in the world to give him a voice. Get the fuck out of here you goddamned motherfucking cocksucking pieces of motherfucking shit. That’s what he would say to them.
Dr. Shakir, Bennet’s senior colleague, was named acting director of the morgue while the county bigwigs sought Wecht’s permanent replacement. Father Carmen, who knew nothing about county politics, said, “Hey, Bennet, maybe they’ll promote you; you can be the new Dr. Wecht!” Bennet said, “I can’t think about that right now,” but the more he thought about it, the more he thought, Sure, why not? and started to want it. He had no idea that people would laugh at him for even wanting it; the county bigwigs had a plan and it certainly did not include the guy from Nigeria.
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