Luckasevic looked at Bennet, blinked, caught himself. This was getting silly. He was thirty years old, a lowly associate making $40,000 at a small firm catering to blue-collar guys in Pittsburgh with asbestos problems.
“Yeah, I’ll sue the NFL, Bennet,” he said. “I’ll get right on that.”
“I’m serious,” Bennet said. “What’s your hang-up?”
For God’s sake. “Well, to file a lawsuit you need a client with a complaint first,” he pointed out.
“You can find thousands of clients,” Bennet said. “Football is a very popular game and there are many professional players!”
“Right.”
“Well, you’re the lawyer,” Bennet said. “You’ll figure something out.”
Luckasevic had to admit it was fun imagining something like that. Like a young Bill Gates and his pals tinkering in his garage. Like a young Steve Jobs doodling on a napkin. Ideas have to be born somewhere.
—
To compile a case history on Andre Waters for his next scientific paper—“Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part III”—Bennet decided to travel to Tampa to visit Andre Waters’s family. Nowinski said he would come, too; they would meet at the airport and drive together.
It was the first time they ever met face-to-face, which was weird, considering their recently shared history making front page news in The New York Times.
“You’re much younger looking than I expected,” Nowinski said, smiling. Bennet’s photo in the Times had him looking so…professional in his white lab coat with his name embroidered in blue cursive on the pocket. This live version of Bennet, all the quirks and the cackle-laugh, was not what Nowinski was expecting.
“And you are very tall!” Bennet said. He thought Nowinski was the picture of TV-commercial America. Towering, blond, boyish, clean-cut, charming.
They drove out into the flat, marshy landscape of south Florida. They joked together, traded skepticism about the guys on the MTBI committee. Nowinski told Bennet about his headaches, and Bennet told Nowinski about Wecht, about Prema and the baby coming, and about how frustrated he was that the NFL was discounting his research. Nowinski made the point that Bennet did have a “believability problem.” Maybe if he was an old gray-haired guy in his seventies, with a name like O’Malu, with a resume replete with Ivy League stamps and badges, maybe people would have believed him about CTE.
I began to feel that I had been deemed an outsider. I did not think people took me seriously, and since they did not take me seriously, my message was not taken seriously. The problem was not the message, but the messenger, and if the messenger is not liked, trusted, or respected, the message is null and void, no matter how true the message is.
It was a good point. And as they drove together, Bennet talked about the partnership he was forming with Bailes and Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons had been talking about doing the legal work, was going to put up the $10,000 seed money. Nowinski said he also had been thinking about a partnership with Cantu, the doctor who had first shown him the light about what was happening in his own bashed head.
In the car, Bennet and Nowinski discussed the idea of their joining forces. They even came up with a name, the Sports Legacy Institute. Bennet liked it because it had a good acronym: SLI.
They would collect brains and study CTE. They would challenge the NFL’s repeated denials. They would help the families of former players. It would be an unbeatable power team. Bailes and Cantu had the medical clout, years of concussion research behind them, and Bailes had the inside track on the NFL. Bennet had the discovery and the encyclopedic knowledge of the science. Nowinski had the face, the smile, the unbeatable schmooze. Nowinski had in spades what none of the others had or understood or cared to acquire. He had the missing ingredient. Nobody understands showmanship better than a former WWE wrestler.
When he got home, Bennet told Bailes and Fitzsimmons about the idea of an expanded partnership with Nowinski, and they agreed.
“I think I have another case,” Bailes said. “There’s another brain we should get.”
CHAPTER 11
ODDBALL
Keana Strzelczyk spoke about her former husband this way:
“If I had still been married to him I could have 302’d him, put him in a mental hospital involuntarily. But I wasn’t married to him anymore so I couldn’t.
“I was like, ‘What do you want?’ And he’s like, ‘Nothing. Never mind.’ And I was like, ‘Justin, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?’
“I met him in 1993. We got married shortly after. He was so much fun to be around. He didn’t judge people. He could fit in anywhere. Black tie or seedy biker bar. I mean, he was just very chill.
“As far as his career goes, he never had concussions that I knew about. He was never diagnosed with concussions on the field. Or off the field, for that matter. I never felt anything one way or the other when he played. I mean, it was great. We were in Pittsburgh the whole time and the Steelers organization was, you know—the women I was with, they were just like family, which was, it was great. I felt as wives we did a lot of good. I loved doing the charity work. But, you know, now, looking back…Now how I feel about it is that I don’t even—I can’t. There’s just too many lies.
“Murderers, liars, thieves. I just—I just don’t.
“He wouldn’t come home. He wouldn’t call. He went to take the trash out one night and he didn’t come back until five o’clock in the morning. I had no idea where he was. One time he said ‘I’m going to Vegas for the weekend, I’ll be back Monday.’ I was like, okay. He didn’t come back for six weeks.
“That was one of the reasons that we split was because of him doing stuff like that. I just couldn’t deal with it anymore.
“I thought maybe he had bipolar, because he started to get angry. He was scaring me. My daughter wouldn’t go anywhere with him. She was afraid of him. I bought my son who was in fourth grade one of those disposable mobile phones and hid it in his bag because I was afraid. Then I just stopped sending the kids.
“I really thought he had bipolar.
“Had I known this was from football, I think I would have behaved differently. You feel some sense of guilt for kicking them out, for kicking them to the curb, because, you know, you’re blaming other things. That’s what always gets to me. That this game, this thing that he loved so much, that gave us so much comfort, you know? Financially, it let us have a great life, and yet it was the downfall of him and that’s kinda like…I still don’t even know what to think about that, like that still kind of just blows my mind. Something that was such a big part of our lives, and that gave us so much—it took him away.
“I’m like, ‘Justin, what’s going on? What’s wrong?’ And he started crying and he’s like, ‘God came to me just now here at the garage and he spoke to me.’ And I was like, what? And he was like—and then he paused, and then he got real angry and he was like, ‘Never mind, never mind.’ And I go, ‘Justin, do you want me to get the kids on the bus and come over there to the garage?’ And he’s like no, no. And I said, ‘I can come over.’ And he was like no. And then he said ‘I love you’ and hung up.
“How these owners sleep at night, I have no idea. I just feel like the NFL is run by murderers, liars, and thieves. They can sugarcoat it, and do all the charity they want. And that kills me because I think: Why aren’t you doing something for these men? Forget breast cancer awareness. Forget colon cancer awareness. Forget, I don’t know, whatever you’re doing. Concentrate on these people that you’ve wronged. You could build a whole entire hospital and facility dedicated to these men. You have enough money! You could have a whole staff! You could have a retirement home for these men. You could build five retirement communities. And have them each with their own personal doctor.
“I don’t think Justin committed suicide like they said. I just—I don’t know. In my mind, he knew. He knew he wasn’t going to be here anymore. He knew he wasn’t coming home, wherever he went. I don’
t know what he had in his mind, but he wasn’t coming back.”
—
Justin Strzelczyk was thirty-six when he drove away on that cool autumn morning in 2004, the sky streaked with clouds. He didn’t tell Keana where he was going; he just hopped in his truck and drove. He stopped at a gas station on a highway outside Buffalo, New York. He tried to give some guy three thousand bucks and told him, Head for the hills! The evil ones are coming! Then he got back in his truck and sped away, ninety miles an hour, eventually with the cops chasing him on Interstate 90. The cops chased him for forty miles, threw metal spikes, blew out his tires, but he kept going and kept going, a hundred miles an hour, until finally he steered over the median strip, into opposing traffic, and smashed into a tanker carrying corrosive acid and everything exploded.
—
Strzelczyk had been dead nearly three years when Julian Bailes started thinking about him in light of CTE, Webster, Long, and Waters. Bailes had been on the Steelers sidelines during Strzelczyk’s playing days, and he had been deeply troubled by his tragic death; he told Bennet and the others the story of that death, and they agreed it was worth asking whether perhaps the local coroner had saved a piece of Strzelczyk’s brain tissue, which in fact he had. Bennet looked in the microscope and again found CTE.
“It’s making me sick,” Bailes said. “All of this, it’s making me sick.”
“I’m sorry, Julian,” Bennet said. They were in the conference room adjacent to Bailes’s office at West Virginia University Hospital in Morgantown, about an hour south of Pittsburgh, where the mountains were blue and round on top.
“They called him Jughead,” Bailes said. “Did I tell you that? That was Justin’s nickname.”
“I don’t understand Jughead,” Bennet said. He was wearing his wide-pinstripe suit and his cologne filled the room like sassafras.
“After the guy in Archie. Because he was just so goofy and so lovable. That was Justin to a tee.”
“Archie?”
“Wow,” Bailes said. “It’s a comic book, Bennet.” He rolled his chair back, put his feet up on the long, wide table. He was in his scrubs, just out of the OR, and he was drinking a Diet Coke.
“Comic book,” Bennet said, trying to be present for his new friend.
Bennet had come down to Morgantown to go over a PowerPoint presentation that Bailes was taking to a meeting in Chicago. Bennet wanted to make sure Bailes got everything right, was there to help prep him. But the news of Strzelczyk’s diagnosis was hitting Bailes hard, and Bennet was trying to give him the room a grieving man needs to reminisce.
“Jugs,” Bailes said. “Everybody loved Jugs. I would go to his apartment. I rode his motorcycle. Did I tell you about his Harley?”
Bennet nodded. “The hat with the spike coming up,” he said, motioning with his hands. “He had the hat?”
“The helmet!” Bailes said. “Like a Prussian helmet. He had this box on the back of the Harley. He filled it with candy. Seriously, this was a guy who would drive around and give kids candy. Friggin’ Santa Claus.”
“You knew these guys,” Bennet said. “It is very different for me looking at a slide.”
“He had a banjo and that big beard, like a mountain man, a big lumberjack on a Harley strumming a banjo. Seriously.”
“A character,” Bennet said. He had so little to offer. He had no reference point. Also, he was better talking about dead people as either just dead people or as spirits moving on. The land of the living was not his forte.
“And it’s like, why?” Bailes said. “With all these guys. And where does it stop? I’m really wondering if every single football player doesn’t have this. Some more, some less. And if they have it, who else does? What about the soldiers coming home, killing themselves? I don’t know who all. It’s staggering, and it’s just…it’s football. A game. All this for a game? I played football. I love football. But mankind does not need football.”
He stood up, fumbled with the cord on the laptop. Fidgety. More and more, Bailes’s southern veneer was falling away. Cool preppy kid, his dad a Louisiana Supreme Court judge. Privileged kid. Brilliant kid. Brain surgeon. Steelers team doctor. It was as though the more the light came on about CTE, the more someone else was crashing through and inhabiting Bailes, compassion was crashing through, or maybe he always had it, yeah, he has to always have had it, Bennet thought. Compassion bottled up.
“And you know, with Webster,” Bailes said, his mind churning. He sat back in his chair. “I was always like, Why, Mike? Why is this happening to you? I mean, if you knew Mike Webster in his prime. I used to sit with him at my mother-in-law’s house…he would come over. He was fine. Then one time he was holed up in the Hilton and I had to come get him out, he was slipping, he was slipping and I was like, What happened? He was a warrior. I was like, Why is Mike doing this? Why? I would think, that’s not Alzheimer’s disease. I’m trained. I know Alzheimer’s disease. I was heartbroken watching him. And then Justin just goes off. Bam. Why? I can’t believe it. I think about all this and I can’t believe it.”
“They couldn’t help themselves,” Bennet offered.
“I’m the doctor, Bennet,” Bailes said. “The doctor is supposed to help.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
Bennet leaned forward, picked a speck of lint off his sleeve. He took the opportunity to switch the subject to Jesus and forgiveness. He talked about God working in mysterious ways and he talked about angels. He said just being friends with these guys, knowing them the way Bailes did, loving them the way he did, that was God’s work right there.
“Do you want something to eat or something?” Bailes said.
Bailes was converting to Catholicism but it wasn’t something he talked about easily. His wife was Catholic. They had five kids. That was how he found Catholicism. Because of that he was converting, not because of this, not because of Bennet and the truth on the slides.
But maybe, yeah, maybe part of the reason was because of this.
“We could order sandwiches,” Bailes said. The Jesus talk had forced him to collect himself. He wasn’t one to get all emotional with remorse or touchy-feely talking about himself or talking about God. If he admired Bennet for one thing it was for his ability to show unabashed vulnerability. All that emotion he wore—Bennet was a man transparent, a man without filters, a man who exploded with love, God, rage, joy, envy. And then he had all that intellect on top.
What an oddball, Bailes thought. That was their friendship. Bennet thought Bailes was an angel with compassion bottled up, and Bailes thought Bennet was an oddball. Someone who needed protection. Because oddball was not, after all, the kind of personality that won fans in academia, or in the medical community. And oddball was exactly the kind of personality that a multi-billion-dollar entertainment behemoth like the NFL could ridicule, discredit, and dismiss.
“Julian, why did they not invite me to Chicago?” Bennet said to Bailes that day.
“I already told you everything I know,” Bailes said.
Everyone who was anyone in concussion research was invited to Chicago. Goodell had convened the meeting in June 2007, the first leaguewide concussion summit. All thirty-two NFL teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting. It would be a chance, finally, for the NFL to talk openly about this unfolding crisis and to hear from independent scientists, many of whom they also invited to the meeting—three hundred participants in all.
They asked Bailes to come. They asked Cantu to come. They did not ask Bennet Omalu.
“They hate me?” Bennet said.
“They don’t hate you,” Bailes said. It was more like they had successfully orchestrated a way to marginalize him. Should he tell him that?
“Okay, should we go over the PowerPoint one more time?” Bennet asked.
“I think I’m good,” Bailes said. “I’m ready for this. In fact, I can’t wait.”
If Bennet wasn’t invited to the meeting, then Bailes would bring Bennet’s science. He would
present Bennet’s work to the NFL and the nation’s top neurosurgeons, slide by slide. He would say “Dr. Bennet Omalu.” He would say “Here’s who you need to listen to.”
“You know, it’s now even more ironic that I am not going to Chicago,” Bennet pointed out. “Because for the first time in many years, I have time on my hands.”
Bailes put back the last of his Diet Coke. “Did you tell Prema yet, Bennet? Did you tell her that you no longer have a job?”
“No.”
“You have to tell her.”
“I’m not going to tell her, Julian.”
—
It wasn’t just that Bennet didn’t get chosen to be Wecht’s replacement as Allegheny County’s new chief medical examiner, it was who the county bigwigs chose when their plan was enacted: Dr. Karl E. Williams, a longtime Pittsburgher, a seemingly innocuous fellow with a bow tie and round wire-rimmed glasses. To Bennet he was hardly an innocuous fellow. The bow tie. The wire-rimmed glasses. Bennet knew him.
Williams’s career trajectory had intersected with Bennet’s in one especially unpleasant way. Williams had served as a forensic pathologist at a small hospital up north, Ellwood City Hospital, which most people even in Pittsburgh had never heard of, but Bennet had heard of it. Back when Bennet got the guy off death row. The Thomas Kimbell case. Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is!
What are the chances? Williams was the prosecutor’s expert forensic pathologist on the Kimbell case, duking it out with Bennet. Williams was on the team that, in the pretrial hearing, had said this guy trying to get Thomas Kimbell off death row was not credible, they said there was no scientific way that some forensic pathologist could determine, all these years later, who killed that woman and her kids.
“Yeah, there is,” Bennet had said, in so many words. “I’m the way.”
The judge sided with Bennet.
Bennet was hardly the picture of humility back then. Bennet was all showmanship, newly schooled by his mentor, Dr. Whizbang himself, Cyril Wecht. And there Bennet was with his applause line, Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is! There were all the media glorifying him, Bennet beaming like a triumphant prizefighter.
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