Concussion

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  MILLEN: It’s the game. It’s the way the game is played.

  DILFER: It’s just gonna happen! These guys are gonna get blown up. It’s a physical game and you can’t take it out of it.

  YOUNG: A defenseless player, you’re gonna have to take it easy on him.

  MILLEN: You can’t!

  YOUNG: You’re going to have to! Or you’re going to sit out for a couple weeks.

  SCOTT: That’s not football!

  It’s the game. It’s the way the game is played. There is, of course, a whole feeder system of guys who want to play it. What of those players? What is happening to their brains?

  On April 26, 2010, Owen Thomas, a twenty-one-year-old University of Pennsylvania defensive end, hangs himself in his apartment. He’s the youngest person yet to be diagnosed with CTE. His mother tells reporters that her son had started playing football when he was about nine, and he had never been diagnosed with a concussion, had never shown any side effects normally associated with brain trauma.

  Thomas’s diagnosis sheds light on a crucial fact that keeps getting lost in all the hoopla. He never had a recorded concussion.

  But CTE is not about the big hit, or not only. A player doesn’t have to be knocked out cold and taken off the field on a stretcher to be in danger of getting CTE. The subconcussive collisions may, in fact, be the real culprit. The little hits. Thousands of them, the little hits that look like nothing, that look like…football. All those linemen starting out every play, banging heads. Bennet’s findings, and the ones others make after him, suggest it’s these subconcussive collisions, all those regular bashes that linemen absorb in practice, twenty to thirty g’s on every play—it’s the accumulation of those hits that ends up making guys go crazy.

  It could, for all anyone knows, begin at the peewee level.

  It’s the game.

  —

  “I hope you’re listening to everything that’s going on out there,” Jason Luckasevic says to Bennet, calling him from his law office in Pittsburgh. The two have remained close, have become confidants over the years. “Because everything they’re finding, everything they’re doing to help these guys, it’s all because of you.”

  “Thank you, Jason,” Bennet says. “Thank you.”

  Luckasevic never let go of the lawsuit dream he and Bennet hatched together back in his office that day in 2007. In fact, he let his imagination run wild with it, and one day he took the idea to the senior partners at the firm. They laughed. A case that huge would require every lawyer in the building, first of all. And what, exactly, would be the case? That football damaged football players? Every player knows it’s a dangerous game, long before they decide to go pro. What was the case?

  “The case is that they were lied to about the possibility of brain damage,” Luckasevic said. “The NFL lied to them.”

  Maybe. The partners didn’t know the subject as intimately as Luckasevic did, and what’s more, they weren’t too sure about that Omalu guy making all those claims. Hadn’t he been run out of town or something?

  “Forget it,” Luckasevic told them, and when he told Bennet that he had been laughed out of the office, Bennet said, “Oh my gosh, that’s how you know you’re on the right path. Such experiences should only strengthen a man’s resolve!” Luckasevic felt the push and the pull. On the one hand, there was the rational, grown-up world his partners represented. And then there was the decidedly more emotional Bennet approach. Maybe he was a fool for going with his gut, but he couldn’t quite help himself. The righteous indignation that drives a kid to go to law school was still a part of him, and Bennet had a way of fueling it. So Luckasevic asked the partners at the firm for permission to float the idea about suing the NFL to other lawyers around the country; maybe someone would be interested and would help him. The partners granted the request. Let the kid go humiliate himself if he wants to.

  So that’s what Luckasevic did, he started cold-calling guys. Dozens of lawyers across the country. Everyone turned him down. Nobody wanted to team up with a junior lawyer from Pittsburgh who wanted to sue the NFL. Just, no.

  “Sorry, son.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think you know how naive that sounds.”

  But by 2010, Luckasevic had met a few former players. He couldn’t tell even Bennet their names because they were in the shadows, struggling with memory, struggling with addiction, and they didn’t want to be known. Luckasevic took his time with them, befriended them, explained CTE. He explained Webster and Long, Waters and Strzelczyk, explained how the madness wasn’t their fault; it was a disease, and it was almost certainly because of football. Luckasevic told them the NFL had lied to them, he told them, hey, what the league did to them was not right.

  “And, you know, they’re starting to listen to me, Bennet,” Luckasevic tells Bennet one day.

  “I told you!”

  “It’s still a pretty far-fetched plan.”

  “If you say so,” Bennet says. Then he tells Luckasevic about a woman he just talked to. She reached out to him. “Her husband is suffering. You should talk to her. She’s coming to the meeting in Las Vegas next month. I’ll introduce you to her.”

  “See you in Vegas,” Luckasevic says.

  —

  Tia McNeill was Googling one night. She was trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with her husband, Fred.

  What the hell is wrong with you, Fred?

  What Fred would do was hold a knife to his wrist; he would sit in his Los Angeles apartment and he would hold a blade to his wrist and look at it. That’s when he would start thinking. It wasn’t “Oh, everyone will be upset if I do this” or “I hate my life.” Nothing like that. Instead, he would feel the cool blade on his skin, and he would think how thin and baby soft that skin was, he would think, This is going to hurt like hell. It might have actually been quite simple if not for the pain part. Now, how can I do this so it doesn’t hurt? He just needed to get past the pain part.

  Tia had no idea about the knife, and she was surprised when her son Gavin, with whom Fred now lived, told her about it. “We have to get him help, Mom. I’m afraid of what he might do.”

  How many guys are out there like Fred? Tia wonders. Not famous. Not glorified. Talented guys good enough to make it to the pros, played the game for the love of the game, and the paycheck, then went on with their lives…and then?

  Fred used to be brilliant. He played linebacker with the Minnesota Vikings for seven years in the 1970s and 1980s, but football was secondary to his dream of going to law school. Tia encouraged him. She wasn’t so big on the football thing, wasn’t part of that world. He started law school during his last year with the Vikings, studying on the plane to and from games while the other guys slept. The day Fred graduated from law school in 1987 was the happiest day of his life. He was an emerging star attorney, quickly made partner. They built a five-bedroom house in Minnetonka. Fred was popular. A former Viking right there in the neighborhood! He and Tia had two sons and Fred coached them in youth football.

  Fred’s memory started failing as early as the mid-nineties, when he was in his forties. He never told Tia; he didn’t understand it himself. Even when he got voted out of the firm. And then at the next firm, when he got fired, and the one after that—fired again. Everything was just taking so long. Something that should take an hour was taking him four. Reading a brief. The simplest tasks. He blamed his deteriorating eyesight. He went to an eye doctor—the only medical help he ever sought. He got glasses, then stronger ones, and stronger ones still. He kept forgetting things. He was supposed to pick up Freddie at school. Forgot. So many thoughts just—poof! He learned to compensate. He learned to say “Nice to see you” instead of “Nice to meet you.” The latter was simply too risky. Apparently some of those people he had been saying that to were friends. But he had no memory of them. Blank. So it was “Nice to see you,” always, just in case.

  The boys were so young they thought their dad was just acting dumb when he would forget thin
gs. They thought he was being funny, and when he did that, they would punch him in the gut.

  That was important information, the gut punch. That meant: You just messed up, Fred. You messed up bad. Come on, get it together. Act like you know what the hell is going on.

  As for Tia, she would scream when he would forget things. She didn’t have a lot of settings, just on or off.

  “You think I’m stupid!” he would say to her.

  “I don’t think you’re stupid!” she would say. She didn’t. She thought maybe he was depressed. She thought she understood. All the excitement of being in the NFL, all that hoopla—the transition back to regular life was hard for those guys. She urged him to get help. She would make the shrink appointment herself, but the day would come and he would bail. “I have to work on my cases,” he’d say.

  They left Minnesota in 1999 at Tia’s urging and headed home to her family in L.A. Fred got a job with a general-practice firm but was fired after a year and a half. He got a job with another firm and was fired again. He was hired to do legal work for an insurance company, but they fired him, too. Within a year of moving to California, the family filed for bankruptcy.

  After that, Tia gave up. It was all those years of urging Fred to go to a doctor, years of him promising and then not going, before she said “I’m done” in 2007, and walked out of the marriage. She didn’t know that Fred’s refusal to get help wasn’t really a refusal. It was more about forgetting, about living in a fog and all the energy of trying not to show it. It was clutching for dignity and losing it, constantly losing it, feeling it dissolve.

  Tia had no idea how sick he was. Would it have made a difference if she had known? Of course it would have. But you can’t think like that. And you can’t give a shit about people whispering behind your back. You hear about Fred McNeill? Linebacker for the Minnesota Vikings back in the seventies and eighties. Ended up going crazy, and his wife couldn’t handle it, so she walked out.

  The guilt, the people whispering, the financial worries, the effect on the boys, life has been a living hell pretty much since Fred lost his mind. Pretty much.

  How many guys like Fred? How many wives and sons and daughters? In all, there are about sixteen thousand retired NFL players living here and living there.

  With all the politicians, scientists, and business execs raging about it, and the newspaper headlines screaming it, you’d think people like Fred and Tia, former football families, would have heard all about CTE.

  But Tia hadn’t. It would turn out that the vast majority hadn’t. Everybody was alone, as if on islands, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

  It had never occurred to Tia that brain damage from football could have anything to do with what was wrong with Fred. He wasn’t a guy who suffered concussions. And anyway, that was so long ago. Why would you think: football?

  “Fred?” Tia was saying one day recently. She was calling him on her cellphone. “Are you coming down?”

  “Am I what?” Fred said.

  “Are you coming down? I’m waiting outside in the car.”

  “You’re waiting?”

  “Fred, I’m out here waiting!”

  “Oh, okay, I’ll come down.”

  “Don’t forget the suitcase,” she said.

  “Suitcase?”

  “Remember I need my suitcase back?”

  He did not remember anything about a suitcase.

  “Fred, I just told you ten minutes ago that I am outside waiting for you and to bring me the suitcase,” she said.

  “It’s too early for karaoke,” he said.

  “Coffee,” she said. “Remember? I am taking you out for coffee. Now, come on.”

  “Coffee. That sounds good.”

  “Please hurry, Fred.”

  “So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to put my shoes on,” Fred said, “and I’m going to get my briefcase, and I am going to get you the suitcase, and I am going to come downstairs, and we are going to get coffee.”

  “Why are you bringing your briefcase?”

  “I need to go to the office.”

  “No, you don’t, Fred.”

  He thought he was still a lawyer. He still dressed like one. He carried a white notepad, stained and smudged, covered top to bottom with phone numbers.

  “Can we stop by the office?” he asked.

  “Just come downstairs.”

  Five minutes went by. She honked. No Fred. Her next call went to voicemail: “You’ve reached the law offices of Frederick Arnold McNeill. Please leave a brief message.” She hung up. She reached into a bag of trail mix, popped a handful, and chewed. She stared forward and shook her head slowly in that way that speaks of tragedy, of comedy, and the insidious fine line.

  Day after day like that, that’s what life was like with Fred. Then Gavin told her about the knife, and that’s when she started Googling, looking for answers. What the hell is the matter with Fred?

  She read about CTE. Football? This is because of football? She dug deeper, read about Dr. Bennet Omalu. She found his phone number, dialed.

  “Hello? Hello!” she said. She didn’t expect anyone to answer, much less the doctor himself. “Hello!”

  “This is Dr. Omalu.”

  She told him about Fred. “Could this be CTE?”

  “It sounds a lot like CTE,” Bennet told her. Not that he was in the business of diagnosing. Living people were not his thing. But he had heard this story so many times by now, the same story.

  He told Tia about the upcoming conference in Las Vegas. Former players and family members like Tia had just started to find one another online, had started discussion boards, had started comparing notes. It was the beginning of awareness. The families decided to get together to learn more. They invited anyone who knew anything about CTE to come and talk, help them understand.

  —

  The Independent Retired Players Summit & Conference in the South Point hotel just off the Vegas Strip is a full-on immersion into the world of football and dementia—a vast, confusing, seemingly infinite parallel universe. It’s the spring of 2010, and word is just beginning to spread. There are maybe fifty guys like Fred at the conference, wives like Tia and daughters and sons like Freddie and Gavin thinking, “Football? This is because of football?”

  Yeah, it was likely football.

  Here in Vegas there are scientists, and doctors, and salesmen, and opportunists, and all kinds of people getting into the brain trauma act for all kinds of reasons. One guy is hawking fish oil and other home-brewed brain trauma remedies, and some people, like Bennet, are here with real science to explain. Bennet presents his slides, stands up there explaining tau tangles. Nowinski, too, is here, and he tells of his team of researchers from Boston. He passes out forms: Sign up to donate your brain to our group when you die.

  Fred sits next to Tia. He has a long, gentle face, a blocky brow, sprouts of gray hair shooting this way and that. He’s wearing a windbreaker, baggy jeans, and sneakers, and he’s listening to the speakers. Well, Fred always looks as if he’s listening, but the truth is, he’s able to zoom in on only a few key points.

  “My brain,” Fred says to Tia. “I don’t want to give my brain away.”

  “That’s for after you die, Fred,” she says. “Like, I’m an organ donor on my driver’s license.”

  Fred fixates on the brain donation part. Tia has to admit the brain donation guy is kind of creepy; he reminds her of a guy doing an infomercial. Fred will continue to fixate on the brain part—over and over again they will have the brain donation conversation.

  “A person still exists when the body stops working,” he’ll say. “I don’t want to be surprised. Like, ‘Oh, God, I wasn’t supposed to feel this! Ooh, oww!’ ”

  “You watch too many movies,” Tia will say.

  “No one gets to tell what happens. You don’t get to say to the guy that buries you, ‘Do you know what really happens down here?’ You’ve lost all communication at that point, Tia.”

 
“Okay, Fred. Okay.” She understands. She understands that for most people there’s living and then there’s dying, but for Fred the whole gig has become more like being slowly buried alive.

  “You can try, but there’s no one who can hear you down there. ‘Hello, it’s me down here, ow, ow, ouch—’ ”

  “Okay, Fred. Okay.”

  When the speakers break for lunch, Tia goes up to Bennet, thanks him for his work. He’s in his blue pin-striped suit, unsure how to respond. It doesn’t feel like a “You’re welcome” moment. He shakes Fred’s hand. It’s the first time he’s met a living guy who probably has CTE. He is not in the living-people business, so he does not know what to say.

  “Nice to meet you,” Bennet says, looking into Fred’s vacant eyes. “Um, hello there, Fred.”

  “Do you need legal assistance, sir?” Fred asks him. Why exactly is Tia introducing him to this man?

  Tia calls over Gavin and Freddie, introduces them to Bennet, and Bennet calls over Garrett Webster, the son of the great Mike Webster, whose brain was Bennet’s first. “Talk to Garrett,” Bennet tells Gavin and Freddie. “You guys have a lot in common.”

  The three sons sit for a long time, straddling folding chairs. Garrett tells them what it was like trying to care for his dad when things got bad. His dad pissing in the oven, his dad Super Gluing his teeth, his dad shooting himself with a Taser, his dad living out of his truck, and Gavin and Freddie nod and nod some more.

  Person by person the awareness spreads like that, person to person, lightbulbs going on.

  “Football. It’s because of football?”

  After lunch, a woman goes up to the podium to speak. She’s Eleanor Perfetto, the wife of retired Steelers and Chargers lineman Ralph Wenzel, and because of her husband she’s been on this subject of brain trauma for a while. Wenzel’s dementia is the reason he’s been institutionalized since 2007, she explains. He’s no longer able to coordinate his body, to feed himself. But Perfetto brings some good news. She explains the NFL’s “88 Plan,” a bright spot of humanity. The 88 Plan is the result of a letter written to the league by Sylvia Mackey, wife of Hall of Famer John Mackey, who wore number 88 for the Colts. His existence, she wrote, had become a “deteriorating, ugly, caregiver-killing, degenerative, brain-destroying, tragic horror,” and his monthly $2,450 pension didn’t come close to covering the cost of the care he needed. The 88 Plan was created to help foot the bill for caregiving. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s a symbolic something. Since the plan’s inception in 2007, 149 retired players suffering from dementia had been approved to receive benefits.