Concussion

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  It’s something. A trickle is better than nothing.

  A trickle.

  Jason Luckasevic, on the other hand, has a tsunami in mind. Tia meets him at the conference. His lawsuit idea is growing more credible by the day. Luckasevic has by now found a lawyer, a heavy hitter from Miami, who wants in. And another lawyer—an even heavier hitter from L.A., the guy who filed and won the famous Erin Brockovich lawsuit. He’s interested, too. And now Luckasevic has seventy-four players and their families interested in suing the NFL, and at the conference, Tia makes it seventy-five.

  —

  In 2011, Luckasevic finally files his lawsuit. The complaint, coauthored by his new all-star legal team, is eighty-six pages long, and it charges that the NFL was involved in a scheme of “fraud and deceit.” It says the NFL lied to its players about the link between football and dementia, and that it created a fake research arm, the MTBI committee, to perpetuate the lie.

  Within a month, a Philadelphia lawyer files on behalf of seven more players. In quick succession the number of players suing the NFL grows to three thousand, representing nearly a quarter of all living players. Then it nearly doubles again, the lawyers consolidating the suit into one mass tort involving nearly six thousand players suing the league.

  In the next two years, almost twenty-five thousand kids drop out of Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth football program—a 10 percent drop in participation, the largest in its eighty-five-year history.

  During the same period, college football players are found to be three times more likely than the general population to have symptoms related to CTE. In a survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education, nearly half of all college trainers say they feel pressure from coaches to return concussed players to the field before they’re medically ready. In 2012, the NCAA finally comes up with an official concussion protocol—its first since the organization was formed at the turn of the twentieth century.

  President Barack Obama says if he had a son, he would not let him play football.

  A growing number of former NFL players—including Joe Namath, Troy Aikman, Brett Favre, Mike Ditka, and Terry Bradshaw—say that had they known what football could do to their brains, they would not have played. In 2015, 49ers rookie star linebacker Chris Borland, age twenty-four, retires from the game after one season, saying the risk of traumatic brain injury isn’t worth any amount of money. He volunteers to give back three quarters of his $617,000 signing bonus.

  “I hope you’re listening to everything that’s going on out there,” people like Luckasevic continue to say to Bennet. “Everything they’re finding, everything they’re doing to help these guys, it’s all because of you.”

  People in Bennet’s circle know it. Does it matter that the rest of the world does not know that a shift in twenty-first-century American culture started with a no-name guy from Nigeria, a lone voice in the wind?

  He works on convincing himself it doesn’t matter. I belong on the outskirts; that’s my comfort zone.

  As for Fred, he never gets the chance to slit his wrist; Tia gets him into a nursing home. It’s not ideal, but he’s safe. It’s not ideal because he’s barely sixty, and he’s an athletic guy who wants to do karaoke, play some hoops or something, and he’s surrounded by ninety-year-old ladies who won’t play, to say nothing of the fact that he needs medical help no one knows how to give. How do you treat guys with CTE? Is there even a protocol? Tia, like Keana Strzelczyk before her, thinks the NFL should man up and create care facilities for guys like Fred, facilities for athletic men who have turned into suicidal toddlers. The league made billions of dollars off them. And now they’re simply tossed aside?

  The other thing Tia does is sign Fred up for a pilot study. Something Bailes and Bennet have started developing. A test to try to diagnose CTE in a living person. If you can identify CTE in a living person, then you can start thinking treatment and maybe even cure. That’s the direction Bennet starts to move in, while Nowinski and the Boston group, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, continue to build their brain bank—hundreds of NFL players pledging to donate their brains after they die. Both groups continue to diagnose CTE in deceased players’ brains—the combined total count reaches twenty in 2011—when one case makes particularly jarring headlines.

  Dave Duerson, a Chicago Bears Pro Bowler who played eleven seasons in the NFL, turns up dead at fifty in a pool of blood in his condo on the outskirts of Miami, a Taurus .38 special by his side. The wound is in his chest, not his head. He has left a suicide note. “My mind slips….I think something is seriously damaged in my brain….Please, see that my brain is given to the NFL’s brain bank.”

  The chilling realization that Duerson chose to shoot himself in the chest, and not the head, leaving his brain intact so that researchers could figure out what football had done to him, brings a new level of intensity to the conversation so much of America does not want to have. Duerson’s suicide lingers in the national consciousness for reasons that go well beyond the fact that, yes, his brain tests positive for CTE. Duerson had served for years on the NFL’s disability board, the Bert Bell / Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. He was one of the guys who had denied claims players made for disability payments, claims like the one Mike Webster made and would spend his last breath on earth trying to win. The six-member pension board repeatedly and unanimously said no to Webster, and Duerson was one of the six. He was one of the guys who would go on to vote no, over and over again, no, whenever guys tried to make the claim that football caused them to suffer mental decline. Duerson said those claims were false: football wasn’t the reason guys were going crazy. It wasn’t football.

  Not until his suicide note did Duerson ever tell anyone he was suffering. But looking back, of course, looking back you always see signs. Like that time in 2005 when he threw his wife, Alicia, out the door of a hotel room, out the door and into a wall. “A three-second snap,” Duerson explained when he pleaded guilty to domestic battery. He wasn’t like that. He was not a violent man. Fans soon looked past that stupid three-second snap. Hey, a lot of NFL guys beat up their wives.

  Domestic violence was becoming a rising issue among players. Was CTE at the root of that, too?

  —

  I was unraveling something that would enhance the lives of other people. In a way, I was helping people who could not help themselves, and like my father said, I should use my talent, my equity, to make a difference in the lives of other people. It was not about natural intellectual acumen or creative capacity, but rather an acquired intellectual capacity invested upon by unending specialized education.

  In my yearbook in the final year of medical school, when I was asked what I wanted to become, I simply said: “I want to become myself.”

  People laughed, asking, was I not yet myself?

  Well, no, I was not.

  As a young man I became overwhelmed by low self-esteem and depression that could have destroyed my life—could possibly have led me to commit suicide. If I overcame all that, who was the NFL, or the Boston group, or anyone who thought I was no good, to overwhelm me and make me lose my focus and my ground on CTE?

  Overcoming my personal issues emboldened me and made me believe in who I was.

  The more attacks I got from the NFL, the more resolved I became to be myself. And every time I smelled racism, I even became angrier and more determined to be myself and stand for what I believed in, which in my mind was the truth.

  I did not need anyone to legitimize me. I recognized I was an outsider. Racism even made me better at that. No one can be better at being Bennet Omalu than Bennet Omalu. There can only be one me, just like there can only be one you.

  I do not have to fit in to be myself.

  CHAPTER 14

  DADDY

  In July 2014, new billboards hang all over Enugwu-Ukwu. THE EXIT OF AN ICON, they read. They feature giant images of Oba in his red hat looking down from a gleaming blue-and-purple night sky. These advertisements are inte
nded to act as reminders to villagers to pray for Oba on his journey through the gates of heaven.

  “Obaaa!” Theodore yells, as he drives past the first one at the edge of town, and Bennet cranes his neck out the window, waving at the giant image of his dad.

  Oba’s embalmed ninety-one-year-old body waits at the morgue, and Bennet will dress it.

  Theodore honks wildly as he pulls into the compound, and Bennet gathers himself. He’s in his traveling clothes, linen shorts and a pink Ralph Lauren polo with the collar flipped up. He sees all three sisters come rushing out of the house, their arms wide open, and Bennet’s mom with her shy smile, and Ikem and Chizoba beaming, and nieces and nephews in spinning circles.

  “Oh, my sweet little baby brother,” Winny says, wrapping herself around Bennet tight, swaying, while the rest of the family fires out the chatter of welcome. “It was a good flight? Do you want something to drink? Let me take your bags. Wait till you hear who’s coming! Wait till you see the crowd!”

  “Look at this place!” Bennet is saying, squished inside Winny’s embrace. “Oh my gosh, look what you’ve done!” The old dirt driveway has been paved with handsome tan and pink tiles, and floodlights and speakers have been brought in. Trees were removed from the back hill and all the vegetables were ripped up. The ground there was terraced to accommodate dozens of rows of tables. Bright white canopies hang overhead like angel’s wings.

  Another Oba billboard has been mounted on the eastern compound wall and Mie-Mie is pointing to it. Turn around, Bennet, turn around and see!

  “Daddy!” Bennet says, eyes popping wide, Uche clapping, the whole family together in a double-exclamation-point reunion inside these walls.

  As soon as Oba died in May 2014, the family began planning, made a spreadsheet, decided on a budget of $100,000, and got to work. Three months later and here we are, not really a funeral so much as a festival celebrating a revered patriarch—the orphan boy who made good and survived the civil war, an esteemed engineer who educated and married off all seven of his children, and who, as an old man, worked to create new village roads and infrastructure while offering wisdom to all who entered his obu.

  More than a thousand mourners are expected over the course of the five days, an enormous number even by village standards, but wholly fitting for a man of Oba’s stature.

  Villagers have written tributes:

  The towering colossus, born of fine steel, a man of candor and panache, Oba J.D.A. Omalu, moulded by destiny to be great…an inspiration to us, exuding an unraveled conviviality to both young and old. Merchant of joy, I know that the day you were made, heaven was gladdened. You fearlessly unleashed yourself on the fury of all life like a hard-boiled Spartan. The storm of life could in no way surmount you, a great whale shark who surmounted with angelic precision.

  Oba! Oba! Obaaa!! You were the quintessence of justice, truth and firmness, you were always ready to say, stand by and defend the truth no matter whose goose is gored….We are grateful to God almighty for the gift of an icon like you to the family and mankind.

  Oh! A great star has salted the firmament. The great trail blazer of his generation has bidden goodbye to mother earth. The man of the people, Oba Gwa m n’iru is a father to us by the way of his teaching and ideas.

  The tributes have been published in an eighty-page, four-color glossy magazine; then more tributes came in so the family had to do an addendum as a separate thirty-page black-and-white chapbook. All the mourners will get copies. Certain mourners will get T-shirts with Oba’s picture on them, or mugs, water bottles, ceremonial hats, a thermos to take your lunch to work in, a “Divine mercy” exercise book with a picture of Oba and Jesus on the cover. There will be plenty of souvenirs to go around. As is the tradition in the region, many people will come dressed in the funeral fabric the family has designed: dark purple with yellow swirls, images of Oba in his red hat inside a circle, and the words THANKSGIVING IN A CELEBRATION OF LIFE OBA GWA M N’IRU OCHI IGEW NZE 1923–2014. You order the fabric in advance and make your own dress, scarf, shirt, jacket, or trousers.

  “Well, brother, I hope you’re ready for all this,” Chizoba says to Bennet, helping him with his bags.

  “You’re in charge of the brandy?” Bennet asks him.

  —

  Bennet decided not to bring Prema or Ashly or their three-year-old boy, Mark, to Nigeria for his father’s funeral. Nigeria would be too hard on them. The rigors of travel through a developing nation, for one thing. But also, all this village hoopla. Bennet is proud to be the son of a man whom everyone holds in such high esteem, of course he is. But do his kids really need all this?

  He wants, anyway, for his kids to be American. At home he buys them every toy they could ever want, every outfit, every treat, spoiling them unapologetically despite Prema’s urging for moderation. He can’t seem to stop himself. He bought Prema a Mercedes SUV to drive them around in.

  If Bennet has any emotional ties to Nigeria, to the nation or the culture, he can’t find them. Maybe that’s typical for an immigrant in America. People expect you to have some measure of longing for the land you left, and you don’t want to disappoint anybody, but frankly all that stuff is dead. That’s like weeds you pulled. Nobody misses a dandelion.

  Prema just got her American citizenship; Bennet’s will come through in six months. If he is proud of one thing in his life, it is that he is about to become a citizen of the United States of America.

  The Nigeria that Bennet left twenty years ago isn’t doing great. Ebola has just hit, and no one quite knows how to talk about it yet. On the radio they hold a contest: “Who do you love enough that you would kiss him and risk getting Ebola?” On the news, they’re saying that in 2014, Nigeria had the highest number of terrorist killings in the world, 3,477 people killed in 146 attacks, mostly at the hands of Boko Haram. The terrorists have taken the schoolgirls. Two hundred seventy-six girls kidnapped from a school in the northern city of Chibok. The Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said he plans to convert the girls to Islam and sell them as wives to militants, twelve dollars each. The name Boko Haram translates to “Western education is forbidden.” It started tiny, in 2002, a group of frustrated men who believed in purity. They wanted to establish an Islamic state in Nigeria, decided on a method that included car bombs, suicide bombers, and IEDs aimed at politicians, religious leaders, security forces, and civilians. They are targeting Igbo Christians who now, in a new century, are once again fleeing the region.

  Theodore and the others say don’t worry about Boko Haram; those terrorists are all way up in the north. A whole different Nigeria up there. Totally different. Nothing to do with people here in Enugwu-Ukwu.

  You have to deal with what’s in front of you.

  —

  There’s a custom in the village and people can’t say for sure where it comes from. The custom says that after a man’s body is lowered into the ground, his widow should be the first to pour dirt on his casket. It could be a sign of honor. Or it could be an act of contempt. It could be a woman saying Here, I’m done with you, and now I am free to sleep with other men. Mostly, these days, it doesn’t mean anything at all; it’s just a leftover tradition from a primitive Igbo era.

  But the idea of contempt seems to be the most popular interpretation of the ritual’s origin, and one time when Oba and Iyom, Bennet’s mom, went to a funeral, they both remarked on how distasteful they found the practice to be.

  “I’ll never do that at your grave,” Iyom said to Oba.

  “Thank you,” he said, “I would appreciate that.”

  It wasn’t much of a conversation, so it’s hard to think it matters so much now. But this dirt-throwing matter has become a bone of contention.

  Months ago, when Theodore and the others were preparing the celebration of Oba’s life, a letter came from the parish priest. The letter included the funeral schedule, and it listed the dirt-throwing part at the end. The family looked at the schedule and said everything looks great, except the dirt thro
wing. Bennet’s mom had told her children she didn’t want to do it, and so Theodore told the priest to nix that part.

  “But it’s a law,” the priest said.

  “A law?” Theodore said. “It’s a village custom.”

  “I said it’s the law,” the priest said.

  “Whose law?” Theodore said.

  “It’s the law.”

  Theodore made the point that there’s a difference between old-world rituals and Catholic doctrine. A widow throwing dirt on a casket is not part of Catholic doctrine.

  The more Theodore protested, the more that priest dug his heels in. He said if Iyom didn’t agree to throw dirt on Oba’s casket, Oba couldn’t have a Catholic funeral. “And if he doesn’t have a Catholic funeral, he won’t go to heaven,” he said.

  Oh, for God’s sake. So Theodore called a family meeting. Emails flew around the world, brother to sister to sister to brother, all of them united in the matter of their mother not having to throw dirt on Oba’s grave if she didn’t want to.

  “If she doesn’t want to do it,” Mie-Mie said, “then she doesn’t have to do it. End of story.”

  “Exactly,” Winny said.