League of Denial

by Mark Fainaru-Wada

  In Denver, Toon caught a pass and was falling near the sideline, his head about a foot off the ground, when linebacker Michael Brooks flew over him, catching the back of his head with his elbow. It was not a particularly dramatic hit—Toon would later say that Brooks “grazed” him—but the effect was like “a cannonball hitting me on the back of the head,” he said. From that point forward, what Toon recalled about the play was gleaned largely from film and information he picked up from the Jets’ trainers.

  As he lay on a training table in the dank basement of Mile High Stadium, Toon found that there were many gaps in his memory. They included: How old am I? Do I have kids? What am I doing here? What year is it?

  “I had to go through a process of remembering who I was,” he told ESPN’s Greg Garber.

  Toon’s symptoms—the headaches and disorientation, the projectile vomiting—had always dissipated, but this time they didn’t: They grew worse. The concussion stayed with Toon like a “lingering flu.” Loud noises, bright lights, the motion of a passing car, all made him swoon. He spent the next two weeks “in bed, in a dark room, curtains drawn, no noise, no kids, no conversation.” As he lingered in his cognitive netherworld, the Jets put out an estimate that the concussion was the fifth of his eight-year career. Toon believed it was more like 10. He confided to Garber that he had contemplated suicide.

  The team sent him to multiple neurologists. The one who led the case, Ira Casson, like Barry Jordan, had studied boxers and chronic brain disease and had even examined Muhammad Ali’s CT scans, determining that Ali had had brain damage even before the end of his career. Casson knew as well as anyone the ravages of the injury, what someone with an overpounded brain looked like. A decade earlier, Casson had led a landmark study that examined 10 boxers who had been knocked out. He discovered “cerebral atrophy” in half of them, an indication of chronic brain damage. Toon already had decided to put his fate in the hands of his doctors, and Casson, for one, had grave doubts: “I’m not sure that you should do this anymore,” the neurologist told Toon. “I don’t know what the next concussion is going to do to you.” Toon interpreted this to mean that he might never wake up.

  Toon had an economics degree from Wisconsin, making the dean’s list his last two years, and was known as one of the smartest players in the league. He had recently signed a three-year, $4.1 million contract but was already financially secure, having acquired his real estate license and used it to expand his own business. He and his family lived on a horse farm outside Madison. That made the decision easier. Weeping softly, Toon, still five months shy of his thirtieth birthday, announced his retirement on November 27, 1992, three weeks after his injury.

  By the time Hoge went down two years later, writers were proclaiming 1994 the “Season of the Concussion.” One bloody Sunday in October, three quarterbacks were knocked out: Troy Aikman, Chris Miller, and Vinny Testaverde. That season, an idea was floated to send defensive players to an NHL-like penalty box for flagrant hits on quarterbacks. Aikman’s concussion had been caused by Wilber Marshall, a 240-pound linebacker. Marshall, then playing for Arizona, plowed the crown of his helmet into Aikman’s chin, splitting it open and lacerating his tongue. Aikman, a bloody mess, made it to the sideline, where he was asked three questions by the Dallas doctor: What day is it? What month is it? What year is it?

  “I think he scored 33 percent,” said the doctor, J. R. Zamorano. Aikman was aware only that it was Sunday.

  As the grisly episodes were recounted, one phenomenon was not lost on the fans and the media: The current generation of players was noticeably bigger, stronger, and faster than the one that preceded it. The prototypical new player was Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor, a tornado of violence who single-handedly launched a nationwide search for unique specimens who embodied the same combination of size, speed, strength, and, more inexact, ruthlessness. Wilber Marshall, in fact, was one of those people.

  The physical consequences of this new phenomenon were obvious: As the game got bigger and faster, the destructive force behind the hits grew. Any fan could see this, but one of them happened to be an atomic physicist. Tim Gay liked to boast that he had played football at Cal Tech (“La Verne College used to kick our ass on a routine basis”). At the University of Nebraska, where he worked, his primary focus was polarized electron physics. Gay’s works included Use of Partial-Wave Decomposition to Identify Resonant Interference Effects in the Photoionization-Excitation of Argon, but Gay also had carved out a niche as the resident expert on the physics of football. On Saturday afternoons, with a voice like a carnival barker, the bow-tied, bespectacled professor delivered one-minute lectures on the science of the spiral to 75,000 Cornhuskers fans who watched him on HuskerVision.

  Gay eventually turned his side project into a book, Football Physics, in which he explored, among other things, changes in kinetic energy as football players got bigger and faster. He focused on the line of scrimmage, the Pit, where the battle for territory is most pronounced and the biggest players smash into one another on every down, creating huge amounts of destructive force. Hoge called it “the Box,” a qualitatively different world from the perimeter, the place where “the big boys play.” Drawing on figures from the NFL Hall of Fame and other sources, Gay calculated that the average mass of a lineman had increased by 60 percent between 1920 and 2000, reaching almost 300 pounds (that figure would climb to 310 by 2011). The average speed had increased by about 12 percent. Gay didn’t want to limit himself to the static force elaborated by Newton’s second law of motion (force = mass × acceleration). He wanted to measure the potential for destruction inside the Pit; hence his focus on energy. “Energy is actually what goes into breaking bones and causing concussions,” he said. “It’s how much I crush him.”

  By Gay’s calculation, the amount of kinetic energy unleashed in the Pit had effectively doubled as modern players evolved. Kinetic energy is a measure of combined mass (in pounds) and speed (in feet per second). The figure Gay arrived at was 1,875 units of kinetic energy. “To put all of this in perspective,” he wrote, “a bullet fired from a .357 Magnum handgun has about 300 [units] of kinetic energy, so we would need to unload a full revolver chamber into the defense in order to expend the same amount of energy on them. We might even suggest that the result would be no more deadly than getting hit by some of the offensive lines that Dallas put on the field in the mid-1990s.”

  For its part, the media seemed not entirely certain how to respond to this new old injury and whether to take it any more seriously than a strained hamstring or a groin pull. Greg Garber’s piece for ESPN had been groundbreaking. The frank admissions by players like Toon, Hoge, and Harry Carson about their post-career suffering were poignant and, in many ways, harrowing. Yet when it came time to edit the piece, Garber, a decorated reporter who had written the script along with his producer, Christine Caddick, found that ESPN was reluctant to use the term brain damage. That’s exactly what had occurred, of course: The players’ brains had been damaged for weeks, months, and even years. Garber and Caddick met with the network’s highest-ranking executives, who told them they couldn’t use the phrase. Only at the last minute did it make it in the feature. In the back of his mind, Garber wondered how much of the debate had to do with ESPN’s contract with the NFL, which at that point was worth not $15.2 billion but a little over $500 million.

  Sportswriters described concussions with a mix of the old jocularity and newfound seriousness. There were scattered calls for reform. After watching Testaverde, then the Browns’ starting quarterback, lose consciousness and, for a time, his senses, Cleveland columnist Bill Livingston pronounced the NFL’s concussion problem “a disgrace.” He decried the league’s lighthearted treatment of the injury, its business strategy of “making money on pain.” “Pro football doesn’t just lovingly detail mayhem, it has helped create a mass culture that thrives on it,” he wrote. Dave Anderson, the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning sports columnist, warned that the NFL was courting “a trage
dy” reminiscent of the hit that had left Darryl Stingley paralyzed in 1978.

  The NFL, in a refrain that would seem eerily familiar years later, downplayed the crisis. Greg Aiello, the league’s director of communication, repeatedly told reporters that the rate of concussions since 1989, when the NFL began to keep track, was unchanged: one concussion every three or four games. The data, Aiello said, had been collected by the teams and passed on to an epidemiologist who had crunched the numbers for the NFL’s competition committee. “In the big picture, when you consider the number of times the head is impacted [in pro football], the number of concussions is relatively small,” said Aiello. “But hey, they do occur. And maybe there’s more we can do.”

  But of course it depended on how you counted concussions. The league, Aiello acknowledged, was counting head injuries as concussions only when a player lost consciousness or was seriously dazed. Garden-variety concussions were not part of the program. Joe Maroon did his own calculations and estimated that two to four concussions occurred in every NFL game.

  That discrepancy perhaps should have raised red flags. At minimum, there was a 156 percent difference between the rate of concussions reported by the NFL and the rate reported by the senior neurological expert in the league. Maroon said that he, for one, was quite concerned. But few people seemed to notice.

  Late in the Season of the Concussion, Tagliabue appeared with two other commissioners, the NBA’s David Stern and the NHL’s Gary Bettman, in the auditorium at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y to discuss the state of their respective leagues. The panel’s moderator was the journalist David Halberstam, who had gone on to a career of writing books, including several about sports, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times.

  After dispensing with questions about labor relations and league finances, Halberstam turned to the NFL’s growing concussion problem. Tagliabue quickly dismissed the matter as a “pack journalism issue” and then used the league’s dubious statistics to try to deflect concern. Tagliabue repeated the claim that the NFL experienced “one concussion every three or four games,” which he said came out to 2.5 concussions for every “22,000 players engaged.”

  For Halberstam, it was a moment of déjà vu. He seemed to be taken back to the days of the Five O’Clock Follies, the name the Saigon press corps bestowed upon the surreal, statistics-crammed U.S. government press briefings. Halbertstam compared the NFL commissioner to the former U.S. defense secretary: “I feel I’m back in Vietnam hearing McNamara give statistics,” he told the audience, which howled.

  Sports Illustrated, covering the exchange, lit into the commissioner: “Tagliabue’s head has been spared this season’s spate of bruising hits; on this issue he ought to be making better use of it.”

  Not long afterward, the NFL announced its own scientific initiative. At Tagliabue’s behest, the league said it was assembling a subcommittee of experts to study concussions. Tagliabue’s initiative would be called the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee.

  The NFL’s most influential voice on concussions belonged not to the news media or a player or perhaps even the commissioner. It belonged to an agent.

  Leigh Steinberg represented almost every major quarterback in the NFL. At a time when free agency was finally coming to football in a significant way and TV money was helping the NFL realize its full financial potential, Steinberg had emerged as one of the league’s most powerful men. His reach extended into the commissioner’s office, the networks, the front offices, and beyond. In December 1993, the seven-year-old Fox Network had paid $1.58 billion to broadcast the NFC, a staggering bet that had knocked out CBS, the league’s network and partner for the previous four decades. The transaction underscored how television was shaping the modern NFL. Steinberg derived his outsized power from his near monopoly of the stars of the show.

  Steinberg had come out of Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley’s prestigious law school. He had fallen into “sports agentry,” as the nascent profession came to be known, after a friend, Cal quarterback Steve Bartkowski, asked him to represent him in his contract negotiations with the Falcons. Bartkowski was the number one pick in the 1975 draft, and Steinberg landed him a deal for $650,000 over four years, at the time the richest contract given to a draft pick in the history of the league. Steinberg was 26, not much older than his client. When he and Bartkowski touched down at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, Steinberg was astonished to find the tarmac lit up like a movie set, a crowd pushing against a police barricade. “I looked at Steve like Dorothy looked at Toto when they got to Munchkin Land and said, ‘I guess we’re not in Berkeley anymore.’ ” For Steinberg, who was still trying to chart his own career path, it was a moment of epiphany: “I saw the tremendous idol worship and veneration that athletes were held in, how they were the movie stars, they were the celebrities. I saw the power that athletes had to potentially be cultural symbols, and I could see that football—although baseball at that time was still the most popular sport—was going to fit the new media, was gonna fit television and grow up together in a unique way.”

  By the mid-1990s Steinberg was at the height of his power. He brought a mixture of naked ambition, self-promotion, and Berkeleystyle activism to the job. He insisted that his athletes take seriously their power as role models. He and his clients donated tens of millions of dollars to charity, setting up personal foundations and volunteering in their communities. Steinberg titled his best-selling autobiography Winning with Integrity: Getting What You’re Worth without Selling Your Soul. He became sports’ first true superagent. The writer-director Cameron Crowe trailed him for two years and then hired him as a consultant on Jerry Maguire, the 1996 movie about a brash sports agent who grows a conscience overnight.

  The movie’s plot turns on a scene in which an athlete who suffered a concussion wakes up to see his wife, his son (who appears to be about 12), his doctor, and his agent at his bedside. After the player, with his wife’s assistance, remembers his name (“Wait, it’s coming … my name is Steve Remo”) and identifies his family, his freckle-faced son confronts Jerry Maguire, played by Tom Cruise, in the hallway.

  “This is his fourth concussion,” the boy says. “Shouldn’t somebody get him to stop?”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” says the agent, checking his cell phone. “It would take a tank to stop your dad. It would take all five Super Trooper VR Warriors to stop your dad. Right? Right?”

  “Fuck you,” says the boy, flipping off the agent as he walks away.

  The scene resembled a real one that had taken place three years earlier. Steinberg had Dallas quarterback Troy Aikman among his clients. When the Cowboys beat the 49ers in the 1993 NFC Championship (played January 23, 1994), a defensive lineman accidentally kneed Aikman in the head during the third quarter. Afterward, the Cowboys said Aikman had a “mild” concussion. J. R. Zamorano, the team doctor, predicted: “He’ll be ready for the Super Bowl. There’s no contact in practices this week, so I don’t foresee a problem.” But it was enough of a problem for the Cowboys to put Aikman in the hospital for evaluation.

  That night, Steinberg stood by Aikman’s bed at Baylor University Medical Center. The city was still celebrating the Cowboys’ second straight trip to the Super Bowl. As Steinberg describes the scene, Aikman is “in a darkened hospital room, alone, no doctor and this incredible celebration is going on which you can hear in the background—horns honking, people screaming. He looked up at me with a puzzled look on his face and said, ‘Leigh, why am I here?’ ”

  “Well, you suffered a concussion,” Steinberg replied.

  “Did I play?” Aikman asked.

  “Yes, you played.”

  “Did I play well?”

  “Yes, you threw some touchdown passes.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, it means you’re going to the Super Bowl.”

  “He was happy, his face brightened,” Steinberg said. “I sat there, and about five minutes later he turned to me with a confused
look on his face and said, ‘Leigh, why am I here? Did I play today? Did I play well?’ The same exact questions. So I answered him, and about 10 minutes passed, and he looked back with the same puzzled expression and said, ‘Why am I here?’ It terrified me. I saw how tenuous the bond was between consciousness and dementia and realized that this young man who I cared for and loved was sitting alone as a result of a concussion and we had no idea what the consequences were.”

  The immediate consequences were that Aikman walked out of the hospital the next morning, not having slept, and got on the team plane for Atlanta, where Super Bowl XXVIII would be held. By Wednesday, he was practicing, and although his teammates said he was sluggish, he laughed it off and proclaimed himself fit to play. Steinberg knew better. Throughout the week, Aikman was dizzy, sometimes vomiting, and at one point led Steinberg to believe he thought he was still playing for his Oklahoma high school team, the Henryetta Mud Hens. By Sunday, Aikman was coasting through the Cowboys’ 30–13 blowout of the Buffalo Bills. A year later, he remembered almost none of it.

  For Steinberg it wasn’t much of a victory. He had become convinced that he was guiding his clients to ruination. He had reached his own turning point.

  “I’m an enabler,” he thought to himself. “That’s all I’m doing.”

  Steinberg thought most agents were so beholden to their clients that they would indulge any fantasy, no matter how outrageous, to avoid endangering their fat commissions. “I used to say that if a player was on the ledge of a 90-story building about to jump, he would have a whole coterie of fans and his agent saying, ‘The law of gravity, it doesn’t apply to you! Go ahead, you can fly!’ ”