League of Denial

by Mark Fainaru-Wada

  “Yes.”

  “And, do you have plans to be a lawyer.”

  “Yes,” Omalu said, beginning to laugh, the jury joining in.

  The judge finally asked Luckasevic to move on; he had made his point.

  “They loved him!” Luckasevic said of the jury’s reaction. “We won the case. I mean, it was a huge verdict for Indiana County. It was like almost $300,000. Ever since then I was a Bennet fan like beyond belief.”

  As Luckasevic watched his friend absorb repeated shots from the NFL, he grew protective. “Basically, I wanted to have his back as his friend,” Luckasevic said. “They’re saying that my expert and my friend is a quack, and he wasn’t and he isn’t. I wasn’t gonna let his reputation go down the tubes for the NFL docs saying that there was nothing there.”

  “Maybe there’s something that you can do from the legal side,” Omalu suggested.

  Luckasevic laughed. He was a lowly associate, spread ridiculously thin, with no time to tilt at windmills. Besides, whom was he going to find that would be willing to take on the NFL in court? And what was the case?

  Omalu had a thought: What if you reached out to the families of all the players who had suffered, people like Terry Long’s wife, Lynne, and the Waters family, and soon there would be others. Omalu noted that he knew some other potential expert witnesses who had been fighting the NFL for years, people such as Cantu, Bailes, Guskiewicz, and Nowinski. Omalu could make those introductions, laying a chronological history of the issue at Luckasevic’s feet.

  The young lawyer thought maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched. He recognized he would have a long, long road before filing an actual claim, if it ever got to that, but it was plausible. In that way, Luckasevic was like Omalu—perhaps too confident and naive to know better.

  It was yet another unlikely moment that soon would turn very bad for Big Football—two outraged young friends shooting the shit, thinking about how to sue the NFL.

  Although such a lawsuit was still years away, its potential to wreak havoc unclear, the NFL found itself facing more immediate challenges that were also bad for business. To that point, the league’s concussion policies had escaped regulatory scrutiny, but that too was about to change. The mounting press coverage—the steady stream of heartrending stories of former players who felt abandoned by the NFL—caught the attention of Congress, which began to examine the plight of retired players from different angles, putting more pressure on Goodell.

  On September 18, 2007, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened a hearing titled “Oversight of the NFL Retirement System.” The hearing focused on the overall complaint that the retirement system was broken, that the league had abandoned the men who had built the modern NFL, but concussions and mental illness had become inextricably linked with that story.

  One of the first witnesses was Garrett Webster. He had been invited to tell the story of his father’s six-year battle with the NFL disability board, which had culminated with the appellate court’s lacerating opinion and a $1.8 million judgment against the NFL rendered four full years after Webster’s death. Garrett used the occasion to provide the Senate Commerce Committee with a sordid recounting of Webster’s life after football. He asked if anyone in the room had any idea what it was like to shock one’s father with a Taser to alleviate his pain; or if they had experienced receiving a desperate phone call from their dad, saying he was about to kill himself to escape the unending torture; or if they had watched a “once-proud, strong man” like Mike Webster beg for Kentucky Fried Chicken. But it was Garrett’s story about how his father missed his tenth birthday without so much as a phone call—a man who once called him practically every night before bed—that left everyone in the room pondering the future of pro football.

  “Later that month I found out why,” Garrett told the rapt committee members, “when our family discovered Iron Mike Webster, bloated to over 300 pounds, shivering naked in a bed in a rat-infested motel, and at his side were not pictures of his kids, nor his Super Bowl rings, nor autographs or any glory that you associate with football, but a bucket of human waste, because he was too weak to make it to the bathroom.”

  Garrett was followed by a former player, Brent Boyd, who had played six seasons as an offensive guard with the Minnesota Vikings before retiring in 1986. Boyd had been looking forward to the opportunity to testify. It was a chance to tell the nation’s policymakers, and by extension the public, his story.

  “I do have brain damage,” Boyd began. He asked the committee to please indulge his “invisible disability,” which most affected him when he was under stress. Boyd explained that he had been diagnosed with football-induced brain damage in 1999. He said that he had been advised by a member of the disability board not to bother filing a claim because the NFL owners “would never open that can of worms by approving a claim for head injury.”

  The NFL’s schizophrenic policy on concussions was beyond confusing at this point. The league had set up the 88 Plan for retired players with dementia, and the retirement board had distributed benefits to at least some players with brain damage. Yet its official concussion committee, cochaired by a neurologist universally known as Dr. No, continued to deny the connection between football and brain damage while players like Brent Boyd testified under oath about what they perceived as a conspiracy. Boyd likened the NFL to the “tobacco companies fighting against the link between smoking and cancer.” He alleged that the NFL had destroyed his medical files. His disability claim, he said, had been denied by the board even though multiple doctors supported it.

  One man took particular issue with Boyd’s testimony. His name was Dave Duerson, and he was also a witness that day. Duerson had spent 11 seasons as a defensive back in the NFL, mostly with the Chicago Bears. He had earned a reputation as one of the game’s fiercest hitters. After retiring, he became a highly successful businessman, so popular in Chicago that local power brokers recruited him to run for office. During his playing days, Duerson was a player representative and took the job seriously—an extension of a childhood that included standing in picket lines with his father, who spent 38 years working for General Motors and was active in the United Auto Workers. Duerson had been one of the named plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit that led to free agency in the NFL. After his final season, he stayed active with the union, eventually becoming so close to its director, Gene Upshaw, that some people viewed him as an heir apparent. Upshaw made Duerson an alternate trustee on the disability bsoard, and Duerson eventually became a voting member on disability claims such as Brent Boyd’s, although it wasn’t clear how he voted in that case.

  During the question-and-answer period, Boyd testified that NFL players were never warned that concussions could destroy their lives.

  Duerson came to the league’s defense. There was no indication, he said, that football caused brain damage. His own father, he pointed out to the committee, “has Alzheimer’s and brain damage, but never played a professional sport. So, the challenge, you know, in terms of where the damage comes from, is a fair question.…”

  Duerson’s defense of the NFL infuriated his fellow former players. They found his argument—that his father had brain damage but hadn’t played in the NFL—bizarre and another indication that he was a sellout, protecting the interests of the league. When Duerson walked out into the hallway after his testimony, he got into a screaming match with Hall of Fame linebacker Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish, a former Cleveland Browns defensive back. Both players were critical of Upshaw, Duerson’s mentor. “Duerson was spewing profanities at Huff and Parrish,” Boyd told the writer Irvin Muchnick, who ran the blog Concussion Inc. “He said, ‘What the fuck do you know about the players union?’ He was acting like he wanted to fight them physically.” Parrish said he accidentally bumped Duerson during the melee, but Duerson “thought it was intentional.”

  Duerson had been charged with assaulting his wife in 2005 and, more recently, had run into financial problems. But to most people who knew
him, screaming at a pair of respected former players in the halls of Congress wasn’t like him. It seemed an extreme reaction, out of character.

  No one had yet put it together that Dave Duerson—defender of the NFL, denier of football-related brain damage—was also losing his mind.

  PART THREE

  RECKONING

  13

  THE ART OF DISEASE

  One weekend in June 2007, Chris Benoit, a 220-pound professional wrestler known as the Canadian Crippler, strangled his wife, smothered his seven-year-old son, and then hanged himself from the pulley of a weight machine at his home in suburban Atlanta. Details of the double murder-suicide spilled across the tabloids for weeks. Benoit, from Montreal (his name was pronounced Ben-WAH), left Bibles next to the bodies. Hours passed between the murders, during which Benoit sent cryptic text messages to coworkers with World Wrestling Entertainment, which alerted the police. Steroids were found inside Benoit’s home, leading to speculation that he had committed the murders during an episode of “roid rage.”

  “I knew him well—nicest guy, plenty of concussions,” wrote Nowinski, the wrestler formerly known as Chris Harvard, in an e-mail to his new colleagues at the Sports Legacy Institute. Nowinski had his own theory about what had caused Benoit to snap. The Canadian Crippler, he recalled, routinely allowed himself to be hit in the back of the head with a chair and often launched himself from the ropes, landing headfirst on his opponent or the mat. Within days of the murders, Nowinski was on the phone to the medical examiner and Benoit’s father to secure his brain for SLI.

  Shortly afterward, an ESPN crew showed up at Omalu’s Pittsburgh condo for a story on Omalu and Nowinski—the odd couple suddenly giving the NFL fits. As they waited for Nowinski to arrive, the producer, Arty Berko, chatted up Omalu.

  “I bet you would love to be involved in the Benoit case,” Berko said.

  Omalu smiled. “Can you keep a secret?” he said.

  He led Berko to his hall closet. Tucked in the corner, beneath the winter coats and the umbrellas, was a large pail. It looked to Berko like a five-gallon paint bucket you’d pick up at the Home Depot. A towel was draped over the bucket. Omalu pulled it back to reveal a large piece of Chris Benoit’s brain floating in a shallow bath of formalin. Omalu explained to Berko that he and Nowinski had driven to Atlanta days earlier to pick up the brain. Omalu planned to cut it up and study it once it hardened.

  “It sounds like you guys had a busy weekend,” Berko said to Nowinski after he arrived.

  “What are you talking about?” Nowinski asked.

  “I heard you’re just back from Atlanta. Bennet showed me what’s in the closet.”

  Nowinski was furious. “He wanted to kill Omalu,” Berko recalled. The producer tried to persuade Nowinski and Omalu to let him report that they were studying Benoit’s brain, but they refused. Nowinski didn’t want to risk alienating Benoit’s father with the disclosure, he said.

  The Sports Legacy Institute had bigger plans for Chris Benoit’s brain. After Omalu pulled it out of the closet, he found that it indeed was riddled with CTE. SLI used the diagnosis to further raise its national profile. Benoit wasn’t a football player, but the case was consistent with the vision Nowinski had mapped out in his bullet points: to examine all athletes involved in contact sports. The organization hired a PR firm, Widmeyer Communications, which staged a press conference in New York to announce that Benoit had the same kind of brain damage that had been found in NFL players. That was followed by a round of national TV interviews, including a memorable appearance on Larry King Live. Benoit’s father, choking back tears, told King the diagnosis was a revelation: “Larry, we were searching for answers. The world was black.” But who would represent the Sports Legacy Institute? Larry could take only one brain researcher. The two neurosurgeons, Cantu and Bailes, bickered over who would get to do the Larry King interview. Cantu prevailed on a coin flip, but like the flare-up at Omalu’s condo, the tiff was another disharmonious sign for SLI.

  To the outside world, the nascent research group, the first of its kind, looked like a natural alliance. The ESPN piece would portray Omalu and Nowinski as underdogs raging against the NFL machine. Omalu was shown cutting up brains. Nowinski pumped iron. The two men—one big and white, the other small and black—strode side by side, united. “The NFL has tried to discredit the work that Bennet and I have done, which has been pretty disappointing,” Nowinski told ESPN reporter Steve Delsohn. “I wonder how many of these cases we’re gonna have to put on their lap before they start taking it seriously.” Nowinski tossed another grenade at the league: “I guess what we’re dealing with is the issue that 32 billionaires are worried that they’re gonna have the values of their franchises drop or that the game won’t be as popular or else the players are going to start suing.”

  But when the cameras were off, SLI wasn’t big enough to accommodate so many egos. The tension started with Nowinski and Omalu. Almost from the beginning, when Nowinski remarked offhandedly that Omalu looked younger and smaller than he expected, the relationship had foundered. Nowinski wanted a partner who was polished and reasonable enough to take on the NFL. He quickly determined that Omalu wasn’t that person. He found him “unpredictable” and tactless, a feeling that was reinforced when Omalu revealed that he was keeping Chris Benoit’s brain in a bucket in his closet or flashed pictures of Webster’s corpse during meetings. “The seeds were planted early on that he wasn’t going to be the right guy to carry the torch and be able to go toe to toe and stand up against the NFL or any other critic,” said Nowinski.

  For his part, Omalu came to see Nowinski as a condescending opportunist whose criticism about his ability to stand up to the NFL was laughable considering that Omalu already had withstood two years of attacks by the league. Moreover, Omalu was a licensed neuropathologist with three degrees and five board certifications. Nowinski, his concussion book notwithstanding, was a former pro wrestler and college lineman with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Omalu thought there was a whiff of racism about Nowinski’s assessment of him. During their first meeting in Florida, he recalled, Nowinski told him: “You have a believability factor.”

  “He said that because I was not white and I was from Nigeria,” Omalu said, “that Nigeria’s not known for any breakthroughs, that I’m not an established scientist from an Ivy League school, that people are less likely to believe me.”

  Nowinski, though, said his issues with Omalu had nothing to do with race or culture. It was simply that Omalu was a “risk that needed to be managed.”

  From that crack in team unity, SLI began to split apart over a variety of issues, most of which revolved around money and control. Nowinski thought the Omalu Group lacked a cohesive plan. Fitzsimmons and Bailes were pushing hard to base the organization at West Virginia University, where Bailes still worked. Nowinski and Cantu thought Boston University was a much better fit, and they came to believe Bailes and Fitzsimmons were bullying them into going with West Virginia. “We were $150,000 in debt with no way of getting out of it, and I didn’t understand what the game plan was,” Nowinski said.

  The members of the Omalu Group thought they understood Nowinski perfectly: He wanted to use their research—research he was unqualified to do on his own—to make himself rich and famous. The more they watched Nowinski try to seize control, the more resentment they felt. Bailes was one of the top neurosurgeons in the country. Omalu had discovered CTE in football players. Fitzsimmons was one of the most prominent lawyers in the Ohio Valley, the man who had beaten the NFL in court. Who was Chris Nowinski?

  “There kind of was a feeling that the thing really was about Chris Nowinski, as opposed to the science and the research,” said Fitzsimmons.

  It all came to a head during a pair of conference calls with the founders. The group still hadn’t resolved where to base the organization. Nowinski, meanwhile, was pressing to be compensated for his efforts. Fitzsimmons asked Nowinski how much he wanted. Recollections of the number Nowinski propose
d varied between $110,000 and $160,000 a year. Nowinski told the group that he wanted to be paid retroactively to when SLI was formed.

  Fitzsimmons laughed at him. “This is crazy,” he told Nowinski. The Sports Legacy Institute, which Fitzsimmons had helped fund with $10,000 of his own money, was broke, indebted from the public relations campaign and the creation of a website. Fitzsimmons had no interest in putting the fledging organization deeper in the hole. Bailes, too, began to object, but Nowinski “shut him down,” according to Omalu. Nowinski suggested that Omalu was trying to shape the organization according to his own agenda. When Omalu started to protest, Bailes snapped: “Bennet, you don’t have to explain yourself to Chris Nowinski.”

  Fitzsimmons had heard enough.

  “I’m resigning,” he said. “Good luck to you guys.” The next sound they heard was a click. Bailes hung up, too. Omalu stayed on the line, chastising Nowinski for his impertinence to the two distinguished men.

  Nowinski later said he and Cantu effectively ousted Bailes and Fitzsimmons from the new organization after deciding that “SLI would have a greater chance of success” without them. Nowinski said his salary demand was “a bluff” to test “their vision for who was going to lead this thing. It was, ‘They’re not looking out for me at all. If they’re not worried about how I make a living, then there’s nothing to [talk about].’ ”

  It was an exit strategy, and it worked. Nowinski already had located another neuropathologist, someone who better met his criteria to “carry the torch” and be able to “go toe to toe” with the NFL. Not long after Bailes and Fitzsimmons resigned, Omalu said he received a call from Nowinski telling him he was no longer needed to analyze brains for SLI. Nowinski denied ever making such a call.

  “Who are you?” Omalu said, incredulous. He said he found it hard to believe the source of the message, a layman who not long ago had called to ask for his help—or, as Omalu would put it, “this motherfucker who was begging me to talk to him.”