by Glenn Stout
In the meeting, Krumrie was told how a simple scan of his brain could point them in the direction of treatments.
The test was called a SPECT scan, which is a type of nuclear imaging that tracks where blood is and isn’t flowing from in the brain. Simply, it’s a test of how well the brain is functioning.
“The assumption being the more that you use a part of the brain the more blood flow you’re going to require,” Brent Masel, the national medical director for the Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA) said. “So if you increase blood flow to that part of the brain, the assumption is that that part of your brain is more active.”
The SPECT scan is not a tool for detecting chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and it is different than an MRI or CT scan, which captures the anatomical structure of the brain in both health and disease.
An MRI, which the NFL has used in its testing of former players, had shown Krumrie’s brain was normal.
“Badass Tim” Returns
On the three-hour drive back through the mountains to Steamboat Springs from Littleton, Cheryl figured there were two outcomes of her husband’s testing.
“One, there’s something wrong and you can treat it,” she said. “Two, there’s nothing wrong and you’re just being an a—. And that’s the way we approached it.”
If members of the military could go through this type of testing, Krumrie felt he could handle it as well. Ready for answers, the Krumries sat with Dr. Gregory Hipskind and director of clinical operations Hilary Morris at CereScan. In the company’s conference room, Krumrie’s brain was displayed on the wall.
There was heavy damage all over.
Cheryl quickly looked for anything opaque, the one color she knew there was no coming back from. There were none to be found, but the swaths of deep purples, blues, and greens concerned her.
Dr. Hipskind asked if Krumrie had mood swings, if his balance was off, if he lacked the motivation to do physical activity, and if he didn’t sleep well. And if he did sleep, if he had vivid, terrible dreams.
“It was the most humbling experience you ever had,” Tim Krumrie said.
He then straightened up in his chair. It scared him.
“I was up like this, like, ‘What in the Sam-you-know-what is going on here? I’m screwed up.’ And all of a sudden, reality hit. Yeah, I have those things. He said, ‘Yeah, you have it. We can help you.’”
In that moment, Krumrie woke up.
“Doc, get ’er started up. Let’s go.”
In that moment, he was familiar again to Cheryl.
“That’s part of a professional athlete’s demeanor, their psyche, that when they decide to do something, it’s just do it and no halfway,” she said.
Krumrie had never gone halfway. But to do this his way—all the way—he needed teammates.
“Your wife is the most important part of the whole thing,” he said of Cheryl. “They realize that day after day and day in and out. They see what you went through. It’s hard on them. Simple things. Short term memory. Go to Starbucks, I don’t know.”
He paused and shrugged to signify he would forget the order.
“Little things. Things like that. They have to be so patient with people like myself. And if you don’t have a good, solid wife, like I have, that understands what is going on and the improvement that went on from remembering things, day-to-day activity . . .”
“She has been terrific.”
He noted his adult children, Kelly and Dexter, know he’s different than he was. They’ve come to understand him, though it has been tough.
“Knowing what I have to deal with and now keeping abreast of what’s going on, yes, that’s very comforting,” Cheryl said. “But it’s also scary as hell to know where this can lead to.”
Committing to the new goal of a better future, armed with family support, information, and a true cause for his problems, Krumrie set about finding a way to fight it. Reed played a role in this too, as a partner for inLight, a Food and Drug Administration–approved Polychromatic Light Therapy (PLT) system that uses infrared light to stimulate blood flow.
The company outfitted Krumrie with a light-filled cap, which he had to use for 30 minutes a day for three months.
On the first night, he dreamed. There were no fights in the trenches. No violence. Instead, it was of high school coaches and teammates. He woke up recalling names for the first time since . . . well, he couldn’t recall.
At the end of that months-long treatment cycle, Krumrie got another scan of his brain.
He taps the screen to wake up his iPad.
He had fiddled with it for over an hour before this moment, flipping open its case, spinning it around on the countertop. He scrolls through the before and after images. It is startling. The purples aren’t as intense. Some blues turned to greens, some greens returned to normal gray.
And with each color change, his brain reawakens a little.
Taking Hold of the Future
Heavy on the gas, Krumrie shifts the truck into third gear to climb the roads of the Alpine Mountain and Ranch Club, with an elevation of about 6,800 feet. He does some work up here in the snowfall, clearing and marking snowshoe paths for guests.
Now it’s time for the downhill.
“Wanna go faster?” he asks. “I have a big suspension.”
He laughs.
Krumrie is still a farm kid from Wisconsin and loves manual labor around the house. He’ll clear snow off roofs, detail his cars, clean whatever needs to be cleaned. And the treatments, which serve to wake up the blood cells and increase their flow, have him happily telling you about his high school teammates, teachers, bus drivers, and coaches. There are other tales from college and with the Bengals.
“I couldn’t tell those stories,” he said. “Couldn’t remember ’em. College? Couldn’t remember ’em. Pros? Couldn’t remember ’em. I lost memory. I’d go to a party and I’d be tapping my wife on the butt.”
He laughs. He wasn’t flirting. It was a silent signal for her to help remind him who he was speaking to.
He is better at that now, but he isn’t cured. The Krumries will be the first to admit that.
“Blood flow does not equate to better brain function—within the normal parameters,” National Brain Injury Association director Masel said.
“I can’t say that it doesn’t help. But it’s one patient.”
Krumrie needs his sticky notes to remind him of things, a detailed calendar, and pictures of the food he needs to pick up at the grocery store. He says if you asked him to read four paragraphs, he probably won’t remember the first one. He wore his AFC Championship ring on November 26 when he was honored at halftime as one of the Bengals’ greatest players, and it was still new to him. He knows his manner of speaking—he says he jumps around a bit—takes some getting used to.
“That stuff is still in the works,” he says.
To help make it work, though, Krumrie is doing more than just the infrared treatments. He no longer drinks alcohol or his favorite Diet Cokes. He eats healthier. No candy. He’s back to a regular workout regimen.
Masel couldn’t agree with that game plan more—practicing good physical shape is essential in keeping the brain healthy. He did a study of about a dozen former players involved in the lawsuit against the NFL that was settled for $765 million in 2013 and found only one led a healthy lifestyle. The rest had abused their bodies and minds with poor diet, heavy alcohol use, and lack of activity.
Krumrie, who was not part of the initial filing of the lawsuit but was lumped in with all former players in the class action settlement, knows this, lived it, and wants the league—someone—to map out a course of action once that money is paid out.
“I hope you get millions of dollars,” he said. “I hope you do. But God darnit I hope you take care of yourself too.”
An unexpected by-product of the physical work Krumrie has put in and his greater understanding of his situation is that a new side of him has emerged.
“Th
ere’s a definite sensitive side to him that has come out that is really freaky weird,” Cheryl said with a smile. “He is extremely sensitive to people and their feelings. He’s very empathetic to people, where probably as a player most of the guys around him probably said he’s an a—. And he probably was.”
Her husband is using his rediscovered persona, his coaching instincts, and this new understanding to convey an important message to former players: Advanced tools are out there. Use them.
“Hey, the reason I say this is because I can,” he said. “I’m not scared. I’m scared of nothin’. I overcome everything.”
But Krumrie stresses every football player needs his own scan and to find his own treatment.
Such tests would include the SPECT scan, but also the more specific PET scan, which is another form of nuclear medicine that can track specific harmful proteins in the brain—like the Tau proteins that cause CTE.
“Absolutely,” Masel said. “If you know your disease and understand your disease you can manage your disease better. Absolutely and positively unquestionable.”
There’s no finality here, even against the starkness of the outcropping.
“This is the same ol’ Tim that’s gonna say, ‘Hey, I’m going to make the team. I’m going to kick your ass every play.’ I’m going to do it. I beat this thing.”
Ligaments and muscle shred. Bones break. They can be reformed, replaced. This is his brain, though, so he intends to do what he can to enjoy whatever the future holds.
This is not the end.
Krumrie wheels his truck onto a gravel pull-off, with a clear view of the mountain range. He gets out and takes it all in, smiling.
It’s a long sunrise east of the Rockies, ascending slow and high over the top of Steamboat Springs. It brings a lot of joy, that view. Krumrie’s not afraid, and he has a big suspension.
Steve Rushin
Rebecca Lobo’s Incredible Journey to Basketball Royalty
from Sports Illustrated
When Ruthann Lobo became pregnant with her third child, in 1973, her doctor looked her in the eye and said, “You know, you have a choice now.” RuthAnn chose another doctor.
Rebecca was born exactly nine months and two weeks after Roe v. Wade, in the first full year of Title IX. When Rebecca was in fifth grade, her teacher sent a note home informing RuthAnn that her youngest child needed to stop playing with the boys at recess and to start dressing like a girl. RuthAnn didn’t change her daughter’s clothes. She changed her daughter’s teacher.
There was a hoop in the driveway in Southwick, Massachusetts, and Rebecca was content to shoot baskets all day, embracing routine like her father, now in his 51st year as a cross-country and track coach at Granby (Connecticut) Memorial High. Nietszche said time is a flat circle, but to Dennis it’s a flat oval, parceled out a quarter of a mile at a time.
Rebecca grew up with two siblings—Jason and Rachel—a cat (Froot Loops), a dog (Nike), and a guinea pig (Pinnywig). One evening Nike was sitting impassively in the front yard when a jogger preemptively maced him, at which time the jogger had to run for his life. Not from the German shepherd, mind you—from RuthAnn.
Dennis and RuthAnn sent Rebecca into the world armed with an iron will, a sense of humor, and a medium-range jump shot. When she chose to attend UConn over Stanford and Notre Dame, RuthAnn—a guidance counselor—said with a sigh, “UConn is a safety school.” Even so, in her senior year at UConn, in 1995, the unbeaten Huskies defeated Tennessee in the national championship game, a watershed moment in women’s basketball, contested between two future Hall of Fame coaches: Geno Auriemma and Pat Summitt.
A year after that game, on one memorable day in Atlanta, Jason Lobo watched his kid sister’s team win Olympic basketball gold and he met a volunteer named Gundi Oberhoessel, to whom he proposed marriage three weeks later. In 2001, at the Dublin House bar in Manhattan, Rebecca confronted an insecure sportswriter who had made a lame joke about women’s hoops and invited him to attend a WNBA game. Twenty-three months later, they—which is to say we—were married.
When RuthAnn died of breast cancer on July 19, 2011, the largest of the countless floral arrangements sent by her many admirers was from a kindred spirit named Pat Summitt.
To our kids, Rebecca is now just Mom. She’s away 100 nights a year broadcasting basketball on ESPN and makes dinner the other 265—even if it’s charred meatballs on a white platter, a meal the kids have memorably dubbed Hate on a Plate. She’s the handy one around the house: baller, shot caller, window-treatment installer. She never lets me or the kids win at anything, including H-O-R-S-E, a muscle memory from all those childhood days spent jump-shooting in the driveway just outside Springfield, the birthplace of basketball.
And so there was a localized outbreak of goosebumps last April, when she sent me a text that read: “Tonight you’ll be sleeping with a Hall of Famer.” From a strip-mall parking lot, I replied: “Yes! Larry Bird?”
Last Friday, Rebecca was officially enshrined in the Naismith Hall of Fame. It’s 13 miles from Rebecca’s childhood driveway, but she took the scenic route there, through Siberia, the Canary Islands, Rio, and countless other places where she played and now broadcasts the game she loves. The wife of former Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs once accused him of loving basketball more than he loved her. “Yes,” Tubbs replied, “but I love you more than track.”
If Rebecca should love basketball more than me, I’ll be content because basketball has given us four children, three nephews, endless laughs, and inspiration. “Is LeBron James in the Hall of Fame?” our 11-year-old daughter asked. When I answered no, our 6-year-old daughter said, “So Mom is better than LeBron?”
“Damn right,” I told her.
Tim Struby
Name of the Father
from Victory Journal
It was supposed to be an easy score. Get in, knock the kid unconscious, grab the drugs, and get out. Nothing Jarrod Tillinghast hadn’t done a dozen times. His buddy Donny had been setting this kid up for weeks. First Donny bought a pound of weed. Then two. Now Donny wanted 30 pounds. But he had no intention of paying the $150K. This kid wasn’t with the cartel. He was white, a “goof” from Johnston, a town outside of Providence. This was free money.
Around 6 p.m., Jarrod slid into the passenger seat of his friend Rodney’s Honda Prelude. On this steamy, summer day, Jarrod wore a white tank top, shorts, and flip-flops. In his waistband he had a brown paper bag stacked full of newspaper strips, all torn into the size of $100 bills. He was nervous. Not scared nervous, but tense and hypervigilant, the same way he felt every time he’d stepped into the boxing ring. He didn’t know exactly how the robbery would go down; no two were ever exactly the same. But one thing was always certain. He wasn’t leaving without what he came for.
Thirty minutes later Jarrod stepped into the kid’s basement apartment. He didn’t like what he saw. Another guy sitting on the couch—the muscle. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go down, Jarrod protested. You trying to set me up? Rob me? I’m not comfortable with this shit. I’m going to get my friend Rodney.
With Rodney in the living room with the muscle, Jarrod followed the kid into the bedroom.
“Where’s the weed?” asked Jarrod.
“Where’s the money?” the kid replied.
Jarrod tossed the paper bag onto the bed. The kid opened the closet door and pointed to three green plastic trash bags. Bingo. But Tillinghast blinked. He looked at the kid’s face and his pleasant suburban apartment and couldn’t bring himself to knock him out. Instead the 27-year-old threw the kid down between the bed and the wall and turned towards Rodney.
“Grab the bags!” yelled Jarrod.
A second later, the kid grabbed a butcher’s knife he’d stashed under the bed and plunged it into Jarrod’s skull. A searing pain unlike anything he’d ever felt. Jarrod twisted the kid’s arm back and bit his finger until he dropped the knife. With the kid’s head wedged between the wall and the bed, Jarrod turned and looked in the mi
rror. Blood sprayed from his head like a fire hydrant without a cap. An inch either way, thought Tillinghast, and he could have lost an ear or an eye. Furious, he did what he did best. “I hit him with two left hooks,” says Tillinghast. “His whole face shattered.”
With the deftness of an athlete, he ran into the living room and knocked the other guy out, grabbed the three bags of weed, and bolted for the door. As the two men charged up the stairs a pizza delivery guy was coming down. He screamed, dropped his pizza, and backed against the wall with his hands up. If Jarrod hadn’t been drenched in blood, the pizza guy might have recognized him as one of the most promising young Providence boxers in recent memory. If he’d somehow heard Jarrod’s last name, he would have definitely known it belonged to one of Rhode Island’s most infamous crime families.
I
It’s a Friday night in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood and 43-year-old Jarrod Tillinghast sits at the bar in Costantino’s Venda Bar and Ristorante. Built like a bank vault, he is preternaturally tan, owns a halogen smile and scars that dapple his face like cave etchings, each one its own story. The street fight in Silver Lake. The bar brawl in downtown Providence. The butcher’s knife incident. “None of ’em ever happened in the ring,” he proudly notes. “I didn’t like to get hit.” Without a word, Frankie, the bartender, refreshes Jarrod’s Tito’s-and-soda.
A couple across the bar recognizes him. They don’t approach, but Jarrod can feel their stares, sees their furtive whispers. Back in the day, depending on how much vodka he’d had, Jarrod might have taken umbrage. Maybe crossed the bar with his left arm locked and loaded. “I always liked to fight,” he concedes.
His first bout was at age four in the family home in Cranston. Tired of Jarrod arguing with his eight-year-old brother, Gerry Jr., their old man Jerry Sr. bought them boxing gloves (heavily padded ones for Gerry Jr.) and rearranged the furniture into a makeshift ring. But Gerry Jr. was too tall, too strong, and Jarrod got pushed around. Couldn’t get close. To even up the fight, their old man grabbed Gerry Jr.’s arms, allowing Jarrod to unleash his inner animal on his brother. “Jarrod tuned him up,” recalls the 71-year-old Jerry. “I couldn’t stop him. Gerry Jr.’s yelling, ‘That ain’t fair!’ I told him, ‘Life’s a bitch, kid.’”