League of Denial (2 page)

Webster, more than anyone, knew how sick he was, and he believed his illness was connected to the game to which he had given his life. Webster once went six seasons without missing a single offensive play; later, when asked by a doctor if he had ever been involved in a car crash, he replied:
“Oh, probably about 25,000 times or so.” He read constantly, even during the worst of his illness, and he would pore over literature on head trauma and brain disease, putting exclamation points in the margins and circling terms that he thought applied to him, such as “ice pick headache” and “disinhibition” and “dysfluency.” He wrapped duct tape around his crooked fingers so that he could grasp a pen to write
thousands of letters—some ranting and paranoid, some desperate, some incomprehensible—on any scrap of paper he could find. One read:

As Webster lay dead inside the coroner’s office that September morning, a silver Mercedes-Benz turned into the back parking lot. A small, dapper forensic pathologist named Bennet Omalu climbed out. It was a mild fall day in Pittsburgh, not yet cold, the start of another football season. Outside the building, TV trucks and reporters had gathered with the news that “Iron Mike” Webster, the indestructible force of four Super Bowl champions, the center of gravity of the Steeler dynasty—“our
strength
,” Bradshaw had called him—was inside on a slab.

Omalu was on call to perform autopsies that Saturday because he was the most junior pathologist in the office. He had been out clubbing the night before.

“What’s going on?” he asked his colleagues.

“It’s Mike Webster. His body is in there,” one of them whispered.

“Who is Mike Webster?” asked Omalu.

Over the last year or so, people sometimes have asked us: Is ESPN really going to let you write this book?

It is an interesting question. We are employees of the company once known as the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network but now commonly identified by its initials—
a media empire that operates seven 24-hour sports channels, a website that attracts more than 37 million unique visitors every month, a radio network of more than 400 stations, and numerous other sports-related enterprises. The centerpiece of ESPN’s empire is its lucrative relationship with the National Football League.
The network pays the NFL—and, by extension, its 32 franchises—$1.9 billion per year to broadcast
Monday Night Football
. That’s $112 million per game, nearly the average budget for the Harry Potter films.

ESPN’s bet on the NFL is based on its own market research, which distinguishes the average sports fan from what the network likes to call
“avids”—people who follow their sports regularly and crave information about them the way they crave food. According to ESPN’s internal data, by 2012 there were 85 million NFL avids—more than a quarter of the nation. The network has been able to pinpoint almost the exact moment when pro football permanently surpassed baseball as America’s pastime: the fall of 1994, when, not coincidentally, a seven-month strike wiped out the World Series. In some major cities today, having a pro football team is a higher priority than providing basic services. The city of Oakland and Alameda County, for example, shell out over $30 million each year to support the Raiders; by 2012, Oakland, with one of the worst crime rates in the nation, had cut 200 police officers to save money.

The national obsession with football, which blew right through the recession, has turned the NFL into the richest and most powerful sports league in the nation and a ubiquitous presence in our lives. ESPN’s research has discovered that for the first time, more people prefer watching games on television to attending them. The NFL is broadcast over five networks—including its own—and brings in annual rights fees of $5 billion. In the fall of 2012, 23 of the 25 top-rated shows on TV were NFL games. Once, when the league moved a game from Sunday to Tuesday because of a blizzard, a spokesman predicted that the ratings would be unaffected because the NFL is the
“ultimate reality show” and impervious even to acts of God.

The players—the larger-than-life men on whom this $10 billion industry was built—participate in what the historian and former Kansas City Chiefs offensive lineman Michael Oriard has described as
“contact ballet.” The violence, of course, has always been a big part of football’s appeal, but it’s cinematic and filtered, almost like a war movie. The destructive force behind the sport was seldom considered. In 2004,
a football-loving physicist at the University of Nebraska named Tim Gay set out to calculate the magnitude of a Dick Butkus hit. Applying Newton’s second law of motion, he calculated that Butkus, who played at 245 pounds (about 30 pounds lighter than many linebackers today), generated 1,150 pounds of force when slamming into a running back of approximately the same size. “That’s the weight of a small adult killer whale!” Gay added helpfully. But rarely did fans dwell on the implications for the men on either side of that transaction.

And then, one Saturday morning in 2002, an obscure forensic pathologist cut open Mike Webster’s skull.

That decision—and its consequences, growing by the day—is the subject of this book. There has never been anything like it in the history of sports: a public health crisis that emerged from the playing fields of our twenty-first-century pastime. A small group of research scientists put football under a microscope—literally. What they found was not the obvious, as many people later would claim. We all knew that football was violent and dangerous, that one hit could break your neck or even kill you. No, what the researchers were saying was that the essence of football—the unavoidable head banging that occurs on every play, like a woodpecker jackhammering at a tree—can unleash a cascading series of neurological events that in the end strangles your brain, leaving you unrecognizable.

The researchers who made this discovery—you could count them on one hand—thought NFL executives would embrace their findings, if only to make their product safer. That is not what happened. Instead, the league used its economic, political, and media power to attack pioneering research and try to replace it with its own. Its resources, of course, were considerable. For years, the NFL would co-opt an influential medical journal whose editor in chief was a consultant to the New York Giants. The league used that journal, which some researchers would come to ridicule as
“the Journal of No NFL Concussions,” to publish an unprecedented series of papers, several of which were rejected by peer reviewers and editors and later disavowed even by some of their own authors. The papers portrayed NFL players as superhuman and impervious to brain damage. They included such eye-popping assertions as “Professional football players do not sustain
frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” The NFL’s flawed research was shaped by a web of conflicting interests. Riddell, the league’s official helmet maker, used the research to create and successfully market a helmet it claimed significantly reduced concussions in children—a claim that triggered an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission,
which concluded it was false.

The NFL’s strategy seemed not unlike that of another powerful industry, the tobacco industry, which had responded to its own existential threat by underwriting questionable science through the creation of its own scientific research council and trying to silence anyone who
contradicted it. There are many differences, as we shall see, but one is that football’s health crisis featured not millions of anonymous victims but very public figures whose grotesque demises seemed almost impossible to reconcile with their personas. One eight-year NFL veteran would kill himself by drinking antifreeze. Another prominent player would crash his Ford pickup into a tanker truck while leading police on a high-speed chase. Two players, Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, would fire handguns into their chests; Seau, one of the finest linebackers to play the game, used a .357 Magnum that his family didn’t know he owned to shoot himself in a guest room of his beach house filled with the memorabilia of a 20-year career. As the crisis grew, the brains of those famous players became valuable scientific commodities. A macabre race ensued among researchers to harvest and study them—even while the bodies were still warm. Minutes after Seau’s body was carted out of his house, his oldest son, Tyler, began getting calls seeking his father’s brain.

The story is far from over. As this book was being written,
nearly 6,000 retired players and their families were suing the league and Riddell for negligence and fraud. Their argument was that the NFL had “propagated its own industry-funded and falsified research” to conceal the link between football and brain damage. One week before the start of the 2013 season, the NFL settled the case — agreeing to pay the players $765 million, plus an expected $200 million in legal fees. The NFL did not admit wrongdoing, but the settlement hardly resolved the question at the core of the league’s concussion crisis: How dangerous is football to one’s brain? Unlike smoking, there was no scientific consensus about the risks of playing football. One neurosurgeon connected to the NFL said children were more likely to sustain a brain injury
riding a bike or falling down. Another neurosurgeon, also connected to the league, called for
abolishing tackle football entirely for children younger than 14.

The prevalence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—the name for the insidious disease found in the brains of Seau, Duerson, and the others—is also unknown. The leading expert on the subject is a blond Green Bay Packers fan named Ann McKee, who works out of a redbrick building at the Department of Veterans Affairs outside Boston in an office cluttered with football helmets, bobblehead dolls, and a Packers cheesehead resting atop a plastic heart. In a nearby building, the largest collection of NFL brains is stored in a freezer at –80 degrees Celsius.

By the fall of 2012, McKee had examined the brains of 34 former NFL players. Thirty-three had CTE.
We asked her what percentage of NFL players probably had it.

The following exchange ensued:

That brings us back to the question: What’s in it for ESPN to support this book? Why would the network that stages the rough equivalent of a Harry Potter movie every week let us dig into a subject that examines the darkest underside of the network’s biggest product.

ESPN—itself worth
an estimated $40 billion—subsists on sports information, any sports information, much the way the
Wall Street Journal
and CNBC subsist on financial information. “The value of the NFL to us is the ubiquity of the sport across all our platforms all the time,” John Skipper, now ESPN’s president, explained to the
New York Times
when asked about the staggering contract in 2011. “It’s just stupendous for us. It’s daily product—we don’t have a day without the NFL.”

From its modest beginnings, journalism has been part of ESPN’s DNA. We work out of a cubbyhole of the empire, an investigative reporting unit with the unusual mandate to investigate the very products that ESPN is selling. It is, in many respects, a journalistic minefield. But for a network that traffics in sports information, one piece of sports information is in particularly high demand these days: Is football killing its players?

Do we really want to know?

“
You mean that guy who was on TV?” Bennet Omalu asked his colleagues as he arrived at the coroner’s office.

Omalu had seen the reports of Webster’s death, the stories about his life unraveling over the final few years. Omalu didn’t think much about it. He had never attended a football game. He found the sport brutal and strange, “extraterrestrials running around a large field and tackling one another, sometimes in a ferocious manner.”

Omalu himself was something of an alien. At that moment, his visa had lapsed, and he was in the process of renewing it to stay in the United States. He was a small man, about 5-feet-6 and black, with a voice that went up several octaves when he was excited, which was often, and a perfectly round head, like a 16-inch softball. Omalu had been born in the middle of Nigeria’s civil war in the short-lived secessionist nation of Biafra. He came to the United States in 1994 and immediately began collecting degrees. He obtained his medical license in Indiana and Pennsylvania (later he would add California and Hawaii); an MBA; a master’s degree in public health; and board certifications in anatomic pathology, clinical pathology, forensic pathology, neuropathology, and medical management.