Good morning!
What’s your favorite football movie, Rudy, Remember the Titans, The Blind Side, Friday Night Lights …?
Odds are it’s not Concussion, which was released last Christmas but barely broke even at the box office despite the buildup and an all-star cast that includes Will Smith, Alec Baldwin and Albert Brooks.
Before its premiere, Sports Illustrated invited 70 retired NFL players to a private screening and “for many, it was a panic-inducing horror flick.”
I’m a football fan and I avoided watching this movie — caving to an inconvenient truth, so to speak — but it’s free on Comcast and so I kicked back and hit the play button.
The film is based on Game Brain from a 2009 expose in GQ by Jeanne Marie Laskas. It opens with former Pittsburgh Steelers hero Mike Webster (played by David Morse) stammering through his Hall of Fame induction speech in Canton, Ohio.
Nicknamed “Iron Mike” by his adoring fans, Webster was a tough-as-nails center who embodied the city’s grit when the steel plants were closing. He played 15 seasons, won four Super Bowls and subsequently sold the rings to raise money.
The next time we see him is five years later inside his truck in a deserted industrial part of the city. Disheveled and reclusive, he’s holding a rag to his mouth and sniffing glue to obliterate the misery. Former teammate Justin Strzelczyk rides up (without a helmet) gets off his Harley and does the locker room shtick. “Webbie! Love the digs! We’re all worried about you man …”
But Strzelczyk is there for another reason. “I’m starting to forget things. I’m saying this crazy crap to my kids. I nearly pushed Keana into a wall. I never thought I’d do that … ”
Strzelczyk was a free spirit who likely would have continued playing football even if he knew that butting heads would cause his demise. Players like Chris Borland are the exception. Borland left after one season with the 49ers and returned his bonus money saying, “I don’t think it’s worth the risk.”
UMass fans at McGuirk Stadium for the season openers in 1987 and ’88 saw Strzelczyk play for the Maine Black Bears. Steelers coach Chuck Knoll took him in the 11th round of the 1990 draft. According to Wikipedia, he loved to run block and was known for phoning from the sideline to the coaches’ booth upstairs and yelling, “Run the damn ball!”
The dangers of concussions can appear vague and inconclusive to naysayers. Unlike other physical injuries, players who get concussed don’t scream or writhe in pain. They lay there, get helped off the field and invariably ask to go back in the game.
Those that don’t ask? Maybe they’re not into it or scared. “You know, football isn’t for everyone,” former NFL coach Jon Gruden sneered to an ESPN reporter who posed the question.
Maybe we’re all too cavalier, because Concussion shows what it’s like to go mad. Webster would zap himself with a stun gun to fall asleep. He drank, took uppers, downers and lived alone. “I’m freakin’ overwhelmed,” he tells former team doctor Julian Bailes (played by Baldwin), who assures him “I’m going to get you some help, what are you taking now?”
“Oh … the Ritalin … ”
“… Dexedrine, Prozac and Klonopin, you still taking all those?”
“Yeah yeah, and Super Glue,” says Webster, managing a brief and barely audible chuckle.
Bailes injects a sedative into Webster’s arm and wheels around, frantically asking his assistant, “What am I missing?!”
No one had the answer when Webster died of a heart attack on Sept. 24, 2002. His obituary in The New York Times had a fox-in-the-henhouse overtone: “The cause of death was a heart attack, the Pittsburgh Steelers said.”
That might have been the end of it had the doctor who performed the autopsy not been a curious neuropathologist. Will Smith meticulously portrays Dr. Bennet Omalu as a compassionate and proud Nigerian, a man with a long list of medical credentials that he gladly reels off to anyone who asks.
When Omalu saw no visible sign of brain damage he ordered more tests and looked under the microscope. “I had to make sure the slides were Mike Webster’s slides,” he told Frontline in the PBS documentary “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crises.”
“I looked again. I saw changes that shouldn’t be in a 50-year-old man’s brains.”
He concludes helmet-to-helmet hits caused the changes and presents his findings to Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht (Brooks) and Alzheimer’s specialist Stephen DeKosky (Eddie Marsan). The blows to the head that Webster sustained playing football had “triggered a cascading series of neurologic events which unleashed killer proteins upon Mike Webster’s brain, strangling his mind like pouring wet concrete down kitchen pipes.”
Two years after Webster’s death, Justin Strzelczyk died in a fiery car crash in upstate New York. AP reported he was being chased by police on I-79 when he crossed the median strip and continued east in the westbound lane. He was clocked at 88 mph and driving on three tires and a rim when he crashed head-on into a diesel tanker carrying corrosive acid.
“It was like an airplane crash,” said Trooper Jim Simpson. “We’re fortunate that only one person died. We may never find out what was going through his mind.”
Omalu received permission from Strzelczyk’s wife Keana to examine his brain. A year later he examined the brain of another former Steeler, Terry Long, who committed suicide by drinking a gallon of anti-freeze. Both had the same disease as Webster, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
He published his findings in the Journal of Neurosurgery using medical language impossible for the average fan to understand — “hyperphosphorylation of neuronal microtubule-associated protein and aberrant metabolism of amy-oid precursor protein” — but it caught the attention of the NFL’s doctors and lawyers.
Omalu is shocked that the NFL is trying to portray him as a quack.
“What did they think they were going to tell you, ‘Thank you’?” asks Wecht.
“Yes, for being told … for knowing,” says Omalu.
“They’re terrified of you. The City of Pittsburgh spent $233 million to build their glorious Steelers a new stadium all the while it was closing schools and raising taxes. You are going to war with a corporation that has 20 million people on a weekly basis craving their product. The NFL owns a day of the week, the same day the Church used to own. Now it’s theirs.”
Eventually the NFL came to grips with the reality that it could no longer cover up its lethal secret. Researchers at Boston University found CTE in 90 of 94 former NFL players who donated their brains and at movie’s end a stark statistic scrolls down the screen: “Actuaries for the NFL say 28 percent of all pro football players will suffer from serious cognitive impairment.”
In 2013 a billion dollar settlement was reached between the NFL and thousands of players and/or their estates. The New York Times called it a “deeply flawed (settlement) that compensates some while others get nothing.”
On Jan. 30 the front page of the New York Daily News showed a multi-colored image of a brain scan. The headline proclaimed, “THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FOOTBALL.”
According to the Daily News “a new generation of radioactive pharmaceuticals” can show signs of CTE in living humans, in this case a retired NFL player. “His symptoms are primarily psychiatric,” said Dr. Samuel Gandy of Mount Sinai Hospital. “He functions, runs a business, but he’s irritable and he has trouble controlling his rage.”
In February, Alex Reima wrote in Forbes Magazine that Justin Strzelczyk’s widow, Keana McMahon, refuses to watch NFL games. “Why should I? It’s always been kind of stupid to me — the whole fan thing — but it’s just amplified now that I know what goes on in the belly of the beast of the NFL and how seedy and undermining they are.”
During her husband’s playing days she said, “They had helmets to protect them, and it was kind of accepted if you got your bell rung, you go back in the game.”
In 2013 The Recorder published a four-part series about concussions in youth sports by staff writer/columnist Jay Butynski. When Butynski asked Dr. Darius Greenbacher, a Baystate ER doctor and sports medicine specialist, if helmets prevented concussions he answered, “It’s the whiplash head movement that causes concussions … you can have your head encased in cement and will still get (concussed).”
Last week 16 players on the NFL’s official injury list were sidelined by concussions. They won’t be back until they can remember and react the same way they did before being concussed. Like any injury, the brain needs rest to heal.
Meanwhile you’ll never see Keana McMahon at a Super Bowl party. “I’d feel like I’m making (the NFL) rich and watching people die. That’s just not something I want to do.”
Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for four decades in the Pioneer Valley.