Concussion Inc. (18 page)

I hope the hockey industry now moves more aggressively and effectively than the football industry has to date on stemming the lifelong damage inflicted by the system on everyone from highly paid, eyes-wide-open pros all the way down to clueless kids and their parents.

I also hope Nowinski and company recognize a good model for public education when they see one, and in the future don't push robotically past complexities outside the four walls of their funded research grants.

7 February 2012..........

Two days before the Super Bowl, Dr. Robert Cantu and Chris Nowinski's Boston University research group and their sister advocacy organization, the Sports Legacy Institute, announced a “bold initiative.” Their findings were transparently a lot less than bold. And their choice of setting, the NFL's official media control center in Indianapolis, ensured that their proposals would be neatly folded into the NFL's public relations counteroffensive 2.0 on traumatic brain injury — an enterprise all about buffing image and limiting legal exposure.

Of course, just because Cantu and Nowinski are establishment dudes who play the corporate game doesn't mean that the SLI “Hit Count” white paper is without any value. I'm sure they sincerely believe that their private interests and improved public health policy overlap. Let's take a look at what they said.
9
Here's the thesis:

We believe that the fastest and most effective path to safer youth sports is to regulate the amount of brain trauma that a child is allowed to incur in a season and a year. Like youth baseball has widely adopted a “Pitch Count” to protect the ulnar collateral ligament of the elbow from wear and tear, we urgently call for the development and adoption of a
Hit Count
to limit the frequency of repetitive brain trauma. Theoretically, a lower
Hit Count
would reduce the risk of concussion, risk of brain damage from sub-concussive blows, and would theoretically reduce the risk of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive brain trauma.

Guidelines include defining a “hit”; limiting the number of hits permitted by day, week, season and year (with all counts stratified by age); developing a “total force” threshold “when the technology is available”; and mandating days of rest for a young athlete following “a minimum brain trauma exposure.”

Like mom and apple pie, all this is close to critic-proof. If, tomorrow, 100 percent of the country's thousands upon thousands of youth and high school football programs were to magically summon both the political will and the material means to adopt and enforce each and every one of these proposals, they would reduce the gross national football mental-health toll, without a doubt. They wouldn't do much, if anything, about the annual incidence of discrete catastrophic injuries (whose most widely accepted accounting, co-directed by Dr. Cantu, seriously lowballs the carnage, according to journalist Matt Chaney). But they would take a bite out of cumulative subconcussive injury and CTE. So in five years, or 10 or 20 or 50, we could do another study and assess the “legacy” in “Sports Legacy Institute.”

Others and I have a better idea: end tackle football in public high schools. (Private schools and club programs, which don't operate with taxpayer funds, could continue to do what they do.)

Also, issue a surgeon general's style warning that no one under age “xx” should be strapping on helmets under the delusion that they will be protected while playing a sport that inevitably and systematically involves knocking heads, with levels of bad outcomes that are both morally and economically unacceptable. Every now and then, Cantu and colleagues tiptoe to the edge of such a warning, but they seem too beholden to the NFL to issue it in plain English.

Cantu and Nowinski want to make football safer, and good for them. But there's a difference between safer and safe. The ultimate safety here is that of their own entrenched positions.

My last observation on the white paper, for now, is the revealing way it cites as a model the already evolving practices of Ivy League college football programs. Revealing in several ways:

• The Ivy League is the cradle of popular American football, and this echo of President Teddy Roosevelt's early 20th century reforms there is conscious. I argue that the parallel is flawed and without relevance in today's era of globally marketed sports and superstars.
  
• Nowinski and company hold up the Ivy League's brain-trauma practices without also promoting our most esteemed academic institutions' total “student-athlete” model. How about turning every NCAA Division 1 football program into a Division 3 program? Oh, right, that's outside the scope of their advocacy.
  
• And finally, the analysis of football and concussions is assumed to rest, with definitive authority, in the hands of experts. I don't buy that. I think there is a larger problem with sports in this country, and that is its rampant professionalization — money-wise, health-wise and otherwise. (I deliberately didn't say
  professionalism
  .) Thus, if the NCAA is trampling educational values, then the only solution isn't to trim its sails but to make sure it pays its players. Did I hear someone complain that baseball's Little League World Series exploits little kids? Well, then don't think about eliminating the exploitation of little kids on international television — just make sure you cut them (and their moms and dads) in on the profits.
  
• When it comes to football safety, we — parents, citizens, all of us — are being manipulated into unleashing “solutions” that will cost vast sums of money, which we are supposed to apply to amateur athletics without a debate over cost, proportion, or priority.
  

8 February 2012..........

Last summer Dan Wetzel of
Yahoo Sports
, a really good overall columnist, made an odd proposal that I find sadly characteristic of the state of our culture, in which there is no demarcation between adults and children — and in which, as a consequence, adults are expected to behave like children and children like adults. “Pay the Little League World Series players,” Wetzel wrote.
10
Don't protect 'em. Just pay 'em. It's the American way.

With somewhat less caricature, the same dynamic infuses the debate over paying athletes in the so-called college revenue sports. I wrote a supportive article about this issue for the
Los Angeles Times Magazine
in 2003, years before Taylor Branch came along to brand it and Joe Nocera to backstop it. (And by no means do I claim to be the first.) I'm bothered, though, by the breezy confidence with which our leading voices — Branch, Nocera, Wetzel, all of them — seem to believe that giving a fair share to young people who are professional athletes in all but name will solve the American sports problem. For the American sports problem, as I see it, is that it is a perpetual growth industry: fun and character building by faith, and without accountability.

It's not too big a reach to relate this theme to the Cantu-Nowinski white paper on youth football solutions. I'm all for having coaches who have some idea of what they're teaching, and I'm all for having safety guidelines and background checks. (One of these days I'll tell you about my daughter's USA Swimming club coach, who turned out to be one of the many across the country later ID'd as child rapists.) But we're doing this sports thing backward. Professionals and Olympians might set the dream bar for our kids, but they shouldn't be setting the standards for the youth sports industry. That's the job of the rest of us: the parents. Yet, time and again, we are seeing the consensus of the football concussion debate reduced to a game of gotcha with the National Football League — as if the stupidity of Michael Vick's and Troy Polamalu's and Colt McCoy's health care matters because it “sets a bad example.”

It matters, all right. But it matters because the NFL, which pays out a few dozen short-term multimillion-dollar contracts to its hired help, is so blatantly pulling the strings anywhere and everywhere, from the Congress of Neurological Surgeons to the Senate Commerce Committee to the Centers for Disease Control.

The NFL-coopted Cantu and Nowinski are playing right along with hit counts, politically calculated silence about the expensive awfulness that is Dr. Joe Maroon's ImPACT “concussion management system,” and state-by-state “Zack Lystedt Laws.” This mutual massaging of the leading players in Concussion Inc. is not, in the end, about the kids; it's about the cottage industries and self-congratulation created around gestures for the kids.

(Notice in the white paper where they foresee calibrating the “total force” on young-uns' noggins as soon as “the technology is available.” The very first post on this blog to use the term Concussion Inc., months before the blog itself was so named, talked about the confused relationship between Cantu and the
Rollerball
-esque Xenith Helmet Company.)

Even the best-intentioned children's advocates have it backward. We don't need to be dedicating disproportionate capital to the best and the brightest so that they can reinvent football's answer to the better mousetrap. We need to be exercising common sense — summoning the political will to take this blood sport back where it belongs, several notches below a national obsession.

It's now a cliché of the concussion discussion that the sport has gone through this kind of thing before, and TR stepped in and saved it from itself, and it's happening again today. To that analogy I say, not so fast.

A hundred years ago the Ivy League was both the spiritual and the financial center of the football universe. There was no NFL, no television, no $10-billion-a-year marketing juggernaut. Lads from Harvard brawled on the gridiron with lads from Yale. These representatives of the ruling class used the manly man's arts, with all their good qualities and all their pretense, to polish their résumés for destinies on Wall Street and elsewhere. In that environment, containing death and disability was achievable.

But that is no longer the case, in my view, and not just because athletes are bigger, stronger, faster, and therefore more menacing to each other's lives and limbs. Football long ago graduated from the Ivy hothouse to the too-much-is-never-enough demands of turbo-charged capitalism.
Friday Night Lights
dramatizes how football has lost its cultural homogeneity, as well, and become a brass ring, a lottery ticket, a vehicle to greater things for all the classes.

Except when it's not.

26 April 2012..........

After nearly two years, the name “Dr. Bennet Omalu” is once again fit to print.

New York Times
op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof today wrote a piece about Dr. Bennet Omalu's work on military service persons' traumatic brain injuries.
11

Omalu is also the researcher who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players. Yet in the 22 months since Omalu's name was last invoked, I counted 22 quotes or mentions of Dr. Robert Cantu in the
Times
archive. Cantu, of course, directs the Center for the Study of CTE at Boston University, which two years ago this month received a $1 million grant from the NFL.

“$1 million, and zero strings,”
Times
reporter Alan Schwarz wrote in celebration that day.

In the wake of Schwarz's promotion (or exile),
Times
concussion coverage remains sparse, opaque, mysterious. We could use the kind of sharp investigation and cogent analysis that can be provided only by our leading newspaper and unofficial house organ of the ruling class. Unfortunately, we're not getting it. Instead, we're gorging on reactive coverage of the New Orleans Saints' NFL-concocted “Bountygate” scandal, pro retiree litigation, peer-reviewed studies of CTE autopsies 501 through 999.

7 May 2012..........

Next Tuesday, May 15, is the night of the premiere, in Chicago, of a new documentary,
Head Games
, which was inspired by the 2006 Chris Nowinski book of the same title.
12

Billed as an account of the “public health issue of our time” — a characterization I wholeheartedly agree with — the film seems to have a substantial budget. Steve James, of
Hoop Dreams
fame, directed. Billy Corgan composed the score, which I am guessing employs a lot of violins.

Needless to say, I was not invited to the red-carpet opening, but I am looking forward to seeing the movie. Based on my screening of the trailer, I have some concerns over whether
Head Games
will get past the long-running self-congratulation phase of the work of Nowinski, Boston sports doctor Robert Cantu, and on-again off-again
New York Times
concussion writer Alan Schwarz. I also doubt that the film will push for more formidable reforms than have been advanced by this group ever since the Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University started accepting National Football League money two years ago.

All the usual suspects/role players make appearances in the trailer. These include Schwarz, who, in keeping with his romantic curation, is billed as “The Reporter,” and is listed on the website as the film's associate producer. Bob Costas supplies an appropriately measured sound byte. In February, Costas teed up Schwarz in the audience at a pre–Super Bowl town hall meeting in Indianapolis for the NBC cable sports network. As he has been doing in a very unfocused fashion ever since formally leaving the
Times
concussion beat last summer, Schwarz used that opportunity to further promote the idea that he and his buddies invented the concussion issue. It is a stance I find journalistically unseemly, and I fear
Head Games
will offer additional such preening.

My larger concern is that this slick, and no doubt competent and compelling, film will monopolize the oxygen for the off-season national conversation on the future of football and frustrate the funding and progress of other documentaries on the subject.