Concussion Inc. (21 page)

Yahoo Sports
' Jason Cole had a feel-good story about how Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, the most valuable player of the Super Bowl, used the time when he was sidelined last fall with a concussion to “refocus.” The piece also highlighted the wise management of Rodgers' second concussion by coach Mike McCarthy. The whole package combined “concussion awareness” and a happy ending so seamlessly that it earned a link at the NFLHealthandSafety.com website.

Left unsaid is that many knowledgeable observers believe Rodgers suffered a
third
concussion during the National Football Conference championship game against the Chicago Bears, just two weeks before the Super Bowl. It came on a vicious helmet-to-helmet hit by the Bears' Julius Peppers early in the fourth quarter.

According to some, the subsequent Fox television footage showed the Packers medical personnel sitting on the opposite end of the bench when Rodgers came to the sidelines at the end of that drive. Throughout Super Bowl hype week there were rumors, which Rodgers denied, that he'd sustained a concussion.

In an article headlined “Conspiracy of silence over possible Rodgers concussion?” Shawn Dougherty of the
Capitol Times
in Madison, Wisconsin, wrote that after the Peppers hit “Rodgers was woozy and wobbling about with dazed eyes. If you didn't notice he was wobbling, surely you noticed his football was wobbling. His magic was gone for the rest of the game. He couldn't even hit the mark with a couple of short passes. And yet for all the consciousness-raising lately about the dangers of concussions in football, hardly anybody seems to be talking about the possibility that our star quarterback suffered another one.”
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Dustin Fink of the
Concussion Blog
, a high school athletic trainer, told Dougherty, “If this had happened to one of my players on Friday night, I would have pulled him off the field, just based on his gaze. We call it ‘the gaze' when we see somebody concussed. It's like they're looking right through you. Their eyes don't look like they're as focused.”

I'm less bothered by whatever executive decisions the Packers might have made about the handling of their multimillion-dollar property than I am about how the story of whatever had transpired got steamrolled into a story with a false moral. Rodgers even added an explicit marketing element, telling Peter King of
Sports Illustrated
that he had escaped a concussion in the NFC championship game thanks to a recent switch from a Riddell to a Schutt helmet. Conveniently, this broke just as the NFL and Joe Maroon were distancing themselves from the FTC investigation of Riddell.

24 August 2011..........

Below is an edited exchange I had the other day with a sports columnist for a major newspaper. I am not identifying the columnist except to say that he had written something in opposition to a new rule in the National Football League this year — moving kickoffs from the 30- to the 35-yard line to facilitate more touchbacks instead of runbacks; the latter type of play has been shown to lead to a high incidence of concussions. I'll continue to hope he gives the subject additional thought and eventually comments more profoundly in his column.

[Muchnick to columnist]

The new kickoff rule is, indeed, intellectually dishonest. You articulate very well the case against it.

I want to ask you a different question, about the very viability of football. To my knowledge, you have not addressed it.

Yes, head-on collisions and the thrill of lethal violence — either the survival or the skillful avoidance of it — are fundamental to the game. Again, good of you to so define it.

But has this become unsustainable? Once upon a time boxing was the most popular sport in the country. But middle-class kids, by and large, no longer aspire to become boxers. I think something like that is evolving here. What say you? As fans, do we just sit around and wait until, say, Tom Brady murders his family and himself on the 50-yard line on national television? (Of course, it doesn't count if it's 10 years after he retires.)

The argument that multimillion-dollar professionals do what they do for our entertainment is OK, so far as it goes, but the reach of pro football in our society goes much further, as we are seeing. Do you have any suggestions? Or is it just not your problem?

[columnist to Muchnick]

I wouldn't align with the boxing comparison ­because the sports are so different. Kids play football ­because it's glamorous, sexy, because they “get the girl,” as they say. It's a chance to excel in the coolest sport in town, and in some cases, it has only to do with pure love of the game. There's seldom much general outcry from the public about football violence at any level. There are individual cases that deservedly draw a ton of attention, but football is the most popular sport in the country because people LOVE to watch such intense conflict. I don't see the sport changing, in essence. In fact, I'd expect to see another change in the kickoff rule within a couple of years, making returns more possible.

[Muchnick to columnist]

The boxing analogy is, obviously, imprecise. The facts about brain damage and death, however, are not. The question is whether such information with respect to football's systematic (not random) delivery of traumatic brain injury trumps the popular romance about getting the girl.

Whether there is or will be a public outcry against football's violence — with “public outcry” defined as defensively as possible by the sport's followers — doesn't really answer the question. We have moved to an era of plausible multibillion-dollar tobacco-style litigation, for both wrongful death and restitution of ­public-health costs. Without resorting to things like cheap lawyer jokes, can you explain how you think football will remain medically, legally, and educationally viable? Will it be simply by force of bread-and-­circuses will?

[columnist to Muchnick]

If I were to make a public comment on the issue, I'd give it considerably more thought.

24 August 2011..........

Football's public health tab is not all concussions and it's not all death. Last month a CBS News report estimated that there are 140,000 annual “mild to severe spinal injuries” in high school football, with 10 resulting in paralysis.
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I suspect alternative methodologies might set the former number lower and the latter higher. Whatever the statistical sweet spot, the existence of a substantial and unacknowledged subsidy is clear, as catastrophic medical costs for spinal injuries can run to $500,000 for just the first six months.

As I post this item, I know of at least two young football players who lie comatose from early season brain (not spinal) injuries: Adrian Padilla in California and Tucker Montgomery in Tennessee.

Rasul “Rocky” Clark — who was left paraplegic by an injury in a high school game 11 years ago and recently had to downgrade his care under changes in Illinois Medicaid policies — was the focus of the CBS story. The Clark case was also covered by the
Chicago Tribune
.
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This is about more than health insurance reform. Clark's now-­inadequate Medicaid coverage itself only kicked in after his suburban Chicago school district's $5 million catastrophic health insurance policy benefits dried up.

You say that playing football is a “personal choice and risk”? Indeed it is: a personal choice and risk for which all American are paying through the nose — both daily and for as far into the future as the mind's eye can see.

3 October 2011..........

Today I had a long telephone conversation with Burl Ingle, father of Adam Ingle, a 17-year-old high school player in Kansas, whose near-fatal traumatic brain injury was reported by Anthony Powell of KSN (NBC 3) in Wichita.

My immediate interest was confirming the story, not yet fully reported in the media, that the incident in the Valley Center–Andover game was actually Adam's second head injury in four days — he was also concussed, and briefly lost consciousness, in practice the previous Tuesday. I'll get to that. But I also want to tell the whole story from Mr. Ingle's perspective. He and I appreciate that we have a difference of opinion on the viability of youth football. Where we agree is that our disagreement is respectful and that it sheds light on the issue's cultural fault line.

The earlier injury at Tuesday's practice indeed happened. Burl Ingle said the first he knew of it was when Adam told doctors and nurses at the emergency room Friday night. Adam — who used to get up at 5 a.m. to lift weights, and who prided himself on playing hurt — never informed coaches or trainers, who didn't witness the blackout. After thoroughly looking into everything, Mr. Ingle is convinced that there was no negligence on anyone's part. It was just one of those things that happen in football. His takeaway is that the sport simply needs better communication among players, parents, and coaches, and a less macho ethic.

Mr. Ingle accepts the bigger picture. He has other sons who have played college ball, one at Clemson, as well as a brother who played briefly for the Dallas Cowboys. “We're a football family,” Mr. Ingle said. “And Adam is in God's hands.”

When Adam collapsed on the field in the third quarter against Andover, he turned blue, obviously suffering from a brain bleed that required emergency surgery. The doctors saved his life, and now he is the midst of a long, slow recovery. Home after a week of hospitalization, he has little stamina. (When I spoke with his father, the neuropsychologist had just paid a visit, but they had to cut it off after 15 minutes.) He can't yet hold down any food. But he can walk, and he expects to attend this Friday's game. He has been nominated for homecoming king.

I wouldn't want to be the campaign manager for anyone else on the ballot.

Adam's dream of a football career is over. However, Butler County Junior College has already stepped up to offer him a full scholarship to be the football team's equipment manager. Mr. Ingle said that when this normally stoic young man got the news, he smiled from ear to ear, then cried for the first time since all this happened.

So … does this add up to another cautionary tale of the insanity of football? Or another thread of the American tapestry?

You decide.

4 October 2011..........

Yesterday on Twitter, the NFL's public relations chief, Brian McCarthy, wrote, “Standing ovation for @nflcommish at Congress of Neurosurgeons re: player safety.” Roger Goodell was a speaker at yesterday's session of the professional group's meeting in Washington.

Though McCarthy went on to say that the Goodell speech was posted at the NFL communications website, that does not appear to have happened yet. Last night McCarthy provided me with the text of the speech, which is unremarkable, in my reading: a restatement of the league's already familiar talking points.

The idea that the Congress of Neurological Surgeons gave the commissioner a standing ovation — whether before or after the speech I didn't clarify with McCarthy — is appalling. A polite reception for an invited guest? Of course. A standing O? Completely out of line for a professional association holding itself up as a gatekeeper of public health. Like President Obama's crusade against college football's Bowl Championship Series while saying absolutely nothing about the national concussion crisis, this is a measure of how juvenile and football-centric American culture has become at all levels.

Crude but fair analogy: the CEO of a tobacco company gets a standing ovation at a convention of oncologists and pulmonary and heart specialists in the 1960s for a review of the company's research and development on filtered cigarettes.

This unprofessional professional group, whose journal
Neurosurgery
already was at the NFL's beck and call, has definitively KO'd its own credibility.

As Goodell suggested in his speech, the league's best and worst practices filter down to the amateur levels. At Yukon High School in Oklahoma, quarterback Corben Jones suffered a concussion at a game on September 23, yet played the next game a week later. Even many of those advocating different protocols for the professional sport agree that youngsters should
never
rush back to action.

Yet the
Oklahoman
newspaper quoted Corben Jones' coach, Todd Wilson, saying he “never worried that his quarterback would miss the game. ‘You never know with a head injury, but knowing Corben, it would have had to been pretty bad to keep him off the field Friday,' Wilson said. ‘It didn't surprise me that he performed pretty well.'” The
Oklahoman
named Jones “City-Area Player of the Week.”
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By Matt Chaney's count, critical-care brain injury No. 8 in 2011 prep football was sustained last Friday in Chandler, Arizona, by Valley Christian High School's Dillon Lackhan. He had emergency surgery for a subdural hematoma.

14 October 2011..........

What sports reform still lacks is its equivalent of MADD — Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We can call it PUNT — Parents Under Neurological Trauma. But first our own public health agencies have to get on our side.

The NFL has partnered up with Centers for Disease Control to publish an educational toolkit for school trainers and medical personnel for the treatment of concussions. A CDC spokeswoman admitted to me that the NFL's $150,000 grant for “Heads Up” marked “the first time the CDC Foundation has received external funding to help support” this initiative, which had a decade's history encompassing various outreach to health care professionals and patients, school professionals, sports coaches, parents, and kids and teens. CDC's own funding for this program has averaged around $200,000 a year.

11 November 2011..........

While criminal investigations and civil lawsuits begin burying Pennsylvania State University and Joe Paterno, the deposed iconic football coach, over their harboring for at least nine years (and probably 17 or more) of Jerry Sandusky, a serial child rapist assistant coach and ex-coach and pillar of the community, I suggest we all turn our attention to the last remaining myth undergirding the JoePa statue in front of Beaver Stadium and sanitizing the JoePa name on the campus library building. I also suggest we don't stop there as we proceed to bring the Penn State scandal home, where it belongs, to our own schools and communities and mass insanity.