The witness box is an almost perfect square, heavy oak coated again and again in shiny shellac, so thick you can dig your fingernails into it. On his second day of testimony at the Wecht trial in Pittsburgh in 2008, Bennet is resisting the urge.
I’m sorry, Dr. Wecht. You have to know I am not here by my own choosing.
Wecht won’t even look up, his arms crossed, biting his thumbnail, staring at nothing.
The jurors are settling in, shifting, trying to get comfortable in their seats, and a few of the alert ones exchange glances: Is this Nigerian dude going to talk slower today?
Bennet just wants to go home. California—that’s where he lives now. That’s where he does his CTE work now. In his garage. After being unemployed in Pittsburgh for six months, never telling Prema a thing about it, faking it, thinking fast on his feet so she wouldn’t find out, he landed the medical examiner job in San Joaquin, and he and Prema bought a house in the sleepy town of Lodi, and it’s wonderful, really. Living in obscurity is wonderful. On the outskirts! That’s where he belongs. Just like when he was a kid. Watching the other kids. Not getting into the fray, sitting on the edges of the action, dreaming about becoming an airline pilot and soaring forever away. And then in med school, not fitting in. Seattle, New York, never fitting in. No, of course, sitting on the edges of life was not wonderful back then. It was depressing as hell. But he’s a man now, and he understands that God placed him on the outskirts like that for a reason, to gain strength, to get used to it, because that’s where he belongs. The outskirts. With dead people.
If he had to point to a single reason why he chose to spend his life with dead people, he would point to this trial in Pittsburgh in 2008. Living people are messy. Dead people are clean. There is no politics with dead people. His retreat from the real world—his necessary retreat—enabled him to be right where a guy like Mike Webster needed him to be. It was his retreat that enabled him to find CTE in Mike Webster’s brain. That worked out just fine.
But this mess here, this is not working out fine. Stuck in a witness box in a pair of too-tight cap-toe oxfords, dreading what’s to come.
“Good morning, Doctor,” the defense attorney says. He’s a dapper enough guy, properly attired in a sharp blue suit; he has a bushy mustache and a flap of gray hair sitting on his head like a doily on an old lady’s coffee table, but otherwise he’s completely put together.
“Good morning, sir.”
“We have not spoken before, have we, sir?” he says to Bennet.
“Sir?”
“We have never spoken?”
“No, no, this is the first time I’m meeting you.”
Today it’s the defense attorney’s turn to question Bennet about the eighty-four counts of piddly shit, now reduced to forty-one counts of piddly shit, that threaten Wecht’s livelihood and future.
The defense attorney wants to know, truthfully: Was Bennet hoping to become a famous pathologist just like his former boss, the defendant sitting before us today, Dr. Cyril Wecht?
“No,” Bennet says, answering way too fast, as if to squelch the part of him that thinks: Yes! Of course, yes. There is so much of Wecht he wanted to be like. Of course. Oh my gosh, yes! Are you kidding me? All those things he learned from Wecht. Slamming down the phone, motherfucking cocksucking ass-kissing bastard. How to dress, where to buy the best car, how to think about race, prejudice, being a black guy, being a Jewish guy, one of those gays. How to stay centered and confident even when the world around you treats you like shit. But that is not the stuff the defense attorney is referring to.
“Now, you were kind of a bargain for Dr. Wecht, weren’t you?” the attorney asks.
“If you say so.”
“Doctor, do you recall, sir, how much you were paid as an employee of the coroner’s office when you were a full-time pathologist?”
Oh, geez. Relevance, Your Honor? This could get embarrassing. “I was started at a low level of ninety thousand dollars,” Bennet says. “Why I say low, is comparatively, compared to what people of my education and level were paid, ninety thousand dollars for a board-certified forensic pathologist, neuropathologist was…low.”
“Did you ever go, Dr. Omalu, to Dr. Wecht to express your concern about your salary and to discuss it with him?”
“Yes. Many times I went up to Dr. Wecht, and I brought it up. In my mind, it wasn’t good.”
“Do you remember what you said to him, how you engaged him on the topic of your salary?”
“Many times he would tell me, ‘Bennet, there is nothing we can do,’ ” he says. “ ‘It is not up to me. It’s up to the county.’ I recall there was once we were talking and he said to me, ‘Sit down, Bennet, and let me explain something to you. If you’re paid a competitive salary at this county, administrators will be monitoring you, looking across your shoulders to see what you do. But if your salary is low, you have greater liberty to do what you want to do. So choose being paid a lower salary, and we are free to do whatever we want to do.’ ”
“Did you get a raise?”
“No.”
Look, the guy used me, okay? Bennet looks at the jury, tries to say with his eyes all that he needs to say. But I agreed to be used! He gave me so much more than money.
“Sir, let’s switch gears for a moment here,” the attorney says, approaching with a slow saunter, like he’s pondering, like he’s just thinking this up right now. This is for dramatic effect; Bennet knows that. The closer he gets, the more Bennet can tell the doily thing is not fake hair, it’s just the way he combs it. Such an easy fix.
“Had you ever indicated that you were scared as a result of the FBI investigation?” he asks.
“I wouldn’t say that I was scared,” Bennet says.
“Were you afraid?”
“Afraid?” Bennet says. On this point he needs to ponder. He leans forward, sits on his hands, can’t wiggle his damn toes. “If you would pardon me,” he says, leaning into the microphone. “The most frequent thing Jesus said, do not be afraid. I’m never afraid. What is it to fear?”
The people on the jury exchange nervous glances. How did Jesus get in on this?
Wecht allows a smile, and so does one of the guys from the morgue, in the galley. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be around Bennet, until you’re around Bennet again. The Jesus crack, that is so…Bennet.
The attorney goes back to his table, looks at his notes.
“In terms of your immigration status, sir, am I correct that when you entered the country, a part of the permit to enter the country was after you completed your medical education you were to return to Nigeria for at least two years to practice medicine?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Immigration and your permit status in the United States was an issue from the day you joined there, correct?”
“If you say it was an issue, that makes it look like a bad thing.”
“Nobody is making anything sound bad, sir. From the moment you came to the coroner’s office did that man, Dr. Wecht, do everything he could to help you with your immigration status?”
Bennet looks at Wecht. “Oh, definitely! When everyone looked away, he helped me. And that is why I hold him in the highest regard. I’ve said it before, what I am today, Dr. Wecht made me. He supported me. He gave me the opportunity. He gave me a place to stand to express myself. He made me what I am today.”
Bennet pauses. Waits for Wecht to look at him, acknowledge him. Or Sigrid? Hey, guys?
Nothing.
Bennet leans closer still into the microphone. “And I love him, if I could say that,” he says.
Love?
Love. Jesus. The words hang in the courtroom like wayward party balloons. Bennet knows that. Americans are not always comfortable with these words in public. But Bennet is just going to be Bennet, and to hell with everyone and everything else. He is almost forty years old. Bennet can only be Bennet! He puts his feet flat, firmly on the ground, collects himself, straightens his back.
“Dr. Wecht was my adopted American father,” he announces loudly to the court. It feels good to say. Just being honest and frank like that. It feels like a lot of pressure letting go.
“Are you under subpoena to be here, sir?” the defense attorney asks.
“Yes, sir. I had no choice.”
“You didn’t want to be deported—”
“Nigeria is corrupt. It’s like the Mafia. I had to run.”
So, yeah, the FBI had threatened to send him back, and he caved. Wecht would have to understand. It wasn’t as if he had anything earth-shattering to offer the prosecution. He could use his testimony to slip in positive words for Wecht. And Wecht would understand.
“When all this is done with,” Bennet says, looking straight at Wecht, “we will reestablish our friendship.”
Wecht looks up. For the first time in two days he looks at Bennet. He shakes his head.
It feels like a shot. It feels like his hero just shot him through the heart. Are you not listening? Bennet Omalu is telling the world that Cyril Wecht is a good man, that he loves him like a father, that he is grateful to him, that he wishes everything could go back to the way it was when he was his loyal sidekick, Junior Wecht.
Again Wecht shakes his head. No. A dismissal. I’m done with you, you piece of shit. Wecht is not a forgiving man, and when it comes to betrayal, no, he is not going to forgive.
Bennet turns to the judge. “Can I ask Your Honor, please, I was hoping we could finish today so I can go back home to California.”
Please, Your Honor.
“Well, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen,” the judge says.
“I have been here since Sunday,” Bennet whispers, deflated.
“I couldn’t hear you?”
“I have been here since Sunday. I left my house at three A.M. on Sunday morning.”
“I didn’t ask you to come here Sunday, sir,” the defense attorney says. “May we have Government Exhibit 365, Page 797?”
The clerk hands over the pages.
Just let me go.
“Are you going to be featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation this week?” the defense attorney asks.
“Oh, I’m surprised—” Bennet answers. “I don’t know, really.”
“You don’t know?”
“I discovered a disease. Has there been media attention on the disease discovered? Yes.”
“You have been involved in a lot of publicity for that discovery of yours, correct?”
Publicity? Canada? Am I supposed to do something in Canada? What does this have to do with anything? Can someone please object? Relevance?
“I have not been involved in the publicity, but my discovery has attracted so much publicity,” Bennet says. “When I discovered this disease, it was by accident. I never knew in my wildest imagination that it would attract the publicity it has attracted and the publicity it has generated.”
“And just so the jury knows what we’re talking about,” the attorney says, “you claim that you discovered, while you were working at the Allegheny County coroner’s office on Mike Webster’s case, a phenomenon called CTE, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you have been all over the national airwaves in America on that phenomenon this past year?”
“It went internationally, not just this past year—”
“And publicity is good for your name and reputation, isn’t it?”
“No, I truly, if you ask me, really, I don’t like it. I wish—I really wish I never touched Mike Webster’s brain. Why? Because it has generated so much—with publicity comes the effects of human behavior, jealousy, envy, rancor, meanness, which actually I do not need, truly.”
He does not need the bullshit, this real-world bullshit. People claiming credit. People running to the press. People stealing credit. Right now he just wants to go home to his garage in Lodi. The garage has floodlights, and big doors to open for fresh air. And a wall of brown cupboards for storing stuff. He wakes up, reads his Bible, says his rosary, goes out and cranks some Pendergrass or Bob Marley, and he examines brains. Before he leaves for the office he makes Prema eggs. Mashes carrots for Ashly. It’s wonderful. He’s been trying to come to peace with it, trying to convince himself that getting kicked into obscurity is wonderful, and mostly it is, of course it is, there is plenty to like about obscurity. It’s the kicked part that he’s still struggling with.
He wanted to stay in Pittsburgh. He wanted to be the new Dr. Wecht. He wanted to move into the big, beautiful house in Moon Township he was building, live happily ever after there with Prema and the baby. His dream house—they never even got a chance to move into it. Never once slept in it. The builders finished it the week they moved to California. The same week. That beautiful house, two white columns, brown brick, giant windows. Flatscreen TVs. Imported tile. Marble. Granite. Every single decision his and hers. The real estate agent said wait until the market goes up to sell it. He said fine, I’ll wait. He doesn’t want to sell it, and Prema can’t bear the thought of selling it. So they still own it. It sits there vacant, like: There’s the life we were supposed to have. There it is. He drove by this morning before he came to the courthouse. He stopped there, got out of the car, felt the bitter air on his cheeks. He marched up to the front stoop like he owned the place. I own this place. He kicked snow off the stoop with his shiny new shoe. He sat there, blew steam. He considered calling Prema. Calling her to say, “Hey, honey, I stopped by the house.” But there was no way he would do that to her.
“Now, sir,” the attorney is saying. “Have you referred to yourself as a brain chaser?”
Huh?
“No.”
“Never?”
“I’m sorry. No.”
“Dr. Omalu, do you recognize Exhibit 369, what that might be from?”
He looks at it. Some announcement or something from SLI. Where did this come from? What does this have to do with anything?
“I resigned. This is outdated. I resigned. It has nothing to do with— I resigned.”
“Did you draft a portion of the description?”
“No. Chris Nowinski did. N-O-W-I-N-S-K-I.” Motherfucking cocksucking ass-kissing bastard! Now, if we are going to talk about Chris Nowinski, Bennet’s head is going to explode. Is that what everyone wants to see here in this courtroom today? Is that why we are here? “I was not in support of so many things that he did—”
“So you are no longer affiliated?”
“No.”
Deliberations in the Wecht trial drag on for ten days and end in a hung jury in April 2008. “Call and cancel your luncheon appointments,” Wecht says to the press hovering outside the courthouse; he’s beaming, full of life again after two years living like a raisin. “All that I built up, and all that my wife and I saved, is gone, and I am very much in debt,” he says, and then he turns to Sigrid, huddled next to him in tweed. “I shall continue unfettered in the next, what, honey? Twenty years?”
He doesn’t speak to Bennet, doesn’t answer his plea for forgiveness even though Bennet’s testimony was anything but damaging. Bennet confirmed dates of autopsies, receipts, payments, and other records that had hardly been questionable. On balance, he probably helped the defense more than the FBI, providing a portrait of his boss that was of a loving and generous man. It would take seven years for Wecht to finally speak to Bennet again.
A few months after the Wecht trial, in his garage in Lodi, Bennet finds CTE in another fallen football player. Tom McHale, a former offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. A steep postretirement decline ended with his taking a lethal dose of oxycodone and cocaine. He was forty-five.
Still partnered with Bailes and Fitzsimmons, Bennet reports his findings to the group, now named the Brain Injury Research Institute, BIRI, headquartered at West Virginia University. “Tom McHale is positive,” Bennet tells them. They tell McHale’s family. This time, Bennet doesn’t want to wait to release the news. He doesn’t want to risk the rigmarole of NFL doctors demanding retractions or trying to humiliate him. He’s prepared to go public with it.
“Please don’t,” the family says. They’re still reeling, trying to understand.
Bennet is in his own way reeling, trying to understand. In a blink the whole CTE landscape has changed. Ego has erupted. Now there are competing scientists and arguments about turf and press releases and media training and money and ulterior motives.
If you make a discovery, you’re supposed to tell people, because the discovery is important. But then what? Are you supposed to hold on to it, run around asking for glory? No, you are not. So what happens if someone else runs off with it, claims it as his own? Are you supposed to argue, try to get it back? Does anyone really care?
No. The important thing is the discovery, and what it can do for the world, and how it can help people. Not you. You were just the messenger. You were God’s tool. Or, you were Mike Webster’s voice. Hey, you did the right thing, now let it go.
But still.
Nowinski has started a new version of SLI. He’s teamed up with the Boston University School of Medicine, and he’s still working with Dr. Cantu, and they’ve added a newcomer to the scene: Dr. Ann McKee, a BU neuropathologist who has been studying Alzheimer’s disease her whole career. CTE in football players comes as no surprise to her, although like others in the field she had never gone looking for it. She agrees to examine the brains that Nowinski says he will be able to bring to her. They create the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy and start a brain bank. One of the brains Nowinski gets her is half of Tom McHale’s.
Half to Bennet, half to Nowinski, that’s what the McHale family decided. Bennet asked first, then Nowinski came. Two competing groups asking for a brain. How does a family even understand something like that?
The whole CTE landscape has changed.
Meanwhile, the NFL ups its damage control operation. In October 2008, the league makes what seems like one final attempt to discredit Bennet’s work. The request comes via Maroon to Bailes. He says that the NFL would like to send an independent researcher to West Virginia to look at Bennet’s slides and make his own judgment of the validity of Bennet’s so-called “discovery.” The league is still not willing to talk about Bennet’s work as anything more than a weird fluke of some sort, an exaggeration, wishful thinking on the part of an uppity young scientist trying to make a name for himself. They want to put the issue to rest, once and for all.
“They want to send out a guy to look at your slides,” Bailes tells Bennet, who has had new sets of slides made up from the brains in his coat closet.
“Forget it,” Bennet says.
“No, don’t forget it,” Bailes says. “You don’t want to be the guy who doesn’t share his research.”
“Julian, I’ve shared.”
“Just come out and show the guy, Bennet.”
Peter Davies of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, a thirty-year veteran of Alzheimer’s disease research, is said to be the consummate pro. He will take no money from the NFL, not even parking reimbursement; he will just look at Bennet’s slides and form his own opinion. Davies is more than a little doubtful; he will go on to speak of his skepticism countless times in the media. He has examined thousands of brains, and he’s never seen anything close to the degree of tau accumulation that Bennet has described in his papers. Bennet, he thinks, is well-intentioned but naive. Bennet’s claims are just too far-fetched; he must be mistaken about what he’s looking at. Davies has to be reminded that Bennet is a real scientist, a neuropathologist, not just some guy at a morgue doing autopsies and playing with a microscope.
Davies, Bennet thinks, is an old white guy with silver hair who commands so much respect on the strength of being an old white guy with silver hair.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Bennet says, in the microscopy room down the hall from Bailes’s office at the West Virginia University Hospital.
“Pleased to meet you,” Davies says.
“Please, gentlemen,” Bailes says, “please sit down.”
“Sit down, Joe,” Bailes says to Maroon. No one knows what to do with Maroon. He discounts Bennet’s work, then accepts it, then discounts it again. It seems he’s on his own private mission.
The microscope has multiple eyepieces so several people can look at the same time. Davies takes one, Maroon another, and Bailes another.
Bennet sits on the sidelines, tapping his foot. He did not get new shoes for this event. He is wearing loafers, the shoes of a man who refuses to care.
“Whoa,” Davies says, focusing on the slide.
“I told you,” Maroon says.
“Wow,” Davies says. “What the hell is this?”
“I told you,” Bailes says.
It goes on like this for two days, slide after slide, the NFL’s independent expert saying “Wow.” Davies is transformed into a believer. It gets to the point where the only doubt Davies has is the staining of the slides themselves. (Jonette! Oh my gosh, you do not second-guess Jonette!) Perhaps the technicians were not using state-of-the-art equipment, Davies says. He asks Omalu if he could take some of the stuff home. Tissue samples, pieces of brain to take back to his lab in New York, where he could make new slides with his own equipment, his own technicians, his own stains.
“Sure, sure, sure,” Bennet says. “You take some pieces home, talk to your guys, see what you think.”
So in his lab in New York, Davies runs his tests, and when he looks in the microscope, he is stunned all over again. The tau pathology is even worse—even more pronounced—than what he’d seen in West Virginia.
He doesn’t believe his own eyes. He has his techs make new slides.
When he looks in the microscope he sees the massive collection of tau tangles again.
“Come look at this!” he says, calling in his team of researchers. “What the hell am I looking at? This will blow your socks off! And it’s not just in one case. I have three separate cases here. Bucketloads of tau pathology, and the one guy wasn’t even forty years old.”
It is far more severe than anything any of them had ever seen in the most advanced Alzheimer’s cases—and in completely different regions of the brain.
So Davies fires off a letter to Bailes and Maroon, confirming what they all witnessed in West Virginia. He tells them that he believes Bennet, that Bennet was right all along. He tells them he had been skeptical but now he’s a believer.
He writes a report for the NFL, detailing his findings, saying yes, Bennet was right. He speculates about the role of steroids, and of specific genetic markers, and other possible contributing factors worth pursuing, but the bottom line is that Bennet Omalu is right.
He writes to Bennet: “I remain convinced that you have discovered something, a new phenomenon….This discovery could prove of great importance to the field of neurodegenerative disease research….This is amazing stuff: you really have opened a major can of worms!”
The NFL never releases Davies’s report, never makes it public.
Instead, the league commissions a new study, tries a whole different approach. They send a team of researchers at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research off to do a survey of retired players. More than a thousand retired players. The researchers are to ask the players about health issues, whether they have heart disease, cholesterol problems, cancer, and they are to ask them if they have ever been diagnosed with “dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or other memory-related disease.”
They wait for the results.
Then, at the 2009 Super Bowl in Tampa, Nowinski and McKee hold a press conference.
“A press conference?” Bennet says to Bailes.
Tom McHale, offensive lineman for nine seasons, had CTE, Nowinski and McKee report. They say they have proof! Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University has found CTE in Tom McHale’s brain.
“That’s my brain!” Bennet says, watching the coverage on CNN. But of course it was Nowinski’s brain, too. Half to each. And Nowinski will later claim that his group tried to call Bennet’s group multiple times, and Bennet’s group never returned the calls.
The infighting doesn’t matter to the media. The wires pick up the headlines. CTE! Brain damage in football players! The story gets murky. Who discovered this new disease? Fact-checking slips. Ann McKee discovered CTE? Chris Nowinski and Ann McKee discovered CTE! That is how the narrative slowly gets rewritten, while Bennet struggles with his place on the sideline, convincing himself, yeah, sure, this is where he belongs. No, really, obscurity is fine.
In September 2009, a year after they began, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research reveals its findings from the survey the NFL commissioned them to do. They find that Alzheimer’s disease, or something very similar, is being diagnosed in former NFL players nineteen times more often than in the national population among men ages thirty through forty-nine.
Nineteen times.
Their own study. It’s like Big Tobacco ordering a study that ends up showing that smokers get cancer.
The Michigan study makes headlines. It’s one more thing on top of one more thing about concussions in football players. It gets Congress activated. What is going on with brain damage and the NFL? The House Judiciary Committee announces that it will hold hearings. They want Roger Goodell to answer for this mess. They want Casson. They want the NFL’s MTBI committee. The committee is still publishing papers in Neurosurgery—it has just come out with its sixteenth paper concluding that there is no worrisome link between football and dementia. What is going on?
Everybody who is anybody in CTE research gets the call from Congress to come to Washington to testify.
Bailes, Maroon, Cantu, Nowinski, McKee.
Everybody who is anybody in CTE research gets the call.
Bennet Omalu does not get the call.
“Why am I not invited, Julian?” Bennet asks Bailes. It will become a refrain—“Why am I left out?”—in the coming years, as Bennet struggles to earn entry to the circles, circles pushing against circles.
Professional sports. Science. Medicine. Politics. Law. Families suffering, guys going crazy, guys beating up wives, guys killing themselves. Bennet watches from the sidelines. He works on convincing himself he belongs on the sidelines, that he’s happy there, not quite knowing what to do with the fact that if not for his contribution, his determination, his discovery, none of the circles would have collided, the sparks would not be flying, the CTE light might never have come on.
What are you supposed to do with knowledge like that? Sing your own praises? Stay involved in the national conversation just because hey, you’re the one who figured it out? Demand respect because, hey, you’re the guy who figured it out?
Exactly how does one do something like that?
I try to understand, and I can’t come up with an explanation as to why the messenger is not listened to. And this is where I have questions of: Could it be related to racism? Could this be nothing more than racism? Where blacks are systematically—and systemically—excluded from mainstream American life?
People have said that to me. They have said, “Bennet, you know, if you were white, if you were a white guy, with the work you have done, the whole world—they would have lifted you so high.” Even Nowinski said it that first day I met him. He said I didn’t have, what do you call it, “the believability factor.” That I’m young. I’m black. I’m from Nigeria. That if my name was O’Malu, an Irish guy with gray hair, a white guy who is in one of the Ivy League schools, everybody would have embraced me when I told them about CTE.
I do think there’s a mind-set—no matter how much we may want to deny it in this country—about the perception of blackness. And sometimes it’s a subconscious mind-set. Where anything associated with blackness has a negative connotation. This mind-set has a very fundamental assumption. A false assumption that black people cannot be intelligent.
I think this is my story, to an extent. It’s a manifestation of a way of thinking.
Like Albert Einstein has said. He said, “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
When I was in Nigeria, I was not aware of the concept of racism. I was not. When I came to America, it was so alien to me. That why would somebody who does not know me—the mere fact that he sees that I’m a certain color, he would pigeonhole me? And then when it comes to creating opportunities for me to express my talent and become who I want to become, he would try to deny me those opportunities. To keep me down!
That disappointed me about America. That disappointed me so much.
What have I done? Can somebody tell me? If there’s something I have done wrong, I want to find out what it is so I don’t repeat it. I want to learn from it. But the more I search, the more convinced I am that I have not done anything wrong. I have done my part in the CTE world. I was able to make the impact I did while being unnoticed.
I think the NFL was totally confused on how to address the CTE issue. They globally mismanaged it, because they dismissed me.
On a cold and rainy Wednesday morning in Washington, D.C., in October 2009, politicians and scientists and business men and women gather in the Rayburn House Office Building, wearing polite expressions of anticipation.
“There appears to be growing evidence that playing football may be linked to long-term brain damage,” the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Representative John Conyers, says, opening the session. He’s in his eighties, broad, hunched over, smooth. He’s the longest-serving current member of the entire Congress, one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus. He’s a walking monument; he was in Selma in 1963 on Freedom Day, he’s the guy responsible for Martin Luther King Day. He’s a no-bullshit guy, and he starts the three-hour morning session with blunt focus. “I say this not because of the impact of these injuries on the two thousand current players and more than ten thousand retirees associated with the football league and their families. I say it because of the effect on the millions of players at the college, high school, and youth levels.”
It’s an issue that warrants federal scrutiny, he says, especially given the insidious fact that the NFL is tax-exempt. Technically, according to the books, the NFL is a trade organization, an unincorporated nonprofit 501(c)(6) association made up of and financed by its thirty-two member teams, and as such, it is required to pay no federal taxes. (Individual teams are for-profit entities, so they have to pay income taxes.) The NFL’s tax-exempt status was bestowed in the 1960s when Congress allowed the then American Football League to merge with the National Football League, granting the newly formed group antitrust waivers. That gave it a monopoly on broadcasting rights—and that’s largely how the league now makes about ten billion dollars every year, and how it can afford to pay Goodell’s annual salary of about $44 million. (In 2015 the NFL will decide to end its tax-exempt status, explaning that the nonprofit designation had become a “distraction.”) Meanwhile, state and local tax dollars go into funding stadiums—about 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers.
America funds America’s game, and the NFL rakes in the profit.
So, yeah, Congress has every reason to stick their nose into this business.
“Is there a link between playing professional football and the likelihood of contracting brain-related injury such as dementia?” Conyers asks Goodell, who is sitting across from him like a schoolboy, rosy-cheeked, his blond hair parted on the left, slicked over, his blue eyes set deep as if tucked beneath a shelf. He’s wearing a powder-blue tie.
“We know that concussions are a serious matter,” Goodell answers. “Our goal will continue to be to make our game as safe as possible.” He goes on like this, like a salesman, polished and vague. No one cares more about concussions than the NFL, he says. In fact, they put a team of doctors together to study this very issue. “We have published every piece of data,” he says. “We have published it publicly, we have given it to medical journals, it is part of peer review.”
“I asked you a simple question,” Conyers says. Is there a link between playing professional football and the likelihood of contracting brain-related injury such as dementia? “What’s the answer?”
“The answer is the medical experts would know better than I would with respect to that,” Goodell says.
The dodge does not go unnoticed. Especially given the fact that the NFL’s medical experts are not here to help answer the question.
Ira Casson, the current head of the MTBI committee?
Not here.
Why is he not here? the committee wants to know.
Nobody asked him to come, Goodell says, in so many words.
Oh, yes, they did.
An aide comes scurrying up to Goodell, hands him a slip of paper. Goodell reads it, leans into the microphone, says he’ll need to get back to the committee on the Casson issue.
“From my experience, the NFL is a model in concussion management,” Maroon adds, when given the floor. He’s as close as the NFL comes to having a medical expert at the hearing. He talks about how honored he was to work with Super Bowl coaches Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Mike Tomlin. He talks about ImPACT, the concussion test he trademarked that is now sold around the world.
Representative Maxine Waters can’t stand listening to this crap. She knows the NFL. Her husband, Sid, played for the Browns. A charade, she says of the MTBI committee. “We’ve heard from the NFL time and time again,” she says. “You’re always ‘studying,’ you’re always ‘trying,’ you’re ‘hopeful.’ ” And she points her finger at Goodell. “Let me say this to Mr. Goodell and everybody who is here today. I think you are an eight-billion-dollar organization that has not taken seriously your responsibility to the players. The fact of the matter is, yes, people want to play. The fact of the matter is they are going to be injured. And we know no matter what kind of helmet you build, or what kind of equipment you have, it is a dangerous sport and people are going to be injured. The only question is: What are you going to do? Are you going to pay for it? Are you going to pay the injured players and their families for the injuries that they have received in helping you to be a multi-billion-dollar operation? That is the only question.”
Goodell blinks.
Representative Linda Sanchez hops on the bandwagon. She knows dementia. Her dad had Alzheimer’s disease. She knows labor. She used to be a labor lawyer. She wants to confront Casson personally. She has a lot of questions for him, says she wishes he was here. She cues the video. She shows a clip of Casson on TV, the clip of him being interviewed in 2007 saying “No,” and “No,” and “No,” all those times, denying the link between dementia and football.
“A blanket denial!” she says. “It reminds me of the tobacco companies pre-nineties when they kept saying, ‘No, there is no link between smoking and damage to your health.’ And they were forced to admit that that was incorrect through a spate of litigation. Don’t you think the league would be better off legally, and that our youth might be a little bit better off in terms of knowledge, if you guys just embraced that there is research that suggests this and admitted to it?”
“Well, Congresswoman, I do believe that we have embraced the research,” Goodell says.
“You are talking about one study, and that is the NFL’s study,” Sanchez says. “You are not talking about the independent studies that have been conducted by other researchers.”
The comparison is made explicit in the first session, and repeated in the second: Big Tobacco. The NFL is like Big Tobacco. The MTBI committee is a charade. Nowinski piles on. McKee piles on. Bailes piles on. He mentions Bennet’s name several times, says he’s the guy who figured this out. None of the other scientists mention Bennet.
It’s a PR nightmare for the NFL.
Three weeks after the hearing, Casson is relieved of his duties with the MTBI committee, and the committee itself is scrapped. The league announces it will start over, with new researchers, actual independent scientists.
Then, two months later, the NFL does something that catches everyone off guard. On December 20, 2009, they announce a gift of one million dollars to Nowinski’s group at Boston University. One million dollars for them to go ahead and study CTE. In addition, they will encourage their players to pledge their brains to BU’s new brain bank.
The gift appears to flummox even Nowinski.
“A million dollars, Julian,” Bennet says, calling Bailes after hearing the news. “The NFL is giving Chris Nowinski a million dollars?”
“Something like that,” Bailes says.
“They’re buying support.”
“That’s too simplistic.”
“It’s the NFL again funding concussion research,” Bennet says. “It is what it is, Julian. The NFL paying for science.”
Nowinski’s group throws Goodell a party after he gives them the million dollars. At the Boston Harbor Hotel, they present him with the Impact Award. They have a big cake. It has a brain on top, made of frosting, in the shape of a football.
“A cake, Julian,” Bennet says. “A cake.”