And if that’s all there was to football, well, we could stop right here and go stock up on snacks for this weekend’s games. But of course I’ve left the ugly parts out of this highlight reel. I’ve failed to mention, for instance, the single most haunting memory of my childhood fandom.
In the summer of 1978, during a pre-season game, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots named Darryl Stingley lunged for a pass just out of his reach. Before he could regain his balance he was leveled by Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum. It was clear at once that Stingley was, in the gentle parlance of the broadcast booth, “shaken up on the play.” Team doctors rushed to his side.
I was eleven years old. I knew I was supposed to feel bad for Stingley, and I did in some minor, dutiful way. Mostly I was proud of Tatum, of the destructive capacities central to his identity. The whole point of being Jack “The Assassin” Tatum was to poleax wide receivers in this manner.
The problem was that Stingley wasn’t moving. The doctors kept tapping at his knees with reflex hammers and I remember this because my dad had pulled a reflex hammer from his old medical kit and done the same thing to us. The longer Stingley lay on the chalked grass, the more ashamed I grew. I knew, even then, that part of my attraction to football was the thrill of such violent transactions.
I can still see that hit. Stingley lowers his head just before impact. Tatum’s shoulder pad strikes his helmet. What you don’t see, what’s safely hidden away under the armor, is how this impact compresses Stingley’s spinal cord and fractures his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. Tatum and his teammates stride away from Stingley’s grotesquely bent body with no apparent remorse.
What I remember most of all is the fear that dogged me in the days afterward, as it became clear that a star player had been rendered a quadriplegic on national TV: surely the game of football would now be outlawed.
Two years later, a congressional sub-committee did call Stingley to testify about a proposed bill to limit excessive violence in pro sports. But that measure, like other previous efforts, proved ceremonial. Instead, the Patriots gave Stingley a desk job and honored him in the manner of a war hero. Tatum, who was neither flagged nor fined for the hit, continued to terrorize opposing players. The NFL juggernaut rolled on. And I kept right on watching.
I spent most of my youth playing soccer. I was lucky enough to witness the first heyday of the pro game in this country. We lived twenty minutes from one of its marquee franchises, the San Jose Earthquakes. So why didn’t I watch soccer instead? Why did I gravitate towards football? Why did I take up with the Raiders and remain loyal to them even after their rebel mystique had curdled?
I’ve argued above that the game of football is simply more gripping as a spectacle, a more faithful reenactment of our fundamental athletic impulses. But if we’re going to be honest about all this, then we should specify what when we say “impulses,” we’re not just talking about the frolicking verbs—run, leap, catch—but the delight that boys (and later men) take in tackling and pounding and hurting.
And I should talk, too, a little more about the family in which I grew up. My parents met in medical school and later established private practices. They were politically active on the left. They made homemade jam and bread and candles. They read novels and performed Lieder as a duet, my father singing in German while my mother accompanied him on piano. They were gentle souls with three well-behaved sons who earned good grades. That was the public version of our family.
The private version was troubled. There was a lot of anger in our home and very little corresponding mercy. As I see it now, my folks had too many children too quickly—Dave was barely two when my twin Mike and I arrived. They felt overrun in ways that I, as a parent of three young children, am only beginning to comprehend.
My folks worked hard to connect with us individually. My dad, for example, coached my soccer team for years. But he and Mom also had ambitions of their own. And none of us boys, to be blunt, felt entirely secure in their love. We desperately wanted more attention, but this desperation frightened us, so we strangled it into silence. Rather than entreat our parents, we froze them out. It was how we punished them. We turned our brotherhood into a furious little fortress.
We sought to humiliate and injure one another constantly. I took a perverse pride in the fact that both of my brothers broke their hands in fights with me. One afternoon in high school I arrived home to find my brother Mike stomping around with a carving knife. Dave had stabbed him in the thigh with a fork and now he wanted revenge.
Beneath all the fury, we felt tremendous fear and despair. Later in life these emotions would bubble up through the cracks and swallow each of us, but back then we remained loyal to our chosen omertà. To reveal any weakness, to ask for comfort or love, was forbidden.
We all dealt with the pressure in different ways. My older brother maniacally pursued hobbies. My twin brother withdrew into himself. I watched football. In a home swirling with chaotic rage, it soothed me to see aggression granted a coherent, even heroic, context.
I’m setting all this out to explain why, even after watching a man get crippled, my devotion to the sport never wavered. My dad may have felt the same way, because I don’t recall that we ever talked about the Stingley incident. We must have been content to write it off as a freak accident. We had that luxury back then.
We don’t anymore.
Over the past few years, a growing body of medical research has confirmed that football can cause traumatic injury to the brain, not as a rare and unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is played. The central concern among doctors is no longer catastrophic injuries—concussions that result from big collisions—but the incremental (and therefore largely invisible) damage done by numerous sub-concussive hits.
A study commissioned by the NFL Players Association determined that recently retired pros (ages thirty to forty-nine) are nineteen times more likely to suffer from brain-trauma-related illness than—what’s the right word here?—noncombatants. Given that aging stars don’t want to be seen as disabled, they tend to downplay or even hide their infirmities. The numbers are likely higher.
Players may die younger, too. “Whereas white males live to 78 years and African-American males live to approximately 70 years, it appears that professional football players in both the United States and Canada have life expectancies in the mid to late 50s,” according to Dr. Lee Nadler, a neurologist at Harvard. A 2011 study conducted by the Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at the University of North Carolina put life expectancy for players at fifty-five.
NFL officials have sought to rebut these claims by trumpeting a 2012 study conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. It tallied death rates among more than 3,400 former players and concluded that they enjoy greater longevity.
But this approach, as any actuary would tell you, is inherently flawed, because the average age of death among men in the general population factors in those who die as children or young adults, as well as the poor, sickly, and undernourished. Oh, and smokers. The proper control for NFL players would be a cohort of super-fit, affluent, college-educated men. The study also tracked subjects who turned pro between 1959 and 1988, an era when players were much smaller. Until a sound longitudinal study is conducted, no one can say for sure how playing football effects mortality.
What has become increasingly obvious is that numerous NFL players incur brain damage. Doctors have autopsied the brains of dozens of former pros such as Junior Seau, Mike Webster, and Dave Duerson, and confirmed that they suffered from a form of dementia called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Like Seau, Duerson, an All-Pro safety, shot himself in the chest. Before taking his life, he sent his family a text message requesting that his brain be used for research.
A new crop of retired stars is just beginning to report symptoms. Brett Favre, among the most heralded quarterbacks of the past two decades, shocked fans when he confessed to memory lapses last year. “I don’t remember my daughter playing soccer one summer,” Favre said. “So that’s a little bit scary to me. For the first time in forty-four years, that put a little fear in me.”
Terry Bradshaw was so concerned about his faculties that he sought diagnostic help five years ago. “I couldn’t focus and remember things, and I was dealing with depression,” the sixty-five-year-old Hall of Famer recounted. “I got tested to see what condition my brain is in. And it’s not in real good shape.”
Running back Tony Dorsett received the same news last year. At fifty-nine, he had been living with bouts of depression and memory loss. In a tearful television interview, he admitted he gets lost driving his daughters to their sports games. “It’s painful, man, for my daughters to say they’re scared of me … I’ve thought about crazy stuff, sort of like, ‘Why do I need to continue going through this?’ I’m too smart of a person, I like to think, to take my life, but it’s crossed my mind.”
Once again, nobody can say for sure what the prevalence rate of CTE is in active NFL players. The diagnostic tools don’t exist yet. Doctors have yet to determine how factors such as drug use or genetic disposition might contribute to the brain damage they’re seeing. And the sample group is admittedly skewed—former players whose families have submitted their brains for examination. But the numbers are stark. As of March, neuropathologists at the NFL’s designated brain bank had examined fifty-five former football players. All but one showed signs of CTE. Already, the disease has been identified in the brains of deceased college players and even one high schooler.
The first wave of media coverage, two decades ago, focused narrowly on the impact of concussions. As doctors gathered more data, and shifted focus to the risks posed by the smaller collisions that occur every single play, the story evolved from a practical question—how to minimize big hits?—to an existential crisis.
It’s useful to recall here the manner in which the public outcry over violence reshaped football a century ago. Back then, the President of the United States felt duty-bound to help speed reforms. The game was killing and maiming college and high school players. It was a moral problem.
The moment football became a business, violence was no longer just a moral problem. It was a money problem.
This, of course, is the big dance of capitalism: how to keep morality from gumming up the gears of profit, how to convince people to make bad decisions without seeing them as bad. We have whole industries devoted to this voodoo, the dark arts of advertising, marketing, public relations, lobbying. Every day, an army of clever men and women are devising new ways to get us to enjoy tobacco and animal flesh and petroleum and corn syrup without suffering the harsh aftertaste of guilt, without dwelling on the ethical costs of these pleasures. Oftentimes, you will hear some academic type marvel at the American capacity for self-delusion. Here’s our secret: we’re soaking in it.
I mention all this not just to get my socialist jollies, but to emphasize the larger system within which modern football operates. From the perspective of its governing body, the NFL, the game is a multi-billion-dollar product. And those of us who love it are not innocent fans rooting for our teams to prevail. We’re consumers. Our money and attention are what subsidize the game.
This is true of all pro sports. But it’s especially true of football. Consider this factoid. In 1948, nearly nine-tenths of the revenue earned by the NFL’s best team, the Philadelphia Eagles, came from ticket sales. The share from radio and TV rights was 3 percent. Hardcore fans kept the league afloat, the ones who braved stadiums so cold that players sat bundled in hay to keep warm on the sidelines.
This season, the NFL will receive $5 billion in TV rights alone, nearly half its total revenue, and three times more than Major League Baseball earns. This money is generated by the tens of millions of casual fans engaged in what we might call “passive consumption” (i.e., watching a game on your couch while inhaling Cheetos).
But the league’s ascendance has had unintended consequences. Stars now qualify as national celebrities, and their physical deterioration is front-page news. Television coverage renders each game as both epic and personal. Back in the seventies, the camera angles were limited and the images often grainy. The players remained obscure under their bulky exoskeletons, more like superheroes than human beings. Today, we see the game in high-def. Slow motion replays show us the unnatural angle of a broken ankle, and a quarterback’s contorted face at the precise moment he is concussed. We hear the impact thanks to tiny microphones affixed to player’s uniforms. It’s gotten harder and harder for even casual fans to deny the cruelty of the game.
The standard rationalization hauled out at this point is that the NFL will clean up the game. As fans, we want to believe that league officials will choose the righteous path over the profitable one. This is nonsense and always has been.
From the beginning, the NFL has sought to obscure the most disturbing aspects of the game. This is why Bertie Bell, the first great commissioner of the NFL, wrote a stipulation into the contracts the league signed with TV networks prohibiting them from showing injuries or fights. “In the matter of television and radio we are doing a job for the public,” he explained, “a job of showing them the best football in the world.” In a more candid moment, Bell explained the appeal of the sport this way: “You knock my brains out this Sunday and I knock your brains out the next time we meet.”
So football’s guardians have always tried to walk this absurd line, between selling violence and disavowing it. The best way to gauge how league officials will respond to safety concerns is to consider what they have done thus far.
The first commissioner to issue a public statement on concussions was Paul Tagliabue, who succeeded Pete Rozelle in 1989. His statement: “On concussions, I think this is one of those pack journalism issues, frankly. The problem is a journalist issue.” He cited steroids, drinking, and other injuries as more pressing matters.
Having served as the league’s lead counsel before becoming commissioner, Tagliabue eventually adopted the same activist strategy employed by the tobacco industry. He sought to shape public debate by flooding the market with junk science. The NFL created a “research body” called the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee. (If you believe, as I do, that language is essentially an instrument of truth, we might pause here a moment to linger upon the spooky propagandistic frisson produced by the juxtaposition of those two words: mild, traumatic.)
Tagliabue chose a man named Elliot Pellman to chair the committee. Pellman was a rheumatologist with no experience in brain research. He worked for the New York Jets and was Tagliabue’s personal physician.
Members of the committee published sixteen papers in a medical journal called Neurosurgery, whose editor-in-chief was a consultant to the New York Giants. These papers invariably reached the same conclusion: NFL players were, if not impervious to brain injury, unlikely to suffer long-term effects. The authors, many of whom had worked in and around football for years, seemed at times almost touchingly naive about the fundamental nature of the game. (“Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.”) A number of these papers found a home in Neurosurgery only after being rejected by other editors and peer reviewers. Some were later repudiated by their own authors. Still, the committee provided crucial cover for Tagliabue. Every time some pesky reporter brought up concussions, he could point to the MBTI and its reams of exculpatory data.
The problem was that the number of former players showing signs of cognitive damage kept growing. They also began committing suicide in rather flamboyant ways. Steelers lineman Terry Long drank anti-freeze. His teammate Justin Strzelczyk led police on a high-speed chase before crashing into a tank truck at 90 mph. Long was forty-five, Strzelczyk thirty-six.
By the mid-2000s, a group of neurologists unaffiliated with the NFL had begun examining deceased players and finding incontrovertible evidence of brain damage that explained the disturbing symptoms of dementia reported by family members. In 2007, new commissioner Roger Goodell listened to a number of these doctors present their findings at a conference he convened on brain injuries.
His public response subtly undermined the link between football and brain damage. “I’m not a doctor, but you have to look at their entire medical history,” he said. “To look at something that is isolated without looking at their entire medical history I think is irresponsible.” The league also released a carefully worded pamphlet whose ostensible purpose was to inform players of the risks associated with concussions: “Current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly … Research is currently underway to determine if there are any long-term effects of concussions in NFL athletes.”
The league had entered its official Obfuscation Phase.
It didn’t last long. Two years later, an NFL spokesman told a reporter this: “It’s quite obvious from the medical research that’s been done that concussions can lead to long-term problems.” By this time, larger media outlets—The New York Times and PBS in particular—had begun piecing together the NFL’s systematic cover-up. Players had begun to speak out and to consider legal remedy.
In 2011, a former Atlanta Falcons safety named Ray Easterling sued the NFL, an action eventually joined by more than 4,500 other former players. The suit accuses the NFL not only of negligence but fraud, a “concerted effort of deception and denial” that includes “industry-funded and falsified research.”
In 2013, the NFL agreed to pay a settlement of $765 million, along with an estimated $200 million in legal fees. The presiding judge deemed this sum insufficient to cover the anticipated medical costs of the 20,000 players who eventually may qualify for payment.
Anybody with even a rudimentary sense of how corporations regard liability will understand why the NFL is so eager to make a deal. First, a settlement would guarantee that league officials never have to answer questions under oath regarding what they knew, and when, about the link between football and brain damage. Second, they would avoid the discovery phase, which would make public the grisly medical histories of former players. Presumably, some of these players and their family members would testify. It would be a public relations disaster.
And that’s what matters, in the end, to NFL officials, and what makes their conduct so transparent. Roger Goodell and the men who work for him are not stupid. They’ve looked at the mountain of medical data and come to the same reluctant conclusion that Big Coal and Big Meat did decades ago. The business they run is unsafe for their workers.
The moral decision in this situation isn’t very complicated: you stop playing the game until you learn more. You explain the dangers to your players (and the public) and you apologize for gambling with their health.
Goodell has made business decisions. He’s done just enough—purged the deniers, tweaked the rules, funded research—to allow us fans to pretend that the league gives a damn. He’s placed his faith in our capacity for self-delusion.
The second big rationalization in the NFL Fan Survival Kit is that players knowingly choose to incur the game’s risks and are paid for doing so. You hear this line all the time on sports talk radio, often in that pitched, contemptuous tone characteristic of men who resent moral contemplation.
Okay. Let’s start with the issue of what constitutes informed consent. Here’s what seems fair: On NFL Draft Day, Roger Goodell can call the number one draft pick to the stage and give him his jersey and hat. But the commish will also have to hand the kid a waiver, the text of which would be printed on-screen:
I, __________, the undersigned, am aware that the average age of death of an NFL player is, according to the Players Union, up to two decades shorter than normal life expectancy. Furthermore, I recognize that playing in the League, even in the absence of formally diagnosed concussions, may cause brain damage leading to the loss of cognitive function, depression, disorientation, and suicidal ideation.
A copy of this waiver will be distributed to the draftee’s family. They will then be required to watch a brief video of former players, such as the late Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, describing—or attempting to describe—what life is like with CTE. Then the player and his family will be given a week to consider the matter.
That would be informed consent.
Most of those kids would sign. They would sign not just because they’re twenty years old and believe they’re bulletproof, but because their talent for football is the single attribute upon which they have been judged for most of their lives. Football isn’t just what they do. It’s who they are.
NFL players are members of an elite fraternity that knowingly places self-sacrifice, valor, and machismo above medical commonsense. Football is the one major American sport that selects specifically for the ability to inflict and absorb physical pain. (We don’t judge baseball or basketball players on how well they can take a hit.) The ultimate badge of honor for a pro football player is not that he play fair or that he play hard but that he play hurt.
In January of 2014, ESPN asked 320 NFL players, anonymously, if they would play in the Super Bowl with a concussion. Eighty-five percent said yes. More recently, a linebacker for the Jacksonville Jaguars named Russell Allen revealed the reason for his unexpected retirement: he suffered a stroke after being hit during a game last year. Allen refused to leave the game or inform medical personnel because he feared he might lose his starting job.
One of the more despicable arguments put forward by the MBTI committee was that the rigors of football weeded out the weak. Those who made it to the pro level were less susceptible to concussions and quicker to recover from them. The proof of this claim was that so many players returned to the playing field so quickly after suffering concussions, which was a little like claiming that the dangers of black lung weren’t that serious because so many coal miners returned to work after bouts of respiratory illness.
What an unbiased examination of the data suggests is that concussions have been under-reported, under-diagnosed, and under-treated for decades. When doctors describe symptoms to an older player—dizziness, seeing stars—they often identify these as routine. The linebacker Bill Romanowski, by all accounts one of the nastiest players in league history, estimated that by these standards he’d suffered five hundred or more concussions during his career. “I saw stars every day for sixteen years. I saw stars in college.” He was diagnosed with twenty concussions.
The NFL’s research wasn’t gauging the resilience of players’ brains, but the toxic convergence of its own reckless cupidity with the macho culture that prevails among its employees.
What happens to a player who rejects this culture?
Consider the case of Ted Johnson. During his ten-year career, the hard-hitting linebacker helped the Patriots win three Super Bowls. In 2002, he suffered a concussion and briefly blacked out during a pre-season game. He returned to practice four days later, expecting he would wear a red jersey for “minimal contact.” A blue “full contact” jersey was hanging in his locker. Johnson confronted a trainer, who told him there had been a mistake, that he wasn’t cleared for contact. Johnson put on the red jersey. Out on the practice field, as the team prepared for a contact drill, an assistant trainer brought him a blue jersey. Coach Bill Belichick had directed him to do so. Johnson was incensed.
Here’s where things get truly messed up.
Johnson put the jersey on anyway. Almost immediately, he suffered a second concussion and was rushed to the hospital. When he confronted Belichick privately, Johnson says the coach admitted that he’d screwed up and apologized to him.
Belichick’s public response to the incident was considerably different: “If Ted felt so strongly that he didn’t feel he was ready to practice with us, he should have told me.”
This is part of what makes Bill Belichick a great coach. He knows how to “get the most out of his players,” which is a kinder way of saying that he knows how to manipulate them. He knows that a tough guy like Johnson would rather risk his health than risk losing face by refusing to put on that blue jersey. “They weren’t going to beat me,” is how Johnson put it.
Instead, Belichick got Johnson to beat himself.
Johnson played three more seasons for the Patriots. He estimates that he suffered half a dozen more concussions, though he reported only one of them because he wanted to avoid being labeled soft. He was already suffering from symptoms of neurological damage, which have worsened.
If you follow football, especially in New England, you hear a lot of talk about the so-called “Patriot way,” a dignified, stoic approach to the game. One of its central tenets is extreme secrecy when it comes to injuries. And yet here is how one team official summed up Johnson’s medical condition to a Boston Globe reporter: “Ted Johnson is a very sick young man. We’ve been aware of the emotional issues he’s had for years. You can’t blame all of his behavior on concussions.”
The Patriot Way: When a player receives serial brain traumas trying to honor your code, suggest in print that he is mentally ill.
Of course, it’s easy to blame ruthless coaches and venal owners and foolhardy players, and much harder for us to see our own role in all this.
Most football players begin life with limited socioeconomic options. They may love football for its inherent virtues. But they also quickly come to see the game as a path to glory and riches. These rewards aren’t inherent. They arise from a culture of fandom that views players as valuable only so long as they can perform.
We might pay lip service to health issues, but we’re much less forgiving when the injury report comes out. Scroll through the Internet message boards, or listen to the provocateurs on sports talk radio. A frequently hurt player is not to be pitied, but suspected. In these kangaroo courts, “injury prone” has become synonymous with cowardly or weak-willed. The explosion in steroid use is partly a response to this mindset. The drugs help speed recovery from injuries.
Then again, according to a lawsuit filed in May, scores of ex-players were fed pain pills by team doctors and trainers—the pills were “handed out to us like candy,” in the words of one retired lineman—and pressured to soldier on despite severe injuries. One of the named plaintiffs (there are more than five hundred in all), former Pro Bowl quarterback Jim McMahon, claims he incurred a broken neck and ankle during his career, never received proper diagnoses, and played through both. Like other former players, McMahon wound up addicted to painkillers, and now suffers from the early stages of dementia.
We worship players for bravery and excoriate them for vulnerability because we wish to see masculine ideals on display. But I think here also of Cicero, who speculated that the loathing for timid gladiators wasn’t a function of their diminished entertainment value but the fact that they forced spectators to confront the profound heartlessness of the games.
If you want to know what the current state of the research is on NFL players and brain damage, one of the best people on earth to consult is Dr. Ann McKee, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University and chief neuropathologist for the National Veterans Affairs ALS Brain Bank in Bedford, MA. McKee is the person who cuts up the brains of former players and determines if they have CTE. Because so many brains have been coming in recently, and because (as her titles suggest) she is a very busy person, she is perpetually “about thirty brains behind.”
She believes the gravest threat to players comes from sub-concussive hits, which the NFL’s safety rules and concussion protocols won’t prevent. The next milestone, McKee predicts, will be when doctors can measure brain injuries incurred during play, and brain disease in living players. “That will be the defining moment, the one that rewrites the book,” she says. “I don’t think we’re that far away.” She foresees a day when players entering the NFL will receive a risk assessment for brain damage based on factors such as genetic disposition, the number of years played, position, etc.
The introduction of such innovations would erode the haze of medical uncertainty that has long insulated the league and us fans. Imagine what would happen if word leaked that the top draft choice in 2017 stood a 25 percent chance of incurring brain damage five years into his career? Or if he was revealed to have incipient CTE? Or if fans had to confront not just replays of a superstar being knocked insensate, but a CAT scan showing the damage to his frontal lobes?
McKee is sometimes miscast as the bête noir of the NFL, because she was among the most visible early authorities on CTE. In fact, league executives dismissed her research for years. They’ve since adopted a kind of keep-your-enemies-closer approach by designating her lab as the league’s “preferred” brain bank, and granting her millions in funding.
McKee is also, helpfully, an outspoken fan of the game. Her desk is surrounded by hundreds of slides of brain slices dyed to show areas with a buildup of tau, the cell-strangling protein symptomatic of CTE. Precariously balanced atop one stack of slides is a bobblehead doll of Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback of her Green Bay Packers.
McKee told me if she were a boy she would have played football, and that she wanted her son to play. “When he got to high school, his dad didn’t want him to play because it was too dangerous. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ It was horrifying to me!” McKee laughed. “So he played soccer.”
I asked McKee how she justifies watching the game, knowing its dangers so intimately. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know where I am. I think it’s a really important question. I have, like, these two faces. Right now they’re pretty separate. I do watch a lot of football on Sunday.”
In the morgue, a small, frigid room thick with the smell of preserving fluid, McKee lifted the lid of a white plastic bucket. Inside was a brain covered with splotches of dark crimson. “That’s a suicide,” explained her colleague, Dr. Victor Alvarez. McKee selected another brain and set it down on her cutting board. It looked like a small, discolored ham. She began slicing it up with a long scalpel.
Most of the brains McKee examines belong to veterans, not athletes. But the second brain she chose was a young female rugby player who had suffered a concussion, then continued to play. After a second impact, she suffered massive swelling of the brain and died. High school athletes are especially susceptible to so-called “second-impact syndrome.”
I was there to talk to McKee about CTE, but the conversation between her and Alvarez and a young assistant named Brian quickly turned to the Super Bowl, which had been played a few weeks earlier.
Brian was a fan of the Denver Broncos, who had been routed. “After the first quarter, I just wanted it to be an entertaining game!” he said, carefully sliding brain slices into small plastic cases.
“After the first series!” said Alvarez, a Buffalo Bills fan.
At a certain point, I outed myself as a Raiders partisan, and we were off to the races.
It was an odd situation—actually surreal is closer to the mark. Even as McKee was dissecting this girl’s hippocampus and amygdala and her delicate spinal cord, we were gabbing about football.
Before I left, McKee showed me two large color prints that hung in the hallway outside her office. One showed the brain of an eighteen-year-old football player with the brown spotting that signifies the onset of CTE. The other was a photo of a brain with two ghastly gouges in its frontal lobes, a lobotomy as they were conducted in the years after World War I.
A psychiatrist named Walter Freeman performed nearly 3,500 lobotomies, many of them by pressing an icepick through the corner of the eye socket and into the patient’s brain. The procedure was sometimes used to treat victims of shell shock. The press hailed Freeman as a miracle worker. Only years later were his methods debunked. McKee marveled at the public acceptance of such barbarism, and I said, only half joking, that maybe decades from now the public will recoil at the thought that we ever watched a game that could permanently harm a teenager’s brain.
“I’ve started to think it’s impossible to change the NFL,” McKee said. “People think none of this work will change the NFL.”
She seemed completely blind to the irony hanging right in front of her. The ultimate agents of social change aren’t researchers like her, but individual fans (like her) who confront the moral meaning of the research, who make the connection between the damaged brains—such as those McKee dissects—and their own behavior.