Concussion Inc. (15 page)

— Alan Schwarz.

Schwarz was responding to the item here yesterday in which I expressed discomfort with the amount of space he and Chris Nowinski were taking up in the national concussion conversation (while also pointing out, as I do repeatedly, their deserved credit for raising that conversation to its present level).

At the bottom of Schwarz's disagreement with me is a difference of opinion on the forward thrust of federal investigations of the National Football League. I will begin by explaining that disagreement from my perspective. If I may say so, the Schwarz account
carefully adumbrates
it. More on this fatal phrase as we move along.

“As far as I know,” Schwarz says, “your concern with the [
Times
] coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue.”

Well, that's one way to read it. Another way is to note that Maroon is a connection that could help push the current probes by executive agencies and members of Congress from their focus on football helmet safety to a wider scope of NFL accountability for a public health tab we are just beginning to tote up. Schwarz is entitled to the opinion — if his opinion it is — that scapegoating helmet manufacturers gets to the heart of the problem. And I am entitled to mine: that the investigations, plural, need to go much higher up the food chain.

I am not sure which dictionary Schwarz consulted for the definition of the word “adumbrate”; nor is it clear whether he ever got his nose out of the air long enough to look at one at all. According to
Merriam-Webster
, the verb means “to foreshadow vaguely:
intimate
”; “to suggest, disclose, or outline partially”; to “
overshadow
,
obscure
.”

Schwarz says my use of the word means that I think he has presented the story “somewhat incompletely in an effort to be vague or misleading.” I have never speculated as to his intentions. A less malignant interpretation of the phrase
carefully adumbrated
could also mean that a
Times
reporter, in contrast to an independent author, journalist, and blogger, lines up his work with certain calculations about the size of his news hole, the number and timing of his investigative angles, and — finally and critically — the internal political demands of the
Times
editing machine.

Again, it should be obvious that Schwarz's resources and methods have distinct advantages over my own, as well as less obvious drawbacks. Having clarified as much, let me go on to say that if Schwarz's interpretive shoe of having been accused of being willfully vague or misleading fits, then he should wear it. Schwarz asserts by fiat that the Maroon link to the Riddell issue is of little or no importance, “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.” I beg to differ, and I also beg Schwarz to enlighten us all on these alleged reasons instead of
carefully adumbrating
them.

My comparison of the Nowinski/Schwarz relationship to that of the co-authors of the book
Freakonomics
“is incorrect, misleading and borderline offensive,” Schwarz says. “[T]hose two are collaborators and business partners, and make no bones about it. Your strong implication that Chris and I are either of those two things is something I recommend you correct.”

This is another great example of inflating a barb into a crime. The point of the
Freakonomics
analogy was not and is not that Levitt and Dubner are ethically challenged. It is that they reside in an echo chamber. This puts their egos in the foreground and their insights in the background. With or without Schwarz's permission, I will continue to worry publicly that he and Nowinski might be doing something similar.

Speaking of ego, all praise is due Schwarz for spurring the involvement of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. I rather doubt, however, that he's “killing” himself in the effort. Evidently
Times
reporters, like the rest of us, employ the occasional figure of speech.

By the same token, your humble blogger is proud to be the named respondent of the landmark United States Supreme Court case
Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick
, the latest step in a 17-year-long public-interest fight. So there, and onward.

30 May 2011..........

In the course of his whiny, egotistical, and largely fact-free email complaint, Alan Schwarz said that, as far as he knew, “your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. Even if that were an issue, which I know it is not for reasons of which you are totally unaware, you have some nerve casting the entire work that way.”

One striking aspect of this passage is that it raised the issue of Dr. Joseph Maroon in response to an item by me that itself did not mention him. Moreover — as anyone plugging the term “Alan Schwarz” into this blog's search engine can confirm — I never frontally criticized the
Times
for its Maroon coverage (as opposed to exhorting the
Times
and all media to pick up on my exposure of the fuller context of his work for the National Football League and World Wrestling Entertainment, and to connect it to the Riddell helmet investigation in a way that would make it, in my view, more meaningful).

Once again: I have not once ripped Schwarz for what he has ­written about Maroon.

On January 13, I wrote:

The
New York Times
' Alan Schwarz, whose investigative article last October on the unreliable work of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) helped spur Senator Udall's call to the FTC, reported that Maroon “disagreed with Riddell's marketing the 31 percent figure without acknowledging its limitations, and supported Udall's request for a formal scrutiny.”

Maroon told the
Times
, “That was the data that came out, but the authors of that study on multiple occasions have recommended further investigations, better controls and with larger numbers. If one is going to make statements relative to the paper we wrote, it should be with the limitations that we emphasized, and not extrapolated to studies that we suggest should be done and haven't been done yet.”

I went on to document that Riddell had been aggressively exploiting the Maroon-co-authored and NFL-funded study of its Revolution model since no later than July 2008, and wondered why neither the doctor nor the league had raised a peep about it before it became a federal case.

The piece also included this paragraph:

I asked the
Times
' Schwarz if he had sought elaboration from Dr. Maroon as to where, when, and to whom he had ever objected to Riddell's advertising claims exploiting his research. Schwarz declined comment.

After the article was posted, Schwarz emailed me: “Nicely done.”

On January 24, I emailed Schwarz, in part,
“On or off the record, your choice: do you intend to explore the Maroon/Riddell fault line? If not, why not? Any insights from your valuable perspective would be appreciated.”

Schwarz again declined comment — but not before first going out of his way to say that Dr. Maroon had been “obviously (and surprisingly) quite generous to me” in comments in a recently published
New Yorker
article, and to make sure that he, Schwarz, was satisfied that my “motives” in asking the question were pure.

Now that Schwarz's thin skin has been pierced and he is giving his crypto-assurance that Joe Maroon is a non-story, it's time to reemphasize that Maroon is not a good guy in the NFL concussion narrative and has not been for years. Why
didn't
Schwarz press Maroon on the history of his enabling of Riddell helmet hype, rather than allow the doctor to get away with a quote triangulating the FTC investigation and distancing himself from the company? Intuitively, this made no more sense than Maroon's parallel survival as a member of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee for years (up to the present) beyond the exposure of his and other league doctors' commercial conflicts of interest in Congressional hearings and in the media (some of them well-drawn stories by Schwarz himself).

This is not an attempt to brand a triviality into the main timeline. As the Pittsburgh Steelers' neurosurgeon, Maroon was on the front rank of the apologists and deniers when Dr. Bennet Omalu identified the breakthrough cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in Mike Webster and Terry Long. Is there a better word in the English language than “lie” for the statement by Maroon that Long's team medical file showed no concussions — a falsity chronicled by Chris Nowinski in his book
Head Games
? (After Maroon's categorical denial, Omalu produced a 1987 letter by Maroon about treating Long for a concussion.)

Any way you slice it, Schwarz's Mount Olympian dismissal of the very idea that Maroon might be more than a bit player in the national sports concussion scandal ignores a clear and chilling through-line. Maroon's and colleagues' articles for the journal
Neurosurgery
(whose editor-in-chief through much of the period was a New York Giants consultant) downplayed concussion syndrome, beat the drum for pseudo-objective neurocognitive testing in return-to-play standards, and were the direct antecedent of the current state-by-state campaign to put the costs of newfangled concussion management software on the backs of high school sports programs. (The runaway market leader in this field is the for-profit ImPACT system owned by Maroon and some of his University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues.)

The DNA of this whole process is evident again in Maroon's work for Riddell. That is why I argue that the federal government will solve nothing, and indeed will be aiding a whitewash, if it stops at a probe of the helmet industry.

Finally, if Alan Schwarz's “reasons” for treating Dr. Joseph Maroon with kid gloves in the pages of the
New York Times
cannot be articulated even though the reporter initiated a reference to them in an unsolicited communication, then I am not the only reader with “reasons” to question whether the reporter's impenetrable code here is a public service.

3 June 2011..........

In a January
New Yorker
article on the concussion crisis in football, writer Ben McGrath quoted Pittsburgh neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon speaking admiringly of Alan Schwarz, the
New York Times
reporter who created this beat and more recently was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Schwarz, said Dr. Maroon, is “the Socratic gadfly in this whole mix.”

Unlike Socrates, however, Schwarz asks questions that are carefully and corporately adumbrated. The resultant national spirit of cautious inquiry into a stunningly broad public health story is being driven by our Newspaper of Record. This process has the effect of protecting powerful and moneyed interests.

I don't think anyone from the Riddell helmet company is going to jail after Congress, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission are finished probing how the company ran hard and fast with ambiguous data from a safety study underwritten by the NFL. Nor do I think anyone should, based on what we so far know, despite the Purple Heart that Schwarz awarded himself last week in a bush league email complaint about my blog's coverage: “I kill myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem — and even conspiracy — in youth football, cause sweeping changes (some about to be announced) and investigations by the CPSC and the FTC …”

Schwarz, who used to write books analyzing baseball stats, is in his element when he verbally slaps around the leadership of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment. He is obviously less comfortable confronting figures like Dr. Maroon, a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers who remains, inexplicably, a quotable authority even though he is facemask-deep in the concussion scandal.

It would behoove the most celebrated concussion reporter in American journalism to press Maroon for better answers. Instead, Schwarz has allowed Maroon to distance himself from the NFL's Riddell helmet study, which the doctor co-authored with, among others, the company's chief engineer, and which Riddell then exploited in its promotion.

Ah, but Maroon is not an issue, Schwarz asserted to me — “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.” If that's true, then this titan of communications needs to do some more communicating.

One upshot of Schwarz's incomplete coverage is that ImPACT has been purchased by an estimated 10 to 15 percent of high school football programs across the country, often under the mandates of new state “safety” legislation. I believe that, rather than shifting the NFL's public health tab to already financially beleaguered school districts, we should be talking seriously, not as a throwaway line, about whether high school football is medically, legally, and educationally sustainable.

Somehow the
Times
has not seen fit to print the devastating critique of ImPACT by Christopher Randolph, a neurology professor at Loyola University Chicago's Stritch School of Medicine, in the journal
Current Sports Medicine Reports
. (Credit for first publicizing Randolph's work goes to Matt Chaney.)

Randolph wrote, “There is no evidence to suggest that the use of baseline testing alters any risk from sport-related concussion, nor is there even a good rationale as to how such tests might influence outcome.” He added that independent studies of ImPACT show a level of reliability “far too low to be useful for individual decision making.” In sum, youth sports programs using it are investing in a false sense of security.

And what, I ask Alan Schwarz and the
New York Times
, would Socrates have to say about
that
?

8 June 2011..........

No doubt some readers think I'm doing an excessive metaphorical tap dance on Dr. Joe Maroon. The same readers may also wish I'd call a halt to my proverbial soft shoe on Alan Schwarz of the
New York Times
, the baseball statistical nerd who, by his own modest account, “[killed] myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem — and even conspiracy — in youth football.” Maroon praises Schwarz in the
New Yorker
, Schwarz quotes Maroon uncritically in the
Times
, and Schwarz tells me flatly that Maroon is a not an issue in the larger national sports concussion scandal “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.”