Concussion Inc. (31 page)

The
San Francisco Chronicle
's Scott Ostler quoted Howie Long, the Raiders' Hall of Famer who is now a television analyst, about the time he failed to get his grandmother, who had cancer, into the right hospital in Boston for treatment — until he enlisted Davis, who called back “20 minutes later” to say he'd secured the bed.

Yeah, right, not a second more than 1,200. The story recited house history about how everyone considered “a true Raider” had Davis's “absolute loyalty.” Apparently Dave Pear, a member of the 1980 Raiders Super Bowl champions who now leads the community of retired players who were screwed by the National Football League's penurious pension and disability plan, didn't make the cut.

(Of course, the Raiders hardly enjoy a Bay Area monopoly on pro football executive callous. The 49ers never paid one dime of the seven-figure medical bills of George Visger, a member of the 1981 champs who had emergency brain surgery shortly after the Super Bowl, followed by dozens of other operations and ongoing health issues in the decades since.)

In 1995, as the Raiders prepared to play their first game back here after a 13-year absence, my then second-grade son and I were at a barbecue at the home of a school friend in another part of Berkeley. All the other adults, perhaps half of whom were career civil servants in the governments of Berkeley and the neighboring Oakland, were uniformly enthusiastic about the return of the NFL. My contribution to cocktail chatter was an observation that taxpayers of a beleaguered city shouldn't be in the business of subsidizing a football team. I might as well have been advocating the abolition of rent control and the quadrupling of DMV fees.

Three years later, I took both my young sons to Jon Gruden's first home game as the Raiders' coach. The walk-up ticket windows were woefully understaffed, and as we waited in the single long line we could hear the roar of the crowd reacting to Napoleon Kaufman's long touchdown run on the first play from scrimmage. By the time we were settled in our seats, the first quarter was over. The crowd's notorious rowdiness further ensured that it would be the last pro football game I have attended in person.

As is well known, the Raiders broke the hearts of their Northern California fans by moving to the Los Angeles Coliseum (and registering the most recent of their three Super Bowl wins while there), and at the time of his death Davis was still claiming territorial rights in the Southland for an actual or threatened second exodus. Sportswriters and columnists respectfully emphasized his persona as the Tiresias of the gridiron, but were not nearly as diligent in noting that he was arguably the biggest civic thief in East Bay history.

The “improvements” to the Oakland Coliseum to get Davis to reverse his original jilting turned a multi-purpose stadium already suffering from a deficit in baseball atmosphere into a rock-bottom mausoleum. The city and Alameda County got fleeced to the tune of scores of millions, a corporate and individual-income base in no position to support it faced one of the pioneering models of the scam now familiarly known as PSLs (“personal seat licenses”). Enough low-lives, however, regularly dug deep enough for individual game tickets to lower the quality of the Raider fan experience, both in the parking lot and inside the stadium (though not enough to prevent one of the NFL's lowest rates of home sellouts, and thus highest rates of local TV blackouts of games).

For all this on-again, off-again pseudo-fealty, Davis and his Raiders sold the myth that their franchise was some kind of community treasure.

Davis, who owned a mansion in Piedmont, died of “undisclosed causes” at his home of late, “a hotel near the Oakland airport,” the
Chronicle
said. Tom FitzGerald, the lead byline on the obit, told me, “I agree readers would like to know the cause of death. If we get anything on that, we'll report it. But, as you know, the Raiders are a very secretive organization. I'm not holding my breath that they will disclose that information.”

29 March 2012..........

Thursday is a big day for George Visger, author of our ebook
Out of My Head: My Life In and Out of Football
.

First, he and his old San Francisco 49ers teammate Dan Bunz will be honored on the floor of the California State Senate. After the Senate votes on a concurrent resolution proclaiming March “Brain Injury Awareness Month,” Visger and Bunz will be presented certificates of recognition by Senator Ted Gaines of Sacramento.

Then George heads straight to his home-away-from-home, the Hyperbaric Oxygen Clinic of Sacramento, for one of the treatments he credits for his recent improvements in memory and general cognition. While inside the oxygen chamber, Visger will be interviewed by Vernon Glenn of KRON4 News in San Francisco.

The entire crack staff of ConcussionInc.Net LLP is proud of George Visger.

17 December 2012..........

Last week I drove up to Sacramento for dinner with my friend and ebook author, the unsinkable George Visger. I was supposed to meet him at 7 p.m. at the Hyperbaric Oxygen Clinic near the UC Davis Medical Center. George is basically sleeping on the floor of the clinic these days while he tries, again, to get back on his feet financially. His last contract as a wildlife biology consultant on a construction project ended in February, which was also the last time I saw him in person.

Another friend of mine, Patrick Hruby, has a big text-and-video package on Visger coming out next month at ESPN.com. Hruby understands how emblematic George's dire straits are of a generation of brain-wounded National Football League veterans. Patrick is a brilliant writer with a wonderful human touch, and I can't wait to read and view what he produced.

But I'm also here to tell you that Visger is not in despair. Even in a hyperbaric chamber, his relentless sense of humor leaves no oxygen for self-pity.

When I made plans to drive to Sacto, I asked George whether I should bring in some Popeye's Chicken, or if he had a key to the clinic and in-and-out capability.

He emailed back: “They actually let me out of the clinic on occasion, as long I'm with a responsible adult so I won't wander off. Can you bring one?”

But when I arrived, guess what? There was no George, nor any response to my texts and voicemails. Fortunately, the clinic's co-owner and manager, Mike Greenhalgh — who lives right next door — was still inside with another patient, and we hung out and traded notes on the latest concussion developments. Eventually George called. He had been visiting with his indestructible 5-foot-1, 89-year-old Lebanese mother, “Big Rita,” and his phone had frozen. Despite a mess of yellow Post-It notes and memory notebook entries, our dinner engagement had slipped his agile mind. No harm, no foul.

Over dinner, Visger told me about the progress he's making with his brain-injury awareness message. He's an engaging and charismatic public speaker — all defensive lineman's shrunken hulk, combined with those kinetic Mediterranean gesticulations and eyebrows — and he is in demand for conferences and school groups. Some even pay honoraria, which in his rent-free condition will help build a bridge back to a normal family life until he lands a new consulting gig. Right now, his wife, Kristi, and their two kids at home, Jack and Amanda, are making a ridiculous 90-minute commute every day from the in-laws' in Sacramento to their school and sports in Grass Valley.

Our dinner wasn't all business. I described for George my eight-year-old daughter's Chinese dance performance at the Richmond Senior Center. In turn, he related the story of how, shortly after meeting Kristi, he got instantly “harpooned” by Stefani, her then two-year-old, blue-eyed, blonde-haired daughter.

At that point I could have busted George's chops by reminding him that he'd told me that anecdote a dozen times already.
Check your goddamn Post-It notes, Visger!
But why bother? It's still a great story in every retelling.

Driving back home late that night, I started thinking about all the George Visgers out there: ex-NFLers, some stars, many more journeymen, who are disabled far too young, in ways small or large, and whose resourcefulness and support networks vary widely. And an idea formed for something I'd first pondered more than a year earlier. After a story on this blog about a retired player in distress (not Visger), a reader began underwriting monthly shipments of high-end Omega-3 supplements to the player. Many believe fish oils hold hope for reversing brain decay and sharpening mental acuity. The reader-donor insisted on anonymity; all he requested was that the recipient report back to him periodically on his progress.

The larger idea goes like this. We all know the ultimate political and legal solutions for the plight of NFL veterans lie in the future. As a nation, we haven't gotten our arms around this football problem; hell, we can't even get our arms around the assault-rifle ­problem. It appears that future benefits for damaged professionals will be resolved in some combination of collective bargaining and litigation. Meanwhile, reducing the national mental-health toll on what are now the millions of American male youths whose parents foolishly launch them into Pop Warner and high school football lies even further on the horizon.

But that doesn't mean the United States of Football — to borrow the title of Sean Pamphilon's new documentary — can't take some interim humanitarian steps. By the US of F, I mean Fan Nation: the millions of NFL spectators who every week blithely shell out $20 for parking and $12 for stadium beer, or whatever the traffic will bear these days, not to mention the price of tickets and premium cable packages. The entertainment they … we … derive from watching men destroy each other's brains is a guilty pleasure, and it's an increasingly
conscious
guilty pleasure.

So I think it's time for fans, whether on an organized or an ad hoc basis, to take action on behalf of taking care of their fallen former heroes. They can start by imposing a simple self-tax — the price of one lousy six-pack a month at a tailgate party, for example. Pooled and well distributed, these funds would offer substantial collective relief for the scattered and isolated men and their families throughout the land who, like the ex-player cited above, could use an over-the-counter mental aid, or just some food or rent money. Perhaps the new so-called fan lobbies, League of Fans (leagueoffans.org) and Sports Fans Coalition (sportsfans.org) — which so far are concentrating on issues like public stadium subsidies and TV blackout rules — could step up to coordinate these efforts.

Just a little something to reflect on at the cusp of Week 16, the college bowl season, the NFL playoffs, and Beyoncé's halftime show on February 3, 2013.

A happy holiday season to all.

8 February 2013..........

Two years ago the Concussion Inc. ebook imprint published a kind of
Reader's Digest
autobiography by George Visger. Today ESPN.com published a long profile of Visger by Patrick Hruby, one of the country's most brilliant writers on sports or anything else.
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Hruby has it all: Visger's bone-crunching ethos; his full medical history; the battles with football authorities — including the supposedly irreproachable Bill Walsh — over being made whole for his sport-induced brain injuries; how it all fits into the chronic traumatic encephalopathy research of Dr. Bennet Omalu; and, most painfully, the toll on Visger's marriage with his wife, Kristi, who has had to protect herself and their children from a gentle giant who can fly into rages, even though they have never had an estrangement of the heart.

I did not pretend that George's ebook short was anything like a comprehensive account of his life story, which can turn so abruptly from warm to chilling. Hruby's article shows that the Kristi aspect might be the most telling omission, both in terms of personal pain and in terms of illustrating the range and fallout of Visger's challenged memory.

Last January, as we were going to press, George called me to make sure the ebook hadn't neglected to document his deep debt to Kristi and his relentless campaign to make things right for her and their family. I assured George that we had indeed included this note:

The stress on Kristi from living with me — not knowing who was coming home from one day to the next — blew us apart. Kristi once told me she hates what football has done to her life. Others tell me I had ­anger-management problems and scared my own family. The thought of this absolutely kills me, and I am determined to win Kristi's trust again. As I write this, Kristi and the kids are with her parents, and I'm at Motel 6 the few days I am not on the road working as an environmental inspector and biologist.

..........

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“The Damage Done,”
es.pn/12z0kbJ
.

THE MICHAEL VICK AND KRIS DIELMAN FOLLIES

19 September 2011..........

Al Michaels, Chris Collinsorth, and everyone involved in the production of last night's NBC telecast of the Philadelphia Eagles–Atlanta Falcons game have to be questioning their professional pride today — if they have any.

Michael Vick got blown up and clearly suffered a concussion. Michaels and Collinsworth babbled about a “neck injury.” Ace sideline reporter Michele “Scoops” Tafoya told scores of millions of viewers that Vick was spitting up blood because he “bit his tongue.” And as Vick departed for the locker room — with no visible support for his “neck injury,” by the way — the network completely whiffed on the prime-time opportunity to educate its audience on the use of the new, supposedly John Madden–inspired, edict to remove concussed players to a quiet space.

What a disgrace.

20 September 2011..........

What becomes most clear from a quick survey of the coverage of Michael Vick's concussion in Sunday night's nationally televised game is that sports journalists have little interest in reflecting on the world beyond sports. The most common thread of sociological insight by the boys in the green eyeshades is the relation between football and
fantasy football
— the internet-facilitated game-within-the-game by which fans build teams with the interchangeable parts of athletes' statistics. In the process, they “objectify” jocks, in the words of the sternest commentators. This we are supposed to take as a bad thing.

The lesson, however, does not extend to projecting the NFL's allegedly changed culture on concussion management to a broader understanding of public health.

Last September, when a Fox telecast showed Philadelphia linebacker Stewart Bradley wobbling from a concussion but going back into the game,
New York Times
concussion writer Alan Schwarz excoriated the NFL's unenforced return-to-play protocols in a news analysis.

But the problem then was the league, not how we all perceived the league. This September,
Schwarz is no longer writing about traumatic brain injuries. And today's
Times
story from Philadelphia, by Mark Viera, is football-centric: “As Fans Fret, Eagles Assess Vick's Injury.”

At the thinking fan's forum, the Slate-Deadspin NFL Roundtable, Josh Levin tried and failed to engage Barry Petchesky.
1
Levin began with some pointed comments on the essential un-governability of football's violence:

Roger Goodell has futzed with the league's rulebook in an attempt to ratchet down the game's most-­frightening-looking injuries: hits to the quarterback's head, kill shots on defenseless receivers, blows to kamikaze ­special-teamers. Vick's concussion, caused when an Atlanta Falcon knocked the quarterback backward into his beefy Eagles offensive lineman Todd Herremans, reveals the limitations of this exercise. For the NFL, this was the worst kind of head injury — one it's impossible to spin as a consequence of rule-breaking.

Levin then asked Petchesky whether he agreed “with the
Concussion Blog
's Dustin Fink that NBC was spinning for the NFL in saying that the obviously woozy Vick had a ‘neck injury.'”

Petchesky didn't bite. He dismissed NBC's inaccurate reporting as football “gamesmanship, the equivalent of saying a hockey player has an ‘upper body injury' to avoid putting a target on a guy who might return to the game.” That Vick didn't return proved the NFL guidelines “worked to perfection.”

21 September 2011..........

After dropping off my son at UCLA last week, I took the 101 back north. In Westlake Village, at the tip of Los Angeles County, I passed by the Oaks Christian School, the football factory that has attracted the sons of jockocratic celebrities, including Will Smith and Joe Montana. Soon I was driving through the Ventura County city of Oxnard, which I used to know mostly from the references to it by James Garner's dad on
The Rockford Files
.

Today, Oxnard is on the map as yet another grim capital of the skyrocketing youth disability and death wrought by our culture's insane obsession with football.

Last Friday, Adrian Padilla, a safety for the Oxnard High School team, suffered a serious concussion in the game at San Luis Obispo. After walking off the field, he collapsed on the sidelines. Padilla, 17, underwent emergency brain surgery at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, where he remains in critical condition.

A week earlier, at the opening game at Sacramento's John F. Kennedy High School, tight end Reginald Wilson “went up for a pass, was hit in the back, and then hit his head on the ground. Paramedics took him to the hospital and he stayed through the weekend,” reports Hugh Biggar of the
Sacramento News & Review
. Coach Chris Palumbo told Biggar that Wilson “lost feeling in his legs and had memory loss,” but is making a “remarkable recovery” and will soon return to school.

The day before the Sacramento incident, 17-year-old Kainen Boring sustained a traumatic brain injury from a helmet-to-helmet collision on the practice field of Bledsoe County High School in Tennessee. He was declared brain-dead a week later, and on Sunday his family took him off life support.

Young Boring's “personal trainer,” Houston Thomas, told the media, “They said it was a perfect form tackle. But for whatever reason it made just a freak accident.”

At last word, a second high school player in Tennessee, Tucker Montgomery, still lay in a coma.

Unless I've lost count of the necrology maintained by author/­blogger Matt Chaney, there are already 14 American football fatalities this year, including 13 kids, three of them from athletic collisions. (The other head-trauma victim was a college player, 22-year-old Derek Sheely. Most of this year's deaths seem to be heat- or heart-related, not from contact, though the disclaimer is hardly reassuring about the overall phenomenon.)

On this Sunday's NBC prime-time football game, the lions and the Christians forged on. America's poster child for glory, demonizing, and redemption, Michael Vick, got concussed in front of 24 million viewers. Announcers Al Michaels, Chris Collinsworth, and Michele Tafoya blabbed misleadingly about a “neck injury” and how Vick was spitting up blood because he “bit his tongue.” Even when the trainer for Vick's Philadelphia Eagles did the right thing and led him to the locker room, per new National Football League protocols, the opportunity to speak the truth about traumatic brain injuries was lost.

In half a century of watching televised sports, this may have been the most disgraceful display by commentators I have ever seen. And that's saying a lot, since I was also in front of the tube when the same NBC wildly speculated as to the identity of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bomber, which fueled a witch-hunt of a wrongfully accused man.

By Monday morning, all was back to normal for the NFL and its fans … sort of. For those who have Vick on their fantasy league teams, the main question was whether he would be good to go
next
Sunday.

25 September 2011..........

In two emails yesterday to the media relations staff, I asked the Philadelphia Eagles the identity of the “independent neurologist” who cleared Michael Vick to play today. I later forwarded the message to their counterparts at the National Football League office.

There has been no response.

The NFL's return-to-play protocols following concussions, which were promulgated in 2009, state that a player “should not be considered for return-to-football activities until he is fully asymptomatic, both at rest and after exertion, has a normal neurological examination, normal neuropsychological testing, and has been cleared to return by both his team physician(s) and the independent neurological consultant.”

This morning's
Philadelphia Inquirer
does not name the “independent neurologist” on the Vick case. Nor does anyone else appear to have done this. The
Inquirer
does quote Vernon Williams, medical director of the Kerlan-Jobe Center for Sports Neurology in Los Angeles, saying, “There is some evidence — and this isn't completely worked out — of what we call injury-induced vulnerability. Once the brain has been concussed, in many people it is easier for them to suffer a second concussion.” Williams adds, “As you increase physical exertion and demand on the brain and body there's a risk you have in a return of symptoms. Think about the differences in your exertion level, your adrenaline between practice and a game — there's a pretty significant difference there.”
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Chris Nowinski, of the Sports Legacy Institute and Boston University's Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, continues his rhetorical tiptoe through the tulips, saying some of the right things while coming off more like an NFL bureaucrat than an independent public health advocate. Nowinski told
Newsday
he would have been happier to see Vick “err on the side of caution” and not play. According to
Newsday
, “Nowinski thinks the NFL is doing ‘a much better job' of determining when it's safe to play. But as the NFL notes in its policy, a critical element of managing concussions is ‘candid reporting of players of their symptoms.'”

My interpretation here is that Nowinski's overarching theme from the Vick controversy is the league's potential liability for a player's disability or death. And such liability is mitigated by the double-­reverse protocols of consulting an unnamed “independent neurologist.” The NFL is further protected if Vick did not “candidly report” his symptoms.

I would much rather have seen Nowinski say something on behalf of the millions of people who will watch today's Eagles–New York Giants game, and the millions of families of youth football players who are being misled by the opaque baloney at the NFLHealthandSafety.com website. Some of that nonsense spews from Dr. Joseph Maroon, neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers and medical director for World Wrestling Entertainment; Maroon's University of Pittsburgh Medical Center was involved in the review of Vick's neurocognitive tests, according to ESPN's Sal Paolantonio.

If Nowinski anywhere has joined me in calling for public disclosure of Vick's “independent neurologist,” I missed it.

26 September 2011..........

One of the wisest observers of the Michael Vick scenario is a coach and trainer named Sal Marinello. Though not well known to readers of this blog, he is a fine example of what I call the fatalistic wing of the concussion debate — honorable sports industry professionals who don't deny the magnitude of traumatic brain injury but who, in my view, need a nudge toward recognizing that their fatalism is neither pragmatic nor acceptable when it comes to tackle football funded and promoted by, for example, public high schools.

Marinello's credentials include USA Weightlifting certified coach; president of the Millburn-Short Hills (New Jersey) Athletic Club; assistant men's basketball coach at Montclair State University; and head athletic development coach for both Mercy College (New York) men's lacrosse and Chatham (New Jersey) High School.

Here's his take, via email, on Vick: “Despite the post-game comments, anyone who watched the Eagle game could see that a) Vick certainly was not OK and b) the Eagle game plan reflected this. He also took several shots to the head that seemed to affect him. Since he broke his hand and will be out three to four weeks, he will get the ‘rest' he needs.”

More important, there's a longer essay on Marinello's blog entitled “There Is No Such Thing as Safer Football”; the money paragraph:

Tobacco will never be outlawed, and neither will football. Education has resulted in fewer people smoking, and the attention paid to the risks and dangers will probably have the same effect on football. Will fewer kids play? Probably. Is this a bad thing? Probably not, and for a variety of reasons.
3

You have to appreciate Sal's candor — three days after he posted this piece, his own son broke his arm playing football.

But you also have to wonder whether he's asking the right question. Sure, tobacco will never be outlawed. But do high school recreation centers include cigarette vending machines? (Sal disagrees with my analogy. He retorts, “What would you say when parents and residents of a town do not complain about having — or want — the machine in the school? This scenario more aptly describes the current situation.”)

Another smart observer in the fatalistic camp is Buzz Bissinger, author of
Friday Night Lights
. I am not trying to put words in Bissinger's mouth, but my sense is that — like Marinello and unlike, for example, Alan Schwarz, Chris Nowinski, and Dr. Robert Cantu — Bissinger isn't searching for an imaginary sweet spot in football safety. Though he recognizes that the game can be improved around the margins, he also understands that its blood sport essence is athletically unalterable.