Sports
Photo by bikesnotscott via Flickr
This morning’s edition of the New York Times features a story about the most recent study to connect playing time in the National Football League (NFL) with some forms of dementia. In it, reporter Alan Schwarz ledes with the very disturbing — for NFL vets, at least — point. “A study commissioned by the National Football League reports that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population — including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49,” he writes.
But it’s not until about halfway through the first electronic page that he gets to the operative portion of his coverage — a skeptical quote from Dr. Ira Casson, co-chair of the NFL’s committee on Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MBTI), also known as the Concussion Committee. “What I take from this report is there’s a need for further studies to see whether or not this finding is going to pan out, if it’s really there or not,” Casson tells Schwarz. “I can see that the respondents believe they have been diagnosed. But the next step is to determine whether that is so.” Granted, the study, performed by researchers at the University of Michigan, relied on over-the-phone interviews, a method its own authors seem to think of as less-than-ideal. And most of the third-party physicians that Schwarz interviewed seemed to think that nothing covered by UM represented a conclusive argument for or against the idea that playing professional football could be linked directly to brain injuries. But, this cold response from Casson — coupled with the NFL’s history of ducking the issue — seems to speak volumes. Indeed, even now — after having been pressured into contracting for an independent look at what happens when a football player’s head makes contact too many times with something hard, and confronted with a bit of negative evidence — the league keeps … punting on delivering any sort of significant response.
A move that continues to guarantee that there will be more Ted Johnsons. Johnson, whose picture was included in the Times‘ coverage but whose story (which had been nicely documented by Schwarz for the Times and the Boston Globe) was strangely absent, spent 10 years playing linebacker for the New England Patriots. “Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the past five Super Bowls before retiring in 2005,” wrote Schwarz in 2007. “Now, he says, he forgets people’s names, misses appointments and, because of an addiction to amphetamines, can become so terrified of the outside world that he locks himself alone inside his Boston apartment, in bed with the blinds drawn for days at a time.” At the time, Johnson was just 34.
Schwarz goes on to detail the grim turn in Johnson’s life, where depression and serious cognitive problems seem to have lead to a dependence on the amphetamine Adderall — a prescription for which Johnson was abusing at, writes Schwarz, a rate of “two to three times the dosage authorized by his doctors.” When the drugs ran out, Johnson would shut “himself inside his downtown apartment for days and [communicate] with no one until a new prescription [became] available.”
When the notoriously media-shy (-savvy?) Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick, and team trainer, Jim Whalen — who Johnson accused of allowing him to return to play after suffering multiple concussions — refused to comment for Schwarz’ story, it wasn’t exactly a shock. And when, two months after Schwarz’ piece was published, the NFL finally claimed that it would — as ESPN put it — “retool” its approach to concussions, the action also seemed to fall in line with what could have been a compassionate (not to mention logical) response.
But now, faced with an opportunity to make some changes that could positively impact what will be the already-creaky physical lives of future players, the NFL seems unready, unwilling, and unable to make that call. This should come as a shock. Unfortunately for Johnson and his like-suffering retirees, it doesn’t.
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