Concussion Inc. Read online

  TO JIM LEESON, 1930–2010

  Reporter, Associated Press.

  Director, Race Relations Information Center.

  Mentor.

  Friend.

  INTRODUCTION

  In the summer of 2011, I changed the name of my blog from Wrestling Babylon to Concussion Inc. This reflected the latest tweak of an oeuvre whose continuous thread is: if pro wrestling is as fake as everyone says, then what are we supposed to make of the rest of the world, which never ceases to imitate it? Epistemological angels have danced on the heads of thinner pins.

  Wrestling Babylon was also the title of my too-long-­marinating collection of articles for mostly mainstream publications about behind­-the-scenes maneuvering and scandal in an industry that graduated in the 1980s from territorial mafia to international brand, thanks to the emergence of cable TV; a burst of rampant, made-in-America ­deregulation; and late-empire cultural devolution. The latter was the stuff of Edward Gibbon. Turns out that global hegemony isn’t as easy on the old collective psyche as it looks.

  A few people, some of them wearing thick eyeglasses, took my thesis as seriously as I did. Vince McMahon watched (or directed) his wife, Linda, in two wildly expensive and unsuccessful runs for a United States Senate seat from Connecticut. For presidential aspirants, a skit on Raw became as obligatory as televised debates. And one of the most quoted gurus on the newly risen issue of traumatic brain injury in sports — as well as one of the most successful profiteers therefrom — was the medical director of WWE.

  In short, Concussion Inc. was the right cliché at the right time. You’ve heard of Fast Food Nation, Steroid Nation, Murder Inc.? (Plus, perhaps, the Green Day rock album and Broadway operetta American Idiot?) Concussion Inc. became a nod to the notion first formulated in Horse Feathers by Groucho Marx, who longed for the Huxley College football team to finally get a school it could be proud of. Not since the surgeon general’s report on the dangers of cigarette smoking in 1964 had American corporatocracy found a public health crisis so worthy of its capacity to equivocate, rationalize, delay, and deny.

  As I confessed in the revised introduction to my second book, Chris & Nancy: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, I gave too much weight to drug abuse and too little to concussion syndrome, in the immediate postmortem of that tragedy. By the time Chris Benoit committed his heinous crimes in 2007, Dr. ­Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born forensic pathologist who had the fatal flaw of being beholden to no old boys’ network, already had begun finding accumulations of tau protein in his brain autopsies of prematurely dead Pittsburgh Steelers. Omalu labeled as “chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” or CTE, the associated phenomenon of depression, loss of impulse control, and dementia, which was consistent with similar findings of early neurocognitive decline in boxers going back to the 1920s.

  Omalu’s Benoit study, released three months after the horrific incident in Georgia in 2007, was the first under the auspices of the Sports Legacy Institute. That group was started by Chris Nowinski, proud holder of the American elite trifecta: Harvard education, WWE superstardom, traumatic brain-injury author-activist.

  From there, things only got better — or worse, depending on your perspective — in the person of Dr. Joseph Maroon, a neurosurgeon whose patient list spanned all the way from the Saudi royal family to wrestling legend Bruno Sammartino. Maroon was an aging anti-aging huckster whose University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues, at minimum, were linked to the steroid and human growth hormone use of the six-time Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers — a team paid by its doctors for the right to advertise themselves as its official sports-medicine practitioners.

  Maroon lied about the back story of Steeler Terry Long’s suicide. Maroon lied about his and WWE’s access to Omalu’s Chris Benoit brain study. Maroon and his co-physician entrepreneurs in the Steel City (where health care was the main post-industrial employment growth center) played fast and loose with facts on the efficacy and standards of their ImPACT “concussion management system,” which one state’s laws after another’s gradually foisted on public high school football programs in order to appear to be doing something … anything … to counteract the systematic braining of young American males. Maroon fudged his relationship with a helmet manufacturers’ borderline-fraudulent study — the latest in the serial scientific book-cooking in which he engaged for more than a decade as a member of the National Football League’s head-injury advisory committee.

  Joe Maroon was the white coat who put the Inc. in Concussion Inc.

  As my rebranded blog took off, many readers tried to cast me as some sort of concussion cop, but that was never my purpose. Wisely or not, I even somewhat resisted the temptation to expand my scope into sports other than football, and especially into female athletes (even though there is credible evidence that comparatively innocuous actions like soccer heading are also quite dangerous, and that girls and women are more susceptible to concussions than boys and men). All along, I wanted to stick to two basic points:

  Like boxing — and unlike soccer, cheerleading, and ­overly vigorous tooth-flossing — football is uniquely and even intentionally a blood sport. Traumatic brain injury is not incidental but central. Further, the NFL is a $10-billion-a-year industry with a footprint on our culture that long ago passed beyond “out of control.” On the 1 to 11 scale of the guitarist’s amp in This Is Spinal Tap, football is a 12.

  Purported corrective measures should be viewed with deep suspicion. The alignment of the money forces makes it far likelier that “solutions” are self-serving cottage industries rather than of genuine public health net benefit.

  By no means do I claim to be on the ground floor of any of these insights. Robert Lipsyte, whose keyboard I can’t even carry, was on to the trap of what he dubbed “SportsWorld” decades ago. Matt Chaney, a little-known author in Missouri, has exhaustively documented the cycles of death and hocus-pocus safety measures in American football; his research gives much of the credit for this persistent national delusion to the successive rise of, first, rotogravure Sunday newspaper magazines, then radio and television. By comparison, your humble blogger was and is a sociological bottom feeder — a mere investigative reporter/social critic with perspectives not found much elsewhere.

  No, ground floor was Chris Nowinski. Ground floor was Alan Schwarz of the New York Times. Compelled, like a ball-hawking free safety, to the infliction of equal-opportunity offense, I’ve alternated praise and criticism of those two worthies: praise of their prescience and basic accuracy; criticism of the Nowinski group’s ill-advised decision to accept a $1 million NFL grant and of Schwarz’s naive reporting of developments flowing from the NFL’s new and responsible age of “concussion awareness.” (In the fall of 2013, Nowinski reprised the whole process with his old employer, WWE — trading a seven-figure research grant commitment for a Sports Legacy Institute award for corporate responsibility. The honor is known, inappropriately enough, as the “Impact” award.)

  With respect to Nowinski in particular, I do appreciate that he has a more intense relationship with the football industry than I do, that he is more emotionally invested in the goal of “saving the sport from itself” than I’ll ever be, and that he works on the front lines — with professional players and with the star-struck kids and parents for whom the pros are the most wobbly of role models.

  In the end, the Concussion Inc. blog has been whatever it is. Sensing saturation, I largely moved on to the under-covered scandals of sexual abuse in American club swimming — a subject my collaborator Tim Joyce and I find we have all too much to ourselves. And hey, if I wake up on a Sunday morning determined to wax rhapsodic about Norah
Jones’s “Chasing Pirates” or the St. Louis Cardinals’ fire-balling relief pitcher, Trevor Rosenthal (whom I’ve dubbed “the Ashkenazi Express” on Twitter, much to the cringe-inducement of my kids) … well, what is the management of ConcussionInc.Net LLP supposed to do about it? Threaten to pay me less than nothing? (Readers of this book should know that neither Norah nor Trevor will be found otherwise herein.)

  I hope the format of this book gets across, at the very least, my disinterest in journalistic convention. I organized the content of my daily noodlings into topics. Sometimes I kept original columns intact. Sometimes I cheated, by adapting and rearranging verbiage from multiple posts, in the hope of clarifying what is a retrospective reading experience with an open ending. Continuity or reader conning? You tell me.

  No jokes, please, about whether the result is evidence of the author’s own early onset dementia. If this modest volume contributes to the documentation of our strange times — when bread and circuses rule, and societal mental health is an afterthought — I’ll be a little happier and a little less dependent on Obamacare.

  Irvin Muchnick

  Berkeley, California

  THE UNITED STATES OF FOOTBALL

  22 September 2013..........

  Sean Pamphilon, a one-time ESPN production assistant who has risen to the ranks of elite sports documentary filmmakers, has produced the very best movie on the football concussion crisis, The United States of Football. Though not accessible everywhere, it has about as wide a release as is possible for any nonfiction film not directed by Michael Moore.

  Whatever you do, go see USOF.

  As someone who’s not paid well enough to hide his natural cantankerousness, I’ll be discussing below my disappointment that Pamphilon made the movie he could readily get lots of people to pay to watch, rather than the one I would have made were I as brilliant at this medium as he is. Read on for one person’s critique, but at the same time, pay no attention to the grump behind the screen.

  I also am proud to call Sean a friend, so let’s get the narcissistic part of this review out of the way first.

  For reasons that must have cost his poor parents thousands of dollars in fees to child psychologists, Pamphilon was bound and determined to include my voice in USOF. In order to fulfill that promise, he had to go out of his way to interview me at the end of a trip to the Bay Area to visit a dying relative. All kidding aside, I am grateful and humbled to be juxtaposed in this work with assorted journalistic betters in two spots.

  One clip has me sourly pointing out that the National Football League’s underwriting of federal research on traumatic brain injury is equivalent to the Tobacco Institute’s drafting of a report by the surgeon general.

  In the other one, I verbally bodyslam Dr. Joe “ImPACT” Maroon of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the NFL coterie of book-cooking scientific researchers, and, of course, World Wrestling Entertainment.

  (Not for the first time, I’m struck by how the real WWE reveals more about the way the world works than the fake NFL does. USOF also has on camera Pittsburgh radio commentator Mark Madden, who boasts wrestling industry broadcast roots — along with, obviously, Chris Nowinski, the Harvard football player turned WWE performer whose investigations into his own bout with concussions permanently changed the national narrative of this issue.)

  If there’s too much Muchnick for everyone else’s taste, there’s too much Bob Costas for mine. This is not directly a knock on Costas (also an acquaintance verging on friend) — for only a fool could fail to acknow­ledge that he is the best we have, maybe even a little too sharp for sports. The setup in which Costas asks the unanswerable question — “What can a football official responsibly tell a parent about the safety of football?” — is perfect.

  Costas with a pitchfork, however, becomes a mere rhetorical Houdini, a little too fuzzy for full-blown social criticism. Pamphilon isn’t Ken Burns (thankfully), and this film doesn’t need the imprimatur and homilies of the most recognized face in network sports. When Costas rips ESPN for its now-defunct violence-pandering football segment “You Got Jacked Up!” I feel the same as when he pontificates about the failure of CBS’s Masters coverage to probe the controversy over the racist Augusta National Golf Club. Personally, what I want to see is whether Costas, who hobnobs with swimming’s biggest stars and anchors NBC’s Olympics package, will ever use his platform for a word or three about the national disgrace that is USA Swimming’s generation-long widespread youth sexual abuse and cover-up, now the subject of Congressional and FBI investigations.

  (Yes, your reviewer is a free-range curmudgeon. Again, the bosses at ConcussionInc.Net LLP don’t pay me well enough to be otherwise.)

  Though “You Got Jacked Up!” was indefensible, USOF is, if anything, too restrained in its depiction of football porn. The movie presents only one monster hit featured on that segment, with associated cackles and guffaws by Chris Berman, Tom Jackson, and the other ESPN frat boys. I believe an extended montage would have reinforced the point more powerfully than the clucking Costas and other talking heads.

  In the same vein, Pamphilon’s hour-and-40-minute feature should have had more than a polite once-over-lightly on all the big hits orchestrated across the “United States of football” every single day, by vicariously bloodthirsty peewee coaches whose orders are dutifully and routinely carried out, pipsqueak on pipsqueak. This is what I mean about Pamphilon not making the same film I would have ordered off the shelf.

  Then again, that wasn’t this director’s vision. His is a frankly NFL-centric story, with a Band of Brothers frame, and it was executed sincerely and beautifully. There’s no doubting the bond between Pamphilon and retired player Kyle Turley, whose life’s second act as a musician provides the soundtrack, even as his activism against the NFL’s default on traumatic brain injuries lurches toward a complex moral.

  Always fighting, on the field and off, Turley is inspiring and tragic. But for my money, the male star of the movie is Sean Morey, the ­special-teams kamikaze whose frightening post-career loss of impulse control, accompanied by ritual denial, plays out in real time on the screen in painful, emotionally naked scenes with his wife. Successive footage shows Morey pushing the NFL Players Association toward honest research of concussion syndrome and fair play for its victims; censoring himself under pressure from the powers that be at a Super Bowl week press conference; and ultimately quitting in disgust the very committee he had co-founded to bring transparency and justice to this ongoing problem.

  This is heartbreaking stuff, yet it’s equaled and surpassed in scenes involving the two female stars of the film: Eleanor Perfetto and Sylvia Mackey, the “living widows” of, respectively, chronic traumatic encephalopathy–impaired Ralph Wenzel and Hall of Famer John Mackey. (Both women became actual widows during the shooting of the movie.) Here’s where Pamphilon’s camera is indeed unsparing, as he shows us legends in wheelchairs far too young, drooling, heads at grotesque angles, unable to feed themselves. Clearly, he made the cinematic decision that this particular brand of pornography was more important to exploit than the by now overly familiar video of 100 G-force collisions. And he may well be right about that.

  As America cruises through yet another season of football carnage — death, catastrophic injury, silent and inexorable erosion of the gross national cognitive product, all in the name of mass entertainment at the supposed national hearth — what matters most is not whether filmmakers as talented and passionate as Pamphilon make my movies or their own. No, let me correct that: it is essential that they make only their own. Phenomena like the systematic braining of boys and the systematic raping of girls — both byproducts of our obsessive and professionalized sports culture — take hold and persist precisely because we’re spectators, consumers, looking over our shoulders at what other people are saying, rather than using our own eyes and ears and other senses, and thinking and speaking for ourselves.
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  Let a hundred USOFs bloom. Then let’s roll up our sleeves and do something about what this sport is doing to us, and what we are doing to ourselves.

  SANTA CLARA SYMPOSIUM ON SPORTS LAW AND ETHICS

  12 August 2011..........

  And now for a heartwarming anecdote from last weekend’s Pro Football Hall of Fame festivities that you probably don’t know: the executive director of the National Football League Players Association, DeMaurice Smith, crashed the dinner in Canton, Ohio, which is traditionally reserved for Hall of Famers and new inductees, and started to speak. According to NFL legend Joe DeLamielleure, blogging for Dave Pear’s Independent Football Veterans, around a dozen guys walked out in the middle of Smith’s remarks.

  The NFLPA chief “had no idea that this audience consisted ­mostly of pre-1993 players,” said DeLamielleure, who estimated that the Hall of Famers in attendance included around 40 guys who receive monthly pension checks of exactly $176 from the $9-billion-a-year NFL. Confronted by the retirees, Smith said the “legacy fund” negotiated in the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) would increase them to between $1,000 and $1,500 a month.

  But here’s the thing, football fans: a lot of NFL veterans, for good reason, don’t trust the NFLPA to negotiate on their behalf and honorably administer the new centimillion-dollar legacy fund.

  After a group of the richiest-rich NFLers filed their antitrust lawsuit in Minnesota, Brady v. NFL, which helped end the lockout, Judge Susan Nelson of U.S. District Court allowed a class of disabled retiree plaintiffs to join the lawsuit. That contingent, led by Carl Eller, didn’t obstruct the consummation of the CBA and the resumption of the 2011 season. But the Eller class action does demand a seat at the table as the devil in the details of the legacy fund gets hashed out.

  Another set of facts with which few in the general public are familiar is the sickeningly corrupt history of the NFLPA under DeMaurice Smith’s predecessor, the late Gene Upshaw.