Concussion Inc. Read online

  Meanwhile, Lerner’s account of Duerson’s introduction of his fiancée in November 2010 does fill in some gaps in the timeline of the last months of his life.

  Retired player Dave Pear, leader of the dissident group Independent Football Veterans, cc’d me on an email today to DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association. The message was spurred by this blog’s coverage of the late Dave Duerson’s role as one of the three NFLPA-appointed trustees of the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.

  Here’s the full text of the email by Dave Pear and his wife, Heidi.

  Dear De Smith,

  Dave Duerson was on the disability board as a voting member in 2008 when my claim for total and permanent degenerative disability was denied (again). I would like my case reopened and I would like a full report as to the merits of my denial and specifically why you think Dave was qualified (along with Robert Smith and Jeff Van Note) to make this decision.

  How can an individual with severe brain damage and no disability training or legal expertise as were Robert Smith and Van Note allowed this abuse of power and breach of fiduciary duty? Or was Andre Collins filling that day (or moonlighting as a disability board voting member)?

  Does ERISA law allow unqualified people the power to make these types of decisions?

  Please explain.

  Thank you.

  Regards,

  Dave & Heidi Pear

  (The Pears don’t even mention that Duerson, in 2007 Congressional testimony, was downplaying known evidence of the connection between football traumatic brain injuries and long-term mental-health problems.)

  15 September 2011..........

  FoxSports.com’s Alex Marvez now reports that a federal judge in Maryland has set a February 27, 2012, trial date in retired National Football League player Andrew Stewart’s lawsuit against the Bert Bell / Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.16

  Marvez’s story notes that, as I have reported — and in contrast to the strong suggestion of the collective NFL statements to him for FoxSports.com coverage of the Stewart case last month — “Dave Duerson didn’t vote upon Stewart’s claim as initially believed. Duerson — a star NFL safety who committed suicide in February — was one of the NFL Players Association’s three trustee appointees on the board. The other three were appointed by the NFL.”

  This trial, the story says, “could reveal some of the NFL’s retirement program’s secretive inner workings.”

  Marvez writes that a proxy “is believed” to have taken Duerson’s spot at the August 18, 2010, meeting of the board in Boston, where Stewart’s disability claim was reviewed and unanimously rejected. From my reporting, I think it’s pretty clear that that proxy was Andre Collins.

  NFL lawyer Douglas Ell “declined comment to FoxSports.com.”

  Interestingly, Ell has filed a motion to remand the case to re-review by the NFL board. I support some kind of re-review of all Duerson-tainted cases. Stewart’s attorney, Michael Rosenthal, however, opposes the motion — apparently because he feels, no doubt correctly, that at this point his client would get a fairer shake in a court of law than through a process now so despised and distrusted by many in the NFL retiree community.

  19 October 2011..........

  The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportaton Committee held a two-hour hearing on sports concussions on Wednesday.17

  Despite an annoyingly oily good-old-boy performance by the chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the hearing had valuable moments. When we set aside the football element of the debate, the promotion of “concussion awareness” through such forums is immensely educational for participants in minor sports and especially for female athletes.

  In my opinion, the most penetrating interlude was almost an aside: an exchange between Senator John Thune of South Dakota and one of the witness panelists, Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher, the director of Michigan NeuroSport, about the appropriate ages at which athletes can begin engaging in violent contact.

  The star of the hearing, of course, was Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, who has spearheaded the investigations by executive agencies of the Riddell football helmet company. But in two important ways, Udall seriously disappointed.

  First, and as expected, Udall directed a lot of outrage against the spurious claims of Riddell and other “Concussion Inc.” marketers — while saying nothing about how the National Football League and its operatives were in bed with many of those same companies.18

  Udall also cited the suicide of Dave Duerson, the donation of Duerson’s brain to chronic traumatic encephalopathy research, and the finding that Duerson had CTE. Udall said Duerson wanted to help others in the future, which is standard superficial commentary. But the senator went over the line when he went on to mention that Duerson had testified before the very same commerce committee in 2007.

  Well, indeed he had, but Udall’s suggestion that Duerson had the same intent in that appearance is shockingly misleading. As the senator well knows, the Duerson of the ’07 testimony, in his role as a NFL Players Association–appointed trustee of the NFL’s retirement and disability plan, had emphatically downplayed mounting evidence of long-term traumatic brain injury.

  24 February 2012..........

  The family of Dave Duerson has sued the NFL for its alleged liability for the brain damage he was found to have in the special autopsy he requested in his suicide note.

  In recent months, more concussion-linked litigation has been filed by various groups of former players than even the 24/7 NFL Network could possibly cover. They add up to lots of confusing legal wrangling by professionals and their professional mouthpieces. The Duerson case is different, though — a bona fide potential game-changer in terms of both the NFL’s exposure and the public’s broader understanding of what I maintain is the bleak future of the sport of football.

  All civil court actions involve two parties, a plaintiff and a defendant. But in this one, we have two institutional bystanders with more than a passing interest. The first is the community of disabled NFLers whose claims were rejected by the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan — on whose board Duerson sat, denying the scientific evidence on chronic traumatic encephalopathy even as the disease ate away at his own brain, destroying mood, impulse control, and judgment.

  The other spectator-stakeholders are all of the rest of us who are trying to sort out this concussion mess for the millions of kids who play football in peewee and high school leagues. Some believe the game, which is inherently violent, simply needs rule changes, better protective equipment, and smarter health and safety practices. I am in the camp holding that football concussion reform is oxymoronic, and that the medical, financial, legal, and educational bottom line is tobacco-like age restrictions, which would chop-block the knees out from under the NFL’s $10-billion-a-year global marketing machine.

  Duerson case discovery and testimony will subject key theories to empirical tests. As the process plays out, the Duerson family and their image will not emerge unscathed. Last year’s suicide got spun as martyrdom because of the decedent’s instructions to donate his brain tissue for research by Boston University’s Center for the Study of CTE. The part about Duerson as a bad guy in his role as a NFL Players Association retirement board trustee got muted. That will no longer be the case, as the NFL’s legal team submits for the court record and magnifies Duerson’s every utterance in his years of denial.

  Alan Schwarz of the New York Times is reporting Tregg Duerson’s contention that his father had a private change of heart between 2007 — when he verbally and almost physically confronted other NFL retirees at a Congressional hearing — and his death. A change of some sort is manifest. Its effect on the entire Bell/Rozelle Plan mental-­disability claim file, whose reopening and daylighting I have advocated? That is what remains to be seen.

  The most devastating litigation against American football cult
ure, our lay religion, is yet to come, from the parents of youth players who will continue to suffer catastrophic injuries and death, notwithstanding the medicine-wagon “solutions” being hyped by the cottage industries of “concussion awareness.”

  If you can’t acknowledge which way the arrows are pointing, then you flunk your baseline neurocognitive test. You’ve been playing football for too long, with or without a helmet.

  ..........

  1 Since the original publication of this article, the site has been rebranded NFLevolution.com.

  2 “A Suicide, a Last Request, a Family’s Questions,” www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/sports/football/23duerson.html.

  3 “‘You Have to Accept My Pain,’” http://deadspin.com/#!5767609/you-have-to-accept-my-pain-an-interview-with-dave-duerson-three-months-before-his-suicide.

  4 youtube.com/watch?v=yeSsYOgGJW4.

  5 This paragraph, reprinted here as originally published online, is incorrect. See the clarification in the next piece.

  6 “Duerson’s case highlights the limits of the N.F.L.’s disability plan,” www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/sports/football/05duerson.html:

  7 Video of the press conference is available at www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=1GIhOEcN.

  8 sportslegacy.org/index.php/science-a-medicine/chronic-traumatic-­encephalopathy.

  9 “New technique targets ex-athletes’ head injuries,” December 1, 2010, www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2010/12/01/brain-injury-virtual-­biopsy-nfl.html.

  10 The judge’s opinion can be viewed at muchnick.net/boydruling52411.pdf.

  11 www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2011-05-23-dave-alicia-duerson-brain-injury-nfl_N.htm.

  12 “Duerson didn’t have to die to have impact,” msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/dave-duerson-didnt-have-to-die-to-have-impact-081511.

  13 msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/andrew-stewart-dave-duerson-nfl-­retirement-plan-faces-legal-challenge-08151.

  14 “Broken Bucs,” at duke1.tbo.com/content/2010/jul/25/260710/bucs-first-success-came-costly-toll/sports-bucs-broken/.

  15 msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/dave-duerson-didnt-have-to-die-to-have-impact-081511.

  16 See msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/nfl-retired-players-injury-claim-court-date-set-091511.

  17 You can view the video at www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Concuss.

  18 More on this aspect of the hearing follows, in the chapter on Dr. Joe Maroon.

  JOE MAROON AND OTHER PITTSBURGH WITCH DOCTORS

  14 December 2009..........

  In an article on ESPN.com about the brain damage of yet another dead pro wrestler, Andrew “Test” Martin,1 World Wrestling Entertainment — the company of Connecticut U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon — stated in part: “WWE is unaware of the veracity of any of these tests, be it for Chris Benoit or Andrew Martin … WWE has been asking to see the research and test results in the case of Mr. Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them.”

  The second sentence is a grossly, and characteristically, misleading statement by the pro wrestling death mill. The following background reveals that “lie” may not be too strong a word.

  Here’s the full chronology.

  In June 2007, WWE star Chris Benoit murdered his wife and their son, and killed himself. Chris Nowinski, a former pro wrestler who had been forced to retire because of the cumulative effects of in-ring concussions, had started a research and advocacy group, and Nowinski prevailed upon Chris Benoit’s father, Mike Benoit, to donate his son’s brain for studies by Dr. Bennet Omalu, a pioneering researcher of what is being called chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Later in the year Nowinski and Mike Benoit publicized Omalu’s research.

  In March 2008, WWE began baseline neurological testing for its performers, using an emerging system of sports-medicine protocols called ImPACT. WWE itself did not announce this change. However, in an April 11, 2008, news release, Sports Legacy Institute’s Nowinski, citing “anonymous wrestlers,” reported: “WWE management has instituted a concussion management program. At a mandatory meeting for all performers in early March WWE performers took a computerized neuropsychological testing protocol, which evaluates such things as memory, cognitive skills, and reaction time. They will be re-tested aggressively every six months to look for long-term health issues, as well as re-tested after suspected concussions to help determine when it is safe to return to in-ring action.”

  According to Dave Meltzer, publisher of the authoritative Wrestling Observer Newsletter, March 2008 corresponds with when Dr. Joseph Maroon was hired to coordinate WWE’s ImPACT program and supervise the work of two doctors who henceforth traveled to all WWE shows.

  On October 1, 2008, Dr. Maroon visited the Brain Injury Research Institute in Morgantown, West Virginia. The institute is co-directed by Dr. Julian Bailes, chair of the neurosurgery department at West Virginia University, and Dr. Omalu, a medical professor and coroner now based in California. Also present at the meeting were the brain institute’s general counsel, Bob Fitzsimmons, and Peter Davies, a professor of pathology and neuroscience at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

  On the phone with me this morning, Omalu was hopping mad about the WWE statement to ESPN. “Dr. Maroon was there with us and he was shown all our research information, slides, and specimens — on Chris Benoit and all the athletes’ brains we studied,” Omalu said.

  The only possible confusion about any of this would be painfully hairsplitting. But that’s WWE’s M.O.

  Maroon also has long been a team physician for the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers and a familiar league consultant throughout the public debate in recent years — culminating in hearings earlier this year before the House Judiciary Committee — over football concussions. An impossibly tortured rationalization could be offered to the effect that when Maroon was in West Virginia, he was representing the NFL, not WWE.

  The WWE corporate website prominently calls Maroon the company “medical director.” Maroon’s own website and bio at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center say he became WWE medical director “in 2008,” though not the month. Again, March 2008 was when the company hired Maroon with a brain-injury portfolio, whether or not the title at the time was “medical director.”

  Omalu pointed out that there is a lot more to how this story relates to the slow and grudging acceptance of his research by the NFL as well as by WWE. The October 2008 meeting was his third with Maroon dating back to 2006. Like WWE, the NFL started with a bureaucratic Alphonse and Gaston act of pretending to ignore Omalu or discredit his research.

  For now, the story is that WWE’s medical director was given full access to Chris Benoit brain studies, in person, 14 months before WWE told ESPN that the company “has been asking to see the research and tests results in the case of Mr. Benoit for years and has not been supplied with them.”

  31 March 2010..........

  I’ve been exploring how a cluster of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physicians came to join the medical staff of World Wrestling Entertainment.

  In my view, these three doctors — WWE medical director and neurologist Joseph Maroon, cardiologist Bryan Donohue, and endocrinologist Vijah Bahl — have done little except give political cover to this billion-dollar publicly traded corporation and to the McMahon family, which runs and profits from it.

  At the moment, I am especially interested in Dr. Bryan Donohue, who is supposed to be supervising cardiovascular screening of WWE talent under a 2007 revision of the company wellness policy. In December 2009, six months after being fired by WWE for refusing to go to drug rehab, wrestler Eddie “Umaga” Fatu died at age 36 of a massive coronary brought on by a toxic mix of prescription medications. Fatu’s autopsy showed that he had an enlarged heart.

  In addition, Dr. Donohue’s overall portfolio of outside business interests may be a bit too entrepreneurial for my blood. Leveraging his medical credentials, he recently sta
rted a hype-happy company in the largely unregulated supplement industry.

  In 2008, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) published a new ethics policy, which has been widely praised for controlling the undue influence of pharmaceutical companies on the clinical decisions of doctors. However, when I viewed the text of the policy online, I noticed it included links to general University of Pittsburgh guidelines for faculty conflicts of interest — and those links did not work.

  Yesterday I spoke to Frank Raczkiewicz, a UPMC media relations director, about getting access to the blocked documents. Raczkiewicz referred me to Dr. Barbara Barnes, the UPMC vice president who authored the ethics policy. Dr. Barnes told me that the links within the UPMC ethics policy to the University of Pittsburgh policies were designed not to be publicly accessible because the latter are “internal” documents.

  In our phone conversation yesterday, Dr. Barnes did not have time to get into the substance of my reporting on the relationship between UPMC and WWE. I emailed her with my contact information but did not hear back. Later yesterday I sent around to all the principals an email with the following text:

  TO:

  Ed Patru / Linda McMahon for Senate campaign, media relations

  Robert Zimmerman / World Wrestling Entertainment, media relations

  Bryan C. Donohue, M.D.

  Joseph C. Maroon, M.D.

  Barbara E. Barnes, M.D. / University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Vice President of Continuing Medical Education, Contracts and Grants and Intellectual Property

  Frank Raczkiewicz / University of Pittsburgh Medi­cal Center, media relations

  I am about to post to my blog a report headlined, “­Umaga Autopsy Turns Focus to Linda McMahon’s WWE Cardio Program and Docs.” The post — to which I invite all of your comments (see my contact information below) — includes the following points:

  The autopsy report on wrestler Eddie “Umaga” Fatu — a WWE performer until six months before his December 2009 death from a heart attack caused by prescription drug toxicity — showed that he had an enlarged heart. This raises questions about the cardiovascular screening under the WWE wellness policy. Dr. Maroon is WWE’s medical director. Dr. Donohue is the consulting cardiologist.