I am a hypocrite.
On one hand, I love football. For 40-plus years I’ve made a living writing as much or more about that sport than any other.
On the other hand, I recognize the danger and potential damage to the body inherent in such a violent sport. I had daughters, so I never faced the ultimate dilemma. Now I have a grandson and pray he never plays the game.
Hypocrite.
On Monday night, I watched an advance copy of the movie Concussion. It is billed as a holiday release, but will do nothing to brighten NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s yuletide. The NFL is the ultimate uncaring, all-for-the-bottom-line Grinch in this film.
Yet, God forgive me, the minute the screen faded to black I turned to a buddy and asked him to call the Internet up on his cell phone and get the Lions-Saints score.
Hypocrite.
Here's a short movie review: It’s OK.
You want more? Will Smith, as usual, is pretty good in the lead role. This being a drama, Alec Baldwin is surprisingly good in the most complex role, that of an NFL insider who becomes a convert. Albert Brooks plays, well, Albert Brooks and does it as only a droll Albert Brooks can. There are no laughs in this flick, but Brooks might make you smile a couple times. It’s too long at more than two hours. The NFL is evil.
I think that’s everything. I’ll leave the rest in the more than capable hands of my colleague Kirk Baird.
As the title might suggest, this movie does not deal with torn anterior cruciate ligaments, dislocated elbows, or air casts around broken tibia and fibula bones.
It deals with death.
Mike Webster’s sad end was the impetus for investigations into football’s role in, and the NFL’s long-term ignorance of, brain trauma. Webster was the Hall-of-Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers who died in 2002 at age 50 after falling into various states of depression, homelessness, and dementia.
If you can witness the portrayal of his demise and then wonder who is winning a completely irrelevant game between the Lions and Saints, well, you’re a hypocrite.
Concussion is the true-to-life story of Bennet Omalu, a physician and forensic pathologist who was working as an Allegheny County (Pa.) medical examiner.
A native of Nigeria, he drove past Heinz Field just about every day while going to and from work, but had no knowledge or interest in American football, had never seen a Steelers' game, and might well have thought that Mike Webster was the dude who wrote the dictionary.
Then Webster’s body landed on Omalu's autopsy table and, to make a long story a bit shorter, he became the first doctor to link football-caused concussions to brain disease. He gave it a name, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and published his findings.
Omalu didn’t sugarcoat what he came to learn and believe: God did not intend for the brain to absorb football’s collisions, and doing so killed Mike Webster.
The NFL, of course, blocked such thinking at every turn, discrediting Omalu as some African preaching voodoo medicine. It was the league’s belief, as stated in the movie’s portrayal of one sycophant physician, that if just 10 percent of the mothers in the U.S. turned against the sport that the whole billion-dollar house of cards would collapse.
Then other dominoes began to fall. Justin Strzelczyk played nine seasons on the offensive line for the Steelers and died in 2004 at age 36. Terry Long played on Pittsburgh’s O-line for eight years and committed suicide in 2005 at age 45 by drinking antifreeze.
It was one Pittsburgh player after another — former Philadelphia safety Andre Waters, too — in a very short period of time. Omalu researched all of the deaths.
The domino that tilted the scales was the suicide of Dave Duerson, a star safety whose best days were with the Chicago Bears, in 2011 at age 50. His story is not told sympathetically, but as an NFL apologist. Yet, when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound it was to the chest and he left a note requesting his brain be examined for CTE. Sure enough, the many concussions he’d suffered played a role.
My thoughts? I didn’t need the movie to realize that football — and other sports — cause concussions, concussions cause further brain injury, often permanent, and brain injury can cause death, both naturally and through suicide. But the movie erases any hesitancy you might have to purchase fact from theory.
And while the NFL has come around — it had no choice — to enforce rules and medical protocols that make the game safer, it remains in perpetual “CYA” mode over concussions to protect the brand as much as possible. After the NFL Players Association and its alumni embraced Omalu and his findings, the league settled an extraordinarily expensive lawsuit with the provision that it would not have to disclose exactly what it knew about CTE and when.
Today’s NFL players know exactly what threat for brain injury exists and, last time I checked, the rosters were still full. Ditto the more than 600 colleges at various levels that field teams. And the thousands of high school teams that trickle down to youth programs. Safer? Sure. Still deadly? No question. A sport so gladiatorial and physically vicious that it merits our disdain? I suppose.
I’d write more, but it’s nearly kickoff time for Toledo’s bowl game in Florida against Temple.
And I am a hypocrite.
Contact Blade sports columnist Dave Hackenberg at: dhack@theblade.com or 419-724-6398.
First Published December 23, 2015, 5:24 a.m.
