When
Gale Sayers’s wife revealed a couple of weeks ago that the former great football
running back has dementia, the Chicago Tribune website story was accompanied by
a picture of Sayers and his Chicago Bears teammate Dick Butkus, standing side
by side at some event or other. The photo looked recent and both men looked
hale. That goes to show that looks can be deceiving, because Mrs. Sayers said
that her husband had been displaying signs of the condition for the past
several years.
In Bears’
lore Butkus and Sayers personify the rough and smooth of their violent sport,
their careers and lives uncannily parallel.
Born six months apart (Butkus turned age 74 in December, Sayers will in
May), the two were drafted moments apart by the team in 1965-- Butkus with the
No. 3 overall pick, Sayers at No. 4. Both were All Pro selections before being
shot down by knee injuries. Both gained first-ballot election to the Pro
Football Hall of Fame.
Looking
at the picture I wondered why their lives had diverged of late—why Sayers fell
victim to the brain-injury scourge that is affecting many football veterans,
while as far as is generally known Butkus thus far has been spared. The ferocious Butkus, after all, played two
years longer than the elusive Sayers, and at his linebacker position probably
sustained the more and harder hits. If either man came away addled it would
seem more likely to have been him.
The
same sort of comparison, I think, should be the new focus of research into sports-connected
brain injuries, the subject that leads any current discussion of boxing, hockey
and even soccer in addition to football. Except to the willfully obtuse, it now
has been firmly established that the blows to the head that are routine in
those activities can cause cognitive and communicative damage or worse,
sometimes surfacing years after the athlete’s career has been completed. What needs
to be established are the factors that separate those who fall victim to such
tragic outcomes and those who don’t.
Concern
about the long-term effects of head trauma is nothing new; I wrote about them
in a 1982 front-page story in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Silent
Epidemic.” Most of the examples in that
piece were of people who’d experienced falls or car or motorcycle accidents,
but the medical profession long has been aware that sports also can cause such
injuries. What physicians call “dementia pugilista,” the Latin name for “punch
drunk,” has been in the literature for decades, and it requires no great mental
leap to equate the bang-bang-bang of football with what goes on in the prize
ring.
Surprisingly,
the link didn’t much register on the national consciousness until the work of
Dr. Bennet Omalu became public a dozen years ago. Dr. Omalu was a pathologist in
the Alleghany County coroner’s office in Pittsburgh who was on duty in 2002 when
the body of the former Pittsburgh Steelers’ center Mike Webster was brought in
for autopsy. The Nigerian-born doctor, not a football fan, wondered why a
robust-looking man of 50 was homeless and destitute, and prematurely dead of a
heart attack. His examination of Webster’s brain revealed evidence of a type of
brain injury called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, something
previously found in boxers. When he later discovered the same pattern in the
brain of Terry Long, another former Steeler who committed suicide at age 45, he
published his findings in a 2005 medical journal article that gained attention.
Dr.
Omalu’s discoveries, and the pushback against them from the National Football
League, were chronicled in an HBO documentary and in the 2015 movie
“Concussion,” starring the popular actor Will Smith. By that time Omalu’s work
had been widely confirmed and soon formed the basis of a lawsuit settlement in
which the NFL agreed to pay about $1 billion to former NFL players who claimed
they’d been misled by the league over the seriousness of their head injuries.
Evidence
of the link between football and the various forms of dementia continues to
mount. A Boston University study of the brains of 91 deceased former NFL
players showed that 87 of them showed signs of CTE, although perhaps not enough
to cause acute symptoms. A 2016 Florida State University study of 40 living
retired NFLers who’d averaged seven seasons in the league, using MRI scans and
concentration and memory tests, showed that 17 of them (43%) had “measurable”
impairments. Anyone who now considers pro-level contact sports to be healthful
exercise probably also is a member of the Flat Earth Club.
Still,
many and seemingly most men who engage in such sports walk away mentally whole;
for one such example scroll down a couple of pages and see my blog on Alan
Page, who followed 14 seasons of battle
in the NFL’s trenches with a distinguished career as a lawyer and jurist.
Learning what characteristics Page had that his less-fortunate brethren lacked
would do more to advance gridiron safety that any of the helmet improvements
the NFL is said to be studying.
Or look
at George Foreman, the former heavyweight boxing champion who, after finally quitting
the ring at age 48 after a 19-year career separated by a 10-year hiatus, today
is bright and chirpy at age 68, continuing as pastor of a church he founded,
pitching commercial products and occasionally appearing as a TV boxing
commentator.
There’s painful irony in contrasting
Foreman’s outcome with that of his most-famous opponent, Muhammad Ali. Before their “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire
in 1974, Ali hung the mocking title of “The Mummy” on Foreman, then a
suspicious and inarticulate younger man uneasy in the spotlight. Now Foreman
sails on while the once-glib Ali has died, having spent the last 25 years of
his life palsied and all but mute from his boxing-related Parkinson’s disease.
Ali fought 61 pro bouts to
Foreman’s 81. Ali was hard to hit for most of his career while Foreman was
slower and more vulnerable. Ali was the
more favored in every easily visible way. But now it’s time to go beyond
appearances to the molecular and find out what really separated the two men.
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