Irv Muchnick: Two Articles
http://theconcussionblog.com/2011/06/29/irv-muchnick-two-articles/
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
And the NFL Band Played On: Concussion Crisis Destined To Become Sports World Counterpart of AIDS Saga (full text)
[originally published 6/24 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/And_the_NFL_Band_Played_On_Concussion_Crisis_Destined_To_Become_Sports_World_Counterpart_of_AIDS_Saga_9292.html]
by Irvin Muchnick
The absolute power of the National Football League has corrupted our sports culture absolutely. In his recent intemperate email to me, The New York Times’ concussion reporter, Alan Schwarz, complained that I have failed to credit him with uncovering a “conspiracy” in the marketing of flawed helmets to youth football players. But, as I see the larger arc of the story, there was no conspiracy. Rather, I see how Schwarz’s choice of a safely domestic investigative target exposes the diminished ambition behind institutional journalism’s insincerely overheated rhetoric.
Since at the very latest 1994, the NFL has been served ample forensic notice that the sport it markets was growing out of human and medical control. These are not ACL’s and torn shoulder capsules we’re talking about, people; they are the brains of frighteningly large numbers of American males who have participated, in organized fashion and from very early ages, in an activity that is a staple of adult approval and social status.
And what did the league, its fawning media, its co-profiting sponsors, and its frat-pack fans do about it? As little as they could get away with.
As this multi-generational saga takes sharper shape with the rush of new discovered cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and with the sentimentally airbrushed back story of NFL player “advocate” Dave Duerson’s suicide, I find “conspiracy” to be a very tepid term, indeed, for the pervasive self-delusion that has gripped all of us for years, for decades. The title of one of historian Barbara Tuchman’s books says it better: The March of Folly. The title of Randy Shilts’ chronicle of the AIDS epidemic says it better still: And the Band Played On.
To be very clear here, we continue to have no evidence – none – that the league leadership grasps this problem at a level more profound than public relations. The new co-chairs of the NFL’s concussion policy committee, Dr. H. Hunt Batjer and Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, were supposed to be making a complete break with the conflicted and unsavory work of their predecessors when they were appointed last year. Don’t make me laugh – it might snap a synapse in my own still barely functioning noodle.
Batjer and Ellenbogen have done nothing at all to squelch the influence of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ University of Pittsburgh Medical Center team, including Joseph Maroon, whose many commercial hats also include the role of a doctor on Twitter for World Wrestling Entertainment. Batjer and Ellenbogen have continued on the NFL’s merry path of “Zackery Lystedt legislation,” in Washington and other states, to raise “concussion awareness” and to codify the purchase and use by public school districts of the Maroon team’s highly dubious for-profit “concussion management software.”
“I defer to the guys who are the experts at football: the competition committee, people like John Madden who actually know the game,” Dr. Ellenbogen said last month.
Once the owners’ lockout of players is out of the way, Commissioner Roger Goodell can get on with the task of loading up the NFL season with more games and more gambling opportunities while he touts the league’s total $20 million investment – taxicab money for a $9-billion-a-year industry – in scandalously dependent and controlling research on brain trauma. Before you know it, he’ll be as comfortable in retirement as his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, and it’ll be the next regime’s turn for “catch me if you can.”
In December 2009 a Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver named Chris Henry was killed when he fell out of the back of a truck while stalking his fiancée. Henry was one of the circle of bad boys out of West Virginia University and his five-year NFL career was marred by legal scrapes. In June 2010 an autopsy by the West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute found that Henry had the accumulations of tau protein associated with CTE.
Here is what Ellenbogen told Schwarz for a Times “news analysis”: “I’m really worried that we’re going to get to where if you have a challenging personality, it must be CTE — that’s really a dangerous way of going.We really need to be careful to parse out the underlying personality issues from the underlying injuries. This is probably just one factor among many that can put someone over the edge.”
Really on a roll here, analyst Schwarz clucked, “[I]f concussions turned every player felonious, Troy Aikman and Steve Young would be broadcasting games from C-block. Many players later found with CTE managed not to commit crimeshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif.” The Timesman concluded: “To be truly valuable moving forward, the legacy of the Chris Henry finding will not be to look back and assign blame for players’ past acts, but to look ahead at how future behavior among players at all levels will derive from a cocktail of factors — psychological, neurological, societal, genetic, or sometimes, just being a jerk.”
And thus the disclaimer, which could have been tossed off with a phrase, becomes the centerpiece of the analysis.
At least football participants have the excuse of brain tissue deadened by tau proteins. What is the excuse for all us spectators?
Irvin Muchnick (http://muchnick.net) is author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.
by Irvin Muchnick
The absolute power of the National Football League has corrupted our sports culture absolutely. In his recent intemperate email to me, The New York Times’ concussion reporter, Alan Schwarz, complained that I have failed to credit him with uncovering a “conspiracy” in the marketing of flawed helmets to youth football players. But, as I see the larger arc of the story, there was no conspiracy. Rather, I see how Schwarz’s choice of a safely domestic investigative target exposes the diminished ambition behind institutional journalism’s insincerely overheated rhetoric.
Since at the very latest 1994, the NFL has been served ample forensic notice that the sport it markets was growing out of human and medical control. These are not ACL’s and torn shoulder capsules we’re talking about, people; they are the brains of frighteningly large numbers of American males who have participated, in organized fashion and from very early ages, in an activity that is a staple of adult approval and social status.
And what did the league, its fawning media, its co-profiting sponsors, and its frat-pack fans do about it? As little as they could get away with.
As this multi-generational saga takes sharper shape with the rush of new discovered cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and with the sentimentally airbrushed back story of NFL player “advocate” Dave Duerson’s suicide, I find “conspiracy” to be a very tepid term, indeed, for the pervasive self-delusion that has gripped all of us for years, for decades. The title of one of historian Barbara Tuchman’s books says it better: The March of Folly. The title of Randy Shilts’ chronicle of the AIDS epidemic says it better still: And the Band Played On.
To be very clear here, we continue to have no evidence – none – that the league leadership grasps this problem at a level more profound than public relations. The new co-chairs of the NFL’s concussion policy committee, Dr. H. Hunt Batjer and Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, were supposed to be making a complete break with the conflicted and unsavory work of their predecessors when they were appointed last year. Don’t make me laugh – it might snap a synapse in my own still barely functioning noodle.
Batjer and Ellenbogen have done nothing at all to squelch the influence of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ University of Pittsburgh Medical Center team, including Joseph Maroon, whose many commercial hats also include the role of a doctor on Twitter for World Wrestling Entertainment. Batjer and Ellenbogen have continued on the NFL’s merry path of “Zackery Lystedt legislation,” in Washington and other states, to raise “concussion awareness” and to codify the purchase and use by public school districts of the Maroon team’s highly dubious for-profit “concussion management software.”
“I defer to the guys who are the experts at football: the competition committee, people like John Madden who actually know the game,” Dr. Ellenbogen said last month.
Once the owners’ lockout of players is out of the way, Commissioner Roger Goodell can get on with the task of loading up the NFL season with more games and more gambling opportunities while he touts the league’s total $20 million investment – taxicab money for a $9-billion-a-year industry – in scandalously dependent and controlling research on brain trauma. Before you know it, he’ll be as comfortable in retirement as his predecessor, Paul Tagliabue, and it’ll be the next regime’s turn for “catch me if you can.”
In December 2009 a Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver named Chris Henry was killed when he fell out of the back of a truck while stalking his fiancée. Henry was one of the circle of bad boys out of West Virginia University and his five-year NFL career was marred by legal scrapes. In June 2010 an autopsy by the West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute found that Henry had the accumulations of tau protein associated with CTE.
Here is what Ellenbogen told Schwarz for a Times “news analysis”: “I’m really worried that we’re going to get to where if you have a challenging personality, it must be CTE — that’s really a dangerous way of going.We really need to be careful to parse out the underlying personality issues from the underlying injuries. This is probably just one factor among many that can put someone over the edge.”
Really on a roll here, analyst Schwarz clucked, “[I]f concussions turned every player felonious, Troy Aikman and Steve Young would be broadcasting games from C-block. Many players later found with CTE managed not to commit crimeshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif.” The Timesman concluded: “To be truly valuable moving forward, the legacy of the Chris Henry finding will not be to look back and assign blame for players’ past acts, but to look ahead at how future behavior among players at all levels will derive from a cocktail of factors — psychological, neurological, societal, genetic, or sometimes, just being a jerk.”
And thus the disclaimer, which could have been tossed off with a phrase, becomes the centerpiece of the analysis.
At least football participants have the excuse of brain tissue deadened by tau proteins. What is the excuse for all us spectators?
Irvin Muchnick (http://muchnick.net) is author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
WWE Releases Chris Benoit Story Figure Chavo Guerrero
[posted 6/26/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
As they did referee Scott Armstrong before bringing him back this year, WWE has parted company with wrestler Chavo Guerrero. Like Armstrong, Guerrero had received Chris Benoit’s final text messages during the horrific double murder/suicide incident that took place, coincidentally, four years ago this weekend.
David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats reviews some of this history at http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/25/2243946/wwe-releases-chavo-guerrero-who-claims-that-he-quit.
Bixenspan doesn’t mention here something else about Guerrero: the time he got knocked unconscious on live television and was attended to by, among others, Stephanie McMahon Levesque – who later would tell Congressional investigators the bald-faced lie that she had never been aware of a single occupational concussion at WWE. See the July 2010 item about Guerrero’s 2004 concussion by Cageside Seats’ Keith Harris at http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/7/7/1557283/did-wwe-downplay-the-severity-of.
Irv Muchnick
As they did referee Scott Armstrong before bringing him back this year, WWE has parted company with wrestler Chavo Guerrero. Like Armstrong, Guerrero had received Chris Benoit’s final text messages during the horrific double murder/suicide incident that took place, coincidentally, four years ago this weekend.
David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats reviews some of this history at http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/25/2243946/wwe-releases-chavo-guerrero-who-claims-that-he-quit.
Bixenspan doesn’t mention here something else about Guerrero: the time he got knocked unconscious on live television and was attended to by, among others, Stephanie McMahon Levesque – who later would tell Congressional investigators the bald-faced lie that she had never been aware of a single occupational concussion at WWE. See the July 2010 item about Guerrero’s 2004 concussion by Cageside Seats’ Keith Harris at http://www.cagesideseats.com/2010/7/7/1557283/did-wwe-downplay-the-severity-of.
Irv Muchnick
View the Dissident NFL Retirees’ Washington Press Conference at Dave Pear’s Blog
[posted 6/26/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giff
Two days ago I posted comments by one-time San Francisco 49er Super Bowler George Visger, who has lived for nearly three decades with a crippling head injury. Visger was part of the delegation speaking on June 20 at the National Press Club in Washington in support of the lawsuit led by ex-Minnesota Viking great Carl Eller. Dave Pear, who heads the best-organized group of National Football League retirees lobbying for better pension and disability benefits, has posted the video at http://davepear.com/blog/2011/06/retired-football-players-june-20th-press-conference/.
A few notes from here:
* The mix of faces at this event included not only Eller but also other African Americans in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, such as Lem Barney and Irv Cross (who moderated the conference). This thoroughly refutes the whisper campaign by NFL Players Association leadership that criticism of it is racially based.
* A number of current NFL players showed up to support the Eller group. I will list all their names in a separate post. While Tom Brady and the Manning brothers sue the league to end the lockout over their inalienable right to hoard $90 million a year each, or whatever the traffic will bear for their services, it is heartening to see that a contingent of their contemporaries maintains a broader perspective.
* Though the general abandonment of retired players is a legitimate economic and moral issue, I am not going to belabor all of their grievances. From a public health standpoint, there is a crucial difference between orthopedic injuries and brain trauma. What has brought us to a national tipping point, in my view, is the league’s denial of a generation of evidence with respect to the latter.
Irv Muchnick
Two days ago I posted comments by one-time San Francisco 49er Super Bowler George Visger, who has lived for nearly three decades with a crippling head injury. Visger was part of the delegation speaking on June 20 at the National Press Club in Washington in support of the lawsuit led by ex-Minnesota Viking great Carl Eller. Dave Pear, who heads the best-organized group of National Football League retirees lobbying for better pension and disability benefits, has posted the video at http://davepear.com/blog/2011/06/retired-football-players-june-20th-press-conference/.
A few notes from here:
* The mix of faces at this event included not only Eller but also other African Americans in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, such as Lem Barney and Irv Cross (who moderated the conference). This thoroughly refutes the whisper campaign by NFL Players Association leadership that criticism of it is racially based.
* A number of current NFL players showed up to support the Eller group. I will list all their names in a separate post. While Tom Brady and the Manning brothers sue the league to end the lockout over their inalienable right to hoard $90 million a year each, or whatever the traffic will bear for their services, it is heartening to see that a contingent of their contemporaries maintains a broader perspective.
* Though the general abandonment of retired players is a legitimate economic and moral issue, I am not going to belabor all of their grievances. From a public health standpoint, there is a crucial difference between orthopedic injuries and brain trauma. What has brought us to a national tipping point, in my view, is the league’s denial of a generation of evidence with respect to the latter.
Irv Muchnick
Chicago Tribune: ‘Doubts Cast on Concussion Remedies’
[posted 6/25/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
Health reporter Julie Deardorff has an excellent piece today at http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-concussion-products-health-20110625,0,761365,full.story. Some highlights:
* “Though parents routinely ask for a ‘concussion-proof’ helmet, there is no way to prevent a brain injury … short of not participating in the sport.”
* “[I]nstead of seeking out products, ... parents should put their energy into familiarizing themselves with the often subtle symptoms of concussion and asking coaches about teams’ plans for addressing possible concussions on the field.”
* “Critics say the [neurocognitive] computer programs are unreliable and may actually increase risks because they likely have a high ‘false negative’ rate, meaning they may show an athlete has recovered when he or she is still cognitively impaired.”
Irv Muchnick
Health reporter Julie Deardorff has an excellent piece today at http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-concussion-products-health-20110625,0,761365,full.story. Some highlights:
* “Though parents routinely ask for a ‘concussion-proof’ helmet, there is no way to prevent a brain injury … short of not participating in the sport.”
* “[I]nstead of seeking out products, ... parents should put their energy into familiarizing themselves with the often subtle symptoms of concussion and asking coaches about teams’ plans for addressing possible concussions on the field.”
* “Critics say the [neurocognitive] computer programs are unreliable and may actually increase risks because they likely have a high ‘false negative’ rate, meaning they may show an athlete has recovered when he or she is still cognitively impaired.”
Irv Muchnick
Former San Francisco 49er George Visger Comments on Today’s Article at Beyond Chron
[posted 6/24/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
This was just posted as a comment to the previous item on the blog. But it warrants its own headline and posting.
Irvin
I agree with you, but think Ellenbogen is trying to do the right thing. I played DT for the 49ers in 80 & 81 when I developed hydrocephalus from numerous concussions, and underwent emergency VP Shunt brain surgery at age 22. My shunt failed (in Mexico fishing) just 4 months after we won Super Bowl XVI and my brother brought me home in a coma. I under went 2 more brain surgeries 10 hours apart and was given last rites. I was also given the hospital bills, and had creditors on me for nearly 5 years till I successfully sued the 49ers for WORKERS COMP! I am now on brain surgery # 9, multiple gran mal seizures and currently taking my 6th different seizure med since starting on them over 25 years ago. The side effects have been catastrophic on my everyday life.
Ellenbogen called me ~ 1 1/2 years ago when I called him out on Dave Pear’s blog immediately after he was hired. He and I correspond regularly now. He asked I submit suggested rule changes which he would present to the NFL Rules Committee. Many of my suggestions have been implemented today (much to the chagrin of players). Only difference I had was I wanted all fines for head to head hits levied at the owners not the players.
I was one of 4 ex players and 5 NFL Hall of Fame players asked to speak at a press conference in Washington DC last Monday, prior to the Carl Eller vs NFL lawsuit.
We need more folks like you not afraid to air the NFL’s dirty laundry.
George Visger
SF 49ers 80 & 81
Survivor of 9 NFL Caused Emergency VP Shunt Brain Surgeries
Benefactor of ZERO NFL Benefits
This was just posted as a comment to the previous item on the blog. But it warrants its own headline and posting.
Irvin
I agree with you, but think Ellenbogen is trying to do the right thing. I played DT for the 49ers in 80 & 81 when I developed hydrocephalus from numerous concussions, and underwent emergency VP Shunt brain surgery at age 22. My shunt failed (in Mexico fishing) just 4 months after we won Super Bowl XVI and my brother brought me home in a coma. I under went 2 more brain surgeries 10 hours apart and was given last rites. I was also given the hospital bills, and had creditors on me for nearly 5 years till I successfully sued the 49ers for WORKERS COMP! I am now on brain surgery # 9, multiple gran mal seizures and currently taking my 6th different seizure med since starting on them over 25 years ago. The side effects have been catastrophic on my everyday life.
Ellenbogen called me ~ 1 1/2 years ago when I called him out on Dave Pear’s blog immediately after he was hired. He and I correspond regularly now. He asked I submit suggested rule changes which he would present to the NFL Rules Committee. Many of my suggestions have been implemented today (much to the chagrin of players). Only difference I had was I wanted all fines for head to head hits levied at the owners not the players.
I was one of 4 ex players and 5 NFL Hall of Fame players asked to speak at a press conference in Washington DC last Monday, prior to the Carl Eller vs NFL lawsuit.
We need more folks like you not afraid to air the NFL’s dirty laundry.
George Visger
SF 49ers 80 & 81
Survivor of 9 NFL Caused Emergency VP Shunt Brain Surgeries
Benefactor of ZERO NFL Benefits
Sunday, June 26, 2011
‘And the NFL Band Played On’ ... today at Beyond Chron
[posted 6/24/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
And the NFL Band Played On: Concussion Crisis Destined to Become Sports World Counterpart of AIDS Saga
by Irvin Muchnick
The absolute power of the National Football League has corrupted our sports culture absolutely. In his recent intemperate email to me, The New York Times’ concussion reporter, Alan Schwarz, complained that I have failed to credit him with uncovering a “conspiracy” in the marketing of flawed helmets to youth football players. But, as I see the larger arc of the story, there was no conspiracy. Rather, I see how Schwarz’s choice of a safely domestic investigative target exposes the diminished ambition behind institutional journalism’s insincerely overheated rhetoric.
Since at the very latest 1994, the NFL has been served ample forensic nohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftice that the sport it markets was growing out of human and medical control. These are not ACL’s and torn shoulder capsules we’re talking about, people; they are the brains of frighteningly large numbers of American males who have participated, in organized fashion and from very early ages, in an activity that is a staple of adult approval and social status.
And what did the league, its fawning media, its co-profiting sponsors, and its frat-pack fans do about it? As little as they could get away with.
CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/And_the_NFL_Band_Played_On_Concussion_Crisis_Destined_To_Become_Sports_World_Counterpart_of_AIDS_Saga_9292.html
And the NFL Band Played On: Concussion Crisis Destined to Become Sports World Counterpart of AIDS Saga
by Irvin Muchnick
The absolute power of the National Football League has corrupted our sports culture absolutely. In his recent intemperate email to me, The New York Times’ concussion reporter, Alan Schwarz, complained that I have failed to credit him with uncovering a “conspiracy” in the marketing of flawed helmets to youth football players. But, as I see the larger arc of the story, there was no conspiracy. Rather, I see how Schwarz’s choice of a safely domestic investigative target exposes the diminished ambition behind institutional journalism’s insincerely overheated rhetoric.
Since at the very latest 1994, the NFL has been served ample forensic nohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftice that the sport it markets was growing out of human and medical control. These are not ACL’s and torn shoulder capsules we’re talking about, people; they are the brains of frighteningly large numbers of American males who have participated, in organized fashion and from very early ages, in an activity that is a staple of adult approval and social status.
And what did the league, its fawning media, its co-profiting sponsors, and its frat-pack fans do about it? As little as they could get away with.
CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/And_the_NFL_Band_Played_On_Concussion_Crisis_Destined_To_Become_Sports_World_Counterpart_of_AIDS_Saga_9292.html
More From Matt Chaney: ‘Research of NFL Brain Trauma Sputters Along’
[posted 6/23/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
Research of NFL Brain Sputters Along; Epidemiologic Study Nowhere in Sight for Afflicted Players
http://blog.4wallspublishing.com/2011/06/23/research-for-nfl-brain-trauma-sputters-along.aspx
Money quote:
Critics of autopsy-based NFL research contend large-scale epidemiological study of living players is urgently needed, valid random clinical trial conducted by a multidisciplinary team of experts and preferably free from influence by the likely funding sources of football. Large control groups must be assembled and quickly, among challenges, say observers such as epidemiologist Charles E. Yesalis, ScD, professor emeritus of Penn State University.
...
No party among the NFL, the NFLPA and NCAA has yet to support such ambitious, costly research while the government has expressed no interest, and other potential sponsors aren’t forthcoming at moment.
Smaller studies are underway, nevertheless, and findings and expert opinion increasingly suggest epidemic parameters for cognitive impairment in players of pro football, if not those of collegiate, school and youth levels.
Research of NFL Brain Sputters Along; Epidemiologic Study Nowhere in Sight for Afflicted Players
http://blog.4wallspublishing.com/2011/06/23/research-for-nfl-brain-trauma-sputters-along.aspx
Money quote:
Critics of autopsy-based NFL research contend large-scale epidemiological study of living players is urgently needed, valid random clinical trial conducted by a multidisciplinary team of experts and preferably free from influence by the likely funding sources of football. Large control groups must be assembled and quickly, among challenges, say observers such as epidemiologist Charles E. Yesalis, ScD, professor emeritus of Penn State University.
...
No party among the NFL, the NFLPA and NCAA has yet to support such ambitious, costly research while the government has expressed no interest, and other potential sponsors aren’t forthcoming at moment.
Smaller studies are underway, nevertheless, and findings and expert opinion increasingly suggest epidemic parameters for cognitive impairment in players of pro football, if not those of collegiate, school and youth levels.
‘And the NFL Band Played On: Concussion Crisis Destined to Become Sports World Counterpart of AIDS Saga’ …
[posted 6/23/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
... headline of new piece tomorrow at Beyond Chron.
... headline of new piece tomorrow at Beyond Chron.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Meet the New NFL Concussion Czars ... Same As the Old NFL Concussion Czars
[posted 6/22/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
We all know what happened to Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York. Last year, before the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and he lost his own seat in a personal scandal, Weiner was the second most effective member of the Judiciary Committee putting heat on the National Football League for its unforgivable suppression and denial of research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
(The most effective committee member was Linda Sanchez of California, who in 2009 committee hearings drew the analogy between the NFL and the tobacco industry.)
In March 2010 the NFL’s concussion policy panel, called the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, got a new name and new co-chairs. Now known as the Head, Neck and Spine Medical Committee, it is jointly chaired by Dr. H. Hunt Batjer, of Northwestern Memorial Hospital outside Chicago, and Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Batjer and Ellenbogen replaced the disgraced Dr. Ira Casson and Dr. David Viano, who in turn had replaced the disgraced Dr. Elliot Pellman.
Though Batjer and Ellenbogen promised to sweep out the Augean stable of league head injury custodians, they have done nothing of the sort. For example, Dr. Joseph Maroon, whose corrupt involvement in this sordid history has been extensively documented by me, remains on the committee.
And in July the two new co-chairs reversed a commitment not to release an ambiguously worded NFL helmet safety study with limited or no value for the broader universe of amateur helmet consumers. In the good coverage of this narrow issue by The New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, Ellenbogen explained that he decided the study was OK “as long as statements were phrased very carefully.” Congressman Weiner blasted this “disturbing step backwards.”
Meanwhile, Batjer and Ellenbogen – who are supposed to be independent but whose public statements get screened by the NFL office – forged ahead with mom-and-apple-pie projects, such as the toughening up of language in posters warning players of the risk of brain injury.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Last month Ellenbogen told The Wall Street Journal: “I defer to the guys who are the experts at football: the competition committee, people like John Madden who actually know the game.” (The money-grubbing Madden knows the game so well that the new edition of his bestselling video game bows to the new “concussion awareness.”) For a good analysis of Ellenbogen’s flawed stance, see “For the NFL, Is More Protection Really the Answer to Its Concussion Quandary?” by Mike Seely of Seattle Weekly, http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/05/for_the_nfl_is_more_protection.php.
Irv Muchnick
We all know what happened to Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York. Last year, before the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and he lost his own seat in a personal scandal, Weiner was the second most effective member of the Judiciary Committee putting heat on the National Football League for its unforgivable suppression and denial of research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
(The most effective committee member was Linda Sanchez of California, who in 2009 committee hearings drew the analogy between the NFL and the tobacco industry.)
In March 2010 the NFL’s concussion policy panel, called the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, got a new name and new co-chairs. Now known as the Head, Neck and Spine Medical Committee, it is jointly chaired by Dr. H. Hunt Batjer, of Northwestern Memorial Hospital outside Chicago, and Dr. Richard Ellenbogen, of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Batjer and Ellenbogen replaced the disgraced Dr. Ira Casson and Dr. David Viano, who in turn had replaced the disgraced Dr. Elliot Pellman.
Though Batjer and Ellenbogen promised to sweep out the Augean stable of league head injury custodians, they have done nothing of the sort. For example, Dr. Joseph Maroon, whose corrupt involvement in this sordid history has been extensively documented by me, remains on the committee.
And in July the two new co-chairs reversed a commitment not to release an ambiguously worded NFL helmet safety study with limited or no value for the broader universe of amateur helmet consumers. In the good coverage of this narrow issue by The New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, Ellenbogen explained that he decided the study was OK “as long as statements were phrased very carefully.” Congressman Weiner blasted this “disturbing step backwards.”
Meanwhile, Batjer and Ellenbogen – who are supposed to be independent but whose public statements get screened by the NFL office – forged ahead with mom-and-apple-pie projects, such as the toughening up of language in posters warning players of the risk of brain injury.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Last month Ellenbogen told The Wall Street Journal: “I defer to the guys who are the experts at football: the competition committee, people like John Madden who actually know the game.” (The money-grubbing Madden knows the game so well that the new edition of his bestselling video game bows to the new “concussion awareness.”) For a good analysis of Ellenbogen’s flawed stance, see “For the NFL, Is More Protection Really the Answer to Its Concussion Quandary?” by Mike Seely of Seattle Weekly, http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/05/for_the_nfl_is_more_protection.php.
Irv Muchnick
‘America’s Game: NFL Poised to Win Labor Battle and Lose Public-Health Fight’ (full text)
[originally published 6/16 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/America_s_Game_NFL_Poised_to_Win_Labor_Battle_and_Lose_Public_Health_Fight_9269.html]
by Irvin Muchnick
Those who think the bargaining and legal skirmishes surrounding the National Football League and its players are in sudden death overtime have fallen for the oldest play-action fake in the book. The NFL lockout likely will resolve itself, perhaps even very soon and essentially in the owners’ favor. But the abject failure of both sides to accept accountability for the mental health of a generation of athletes – putting American youth in harm’s way in service of an industry bursting at the seams with greed – is a story that hasn’t even reached the two-minute warning of the first half.
The eyes of the sports-legal world are on Tom Brady v. NFL, the lawsuit by some of football’s richest stars to end the lockout. Not a single major newspaper or radio/television outlet has picked up the decision last month, in U.S. District Court in Maryland, in Brent V. Boyd v. Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.
In a miscarriage of justice no less profound for not being shocking, Judge J. Frederick Motz granted summary judgment to the league’s retirement plan in a suit brought by Boyd, a Minnesota Viking offensive lineman in the 1980s, whose diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy was all but confirmed by a recent “virtual biopsy.” Boyd’s case and countless parallel ones, over a period of many years, will bring the human and societal toll of football home to the American public long after the beer and guacamole have been taken out of ice for this fall’s tailgate parties.
Outrageously, Judge Motz ruled that Boyd had not established “changed circumstances” in reapplying for NFL Player Care mental health benefits – this despite a decade of fresh, smoking-gun research on CTE, which league-affiliated doctors did their damndest to downplay. To the everlasting shame of the NFL Players Association, which appoints three of the six members of the disability plan review board, one of them was Dave Duerson, who loudly minimized multiple-concussion syndrome in 2007 Congressional testimony before killing himself this February – whereupon he was found to have had CTE himself.
According to the court, the newly published research and the Duerson scenario don’t matter; Brent Boyd did not have “changed circumstances,” for he was just as depressed and non-functional in 2000, when he first applied for mental disability benefits, as he remains in 2011.
Thanks for cutting to the heart of the matter, Your Honor.
Let’s see if the federal government now can be persuaded to take time out from its grandstanding investigation of the Bowl Championship Series, and have the Labor Department audit the Bell/Rozelle Plan. Underfunded and riddled with conflicts of interest, it makes a mockery of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
But regardless, disabled players’ litigation, Boyd’s and others, will proceed. At this point in the evolution of these cases, the plaintiffs’ attorneys, working on contingency fees, are outgunned by cost-plus-billing corporate law firms representing the NFL, which have the resources to make craven, sideline-tiptoeing arguments while they try to run out the clock. But eventually the cases will be joined, in spirit or in explicit class actions, as the magnitude of the slow destruction of millionaire professionals’ lives becomes evident and is connected to the stark and undercovered hazards of high school and peewee football. (One of the most intriguing pending cases, the first to touch the hot button of worker’s compensation, is by Dr. Eleanor Perfetto, wife of Ralph Wentzel, an NFL lineman in the sixties and seventies.)
After that, and as in the tobacco industry narrative, an enterprising state attorney general or two will step forward to frame lawsuits as public health system recoveries and to steer the fees to friendly and powerful plaintiffs’ firms. By then, outlets like The New York Times – which today seems to think we can all lean a little harder on football helmet manufacturers and call it a day – will have completed the process of measuring out their front-page crusades in coffee spoons.
Before that can happen, the nation must crab-walk through an interlude of the new half-assed “awareness,” which is little more than sophisticated and profit-enabling denial. This will include – you can all but set your watch by it – a second-concussion death of a teenage football player in a program that had been scared into buying the nearly useless neurocognitive testing system marketed by NFhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifL doctors (one of whom, Joseph Maroon, also shills for that charming death mill at World Wrestling Entertainment).
So far just one prominent CTE researcher is saying with clarity that only grown men should be playing tackle football. That is Dr. Bennet Omalu, who discovered this discrete pathology in 2002 and commenced shouting about it from rooftops – for which he got himself drummed out of the NFL establishment.
But who cares? Hank Williams Jr. is warming up his vocal chords. Meanwhile, the biggest scandal in sports history plays out in the shadows.
Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, blogs at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com and is “@irvmuch” on Twitter.
by Irvin Muchnick
Those who think the bargaining and legal skirmishes surrounding the National Football League and its players are in sudden death overtime have fallen for the oldest play-action fake in the book. The NFL lockout likely will resolve itself, perhaps even very soon and essentially in the owners’ favor. But the abject failure of both sides to accept accountability for the mental health of a generation of athletes – putting American youth in harm’s way in service of an industry bursting at the seams with greed – is a story that hasn’t even reached the two-minute warning of the first half.
The eyes of the sports-legal world are on Tom Brady v. NFL, the lawsuit by some of football’s richest stars to end the lockout. Not a single major newspaper or radio/television outlet has picked up the decision last month, in U.S. District Court in Maryland, in Brent V. Boyd v. Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.
In a miscarriage of justice no less profound for not being shocking, Judge J. Frederick Motz granted summary judgment to the league’s retirement plan in a suit brought by Boyd, a Minnesota Viking offensive lineman in the 1980s, whose diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy was all but confirmed by a recent “virtual biopsy.” Boyd’s case and countless parallel ones, over a period of many years, will bring the human and societal toll of football home to the American public long after the beer and guacamole have been taken out of ice for this fall’s tailgate parties.
Outrageously, Judge Motz ruled that Boyd had not established “changed circumstances” in reapplying for NFL Player Care mental health benefits – this despite a decade of fresh, smoking-gun research on CTE, which league-affiliated doctors did their damndest to downplay. To the everlasting shame of the NFL Players Association, which appoints three of the six members of the disability plan review board, one of them was Dave Duerson, who loudly minimized multiple-concussion syndrome in 2007 Congressional testimony before killing himself this February – whereupon he was found to have had CTE himself.
According to the court, the newly published research and the Duerson scenario don’t matter; Brent Boyd did not have “changed circumstances,” for he was just as depressed and non-functional in 2000, when he first applied for mental disability benefits, as he remains in 2011.
Thanks for cutting to the heart of the matter, Your Honor.
Let’s see if the federal government now can be persuaded to take time out from its grandstanding investigation of the Bowl Championship Series, and have the Labor Department audit the Bell/Rozelle Plan. Underfunded and riddled with conflicts of interest, it makes a mockery of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
But regardless, disabled players’ litigation, Boyd’s and others, will proceed. At this point in the evolution of these cases, the plaintiffs’ attorneys, working on contingency fees, are outgunned by cost-plus-billing corporate law firms representing the NFL, which have the resources to make craven, sideline-tiptoeing arguments while they try to run out the clock. But eventually the cases will be joined, in spirit or in explicit class actions, as the magnitude of the slow destruction of millionaire professionals’ lives becomes evident and is connected to the stark and undercovered hazards of high school and peewee football. (One of the most intriguing pending cases, the first to touch the hot button of worker’s compensation, is by Dr. Eleanor Perfetto, wife of Ralph Wentzel, an NFL lineman in the sixties and seventies.)
After that, and as in the tobacco industry narrative, an enterprising state attorney general or two will step forward to frame lawsuits as public health system recoveries and to steer the fees to friendly and powerful plaintiffs’ firms. By then, outlets like The New York Times – which today seems to think we can all lean a little harder on football helmet manufacturers and call it a day – will have completed the process of measuring out their front-page crusades in coffee spoons.
Before that can happen, the nation must crab-walk through an interlude of the new half-assed “awareness,” which is little more than sophisticated and profit-enabling denial. This will include – you can all but set your watch by it – a second-concussion death of a teenage football player in a program that had been scared into buying the nearly useless neurocognitive testing system marketed by NFhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifL doctors (one of whom, Joseph Maroon, also shills for that charming death mill at World Wrestling Entertainment).
So far just one prominent CTE researcher is saying with clarity that only grown men should be playing tackle football. That is Dr. Bennet Omalu, who discovered this discrete pathology in 2002 and commenced shouting about it from rooftops – for which he got himself drummed out of the NFL establishment.
But who cares? Hank Williams Jr. is warming up his vocal chords. Meanwhile, the biggest scandal in sports history plays out in the shadows.
Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, blogs at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com and is “@irvmuch” on Twitter.
Must Read: FoxSports’ Alex Marvez on Strength Coach Legend Kim Wood’s Neck Symposium
[posted 6/20/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
“NFL must help prevent head trauma”
Alex Marvez, foxsports.com
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/NFL-must-become-more-proactive-to-prevent-head-trauma-061911
“NFL must help prevent head trauma”
Alex Marvez, foxsports.com
http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/NFL-must-become-more-proactive-to-prevent-head-trauma-061911
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Comedy Central: NFL’s PR Video of Dr. Joseph Maroon Conducting the Perfect Neurological Exam
[posted 6/20/11 at httphttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
The National Football League’s new PR website, nflhealthandsafety.com, has a video demonstrating how Dr. Joseph Maroon, team neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers, might examine a player who has been concussed. The clip, which Maroon describes as a kind of “two-minute drill” showing how a trained professional can check out a player “efficiently and expeditiously,” is unintentionally comical.
See http://nflhealthandsafety.com/2011/01/20/performing-a-neurological-exam/.
The obvious flaw here is that the person Maroon is examining passes all his markers perfectly. Is the NFL representing this as a typical outcome?
A companion piece might be a skit with the cast of Saturday Night Live reenacting the anecdote about the player who, the coach is told, doesn’t know his name. “Well, tell him his name and get him back out there!” the coach says.
Irv Muchnick
The National Football League’s new PR website, nflhealthandsafety.com, has a video demonstrating how Dr. Joseph Maroon, team neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers, might examine a player who has been concussed. The clip, which Maroon describes as a kind of “two-minute drill” showing how a trained professional can check out a player “efficiently and expeditiously,” is unintentionally comical.
See http://nflhealthandsafety.com/2011/01/20/performing-a-neurological-exam/.
The obvious flaw here is that the person Maroon is examining passes all his markers perfectly. Is the NFL representing this as a typical outcome?
A companion piece might be a skit with the cast of Saturday Night Live reenacting the anecdote about the player who, the coach is told, doesn’t know his name. “Well, tell him his name and get him back out there!” the coach says.
Irv Muchnick
In Praise of Alan Schwarz and The New York Times … And On to the Work of the NFL Concussion Committee’s New Co-Chairs
[posted 6/19/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
Let’s move beyond my criticism of Alan Schwarz and The New York Times. I want to impress upon everyone not just that the Gray Lady recently has fumbled the ball in the red zone, but also how to regain the lost momentum of its generally excellent coverage of the concussion crisis prior to this year.
The Times website’s March 13, 2010, interactive timeline, “The N.F.L.’s Embattled Concussions Panel,” with references dating back to 1994, remains a great historical resource. I urge everyone to read it and follow the linked articles, at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/17/sports/football/20100317_CONCUSSION_TIMELINE.html?ref=football.
Several things have gone wrong since then, in my view, beginning with the subtle co-optation of Schwarz, an inexperienced investigative reporter, which has paralleled that of his friend Chris Nowinski. It is hard to hear people nominating you for a Pulitzer Prize in Schwarz’s case, or to find yourself brokering a $1 million National Football League grant in Nowinski’s case, and retain your outsider’s edge. Someone whom The New Yorker quotes corrupt NFL doctor Joseph Maroon calling “the Socratic gadfly” of concussion discussion is receiving accolades with strings: he also is being unofficially appointed the amanuensis of the ruling class.
Add to all this last fall’s loss of Democratic control of the House of Representatives, whose Judiciary Committee had conducted the most penetrating public hearings drawing the parallel between the NFL and the tobacco industry, and you have a recipe for tepid and hyped measures like helmet reform, along with acquiescence in spurious and cost-shifting post-concussion “management.”
I am not the only observer who, in his own mind, damns The Times with such faint praise. I am just one of the few doing so out loud.
Coincident with The Times’ squishy coverage of the last year has been the NFL’s appointment of new co-chairs of its concussion policy committee. What have Dr. H. Hunt Batjer and Dr. Richard Ellenbogen accomplished so far? I’ll discuss that in upcoming posts.
Irv Muchnick
Let’s move beyond my criticism of Alan Schwarz and The New York Times. I want to impress upon everyone not just that the Gray Lady recently has fumbled the ball in the red zone, but also how to regain the lost momentum of its generally excellent coverage of the concussion crisis prior to this year.
The Times website’s March 13, 2010, interactive timeline, “The N.F.L.’s Embattled Concussions Panel,” with references dating back to 1994, remains a great historical resource. I urge everyone to read it and follow the linked articles, at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/17/sports/football/20100317_CONCUSSION_TIMELINE.html?ref=football.
Several things have gone wrong since then, in my view, beginning with the subtle co-optation of Schwarz, an inexperienced investigative reporter, which has paralleled that of his friend Chris Nowinski. It is hard to hear people nominating you for a Pulitzer Prize in Schwarz’s case, or to find yourself brokering a $1 million National Football League grant in Nowinski’s case, and retain your outsider’s edge. Someone whom The New Yorker quotes corrupt NFL doctor Joseph Maroon calling “the Socratic gadfly” of concussion discussion is receiving accolades with strings: he also is being unofficially appointed the amanuensis of the ruling class.
Add to all this last fall’s loss of Democratic control of the House of Representatives, whose Judiciary Committee had conducted the most penetrating public hearings drawing the parallel between the NFL and the tobacco industry, and you have a recipe for tepid and hyped measures like helmet reform, along with acquiescence in spurious and cost-shifting post-concussion “management.”
I am not the only observer who, in his own mind, damns The Times with such faint praise. I am just one of the few doing so out loud.
Coincident with The Times’ squishy coverage of the last year has been the NFL’s appointment of new co-chairs of its concussion policy committee. What have Dr. H. Hunt Batjer and Dr. Richard Ellenbogen accomplished so far? I’ll discuss that in upcoming posts.
Irv Muchnick
Cageside Seats: Dr. Maroon’s ImPACT Clearance of Randy Orton for Tomorrow’s WWE Pay-Per-View ‘Questionable at Best’
[posted 6/18/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
“Randy Orton has been medically cleared for WWE Capitol Punishment”
by David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats:
http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/18/2230917/randy-orton-has-been-medically-cleared-for-wwe-capitol-punishment
“Randy Orton has been medically cleared for WWE Capitol Punishment”
by David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats:
http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/18/2230917/randy-orton-has-been-medically-cleared-for-wwe-capitol-punishment
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
New York Times Blacks Out Concussion Research Pioneer Bennet Omalu – While Coddling NFL / WWE Charlatan Joseph Maroon
[posted 6/17/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz, May 27: “As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. [I know that is not an issue] for reasons of which you are totally unaware …”
New York Times columnist George Vecsey, June 14: “the NYT has led that story for three years. what are you talking about?”
=====
We all realize that The New York Times is the worldwide leader in worldwide leadering. But on the story of the pandemic of traumatic brain injuries in sports and entertainment, exactly where is The Times trying to lead us?
An examination of the Newspaper of Record’s coverage over the last six months suggests that the answer is it is leading us to a world made safe for the National Football League and its $9-plus billion in annual revenues.
Pay plenty of lip service to the alleged mental health toll for the thousands upon thousands of professional and amateur athletes employed by the NFL or in its orbit – but also make sure all the opinion-making honor and commercial benefits are reaped by the very league-connected doctors whose corrupt research and false public statements brought us to this pass.
Last December 8 The Times led a story headlined “N.F.L. Invites Helmet Safety Ideas” with these words: “With the federal government, state legislatures and football helmets’ regulatory body already focusing on concussions and head protection, perhaps the most influential group of all — the N.F.L. — convened its own summit of experts Wednesday to discuss possible reforms.”
Try to imagine a Times story in the 1960s, subsequent to the surgeon general’s report on the dangers of cigarettes, with a lead characterizing the Tobacco Institute as “perhaps the most influential group of all.”
One of the NFL’s “summit of experts” – quoted in paragraph 3 of the Times account with the searing insight “there’s still more questions than answers” – was Dr. Joseph Maroon of the Pittsburgh Steelers medical team and the league’s concussion policy committee, as well as World Wrestling Entertainment. (The WWE line in Maroon’s resume is scrubbed in Times coverage.)
There are already plenty of answers about Maroon himself, one of the root liars of the concussion saga. The first cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football players, discovered by a then little-known deputy medical examiner in Pittsburgh named Bennet Omalu, were in Steelers players, including Terry Long. As this blog (citing Chris Nowinski’s book Head Games), has reported, Maroon attacked the “fallacious reasoning” of Omalu’s research and added, “I was the team neurosurgeon during Long’s entire tenure with the Steelers, and I still am. I re-checked my records; there was not one cerebral concussion documented in him during those entire seven years.”
But there was such documentation: a letter by Maroon himself.
Yet The Times continues to inflict unfiltered Maroon on the concussion education of its readers. Most recently, Maroon, who says he welcomes the federal investigation of his NFL-funded safety study of Riddell football helmets, has been given Times news real estate for the lame explanation that he studied good but Riddell promoted bad.
As for Dr. Omalu, he has not appeared even one time this year in print editions of The Times. On February 26, The Times did run a blog item by Toni Monkovic, which allowed that Omalu once upon a time “figured prominently” in a breakthrough finding of brain damage in NFL players. Monkovic also quoted author-blogger Matt Chaney’s report on Omalu’s call to sideline all concussed athletes for three months.
In lieu of conducting this threshold debate in print, however, The Times has chosen to go yawn and on about football helmets and neurocognitive testing. The latter is a field that Maroon and his University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues, with their NFL affiliation, dominate via their for-profit concussion management software, ImPACT, which is making new inroads at the high school level thanks to state football safety legislation. This despite a substantial body of research – also unreported in The Times – arguing that neurocognitive testing in general, and ImPACT in particular, are at best ineffective.
And it’s not as if Omalu hasn’t been heard from lately in the CTE field: After several years of effective exile from the pages of the NFL-doctor-controlled journal Neurosurgery, he returned there under new management with a recent major article.
There’s no new management at the National Football League itself. For The New York Times and reporter Alan Schwarz (whom The New Yorker quotes the corrupt Dr. Maroon praising), that seems to be what counts most.
Irv Muchnick
New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz, May 27: “As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. [I know that is not an issue] for reasons of which you are totally unaware …”
New York Times columnist George Vecsey, June 14: “the NYT has led that story for three years. what are you talking about?”
=====
We all realize that The New York Times is the worldwide leader in worldwide leadering. But on the story of the pandemic of traumatic brain injuries in sports and entertainment, exactly where is The Times trying to lead us?
An examination of the Newspaper of Record’s coverage over the last six months suggests that the answer is it is leading us to a world made safe for the National Football League and its $9-plus billion in annual revenues.
Pay plenty of lip service to the alleged mental health toll for the thousands upon thousands of professional and amateur athletes employed by the NFL or in its orbit – but also make sure all the opinion-making honor and commercial benefits are reaped by the very league-connected doctors whose corrupt research and false public statements brought us to this pass.
Last December 8 The Times led a story headlined “N.F.L. Invites Helmet Safety Ideas” with these words: “With the federal government, state legislatures and football helmets’ regulatory body already focusing on concussions and head protection, perhaps the most influential group of all — the N.F.L. — convened its own summit of experts Wednesday to discuss possible reforms.”
Try to imagine a Times story in the 1960s, subsequent to the surgeon general’s report on the dangers of cigarettes, with a lead characterizing the Tobacco Institute as “perhaps the most influential group of all.”
One of the NFL’s “summit of experts” – quoted in paragraph 3 of the Times account with the searing insight “there’s still more questions than answers” – was Dr. Joseph Maroon of the Pittsburgh Steelers medical team and the league’s concussion policy committee, as well as World Wrestling Entertainment. (The WWE line in Maroon’s resume is scrubbed in Times coverage.)
There are already plenty of answers about Maroon himself, one of the root liars of the concussion saga. The first cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in football players, discovered by a then little-known deputy medical examiner in Pittsburgh named Bennet Omalu, were in Steelers players, including Terry Long. As this blog (citing Chris Nowinski’s book Head Games), has reported, Maroon attacked the “fallacious reasoning” of Omalu’s research and added, “I was the team neurosurgeon during Long’s entire tenure with the Steelers, and I still am. I re-checked my records; there was not one cerebral concussion documented in him during those entire seven years.”
But there was such documentation: a letter by Maroon himself.
Yet The Times continues to inflict unfiltered Maroon on the concussion education of its readers. Most recently, Maroon, who says he welcomes the federal investigation of his NFL-funded safety study of Riddell football helmets, has been given Times news real estate for the lame explanation that he studied good but Riddell promoted bad.
As for Dr. Omalu, he has not appeared even one time this year in print editions of The Times. On February 26, The Times did run a blog item by Toni Monkovic, which allowed that Omalu once upon a time “figured prominently” in a breakthrough finding of brain damage in NFL players. Monkovic also quoted author-blogger Matt Chaney’s report on Omalu’s call to sideline all concussed athletes for three months.
In lieu of conducting this threshold debate in print, however, The Times has chosen to go yawn and on about football helmets and neurocognitive testing. The latter is a field that Maroon and his University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues, with their NFL affiliation, dominate via their for-profit concussion management software, ImPACT, which is making new inroads at the high school level thanks to state football safety legislation. This despite a substantial body of research – also unreported in The Times – arguing that neurocognitive testing in general, and ImPACT in particular, are at best ineffective.
And it’s not as if Omalu hasn’t been heard from lately in the CTE field: After several years of effective exile from the pages of the NFL-doctor-controlled journal Neurosurgery, he returned there under new management with a recent major article.
There’s no new management at the National Football League itself. For The New York Times and reporter Alan Schwarz (whom The New Yorker quotes the corrupt Dr. Maroon praising), that seems to be what counts most.
Irv Muchnick
Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer on Randy Orton’s Concussion and the Research of Dr. Bennet Omalu
[posted 6/16/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifgif
From the June 20 issue of Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Reprinted with permission. For subscription information, go to http://www.f4wonline.com/.
Randy Orton suffered a legitimate concussion on the 6/12 show in Madrid, Spain, doing a three-way with Sheamus and Christian. That’s why he couldn’t wrestle on either Raw or Smackdown the next two days. On both shows, they acknowledged the concussion, but they were pushing on both shows that he would be wrestling Christian on the PPV. For the old wrestling business pre-2007, that would be a given, and he’d probably have wrestled on TV as well. But if he got a concussion on 6/12, the idea that he’d be fine to do a match on 6/19 is very questionable. Company policy is that with a legit concussion, you have to pass Dr. Joseph Maroon’s Impact testing to determine whether you are fit to go back out. It’s hard to believe that they would violate their own system and allow Orton to do anything where he’d have to take a bump until he was cleared. But it’s also operating very shady to the public to still be pushing his match for the PPV on Sunday. That in itself is a controversial subject, as the entire concussion diagnosis issue is filled with politics and agendas and contradictory viewpoints. There are a number of leaders in the field who dislike each other and run down the beliefs of the other. But what’s bad here is with a legitimate concussion, how can they possibly know the next day when taping Raw after Orton flew from Madrid directly to New York that Orton would be fine to wrestle six days later? If he passed the testing the day after a concussion, then all a sudden you have to wonder about the testing. If he didn’t, then WWE had no business pushing him wrestling for Sunday past saying he’s questionable and they would update later in the week. And if he can’t, given that Orton vs. Christian on paper is the No. 2 match on the show, but many consider it the No. 1 match on the show, they should at least on Raw and Smackdown push that there is a question regarding if this match can take place. It comes off really shady for a company that has worked hard to cleanse what has been a very negative image, particularly since it has to do with misleading its most loyal 2% of its audience.
In the ever-evolving science of concussion research and understanding, Dr. Bennett Omalu, who is, within the medical world considered the No. 1 authority on concussions, believes that any athlete who suffers a concussion should be kept out of action for 90 days. His reasoning is a concussion often involves head rotation, not limited to a blow to the skull, and that can cause tearing of brain tissue and can take 90 days for brain fluid to return to normal. The NFL and WWE, for instance, use Maroon’s system to determine whether a competitor has recovered enough to return. Among players, there has been talk that taking Ritalin can help you perform better in that testing and get you back on the field. It’s not like in MMA and boxing, if you are diagnosed with a concussion in a fight, you have a time frame when you can’t spar (although that is not always adhered to) and can’t fight. The time frames in major sports, as well as pro wrestling, are not usually as lengthy.
From the June 20 issue of Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter. Reprinted with permission. For subscription information, go to http://www.f4wonline.com/.
Randy Orton suffered a legitimate concussion on the 6/12 show in Madrid, Spain, doing a three-way with Sheamus and Christian. That’s why he couldn’t wrestle on either Raw or Smackdown the next two days. On both shows, they acknowledged the concussion, but they were pushing on both shows that he would be wrestling Christian on the PPV. For the old wrestling business pre-2007, that would be a given, and he’d probably have wrestled on TV as well. But if he got a concussion on 6/12, the idea that he’d be fine to do a match on 6/19 is very questionable. Company policy is that with a legit concussion, you have to pass Dr. Joseph Maroon’s Impact testing to determine whether you are fit to go back out. It’s hard to believe that they would violate their own system and allow Orton to do anything where he’d have to take a bump until he was cleared. But it’s also operating very shady to the public to still be pushing his match for the PPV on Sunday. That in itself is a controversial subject, as the entire concussion diagnosis issue is filled with politics and agendas and contradictory viewpoints. There are a number of leaders in the field who dislike each other and run down the beliefs of the other. But what’s bad here is with a legitimate concussion, how can they possibly know the next day when taping Raw after Orton flew from Madrid directly to New York that Orton would be fine to wrestle six days later? If he passed the testing the day after a concussion, then all a sudden you have to wonder about the testing. If he didn’t, then WWE had no business pushing him wrestling for Sunday past saying he’s questionable and they would update later in the week. And if he can’t, given that Orton vs. Christian on paper is the No. 2 match on the show, but many consider it the No. 1 match on the show, they should at least on Raw and Smackdown push that there is a question regarding if this match can take place. It comes off really shady for a company that has worked hard to cleanse what has been a very negative image, particularly since it has to do with misleading its most loyal 2% of its audience.
In the ever-evolving science of concussion research and understanding, Dr. Bennett Omalu, who is, within the medical world considered the No. 1 authority on concussions, believes that any athlete who suffers a concussion should be kept out of action for 90 days. His reasoning is a concussion often involves head rotation, not limited to a blow to the skull, and that can cause tearing of brain tissue and can take 90 days for brain fluid to return to normal. The NFL and WWE, for instance, use Maroon’s system to determine whether a competitor has recovered enough to return. Among players, there has been talk that taking Ritalin can help you perform better in that testing and get you back on the field. It’s not like in MMA and boxing, if you are diagnosed with a concussion in a fight, you have a time frame when you can’t spar (although that is not always adhered to) and can’t fight. The time frames in major sports, as well as pro wrestling, are not usually as lengthy.
‘America’s Game: NFL Poised to Win Labor Battle and Lose Public-Health Fight’ ... today at Beyond Chron
[posted 6/16/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Those who think the bargaining and legal skirmishes surrounding the National Football League and its players are in sudden death overtime have fallen for the oldest play-action fake in the book. The NFL lockout likely will resolve itself, perhaps even very soon and essentially in the owners’ favor. But the abject failure of both sides to accept accountability for the mental health of a generation of athletes – putting American youth in harm’s way in service of an industry bursting at the seams with greed – is a story that hasn’t even reached the two-minute warning of the first half.
The eyes of the sports-legal world are on Tom Brady v. NFL, the lawsuit by some of football’s richest stars to end the lockout. Not a single major newspaper or radio/television outlet has picked up the decision last month, in U.S. District Court in Maryland, in Brent V. Boyd v. Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
In a miscarriage of justice no less profound for not being shocking, Judge J. Frederick Motz granted summary judgment to the league’s retirement plan in a suit brought by Boyd, a Minnesota Viking offensive lineman in the 1980s, whose diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy was all but confirmed by a recent “virtual biopsy.” Boyd’s case and countless parallel ones, over a period of many years, will bring the human and societal toll of football home to the American public long after the beer and guacamole have been taken out of ice for this fall’s tailgate parties.
CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/America_s_Game_NFL_Poised_to_Win_Labor_Battle_and_Lose_Public_Health_Fight_9269.html
Those who think the bargaining and legal skirmishes surrounding the National Football League and its players are in sudden death overtime have fallen for the oldest play-action fake in the book. The NFL lockout likely will resolve itself, perhaps even very soon and essentially in the owners’ favor. But the abject failure of both sides to accept accountability for the mental health of a generation of athletes – putting American youth in harm’s way in service of an industry bursting at the seams with greed – is a story that hasn’t even reached the two-minute warning of the first half.
The eyes of the sports-legal world are on Tom Brady v. NFL, the lawsuit by some of football’s richest stars to end the lockout. Not a single major newspaper or radio/television outlet has picked up the decision last month, in U.S. District Court in Maryland, in Brent V. Boyd v. Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
In a miscarriage of justice no less profound for not being shocking, Judge J. Frederick Motz granted summary judgment to the league’s retirement plan in a suit brought by Boyd, a Minnesota Viking offensive lineman in the 1980s, whose diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy was all but confirmed by a recent “virtual biopsy.” Boyd’s case and countless parallel ones, over a period of many years, will bring the human and societal toll of football home to the American public long after the beer and guacamole have been taken out of ice for this fall’s tailgate parties.
CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/America_s_Game_NFL_Poised_to_Win_Labor_Battle_and_Lose_Public_Health_Fight_9269.html
FLASHBACK: How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Scandal
[posted 6/15/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz, May 27: “As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. [I know that is not an issue] for reasons of which you are totally unaware …”http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
New York Times columnist George Vecsey, June 14: “the NYT has led that story for three years. what are you talking about?”
=====
[originally published 6/3/11 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/How_the_New_York_Times_Is_Fumbling_the_National_Sports_Concussion_Scandal_9229.html]
How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Scandal
by Irvin Muchnick
In a January New Yorker article on the concussion crisis in football, writer Ben McGrath quoted Pittsburgh neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon speaking admiringly of Alan Schwarz, the New York Times reporter who created this beat and more recently was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Schwarz, said Dr. Maroon, is “the Socratic gadfly in this whole mix.”
Unlike Socrates, however, Schwarz asks questions that are carefully and corporately adumbrated. The resultant national spirit of cautious inquiry into a stunningly broad public health story is being driven by our Newspaper of Record. This process has the effect of protecting powerful and moneyed interests.
As the game is currently being played, the final score will be some combination of Ivy League-style reforms of football safety and rules, in a sequel to President Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign in the early 20th century, along with federal investigations scapegoating helmet manufacturers – all while letting the $9-billion-a-year National Football League off the hook for a scandal of near-tobacco industry proportions.
I don’t think anyone from the Riddell helmet company is going to jail http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifafter Congress, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission are finished probing how the company ran hard and fast with ambiguous data from a safety study underwritten by the NFL. Nor do I think anyone should, based on what we so far know, despite the Purple Heart that Schwarz awarded himself last week in a bush league email complaint about my blog’s coverage: “I kill myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem – and even conspiracy – in youth football, cause sweeping changes (some about to be announced) and investigations by the CPSC and the FTC …”
(For my full exchange with Schwarz, go to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com.)
Schwarz, who used to write books analyzing baseball stats, is in his element when he verbally slaps around the leadership of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment. He is obviously less comfortable confronting figures like Dr. Maroon, a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers who remains, inexplicably, a quotable authority even though he is facemask-deep in the concussion scandal. For years, Maroon has conducted book-cooking, NFL-friendly, “peer-reviewed” research boosting the for-profit ImPACT concussion management software system developed by his team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Maroon is also the medical director of World Wrestling Entertainment, a huckster for at least two supplement companies, and a serial liar in the concussion narrative. In 2005, after Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered the second Steelers case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in his autopsy of Terry Long, who had committed suicide, Maroon stated categorically that there was no record of Long’s ever having had a concussion while with the team. Omalu soon produced a 1987 letter by Maroon proving the contrary.
It would behoove the most celebrated concussion reporter in American journalism to press Maroon for better answers. Instead, Schwarz has allowed Maroon to distance himself from the NFL’s Riddell helmet study, which the doctor co-authored with, among others, the company’s chief engineer, and which Riddell then exploited in its promotion.
Ah, but Maroon is not an issue, Schwarz asserted to me – “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.” If that’s true, then this titan of communications needs to do some more communicating.
One upshot of Schwarz’s incomplete coverage is that ImPACT has been purchased by an estimated 10 to 15 percent of high school football programs across the country, often under the mandates of new state “safety” legislation. I believe that, rather than shifting the NFL’s public-health tab to already financially beleaguered school districts, we should be talking seriously, not as a throwaway line, about whether high school football is medically, legally, and educationally sustainable.
Somehow The Times has not seen fit to print the devastating critique of ImPACT by Christopher Randolph, a neurology professor at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine, in the journal Current Sports Medicine Reports. (Credit for first publicizing Randolph’s work goes to blogger Matt Chaney, author of the excellent but little-known book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football.)
Randolph wrote: “There is no evidence to suggest that the use of baseline testing alters any risk from sport-related concussion, nor is there even a good rationale as to how such tests might influence outcome.” He added that independent studies of ImPACT show a level of reliability “far too low to be useful for individual decision making.” In sum, youth sports programs using it are investing in a false sense of security.
And what, I ask Alan Schwarz and The New York Times, would Socrates have to say about that?
Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, is working on a book about concussions.
New York Times reporter Alan Schwarz, May 27: “As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. [I know that is not an issue] for reasons of which you are totally unaware …”http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
New York Times columnist George Vecsey, June 14: “the NYT has led that story for three years. what are you talking about?”
=====
[originally published 6/3/11 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/How_the_New_York_Times_Is_Fumbling_the_National_Sports_Concussion_Scandal_9229.html]
How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Scandal
by Irvin Muchnick
In a January New Yorker article on the concussion crisis in football, writer Ben McGrath quoted Pittsburgh neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon speaking admiringly of Alan Schwarz, the New York Times reporter who created this beat and more recently was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Schwarz, said Dr. Maroon, is “the Socratic gadfly in this whole mix.”
Unlike Socrates, however, Schwarz asks questions that are carefully and corporately adumbrated. The resultant national spirit of cautious inquiry into a stunningly broad public health story is being driven by our Newspaper of Record. This process has the effect of protecting powerful and moneyed interests.
As the game is currently being played, the final score will be some combination of Ivy League-style reforms of football safety and rules, in a sequel to President Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign in the early 20th century, along with federal investigations scapegoating helmet manufacturers – all while letting the $9-billion-a-year National Football League off the hook for a scandal of near-tobacco industry proportions.
I don’t think anyone from the Riddell helmet company is going to jail http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifafter Congress, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission are finished probing how the company ran hard and fast with ambiguous data from a safety study underwritten by the NFL. Nor do I think anyone should, based on what we so far know, despite the Purple Heart that Schwarz awarded himself last week in a bush league email complaint about my blog’s coverage: “I kill myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem – and even conspiracy – in youth football, cause sweeping changes (some about to be announced) and investigations by the CPSC and the FTC …”
(For my full exchange with Schwarz, go to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com.)
Schwarz, who used to write books analyzing baseball stats, is in his element when he verbally slaps around the leadership of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment. He is obviously less comfortable confronting figures like Dr. Maroon, a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers who remains, inexplicably, a quotable authority even though he is facemask-deep in the concussion scandal. For years, Maroon has conducted book-cooking, NFL-friendly, “peer-reviewed” research boosting the for-profit ImPACT concussion management software system developed by his team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Maroon is also the medical director of World Wrestling Entertainment, a huckster for at least two supplement companies, and a serial liar in the concussion narrative. In 2005, after Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered the second Steelers case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in his autopsy of Terry Long, who had committed suicide, Maroon stated categorically that there was no record of Long’s ever having had a concussion while with the team. Omalu soon produced a 1987 letter by Maroon proving the contrary.
It would behoove the most celebrated concussion reporter in American journalism to press Maroon for better answers. Instead, Schwarz has allowed Maroon to distance himself from the NFL’s Riddell helmet study, which the doctor co-authored with, among others, the company’s chief engineer, and which Riddell then exploited in its promotion.
Ah, but Maroon is not an issue, Schwarz asserted to me – “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.” If that’s true, then this titan of communications needs to do some more communicating.
One upshot of Schwarz’s incomplete coverage is that ImPACT has been purchased by an estimated 10 to 15 percent of high school football programs across the country, often under the mandates of new state “safety” legislation. I believe that, rather than shifting the NFL’s public-health tab to already financially beleaguered school districts, we should be talking seriously, not as a throwaway line, about whether high school football is medically, legally, and educationally sustainable.
Somehow The Times has not seen fit to print the devastating critique of ImPACT by Christopher Randolph, a neurology professor at Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine, in the journal Current Sports Medicine Reports. (Credit for first publicizing Randolph’s work goes to blogger Matt Chaney, author of the excellent but little-known book Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football.)
Randolph wrote: “There is no evidence to suggest that the use of baseline testing alters any risk from sport-related concussion, nor is there even a good rationale as to how such tests might influence outcome.” He added that independent studies of ImPACT show a level of reliability “far too low to be useful for individual decision making.” In sum, youth sports programs using it are investing in a false sense of security.
And what, I ask Alan Schwarz and The New York Times, would Socrates have to say about that?
Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, is working on a book about concussions.
Columnist George Vecsey Defends New York Times Concussion Scandal Coverage: ‘What Are You Talking About?’
[posted 6/15/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
From: George Vecsey
Subject: RE: New York Times fumbles national sports concussion scandal
To: Irvin Muchnick
Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 5:09 PM
the NYT has led that story for three years.
what are you talking about?
GV
**********
From: Irvin Muchnick
Subject: RE: New York Times fumbles national sports concussion scandal
To: George Vecsey
Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 5:30 PM
I’m talking about how appearances are deceiving. In my writings I have given NYT plenty of credit for their leadership in the past. But the current pushing of neurocognitive testing and whitewashing of NFL / WWE doc Maroon are appalling. Ask a more specific question and I’ll try to answer it for you.
From: George Vecsey
Subject: RE: New York Times fumbles national sports concussion scandal
To: Irvin Muchnick
Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 5:09 PM
the NYT has led that story for three years.
what are you talking about?
GV
**********
From: Irvin Muchnick
Subject: RE: New York Times fumbles national sports concussion scandal
To: George Vecsey
Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 5:30 PM
I’m talking about how appearances are deceiving. In my writings I have given NYT plenty of credit for their leadership in the past. But the current pushing of neurocognitive testing and whitewashing of NFL / WWE doc Maroon are appalling. Ask a more specific question and I’ll try to answer it for you.
Dave Meggyesy Challenges Sam Huff’s NFL Players Union Bona Fides
[posted 6/14/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
In the story here about the late Dave Duerson’s loud altercation with Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish in a Congressional committee hearing room in 2007, I have characterized both Huff and Parrish as historic builders of the National Football League Players Association who became disenchanted with the NFLPA’s advocacy on behalf of disabled retired players.
In an email to me, Dave Meggyesy objected to what he called “revisionist history” with respect to Huff. “Sam Huff was not a union supporter or a union leader. He was and is a management guy,” Meggyesy wrote. “Sam claims union affiliation and sentiment through his father, mine workers I believe. This apple fell far from the tree. The Marriott hotel chain is and has been non-union, Sam has been a spokesman for them for years.”
I respect Meggyesy, who played linebacker for the old St. Louis football Cardinals from 1963 through 1969 before retiring and writing the book Out of Their League, a breakthrough critical look at the football industry. He later served many years as the NFLPA’s western regional director.
Regarding the case of Brent Boyd – the proximate cause of Duerson’s outburst during criticism of his role on the NFL Player Care review board, which rejected Boyd’s application for mental disability benefits – Meggyesy said, “Duerson shows the impact of CTE, nothing more. Boyd’s case should stand on its own, and no doubt be reevaluated.”
Unfortunately, I disagree with Meggyesy on that point. Duerson, and by extension the NFLPA, have been wrong, loud wrong, on the issue of football brain injuries and on taking the most aggressive and best steps to protect the community of retired players. The Brent Boyd case emphatically does not stand “on its own”; it must be viewed in the context of years of league-friendly, suppressed, and incomplete research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Irv Muchnick
In the story here about the late Dave Duerson’s loud altercation with Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish in a Congressional committee hearing room in 2007, I have characterized both Huff and Parrish as historic builders of the National Football League Players Association who became disenchanted with the NFLPA’s advocacy on behalf of disabled retired players.
In an email to me, Dave Meggyesy objected to what he called “revisionist history” with respect to Huff. “Sam Huff was not a union supporter or a union leader. He was and is a management guy,” Meggyesy wrote. “Sam claims union affiliation and sentiment through his father, mine workers I believe. This apple fell far from the tree. The Marriott hotel chain is and has been non-union, Sam has been a spokesman for them for years.”
I respect Meggyesy, who played linebacker for the old St. Louis football Cardinals from 1963 through 1969 before retiring and writing the book Out of Their League, a breakthrough critical look at the football industry. He later served many years as the NFLPA’s western regional director.
Regarding the case of Brent Boyd – the proximate cause of Duerson’s outburst during criticism of his role on the NFL Player Care review board, which rejected Boyd’s application for mental disability benefits – Meggyesy said, “Duerson shows the impact of CTE, nothing more. Boyd’s case should stand on its own, and no doubt be reevaluated.”
Unfortunately, I disagree with Meggyesy on that point. Duerson, and by extension the NFLPA, have been wrong, loud wrong, on the issue of football brain injuries and on taking the most aggressive and best steps to protect the community of retired players. The Brent Boyd case emphatically does not stand “on its own”; it must be viewed in the context of years of league-friendly, suppressed, and incomplete research on chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Irv Muchnick
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
‘NFL Too Big to Fail — That’s Our Real National Concussion Problem’ (full text from Beyond Chron)
[originally published 6/10 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/NFL_Too_Big_to_Fail_That_s_Our_Real_National_Concussion_Problem_9249.html]
by Irvin Muchnick
In sports, as in everything, we love our scandals served on a tabloid plate: the jock DUI’s, the strippers taunted with $100 bills, the sexting, the dog-fighting rings, and most recently, the “amateur” football players for whom the National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibition against “extra benefits” turns out to cover not just cars but also tattoos.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
What we don’t enjoy so much is contemplating life and death. That is why the sports-industrial complex can succeed in feeding the public appetite for the concussion pandemic by substituting pablum for information. Most of us just want this thing to go away, and the National Football League and its circle of friendly media have devised an easy way out: state legislation making youth football “safer” – with the assistance of a “solution” that, it just so happens, was packaged and sold by NFL doctors.
Back in 2003 I wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, “Welcome to Plantation Football,” about the injustice of not paying the performers who do the dirty work of a multibillion-dollar industry carrying the brand names of America’s institutions of higher education. That piece can be viewed at http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/31/magazine/tm-athletes35.
But today, no matter how noble the sentiment behind ending the central hypocrisy of the NCAA, our No. 1 national sports issue is not whether and how much to pay college football and basketball players. It is not President Obama’s populist-pandering threat to lower the antitrust boom on the Bowl Championship Series. And, Lord knows, it is not the crusade by Senator Tom Udall – egged on by The New York Times – to strike fear in the hearts of football helmet manufacturers.
The No. 1 issue in sports is the set of willfully ignored corollaries of the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bennet Omalu, now the chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County, California. Over the last decade, Omalu has been the researcher most responsible for identifying and defining the post-concussion syndrome known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That such a disease, long associated with boxers, also was widespread among athletes in other contact sports (primarily football) had remained a secret hidden in plain sight for more than half a century.
Now Omalu is espousing a position totally at odds with the pushers of neurocognitive testing to help determine when concussed athletes can return to play. Omalu says anyone who suffers a concussion should sit for three months, period. The reason is that a concussion, often involving violent head rotation, rather than (or in addition to) a blow to the skull, can cause tearing of brain tissue all the way down to the brain stem, and it can take 90 days for brain fluid to return to normal.
Omalu, along with others, also comes very close to calling for an out-and-out ban on youth football. Growing brains should not be subjected to a diet of concussive and subconcussive blows, any more than growing arms should throw baseball curveballs – and the stakes of the former activity are a lot higher. As awareness and reporting improve, I am convinced we are going to see ramifications of traumatic brain injury in American youth going to the root of indexes of academic performance, workplace productivity, and criminal behavior.
This leads to a problem no easier to solve than the ingrained and corrupt ways of Wall Street. There was a time when a heavyweight boxing championship fight could galvanize the land, not just with a million pay-per-view buys but as a truly unifying cultural experience. That day passed, and we became more aware of “punch-drunk syndrome” – the forerunner to CTE – and boxing dipped in spectatorship and influence.
In the America of 2011, only football’s Super Bowl is a comparable national hearth, blending hard-core, soft-core, and kitsch. Except that now we are learning that football, especially in the steroid era and with the sophistication of industrial training and the might of global marketing, literally involves armies of athletes daily and systematically inflicting CTE on each other. But we’re stuck. The NFL has become too big to fail. I am hoping that the enforced interlude of a pro football lockout could help bring us to our senses, but the likelihood is that not even that would turn the trick.
For if we were to eliminate football under, say, age 18 (and is that really what Chris Nowinski of the Sports Legacy Institute means when he talks about “changing how football is played”?), what will happen to the high school and youth leagues that develop skills and grease recruitment to college and the pros? Who will hire the coaches? Dress the cheerleaders? Market the lines of pint-sized blocking sleds and shoulder pads? In Miracle on 34th Street, the political adviser to the judge, who was trying to decide whether to declare Kris Kringle insane, ticked off all the categories of Christmas-related constituents who would be up in arms. But Santa Claus is a kindly myth http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif– football is head-delivered death.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
And without that intergenerational thread, how will the NFL carnival, with its sexually predatory quarterbacks, its diva wide receivers, its human-missile defensive secondary personnel, remain a national obsession? Especially when the legal bills start piling up. Wrongful death goes for seven figures. As the late Senator Everett Dirksen once observed, a million here and a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Such is the crisis of our football economy, whether anyone out there wants to talk about it seriously or not.
Irvin Muchnick (http://muchnick.net; http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com; http://twitter.com/irvmuch) is a regular Beyond Chron contributor.
by Irvin Muchnick
In sports, as in everything, we love our scandals served on a tabloid plate: the jock DUI’s, the strippers taunted with $100 bills, the sexting, the dog-fighting rings, and most recently, the “amateur” football players for whom the National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibition against “extra benefits” turns out to cover not just cars but also tattoos.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
What we don’t enjoy so much is contemplating life and death. That is why the sports-industrial complex can succeed in feeding the public appetite for the concussion pandemic by substituting pablum for information. Most of us just want this thing to go away, and the National Football League and its circle of friendly media have devised an easy way out: state legislation making youth football “safer” – with the assistance of a “solution” that, it just so happens, was packaged and sold by NFL doctors.
Back in 2003 I wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, “Welcome to Plantation Football,” about the injustice of not paying the performers who do the dirty work of a multibillion-dollar industry carrying the brand names of America’s institutions of higher education. That piece can be viewed at http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/31/magazine/tm-athletes35.
But today, no matter how noble the sentiment behind ending the central hypocrisy of the NCAA, our No. 1 national sports issue is not whether and how much to pay college football and basketball players. It is not President Obama’s populist-pandering threat to lower the antitrust boom on the Bowl Championship Series. And, Lord knows, it is not the crusade by Senator Tom Udall – egged on by The New York Times – to strike fear in the hearts of football helmet manufacturers.
The No. 1 issue in sports is the set of willfully ignored corollaries of the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bennet Omalu, now the chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County, California. Over the last decade, Omalu has been the researcher most responsible for identifying and defining the post-concussion syndrome known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. That such a disease, long associated with boxers, also was widespread among athletes in other contact sports (primarily football) had remained a secret hidden in plain sight for more than half a century.
Now Omalu is espousing a position totally at odds with the pushers of neurocognitive testing to help determine when concussed athletes can return to play. Omalu says anyone who suffers a concussion should sit for three months, period. The reason is that a concussion, often involving violent head rotation, rather than (or in addition to) a blow to the skull, can cause tearing of brain tissue all the way down to the brain stem, and it can take 90 days for brain fluid to return to normal.
Omalu, along with others, also comes very close to calling for an out-and-out ban on youth football. Growing brains should not be subjected to a diet of concussive and subconcussive blows, any more than growing arms should throw baseball curveballs – and the stakes of the former activity are a lot higher. As awareness and reporting improve, I am convinced we are going to see ramifications of traumatic brain injury in American youth going to the root of indexes of academic performance, workplace productivity, and criminal behavior.
This leads to a problem no easier to solve than the ingrained and corrupt ways of Wall Street. There was a time when a heavyweight boxing championship fight could galvanize the land, not just with a million pay-per-view buys but as a truly unifying cultural experience. That day passed, and we became more aware of “punch-drunk syndrome” – the forerunner to CTE – and boxing dipped in spectatorship and influence.
In the America of 2011, only football’s Super Bowl is a comparable national hearth, blending hard-core, soft-core, and kitsch. Except that now we are learning that football, especially in the steroid era and with the sophistication of industrial training and the might of global marketing, literally involves armies of athletes daily and systematically inflicting CTE on each other. But we’re stuck. The NFL has become too big to fail. I am hoping that the enforced interlude of a pro football lockout could help bring us to our senses, but the likelihood is that not even that would turn the trick.
For if we were to eliminate football under, say, age 18 (and is that really what Chris Nowinski of the Sports Legacy Institute means when he talks about “changing how football is played”?), what will happen to the high school and youth leagues that develop skills and grease recruitment to college and the pros? Who will hire the coaches? Dress the cheerleaders? Market the lines of pint-sized blocking sleds and shoulder pads? In Miracle on 34th Street, the political adviser to the judge, who was trying to decide whether to declare Kris Kringle insane, ticked off all the categories of Christmas-related constituents who would be up in arms. But Santa Claus is a kindly myth http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif– football is head-delivered death.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
And without that intergenerational thread, how will the NFL carnival, with its sexually predatory quarterbacks, its diva wide receivers, its human-missile defensive secondary personnel, remain a national obsession? Especially when the legal bills start piling up. Wrongful death goes for seven figures. As the late Senator Everett Dirksen once observed, a million here and a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
Such is the crisis of our football economy, whether anyone out there wants to talk about it seriously or not.
Irvin Muchnick (http://muchnick.net; http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com; http://twitter.com/irvmuch) is a regular Beyond Chron contributor.
Retired Wrestler Jeff Farmer: ‘Is This What Is Wrong With Me?’
[posted 6/12/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Blog reader Jeff Farmer, a former pro wrestler, emailed, “Is this what is wrong with me?”
He elaborated: “I have had several concussions over the years, and wonder if I will suffer some adverse effects. To date I think I am OK, but who knows, I do forget things, so would I not forget as many things, etc., had I not sustained the concussions – could I have been a genius, like my brother? I started playing football in the pew-wees and remember getting my bell rung even back then (we were encouraged to use our heads to strike).”
Jeff Farmer, 48, had his most famous wrestling role in Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling as the evil alter-ego of Steve “Sting” Borden. He is now the project manager for the genetics exercise and research program at the University of Miami’s Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.
Jeff’s older brother Paul is the world-famous doctor, anthropologist, and activist who founded the public health and justice organization Partners in Health. Paul Farmer, subject of Tracy Kidder’s bestselling biography Mountains Beyond Mountains, is a MacArthur “genius” award recipient and one of these days should win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Irv Muchnick
Blog reader Jeff Farmer, a former pro wrestler, emailed, “Is this what is wrong with me?”
He elaborated: “I have had several concussions over the years, and wonder if I will suffer some adverse effects. To date I think I am OK, but who knows, I do forget things, so would I not forget as many things, etc., had I not sustained the concussions – could I have been a genius, like my brother? I started playing football in the pew-wees and remember getting my bell rung even back then (we were encouraged to use our heads to strike).”
Jeff Farmer, 48, had his most famous wrestling role in Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling as the evil alter-ego of Steve “Sting” Borden. He is now the project manager for the genetics exercise and research program at the University of Miami’s Hussman Institute for Human Genomics.
Jeff’s older brother Paul is the world-famous doctor, anthropologist, and activist who founded the public health and justice organization Partners in Health. Paul Farmer, subject of Tracy Kidder’s bestselling biography Mountains Beyond Mountains, is a MacArthur “genius” award recipient and one of these days should win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Irv Muchnick
NFL Defense: Retirement Board Trustee Dave Duerson’s Suicide Not a ‘Changed Circumstance’ For Living Mental Disability Claimants
[posted 6/12/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifgif
On May 24 – the very day Judge J. Frederick Motz of U.S. District Court in Maryland dismissed former player Brent Boyd’s appeal of the National Football League retirement plan’s rejection of his mental disability claim – Dave Lopresti of USA Today wrote a touching column headlined “Struggle continues for widow of Dave Duerson,” http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2011-05-23-dave-alicia-duerson-brain-injury-nfl_N.htm.
In the piece, Alicia Duerson called her former husband’s February suicide “the tip of the iceberg” of the NFL’s traumatic brain injury problem. Lopresti recounted the former star defensive back’s domestic violence arrest, personal bankruptcy, and postmortem finding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
He was a big man with a shrinking brain, Alicia Duerson said, adding: “His brain had started dying 10 years ago.”
There’s one more small thing USA Today didn’t discuss, and she apparently is not incorporating into the talking points of her CTE public awareness tour: the fact that Dave Duerson served on the review board, consisting of representatives from both the league and the NFL Players Association, which has stonewalled other retired players’ claims for head-injury benefits. In 2007, he even argued the retirement plan’s position on Capitol Hill, and during a break at a Congressional hearing, exploded in abuse at Brent Boyd and old player union leaders Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish.
And without that crucial connection, Dave Duerson’s suicide becomes just one more sob story.
In his travesty of a decision, Judge Motz held that Boyd’s attorneys did not prove “changed circumstances,” “abuse of discretion,” or “conflict of interest.” The Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan successfully sold the argument that introducing into evidence a decade’s worth of new published findings on CTE, along with the reason for Duerson’s own death by self-inflicted gunshot, was simply a desperation ploy by a rejected disability claimant to get “a second bite of the apple.”
Oh, I see. The Duerson suicide was not a “changed circumstance” for the dozens, scores, or hundreds of retired players still living with depression, still unable to function or support their families or live normal lives, still getting no relief from the $9-billion-a-year NFL. It was only a “changed circumstance” for Alicia Duerson.
Outrageous.
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Irv Muchnick
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SEE ALSO:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Dave Duerson NFL Suicide Story You’ll Read Nowhere Else — In Five Parts
‘Honoring Dave Duerson: Three Things the NFL, Fans, And Sponsors Must Do’ (full text)
Brent Boyd Loses NFL Disability Court Case – It Shouldn’t Be the Last Round
Dave Duerson Is the Pandora’s Box of NFL Mental Disability Cases – But Cowardly U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz Refused to Open It
On May 24 – the very day Judge J. Frederick Motz of U.S. District Court in Maryland dismissed former player Brent Boyd’s appeal of the National Football League retirement plan’s rejection of his mental disability claim – Dave Lopresti of USA Today wrote a touching column headlined “Struggle continues for widow of Dave Duerson,” http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/lopresti/2011-05-23-dave-alicia-duerson-brain-injury-nfl_N.htm.
In the piece, Alicia Duerson called her former husband’s February suicide “the tip of the iceberg” of the NFL’s traumatic brain injury problem. Lopresti recounted the former star defensive back’s domestic violence arrest, personal bankruptcy, and postmortem finding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
He was a big man with a shrinking brain, Alicia Duerson said, adding: “His brain had started dying 10 years ago.”
There’s one more small thing USA Today didn’t discuss, and she apparently is not incorporating into the talking points of her CTE public awareness tour: the fact that Dave Duerson served on the review board, consisting of representatives from both the league and the NFL Players Association, which has stonewalled other retired players’ claims for head-injury benefits. In 2007, he even argued the retirement plan’s position on Capitol Hill, and during a break at a Congressional hearing, exploded in abuse at Brent Boyd and old player union leaders Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish.
And without that crucial connection, Dave Duerson’s suicide becomes just one more sob story.
In his travesty of a decision, Judge Motz held that Boyd’s attorneys did not prove “changed circumstances,” “abuse of discretion,” or “conflict of interest.” The Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan successfully sold the argument that introducing into evidence a decade’s worth of new published findings on CTE, along with the reason for Duerson’s own death by self-inflicted gunshot, was simply a desperation ploy by a rejected disability claimant to get “a second bite of the apple.”
Oh, I see. The Duerson suicide was not a “changed circumstance” for the dozens, scores, or hundreds of retired players still living with depression, still unable to function or support their families or live normal lives, still getting no relief from the $9-billion-a-year NFL. It was only a “changed circumstance” for Alicia Duerson.
Outrageous.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Irv Muchnick
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SEE ALSO:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Dave Duerson NFL Suicide Story You’ll Read Nowhere Else — In Five Parts
‘Honoring Dave Duerson: Three Things the NFL, Fans, And Sponsors Must Do’ (full text)
Brent Boyd Loses NFL Disability Court Case – It Shouldn’t Be the Last Round
Dave Duerson Is the Pandora’s Box of NFL Mental Disability Cases – But Cowardly U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz Refused to Open It
Dave Duerson Is the Pandora’s Box of NFL Mental Disability Cases – But Cowardly U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz Refused to Open It
[posted 6/10/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
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To the best of my knowledge, not a single media outlet except this blog has reported on the May 24 ruling in Baltimore by U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz, who threw out retired Minnesota Viking lineman Brent Boyd’s case against the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. If any readers find otherwise, they should forward the links to me.
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My initial story on Judge Motz’s summary judgment for the defendants appeared yesterday under the headline “Brent Boyd Loses NFL Disability Court Case – It Shouldn’t Be the Last Round,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/brent-boyd-loses-nfl-disability-court-case-%E2%80%93-it-shouldn%E2%80%99t-be-the-last-round/. The judge’s memorandum in support of his order is at http://muchnick.net/boydruling52411.pdf.
Boyd’s attorney, Mark DeBofsky, told me, “We felt we had presented sufficient evidence of changed circumstances and that despite the court’s finding of no conflict of interest, the numbers suggest otherwise. Given the paltry number of claims paid by the NFL disability and retirement plan for head injuries, it appears the plan is biased against such claims out of fear of an avalanche of brain trauma disability claims.”
I described the ruling as a miscarriage of justice, but that didn’t go far enough. Motz was also cowardly. Cut through the legalese and split hairs, and it all comes down to this: The court decided that the retirement plan “did not abuse its discretion” in rejecting Boyd’s reapplications and administrative appeals. There was no showing of “changed circumstances” – even though we have tons more basic information on the legitimacy of Boyd’s claim of traumatic brain injury from football than was known at the time of the original filing some 11 years ago; and even though one of the three National Football League Players Association members of the disability claims board was Dave Duerson, who himself had chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he committed suicide in February.
What extraordinary judicial incuriosity.
Last month John Hogan, the Georgia lawyer who is perhaps the best-known representative of NFL retiree disability claims, told The New York Times that he was considering requesting an audit by the U.S. Department of Labor to see how Duerson had voted on claims. Hogan added: “He had to exercise a high degree of care, skill, prudence and diligence — the CTE findings, coupled with his suicide, certainly raise the question of whether he was capable of properly fulfilling those duties as is required in such an important undertaking. It therefore calls into question the possibility that some or all of the decisions he made when passing on disability claims are suspect, and perhaps invalid.”
Boyd attorney DeBofsky told me that during litigation “we had requested discovery that would essentially have been an audit of the plan and benefits paid for head injuries, but the judge denied our request.”
Judge Motz’s rulings on discovery and on the merits were both farces. They must not stand.
Irv Muchnick
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To the best of my knowledge, not a single media outlet except this blog has reported on the May 24 ruling in Baltimore by U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz, who threw out retired Minnesota Viking lineman Brent Boyd’s case against the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan. If any readers find otherwise, they should forward the links to me.
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
My initial story on Judge Motz’s summary judgment for the defendants appeared yesterday under the headline “Brent Boyd Loses NFL Disability Court Case – It Shouldn’t Be the Last Round,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/brent-boyd-loses-nfl-disability-court-case-%E2%80%93-it-shouldn%E2%80%99t-be-the-last-round/. The judge’s memorandum in support of his order is at http://muchnick.net/boydruling52411.pdf.
Boyd’s attorney, Mark DeBofsky, told me, “We felt we had presented sufficient evidence of changed circumstances and that despite the court’s finding of no conflict of interest, the numbers suggest otherwise. Given the paltry number of claims paid by the NFL disability and retirement plan for head injuries, it appears the plan is biased against such claims out of fear of an avalanche of brain trauma disability claims.”
I described the ruling as a miscarriage of justice, but that didn’t go far enough. Motz was also cowardly. Cut through the legalese and split hairs, and it all comes down to this: The court decided that the retirement plan “did not abuse its discretion” in rejecting Boyd’s reapplications and administrative appeals. There was no showing of “changed circumstances” – even though we have tons more basic information on the legitimacy of Boyd’s claim of traumatic brain injury from football than was known at the time of the original filing some 11 years ago; and even though one of the three National Football League Players Association members of the disability claims board was Dave Duerson, who himself had chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he committed suicide in February.
What extraordinary judicial incuriosity.
Last month John Hogan, the Georgia lawyer who is perhaps the best-known representative of NFL retiree disability claims, told The New York Times that he was considering requesting an audit by the U.S. Department of Labor to see how Duerson had voted on claims. Hogan added: “He had to exercise a high degree of care, skill, prudence and diligence — the CTE findings, coupled with his suicide, certainly raise the question of whether he was capable of properly fulfilling those duties as is required in such an important undertaking. It therefore calls into question the possibility that some or all of the decisions he made when passing on disability claims are suspect, and perhaps invalid.”
Boyd attorney DeBofsky told me that during litigation “we had requested discovery that would essentially have been an audit of the plan and benefits paid for head injuries, but the judge denied our request.”
Judge Motz’s rulings on discovery and on the merits were both farces. They must not stand.
Irv Muchnick
Sunday, June 19, 2011
‘NFL Too Big To Fail – That’s Our Real National Concussion Problem’... today at Beyond Chron
[posted 6/10/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
NFL Too Big to Fail – That’s Our Real National Concussion Problem
by Irvin Muchnick
In sports, as in everything, we love our scandals served on a tabloid plate: the jock DUI’s, the strippers taunted with $100 bills, the sexting, the dog-fighting rings, and most recently, the “amateur” football players for whom the National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibition against “extra benefits” turns out to cover not just cars but also tattoos.
What we don’t enjoy so much is contemplating life and death. That is why the sports-industrial complex can succeed in feeding the public appetite for the concussion pandemic by substituting pablum for information. Most of us just want this thing to go away, and the National Football League and its circle of friendly media have devised an easy way out: state legislation making youth football “safer” – with the assistance of a “solution” that, it just so happens, was packaged and sold by NFL doctors.
… [N]o matter how noble the sentiment behind ending the central hypocrisy of the NCAA, our No. 1 national sports issue is … the set of willfully ignored corollaries of the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bennet Omalu[….] Omalu is espousing a position totally at odds with the pushers of neurocognitive testing to help determine when concussed athletes can return to play. Omalu says anyone who suffers a cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifncussion should sit for three months, period. The reason is that a concussion, often involving violent head rotation, rather than (or in addition to) a blow to the skull, can cause tearing of brain tissue all the way down to the brain stem, and it can take 90 days for brain fluid to return to normal.
Omalu, along with others, also comes very close to calling for an out-and-out ban on youth football. Growing brains should not be subjected to a diet of concussive and subconcussive blows, any more than growing arms should throw baseball curveballs – and the stakes of the former activity are a lot higher.
FULL TEXT TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/NFL_Too_Big_to_Fail_That_s_Our_Real_National_Concussion_Problem_9249.html
NFL Too Big to Fail – That’s Our Real National Concussion Problem
by Irvin Muchnick
In sports, as in everything, we love our scandals served on a tabloid plate: the jock DUI’s, the strippers taunted with $100 bills, the sexting, the dog-fighting rings, and most recently, the “amateur” football players for whom the National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibition against “extra benefits” turns out to cover not just cars but also tattoos.
What we don’t enjoy so much is contemplating life and death. That is why the sports-industrial complex can succeed in feeding the public appetite for the concussion pandemic by substituting pablum for information. Most of us just want this thing to go away, and the National Football League and its circle of friendly media have devised an easy way out: state legislation making youth football “safer” – with the assistance of a “solution” that, it just so happens, was packaged and sold by NFL doctors.
… [N]o matter how noble the sentiment behind ending the central hypocrisy of the NCAA, our No. 1 national sports issue is … the set of willfully ignored corollaries of the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bennet Omalu[….] Omalu is espousing a position totally at odds with the pushers of neurocognitive testing to help determine when concussed athletes can return to play. Omalu says anyone who suffers a cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifncussion should sit for three months, period. The reason is that a concussion, often involving violent head rotation, rather than (or in addition to) a blow to the skull, can cause tearing of brain tissue all the way down to the brain stem, and it can take 90 days for brain fluid to return to normal.
Omalu, along with others, also comes very close to calling for an out-and-out ban on youth football. Growing brains should not be subjected to a diet of concussive and subconcussive blows, any more than growing arms should throw baseball curveballs – and the stakes of the former activity are a lot higher.
FULL TEXT TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/NFL_Too_Big_to_Fail_That_s_Our_Real_National_Concussion_Problem_9249.html
Brent Boyd Loses NFL Disability Court Case – It Shouldn’t Be the Last Round
[posted 6/9/11 to httphttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
On May 24, Judge J. Frederick Motz of U.S. District Court in Maryland ruled against former Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman Brent Boyd in the latest round of his long-running administrative and legal fight with the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.
The judge’s opinion can be viewed at http://muchnick.net/boydruling52411.pdf.
This is a miscarriage of justice, turning not on a serious substantive dispute about Boyd’s football-caused mental illness so much as on procedural technicalities about whether his reapplications of previously denied claims established “changed circumstances.” On this blog, I will be publishing more documents from this case file and explaining how it is another chapter of shame for both the National Football League and the NFL Players Association.
More importantly, I will be exhorting the pro football public – media, fans, and sponsors – not to turn their heads away. This does not need to be the last chapter of the Brent Boyd story. Unfortunately, Brent told me yesterday that his attorney, Mark DeBofsky of the Chicago firm Daley DeBofsky & Bryant, does not have the resources to pursue an appeal on a contingency basis (that is, without payment of ongoing fees rather than the hope of recovering them as part of a settlement or judgment). But that does not mean that a fund cannot be set up on Boyd’s behalf to help sustain the work of his legal team, or that other representation cannot be persuaded to join the effort on a contingency or pro bono basis.
Legal fees are not the only type of support Boyd could use. Through this blog, an anonymous benefactor has already stepped forward to order sent to Boyd’s Nevada home a regular supply of high-end Omega 3 supplements, in the hope that these will help alleviate the symptoms of what is almost surely a case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Please follow this blog for further developments. My hope is that we can help build a network of concerned fans who, instead of just sitting around and awaiting the fate of 2011 NFL season, will also choose to do constructive things on behalf of the many men across the country who have entertained us and now find themselves disabled much too young, and abandoned by the $9-billion-a-year league and its players’ union.
Anyone with ideas in any of these areas is invited to email.
For the full background, see:
‘Dave Duerson Knew Nothing About Concussions and Players’ Best Interests’ – My Exclusive Interview With Ex-Minnesota Viking Brent Boyd
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February 24
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Honoring Dave Duerson – Three Things the NFL, Fans, and Sponsors Must Do
March 4
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/honoring-dave-duerson-http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthree-things-the-nfl-fans-and-sponsors-must-do-full-text/
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Introducing ALREADY LOCKED OUT: The NFL and NFLPA’s Rejected Disability Claims
March 15
http:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/introducing-already-locked-out-the-nfl-and-nflpa%E2%80%99s-rejected-disability-claims/
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NFL Living CTE Victim Brent Boyd: ‘Where’s the Counseling? Where’s the Support?’
June 1
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/nfl-living-cte-victim-brent-boyd-%E2%80%98where%E2%80%99s-the-counseling-where%E2%80%99s-the-support%E2%80%99/
Irv Muchnick
On May 24, Judge J. Frederick Motz of U.S. District Court in Maryland ruled against former Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman Brent Boyd in the latest round of his long-running administrative and legal fight with the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan.
The judge’s opinion can be viewed at http://muchnick.net/boydruling52411.pdf.
This is a miscarriage of justice, turning not on a serious substantive dispute about Boyd’s football-caused mental illness so much as on procedural technicalities about whether his reapplications of previously denied claims established “changed circumstances.” On this blog, I will be publishing more documents from this case file and explaining how it is another chapter of shame for both the National Football League and the NFL Players Association.
More importantly, I will be exhorting the pro football public – media, fans, and sponsors – not to turn their heads away. This does not need to be the last chapter of the Brent Boyd story. Unfortunately, Brent told me yesterday that his attorney, Mark DeBofsky of the Chicago firm Daley DeBofsky & Bryant, does not have the resources to pursue an appeal on a contingency basis (that is, without payment of ongoing fees rather than the hope of recovering them as part of a settlement or judgment). But that does not mean that a fund cannot be set up on Boyd’s behalf to help sustain the work of his legal team, or that other representation cannot be persuaded to join the effort on a contingency or pro bono basis.
Legal fees are not the only type of support Boyd could use. Through this blog, an anonymous benefactor has already stepped forward to order sent to Boyd’s Nevada home a regular supply of high-end Omega 3 supplements, in the hope that these will help alleviate the symptoms of what is almost surely a case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Please follow this blog for further developments. My hope is that we can help build a network of concerned fans who, instead of just sitting around and awaiting the fate of 2011 NFL season, will also choose to do constructive things on behalf of the many men across the country who have entertained us and now find themselves disabled much too young, and abandoned by the $9-billion-a-year league and its players’ union.
Anyone with ideas in any of these areas is invited to email
For the full background, see:
‘Dave Duerson Knew Nothing About Concussions and Players’ Best Interests’ – My Exclusive Interview With Ex-Minnesota Viking Brent Boyd
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
February 24
hthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftp://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/%E2%80%98dave-duerson-knew-nothing-about-concussions-and-players%E2%80%99-best-interests%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93-my-exclusive-interview-with-ex-minnesota-viking-brent-boyd/
***
Honoring Dave Duerson – Three Things the NFL, Fans, and Sponsors Must Do
March 4
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/04/honoring-dave-duerson-http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthree-things-the-nfl-fans-and-sponsors-must-do-full-text/
***
Introducing ALREADY LOCKED OUT: The NFL and NFLPA’s Rejected Disability Claims
March 15
http:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/introducing-already-locked-out-the-nfl-and-nflpa%E2%80%99s-rejected-disability-claims/
***
NFL Living CTE Victim Brent Boyd: ‘Where’s the Counseling? Where’s the Support?’
June 1
http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/nfl-living-cte-victim-brent-boyd-%E2%80%98where%E2%80%99s-the-counseling-where%E2%80%99s-the-support%E2%80%99/
Irv Muchnick
Friday, June 17, 2011
More of What Alan Schwarz of The New York Times Doesn’t Cover About the Inadequacy of Dr. Joseph Maroon’s ‘ImPACT’ Concussion Management
No doubt some casual readers of this blog think I’m doing an excessive metaphorical tap dance on Dr. Joseph Maroon, the visionary co-founder of ImPACT Applications, Inc., as well as the team neurosurgeon for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a widely quoted spokesperson for the National Football League’s concussion policy committee, a stalwart of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, partner in the company licensing the research behind the supplement Vindure, endorser of the supplement Sports Brain Guard, author of The Longevity Factor, and septuagenarian triathlete. Plus, of course, medical director of World Wrestling Entertainment, in which capacity he treats head injuries both real and imagined. Maroon is also the co-author of the NFL-funded study of a new football helmet design, and the overzealous promotion of that study by the Riddell helmet company is now under federal investigation.
These same readers may also wish I’d call a halt to my proverbial soft shoe on Alan Schwarz of The New York Times, the baseball statistical nerd who, by his own modest account, “[killed] myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem – and even conspiracy – in youth football.” Maroon praises Schwarz in The New Yorker, Schwarz quotes Maroon uncritically in The Times, and Schwarz tells me flatly that Maroon is a not an issue in the larger national sports concussion scandal, “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.”
I point these readers and others to author-journalist-blogger Matt Chaney’s January 28 post, “Brain Expert Omalu Wants Longer Rest for Concussed Football Players,” http://blog.4wallspublishing.com/2011/01/28/brain-expert-omalu-wants-longer-rest-for-concussed-football-players.aspx.
The subhead of Chaney’s article: “Sideline concussed juveniles for three months, says the breakthrough neuropath; Neuropsychological testing lacks validation and might be harmful, critics caution; NFL players rebuke theory of ‘safer’ football through their ‘behavior modification’”
Here’s most of the section headed “Critics Doubt Efficacy of NP testing for concussion diagnosis, ‘return to play’”:
Today’s general view that concussion management works or can work in tackle football is rendered highly suspect, if not effectively discredited, by independent review and mounting adverse opinion of experts and witnesses like players.
Linebacker Fujita notes he hasn’t been measured on neural baseline for two NFL seasons. Might not matter, anyway, for NP testing has taken a systematic beating by reviewers of late. Observations and findings of medical literature from 2005 to 2010, listed without full author groups or first names, include:
*Randolph et al, 2005, for Journal of Athletic Training: “Despite the theoretic rationale for the use of NP testing in the management of sport-related concussion, no NP tests have met the necessary criteria to support a clinical application at this time. Additional research is necessary to establish the utility of these tests before they can be considered part of a routine standard of care… until NP testing or other methods are proven effective for this purpose.”
*Patel et al, 2005, for Sports Medicine: “Numerous guidelines have been published for grading and return-to-play criteria following concussion; however, none of these have been prospectively validated by research and none are specifically applicable to children and adolescents.”
*Mayers, 2008, for Archives of Neurology: “Current guidelines result from thoughtful consensus recommendations by expert committees but are chiefly based on the resolution of symptoms and the results of neuropsychological testing, if available. Adherence to this paradigm results in most injured athletes resuming competition in 1 to 2 weeks.”
*Duff, 2009, for ASHA Leader: “Indeed, the identification and management of concussion has become a growing public health issue. Considered to be the fastest-growing sub-discipline in neuropsychology, concussion management poses unique challenges and opportunities for those working with school-aged children. … There is no consensus on the best course of action for concussion management. In fact, there are as many as 22 different published guidelines for grading concussion severity and determining return to play. … Developers are working to collect data regarding reliability, validity, and clinical utility of these (NP) tools; independent replication is still forthcoming.”
*Echemendia et al, 2009, for British Journal of Sports Medicine: “Post-injury assessment requires advanced neuropsychological expertise that is best provided by a clinical neuropsychologist. Significant international differences exist with respect to the training and availability of clinical neuropsychologists, which require modification of these views on a country by country basis.”
*Covassin et al, 2009, for Journal of Athletic Training: “…little is known about the use of baseline neurocognitive testing in concussion assessment and management. … We found that the majority of ATs (athetic trainers) are interpreting ImPACT results without attending a neuropsychological testing workshop. … The use of baseline-testing, baseline testing re-administration, and post-concussion protocols among ATs is increasing. However, the ATs in this study reported that they relied more on symptoms than on neurocognitive test scores when making return-to-play decisions.”
*Maerlender et al, 2010, for The Clinical Neuropsychologist: “Although computerized neuropsychological screening is becoming a standard for sports concussion identification and management, convergent validity studies are limited.”
*Piland et al, 2010, for Journal of Athletic Training: “Obtaining (self-reported symptom) statements before a concussion occurs assists in determining when the injury is resolved. However, athletes may present with concussion-related symptoms at baseline. … In other words, some post-concussive symptoms occur in persons who have not sustained concussions, rendering the specificity of alleged post-concussive symptoms suspect.”
*Schatz, 2010, for American Journal of Sports Medicine: “Computer-based assessment programs are commonly used to document baseline cognitive performance for comparison with post-concussion testing. There are currently no guidelines for how often baseline assessments should be updated, and no data documenting the test-retest stability of baseline measures over relevant time periods.”
*Comper et al, 2010, for Brain Injury: “Despite the proliferation of neuropsychological research on sports-related concussion over the past decade, the methodological quality of studies appears to be highly variable, with many lacking proper scientific rigour. Future research in the area needs to be carefully controlled, repeatable and generalizable, which will contribute to developing practical, evidence-based guidelines for concussion management.”
*Eckner et al, 2010, for Current Sports Medicine Reports: “The sports medicine practitioner must not rely on any one tool in managing concussion and must be aware of the strengths and limitations of whichever method is chosen…”
Unfortunately, software packages like ImPACT, long criticized for its direct connections to the NFL, are widely employed as cornerstone for concussion evaluation and typically by untrained clients, as literature and news reports confirm.
Irv Muchnick
These same readers may also wish I’d call a halt to my proverbial soft shoe on Alan Schwarz of The New York Times, the baseball statistical nerd who, by his own modest account, “[killed] myself for six months to expose a serious safety problem – and even conspiracy – in youth football.” Maroon praises Schwarz in The New Yorker, Schwarz quotes Maroon uncritically in The Times, and Schwarz tells me flatly that Maroon is a not an issue in the larger national sports concussion scandal, “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.”
I point these readers and others to author-journalist-blogger Matt Chaney’s January 28 post, “Brain Expert Omalu Wants Longer Rest for Concussed Football Players,” http://blog.4wallspublishing.com/2011/01/28/brain-expert-omalu-wants-longer-rest-for-concussed-football-players.aspx.
The subhead of Chaney’s article: “Sideline concussed juveniles for three months, says the breakthrough neuropath; Neuropsychological testing lacks validation and might be harmful, critics caution; NFL players rebuke theory of ‘safer’ football through their ‘behavior modification’”
Here’s most of the section headed “Critics Doubt Efficacy of NP testing for concussion diagnosis, ‘return to play’”:
Today’s general view that concussion management works or can work in tackle football is rendered highly suspect, if not effectively discredited, by independent review and mounting adverse opinion of experts and witnesses like players.
Linebacker Fujita notes he hasn’t been measured on neural baseline for two NFL seasons. Might not matter, anyway, for NP testing has taken a systematic beating by reviewers of late. Observations and findings of medical literature from 2005 to 2010, listed without full author groups or first names, include:
*Randolph et al, 2005, for Journal of Athletic Training: “Despite the theoretic rationale for the use of NP testing in the management of sport-related concussion, no NP tests have met the necessary criteria to support a clinical application at this time. Additional research is necessary to establish the utility of these tests before they can be considered part of a routine standard of care… until NP testing or other methods are proven effective for this purpose.”
*Patel et al, 2005, for Sports Medicine: “Numerous guidelines have been published for grading and return-to-play criteria following concussion; however, none of these have been prospectively validated by research and none are specifically applicable to children and adolescents.”
*Mayers, 2008, for Archives of Neurology: “Current guidelines result from thoughtful consensus recommendations by expert committees but are chiefly based on the resolution of symptoms and the results of neuropsychological testing, if available. Adherence to this paradigm results in most injured athletes resuming competition in 1 to 2 weeks.”
*Duff, 2009, for ASHA Leader: “Indeed, the identification and management of concussion has become a growing public health issue. Considered to be the fastest-growing sub-discipline in neuropsychology, concussion management poses unique challenges and opportunities for those working with school-aged children. … There is no consensus on the best course of action for concussion management. In fact, there are as many as 22 different published guidelines for grading concussion severity and determining return to play. … Developers are working to collect data regarding reliability, validity, and clinical utility of these (NP) tools; independent replication is still forthcoming.”
*Echemendia et al, 2009, for British Journal of Sports Medicine: “Post-injury assessment requires advanced neuropsychological expertise that is best provided by a clinical neuropsychologist. Significant international differences exist with respect to the training and availability of clinical neuropsychologists, which require modification of these views on a country by country basis.”
*Covassin et al, 2009, for Journal of Athletic Training: “…little is known about the use of baseline neurocognitive testing in concussion assessment and management. … We found that the majority of ATs (athetic trainers) are interpreting ImPACT results without attending a neuropsychological testing workshop. … The use of baseline-testing, baseline testing re-administration, and post-concussion protocols among ATs is increasing. However, the ATs in this study reported that they relied more on symptoms than on neurocognitive test scores when making return-to-play decisions.”
*Maerlender et al, 2010, for The Clinical Neuropsychologist: “Although computerized neuropsychological screening is becoming a standard for sports concussion identification and management, convergent validity studies are limited.”
*Piland et al, 2010, for Journal of Athletic Training: “Obtaining (self-reported symptom) statements before a concussion occurs assists in determining when the injury is resolved. However, athletes may present with concussion-related symptoms at baseline. … In other words, some post-concussive symptoms occur in persons who have not sustained concussions, rendering the specificity of alleged post-concussive symptoms suspect.”
*Schatz, 2010, for American Journal of Sports Medicine: “Computer-based assessment programs are commonly used to document baseline cognitive performance for comparison with post-concussion testing. There are currently no guidelines for how often baseline assessments should be updated, and no data documenting the test-retest stability of baseline measures over relevant time periods.”
*Comper et al, 2010, for Brain Injury: “Despite the proliferation of neuropsychological research on sports-related concussion over the past decade, the methodological quality of studies appears to be highly variable, with many lacking proper scientific rigour. Future research in the area needs to be carefully controlled, repeatable and generalizable, which will contribute to developing practical, evidence-based guidelines for concussion management.”
*Eckner et al, 2010, for Current Sports Medicine Reports: “The sports medicine practitioner must not rely on any one tool in managing concussion and must be aware of the strengths and limitations of whichever method is chosen…”
Unfortunately, software packages like ImPACT, long criticized for its direct connections to the NFL, are widely employed as cornerstone for concussion evaluation and typically by untrained clients, as literature and news reports confirm.
Irv Muchnick
Near-Death in Japan Pro Wrestling, With Real Fallout
[posted 6/8/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
Other developments have kept me from staying on top of the harrowing recent incident in pro wrestling in Japan, from which a veteran performer remains in critical condition after getting beaten up by a younger wrestler in the dressing room prior to a match – on top of having taken at least one hard chair shot to the head on earlier shows. See the coverage at Cageside Seats by Keith Harris:
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
* “Nobukazu Hirai’s brain bleeding – Another lesson in the dangers of head trauma,” June 5, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/5/2208226/nobukazu-hirais-brain-bleeding-another-lesson-in-the-dangers-of-head
* “Keiji Mutoh resigns as All Japan Pro Wrestling president,” June 7, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/7/2212315/keiji-mutoh-resigns-as-all-japan-pro-wrestling-president
The story here combines elements of two appalling episodes at World Wrestling Entertainment that I covered last year. One was the near-death of WWE legend Ricky Steamboat. See “Watch Linda McMahon’s Wrestler Ricky Steamboat Get Beaten to Within an Inch of His Life Last Month on ‘Raw’ by Inexperienced Fellow ‘Soap Opera’ Cast Members,” July 22, 2010, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/watch-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wrestler-ricky-steamboat-get-behttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifaten-to-within-an-inch-of-his-life-last-month-on-%E2%80%98raw%E2%80%99-by-inexperienced-fellow-%E2%80%98soap-opera%E2%80%99-cast-members/, plus earlier coverage.
The other was the de facto manslaughter of WWE’s Lance Cade – who, as private punishment for a breach of dressing-room etiquette, was punished on live TV with more than a dozen chair shots (including a stiff one to the head in a move supposedly banned a year earlier). Cade fell into prescription painkiller addiction and died two years later. See “WWE Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels Should Speak Up on What Happened to Lance Cade,” February 14, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/wwe-hall-of-famer-shawn-michaels-should-speak-up-on-what-happened-to-lance-cade/.
Irv Muchnick
Other developments have kept me from staying on top of the harrowing recent incident in pro wrestling in Japan, from which a veteran performer remains in critical condition after getting beaten up by a younger wrestler in the dressing room prior to a match – on top of having taken at least one hard chair shot to the head on earlier shows. See the coverage at Cageside Seats by Keith Harris:
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
* “Nobukazu Hirai’s brain bleeding – Another lesson in the dangers of head trauma,” June 5, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/5/2208226/nobukazu-hirais-brain-bleeding-another-lesson-in-the-dangers-of-head
* “Keiji Mutoh resigns as All Japan Pro Wrestling president,” June 7, http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/7/2212315/keiji-mutoh-resigns-as-all-japan-pro-wrestling-president
The story here combines elements of two appalling episodes at World Wrestling Entertainment that I covered last year. One was the near-death of WWE legend Ricky Steamboat. See “Watch Linda McMahon’s Wrestler Ricky Steamboat Get Beaten to Within an Inch of His Life Last Month on ‘Raw’ by Inexperienced Fellow ‘Soap Opera’ Cast Members,” July 22, 2010, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/watch-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wrestler-ricky-steamboat-get-behttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifaten-to-within-an-inch-of-his-life-last-month-on-%E2%80%98raw%E2%80%99-by-inexperienced-fellow-%E2%80%98soap-opera%E2%80%99-cast-members/, plus earlier coverage.
The other was the de facto manslaughter of WWE’s Lance Cade – who, as private punishment for a breach of dressing-room etiquette, was punished on live TV with more than a dozen chair shots (including a stiff one to the head in a move supposedly banned a year earlier). Cade fell into prescription painkiller addiction and died two years later. See “WWE Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels Should Speak Up on What Happened to Lance Cade,” February 14, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/wwe-hall-of-famer-shawn-michaels-should-speak-up-on-what-happened-to-lance-cade/.
Irv Muchnick
Prevention, Anyone? Cincinnati Football Strength Clinic Approach to the Concussion Problem Connects the Head to the Neck
[posted 6/7/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Inevitably, my quest to expose the phonies and the hyper-self-interested gives short shrift to a critical subplot of the concussion story: the science of the prevention of traumatic brain injuries before they happen at all. Even if the ImPACT management system, developed by Dr. Joseph Maroon and his National Football League-connected colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, is both effective and on the up-and-up – which evidence suggests it is not – it still only addresses when an athlete who has already suffered a traumatic head injury can return to play. It does nothing about the first concussion.
And though Alan Schwarz of The New York Times is on to something about helmet hype and what he calls thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife “conspiracy” at the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, I am not the only one who believes his investigations skim the surface of the overall public-health issue and exaggerate the extent to which better helmet oversight can reduce the incidence of multiple-concussion syndrome.
In a January 12 post, “More Questions About WWE Medical Director Joseph Maroon,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/more-questions-about-wwe-medical-director-joseph-maroon/, I briefly touched on something called the Maher Mouth Guard. Mark Picot, an executive of the company that produces it, contends that the one NFL team using it, the New England Patriots, has a strikingly low concussion rate in comparison to others’; that as many as a third of all concussions are transmitted through the jaw; and that the league, in mysterious contrast with the American military, simply refuses to give these facts a fair hearing. I will return to mouth guards and their media coverage in due course. I am not an expert and I don’t want to get caught up in endorsing a single product or approach. For my money, the main narrative remains process: the flow of financial and social benefits, along with the human and societal costs, of our country’s No. 1 spectator sport.
On June 17-18, there will be a clinic in Cincinnati featuring presentations by legendary former strength and conditioning coaches Dan Riley (Houston Texans), Mike Gittleson (University of Michigan), and Kim Wood (Cincinnati Bengals). These worthies believe that the key missing piece is strengthening the neck – or, as the literature for their event puts it, “developing muscular structures that dissipate the forces that cause concussions.” For more information about the conference at Cincinnati’s Clifton Cultural Arts Center, go to http://FootballStrength.com.
The implications of strengthening necks for concussion prevention are uncomfortable for the football economy – a lot more so than conducting a few Congressional hearings on whether the Riddell helmet company failed to adequately footnote the “limitations” of Maroon and colleagues’ NFL-funded research for Riddell’s Revolution model.
One implication is that, if we’re banning kid baseball pitchers from throwing curveballs before their arms have more fully developed, we should be banning kids from playing tackle and collision football. Also, not incidentally, that the cerebrum and cerebellum are somewhat more important body parts to protect than the shoulder and arm.
More on all this in my Beyond Chron piece later this week.
Irv Muchnick
Inevitably, my quest to expose the phonies and the hyper-self-interested gives short shrift to a critical subplot of the concussion story: the science of the prevention of traumatic brain injuries before they happen at all. Even if the ImPACT management system, developed by Dr. Joseph Maroon and his National Football League-connected colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, is both effective and on the up-and-up – which evidence suggests it is not – it still only addresses when an athlete who has already suffered a traumatic head injury can return to play. It does nothing about the first concussion.
And though Alan Schwarz of The New York Times is on to something about helmet hype and what he calls thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife “conspiracy” at the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, I am not the only one who believes his investigations skim the surface of the overall public-health issue and exaggerate the extent to which better helmet oversight can reduce the incidence of multiple-concussion syndrome.
In a January 12 post, “More Questions About WWE Medical Director Joseph Maroon,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/more-questions-about-wwe-medical-director-joseph-maroon/, I briefly touched on something called the Maher Mouth Guard. Mark Picot, an executive of the company that produces it, contends that the one NFL team using it, the New England Patriots, has a strikingly low concussion rate in comparison to others’; that as many as a third of all concussions are transmitted through the jaw; and that the league, in mysterious contrast with the American military, simply refuses to give these facts a fair hearing. I will return to mouth guards and their media coverage in due course. I am not an expert and I don’t want to get caught up in endorsing a single product or approach. For my money, the main narrative remains process: the flow of financial and social benefits, along with the human and societal costs, of our country’s No. 1 spectator sport.
On June 17-18, there will be a clinic in Cincinnati featuring presentations by legendary former strength and conditioning coaches Dan Riley (Houston Texans), Mike Gittleson (University of Michigan), and Kim Wood (Cincinnati Bengals). These worthies believe that the key missing piece is strengthening the neck – or, as the literature for their event puts it, “developing muscular structures that dissipate the forces that cause concussions.” For more information about the conference at Cincinnati’s Clifton Cultural Arts Center, go to http://FootballStrength.com.
The implications of strengthening necks for concussion prevention are uncomfortable for the football economy – a lot more so than conducting a few Congressional hearings on whether the Riddell helmet company failed to adequately footnote the “limitations” of Maroon and colleagues’ NFL-funded research for Riddell’s Revolution model.
One implication is that, if we’re banning kid baseball pitchers from throwing curveballs before their arms have more fully developed, we should be banning kids from playing tackle and collision football. Also, not incidentally, that the cerebrum and cerebellum are somewhat more important body parts to protect than the shoulder and arm.
More on all this in my Beyond Chron piece later this week.
Irv Muchnick
New York Times: No Comment on Reporter Alan Schwarz’s ‘Reasons’ for Soft Coverage of Concussion Doc Joseph Maroon
[posted 6/7/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
It is possible to argue that Dr. Joseph Maroon is a low-value target in the national sports concussion story. I would disagree with such an argument, given Maroon’s tentacles into so many aspects of the story, his history of lies, and the fact that his ImPACT concussion management product is front and center in the changes filtering down to high school and youth football programs. But it is possible.
Anyway and unfortunately, that is not the argument of Alan Schwarz of The New York Times. Schwarz quotes Maroon as an expert, with a straight face and without sharing with his readers the background of the doctor’s deep participation in a generation of National Football League experts’ false statements about and denial of concussion syndrome. The Times also has not shed light on the controversy over whether neurocognitive testing systems like ImPACT are very – or even at all – effective.
All this should trouble anyone who would like the American media, led by The Times, to succeed in promoting public understanding of what has caused and what can fix the pandemic of traumatic brain injuries in our sports and entertainment. Equally troubling is how the The New Yorker (which likewise swallows Maroon as a credible authority) has used editorial real estate to quote Maroon praising Schwarz.
On May 27, Schwarz said in an email to me that the Maroon angle of the concussion investigation is a non-issue for “reasons” of which I am “totally unaware.”
Yesterday, in search of those reasons, I queried Times management.
“As a matter of policy, we don’t comment publicly on our editorial decision making,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told me. But didn’t Schwarz, in his unsolicited email to me, already do just that?
More importantly, don’t Times readers need something better than the newspaper’s current paint-by-numbers campaign to hang a wide-ranging national health crisis on the football helmet industry?
Irv Muchnick
PREVIOUSLY:
“Chris Nowinski, New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, and the Freakonomicization of Concussions,” May 26, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/chris-nowinski-new-york-times%E2%80%99-alan-schwarz-and-the-freakonomicization-of-concussions/
“Yesterday’s Post ‘Pisses Off’ Alan Schwarz of The New York Times,” May 27, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/yesterday%E2%80%99s-post-%E2%80%98pisses-off%E2%80%99-alan-schwarz-of-the-new-york-times/
“Guide to This Blog’s References to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times,” May 27, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/guide-to-this-blog%E2%80%99s-references-to-alan-schwarz-of-the-new-york-times/
“Muchnick Response to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times,” May 27, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/muchnick-response-to-alan-schwarz-of-the-new-york-times/
“Why Is New York Times Reporter Alan Schwarz So Defensive About NFL / WWE Concussion Profiteer Dr. Joseph Maroon?”, May 30, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/why-is-new-york-times-reporter-alan-schwarz-so-defensive-about-nfl-wwe-concussion-profiteer-dr-joseph-maroon/
“How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Scandal (full text from Beyond Chron),” June 6, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/how-the-new-york-times-is-fumbling-the-national-sports-concussion-scandal-full-text-from-beyond-chron/
It is possible to argue that Dr. Joseph Maroon is a low-value target in the national sports concussion story. I would disagree with such an argument, given Maroon’s tentacles into so many aspects of the story, his history of lies, and the fact that his ImPACT concussion management product is front and center in the changes filtering down to high school and youth football programs. But it is possible.
Anyway and unfortunately, that is not the argument of Alan Schwarz of The New York Times. Schwarz quotes Maroon as an expert, with a straight face and without sharing with his readers the background of the doctor’s deep participation in a generation of National Football League experts’ false statements about and denial of concussion syndrome. The Times also has not shed light on the controversy over whether neurocognitive testing systems like ImPACT are very – or even at all – effective.
All this should trouble anyone who would like the American media, led by The Times, to succeed in promoting public understanding of what has caused and what can fix the pandemic of traumatic brain injuries in our sports and entertainment. Equally troubling is how the The New Yorker (which likewise swallows Maroon as a credible authority) has used editorial real estate to quote Maroon praising Schwarz.
On May 27, Schwarz said in an email to me that the Maroon angle of the concussion investigation is a non-issue for “reasons” of which I am “totally unaware.”
Yesterday, in search of those reasons, I queried Times management.
“As a matter of policy, we don’t comment publicly on our editorial decision making,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told me. But didn’t Schwarz, in his unsolicited email to me, already do just that?
More importantly, don’t Times readers need something better than the newspaper’s current paint-by-numbers campaign to hang a wide-ranging national health crisis on the football helmet industry?
Irv Muchnick
PREVIOUSLY:
“Chris Nowinski, New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, and the Freakonomicization of Concussions,” May 26, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/chris-nowinski-new-york-times%E2%80%99-alan-schwarz-and-the-freakonomicization-of-concussions/
“Yesterday’s Post ‘Pisses Off’ Alan Schwarz of The New York Times,” May 27, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/yesterday%E2%80%99s-post-%E2%80%98pisses-off%E2%80%99-alan-schwarz-of-the-new-york-times/
“Guide to This Blog’s References to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times,” May 27, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/guide-to-this-blog%E2%80%99s-references-to-alan-schwarz-of-the-new-york-times/
“Muchnick Response to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times,” May 27, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/muchnick-response-to-alan-schwarz-of-the-new-york-times/
“Why Is New York Times Reporter Alan Schwarz So Defensive About NFL / WWE Concussion Profiteer Dr. Joseph Maroon?”, May 30, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/why-is-new-york-times-reporter-alan-schwarz-so-defensive-about-nfl-wwe-concussion-profiteer-dr-joseph-maroon/
“How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Scandal (full text from Beyond Chron),” June 6, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/how-the-new-york-times-is-fumbling-the-national-sports-concussion-scandal-full-text-from-beyond-chron/
More Words From a Defender of Alan Schwarz of The New York Times
[posted 6/6/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
On May 27, Jean Rickerson posted a comment rebutting my criticism of Alan Schwarz of The New York Times. Today she has a letter to the editor at Beyond Chron in response to my article there (and now on this blog, as well), “How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Crisis.”
Rickerson is the founder and editor of a website, SportsConcussions.org. According to the site, it “was created to help educate coaches, parents, and athletes about the dangers of concussions and the importance of proper management. Founder Jean Rickerson’s son sustained a concussion playing high school football in 2008 and as his four-month-long journey to recovery unfolded, she realized how pervasive the lack of education was. Initially intending to educate his football team, as the stories began flowing in, the magnitude of the problem became very evident. The staff at SportsConcussions.org is dedicated to raising awareness about sports-related concussions by providing free training for coaches, speaking to parents and athletes, and arranging community workshops with concussion experts.”
Here’s the full text of Rickerson’s Beyond Chron letter:
Your continual criticism of Alan Schwarz and the New York Times indicates to me that you don’t see the big picture. If one steps away from the oft-cited politics and looks at the positive changes that have filtered down to the youth level as a result of Mr. Schwarz’s work, you might feel differently. No one else has competently challenged the status quo like he has and I know many parents who are grateful for his voice. Concussions are a very complex issue and so are the politics. Perhaps concentrating on results rather than criticizing the messenger would serve your audience better. As for ImPACT, there’s much more to that story as well. Your simplistic approach leaves much to be desired.
Rickerson’s sincerity is not questioned, and her loyalty to Schwarz, who has indeed been instrumental in elevating the concussion debate, is admirable. Her logic here, however, is wanting. By “concentrating on results,” as she puts it, I have questioned, with so far unchallenged legitimacy, The Times’ soft coverage of the commercial and often mendacious historical role of Dr. Joseph Maroon. I also have reproduced a significant chunk of the experts’ current discussions, absent in The Times, about whether Maroon’s ImPACT concussion management software is anywhere near as effective as the general public presumes.
TOMORROW ON THIS BLOG: I ask the sports editor of The New York Times what are the “reasons,” alluded to by Alan Schwarz, that Dr. Maroon has not been subjected to more critical and sharper coverage.
Irv Muchnick
On May 27, Jean Rickerson posted a comment rebutting my criticism of Alan Schwarz of The New York Times. Today she has a letter to the editor at Beyond Chron in response to my article there (and now on this blog, as well), “How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Crisis.”
Rickerson is the founder and editor of a website, SportsConcussions.org. According to the site, it “was created to help educate coaches, parents, and athletes about the dangers of concussions and the importance of proper management. Founder Jean Rickerson’s son sustained a concussion playing high school football in 2008 and as his four-month-long journey to recovery unfolded, she realized how pervasive the lack of education was. Initially intending to educate his football team, as the stories began flowing in, the magnitude of the problem became very evident. The staff at SportsConcussions.org is dedicated to raising awareness about sports-related concussions by providing free training for coaches, speaking to parents and athletes, and arranging community workshops with concussion experts.”
Here’s the full text of Rickerson’s Beyond Chron letter:
Your continual criticism of Alan Schwarz and the New York Times indicates to me that you don’t see the big picture. If one steps away from the oft-cited politics and looks at the positive changes that have filtered down to the youth level as a result of Mr. Schwarz’s work, you might feel differently. No one else has competently challenged the status quo like he has and I know many parents who are grateful for his voice. Concussions are a very complex issue and so are the politics. Perhaps concentrating on results rather than criticizing the messenger would serve your audience better. As for ImPACT, there’s much more to that story as well. Your simplistic approach leaves much to be desired.
Rickerson’s sincerity is not questioned, and her loyalty to Schwarz, who has indeed been instrumental in elevating the concussion debate, is admirable. Her logic here, however, is wanting. By “concentrating on results,” as she puts it, I have questioned, with so far unchallenged legitimacy, The Times’ soft coverage of the commercial and often mendacious historical role of Dr. Joseph Maroon. I also have reproduced a significant chunk of the experts’ current discussions, absent in The Times, about whether Maroon’s ImPACT concussion management software is anywhere near as effective as the general public presumes.
TOMORROW ON THIS BLOG: I ask the sports editor of The New York Times what are the “reasons,” alluded to by Alan Schwarz, that Dr. Maroon has not been subjected to more critical and sharper coverage.
Irv Muchnick
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
My Weird 1988 Conversation With Then WWE Lobbyist and Now Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum
[posted 6/6/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
In 1988 I wrote an article for The Washington Monthly titled “The (Thwak!) Deregulation of (Thump!) Pro Wrestling.” It would become a chapter of my 2007 book Wrestling Babylon. The piece was republished at this blog at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/muchnick-book-bonus-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cthe-thwak-deregulation-of-thump-pro-wrestling-the-bureaucrats-behind-hulk-hogan%E2%80%9D/.
Rick Santorum — who today announced his candidacy for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination — was not named in that story, but at the time he was working as a World Wrestling Entertainment (then World Wrestling Federation) lobbyist out of the Pittsburgh office of Jerry McDevitt’s law firm, then known as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart.
Santorum contacted me by phone shortly after the Washington Monthly article was published in the spring of ’88. He wanted to tell me how funny he thought it was. I have a vivid memory of his reading lines back to me and laughing uproariously. As we conversed, he was listening in the background to live radio reports about the demise of some Pennsylvania politician in an ethics scandal; at one point he shushed me so we could listen together to the latest development in that case. Santorum couldn’t contain his mirth about that, either. He was obviously high on something – polihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftico adrenaline, I suppose.
Irv Muchnick
FURTHER READING:
* “Senate Candidate Linda McMahon, Former Senator Rick Santorum, and Pro Wrestling Deregulation,” December 9, 2009, http:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/senate-candidate-linda-mcmahon-former-senator-rick-santorum-and-pro-wrestling-deregulation/
* “No WWE Lobbying? Why, Rick Santorum Handled the Account!”, April 8, 2010, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/no-wwe-lobbying-why-rick-santorum-handled-the-account/
* “In Pennsylvania, Wrestling Deregulation Is Tied Up With Another Small Piece of Linda McMahon Baggage: Obstruction of Justice,” October 21, 2010, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/in-pennsylvania-wrestling-deregulation-is-tied-up-with-another-small-piece-of-linda-mcmahon-baggage-obstruction-of-justice/
In 1988 I wrote an article for The Washington Monthly titled “The (Thwak!) Deregulation of (Thump!) Pro Wrestling.” It would become a chapter of my 2007 book Wrestling Babylon. The piece was republished at this blog at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/muchnick-book-bonus-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cthe-thwak-deregulation-of-thump-pro-wrestling-the-bureaucrats-behind-hulk-hogan%E2%80%9D/.
Rick Santorum — who today announced his candidacy for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination — was not named in that story, but at the time he was working as a World Wrestling Entertainment (then World Wrestling Federation) lobbyist out of the Pittsburgh office of Jerry McDevitt’s law firm, then known as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart.
Santorum contacted me by phone shortly after the Washington Monthly article was published in the spring of ’88. He wanted to tell me how funny he thought it was. I have a vivid memory of his reading lines back to me and laughing uproariously. As we conversed, he was listening in the background to live radio reports about the demise of some Pennsylvania politician in an ethics scandal; at one point he shushed me so we could listen together to the latest development in that case. Santorum couldn’t contain his mirth about that, either. He was obviously high on something – polihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftico adrenaline, I suppose.
Irv Muchnick
FURTHER READING:
* “Senate Candidate Linda McMahon, Former Senator Rick Santorum, and Pro Wrestling Deregulation,” December 9, 2009, http:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/senate-candidate-linda-mcmahon-former-senator-rick-santorum-and-pro-wrestling-deregulation/
* “No WWE Lobbying? Why, Rick Santorum Handled the Account!”, April 8, 2010, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/no-wwe-lobbying-why-rick-santorum-handled-the-account/
* “In Pennsylvania, Wrestling Deregulation Is Tied Up With Another Small Piece of Linda McMahon Baggage: Obstruction of Justice,” October 21, 2010, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/in-pennsylvania-wrestling-deregulation-is-tied-up-with-another-small-piece-of-linda-mcmahon-baggage-obstruction-of-justice/
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