Chris & Nancy

‘Concussion Inc. ... Author Irvin Muchnick’

2011-07-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

This "mirror" blog is no longer being maintained. The hub of my web presence, including my blog, is now the website "Concussion Inc. ... Author Irvin Muchnick":

http://concussioninc.net

WWE Drug Testing Again Reveals Its Transparent Opacity

2011-07-19T15:48:00.000-07:00

[posted 7/18/11 at http://concussionhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifinc.net]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

World Wrestling Entertainment’s Luis Ignascio Urive Alvride, the masked Mexican who performs as “Sin Cara” and was known in his native country as “Mistico,” has been suspended by WWE for flunking a drug test.

David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats cites sources reporting that the drug was steroids and adding that the test results were known as early as June 20: http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/7/18/2281249/sin-cara-failed-steroid-test-in-june-wwe-waited-weeks-to-suspend-him.

After the 2007 Signature Pharmacy debacle, WWE amended its “Wellness Policy” and began announcing disciplinary actions for violations. But they waited with Sin Cara for weeks, first using him on last night’s pay-per-view show to get him written out of the storyline with an “injury.” Stop the presses.

Irv Muchnick

‘NFL’s “Legacy Fund” For Disabled Retirees Just a Down Payment on National Concussion Costs’ ... today at Beyond Chron

2011-07-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

[originally posted 7/18/11 at http://concussioninc.net]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

According to reliable reports, National Football League owners and players are very close to a deal that will save the 2011 season. One of the last hang-ups of a lockout-averting agreement is a provision being referred to as the “Legacy Fund” – a negotiated siphoning off of a portion of the NFL’s $9 billion in annual revenues to cover more fully the disability claims of retired players who suffer from crippling orthopedic injuries or brain trauma. Let’s focus on the latter. The category going by the useful shorthand “concussions” not only shortens quantity and maims quality of life, but also defines the problem in terms over and above the interests of management, players, and even professional retirees.

Bully for Hall of Famer Carl Eller and the other named plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit if they have been able to gain a seat at the collective-bargaining table alongside the NFL and the temporarily decertified NFL Players Association – or at least created pressure for more comprehensive benefits to offset the nearly bottomless pit of sob stories that are the fallout of mass entertainment.

But I also say: Who’s speaking for the rest of us? These include kids who should not have been playing tackle football at all in peewee and high school proghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giframs before their informed consent could be secured and their risks of lifelong disability from concussions and repetitive subconcussive head blows could be properly processed.

On the larger canvas, they also include a society that, when all is said is done, will have manifested lower academic achievement and workforce productivity, and increased violent crime, all as a consequence of America’s brilliantly marketed football obsession.
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CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/NFL_s_Legacy_Fund_For_Disabled_Retirees_Just_a_Down_Payment_on_National_Concussion_Costs_9349.html

SEE ALSO:

Introducing ‘Concussion Inc. ... Author Irvin Muchnick’

What They’re Saying About Irvin Muchnick

What They’re Saying About Irvin Muchnick

2011-07-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

[originally posted 7/15/11 at http://concussioninc.net]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

On WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death., and Scandal (2007):

“Irv Muchnick knows wrestling likes Anna Wintour knows fashion.”

Frank Deford

author, Sports Illustrated writer, National Public Radio commentator

“The wrestling version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND: you fall into the hole and you discover a world you never dreamed of. But Muchnick didn’t dream this stuff up, he dug it up.”

Scott Ostler

columnist, San Francisco Chronicle

“In a world of timid, formulaic scrivenings on sports and entertainment and sports entertainment, WRESTLING BABYLON is a sock on the jaw.”

Bert Randolph Sugar

boxing historian and author

***

On CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (2009):

“Muchnick is still throwing facts into the fire, still connecting the dots between the sacred cows of respectable society and the WrestleWorld they collude with.”

Phil Mushnick

columnist, New York Post

“Should be called ZEN AND THE ART OF SCANDAL MAINTENANCE. An instant cult classic.”

Larry Matysik

wrestling promoter and author

***

On Irv Muchnick’s investigations of sports concussions:

“[You characterize] the Times coverage as ‘carefully adumbrated’ — which, I’m assuming for now that you know, means presented somewhat incompletely in an effort to be vague or misleading. As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. Even if that were an issue, which I know it is not for reasons of which you are totally unaware, you have some nerve casting the entire work that way.”

Alan Schwarz

reporter, The New York Times, May 27, 2011, email

“the NYT has led that story for three years. what are you talking about?”

George Vecsey

columnist, The New York Times, June 17, 2011, email
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

***

on IRV MUCHNICK:

“He’s a vicious man.”

WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt, The American Lawyer, February 2011

http://muchnick.net/americanlawyer.pdf

Introducing ‘Concussion Inc. ... Author Irvin Muchnick’

2011-07-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

[originally posted 7/15/11 at http://concussioninc.net]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifblogger.com/img/blank.gif

Welcome to the new look of my blog, which has been renamed “Concussion Inc.” and transformed into the hub of my web presence. You can get here via either http://concussioninc.net or the old address, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com.

Concussion Inc. continues to archive posts related to my previous books, WRESTLING BABYLON and CHRIS & NANCY. As has been the case for a while, the reporting here is now directed more toward my next book, with familiar common themes.

General theme: The world of pro wrestling and the world at large are considerably more alike than different. This is evident even, and perhaps especially, in the blood sport of politics. (Think of the scene in The Godfather in which the Diane Keaton character, upon noticing pillars of the community mingling socially with Mafiosi, expresses revulsion. The Al Pacino character says back to her, “Now who’s being naïve?”)

Specific theme: The nearly $10-billion-a-year global pro football industry is being shaken all the way down to its three-point stance by awareness that the sport at all levels involves a previously covered up toll of long-term brain trauma. This has turned into a national public health crisis, as well as a hiccup for the National Football League, one of American culture’s iconic brands. What you have is an athletic echo of the tobacco industry scandal – and, once more, one with a wrestling provenance. The sensational 2007 double murder/suicide of World Wrestling Entertainment star Chris Benoit helped put chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) on the map. WWE’s medical director, Dr. Joseph Maroon, is a central figure in the long contemporary history of CTE through his ties with the NFL and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and through his development and marketing of the most popular product in sports-medicine concussion management.

Investigative journalism is not “peer-reviewed scientific literature.” It is a contact sport. My version of it favors transparent and interactive relationships with readers and sources. I also recognize that back stories and their interpretation are organic; I strive for what is, at best, the second dhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifraft of history. Finally, readers will find that I am far more willing than conventional sportswriters to steer the narrative toward personalities, institutions, and questions with which others are disinclined to wrestle (so to speak).

I invite you all along for the ride.

Irv Muchnick

see also: WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT IRVIN MUCHNICK

Timeline of Eller Lawsuit and NFL Lockout Developments

2011-07-12T00:17:00.000-07:00

Retired players’ activist Dave Pear’s blog has an informative timeline of the Carl Eller lawsuit and efforts to get a seat at the table in the National Fohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifotball League lockout talks: http://davepear.com/blog/2011/07/retired-players-benefits-pensions-lawsuit/.

Incidentally, to correct what this blog stated earlier, Irv Cross, the former defensive back and CBS commentator, is not a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. However, in 2009, the Hall awarded Cross the Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award to honor his career in television.

Irv Muchnick

Columnist: NFL Retired Players’ Negotiations the ’800-Pound Gorilla’ of Lockout

2011-07-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Gwen Knapp today has a good analysis of the pro football labor talks headlined “For NFL, retiree care is the tougher battle.” (Chronicle columnist content is kept offline for non-subscribers for 48 hours, so no link.)

Knapp mildly disparages the Carl Eller group’s lawsuit as a piece of public relations leverage. This is an unfortunate, though standard, trope of hard-boiled rhetoric by sports pundits who get mileage out of playing the parts of cynics on TV. But Knapp does go on to call the Eller manuevers for a seat at the collective bargaining table “a giraffe and an 800-pound gorilla circling the perimeter of the room.”

Knapp also chooses not to zero in on brain trauma, which is where former football players’ disabilities intersect with the public’s interest, not just the fans’ in expeditiously ending the lockout. She strikes the right note, however, in observing that John Mackey’s death following a long battle with dementia “served as a reminder of the negligence that once ruled treatment of former pro football players, by both their former employers and the union allegedly representing their interests.”

Irv Muchnick

No Lockout or Offseason for the NFL’s Pitt Med Center Docs Who Also Work for WWE

2011-07-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

National Football League training camps are shuttered this month, pending resolution of the owners’ lockout of players. But for clinicians at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who have cushy consultancies not just with the NFL’s Steelers but also with other sports and entertainment entities, there are no idle hands.

At World Wrestling Entertainment – home of a performer early-death rate that makes pro football look like a counselor gig at a boys’ club – UPMC’s Dr. Joseph Maroon still holds down the fort as medical director, a post he has held since 2008. He is joined on the WWE medical team, the company website continues to confirm, by his colleague Dr. Mark Lovell. Both Maroon and Lovell are founders and partners of the for-profit ImPACT concussion management system, whose marketing inroads have been so helped along by the new “concussion awareness” – even though many intelligent observers question whether neurocognitive testing software is anything more than a PR band-aid for the sports brain-trauma pandemic.

In addition to practicing dubiously rigorous medicine for WWE, Maroon plays the team doctor in grunt-and-groan storylines. Twice in the last year-plus, the company’s No. 1 star, John Cena, has used his Twitter feed to invoke his post-beatdown ImPACT tests as part of concussion “angles.” Much more questionable are WWE practices when the head injuries are indisputably real. Recently, Randy Orton was knocked unconscious in a choreography mishap at a show in Spain. Orton said this was his sixth known concussion. ImPACT “testing” nonetheless cleared Orton to work the main event of a pay-per-view event exactly seven days later.

To date, no mainstream journalist has picked up on this blog’s background of Maroon’s WWE work. Worse, no one has examined why Maroon survives at all as a front-and-center NFL concussion spokesman, after his years of involvement in tainted research downplaying evidence of chronic traumatic encephelopathy. In January, The New Yorker quoted Maroon in a major article – and specifically quoted him extolling the reporting of The New York Times’ Alan Schwarz. The Times, for its part, has not gotten around to examining the controversy over ImPACT. (The Chicago Tribune has done so, however.)

And never mind Maroon’s icky relationship with WWE. That’s just the circus, you know; it doesn’t count. Tell that to the voters of Connecticut, who next year may very well be asked to assess the second “self-funded” U.S. Senate candidacy of WWE co-founder Linda (Mrs. Vince) McMahon.

For the edification of new readers, I have pasted below links to some of my reports on the NFL/UPMC/WWE/ImPACT/ Dr. Joseph Maroon nexus.

Irv Muchnick

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif
EXCLUSIVE: Linda McMahon’s WWE Medical Director Met With Chris Benoit Brain Experts in 2008
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Pitt Med Center Doctors’ Supplement Company and WWE Ties Skirt Ethics Policy

Timeline of Dr. Joseph Maroon’s Work As WWE Medical Director

Pittsburgh Steelers’ Physician Joseph Maroon Key Figure in Sports Concussion Probe

Subpoena Cena: Does WWE Medical Director Joseph Maroon’s ImPACT System Manage Concussions – Or Merely ‘Manage’ ‘Concussions’?

Cageside Seats: Dr. Maroon’s ImPACT Clearance of Randy Orton for Tomorrow’s WWE Pay-Per-View ‘Questionable at Best’

NFL Legend John Mackey, Inspiration for Mental Disability ’88 Plan,’ Dies at 69

2011-07-08T10:55:00.001-07:00

John Mackey, the Hall of Fame tight end for the old Baltimore Colts and later a National Football League Players Association pioneer, has died at age 69 after battling dementia for more than a decade.

In recent years NFL Player Care enacted a plan to reimburse retirees up to $88,000 a year for acute-care expenses in connection with mental disability claims. The “88 Plan” was named in honor of Mackey, who wore uniform number 88.

Inexcusably, the main obituary on Mackey at The Baltimore Sun does not even make reference to the 88 Plan. The story does note his dementia and that his “off-the-field exploits were as important as his accomplishments on it.” See http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/ravhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifens/bal-john-mackey-dies,0,5908899.story.

Irv Muchnick

Connecticut Governmental and Political Dysfunction a Recipe for Linda McMahonism – And Vice Versa

2011-07-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

Look, gentle readers, I don’t believe the Connecticut Labor Department’s audit of World Wrestling Entertainment independent contractor misclassification practices is more urgent than public employee union concessions – which Governor Dan Malloy either did or did not negotiate, and which in turn either are or are not meaningful for the resolution of the state’s current budget mess.

I’m not that stupid.

Still, I can’t help reiterating that Linda McMahon, co-founder and ex-CEO of WWE, was the Republican nominee for one of Connecticut’s U.S. Senate seats last year, and by some accounts she is the presumptive nominee for the other Senate seat next year. And from my critical distance – a commodity obviously in short supply among the Nutmeg State chattering classes – I happen to think that the Government and Politics 101 fumbling of the state WWE investigation is a useful microcosm of general dysfunction.

People in the state that exported the WWE franchise across the globe are showing us, to a fare-thee-well, how WWE values rule that world, as well as theirs. They were shocked, shocked, by the tawdriness of the campaigns waged in 2010, both by McMahon and against her. Then the victors, to whom go the spoils and, with great reluctance, the responsibilities, proceeded to do absolutely nothing of substance about the most meaningful policy issue exposed by the McMahon family’s entry in the electoral arena.

Now all of them – Governor Malloy (former mayor of Stamford, hometown of WWE); Senator Richard Blumenthal (who squashed McMahon by double digits in last year’s election, evidently for the privilege of bringing Google Maps to its knees); Labor Commissioner Glenn Marshall (who supports misclassification crackdowns except when they’re real rather than theoretical); and whomever the Democratic establishment will put up for retiring Senator Joe Lieberman’s seat – are ready to do it all over against Linda McMahon in 2012.

I suspect they like it that way: the easy win on Election Day, the lack of results afterward, and above all the smug sense that the joke about wrestling is on everyone except them.

Irv Muchnick

Honor Roll: Current NFL Players Brendon Ayanbadejo and Will Witherspoon Support the Carl Eller Retirees’ Lawsuit

2011-07-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

In my June 26 post, “View the Dissident NFL Retirees’ Washington Press Conference at Dave Pear’s Blog,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/view-the-dissident-nfl-retirees%E2%80%99-washington-press-conference-at-dave-pear%E2%80%99s-blog/, I promised a shout-out to the active players who appeared at the Washington Press Club news conference in support of Carl Eller’s class-action lawsuit making the anti-anti-lockout case of abandoned former players.

The list first given to me was hyped. There were eight names on it, but six of them were marginal ex-players, three of whom played as recently as 2006 or 2007 but perhaps still harbor hopes of resuming National Football League careers.

I have immense respect for Brendon Ayanbadejo (linebacker, Baltimore Ravens) and Will Witherspoon (linebacker, Tennessee Titans), who risked their current positions by bucking both the league and its players’ union. Both were at the Washington event, and Ayanbadejo spoke at it.

Irv Muchnick

Slouching Toward Anti-Maroonism: Some More Gentle Criticism of ImPACT Testing

2011-07-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

From Dustin Fink’s Concussion Blog:
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http://theconcussionblog.com/2011/07/05/more-research-for-multi-faceted-approach/

San Francisco 49er Eric Heitmann Cracks His Nuts ... And Leg ... And Neck ... And Head?

2011-07-01T15:04:00.001-07:00

You don’t have to be an ambulance chaser in order to know which way the sports-head-injury litigation winds are blowing. The San Francisco Chronicle’s football writer, Kevin Lynch, has provided some instructive background on the woes of San Francisco 49ers center Eric Heitmann.

Yesterday Lynch reported that Heitmann, who missed all of last season after injuring his neck and breaking his leg in training camp, will sit out all of 2011, as well, lockout or not, with a ruptured neck disk.

But it was Lynch’s blog post on the Chronicle’s website that told “the rest of the story.” See “Eric Heitmann – victim of the nutcracker,” http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ninerinsider/detail?entry_id=92054:

Heitmann’s injury is another lasting legacy from Mike Singletary’s infamous nutcracker drill. The exercise in which two players clashed into each other and tried to push the other one back, like a pair of mountain rams, resulted in a series of injuries. None more serious than Heitmann’s; he felt a tweak in his neck after a nutcracker encounter in last summer’s training camp.

According to tackle Joe Staley, Heitmann ignored the injury but was slowed by it. The next day in a team drill, Heitmann broke his leg when he wasn’t quick enough to escape a falling teammate. The shattered fibula might have prevented possible paralysis with his vulnerable neck. While recovering from the leg injury, numbness and shooting pain persisted from his neck. When the symptoms refused to abate, Heitmann underwent surgery last month.

Those of you who follow football already know that in his two-plus years as the 49ers’ head coach, Singletary convincingly established that he was one of the 25 or so National Football League field generals who have no idea what they’re doing, rather than one of the seven or so who have a clue. The Heitmann anecdote adds another dimension to the sensitive-assassin shtick that Singletary (a teammate of Dave Duerson on the defense of the Chicago Bears’ 1986 Super Bowl champions) parlayed into a career on the Christian motivational-speaker circuit and then in the NFL coaching ranks.

As for Singletary’s employer and league – it is not exactly reassuring to hear that the much-ballyhooed concussion-awareness culture shift of 2010 did nothing to prevent this men-among-men barbarism, which not only damaged Heitmann’s neck but also, I strongly suspect, resulted in long-term brain trauma, diagnosed or otherwise.

Irv Muchnick

Randy Orton Interview About 2006 Drug Overdose Taken Down From Official Website

2011-07-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

[posted 6/30/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif

Randy Orton, with or without WWE’s input, has concluded that he took the hype of his upcoming DVD documentary too far by discussing his 2006 drug overdose in an Arizona radio interview two days ago. Either that or the interview tease has already served its purpose.

In any case, you can no longer find the audio at Orton’s official site. I’m told that you can access it at http://podcasting.fia.net/6005/4788152.mp3.

Irv Muchnick

While WWE Star Randy Orton Overdosed on Drugs, Wrestling Media and Fans Underdosed on Reality

2011-07-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

[posted 6/30/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifif

Breaking his years-long silence on the subject, Randy Orton has acknowledged in an Arizona radio interview that in 2006 he indeed overdosed on an unspecified drug, was rushed by his then-fiancee to a suburban St. Louis hospital (DePaul Health Center, I can now report), and nearly died.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

This verifies the account first published on this blog a year after the incident. The most comprehensive retrospective here – in January 2010 during the U.S. Senate campaign in Connecticut – was “The Suicide Attempt (Part 2 – Randy Orton, Poster Boy for Linda McMahon’s WWE ‘Wellness Policy’),” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/the-suicide-attempt-part-2-randy-orton-poster-boy-for-linda-mcmahon%E2%80%99s-wwe-%E2%80%98wellness-policy%E2%80%99/.

The audio of Orton’s KUPD-Tempe interview is up on his own site at http://randy-orton.com/2011/06/randy-talks-with-98-kupd-arizonas-real-rock/.

Cageside Seats’ S. Bruce was the first wrestling journalist to report Orton’s admission, at http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/6/29/2250462/outrageous-randy-orton-interview. Bruce notes that this confirms, “in part, Irv Muchnick’s story in 2007 that Orton had overdosed, although Irv initially claimed it was a suicide attempt, which is clearly not the case.”

At the Pro Wrestling Torch site, James Caldwell goes minimalist and cryptic: “Orton talked candidly about past drug abuse issues, including a documented incident five years ago when he ‘stopped breathing’ and his wife called an ambulance to save his life.”

Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer makes the important marketing tie-in to Orton’s disclosure: “He admitted to overdosing, stopped breathing and being rushed to the hospital in 2006 (this story had been reported by Irv Muchnick shortly after it happened) but he also admits to that on a new documentary DVD the company is putting out.”

When I broke the story, Brian Stull of KFNS radio in St. Louis had me on his “Stranglehold” show to talk about it. Beforehand, Stull spoke off the air with Orton’s father, Bob Orton Jr., who denied all. But Cowboy Bob later vaguely confirmed the episode in a KFNS documentary series on local sports heroes.

At the time, I did no favors to my opportunity to focus wrestling fans on the key issues when my early reports included easy-to-nitpick errors about the time frame of Orton’s OD and the background of his “legend killer” gimmick. So, yes, I wish I had rolled out the story more effectively.

I doubt, however, that perfection – as opposed to an overall sound scoop – would have made any difference. Just a few months after the Chris Benoit murder-suicide gripped mainstream media the world over, the news that a bankable WWE star had already gone through a hushed-up near-death experience would have resonated if fans, and the media pandering to them, wanted it that way. But they were eager to crawl back into their shells of denial. Not even the additional information that Randy Orton mysteriously dodged a suspension in the contemporaneous Signature Pharmacy scandal could shake the deniers out of their complacency.

As for the assertion by Bruce of Cageside Seats that there “clearly” was no suicide attempt ... I’m not so sure. The slope of agency in drug overdoses can be slippery, and the bottom line of mortality doesn’t account for intent. (In 2008 Sean Waltman would be vehement that his own OD had been accidental, but later would change his tune.)

Anyway, it would be nice if the moral of this story were more than the parsing of gossipy details or the inevitable speculation that Orton’s new “candid” interview was just a self-congratulating work-shoot-work-shoot ploy to boost the sales of Randy Orton: Evolution of a Predator (of course it was). Orton is also, by his count, a six-concussion survivor – an issue which, like drug abuse, transcends both wrestling and its vastly larger cousin entertainment, pro football. The measurements of the ingredients of the “cocktail of death” are debatable – but not the conclusion that it’s a serious public health problem.

Irv Muchnick

Dustin Fink’s ‘Concussion Blog’ Comments on Our Recent Posts

2011-06-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

Irv Muchnick: Two Articles

http://theconcussionblog.com/2011/06/29/irv-muchnick-two-articles/

And the NFL Band Played On: Concussion Crisis Destined To Become Sports World Counterpart of AIDS Saga (full text)

2011-06-29T10:24:00.000-07:00

[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.

WWE Releases Chris Benoit Story Figure Chavo Guerrero

2011-06-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

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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’

2011-06-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-28T09:32:00.000-07:00

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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

‘And the NFL Band Played On’ ... today at Beyond Chron

2011-06-26T09:23:00.000-07:00

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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’

2011-06-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

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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’ …

2011-06-26T09:18:00.000-07:00

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... headline of new piece tomorrow at Beyond Chron.

Meet the New NFL Concussion Czars ... Same As the Old NFL Concussion Czars

2011-06-25T09:32:00.000-07:00

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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)

2011-06-25T09:27:00.000-07:00

[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.

Must Read: FoxSports’ Alex Marvez on Strength Coach Legend Kim Wood’s Neck Symposium

2011-06-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

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“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

Comedy Central: NFL’s PR Video of Dr. Joseph Maroon Conducting the Perfect Neurological Exam

2011-06-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

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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’

2011-06-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

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“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

New York Times Blacks Out Concussion Research Pioneer Bennet Omalu – While Coddling NFL / WWE Charlatan Joseph Maroon

2011-06-22T19:57:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-22T19:54:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-22T19:51:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-22T07:35:00.000-07:00

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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?”

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[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?’

2011-06-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

[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

‘NFL Too Big to Fail — That’s Our Real National Concussion Problem’ (full text from Beyond Chron)

2011-06-21T07:32:00.001-07:00

[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.
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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
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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?’

2011-06-21T07:30:00.001-07:00

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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

2011-06-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

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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

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

2011-06-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

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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

‘NFL Too Big To Fail – That’s Our Real National Concussion Problem’... today at Beyond Chron

2011-06-19T21:25:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-19T17:33:00.000-07:00

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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

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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

More of What Alan Schwarz of The New York Times Doesn’t Cover About the Inadequacy of Dr. Joseph Maroon’s ‘ImPACT’ Concussion Management

2011-06-17T12:17:00.000-07:00

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

Near-Death in Japan Pro Wrestling, With Real Fallout

2011-06-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

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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:
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* “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

2011-06-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

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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

2011-06-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

[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/

More Words From a Defender of Alan Schwarz of The New York Times

2011-06-17T11:58:00.000-07:00

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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

My Weird 1988 Conversation With Then WWE Lobbyist and Now Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum

2011-06-14T18:23:00.000-07:00

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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/

‘How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Scandal’ (full text from Beyond Chron)

2011-06-07T13:12:00.001-07:00

[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 after Congress, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Tradhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife 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.

ESPN’s ‘Outside the Lines’ Seems to Have Its Limits in Covering Football Scandals

2011-06-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

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On Twitter, Alex Marvez, the sharp lead pro football columnist for FoxSports.com, points to an intriguing story by the blogger “SPORTSbyBROOKS” on a cover-up by ESPN’s usually excellent investigative program, Outside the Lines, regarding network personality Mel Kiper’s questionable involvement in a summer 7-on-7 football program, an activity banned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

You can read the story at http://www.sportsbybrooks.com/espn-covers-up-mel-kipers-sec-banned-activity-29739.

Marvez is a journalist worth following. Part of the reason may be that he has a background in covering the pro wrestling industry, which equips him with a well-tested bullshit detector.

On the general subject of ESPN and Outside the Lines, I have given them credit for important early investigations of tainted and commercially conflicted research on brain injuries by National Football League-affiliated doctors. But ESPN, which was once ahead of the curve on this national health scandal, has been playing lackluster catch-up lately. I wonder why. More on this subject here as we move along.

Irv Muchnick

NFL Hall of Famer John Henry Johnson Had Alzheimer’s at Age 59

2011-06-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

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John Henry Johnson, a running back from the 1950s and 60s who is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, has died at 81. The San Francisco Chronicle obituary is at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/05/SP5L1JPQ0R.DTL.

According to the article, Johnson was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1989.

In 1989, John Henry Johnson was 59 years old.

Irv Muchnick

How The New York Times Is Fumbling the National Sports Concussion Scandal ... today at Beyond Chron

2011-06-07T13:06:00.000-07:00

[posted 6/3/11 at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

In a January New Yorker article on the concussion crisis in pro 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 stunhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifningly 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.

CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:

http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/How_the_New_York_Times_Is_Fumbling_the_National_Sports_Concussion_Scandal_9229.html

NFL Living CTE Victim Brent Boyd: ‘Where’s the Counseling? Where’s the Support?’

2011-06-07T13:03:00.000-07:00

[posted 6/1/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

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On the subject of what is being done on behalf of the untold number of former athletes who are walking around with serious brain injuries (though many are capable of doing little else), I caught up with Brent Boyd.

Following the suicide of Dave Duerson, I told the full story of the confrontation between Boyd and Duerson in a Congressional hearing room in 2007, and of the latter’s less-than-helpful service on the National Football League’s disability benefits board, a joint effort of the league and the NFL Players Association. See “‘Dave Duerson Knew Nothing About Concussions and Players’ Best Interests’ – My Exclusive Interview With Ex-Minnesota Viking Brent Boyd,” February 24, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/%E2%80%98dave-duerson-knewhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif-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/.

Boyd, founder of the advocacy group Dignity After Football (http://dignityafterfootball.org), also is on the advisory board of Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute. However, Boyd is highly critical of the Boston chronic traumatic encephelopathy research team’s acceptance of a $1 million NFL grant to support the Center for the Study of CTE at Boston University. Boyd and others believe that this skews research and compromises advocacy.

Last year Robert Stern, Nowinski’s co-director at the center, co-authored a study of an innovative imaging technique to determine if CTE is detectable in living people – a key component of the search for cures. (At the moment the disease can be isolated only from postmortem brain tissue.) The findings from this round of “virtual biopsies” suggested that all five athletes who participated – three football players, one boxer, and one wrestler – have CTE. See “New technique targets ex-athletes’ head injuries,” December 1, 2010, http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2010/12/01/brain-injury-virtual-biopsy-nfl.html.

Brent Boyd, 54, whose six-year NFL career ended in 1986, was one of the football players who underwent a virtual biopsy. As a result, he considers himself one of “the only yet identified living persons to walk the earth knowing they have deadly CTE.”

Boyd also thinks he was “a guinea pig” who was treated brusquely and received no counseling or support in the wake of the finding. “It was like, ‘Here’s lunch money, you have significant CTE, and here are your return flight tickets. Thanks for coming!’”

The ordeal “has left me sleepless for months,” Boyd said. “What am I supposed to do with this information?”

Boyd said that recent comments on this blog by Mike Benoit, father of the late World Wrestling Entertainment star Chris Benoit, captured the frustrations of the living CTE community. Benoit said, “Everyone loves to be in front of the cameras talking about the latest case of CTE, but no one is talking about the people who are currently suffering. The research world is an old boys’ club. How many more brains do we need to prove that concussions can cause CTE?”

Chris Nowinski is out of the country. This morning I spoke with Dr. Robert Cantu, the leader of the Boston CTE research team. Cantu emphasized that he was not involved in the “virtual biopsy” study, which was presented last December in Chicago at the annual conference of the Radiological Society of North America.

“We can have an index of suspicion that certain individuals have CTE, and given Brent’s history of brain trauma, the level of suspicion is very high,” Cantu said. “But we still don’t yet have blood markers or any other way of identifying CTE with certainty, except through finding tau protein in the brain tissue of dead people.”

Cantu added that as a physician – which many CTE researchers are not – he regards himself as having doctor-patient relationships and is sensitive to the need for treating research subjects with dignity and humanity.

Cantu also acknowledged that counseling and support are missing pieces of concussion reform work: “It would be ideal for SLI to have a personal advocacy wing. That is not as easy to pull off as it may sound. On almost a daily basis, SLI gets contacted by people offering help in these areas, but before accepting that help, we must determine their level of qualifications for assisting those with brain trauma with their cognitive and other life problems. Without a doubt, building that network is a very important task as research and advocacy move forward.”

Irv Muchnick

Why Is New York Times Reporter Alan Schwarz So Defensive About NFL / WWE Concussion Profiteer Dr. Joseph Maroon?

2011-06-07T12:55:00.000-07:00

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In the course of his whiny, egotistical, and largely fact-free email complaint to me last Friday, Alan Schwarz of The New York Times said the following:

“As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. Even if that were an issue, which I know it is not for reasons of which you are totally unaware, you have some nerve casting the entire work that way.”

(Schwarz’s full message and my response were posted the same day.)

One striking aspect of this passage is that it raised the issue of Dr. Joseph Maroon in response to an item by me that itself did not mention him. Moreover – as anyone plugging the term “Alan Schwarz” into this blog’s search engine can confirm – I never frontally criticized The Times for its Maroon coverage (as opposed to exhorting The Times and all media to pick up on my exposure of the fuller context of his work for the National Football League and World Wrestling Entertainment, and to connect it to the Riddell helmet investigation in a way that would makehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif it, in my view, more meaningful).

Once again: I have not once ripped Schwarz for what he has written about Maroon.

Until today.

In a January 13 post headlined “Why Didn’t the NFL and WWE’s Dr. Maroon Speak Up About the Riddell Helmet Advertising Claims?” (http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/why-didn%E2%80%99t-nfl-and-wwe%E2%80%99s-dr-maroon-speak-up-about-the-riddell-helmet-advertising-claims/), I wrote:

The New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, whose investigative article last October on the unreliable work of the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) helped spur Senator Udall’s call to the FTC, reported that Maroon “disagreed with Riddell’s marketing the 31 percent figure without acknowledging its limitations, and supported Udall’s request for a formal scrutiny.”

Maroon told The Times: “That was the data that came out, but the authors of that study on multiple occasions have recommended further investigations, better controls and with larger numbers. If one is going to make statements relative to the paper we wrote, it should be with the limitations that we emphasized, and not extrapolated to studies that we suggest should be done and haven’t been done yet.”

I went on to document that Riddell had been aggressively exploiting the Maroon-co-authored and NFL-funded study of its Revolution model since no later than July 2008, and wondered why neither the doctor nor the league had raised a peep about it before it became a federal case.

The piece also included this paragraph:

I asked The Times’ Schwarz if he had sought elaboration from Dr. Maroon as to where, when, and to whom he had ever objected to Riddell’s advertising claims exploiting his research. Schwarz declined comment.

After the article was posted, Schwarz emailed me: “Nicely done.”

On January 24, I emailed Schwarz, in part: “On or off the record, your choice: Do you intend to explore the Maroon/Riddell fault line? If not, why not? Any insights from your valuable perspective would be appreciated.”

Schwarz again declined comment – but not before first going out of his way to say that Dr. Maroon had been “obviously (and surprisingly) quite generous to me” in comments in a recently published New Yorker article, and to make sure that he, Schwarz, was satisfied that my “motives” in asking the question were pure.

Now that Schwarz’s thin skin has been pierced and he is giving his crypto-assurance that Joe Maroon is a non-story, it’s time to reemphasize that Maroon is not a good guy in the NFL concussion narrative, and has not been for years. Why didn’t Schwarz press Maroon on the history of his enabling of Riddell helmet hype, rather than allow the doctor to get away with a quote triangulating the FTC investigation and distancing himself from the company? Intuitively, this made no more sense than Maroon’s parallel survival as a member of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee for years (up to the present) beyond the exposure of his and other league doctors’ commercial conflicts of interest in Congressional hearings and in the media (some of them well-drawn stories by Schwarz himself).

This is not an attempt to brand a triviality into the main timeline. As the Pittsburgh Steelers’ neurosurgeon, Maroon was on the front rank of the apologists and deniers when Dr. Bennet Omalu identified the breakthrough cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in Mike Webster and Terry Long. Is there a better word in the English language than “lie” for the statement by Maroon that Long’s team medical file showed no concussions – a falsity chronicled by Chris Nowinski in his book Head Games? (After Maroon’s categorical denial, Omalu produced a 1987 letter by Maroon about treating Long for a concussion.)

Any way you slice it, Schwarz’s Mount Olympian dismissal of the very idea that Maroon might be more than a bit player in the national sports concussion scandal ignores a clear and chilling through-line. Maroon’s and colleagues’ articles for the journal Neurosurgery (whose editor-in-chief through much of the period was a New York Giants consultant) downplayed concussion syndrome, beat the drum for pseudo-objective neurocognitive testing in return-to-play standards, and were the direct antecedent of the current state-by-state campaign to put the costs of newfangled concussion management software on the backs of high school sports programs. (The runaway market leader in this field is the for-profit ImPACT system owned by Maroon and some of his University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues.)

The DNA of this whole process is evident again in Maroon’s work for Riddell. That is why I argue that the federal government will solve nothing, and indeed will be aiding a whitewash, if it stops at a probe of the helmet industry.

Finally, if Alan Schwarz’s “reasons” for treating Dr. Joseph Maroon with kid gloves in the pages of The New York Times cannot be articulated even though the reporter initiated a reference to them in an unsolicited communication, then I am not the only reader with “reasons” to question whether the reporter’s impenetrable code here is a public service.

Irv Muchnick
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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,” Mhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifay 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/

Is There Now a Feeding Frenzy of Concussion-Related Sports Suicides? (full text from Beyond Chron)

2011-06-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

[originally published May 23 at Beyond Chron, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Is_There_Now_a_Feeding_Frenzy_of_Concussion_Related_Sports_Suicides__9204.html]
Is There Now a Feeding Frenzy of Concussion-Related Sports Suicides?

by Irvin Muchnick

We now know that hockey player Derek Boogaard’s recent mysterious death at 28 was caused by a fatal mix of alcohol and the painkiller oxycodone. As soon as Boogaard died, his family donated his brain to the chronic traumatic encephalopathy research group in Boston, led by Dr. Robert Cantu and spearheaded by Harvard alum and retired World Wrestling Entertainment performer Chris Nowinski. The Boogaard tragedy followed close on the heels of the Boston group’s announcement that 50-year-old ex-football star Dave Duerson, who committed suicide in February, had CTE.

A cluster of recent sports suicides highlights the American concussion crisis, of course. But it also raises another tough question: After years of being asleep at the switch on the scope and magnitude of industrial brain injuries in our couch-potato entertainment, are the sports establishment and media now contributing to a feeding frenzy that is actually causing additional deaths rather than preventing them?

I have a theory. Viewed in the round, the CTE story is starting to look a little bit like rape – an outrage for which awareness and reporting levels inevitably influence public understanding. The root issue should drive consensus, but the methods are delicate. In raising all this in my own indelicate way, I am not indicting Nowinski, who has done the yeoman’s work of putting the whole subject in play in the first place.

In a Beyond Chron column last September, “Why a 2011 NFL Strike or Lockout Would Be the Best Thing for America,” I predicted that this year would be one of reckoning for concussions. Naturally, a yahoo reader (with a small “y”) immediately wrote to call me “an idiot.” I’m not sure he realized that even as his billet deux rocketed through the ether to me, police in Denver were discovering the suicide of a young Broncos player named Kevin McKinley. Did McKinley have CTE?

In February, while the sports pages were filled with stories about what a great guy Dave Duerson was – even though he was on record in Congressional testimony, and as a member of a player-management National Football League compensation board, as downplaying the connections of retired players’ mental disability claims – a former NFL player named Ricky Bell died, with little attention, in South Carolina at 36. His family refused to comment on how. Did Bell have CTE?

My theory is that CTE news is scaring athletes, as well it should. And that some of them could be getting scared to death. Or at least, with the onset of their own horrible post-multiple-concussion syndrome symptoms, finding themselves wondering if it’s better to end it all than to live an additional 10 or 20 years – with a prospect of winding up homeless and crazy like Mike Webster, or homicidal like Chris Benoit.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that the federal government has to get on with the task of cleaning up this mess. Investigating the sharp angles of football helmet hype doesn’t even begin to cut it. There’s a long and sorry history here of research conducted and research subtly censored, and the trail is paved in gold by the $9-billlion-a-year NFL.

Another lesson emerging from the Duerson suicide is that the dog-and-pony show of brain study finding news conferences may have passed its peak of usefulness. At this point, we need appeals for more brains to study a lot less than we need more action.

I’ll give the last word of this round to Michael Benoit, the father of Chris Benoit. Mike and I have had our ups and downs, but I’ve never doubted his integrity.

“What are my thoughts?” Benoit told me. “My thoughts are that the CTE doctors and advocates need their behinds kicked. Everyone loves to be in front of the cameras http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftalking about the latest case of CTE, but no one is talking about the people who are currently suffering. The research world is an old boys’ club. How many more brains do we need to prove that concussions can cause CTE?

“Here’s what I say: If you are an athlete in a contact sport, take three to five grams of high-grade Omega 3 oils daily. If you get concussed, it will provide protection for your brain and greatly reduce your recovery time. If you are already showing symptoms of CTE, take five to 10 grams of Omega 3 oils daily. It will help your brain by reducing inflammation, and it is a mood enhancer and may help people who are suicidal.”

Irvin Muchnick, who blogs at http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com, is author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.

Connecticut Department of Labor Attorney on WWE Audit

2011-06-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

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Me: “I am interested in determining whether the Associated Press report of a settlement between the Labor Department and World Wrestling Entertainment is dispositive. While it is understood that you do not disclose names of employers being audited, does a closed file permit you to confirm that one is not being audited?”

Heidi Lane, Connecticut Labor Department attorney: “DOL is still unable to confirm or deny the existence of an audit. Further, if there were an audit, information obtained for that audit would be confidential, even at the closure or settlement of the audit.”

Me: “Please allow me to go around on this again to make sure I’m clear. If a case is closed, does DOL policy allow you to confirm it’s closed?”

Lane: “No we are not able to give any information at all.”

Hmm ... Sounds like this might be another job for the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.

Irv Muchnick

Muchnick Response to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times

2011-06-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

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Earlier today I posted an angry email from Alan Schwarz of The New York Times. He was responding to the item here yesterday in which I expressed discomfort with the amount of space he and Chris Nowinski were taking up in the national concussion conversation (while also pointing out, as I do repeatedly, their deserved credit for raising that conversation to its present level).

At the bottom of Schwarz’s disagreement with me is a difference of opinion on the forward thrust of federal investigations of the National Football League. I will begin by explaining that disagreement from my perspective. If I may say so, the Schwarz account carefully adumbrates it. More on this fatal phrase as we move along.

“As far as I know,” Schwarz says, “your concern with the [Times] coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue.”

Well, that’s one way to read it. Another way is to note that Maroon is a connection that could help push the current probes by executive agencies and members of Congress from their focus on football helmet safety to a wider scope of NFL accountability for a public health tab we are just beginning to tote up. Schwarz is entitled to the opinion – if his opinion it is – that scapegoating helmet manufacturers gets to the heart of the problem. And I am entitled to mine: that the investigations, plural, need to go much higher up the food chain.

I am not sure which dictionary Schwarz consulted for the definition of the word “adumbrate”; nor is it clear whether he ever got his nose out of the air long enough to look at one at all. According to Merriam-Webster, the verb means “to foreshadow vaguely: intimate”; “to suggest, disclose, or outline partially”; to “overshadow, obscure.”

Schwarz says my use of the word means that I think he has presented the story “somewhat incompletely in an effort to be vague or misleading.” I have never speculated as to his intentions. A less malignant interpretation of the phrase carefully adumbrated could also mean that a Times reporter, in contrast with an independent author, journalist, and blogger, lines up his work with certain calculations about the size of his news hole, the number and timing of his investigative angles, and – finally and critically – the internal political demands of the Times editing machine.

Again, it should be obvious that Schwarz’s resources and methods have distinct advantages over my own, as well as less obvious drawbacks. Having clarified as much, let me go on to say that if Schwarz’s interpretive shoe of having been accused of being willfully vague or misleading fits, then he should wear it. Schwarz asserts by fiat that the Maroon link to the Riddell issue is of little or no importance, “for reasons of which you are totally unaware.” I beg to differ, and I also beg Schwarz to enlighten us all on these alleged reasons instead of carefully adumbrating them.

My comparison of the Nowinski/Schwarz relationship to that of the co-authors of the book Freakonomics “is incorrect, misleading and borderline offensive,” Schwarz says. “... [T]hose two are collaborators and business partners, and make no bones about it. Your strong implication that Chris and I are either of those two things is something I recommend you correct.”

This is another great example of inflating a barb into a crime. The point of the Freakonomics analogy was and is not that Levitt and Dubner are ethically challenged. It is that they reside in an echo chamber. This puts their egos in the foreground and their insights in the background. With or without Schwarz’s permission, I will continue to worry publicly that he and Nowinski might be doing something similar.

Speaking of ego, all praise is due Schwarz for spurring the involvement of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. I rather doubt, however, that he’s “killing” himself in the effort. Evidently Times reporters, like the rest of us, employ the occasional figure of speech.

By the same token, your humble blogger is proud to be the named respondent of the landmark United States Supreme Court case Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick, the latest step in a 17-year-long publichttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif-interest fight. So there, and onward.

Irv Muchnick

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PREVIOUSLY:

* “Chris Nowinski, New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, and the Freakonomihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifcization 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/

Guide to This Blog’s References to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times

2011-06-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

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In the previous post I published in full a note I received this morning from Alan Schwarz of The New York Times. I’ll respond in the next post.

Below are pointers to all the things I’ve said about Schwarz – some complimentary, some not.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Irv Muchnick

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3/18/10

Where Does WWE ‘Medical Director’ Fit in Shakeup of NFL’s Concussion Committee?

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/where-does-wwes-medical-director-fit-in-shakeup-of-nfls-concussion-committee/

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7/27/10

Latest on NFL Concussion Policies

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/latest-on-nfl-concussion-policies/

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8/17/10

Was It ‘Lou Gehrig’s Disease’ Or Brain Trauma? A Fascinating New Study
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http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/was-it-lou-gehrigs-disease-or-brain-trauma-a-fascinating-new-study/

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9/14/10

Brain Disease Finding in College Football Suicide
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http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/09/14/brain-disease-finding-in-college-football-suicide/

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9/16/10

It’s the Breakthrough Year of Concussion Awareness in Sports – Will Connecticut Do Its Part?
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1/13/11

Why Didn’t NFL’s and WWE’s Dr. Maroon Speak Up About the Riddell Helmet Advertising Claims?

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1/21/11

ESPN’s Peter Keating Was First to Expose NFL and WWE Concussion Doc Joseph Maroon’s Conflicts of Interest

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1/23/11

Sports Concussion Scandal Ground Zero: NFL and WWE Doc Joseph Maroon’s Hype Article in ‘Neurosurgery’ on Riddell Football Helmets

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/sports-concussion-scahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifndal-ground-zero-nfl-and-wwe-doc-joseph-maroon%E2%80%99s-hype-article-in-%E2%80%98neurosurgery%E2%80%99-on-riddell-football-helmets/

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2/20/11

There’s No Overstating Where the Dave Duerson Suicide Story Could Lead

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/theres-no-understating-where-the-dave-duerson-suicide-story-could-lead/

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2/23/11

For Dave Duerson, ‘88 Plan’ Wasn’t Enough

http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/for-dave-duerson-%E2%80%9888-plan%E2%80%99-wasn%E2%80%99t-enhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifough-2/

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3/8/11

Concussion Inc.: CTE Expert Robert Cantu Has Confused Relationship With Xenith Helmet Company

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3/12/11

TIMEOUT! Flashback to My September 2010 Column, ‘Why an NFL Lockout Would Be the Best Thing for America

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5/5/11

Duerson Legacy Belongs in a Labor Department Audit, Not in Jock Hagiography

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5/18/11

MAROONED: The NFL/WWE Doc … the Journal Neurosurgery … Concussions for Dummies
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5/26/11

Chris Nowinski, New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, and the Freakonomicization of Concussions

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

2011-06-03T18:55:00.000-07:00

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Today I received the following email, with the subject line “what you don’t know.”

is that all I did — based solely on the public-interest aspect of his message, and long before I was even an employee of the Times – was introduce him to a few people. And they quickly blew him off. He didn’t find a publisher for his book for another 12 months, and completely independent of me.

More importantly, your comparison to Leavitt and Dubner is incorrect, misleading and borderline offensive. (Despite the fact that both of them are friends of mine.) Regardless of how they might have met, those two are collaborators and business partners, and make no bones about it. Your strong implication that Chris and I are either of those two things is something I recommend you correct.

Third, and most serious, your characterization of the Times coverage as “carefully adumbrated” — which, I’m assuming for now that you know, means presented somewhat incompletely in an effort to be vague or misleading. As far as I know your concern with the coverage stems only from your Maroon-connection-to-Riddell-study issue. Even if that were an issue, which I know it is not for reasons of which you are totally unaware, you have some nerve casting the entire work that way.
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, and you sit back and decide that one small issue you think you’ve found with it makes it “carefully adumbrated”? Wow.

I am not above criticism. But misinformed and careless criticism pisses me off. When you accomplish one-tenth of the good for the world and kids that I — or for that matter, Chris — have on this subject, then you’ll really have something.

–Alan Schwarz.

Chris Nowinski, New York Times’ Alan Schwarz, and the Freakonomicization of Concussions

2011-06-03T18:52:00.000-07:00

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Chris Nowinski has done valuable work on the concussion crisis in sports. That work is also limited and flawed.

He is the subject of a profile in today’s edition of the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper of his alma mater, at http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/5/26/commencement2011-feature-nowinski/. Clearly and deservedly, Crimson reporters Emily Rutter and Scott A. Sherman take note of Nowinski’s value. They may not realize that the Old Ivy orientation of their account also reveals his limitations and flaws.

The story has it all: Nowinski’s Harvard and football pedigree; his fascination with and employment by World Wrestling Entertainment – which led to his debilitating, career-ending concussions; and his decision to write a book about brain trauma in sports and start the Sports Legacy Institute.

The revealing passage, from my perspective, was this:

With the help of Alan Schwarz, at the time a freelance sportswriter for the New York Times, he got in touch with publishers.

“I thought his manuscript was great,” says Schwarz, who had written one book on baseball statistics and was working on another.

As I reflect on what I find both inspiring and dissatisfying about Nowinski’s career advocacy, the (obviously indispensable) Schwarz/Times connection is instructive. It reminds me very much of the phenomenon surrounding Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, a 2005 bestseller by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

For my money, Freakonomics is a pedestrian book, but my opinion doesn’t matter. In any case, I’m more interested in the process of its creation. Freakonomics grew out of a profile of Levitt by Dubner in the Sunday magazine of The New York Times. The two Steves then decided to collaborate on a book. And get this: The epigraph of every chapter of the book wound up being a quote from Dubner’s Times Magazine profile of Levitt.

Talk about a hall of mirrors!

I wish Nowinski the very best, both with his brave personal battle to survive post-concussion syndrome, and his likely as-yet-undiagnosed own case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and with his campaign to spread the word about and temper the brutality of football and other sports.

However, with respect to the latter, I also observe that his voice is skewed, at times even muted, by his ready access to the resources of both our Newspaper of Record and the National Football League (the latter thanks to a $1 million NFL grant to the Sports Legacy Institute’s sister Center for the Study of CTE at Boston University Medical School). You can see it in the increased corporatization of SLI’s message and in the current carefully adumbrated coverage by The Times of football helmet safety and promotion. So much more remains unsaid: the accounting for the tobacco-level scandal of NFL-branded research over the last generation, and the structural solutions we must be devising as a society, outside of willy-nilly litigation on behalf of the many lives ruined and prematurely ended by this system.

Above all, I’m convinced, there is a need for more than just Chris Nowinski’s voice on this critical issue.

Irv Muchnick

Connecticut Media Profiles in Caution on the WWE Independent Contractor Story

2011-06-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

[posted 5/26/11 to htthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifp://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

A prominent Connecticut journalist, in his wisdom, took the time to email me for the sole purpose of sniffing that my previous item on this blog was a “non-story.” For proof, he offered the analysis of James Caldwell of Pro Wrestling Torch (pwtorch.com):

$7,316 is a tiny drop in the bucket for WWE, so this won’t affect them. The state’s TV production tax credits to WWE over the past few years is about 1,000% larger than this fine.

The next step should be an investigation of WWE’s independent contractor classification, but that probably won’t happen after the Department of Labor went through a two-year audit that likely cost a whole lot more than the fine WWE will be paying. It would be difficult to justify a follow-up investigation despite evidence WWE does not meet the guidelines to classify wrestlers as independent contractors.

You can file this one — both the Caldwell observation and my esteemed correspondent’s exploitation of it — under “speaking platitudes to power.” If Linda McMahon takes another stab at a U.S. Senate seat next year, as expected, Governor Dan Malloy, Labor Commissioner Glenn Marshall, and others might get a little better focus on the independent contractor issue. But they won’t get much help from the public-spirited commentators of the Nutmeg State, who will be busy replaying the YouTube of Linda kicking wrestling announcer Jim Ross in the testicles.

Irv Muchnick

WWE Tries to Ring the Bell on Connecticut Labor Department Probe

2011-06-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

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In an obvious and ham-handed two-stage leak by corporate operatives, the Associated Press is reporting that the Connecticut Labor Department’s audit of World Wrestling Entertainment independent contractor practices laid a dud.

The second and more-developed version of the story, under the headline “APNewsBreak: Contentious audit finds WWE owes $7K,” is at http://www.nola.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/apnewsbreak-wwe-owes-7316-in-back-unemployment/d17d1f740e954de39624b6c3a5a40c32.

The upshot, according to WWE lawyer Mary Gambardella (where is ole Jerry McDevitt when you need him?), is that a two-year investigation of the company turned up an alleged $7,316.64 shortfall in unemployment insurance payroll taxes for a couple of dozen part-time film archive editors. WWE paid the bill under protest to make the nuisance go away. To give this all extra-comical resonance, the employees in dispute had had the job of blurring out the old logo “WWF,” for “World Wrestling Federation,” following a successful trademark infringement suit years ago by the World Wildlife Fund, which forced the wrestling entity to change its name and abbreviation.

The substantial independent misclassification controversy at WWE isn’t about a few office flunkies, of course. It’s about how the wrestlers on Vince and Linda McMahon’s payroll, who drop dead by the bushel before their time, are not treated as the regular employees everyone knows they are, and are thus cheated out of covered health care and other benefits. (In the bargain, governments at all levels also get stiffed out of payroll taxes.)

If this is the last word on the subject from Connecticut Labor Commissioner Glenn Marshall, with the blessing of Governor Dan Malloy, then the state’s government and politics have become even more of a national laughingstock than they already were.

Irv Muchnick

Author Muchnick’s Montreal Radio Interview About Randy Savage on YouTube

2011-06-03T18:46:00.000-07:00

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Author Irvin Muchnick’s Monday interview with Dan Delmar of CJAD Radio in Montreal, discussing the death of Randy “Macho Man” Savage and related topics, is now at the WrestlingBabylon channel on YouTube (http://youtube.com/WrestlingBabylon).

The interview link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evRQuk09brE.

Dr. Joseph Maroon & ‘Neurosurgery’ 2004: The Corrupt NFL Pellman-Casson-Lovell Research Team Weighs In

2011-05-31T19:30:00.001-07:00

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Neurosurgery, January 2004 – “Duration of Cognitive Impairment after Sports Concussion.” Authors: Joseph Bleiberg, Ph.D., Alison N. Cernich, Ph.D., Kenneth Cameron, M.S., ATC, Wenyu Sun, M.D., M.P.H., Karen Peck, M. Ed., ATC, James Ecklund LTC (P), M.D., Dennis Reeves CDR, Ph.D., John Uhorchak COL, M.D., Molly B. Sparling, B.A., Deborah L. Warden, M.D.

COMMENT

A military study with no significant new findings. They “are consistent with the American Academy of Neurology” guidelines “suggesting a 1-week time-out from participation in contact sports” following a concussion.

In his published comment, Dr. Maroon observed: “Neurocognitive testing has been deemed the ‘cornerstone’ of proper concussion assessment and management.”

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Neurosurgery, January 2004 – “Concussion in Professional Football: Epidemiological Features of Game Injuries and Review of the Literature – Part 3.” Authors: Elliot J. Pellman, M.D., John W. Powell, Ph.D., David C. Viano, Dr. med., Ph.D., Ira R. Casson, M.D., Henry Feuer, M.D., Mark Lovell, Ph.D., Joseph F. Waeckerle, M.D., Douglas W. Robertson, M.D.

COMMENT

All nine co-authors were members of the National Football League’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee. Since then, Dr. Pellman and Dr. Casson, in particular, have been thoroughly disgraced in separate rounds of Congressional hearings; and a reminder to all that Lovell is one of Dr. Maroon’s University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and ImPACT Applications colleagues. See this blog, passim.

The article reported on an 1996-2001 NFL study “to determine the circumstances, causes, and outcomes” of concussions. Encompassing 3,826 team games and 787 reported cases, it concluded that quarterbacks, wide receivers, and defensive secondaries were the most vulnerable to concussions. There were “2.74 symptoms/injury, and players were generally removed from the game. More than one-half of the players returned to play within 1 day, and symptoms resolved in a short time in the vast majority of cases.”

Maroon’s published comment: “The incidence was only 0.41 percussion per NFL game” (though he added that “this seemingly low incidence” was mitigated by the dependence on players themselves to report their symptoms). “The NFL and the members of the MTBI Committee of the NFL are to be commended for their concise and succinct summary.” He did not bother with a disclaimer that he was himself a member of the committee.

Series “Dr. Maroon & Neurosurgery” will continue in following posts.
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PREVIOUSLY:

“MAROONED: The NFL/WWE Doc ... the Journal Neurosurgery ... Concussions for Dummies,” May 18, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/marooned-the-nflwwe-dhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifoc-%E2%80%A6-the-journal-neurosurgery-%E2%80%A6-concussions-for-dummies/

“Dr. Joseph Maroon & ‘Neurosurgery’ 1999-2000: Origins of ‘ImPACT’,” May 18, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/dr-joseph-maroon-neurosurgery-1999-2000-origins-of-%E2%80%98impact%E2%80%99/

“Dr. Joseph Maroon & ‘Neurosurgery’ 2002: ‘Cumulative Effects’,” May 19, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/19/dr-joseph-maroon-%E2%80%98neurosurgery%E2%80%99-2002-%E2%80%98cumulative-effects%E2%80%99/

Irv Muchnick

Author Muchnick Interviewed on Montreal Radio About Death of Randy ‘Macho Man’ Savage

2011-05-31T19:28:00.001-07:00

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Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, was interviewed about the death of Randy “Macho Man” Savage and related topics today by Dan Delmar of CJAD Radio in Montreal. The audio file can be accessed at http://muchnick.net/cjad52311.mp3 (the interview begins at about the 2:00 mark).

Boogaard: Alcohol And Oxycodone

2011-05-31T19:26:00.000-07:00

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According to new wire service reports, the death of Derek Boogaard was caused by an accidentally fatal mix of alcohol and the painkiller oxycodone.

The original first sentence of my new column for Beyond Chron, which will be published Monday, was going to be, “We don’t yet know why hockey player Derek Boogaard died at 28, but we do know that his family immediately donated his brain to the chronic traumatic encephalopathy research group in Boston, led by Dr. Robert Cantu and spearheaded by Harvard alum and retired World Wrestling Entertainment performer Chris Nowinski.”

This development causes me to tweak that sentence. But it doesn’t change the essence of the piece, headlined “Is There Now a Feeding Frenzy of Concussion-Related Sports Suicides?”

Irv Muchnick

My Monday Piece For Beyond Chron, Plus Other Program Notes

2011-05-31T19:24:00.000-07:00

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My column “Is There Now a Feeding Frenzy of Concussion-Related Sports Suicides?” will be published Monday at Beyond Chron, the San Francisco online newspaper.

The series here on Dr. Joseph Maroon and the journal Neurosurgery will resume next week.

A huge WWE star of years past, Randy Poffo (“Macho Man Savage”), died this morning at 58 in a car crash in Tampa. According to early reports, he either suffered fatal injuries in the crash or died from the heart attack that caused him to lose control of the car. The tragedy does not appear to have any special significance for the themes of this blog.

WWE’s New Health Insurance Mandate For Its ‘Contract’ Wrestlers Seems Politically Tone-Deaf

2011-05-31T19:22:00.000-07:00

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Mike Johnson of Pro Wrestling Insider is reporting that World Wrestling Entertainment (or, excuse me, The New WWE) has started requiring its wrestlers to carry their own health insurance. See “Big, Big Change to WWE Contracts,” http://www.pwinsider.com/article/58111/big-big-change-to-wwe-contracts.html?p=1.

Through other sources, I have confirmed that Johnson’s scoop is accurate. The questions are “why?” and, perhaps especially, “why now?”

By coincidence, this news leaks out just as the leading company in the cousin mixed martial arts industry, Ultimate Fighting Championship, has announced innovative and comprehensive health insurance coverage for all its fighters.

WWE clings to a legalistic fiction that its “talents” are all independent contractors rather than employees – an assertion now under investigation by the Connecticut Labor Department. So not only does the company look very bad in comparison to UFC; WWE also is giving the finger to those who maintain that it is their responsibility to take care of the people whose daily sweat of the brow builds this global, billion-dollar brand. Effectively, Vince McMahon and his once-and-future-Senate-candidate wife Linda are saying, “We agree that the work we are assigning cannot be performed unless there is a guarantee that the substantial long-term, as well as short-term, medical bills will be paid. Now, Punkilious Preposterous, please produce the documentation that you have someone who will pay them – in addition to bringing your own tights and tan-spray to the next TV taping.”

My guess – and it’s only that – is that this corporate decision had nothing to do with the political ramifications and was a bottom-line call by Stamford bean-counters. WWE already “generously” pays medical bills for confirmed WWE ring injuries and “magnanimously” underwrites drug rehab for all current and former talent. The new health insurance mandate for its “contractors” seems designed to shift some of that burden. Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter is the best at acquiring and crunching the numbers related to these sorts of questions, and I look forward to his analysis.

Irv Muchnick

Dr. Joseph Maroon & ‘Neurosurgery’ 2002: ‘Cumulative Effects’

2011-05-31T19:17:00.000-07:00

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Neurosurgery, November 2002 – “Cumulative Effects of Concussion in High School Athletes.” Authors: Michael W. Collins, Ph.D., Mark R. Lovell, Ph.D., Grant L. Iverson, Ph.D., Robert C. Cantu, M.D., Joseph C. Maroon, M.D., Melvin Field, M.D.

COMMENT

This article is intrinsically unremarkable. The two lead authors, Collins and Lovell, are, of course, Dr. Maroon’s University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues and ImPACT Applications partners. Labeling itself “the first to suggest a cumulative effect of concussions in high school athletes,” the article concluded with “the need for more long-term outcome studies.”

The historical context, however, is striking: 2002 was the year the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Webster died; it was a researcher outside the football establishment, Dr. Bennet Omalu of the Pittsburgh coroner’s office, who identified Webster’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which sent the field into its current tizzy.

Speaking of Maroon and Omalu and dead Pittsburgh Steelers ... Maroon during this period was beginning to display his penchant for lying about his familiarity with evidence in brain-injury death cases. Three years after Webster, anothehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifr Steeler, Terry Long, committed suicide by drinking antifreeze, and Omalu found CTE in Long’s brain, too. Maroon attacked Omalu’s “fallacious reasoning” and said, “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 Long’s files included a 1987 letter by Maroon recommending that Long be held out of action for two weeks after suffering a concussion.

The source for this is Chris Nowinski’s book Head Games. See “Dr. Joseph Maroon’s Disturbing Pattern of Misstatements,” January 5, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/dr-joseph-maroons-disturbing-pattern-of-misstatements/.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Series “Dr. Maroon & Neurosurgery” will continue in following posts.

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PREVIOUSLY:

“MAROONED: The NFL/WWE Doc ... the Journal Neurosurgery … Concussions for Dummies,” May 18, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/marooned-the-nflwwe-doc-%E2%80%A6-the-journal-neurosurgery-%E2%80%A6-concussions-for-dummies/

“Dr. Joseph Maroon & ‘Neurosurgery’ 1999-2000: Origins of ‘ImPACT’,” May 18, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/dr-joseph-maroon-neurosurgery-1999-2000-origins-of-%E2%80%98impact%E2%80%99/

Irv Muchnick

Dr. Joseph Maroon & ‘Neurosurgery’ 1999-2000: Origins of ‘ImPACT’

2011-05-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

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Neurosurgery, October 1999 – A review of the just-published anthology Sports-Related Concussion, edited by Julian E. Bailes, Mark R. Lovell, and Joseph C. Maroon

COMMENT

Reviewer Kevin J. Gibbons called the book “excellent and comprehensive.” The piece said Sports-Related Concussion “merits inclusion in the libraries of all neurosurgeons, as well as any physician acting as a team physician or consultant, including neurologists, psychiatrists, general practitioners, and pediatricians. In addition, physicians involved firsthand as participants, parents, or coaches will benefit from this work.”

Dr. Joseph Maroon’s first co-author, Dr. Julian Bailes, initially would work with the Boston group of chronic traumatic encephalopathy researchers, organized by Chris Nowinski and headed by Dr. Robert Cantu, when Nowinski launched the Sports Legacy Institute in 2007. Bailes later broke off from the Boston group and now directs the Brain Injury Research Institute at West Virginia University.

Maroon’s second co-author, Mark Lovell, also of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, would go on to become one of Maroon’s partners in ImPACT Applications, a company marketing concussion-management software.

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Neurosurgery, September 2000 – “Cerebral Concussion in Athletes: Evaluation and Neuropsychological Testing.” Authors: Joseph C. Maroon, M.D., Mark R. Lovell, Ph.D., John Norwig, A.T.C., Kenneth Podell, Ph.D., John W. Powell, Ph.D., A.T.C., and Roger Hartl, M.D.

COMMENT

The article chronicled “a topic review of studies related to cerebral concussion in athletes, as an aid to improving decision-making and outcomes,” and concluded that neuropsychological testing “seems to be an effective way to obtain useful data on the short-term and long-term effects of mild traumatic brain injury.”

Maroon and co-authors stated that they had developed a series of neurocognitive tests to assist in determining whether and when concussed athletes could return to play – tests already used by both the National Football League and the National Hockey League, and under evaluation at the college and high school levels.

The article cited a study finding that standards promulgated in 1980 by the National Operating Committee for Safety in Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) had resulted in a marked reduction in the incidence of mild traumatic brain injury in football since that date.

The article reviewed findings for Second-Impact Syndrome (SIS), a term coined in the literature in 1973. “[I]t must be concluded that SIS is an infrequent finding, predominately involves young athletes, and only rarely is fatal.”

The article then discussed the evolution of neuropsychological testing developed at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center starting in 1989, and eventually taking on the acronym IMPACT (for “Immediate Measurement of Performance and Cognitive Testing”). The authors emphasized that preseason baseline evaluation was essential, and was compared with reevaluation of a concussed player 24 to 48 hours after the injury, and again five days later.

The article moved on to the question “how many concussions are too many?” It quoted Dr. Eliot Pellman, head of the NFL’s concussion committee, as calling concussion management “more of an art than a science.” Pellman is now thoroughly disgraced for, among other things, his own articles in Neurosurgery, beginning in 2003, at a time when the journal was edited by Dr. Michael Apuzzo, a consultant for the New York Giants. One of Pellman’s articles came under heavy criticism by Dr. Robert Cantu, and it was later revealed that Pellman had revised an article subsequent to peer review and without consulting his co-authors. Both the NFL and Major League Baseball dumped Pellman as a consultant.

Maroon and co-authors concluded by predicting that neurocognitive testing – “easily administered” with “low-cost, computerized instruments” – would expand beyond pro and college athletes to become a staple at high schools, and “may help to improve the safety and extend the playing life of athletes in contact sports.”

Published commenters on the article had some praise of it as a review of existing literature and some criticism of it for presenting little or no original research.

Series “Dr. Maroon & ‘Neurosurgery’” will continue in following posts.

Irv Muchnick

MAROONED: The NFL/WWE Doc … the Journal Neurosurgery ... Concussions for Dummies

2011-05-31T19:00:00.000-07:00

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I am completing a reading task that is required for deeper understanding of the national sports concussion scandal: all articles by or referring to Dr. Joseph Maroon in Neurosurgery, the official journal of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Maroon, a long-time neurologist for the Pittsburgh Steelers and spokesperson for the National Football League’s committee on traumatic brain injury, also since 2008 has held the title of medical director of World Wrestling Entertainment.

This post introduces a series with my notes on pertinent historical Neurosurgery articles. Some of the information here has been published previously in dribs and drabs. Notably, ESPN’s Peter Keating in 2007 did much to expose the general conflicts of interest of NFL-affiliated doctors and researchers, and specifically revealed how Pitt Med Center clinicians involved in the marketing of Maroon’s for-profit ImPACT concussion management software manipulated the academic journal process to produce commercial hype.

The New York Times and The New Yorker are responsible for elevating the concussion issue from the sports pages to the national agenda. Times reporter Alan Schwarz gets the lion’s share of credit for ongoing federal government investigations of the safety claims of football helmet manufacturers, as well as the current proposed legislation introduced by Senator Tom Udall.

However, in my view, The Times frames the story inadequately. The Gray Lady would prefer to spur much too gentlemanly an outcome: a reprise of President Teddy Roosevelt’s football reforms of a century ago. The problem is that this sport and associated ones are no longer character-building rituals by Ivy League elites buffing their resumes in anticipation of careers on Wall Street and in other ruling-class institutions. Football today is a global multi-layered mega-industry. The urgency of reducing the human toll of this culture, across all classes and races, exceeds the scope of legislating helmets or any other piece of hardware, or mumbling bromides about changing the way players block and tackle.

In its January coverage of the controversy surrounding Riddell helmets, The Times quoted Dr. Maroon – co-author of the Neurosurgery article that was the basis for the company’s promotion – as claiming Riddell quoted him out of context. But Maroon (who doesn’t return my own calls or emails) was not asked if he ever so complained, in public or in private, prior to the initiation of a Federal Trade Commission investigation of Riddell.

In his January article in The New Yorker, “Does Football Have a Future?”, writer Ben McGrath quoted Maroon as calling The Times’ Schwarz “the Socratic gadfly in this whole mix.” Maroon added: “What we’re seeing now is [a] major cultural shift, and I think Alan took a lot of barbs, and a lot of hits, initially, for his observations.”

I am not accusing The New York Times, The New Yorker, Alan Schwarz, or Ben McGrath of being in the tank for Joseph Maroon or the NFL. I am just pointing out that those august journals have their job to do, and I have mine.

Irv Muchnick

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NEXT, Dr. Joseph Maroon & Neurosurgery 1999-2000: Origins of ‘ImPACT’

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FURTHER READING:

“Roundup of Coverage of Pittsburgh Steelers / NFL / WWE Doc Joseph Maroon’s Misstatements and Ethical Shortcuts on Concussion Research,” January 21, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/roundup-of-coverage-of-pittsburgh-steelers-nfl-wwe-doc-joseph-maroon%E2%80%99s-misstatements-and-ethical-shortcuts-on-concussion-research/

“Sports Concussion Scandal Ground Zero: NFL and WWE Doc Joseph Maroon’shttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Hype Article in Neurosurgery on Riddell Football Helmets,” January 23, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/sports-concussion-scandal-ground-zero-nfl-and-wwe-doc-joseph-maroon%E2%80%99s-hype-article-in-%E2%80%98http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifneurosurgery%E2%80%99-on-riddell-football-helmets/

“Timeline of Dr. Joseph Maroon’s Work as WWE Medical Director,” January 24, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/timeline-of-dr-joseph-maroon%E2%80%99s-work-as-wwe-medical-director/

“What the Feds Must Investigate About WWE-NFL Doc Joseph Maroon’s ImPACT Concussion Product,” March 23, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/introducing-%E2%80%98what-the-feds-must-investigate-about-wwe-nfl-doc-joseph-maroon%E2%80%99s-impact-concussion-product%E2%80%99/

“Subpoena Cena: Does WWE Medical Director Joseph Maroon’s ImPACT System Manage Concussions Manage Concussions – Or Merely ‘Manage’ ‘Concussions’?”, March 23, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/subpoena-cena-does-wwe-medical-director-joseph-maroon%E2%80%99s-impact-system-manage-concussions-%E2%80%93-or-merely-%E2%80%98manage%E2%80%99-%E2%80%98concussions%E2%80%99/

“FLASHBACK: ESPN’s Peter Keating Was First to Expose NFL and WWE Concusshttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifion Doc Joseph Maroon’s Conflicts of Interest,” March 24, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/flashback-espn%E2%80%99s-peter-keating-was-first-to-expose-nfl-and-wwe-concussion-doc-joseph-maroon%E2%80%99s-conflicts-of-interest/

“In FoxSports.com Story, Doc Confirms Report on Ritalin and Beating Concussion Tests,” April 21, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/in-foxsports-com-story-doc-confirms-report-on-ritalin-and-beating-concussion-tests/

“’ImPACT’ of Dr. Maroon’s and Colleagues’ Writings,” March 25, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/impact-of-dr-maroons-and-colleagues-writings/

Football Helmet Safety Generals Are Fighting Last War – While the Current One Kills and Stupefies Youth Athletes

2011-05-31T18:56:00.000-07:00

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The lobbying money is pouring in as the lines get drawn around the Children’s Sports Athletic Equipment Safety Act introduced by Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico and Congressman Bill Pascrell of New Jersey. The Associated Press story is at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j7QeqP4ZtPZOJyknc16C-5-ssBVg?docId=687abd45267f48798c5dc0baa717c202.

Far be it from me to defend the helmet industry, but someone needs to tell the federal government that its helmet-safety crusade is a gigantic misfire in the overall national sports concussion crisis.

When Senator Harry Truman investigated shoddy military parts by World War II profiteers, it helped catapult him to the vice presidency. But back then the underlying endeavor was one of national purpose and consensus. The truly frightening thing about sports concussions, especially in football, is the range and importance of the punches pulled by our political leaders in service of an entertainment activity that is not a war, except by metaphor, and is endangering youth physical and mental health, warping education, and decimating American productivity by, quite literally, draining our brains.

In this equation, exposing whatever shortcuts helmet manufacturers or budget-restricted families and amateur athletic programs might have taken ranks far down the list of national priorities.

The problem starts at the top, with the National Football League and its bought-and-paid-for doctors and researchers, who have sold the media, the public, and now Congress on the illusion of a better mousetrap. The scandal resides much deeper, in places where polite conversation refuses to go – such as to how Riddell helmets got hyped and legitimated in the first place by the NFL and its brain-injury guru Dr. Joseph Maroon (also the “medical director” of World Wrestling Entertainment), and how Maroon and his cronies have used the same pseudo-academic channels to plug their now-discredited for-profit ImPACT concussion system rather than publish the full truth about the chronic traumatic encephalopathy pandemic in this country.

More about Maroon from here shortly.

Irv Muchnick

Pro Hockey Player Derek Boogaard Is Dead. So Is Amateur Football Player Nathan Stiles.

2011-05-31T18:49:00.000-07:00

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Derek Boogaard of the National Hockey League’s New York Rangers, a notorious brawler who had been sidelined since December with a concussion, has been found dead at 28 and his family has donated his brain to the Boston chronic traumatic encephalopathy research group headed by http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifChrishttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Nowinski and Dr. Robert Cantu.

Meanwhile, Laura Bauer of the Kansas City Star has been writing a multi-part series on Nathan Stiles, a high school football player from Spring Hill, Missouri, who died from a head injury at 17. Here are the links:

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/05/14/2875254/a-matter-of-faith-part-1-prayers.html#storylink=misearch

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/05/15/2877525/to-family-high-school-football.html#storylink=misearch

Below is the text of an email to the Star’s Bauer by Missouri writer Matt Chaney, author of Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, who is now reporting on the sports concussion crisis.

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Your current series on the Nathan Stiles tragedy is a fine tribute to a family, their religion and forgiveness—because this story is about forgiveness, of a mistake by someone or something, given the fact Nathan DID return to football when he shouldn’t have.

Football’s invalid and unreliable concussion “guidelines” and/or “testing” failed Nathan, Laura, even if he misled people to think he was asymptomatic of his first concussion and ready to return.

I have spoken on-record with Dr. Robert Cantu of Boston about Nathan’s case, in a tape-recorded telephone interview, and I continue to communicate with Dr. Bennet Omalu in California. These experts represent the two research labs currently analyzing Nathan’s case postmortem.

Yes, the subdural hematoma Nathan suffered in the Oct. 28 game killed him, led to his death the following morning.

However, Nathan also suffered a RE-BLEED or ‘second-impact’ concussion on Oct. 28, which, barring further lab results, means Dr. Ratzlaff’s “guidelines” failed–or football’s current “concussion management” failed–and everyone missed the apparent fact Nathan was still suffering trauma of his original Oct. 1 concussion when he was returned to play on Oct. 22 and 28.

This is Dr. Cantu’s exchange with me on Dec. 21, 2010, regarding his research’s group work to that point with Nathan’s brain slides:

Cantu: “His original CT was normal…

Chaney: “Right.”

Cantu: “And he took additional trauma and that CT showed a subdural.”

Chaney: “I’ll be darn. Yeah, see the news reports–I couldn’t quite jibe all that , because several reports are stating that the subdural hematoma was result of the October 1 incident, and then it was missed leading up to his first return to action on the 22nd. So under your understanding, the subdural occurred on the second impact, perhaps–or a second impact, perhaps?”

Cantu: “A second impact, and whether there was any bleeding in between–and then the bleeding got a great deal worse–that we don’t know. … He played the final game of the season, and in that one suffered a combined second-impact [concussion] and a subdural, both.”

Chaney: “Wow. Isn’t that something. And there’s one that got by [concussion testing]. Is it fair to say there’s just so much we still don’t know? About managing these situations? How do you feel about it today? The state of concussion management, especially in a vast environment of athletes like tackle football in the United States?”

Cantu: “I think the most important thing, Matt, is… and I’ve talked with Mrs. Stiles, Connie Stiles, and she tells me that [Nathan] was not telling her he had symptoms. I really wonder whether that’s accurate [no symptoms]. … I have a very hard time thinking he was asymptomatic.”

Chaney: “Right, right. So it really takes some specialized training here…”

Cantu: “I think so, and it takes honesty on the part of the individual as they’re symptomatic with headache, nausea, on and on and on, to come forward with it. It’s not safe to play with it.”

Bottom line, Laura, Mr. And Mrs. Stiles have every right to forgive and forget here. But more preventable second-impacts will happen in prep football, with or without catastrophic injury like a subdural, because “concussion testing” and http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif“guidelines” are invalid, missing countless still-concussed athletes by rates of 25 to 50 percent, according to numerous reviewing experts worldwide.

What must be adopted for juvenile concussed athletes is a mandatory layoff of at least 1 to 3 months, proposed in varying lengths by brain experts like Omalu, Dr. Lester Mayers and Dr. Randall Benson. THAT would have saved Nathan’s life from football mortality as a teenager.

No one has the right to stifle or distort that message. No one. Other football families must be properly informed.

Matt Chaney

www.chaneysblog.com

‘Government’s Sports Priorities Value Business Over Public Health’ (full text)

2011-05-31T18:44:00.001-07:00

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[originally published May 9 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Government_s_Sports_Priorities_Value_Business_Over_Public_Health_9163.html]

by Irvin Muchnick

Some day the next Edward Gibbon will come along to chronicle the obsessive triviality of the succession of boy-kings we’ve been choosing to manage the late period of the American empire. In his own half-term-plus, President Obama has regularly taken time out to issue March Madness brackets. Meanwhile, he has delivered a single Oval Office speech, late and unspecific, on why he opened a third front of foreign wars.

Now, amidst mounting evidence that our out-of-control sports industries are producing, literally, a generation of bird brains, the Justice Department Antitrust Division has positioned its teeth where they can really bite: on how college football’s Bowl Championship Series might be illegally hoarding glory and moolah on behalf of just a few of the most powerful athletic conferences.

Fittingly, news of the BCS probe leaked the same week in which researchers in Boston released the expected finding on the chronic traumatic encephalopathy that had deadened portions of the brain of former National Football League star Dave Duerson, who committed suicide three months ago.

If Obama and his advisers could be persuaded to redirect their focus from the real and present danger of a mythical football championship, they might want to ponder how the fewer than one percent of exploited college players who “graduate” to the NFL confront a health and disability system that likely wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny in any other $9-billion-a-year industry.

The most explosive element of the confirmation that Duerson had CTE was the fact that he was an NFL Players Association representative on the joint management-player committee that rules on retired players’ disability claims. In that capacity, Duerson had parroted the owners’ line that there was no proof of the link between football and brain injuries – even as what we now know was his own case of CTE clouded his judgment. Duerson’s once-formidable food distribution business went into receivership, and he went bankrupt and his marriage collapsed. His loss of impulse control manifested itself in an expletive-laden diatribe against NFL legends Sam Huff and Bernie Parrish during a break at a 2007 Senate Commerce Committee hearing.

I first reported this last anecdote immediately after Duerson’s suicide, and advocated that 11 rejected claims of retired players’ families for dementia-related medical expenses, plus an untold number of other mental-illness claims rejected on his watch, be reopened in light of the information that Duerson himself had diminished mental capacity and therefore inadequately represented his fellow athletes.

Last week, following the announcement of the CTE finding, coverage in The New York Times raised the same point. John Hogan, an attorney representing many ex-NFLers fighting legal battles over rejected claims, told The Times that he was considering asking the Labor Department to conduct an audit of the cases on which the NFL Player Care panel ruled during Duerson’s tenure.

The Duerson factor is only one piece of what could should be a wide-ranging investigation, either by the Labor Department or by Senator Tom Udall, who is spurring examinations of football helmet marketing. The White House could help by sending as enthusiastic a signal on the concussion issue as it did to Justice on the BCS. The NFL Player Retirement Plan, named for the late commissioners Bert Bell and Pete Rozelle, is governed by ERISA – the Employment Retirement Income Security Act. There are allegations that the plan is underfunded, routinely ignores ERISA regulations for adjudicating claims, and is riddled with conflicts of interest and “doctor shopping” practices.

Curators of Duerson’s legacy currently are peddling the narrative that he is a hero of concussion reform. Nonsense: though his suicide called attention http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifo the cause and cannot be discounted, his was the 15th deceased pro football player’s brain to be studied for CTE – and the 14th to turn up positive. Sportswriters and Duerson’s other friends need to put down their hankies and follow the real and harder-hitting implications of their logic.

Dave Duerson – who played college football at Notre Dame and later served as a university trustee, before being forced to resign after an arrest for battering his wife – isn’t around to tell us what he thinks of Obama’s BCS crusade. But I know what I think: it is a distraction from the concussion crisis, the No. 1 off-the-field issue in sports today.

Irvin Muchnick (http://muchnick.net; blog http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com) is author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.

In Concussion Reform Advocacy, ‘Peer Review’ Is Not Always Clear Review

2011-05-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

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Activist movements have morphologies. At this moment the national sports concussion fight, like many others, is bogged down in a fetish over “peer-reviewed scientific literature.” I argue that a lot of the vaunted peer-review process is pompous bunk – a ritual by elites to demonstrate their eliteness while giving aid and comfort to the status quo.

Peer review is a bit like another academic institution: tenure in higher education. The concept is that it promotes intellectual freedom. But in all too many cases, those who have it don’t need it, and those who need it don’t have it.

In 2007 Chris Nowinski started his Sports Legacy Institute in Boston and got the brain of dead pro wrestler Chris Benoit for Dr. Bennet Omalu to study. When the Boston group announced that Benoit (who, at age 40, had murdered his wife and their 7-year-old son before killing himself) had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the corporation of professional liars that had employed him, World Wrestling Entertainment, derided the finding as “not published in a peer-reviewed journal.” Then, when Omalu published a paper about it in a peer-reviewed journal, it was “only” the Journal of Forensic Nursing, not one of the high-end publications like Neurosurgery. Of course, the reason was that Omalu, for a time and for all intents and purposes, had been blackballed by Neurosurgery, which was in the National Football League’s pocket. Earlier this year Omalu did resume publishing in Neurosurgery; I’m waiting for the next pointless excuse from the naysayers.

Some of us who admire Nowinski’s work with SLI and want to see its mission succeed worry that he is falling into the peer-review trap. We also worry that the NFL’s $1 million grant to SLI’s sister Center for the Study of CTE at Boston University will become part of a larger pattern of delay and dilution.

The Boston group has said that it is moving away from announcements to journalistic outlets and toward releasing findings only after they are published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. They made an exception 11 days ago with the Dave Duerson press conference because, Dr. Robert Cantu explained, they always bow to the wishes of the family.

But even assuming that the policy is plausible, I believe the wishes of the family are precisely the wrong exception. As a result of Nowinski and company’s own logic and energy, sports concussions are a major societal issue. Instead of pontificating about peer review and then making exceptions when it’s convenient, I would rather hear the response to a call from Omalu, in his forthcoming Neurosurgery article, for new protocols allowing automatic CTE study of postmortem brains of certain populations, such as athletes in contact sports.

Please don’t tell me I’m being simplistic. I’m being simple. Obviously, there’s a role for editorial gatekeepers – in academia, journalism, and elsewhere. The point is that we don’t need to study 500 more dead football players’ brains before coming to common-sense conclusions about important actions and political solutions. Take it from an old college dropout: peer-review rhetoric is mumbo-jumbo.

Irv Muchnick

Sure, ‘Change the Way Football Is Played.’ But Also Change Who Is Allowed to Play It.

2011-05-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

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Readers of this blog should know two things by now: (1) I have the highest regard for the people who have done and are doing the serious work in the trenches on sports brain injury research; and (2) While reasonable people can disagree on when the tipping point was reached, we need fewer angels dancing on the heads of pins, in exchange for more concrete steps to prevent chronic traumatic encephalopathy on the front end and, if possible, develop cures at the back end.

For the former, I’m pretty dubious that helmet reform is much of an answer, and I’ll explain why with an analogy. A lot of people have the perception that the end of bareknuckles boxing made the sport less brutal, when the opposite was actually the case. Gloves protect the hands that hit, not the heads that get hit. Relieved of much of the fear that they would break their hands, gloved boxers started punching harder than ever. Mandatory eight counts, three-knockdown rules, limiting the number of rounds, stopping bloodbaths, and other measures did civilize boxing to a degree, but mostly at the level of image. No one who understands how these things work really believes that as a live-and-death matter, boxing is less, rather than more, dangerous than it used to be.

The focus on football helmet safety might very well be a similar public-health trap. The industrial demands of modern football make the helmet as much a weapon as it is a piece of protective gear.

Of course, we can and should do our best with helmet design. We also need changes in rules and in coaching culture. But jeez, the volume of accidents happening with athletes of this size and speed is well beyond acceptable, even if we assume that they’re accidents. The confidence with which some experts project threading the needle here is, intuitively, as absurd as that old Hawaii Five-O episode in which an assassin created a decoy by arranging to have himself shot at long range exactly one-eighth of an inch from his heart.

The reform that needs to get sustained discussion is not the installation of National Football League and World Wrestling Entertainment doctor Joseph Maroon’s ImPACT concussion management software in high school athletic departments. The national conversation we need to be having is about is whether the sport of football should be played at all before age X. I don’t pretend to know what “X” should be; only that the current murmur about the subject is so tossed-off as to be far short of a paradigm shift.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Today’s Chicago Sun-Times has an article about a speaking appearance by Dr. Ann McKee, a doctor of pathology at Boston University who did the Dave Duerson brain study and probably has received fewer mentions here than she deserves. See http://www.suntimes.com/sports/football/5329586-419/doctor-football-must-change-rules-to-protect-players.html.

The headline on the story is “Doctor: Football must change rules to protect players.” Yet the last paragraph of the story has this quote from McKee:

“I don’t think 10-year-olds need to play tackle football. I’ve already told my son he’s got to stop playing.”

I look forward to stories that stop burying the lead and give us headlines like this: “Doctor: Youth football must be banned.”

Irv Muchnick

A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose – Until It’s CTE in a Football Player

2011-05-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

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Yesterday I apologized for falsely suggesting that Dr. Robert Cantu had airbrushed the history of chronic traumatic encephalopathy research in his remarks last week at the Dave Duerson brain study press conference.

Today I offer an extended P.S. on the nuances of that research and its political landmines. The story of CTE involves maimed and prematurely dead athletes, of course. But it also includes egos, grants, media coverage … in sum, careers. The behind-the-scenes rivalry between the Boston research group, led by the Sports Legacy Institute’s Chris Nowinski and Boston University Medical Center’s Cantu, and the West Virginia research group, led by Drs. Julian Bailes and Bennet Omalu, is a glimpse into that world. The stakes are high for the parties – and for the rest of us.

Let’s stipulate that any controversy over the origins of the naming of this brain disease is a sideshow in comparison with the substance of what Omalu brought to the table – unfortunately, it was literally the autopsy table – over the last decade. I would summarize it thusly:

- For many years, there was an understanding that boxers suffered various symptoms resembling Parkinson’s Disease, accompanied by dementia.

- There was also an escalating appreciation that people in all walks of life who suffered major traumatic brain injury could develop a disease that resembled Alzheimer’s.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

- Beginning with Mike Webster in 2002 and continuing through to the Nowinski group’s initial and breakthrough finding, on pro wrestler Chris Benoit in 2007, Omalu put what we now call CTE on the map. Omalu determined that minor blows to the head, over time, with or without documentation – notably in football, hockey, lacrosse, and wrestling – could result in a disease distinct from Alzheimer’s. Omalu is publishing an overview on all this in the journal Neurosurgery; it is available in advance in electronic form, and I wrote about it here on March 9. See “Concussion Research Pioneer Bennet Omalu Returns to ‘Neurosurgery’ Journal,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/concussion-research-pioneer-bennet-omalu-returns-to-%E2%80%98neurosurgery%E2%80%99-journal/.

Omalu has defined CTE as a disease entity. He also has confirmed that what we used to think of as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or their offshoots are not these diseases in victims of CTE, which has distinct pathognomonic diagnostic features.

Nomenclature aside, there was no media attention given to CTE until after the publication of the Mike Webster paper in 2005.

About that nomenclature:

* There is evidence that “punch drunk syndrome” in boxers, or dementia pugilistica, was also being called “traumatic encephalopathy” as early as the 1930s.

* A 1996 paper in Pathology, “Dementia Pugilistica in an Alcoholic Achondroplastic Dwarf,” by David J. Williams and Anthony E.G. Tannenberg,” says that dementia pugilistica is “otherwise known as chronic progressive post-traumatic encephalopathy of boxing.” Not exactly the same as CTE – though so close that I probably would have felt compelled yesterday to clarify and apologize to the Boston folks even if they hadn’t also shared with me ...

* A 1966 paper from Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, “Mental Sequelae of Head Injury,” by Henry Miller, has a subsection headed “Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy.” Though Miller did not seem to go anywhere with this term in the body of the article, nor give it the abbreviation CTE, the exact sequence of the three words clinched at least the minimal point that great minds prior to Omalu had thought at least somewhat alike. And it confirmed that I’d stubbed my toe in my May 3 story on Duerson.

I haven’t yet gotten to my promised oration on how fetishized peer-review literature too often amounts to trees falling in a forest with no one around to hear or act on them. I’ll get to that next, I think.

Irv Muchnick

Will Senator Blumenthal Strut His Stuff on Sports Concussions and Pro Wrestling Regulation?

2011-05-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

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Connecticut Capitol Report (http://ctcapitolreport.com), whose Tom Dudchik writes catchier headlines than your humble blogger, links to a story about Senator Richard Blumental’s latest handiwork at the Judiciary Committee with the tag “Blumenthal struts his ‘Attorney General’ stuff in front of Apple, Google suits.”

The story itself, by Deirdre Shesgreen of the CT Mirror, under the more Muchnickian headline “Blumenthal in his element at privacy, anti-trust hearings,” is at http://ctmirror.com/story/12558/blumenthaltech.

Here’s hoping that in the near future Dudchik will find himself hyperlinking “SMACKDOWN! PERSONAL FOUL! Blumenthal confronts WWE medical doctor and NFL concussion profiteer Joseph Maroon.”

Irv Muchnick

Clarification: The Term ‘Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy’ Does Date Back to 1969

2011-05-25T07:17:00.000-07:00

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A couple of different readers, with a couple of different viewpoints, have told me that my coverage of the announcement of Dave Duerson’s chronic traumatic encephalopathy maligned Boston University’s Dr. Robert Cantu by stating that he had vaguely backdated the definition and naming of the disease in a way that disrespects the work of Dr. Bennet Omalu.

On this point, I think the critics are right and I was wrong, so let me correct the record here.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

After that, I’ll proceed to explain why I believe exposure of my error only deepens the suspicions that the sports medical establishment fell down on the job and that the National Football League was none too eager to see that a better jhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifob be done.

What Cantu said in Boston a week ago Monday was that CTE was identified in boxers as “punch drunk syndrome” in the 1920s, and “since the sixties and especially the seventies it has been known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, with multiple case reports in the world’s clinical and neuropathological literature.” (The press conference video is at http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=1GIhOEcN.)

That is accurate. Nor is there any reason to dispute this fuller chronology by the Sports Legacy Institute at http://sportslegacy.org/index.php/science-a-medicine/chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy:

The term “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy” appears in the medical literature as early as 1969 and is now the preferred term. Through 2009 there were only 49 cases described in all medical literature since 1928, 39 of whom were boxers. Many thought this was a disease exclusive to boxers, although cases have been identified in a battered wife, an epileptic, two mentally challenged individuals with head-banging behavior, and an Australian circus performer who was also involved in what the medical report authors referred to as “dwarf-throwing.”

CTE remained under the radar when a Pittsburgh medical examiner named Bennet Omalu identified CTE in two former Pittsburgh Steelers who died in his jurisdiction in 2002 and 2005. He published his findings, drawing the attention of SLI co-founder Chris Nowinski, who worked with families to deliver three more cases that Dr. Omalu and others diagnosed with CTE, including SLI’s first case, former WWE wrestler Chris Benoit.

***

What happened?

In my several lengthy conversations with Dr. Omalu, he has taken credit for the term CTE; on one occasion, Omalu even gently reminded me that he had been the sole, and not merely a major contributory, coiner of it. To the extent that I ran with Omalu’s assertion, bad on me. If I’ve somehow misinterpreted what Omalu has been telling me (but I don’t think I have), then double-bad on me. (Omalu declined comment in an email this morning.)

Now that that piece is out of the way – again, apologies to Cantu, Chris Nowinski’s SLI, and the Center for the Study of CTE for the implication that they were deflecting due credit to Omalu by fudging history – what does all this mean for the story of the national head injury crisis in sports?

The answer is that it is, if anything, even less flattering to the powers-that-be.

Bennet Omalu didn’t discover CTE or even attach the most widely recognized handle to it. He was just the first to identify CTE in football players.

CTE was wending its way through the medical literature throughout the 1970s in association not just with boxers, but with battered women and circus performers as well. Meanwhile, as concussions took a skyrocketing toll on football players over the next 30 years, no one made the connection.

Remember Travis Williams, “the Road Runner,” a speedy running back who set kickoff return records as a rookie for the 1967 Super Bowl champion Green Bay Packers? He was finished way too early, battled depression, wound up penniless in a homeless shelter in Richmond, California, and died at 45. Of course, we can’t know if Williams had CTE, but his story is just one of dozens or scores or hundreds of similar ones prior to that day in 2002 when Omalu happened upon Mike Webster’s brain.

All of which leads to another broad observation – about the folly of “peer-reviewed scientific literature.” This phrase, preferably uttered in hushed tones and on bended knee, is the talisman of the same priesthood that has failed a sports-mad nation in disseminating needed public health information. Peer review, in my opinion, is a pastiche of standards, honored as much in the breach as in the observance when convenient, and it comes embedded with its own set of social, professional, and commercial biases. More on this in tomorrow’s post.

Irv Muchnick

‘Duerson’s CTE Finding Must Change NFL Concussion Debate From Consciousness-Raising to Accountability’ (full text from Beyond Chron)

2011-05-18T13:10:00.000-07:00

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[originally published May 3 at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Duerson_s_CTE_Finding_Must_Change_NFL_Concussion_Debate_From_Consciousness_Raising_to_Accountability_9147.html]

by Irvin Muchnick

Dave Duerson had CTE – chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The finding on the brain of the 50-year-old retired National Football League star, who committed shttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifuicide in February, was announced at a Monday news conference conducted by doctors at Boston University’s Center for the Study of CTE, Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute, and Duerson’s ex-wife and four children.

The Boston group deserves the victory lap it is taking for raising consciousness about concussions in contact sports. Everyone should view Nowinski’s video on the subject, “Game Changers,” at http://youtube.com/watch?v=yeSsYOgGJW4.

At the same time, there is a danger that the NFL’s activism in finding a cure for CTE and promoting sports safety reforms is way too little and way too late. That is why I asked the following question at yesterday’s event:

Mr. Duerson served as a trustee on the NFL Player Care committee that reviews disability claims of retired players. A league spokesman told me that a total of 11 claims to the Mackey 88 Plan for dementia-related acute-care expenses have been rejected. There is some additional number of line-of-duty and disability benefits that have been rejected, and many of those also involve brain injuries – a subject that certainly weighed heavily on Mr. Duerson. In light of this new information confirming that he was himself of diminished mental capacity when he participated in these NFL Player Care deliberations, do you agree that there is a moral, if not also a legal, obligation to reopen the files of these rejected claims?

Robert Stern, co-director of the center, replied that his organization was not in the business of telling the NFL how to distribute disability benefits. He also said that the Duerson CTE finding could not be extrapolated to determine just when and how, or even whether, this player and fallen business tycoon came to incur “diminished mental capacity.” (The original version of this post incorrectly identified Chris Nowinski as the person who responded to my question.)

Though fair enough as far as the response went, this reticence to use the Duerson cautionary tale for more aggressive generic comment on the political landscape ahead may point to the limitations of the Sports Legacy Institute’s new million-dollar partnership with the NFL. In a related vein, I believe the question is not whether youth football coaches should be cutting back on contact in practices; it is whether youth football should exist at all.

Further unfortunate fallout from the public progress on concussion reform is the schism between the Boston group and the West Virginia Brain Injury Research Institute headed by Drs. Julian Bailes and Bennet Omalu. The latter, now chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County, California, is the researcher who took the NFL head-on while more established voices were still equivocating – often in journal articles authored by doctors with league connections and other commercial conflicts of interest.

A hint of the Boston-West Virginia turf war was evident yesterday after Boston University’s Dr. Robert Cantu correctly linked CTE to the phenomenon of “punch drunk syndrome” in boxers, which was first isolated in 1928. Cantu went on to suggest, incorrectly, that CTE became widely recognized in the sixties and seventies. In fact, the pathology was neither named nor defined before Omalu came along in 2002. If there was widespread awareness of the scale of concussion syndrome in the immediate aftermath of football players such as Al Toon getting blasted into early retirement in the 1990s, then the NFL made sure it was a well-kept secret.

In any case, the point isn’t who gets credit for the discovery of CTE so much as who will pay the bill for the current generation of sports-generated broken lives. This exercise runs deeper than the NFL’s bottom line. Half-baked prospective solutions driven by an image-conscious, money-hungry corporation will not signifihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifcantly arrest the CTE pandemic. And as writer Matt Chaney has noted, it is non-professionals and their families – along with the nation as a whole – who bear the brunt of the NFL lobby’s current campaign to shift responsibility to state legislatures mandating new practices by cash-strapped school and other amateur athletic programs.

A better idea: Make Commissioner Roger Goodell and his 32 owners cough up some realistic restitution for the brain-injury mill from which they profit so obscenely. A mere $20 million in research grants and $7 million in aid to retired players with dementia won’t cut it. That was the background of my question at the Duerson press conference. I’ll take my answer off the air.

Irvin Muchnick (blog http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com; Twitter “@irvmuch”) is author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.

Duerson Legacy Belongs in a Labor Department Audit, Not in Jock Hagiography

2011-05-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

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Alan Schwarz of The New York Times has taken the Dave Duerson story exactly where it needs to go: toward no-holds-barred examination of the National Football League disability benefits system, which Duerson himself, with cruel irony, had helped administer and defend.

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

Another question beginning to circle among retired players whose claims were denied during Duerson’s tenure is whether they can refile given his admitted impairment. Board votes are not disclosed to applicants or to the public.

John Hogan, a lawyer for dozens of players in disability matters, said that he might request an audit by the United States Department of Labor to see how Duerson voted on claims.

“He had to exercise a high degree of care, skill, prudence and diligence — the C.T.E. 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,” Hogan said. “It therefore calls into question the possibility that some or all of the decisions he made when passing on disahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifbility claims are suspect, and perhaps invalid.”

I welcome attorney Hogan’s assumption of a more aggressive stance than he articulated to me in the immediate aftermath of Duerson’s February suicide. Back then, while not hesitating to brand the entire NFL disability apparatus illegitimate, with or without the Duerson factor, Hogan had added that probing Duerson’s specific cases on the compensation board would be a tough road to hoe because of confidentiality laws and the possibility that he had actually cast his own votes in favor of retired players whose claims were rejected. (See “ALREADY LOCKED OUT: The NFL and NFLPA’s Rejected Disability Claims,” March 15, http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/introducing-already-locked-out-the-nfl-and-nflpa%E2%80%99s-rejected-disability-claims/.)

A lawyer for NFL Player Care, Douglas Ell, reinforces this point to The Times, saying “he knew of no case where ‘if Dave’s vote were disregarded, the outcome would have been different.’”

I think the league’s position is spectacularly wrong. The disability committee is not tainted because of Duerson’s individual votes, but because of his overall participation. As one of the three NFL Players Association appointees, Duerson carried an expectation to deliberate and advocate on behalf of a constituency in need. To use a very loose analogy, if a lawyer is found to have provided inadequate representation to an accused criminal, the process is understood to be flawed and a rehearing required. War-gaming the final verdicts of the disability panel to determine whether they would have turned out the same anyway does not remove their procedural cloud.

At Monday’s press conference in Boston, officials at the Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy (a partnership of Boston University and the Sports Legacy Institute, recently infused with a $1 million NFL grant) declined to go there. See my coverage at Beyond Chron, the full text of which will be posted shortly here.

But even if the best-known faces of concussion reform are getting unhelpfully cautious in their rhetoric, the sports commentariat and the federal government have the means to take the Duerson narrative all the way home.

Irv Muchnick

‘Duerson CTE Finding Must Change NFL Concussion Debate From Consciousness-Raising to Accountability’ ... today at Beyond Chron

2011-05-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

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Dave Duerson had CTE – chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The finding on the brain of the 50-year-old retired National Football League star, who committed suicide in February, was announced at a Monday news conference conducted by doctors at Boston University’s Center for the Study of CTE, Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute, and Duerson’s ex-wife anhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifd four children.

The Boston group deserves the victory lap it is taking for raising consciousness about concussions in contact sports. Everyone should view Nowinski’s video on the subject, “Game Changers,” at http://youtube.com/watch?v=yeSsYOgGJW4.

At the same time, there is a danger that the NFL’s belated activism in finding a cure for CTE and promoting sports safety reforms is way too little and way too late. That is why I asked the following question at yesterday’s event:

CONTINUED TODAY AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER: http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Duerson_s_CTE_Finding_Must_Change_NFL_Concussion_Debate_From_Consciousn

Dave Duerson’s CTE and the Cause of Living Brain-Injured NFL Alumni

2011-05-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

[posted 5/2/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

At a just-concluded press conference in Boston attended by Dave Duerson’s ex-wife and their four children, doctors affiliated with Boston University and Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute announced that the postmortem study of the brain of Duerson, who committed suicide in February, confirms that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He is one of dozens of recently deceased athletes, at least 13 of whom were National Football League players, shown to have had CTE.

I asked the following question at the press conference:

Mr. Duerson served as a trustee on the NFL Player Care committee that reviews disability claims of retired players. A league spokesman told me that a total of 11 claims to the Mackey 88 Plan for dementia-related acute-care expenses have been rejected. There is some additional number of line-of-duty and disability benefits that have been rejected, and many of those also involve brain injuries – a subject that certainly weighed heavily on Mr. Duerson. In light of this new information confirming that he was himself of diminished mental capacity when he participated in these NFL Player Care deliberations, http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifdo you agree that there is a moral, if not also a legal, obligation to reopen the files of these rejected claims?

For the panel’s answer to this question and my analysis, see my article Tuesday at Beyond Chron, the San Francisco online newspaper.

For background, see this blog’s series on Duerson, linked in five parts at “Dave Duerson NFL Suicide Story You’ll Read Nowhere Else,” http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/dave-duerson-nfl-suicide-story-youll-read-nowhere-else-in-five-parts/.

Irv Muchnick

Senator Udall No-Comments Query on Investigation of Rigging of Concussion Tests

2011-05-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/26/11 to http:http://www.blhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

This morning I faxed the following to Senator Tom Udall’s press secretary, Amber McDowell. There has been no response.

Please provide a statement from Senator Udall on whether federal investigations of football helmet safety should be expanded to include investigations of sports concussion testing.

This query is prompted by reports over the past week — on my blog, at FoxSports.com, and elsewhere — that some National Football League players are known to have cheated the “ImPACT” concussion test at both ends: by deliberately doing poorly on baseline testing and by taking Ritalin to artificially elevate alertness post-concussion.

The helmet and concussion-testing questions are linked because Dr. Joseph Maroon both participated in the NFL-funded study used in hype by the Riddell helmet company, and developed and co-owns the ImPACT software, which is marketed to many sports leagues, including youth programs.

Irv Muchnick

‘Blumenthal backs “misclassification” bill but ducks questions about WWE’ (Manchester Journal Inquirer)

2011-05-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/26/11 to http:http://www.blhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

Reprinted in full with permission.

Blumenthal backs ‘misclassification’ bill but ducks questions about WWE

by Don Michak

Manchester Journal Inquirer

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, flanked Monday by state labor Commissioner Glenn Marshall and a bevy of construction industry and labor representatives, trumpeted his co-sponsorship of a bill that would protect workers from being “misclassified” as independent contractors or part-timers by their employers.

But the former state attorney general — who as a Democratic candidate last year questioned whether his Republican opponent, Linda McMahon, had done exactly that as the former chief executive officer of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. — ducked when asked to comment on a misclassification audit of WWE reportedly initiated by the state Labor Department.

“This federal law is about industrywide and countrywide violations of basic fairness in misclassification, which is cheating, plain and simple,” Blumenthal responded. “It’s not about any one business or any one industry. It’s about construction, but it’s also about a variety of other areas where workers, honest businesses, taxpayers, and ordinary citizens are all cheated as a result of this practice.

“We’re going to fight for this proposal, regardless of allegations against any one business,” he added.

Meanwhile, Marshall, the former carpenters union official named three months ago by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy to head the Labor Department, also dodged when asked about the reported WWE probe.

“At this time I’m not in a position to divulge anything on that,” he said. “If there is an investigation, we can’t report on it. There are protections in place within the department — some of it’s federal and some of it’s state law — where we can’t divulge things when investigations are ongoing.”

Asked why, if he were bent on increasing public awareness of “misclassification,” he would keep secret the name of any company engaged in the practice, Marshall responded: “This is a broader venue that we’re talking about here and I’d rather not get specific about if there is an investigation ongoing.”

The officials, speaking at the Wethersfield office of the Connecticut Construction Industries Association, characterized misclassification as a means for unscrupulous employers to cut costs and avoid contributions for unemployment and workers compensation.

They said such workers don’t qualify for minimum wage and overtime compensation and aren’t protected by anti-discrimination and health and safety laws. Businesses that properly classify their employees are put at a competitive disadvantage, they said.

The Labor Department was reported to have begun a misclassification audit of WWE in September, although one department source has since said it had become focused on whether the company underpaid unemployment insurance taxes.

McMahon, who before launching her Senate bid had headed the company that classifies its wrestlers and other employees as independent contractors, initially said she was unaware of any audit.

A WWE spokesman, meanwhile, denied any corporate wrongdoing and told the Stamford Advocate that the state had “curiously” begun auditing the company as McMahon made her first run for public office.

The McMahon campaign subsequently suggested Blumenthal was behind the probe, and he responded that while he had worked with a task force looking for ways to reduce the practice, he was not involved in the Labor Department investigation.

Blumenthal on Monday again emphasized his work on behalf of a state law signed into law last spring that increased the fine from $300 per incident to $300 a day per violation for employers who misclassify employees as independent contractors.

“That law has been strengthened as a result of the report that was done,” he said. “I was co-chair of the committee and I’ve been working on this problem for years.”

The freshman senator said the proposed Payroll Fraud Prevention Act drafted by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, would “take Connecticut’s law as a model” and establish misclassification as separate federal violation.

He said it also would set a $1,100 fine for each violation and a $5,000 fine for each repeated violation, require employers to keep records and notify workers exactly how they are classified, and protect workers who report violations.

Muchnick Interviewed About WWE on Connecticut Radio Friday

2011-05-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/25/11 to http:http://www.blhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, will be interviewed by host Larry Rifkin on “Talk of the Town” on WATR Radio, 1320 AM, in Waterbury, Connecticut, on Friday, April 29, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time (8:30 a.m. Pacific).

The live interview, scheduled for 30 minutes, also will stream at http://watr.com.

Anticipated topics include Linda McMahon’s widely assumed 2012 campaign for a Connecticut U.S. Senate seat, the turmoil at World Wrestling Entertainment (including the resignation of long-time board member Lowell Weicker), http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.ghttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gififnd the state Labor Department audit of WWE for independent contractor misclassification and the parallel federal legislation proposed by Senator Richard Blumenthal.
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Web: http://muchnick.net

Blog: http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/irvmuch

YouTube: http://youtube.com/WrestlingBabylon

Media inquiries: media@muchnick.net

#####

Ex-NFL Player Matt Bowen: I Sandbagged My Concussion Test

2011-05-14T15:11:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/25/11 to http:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif//wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

Continuing last week’s line of reporting from this blog and from FoxSports.com’s Alex Marvez:

“Why players ‘cheat’ the concussion test”

by Matt Bowen

National Football Post

http://www.nationalfootballpost.com/Why-players-cheat-the-concussion-test.html

WWE Lawyer McDevitt: Company Meets ‘Most of’ Independent Contractor Requirements

2011-05-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/25/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

Senator Richard Blumenthal will hold a press conference today at the Connecticut Construction Industries Association in Wethersfield to promote federal legislation he is co-sponsoring to curb abuse by employers of the independent contrachttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftor classification. The state Labor Department has an ongoing investigation of alleged misclassification practices by WWE, whose co-founder and former chief executive, Linda McMahon, was defeated by Blumenthal in last year’s election.

In an article in the February issue of American Lawyer magazine, WWE attorney Jerry McDevitt was quoted as saying the company “covers medical bills for those hurt in the ring and fulfills ‘most of’ the tests used to define independent contractors.”

See http://muchnick.net/americanlawyer.pdf.

Irv Muchnick

Dr. Maroon’s ImPACT Testing Part of ‘Hocus Pocus Concussion Remedy’: Author-Blogger Matt Chaney

2011-05-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/23/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
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Matt Chaney’s piece today, “Critics, Evidence Debunk ‘Concussion Testing’ in Football,” suggests that I have been far too kind in my criticisms of the ImPACT system developed by National Football League and World Wrestling Entertainment doctor Joseph Maroon.

The article is at http://blog.4wallspublishing.com/2011/04/23/critics-evidence-debunk-concussion-testing-in-football.aspx. Some highlights:

* A peer-reviewed article in Current Sports Medicine Reports by Loyola University’s Dr. Christopher Randolph details ImPACT’s “glaring faults,” with unacceptable rates of false-positives and false-negatives.

* Chaney: “An overwhelming majority of journalists, politicians, educators and football experts ignore the accumulating evidence rebuking concussion testing as invalid and unreliable, choosing instead to endorse the quick-fix notion and push it for mandate by law.”

* Generally speaking, the neuropsych tests on the market “are unsuitable for clinical work with concussions,” according to Dr. Lester Mayers of Pace University.

* Dr. Bennet Omalu, who discovered chronic traumatic encephalopathy in athletes in contact sports, says, “ImPACT testing is not a diagnosis tool…. Using [computerized] testing in the acute phase of injury can actually make the symptoms worse.”

Chaney also takes a shot at Chris Nowinski’s Sports Legacy Institute and Boston University’s Dr. Robert Cantu; the blogger calls them “current purveyors” of the theory that modifying the behavior and tackling techniques of football players can fundamentally alter the public health risks of football.

Irv Muchnick

AP Story on Blumenthal Independent Contractor Initiative Cites WWE

2011-05-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/23/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

“Worker misclassification came up during Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaign when it was revealed World Wrestling Entertainment was being investigated by the state for possible violations. Linda McMahon, the Republican candidate, is the former CEO of WWE. McMahon at the time questioned whether the audit was politically motivated.”

Full report from the Associated Press is headlined “Blumenthal to discuss worker misclassification” at the Stamford Advocate: http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/news/article/Blumenthal-to-discuss-worker-misclassification-1349558.php#ixzz1KMZeXjhs

More on Senator Blumenthal’s ‘Payroll Fraud Prevention Act’

2011-05-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/22/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

The blog “Independent Contractor Compliance” has details on S. 770, the Payroll Fraud Prevention Act, co-sponsored by Connecticut’s Senator Richard Blumenthal and his Democratic colleagues Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Tom Harkin of Iowa:

http://independentcontractorcompliance.com/2011/04/13/senate-re-loads-on-independent-contractor-misclassification-new-bill-characterizes-misclassification-as-%E2%80%9Cpayroll-fraud%E2%80%9D/

Senator Blumenthal to Discuss Independent Contractor Misclassification

2011-05-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/22/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

MONDAY: SENATOR BLUMENTHAL TO HOST PRESS CONFERENCE IN WETHERSFIELD

(Hartford, CT) – On Monday, April 25, 2011, Senator Richard Blumenthal will join representatives of the construction industry and labor to discuss the serious impacts of the misclassification of employees by companies. Misclassification of workers occurs when companies designate employees as “contractors” or “part-time” employees in order to avoid providing proper wages, taxes, and benefits. This not only adversely affects targeted employees but also creates unfair competition for those contractors that abide by the law. Misclassification also adversely affects the budgets of state and local governments.

Blumenthal will address legislation he’s supporting in the Senate to curb the practice and create a level playing field for workers and businesses.

Below is a list of scheduled stops for Monday, April 25, 2011.

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2011

WETHERSFIELD

1:00 PM

Misclassification Press Conference

CT Construction Industries Association

912 Silas Deane Highway
Wethersfield, Connecticut

###

Contact: Lily Adams, (860) 729-4812

Lily_Adams@blumenthal.senate.gov

What Chris Benoit Wrote After the Funeral of Ray ‘Big Boss Man’ Traylor

2011-05-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/22/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

The following is a transcript of the entry in Chris Benoit’s journal on September 25, 2004. A copy of the document was given to me by Chris’s father, Michael Benoit. According to Mike, the writings left behind by Chris suggest that Ray “Big Boss Man” Traylor was one of his two best friends in wrestling (the other being Eddie Guerrero, who would die a year later).

22nd of September 2004 Ray Trailor passed away from a heart attack. I dont remember the first time I met Ray, but that seems to be with alot of my life. I dont know if its because Ive lost a lot of memories because of bumbing, or if I just dont like looking in the rear view mirrors too much. This one thing I hate about myself are these walls I put up around myself sometimes when I feel hurt and everything seems to be oblivious.

I loved Ray Trailor. he’s the only person that I know that Ive never seen in a bad mood, or not smile, or not make me smile, EVER. He always made time for me, whether to talk or to lend a helping hand. Ray Trailor was a real person. No guess work. I like to say Ray Trailor was a man’s man. He always used to say that about me, to me. I would spend days with him, and every half hour or so, though it seemed like every 5 minutes he would say “Chris Benoit, Have I told you I loved you yet.” And I used to laugh and he would laugh, but by the end of the day, whenever we were done doing whatever we were doing we would hug I and I would tell him I loved him. I used to laugh when I would hear that from him all day. I used to laugh thinking about it. Now I dont. But I know why he did it, and what he meant. Ray Trailor loved life and everything it offered.

It is Sept 25th today. I’m sitting on a plane on my way to Sioux City to wrestle. I just left Picket Mills Baptist Church where the service for Ray Trailor was held. I spent time with his wife Angie and two young daughter Lacey and Megan. I listened to some of his friends get up and tell stories that made me laugh while I was crying. The most emotional part was listening to his daughter Lacey talk. I wanted to take all her pain and sadness away. I pray that God gives them the strength and faith they need to get through this, Angie, Lacey, Megan.

As Nancy and I left the church and watched them put Ray’s coffin into the hearse. We both waved goodbye one last time and I thanked him in my heart and thanked God for putting him in my life and said I love you Ray.

Once Again and For the Record: TNA Is Worse Than WWE

2011-05-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/21/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

TNA is the No. 2 wrestling promotion. I don’t dwell on it because unlike World Wrestling Entertainment — or, excuse me, The New WWE — few people have even heard of TNA unless they’rehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif wrestling fans.

But I am reminded by fans, time and again, that TNA’s occupational health and safety standards are worse, far worse, than WWE’s. The website Cageside Seats is way ahead of everyone else in documenting this. The latest at Cageside, by writer S. Bruce, must be read to be believed:

“The Sad Story of Shannon ‘Daffney’ Spruill in TNA,” http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/4/21/2125160/the-sad-story-of-shannon-daffney-spruill.

It’s all there: concussions ... a litany of other grotesque and avoidable injuries imposed by the booking and demands of management ... reneging on coverage of talent hospital bills ... culminating in legal action by this “Knockout” against this promotion. (At TNA, women wrestlers are in every way, including medically, treated worse than male wrestlers.)

And that is one more important set of exhibits of why pro wrestling needs to be reformed. Such reform will have to come down from the top: a single company, WWE, the only mainstream player on the scene, generates well over 90 percent of the industry’s revenue. There is hope in WWE’s home state, Connecticut, that government will take action to end its independent contractor classification for its wrestlers, which is a scam. Thid would be a huge step toward making all wrestling promoters accountable for the gratuitous damage they inflict on their workers.

Irv Muchnick

‘Will Ritalin Become the Human Growth Hormone of Sports Concussion Testing?’ (full text from Beyond Chron)

2011-04-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/21/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

[originally published April 18 at Beyond Chron, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Will_Ritalin_Become_the_Human_Growth_Hormone_of_Sports_Concussion_Testing__9098.html]

by Irvin Muchnick

Here’s a story you may be hearing a lot more about in six months or six years: National Football Leaguers – followed by college, high school, and youth league football players – soon will be gaming corrupt Pittsburgh Steelers/World Wrestling Entertainment doctor Joseph Maroon’s “ImPACT” concussion management software system by taking the amphetamine-family drug Ritalin before being retested to assess their recovery from head injuries.

According to one concussion expert I’ve spoken with, this has already started happening at the NFL level. And of course it makes perfect sense. Ritalin is the medication prescribed most notoriously for “hyperactive” kids and sufferers from ADD (attention deficit disorder), with the goal of improving mental focus. Inevitably, professional athletes and their handlers would seize on Ritalin’s ability to mask the fact that they hadn’t entirely “cleared the cobwebs” from recent blows to the brain. (The phrase in quotes was used last week in an admirably candid interview by Fox TV commentator Terry Bradshaw, 62, discussing how concussions during his own Hall of Fame career have proceeded to impair his quality of life.)

With the assistance of a doc with a promiscuous prescription pad – if not simply a friendly pharmacist who doesn’t need to get too rigorous about the whole script thing – a player who “got his bell rung” can ease the process of identifying whether the diagnostician in front of him is holding up three fingers or four. Which, in more technologically sophisticated form, basically describes the ImPACT program that Maroon and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center colleagues have successfully pushed on the sports establishment – aided by authoritative-sounding articles in journals such as Neurosurgery.

Yet somehow this same class of esteemed researchers went 74 years between the 1928 discovery of dementia pugilistica (“punch drunk syndrome” in boxers) and that of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in athletes in other contact sports. It took a Nigerian-born forensic pathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu, to come across the latter almost inadvertently in autopsies of retired Steeler Mike Webster and others. Since Omalu wasn’t well-connected or sufficiently coached in how far he was supposed to go in his scientific conclusions, his follow-up articles on CTE got unofficially blacklisted from Neurosurgery until very recently.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maroon – pillar of the community, 70-year-old ironman competitor, supplement huckster – forges on. Two weeks ago he advised World Wrestling Entertainment star Edge that he should retire because of a damaged neck, eight years after WWE paid for the wrestler’s cervical fusion surgery. Last year non-star wrestler Charlie Haas had been advised by his own doctor to consider the same operation. But Maroon, according to Haas, then said naw, it was just a “stinger” (the broken neck’s analogy to a “rung bell”), and WWE quickly released Haas. These are all “independent contractors,” you see.

Though I’m hard on Maroon, I am somewhat sympathetic about the shortcomings of ImPACT. People who know a lot more about the subject than I do say it’s a decent tool. “I use it to scare players and their parents when they get complacent about a concussion,” a high school trainer explained to me. “ImPACT does establish a baseline of certain neurological functions, and it has value. But concussion management is still a subjective thing.”

The problem with ImPACT is that it was overhyped as a solution, at the expense of attention that should have been paid to more central considerations: prevention and unbiased, uncommercialized basic research.

The result, I fear, is that medical paraprofessionals like this trainer, and all of amateur sports in America, will find themselves in the same pickle with concussions that we already face with steroid abuse. (That’s assuming there is any more such a thing as an amateur sport – which anyone who last week viewed the PBS Frontline documentary on high school football might be led to question.) In recent decades, elaborate specialized cat-and-mouse protocols were set up to test athletes’ urine, but the most ambitious and resourceful among them simply moved on to human growth hormone, which doesn’t show up in their pee-pee.
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Ritalin potentially is the HGH of concussion thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifesting. I didn’t expect ever to find myself typing the words “I feel for Roger Goodell,” but the NFL commissioner has a point when he jawbones for HGH blood testing during collective bargaining with the players association. Now, in order to demonstrate responsibility for the health of its athletes and, more importantly, the overall gross national mental health, the league will have to do more than cite the very limited ImPACT system, along with the very limited and inaccurately targeted $20 million in research the league has spent – mostly to bolster the clinical-corporate yes men epitomized by Joseph Maroon.

Irvin Muchnick (http://muchnick.net; http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com; http://twitter.com/irvmuch) is author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death.

In FoxSports.com Story, Doc Confirms Report on Ritalin and Beating Concussion Tests

2011-04-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/21/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

Today’s column by Alex Marvez, FoxSports.comhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif’s lead National Football League writer, confirms our story earlier this week on how Dr. Joseph Maroon’s ImPACT concussion test can be manipulated by taking the drug Ritalin and by other means.

See “Players could try to beat concussion tests,” http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/NFL-players-could-try-to-beat-concussion-tests-042111. The Marvez piece draws from interviews he and former quarterback and NFL most valuable player Rich Gannon conducted on their Sirius radio show with brain imaging expert Dr. Daniel Amen and with Ronnie Barnes, the New York Giants’ vice president of medical services. The FoxSports link also embeds Marvez’s earlier video report on Dr. Amen’s work.

Marvez: “Baseline testing is the crux of the NFL’s new ‘go/no-go’ concussion policy. Any player who suffers a head injury must now pass a six- to eight-minute test that measures such elements as cognitive thinking, memory, concentration and balance. Those results are then compared to how the player scored in the preseason to determine clearance for an in-game return.” But Amen told him that a number of his player patients have said “they purposely do bad on the testing to start so if they get a concussion it doesn’t affect them.”

Amen also verifies that using Ritalin is another potential form of cheating. “Ritalin will work,” Amen said. “It helps boost activity to the front part of the brain. In my mind, it’s not the first thing I would do to rehabilitate a concussion but it would be on the list of things to do.” The doctor underscored that this practice is “not approved or a smart thing to do.”

Marvez cites my Monday article about this issue for Beyond Chron, which will be reposted in full on this blog shortly.

As I have been saying for months, the investigations of football helmet safety claims by Congress and federal regulatory agencies are incomplete and a disservice to public health unless they drill deeper into the work of the concussion researchers who have profited from academic publications promoting commercial products that they own or endorse. Dr. Maroon, a Pittsburgh Steelers neurologist, an NFL spokesman on traumatic brain injuries, and the medical director of World Wrestling Entertainment, co-authored the Neurosurgery article underpinning the hype of the Riddell company’s “Revolution” helmet. Maroon also developed and co-owns the easy-to-beat ImPACT concussion testing system, endorses at least one supplement with exaggerated claims, and endorses and owns, at minimum, an indirect equity interest in another supplement product line.

Player health and safety is at the heart of the currently stalled NFL labor talks. The time is now for Senators Tom Udall and Richard Blumenthal, among others, to direct the public to this important information.

Irv Muchnick

Sad (And Getting Sadder) Story of Olympic Gold Medalist and Pro Wrestling Train Wreck Kurt Angle

2011-04-24T08:19:00.001-07:00

[posted 4/20/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

From David Bixenspan of Cageside Seats:

http://www.cagesideseats.com/2011/4/20/2123342/kurt-angle-sentenced-for-reckless-driving-to-be-evaluated-for

Ritalin for the Once-Concussed ... and the Many-Times-Concussed

2011-04-24T08:16:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/20/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

Two days ago this blog broke the story of how concussed athletes use Ritalin to beat National Football League/World Wrestling Entertainment doctor Joseph Maroon’s patented ImPACT neurocognitive testing system. I’ll have the full text of that piece up here as soon as it rotates off the front page at Beyond Chron.

One of the seminal national magazine articles on chronic traumatic encephalopathy – “Game Brain” by Jeanne Marie Laskas in the October 2009 issue of GQ – suggests that the Ritalin trail also extends to the post-career agony of brain-damaged football players.

“Game Brain” tells the story of the late Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer Mike Webster’s descent into mental illness and homelessness, and the postmortem discovery of his CTE by Dr. Bennet Omalu. In 1997, Laskas writes, Webster met Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer who is now on the boardhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif of directors of West Virginia University’s Brain Injury Research Institute:

“Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. He really couldn’t remember whom he’d seen or when. He couldn’t remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.”

The full text of the article is viewable at http://muchnick.net/gq.pdf. It was an exhibit of WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt’s most recent saber-rattling letter to me last December (see http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/new-threats-from-wwe-lawyer-jerry-mcdevitt/).

Irv Muchnick

Weicker-WWE Split Was Reported April 7 by Don Michak of Manchester Journal Inquirer

2011-04-24T08:14:00.000-07:00

[posted 4/19/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]

Following up on my previous item, the story of Lowell Weicker’s departure from the WWE board was actually broken on April 7 by the Manchester Journal Inquirer, in a piece by reporter Don Michak scrutinizing the company’s recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Journal Inquirer work, in general, gets undervalued in the blogosphere because most of the newspaper’s content is behind a paywall online.

Michak noted that Weicker, a WWE director since the company went public in 1999, is not standing for reelection at the April 29 annual stockholders’ meeting.

Weicker collected an annual retainer from the company, plus fees for attending board meetings and chairing the compensation committee. Last year Weicker received an $80,000 retainer, a $12,000 fee for the compensation committee, and either $1,500 or $500 for each board meeting (depending on whether he attended it in person or joined it by conference call). As of March 4, Weicker and his wife together held 3,282 shares of WWE’s unrestricted Class A common stock.

Irv Muchnick