[posted 3/8/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
Having lambasted Dr. Joseph Maroon for his sundry commercial associations, I cannot fail to explore a controversy last week sparked by articles in the Boston business press reporting that Dr. Robert Cantu had some kind of advisory status with the innovative Xenith helmet company.
Cantu of Boston University, the physician who diagnosed Chris Nowinski’s concussions prior to the launch of his Sports Legacy Institute, is one of the leading lights in chronic traumatic encephalopathy research. He was quoted widely in the coverage of the latest Boston U./SLI finding of CTE in a deceased athlete: hockey player Bob Probert. In coming days I’ll try to add a little to the public conversation about the Probert case.
Meanwhile, fasten your chin straps for a complicated tale of hype in the world of venture capital.
I am not alleging here the kind of blatant corruption suggested by the deep-seated symbiosis of Maroon with the Pittsburgh Steelers, the National Football League, World Wrestling Entertainment, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the imPACT testing program, the unregulated supplements Vindure and Sports Brain Guard, and the Riddell “Revolution” helmet. That particular custodian of the Hippocratic Oath has turned himself into a walking infomercial.
On the other hand, do Cantu and Xenith themselves pass the “Caesar’s wife” test of discouraging even the appearance of impropriety? You decide.
Xenith, LLC is a Lowell, Massachusetts-based company started by Vincent Ferrara, who played quarterback at Harvard in the 1990s and, indeed, lost most or all of one season to a concussion. (He happened to be four years ahead of Nowinski at Harvard.) Ferrara then got his M.D. and, upon finding himself most interested in the business side of health care, his MBA at Columbia.
I am not an expert and I have no opinion on the benefits of Xenith’s helmet model. If it has the potential to prevent injuries and save lives, then great. In a phone conversation with me last Thursday, Vin Ferrara said all the right things about the primacy of education – how no piece of head hardware can substitute for safer playing technique and a smarter athletic mindset.
In a 2007 New York Times story on Ferrara’s company – written by concussion beat writer Alan Schwarz – Dr. Cantu said a good bit more.
Schwarz’s article asserted that the Ferrara helmet’s 18 thermoplastic shock absorbers filled with air “can accept a wide range of forces and still moderate the sudden jarring of the head that causes concussion.” In addition, unlike traditional foam helmet lining, the disks do not degrade after hundreds of impacts, according to laboratory tests.
Cantu told The Times this was “the greatest advance in helmet design in at least 30 years.” He was identified as an informal adviser during the helmet’s development with “no financial relationship with the product.”
In September 2010, Xenith issued a press release announcing it had raised $10.5 million in equity financing. The release cited the marketing inroads of the company’s X1 football helmet. Dr. Cantu was nowhere mentioned. (The document can be viewed at http://muchnick.net/xenithpr.pdf.)
However, until very recently – that is, some time past the September round of PR – Cantu was still on the Xenith website (http://xenith.com). Ferrara told me that Cantu had asked for the removal of the references to him several months ago.
By law, Xenith was required to submit paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission about its $10 million financing threshold; the filing became public on February 25. Three days later – a week ago Monday – a spate of articles about Xenith appeared in online versions of Boston business magazines. Citybizlist.com, for example, wrote:
Xenith helmets have been recorded to reduce the risk of concussion by as much as 60%, and players have reported a 70% reduction in the incidence of headaches. Xenith advisor Dr. Robert Cantu, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University School of Medicine and one of the nation’s leading experts in concussion management, called it “the greatest advance in helmet design in at least 30 years.”
The Boston Business Journal and its offshoots also erroneously reported (and subsequently retracted) NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon’s participation in the Xenith investment group.
Ferrara shared with me his email to the leadership of the National Operating Committee on Standards of Athletic Equipment, in which he said he had “absolutely no idea why anything came out today, and Xenith had no involvement in this whatsoever…. [Xenith’s September press release] in no way mentions concussions, concussion reduction, the NFL, Warren Moon, Bob Cantu, or anything else that is being printed in these recent posts. I have received numerous calls, emails, etc about these releases, and I am truly baffled as to how this transpired. I have already emailed Jeff Pash [NFL attorney] to inform him of this as well.”
I also spoke last Thursday with Cantu, who reinforced that he has never been a paid advisor for Xenith. “Have I talked with people from that company about their products? Yes. I do that with a lot of companies,” Cantu said. “But I have not received money from any of them.”
I’m not sure what to make of all this. In my experience, business journalists don’t ordinarily have the enterprise to research and publish deep backgrounders with short turnarounds – let alone inaccurate ones – every time a company makes a routine SEC filing.
I also think that, while the root 2007 Times article carefully disclaimed Cantu’s equity interest in Xenith, the story as a whole smells of social networking in the old-fashioned sense – the kind involving Ivy League elites well practiced in planting high-toned hype in the Newspaper of Record. Would a startup elsewhere located and with a worse-connected CEO have been able to get this kind of ink?
It was wrong for Riddell Helmets, aided by NFL-funded research conducted by Joseph Maroon, to be making the kinds of statistical safety claims now under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
It was also wrong for Robert Cantu and Xenith to have gotten mixed up in their own brand of fledgling and unverifiable braggadocio.
As the public witnesses a statistically significant population of athletes dying young, often by their own hands, leading doctors cautiously emphasize how much is yet to be understood about the scope and magnitude of traumatic brain injury in contact sports. I just wish the same doctors would be correspondingly modest about the commercial products designed to mitigate it.
Tomorrow: My review of the new article for Neurosurgery by Dr. Bennet Omalu, the “conscience of CTE research.”
Irv Muchnick
Saturday, March 12, 2011
‘Never Mind the Lockout – Make NFL Pay Its Fair Share of the National Sports Concussion Tab’ … at Beyond Chron
File the National Football League labor negotiations under the heading “game within the game.” My best guess is that since veteran players, in particular, hate offseason minicamps and summer training camp anyway, this sucker remains months away from resolution. Don’t be surprised if the first few games of the 2011 season have to be scrubbed before the owners have made their point; and you’d need more than a feather to knock me over if the immediate upshot were a loaded-up January-February 2012 playoff schedule to prepare the television audience for the new tradition of an 18-game regular season starting the following fall.
It’s an understatement to say that the fate of the next edition of the NFL market-a-thon shouldn’t top our list of collective worries. Last week I saw this astute post on Twitter: “Maybe a country so obsessed with the NFL combine could use a year off from pro football.” I expressed a similar sentiment in this space six months ago (“Why a 2011 NFL Strike or Lockout Would Be the Best Thing for America,” Beyond Chron, Sept. 20, 2010) – except that I wasn’t commenting on priorities willy-nilly. I was, and I still am, talking about the national sports concussion crisis, reflection on which would be aided by an enforced shutdown over the failure of owners and players to peacefully divvy up their $9 billion annual pie.
CONTINUED AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Never_Mind_the_Lockout_Make_NFL_Pay_Its_Fair_Share_of_the_National_Sports_Concussion_Tab_8961.html
It’s an understatement to say that the fate of the next edition of the NFL market-a-thon shouldn’t top our list of collective worries. Last week I saw this astute post on Twitter: “Maybe a country so obsessed with the NFL combine could use a year off from pro football.” I expressed a similar sentiment in this space six months ago (“Why a 2011 NFL Strike or Lockout Would Be the Best Thing for America,” Beyond Chron, Sept. 20, 2010) – except that I wasn’t commenting on priorities willy-nilly. I was, and I still am, talking about the national sports concussion crisis, reflection on which would be aided by an enforced shutdown over the failure of owners and players to peacefully divvy up their $9 billion annual pie.
CONTINUED AT BEYOND CHRON, THE SAN FRANCISCO ONLINE NEWSPAPER:
http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Never_Mind_the_Lockout_Make_NFL_Pay_Its_Fair_Share_of_the_National_Sports_Concussion_Tab_8961.html
Friday, March 11, 2011
‘Muchnick on Duerson, CTE Consciousness, And What It Means For Wrestling’ (full text from WrestlingObserver.com)
[originally published on March 2 at http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/19670/]
Irv Muchnick on football’s Dave Duerson, CTE consciousness, and what it means for wrestling
The other day I got an email from a friend who was following my coverage of the suicide of former National Football League player Dave Duerson. While the mainstream media proceed with predictable tearjerkers, I’ve been talking about this story’s elephant in the closet: the outrage that Duerson, who seems to be yet another case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), was serving on a joint union-management panel making wrongheaded rulings on mental disability claims applications of other retired players and their families.
My friend didn’t get into all that. She simply wanted to know this: “So – is football your next big thing?”
My answer is that the CTE trail, wherever it leads, is more of the same big thing. The focus on pro football, rather than pro wrestling, is both good and bad. Good, because the former is at least nine times larger and more influential than the latter, and therefore an easier public-education sell.
But also potentially bad for two reasons. Bad because the NFL is so financially powerful and so engrained in our popular culture that defenders of the indefensible – a paradigm of slow and systematic death trickling down to thousands of youth sports programs across the country – could carry the day with a combination of inane libertarian arguments and profitable denial.
And bad because all this could allow World Wrestling Entertainment, itself a billion-dollar publicly traded company, to lurk back underneath the radar while its almost criminally negligent occupational health and safety lapses – starkly exposed during Linda McMahon’s failed 2010 Connecticut Senate run – go unaddressed.
Understand that my position here has nothing to do with which sport is “legit” and which “worked.” Wrestling is “worse” than football in one main respect: the spectacle is choreographed, and the promotion therefore has more control over what the performers do to others and themselves in the name of glory and riches. In addition, the doctors there who enable bad practices (like WWE medical director Joseph Maroon, also a Pittsburgh Steelers and NFL consultant who is now caught up in a federal investigation of the exaggerated safety claims of Riddell helmets, an official league supplier) are arguably more contemptible, though they would undoubtedly contend that their very presence does more good than harm.
As with steroid and painkiller abuse, working conditions, the flow and accounting of revenues, and other related issues, the intersection of football and wrestling leads to another thought, about the concept of a wrestlers’ talent union. Some wrestlers like to speak out on behalf of one, but always only after their voices are no longer powerful enough to make a difference. Bret Hart is the classic recent example.
But anyone examining the Dave Duerson scenario has to admit that a union itself might not be the answer anyway. Right now the National Football League Players Association is at an impasse with the league in collective bargaining over how to divide the industry’s $9 billion in annual revenues. Player safety is an afterthought. The Players Association leadership consistently, and perhaps accurately, concludes that the vast majority of its members want it that way. How else to explain the disgraceful foot-dragging on outreach to and appropriate compensation for the hundreds of mentally and financially disabled NFL alumni across the country – almost all of them ticking CTE time bombs waiting to happen?
Duerson put a bullet through his heart, and the treacly commentary is that this was a selfless gift to future CTE awareness. Well, maybe, but reining in the excesses of bread-and-circuses American sports will have no single-bullet solution. In the case of wrestling, greater government oversight is part of the answer. I say so not because wrestling is gross, or wrestlers are “role models,” or adult men and women aren’t entitled to make their own career choices (or, in the death-defying euphemism, “pursue their dreams”). It is because the rest of us have an interest in not picking up the tab for a gratuitous industrial body count, and in balancing our thirst for entertainment with deterrence against warped public-health values.
Today is, I believe, the first day in office for Glenn Marshall, Connecticut’s new commissioner of labor. Wrestling fans everywhere should look forward eagerly to the results of the Labor Department’s audit of WWE’s alleged abuse of independent contractor classification for its wrestlers. This is one important step in a long process of saving lives, families, and unconscionable societal costs.
Irvin Muchnick (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.
Irv Muchnick on football’s Dave Duerson, CTE consciousness, and what it means for wrestling
The other day I got an email from a friend who was following my coverage of the suicide of former National Football League player Dave Duerson. While the mainstream media proceed with predictable tearjerkers, I’ve been talking about this story’s elephant in the closet: the outrage that Duerson, who seems to be yet another case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), was serving on a joint union-management panel making wrongheaded rulings on mental disability claims applications of other retired players and their families.
My friend didn’t get into all that. She simply wanted to know this: “So – is football your next big thing?”
My answer is that the CTE trail, wherever it leads, is more of the same big thing. The focus on pro football, rather than pro wrestling, is both good and bad. Good, because the former is at least nine times larger and more influential than the latter, and therefore an easier public-education sell.
But also potentially bad for two reasons. Bad because the NFL is so financially powerful and so engrained in our popular culture that defenders of the indefensible – a paradigm of slow and systematic death trickling down to thousands of youth sports programs across the country – could carry the day with a combination of inane libertarian arguments and profitable denial.
And bad because all this could allow World Wrestling Entertainment, itself a billion-dollar publicly traded company, to lurk back underneath the radar while its almost criminally negligent occupational health and safety lapses – starkly exposed during Linda McMahon’s failed 2010 Connecticut Senate run – go unaddressed.
Understand that my position here has nothing to do with which sport is “legit” and which “worked.” Wrestling is “worse” than football in one main respect: the spectacle is choreographed, and the promotion therefore has more control over what the performers do to others and themselves in the name of glory and riches. In addition, the doctors there who enable bad practices (like WWE medical director Joseph Maroon, also a Pittsburgh Steelers and NFL consultant who is now caught up in a federal investigation of the exaggerated safety claims of Riddell helmets, an official league supplier) are arguably more contemptible, though they would undoubtedly contend that their very presence does more good than harm.
As with steroid and painkiller abuse, working conditions, the flow and accounting of revenues, and other related issues, the intersection of football and wrestling leads to another thought, about the concept of a wrestlers’ talent union. Some wrestlers like to speak out on behalf of one, but always only after their voices are no longer powerful enough to make a difference. Bret Hart is the classic recent example.
But anyone examining the Dave Duerson scenario has to admit that a union itself might not be the answer anyway. Right now the National Football League Players Association is at an impasse with the league in collective bargaining over how to divide the industry’s $9 billion in annual revenues. Player safety is an afterthought. The Players Association leadership consistently, and perhaps accurately, concludes that the vast majority of its members want it that way. How else to explain the disgraceful foot-dragging on outreach to and appropriate compensation for the hundreds of mentally and financially disabled NFL alumni across the country – almost all of them ticking CTE time bombs waiting to happen?
Duerson put a bullet through his heart, and the treacly commentary is that this was a selfless gift to future CTE awareness. Well, maybe, but reining in the excesses of bread-and-circuses American sports will have no single-bullet solution. In the case of wrestling, greater government oversight is part of the answer. I say so not because wrestling is gross, or wrestlers are “role models,” or adult men and women aren’t entitled to make their own career choices (or, in the death-defying euphemism, “pursue their dreams”). It is because the rest of us have an interest in not picking up the tab for a gratuitous industrial body count, and in balancing our thirst for entertainment with deterrence against warped public-health values.
Today is, I believe, the first day in office for Glenn Marshall, Connecticut’s new commissioner of labor. Wrestling fans everywhere should look forward eagerly to the results of the Labor Department’s audit of WWE’s alleged abuse of independent contractor classification for its wrestlers. This is one important step in a long process of saving lives, families, and unconscionable societal costs.
Irvin Muchnick (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.
‘Honoring Dave Duerson: Three Things the NFL, Fans, And Sponsors Must Do’ (full text)
[originally published on February 28 at Beyond Chron, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Honoring_Dave_Duerson_Three_Things_the_NFL_Fans_And_Sponsors_Must_Do_8939.html]
by Irvin Muchnick
The suicide of Dave Duerson, a long-time National Football League Players Association stalwart, came during a collective bargaining impasse between the union and the owners. The sad truth revealed by the maudlin first round of reaction to the news that Duerson probably had severe brain damage from football concussions – something postmortem study will have to confirm – is that these contract negotiations do not, in the familiar idiom, simply pit greedy billionaires against greedy millionaires. Rather, they pit billionaires who know what they’re doing against millionaires who don’t have a clue.
That’s the only logical conclusion I can draw from the fact that Duerson, while losing his Goliath post-NFL career food distribution business, plunging into personal bankruptcy, seeing his house seized by a bank, and getting arrested for beating his wife – all among the telltale signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – was being appointed by the Players Association as one of the trustees of a league fund, jointly administered by management and union, to compensate retired players with disability claims. These included since 2007, under the “88 Plan,” claims for reimbursement of acute care expenses for players with dementia.
Who needed a fox guarding the chicken coop when there was a hypermacho-enabling union more focused on the fair division of the NFL’s $9 billion revenue pie than on whether its members worked under conditions that would give them a reasonable expectation of living and functioning past age 50?
No doubt Duerson had the best of intentions for his fellow athletes when he insisted, both on the NFL Player Care panel and in Senate Commerce Committee testimony, that ex-Minnesota Viking lineman Brent Boyd’s mental illness in his forties wasn’t proven to be football-related. Duerson pointed out that his own father had Alzheimer’s disease, in his late seventies or eighties, yet had never played football!
But sincere or not, we now also know more than just that Duerson’s argument was nuts. He was, too. Cognitively impaired. Of diminished capacity. Lacking responsible judgment. All from the very phenomenon on which he was himself instrumental in making crucial administrative-legal rulings – a role for which, in retrospect, he was clearly incompetent.
That’s why I say enough with the media’s Duerson pity party. If his friends and loved ones take comfort that his donated brain will contribute to public awareness of CTE, then by all means give them their soft landing.
But the powers-that-be, in both the NFL and the NFLPA? Not so fast. Duerson was no hero, any more than World Wrestling Entertainment star Chris Benoit, who murdered his family and killed himself, and has been shown to have had CTE, was a hero. There were already dozens of confirmed cases of CTE, and undoubtedly hundreds of other unreported or ill-reported cases, by the time Duerson put a gun to his chest.
If we’re really intent on honoring Dave Duerson, then let’s put some substance on his legacy. I have a three-point plan. We can call it the Double D Three-Point Stance.
REOPEN ALL REJECTED DISABILITY CLAIMS BY RETIRED PLAYERS. The NFL’s Brian McCarthy told me that 11 of 170 ex-players’ claims submitted so far under the 88 Plan were rejected. (Eight applications are pending.) I believe Duerson participated in all of the negative votes of the six-person panel. I’m sure that, even as I write this, lawyers for these players’ families are preparing new litigation arguing that the evidence of Duerson’s incompetence should invalidate the disability plan decisions. Instead of fighting a legal war of attrition over the inevitable, NFL Player Care should concede the morally obvious and order immediate “replay review” of the rejected 11.
DOUBLE 88 PLAN OUTREACH AND BENEFITS. The plan – named for Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey, who wore uniform No. 88 – grants up to $88,000 a year in reimbursement for the medical expenses of dementia victims. At Duerson’s funeral Saturday in Chicago, his son Brock said the family would be setting up a foundation to aid players with mental illness. But hey, let’s cut out the middle man here. To date, NFL Player Care has distributed around $7 million under the 88 Plan. In their contract talks, let the NFL and the NFLPA take off the table enough crumbs from their $9 billion food fight to double the size of the disability fund endowment and benefits.
GIVE FANS AND SPONSORS OWNERSHIP OF PLAYER CARE. This is the hardest one for me to talk about in specifics at this point. But nothing will get the league and the players’ union to take meaningful action until fans pull their heads out of their hero-worshipping butts and start taking responsibility for the human and societal costs of their entertainment. One possible idea: There is much promising research on the efficacy of Omega-3 supplements in reversing or at least slowing brain damage. Fan groups could raise money for distributing free supplies to NFL alumni – and also pressure beer companies, which tag “drink responsibly” bromides onto their wall-to-wall football telecast commercials, to pitch in, too.
While I was filing this piece with Beyond Chron on Sunday night, obsessed fans were already turning the page on Duerson and refocusing on the disgusting meat rack that is the NFL pre-draft combine coverage. (Where is Jesse Jackson when you really need him for an observation on how the big-time sports system is just like an antebellum plantation?)
As millions pondered Cam Newton’s flexing pecs and stopwatch reading in the 40-yard dash, a report out of Canada said that former NFL and Canadian Football League defensive back Ricky Bell died ten days ago at age 36. Bell’s girlfriend and mother in South Carolina declined to comment on the cause of death.
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.
by Irvin Muchnick
The suicide of Dave Duerson, a long-time National Football League Players Association stalwart, came during a collective bargaining impasse between the union and the owners. The sad truth revealed by the maudlin first round of reaction to the news that Duerson probably had severe brain damage from football concussions – something postmortem study will have to confirm – is that these contract negotiations do not, in the familiar idiom, simply pit greedy billionaires against greedy millionaires. Rather, they pit billionaires who know what they’re doing against millionaires who don’t have a clue.
That’s the only logical conclusion I can draw from the fact that Duerson, while losing his Goliath post-NFL career food distribution business, plunging into personal bankruptcy, seeing his house seized by a bank, and getting arrested for beating his wife – all among the telltale signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – was being appointed by the Players Association as one of the trustees of a league fund, jointly administered by management and union, to compensate retired players with disability claims. These included since 2007, under the “88 Plan,” claims for reimbursement of acute care expenses for players with dementia.
Who needed a fox guarding the chicken coop when there was a hypermacho-enabling union more focused on the fair division of the NFL’s $9 billion revenue pie than on whether its members worked under conditions that would give them a reasonable expectation of living and functioning past age 50?
No doubt Duerson had the best of intentions for his fellow athletes when he insisted, both on the NFL Player Care panel and in Senate Commerce Committee testimony, that ex-Minnesota Viking lineman Brent Boyd’s mental illness in his forties wasn’t proven to be football-related. Duerson pointed out that his own father had Alzheimer’s disease, in his late seventies or eighties, yet had never played football!
But sincere or not, we now also know more than just that Duerson’s argument was nuts. He was, too. Cognitively impaired. Of diminished capacity. Lacking responsible judgment. All from the very phenomenon on which he was himself instrumental in making crucial administrative-legal rulings – a role for which, in retrospect, he was clearly incompetent.
That’s why I say enough with the media’s Duerson pity party. If his friends and loved ones take comfort that his donated brain will contribute to public awareness of CTE, then by all means give them their soft landing.
But the powers-that-be, in both the NFL and the NFLPA? Not so fast. Duerson was no hero, any more than World Wrestling Entertainment star Chris Benoit, who murdered his family and killed himself, and has been shown to have had CTE, was a hero. There were already dozens of confirmed cases of CTE, and undoubtedly hundreds of other unreported or ill-reported cases, by the time Duerson put a gun to his chest.
If we’re really intent on honoring Dave Duerson, then let’s put some substance on his legacy. I have a three-point plan. We can call it the Double D Three-Point Stance.
REOPEN ALL REJECTED DISABILITY CLAIMS BY RETIRED PLAYERS. The NFL’s Brian McCarthy told me that 11 of 170 ex-players’ claims submitted so far under the 88 Plan were rejected. (Eight applications are pending.) I believe Duerson participated in all of the negative votes of the six-person panel. I’m sure that, even as I write this, lawyers for these players’ families are preparing new litigation arguing that the evidence of Duerson’s incompetence should invalidate the disability plan decisions. Instead of fighting a legal war of attrition over the inevitable, NFL Player Care should concede the morally obvious and order immediate “replay review” of the rejected 11.
DOUBLE 88 PLAN OUTREACH AND BENEFITS. The plan – named for Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey, who wore uniform No. 88 – grants up to $88,000 a year in reimbursement for the medical expenses of dementia victims. At Duerson’s funeral Saturday in Chicago, his son Brock said the family would be setting up a foundation to aid players with mental illness. But hey, let’s cut out the middle man here. To date, NFL Player Care has distributed around $7 million under the 88 Plan. In their contract talks, let the NFL and the NFLPA take off the table enough crumbs from their $9 billion food fight to double the size of the disability fund endowment and benefits.
GIVE FANS AND SPONSORS OWNERSHIP OF PLAYER CARE. This is the hardest one for me to talk about in specifics at this point. But nothing will get the league and the players’ union to take meaningful action until fans pull their heads out of their hero-worshipping butts and start taking responsibility for the human and societal costs of their entertainment. One possible idea: There is much promising research on the efficacy of Omega-3 supplements in reversing or at least slowing brain damage. Fan groups could raise money for distributing free supplies to NFL alumni – and also pressure beer companies, which tag “drink responsibly” bromides onto their wall-to-wall football telecast commercials, to pitch in, too.
While I was filing this piece with Beyond Chron on Sunday night, obsessed fans were already turning the page on Duerson and refocusing on the disgusting meat rack that is the NFL pre-draft combine coverage. (Where is Jesse Jackson when you really need him for an observation on how the big-time sports system is just like an antebellum plantation?)
As millions pondered Cam Newton’s flexing pecs and stopwatch reading in the 40-yard dash, a report out of Canada said that former NFL and Canadian Football League defensive back Ricky Bell died ten days ago at age 36. Bell’s girlfriend and mother in South Carolina declined to comment on the cause of death.
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.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
10 Most-Read Posts at This Blog in February
1.
Dave Duerson NFL Suicide Story You’ll Read Nowhere Else — In Five Parts
(26 February)
**********
2.
Muchnick Book Bonus: ‘In Bed With the WWF – Sex and Scandal in Pro Wrestling’
(May 15, 2010)
**********
3.
WWE Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels Should Speak Up on What Happened to Lance Cade
(14 February)
**********
4.
Linda McMahon’s Role in the WWE Pedophile Scandal Still Hangs, Unpublished, in the Politicos’ Air
(July 14, 2010)
**********
5.
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Bennet Omalu, Barred From Publishing Chris Benoit Brain Findings in Neurosurgery, Has a New Article Scheduled for the Journal’s March 2011 Issue
(8 February)
*********
6.
New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt
December 17, 2010
**********
7.
Super Bowl Concussion Hype Week, Part 2: What’s the Deal with the NFL and the Journal Neurosurgery?
2 February
**********
8.
Pittsburgh Steelers’ Physician Joseph Maroon Key Figure in Sports Concussion Probe
1 February
*********
9.
‘Honoring Dave Duerson: Three Things the NFL, Fans, And Sponsors Must Do’ … today at Beyond Chron
28 February
**********
10.
Muchnick vs. WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt — February’s American Lawyer Magazine
16 February
Dave Duerson NFL Suicide Story You’ll Read Nowhere Else — In Five Parts
(26 February)
**********
2.
Muchnick Book Bonus: ‘In Bed With the WWF – Sex and Scandal in Pro Wrestling’
(May 15, 2010)
**********
3.
WWE Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels Should Speak Up on What Happened to Lance Cade
(14 February)
**********
4.
Linda McMahon’s Role in the WWE Pedophile Scandal Still Hangs, Unpublished, in the Politicos’ Air
(July 14, 2010)
**********
5.
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Bennet Omalu, Barred From Publishing Chris Benoit Brain Findings in Neurosurgery, Has a New Article Scheduled for the Journal’s March 2011 Issue
(8 February)
*********
6.
New Threats From WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt
December 17, 2010
**********
7.
Super Bowl Concussion Hype Week, Part 2: What’s the Deal with the NFL and the Journal Neurosurgery?
2 February
**********
8.
Pittsburgh Steelers’ Physician Joseph Maroon Key Figure in Sports Concussion Probe
1 February
*********
9.
‘Honoring Dave Duerson: Three Things the NFL, Fans, And Sponsors Must Do’ … today at Beyond Chron
28 February
**********
10.
Muchnick vs. WWE Lawyer Jerry McDevitt — February’s American Lawyer Magazine
16 February
Monday, March 7, 2011
‘Muchnick on Duerson, CTE Consciousness, And What It Means For Wrestling’ ... at WrestlingObserver.com
[posted 3/2/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
Irv Muchnick on football’s Dave Duerson, CTE consciousness, and what it means for wrestling
http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/19670/
Irv Muchnick on football’s Dave Duerson, CTE consciousness, and what it means for wrestling
http://www.f4wonline.com/content/view/19670/
How Many Other Players’ Applications Did Dave Duerson Reject on the NFL Disability Claims Committee?
[posted 3/2/11 to http://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com]
I’ve reported that the NFL Player Care panel reviewing claims under the “88 Plan,” covering medical costs associated with dementia, has rejected 11 of the 170 applications received since the plan’s inception in 2007.
What we don’t yet know is how many other disability claims were turned down while the late Dave Duerson served as one of the six joint management-union trustees on that committee.
Last week NFL communications head Brian McCarthy gave me the 88 Plan stats. When I asked for the other Duerson data, McCarthy said he didn’t know Duerson’s precise tenure (I believe it started around 2006), and suggested I contact the NFL Players Association, which appointed him.
But the union’s spokesman, Carl Francis, has not responded to emails sent either before or after my exchange with McCarthy.
Remember why this matters: Duerson, in hindsight, was not competent and the disability claims deliberations in which he participated were tainted. Many of the negative claims decisions were spectacularly controversial. All must be reconsidered.
Irv Muchnick
I’ve reported that the NFL Player Care panel reviewing claims under the “88 Plan,” covering medical costs associated with dementia, has rejected 11 of the 170 applications received since the plan’s inception in 2007.
What we don’t yet know is how many other disability claims were turned down while the late Dave Duerson served as one of the six joint management-union trustees on that committee.
Last week NFL communications head Brian McCarthy gave me the 88 Plan stats. When I asked for the other Duerson data, McCarthy said he didn’t know Duerson’s precise tenure (I believe it started around 2006), and suggested I contact the NFL Players Association, which appointed him.
But the union’s spokesman, Carl Francis, has not responded to emails sent either before or after my exchange with McCarthy.
Remember why this matters: Duerson, in hindsight, was not competent and the disability claims deliberations in which he participated were tainted. Many of the negative claims decisions were spectacularly controversial. All must be reconsidered.
Irv Muchnick
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