But this has been going on and on, similar findings, institution after institution. I don't hear the NFL spokesmen indicating any change in their long-held and stated opinions that multiple brain injuries while playing football don't lead to any problems later in life. We're not just talking about NFL players. The congressional hearings are possibly looking into the effects of head trauma on college and high school players, too. Shockingly, we have found this even at the high school level.
Bennet Omalu has examined the brains of three high school players who died as a result of injuries they sustained from playing football. In the brain of one of the players, he found incipient CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE in a high school football player—the same sort of brain damage that led to the downfall of Mike Webster, Terry Long, Andre Waters, and so many others? In a high school player. The greater good, meaning all the young men and women who desire to participate in football and other contact sports, the ones who aspire at a young age to emulate the NFL and their players and are fueled by their advertising and the incessant bombardment of our society.
What is their responsibility to the greater good? I don't know. They're going to have to answer that.
Do you agree that it's time for Congress to step in? There is some historical precedent for this. Back in , President Roosevelt was practically going to ban football when eighteen young men died and were injured seriously that year. And that's how the NCAA was formed. Here we are, years later, and it's come full circle. I think we have to make changes again. It has to be pretty significant changes. I really believe the velocity factor, the speed of the game, is what's doing it.
It's not necessarily the hit; it's your head movement. It's what's going on inside the cranium with the brain floating and moving and rotating. He thought they could use his research to try and fix the problem. It has dragged me into worldly affairs I do not want to be associated with. Human meanness, wickedness, and selfishness. People trying to cover up, to control how information is released.
I started this not knowing I was walking into a minefield. That is my only regret. In tone their letter to the editor struggled to remain calm, but everyone could read the subtext: We own this field. We are not going to bow to some no-name Nigerian with some bullshit theory. The attack against Omalu was that he had misinterpreted his own neuropathological findings. In his calmer moments, Omalu considered the fact that neither Casson, Pellman, nor Viano were neuropathologists.
He wondered, How can doctors who are not neuropathologists interpret neuropathological findings better than neuropathologists? But mostly Omalu did not remain calm. In fact, he sweated profusely when he heard that the NFL had written demanding a retraction.
It took a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker Red before he could even summon the courage to read their letter, after which he tore it up in disgust. Omalu began to question the integrity of the MTBI committee. It was one thing to not even put a neuropathologist on the committee, quite another to have the committee headed by Same morgue. Same slab. Same story. Memory loss.
Crazy behavior. In and out of psych wards. He was bankrupt, living destitute and alone. He tried rat poison. He tried other cocktails. Nothing worked until finally he got it right.
So Omalu wrote another paper. The news of CTE, of retired athletes possibly suffering debilitating brain damage, was now hitting the mainstream press. The NFL responded with denial and attack against the young pathologist in Pittsburgh, who surely had no idea what he was talking about. Omalu did not like the education he was receiving. He was becoming afraid. Friends were warning him. They were saying, "You are challenging one of the most powerful organizations in the world. Be careful!
Then came a bright spot. Maybe the best day of his life. Omalu got a phone call from Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon of considerable renown who had for a decade worked as a Steelers team doctor. Bailes, chairman of neurosurgery at West Virginia University Hospitals, had known Mike Webster well, was friends with the family. And he knew Terry Long. He knew brains. He knew concussions. In his lab in West Virginia he was concussing rats, examining the resulting damage to brain tissue.
On the phone, Bailes introduced himself. He said, "Dr. He ran home and told his wife. She said, "How do you know? It could be a trick! I have heard not nice things about the NFL; they are very powerful, and some of them not nice! Someone could come in and kill you and steal these brains!
In the end, Omalu sent all his brain tissue to Bailes to store in his lab in West Virginia. The third case was Andre Waters—hard-hitting safety for the Philadelphia Eagles—who was denied disability under the NFL retirement plan despite numerous concussions, constant pain, and crippling depression. On November 20, , at 44, he shot himself in the mouth. The fourth case was Justin Strzelczyk, the youngest of all, just 36 when he died a most dramatic death.
Offensive lineman for the Steelers through most of the s, Strzelczyk was popular in the locker room, a big mountain man of a guy with a banjo at the ready. Just a few years after his retirement, the downward spiral began. He started hearing voices from "the evil ones," who he believed were in constant pursuit. He stopped at a gas station on a highway outside Buffalo, New York. He tried to give some guy 3, bucks, told him to head for the hills!
The evil ones are coming! Then he got in his truck and sped away, ninety miles an hour, eventually with the cops chasing him for forty miles. The cops threw metal spikes, blew out his tires, but he kept going and kept going, until finally he swerved into opposing traffic and smashed into a tanker carrying corrosive acid, and everything, everything, exploded.
Why not other guys? Not every retired NFL player, after all, goes crazy and kills himself. How many had died young and had never been diagnosed? Omalu and Bailes would sit and think and talk and think. Head trauma, sure. But what else?
Did these guys take steroids? Other drugs? Were there genetic markers? Did it matter when the head injuries occurred? Omalu had, in fact, asked. They were joined by a fourth, Chris Nowinski, who had been helping broker brain deals with families—getting brains for Omalu to study.
Nowinski was not like the others. He seemed to be on a different mission. It was hard to put your finger on it, exactly. He said CTE was a public-health issue and the public had a right to know. No one could blame Nowinski, really, if he was on some sort of crusade.
He was not a scientist. Vision loss, ferocious migraines, loss of balance, memory problems; he was 24 years old and feeling some days like a feeble old man. He went to eight doctors before anyone took the time to tell him what was going on. Those were concussions.
All those times. Not just the times he had become unconscious. But all those times, perhaps one hundred times, that he saw stars, suffered a "ding"—any loss of brain function induced by trauma was a concussion, and all of them were serious, all of them were brain injuries, all of them required attention, not the least of which was the time to heal before suffering another one.
No one had ever told him that. No one had ever told him that the job he returned to each day was potentially brain damaging.
No one until Nowinski met a world-renowned concussion expert who explained it all, and so Nowinski quit the WWE. Omalu did not understand what was happening. Bailes and Fitzsimmons did. They would look at each other and say, "Uh-oh. In the summer of , Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit.
All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting. It would be a chance for the NFL to talk about this and hear from independent scientists, many of whom they also invited to the meeting— participants in all.
Bailes had no easy answer. He knew those guys. He knew who was in and who was out and how dirty the politics could get. You will take my research. Do you join these scientists and try to solve the problem, or do you use your power to discredit them? It is definitely worth the read — especially before you see the movie Concussion. Yes, a rheumatologist was heading up a committee on the brain! It was then that Omalu knew what he was getting into. And although I was on the other side of the water: for me, what he did, it transmitted, especially for a Black guy.
He was second to none. Who do you think compares the most right now to your game? Look, I'm not trying to be humble and all of that. That's why people always compare me to him. I don't particularly like it. Not because of what I did. It's not about that. I actually love him, by the way. The way he plays is just crazy. But he's him, I was me. I like how clever he is on the field. His brain. When he speaks, when he gives interviews, he seems like a level-headed guy.
He knows where he wants to go. And the way he sees the game, his football IQ for me is really high. People always mention his speed and his dribbling. But listen, you have a ball at your feet. You need to see everything at that speed and make the right choice. So your brain has to be right, because if not, if it was only a matter of speed For me, he's brainy and not a lot of people mention that, because to be able to handle all of that, the media, social media, and everything that's in and around him, he seems to do that well on top of playing.
What do you think about the current season for Paris Saint-Germain? Well, it's kind of weird because, look, they are well ahead in the league in France. And right now in the Champions League they are not doing badly. What people want PSG to do better is the way they are playing.
It's not always fluent, it's not always flamboyant, but at the end of the day, they are winning games. And you know as much as I do, as long as you win, you are right and accepted. Now, for me to see Lionel Messi in Ligue 1 is just I didn't think that was going to ever happen. I never thought he was going to leave Barcelona. But what you have sometimes is when you give caviar to people every day, and then you don't give them that, then they're like, well, what's wrong with you?
I'm used to caviar. But that doesn't happen often, it's not normal. What people do not understand, because the best players often go to the national team, and because they play every three days, is that you do not actually train a lot.
And to put a new tactic, new ideas with new players to make them gel, especially when you have egos in the team, it's not always easy to make them gel. So right now the thing that buys them time, a lot of time, is that they are winning games. I'm not that worried for them. But the main thing is if you start to lose, then maybe people will question it even more.
But when you play for Paris Saint-Germain, you always get judged on what you are not doing or what you didn't do or what you didn't win. That's life at the top and it's not easy. Is that why people think that Messi is struggling as much as he is, even though the team is winning so much? When you leave a place that you've been at a young age for a very long time, that you never thought you were going to leave, it takes a lot out of you emotionally.
You need to realize and understand where you are, adapt to a new league and adapt to a new team and digest the move. You saw he cried when he left, those were not fake tears. He cried. It takes a little time to adapt and understand, even if you are him. But you need to understand that the guy is a human being also. And that emotionally, sometimes, we all do get touched by something. Leaving Barcelona, it's still raw for him.
But I believe he will turn it over. I hope he will turn it up. I'm confident in him. Same with me when I left Arsenal to go to Barcelona, it took me a minute to get used to my surroundings. I never thought that I was going to leave Arsenal, so joining Barcelona Was I in a great club, in a great town?
Hell yeah. But it took me a little time to digest it. Last month, in Lisbon, you accused social media companies of profiting off of hate. And you said that you were going to boycott them moving forward. So what do you think, is the solution to this problem?
Well, the solution is to legislate a law. When someone does something wrong on there, can we find out who the guy is? Can we trace who is the person behind the account? Because at the end of the day, they generate money through hate.
There was a massive boycott for a weekend with a lot of people, a lot of leagues turned out. Then it became something that they're talking about at the parliament here in the UK. The legislation Boris Johnson is pushing for: Is that something you support? It's about making people accountable for what they say.
It's just that. I was just wondering and hoping and saying, why can you not get punished when you do something there? It's supposed to be a safe place. My statement was not only about being Black. But it seems like everybody wanted to talk about racism.
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