Football’s future is in doubt
On the eve of Super Bowl 50, news broke that the late Kenny “The Snake” Stabler, the legendary Oakland Raider, has joined the list of those inflicted with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a crippling brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head.
“He had moderately severe disease,” according to Dr. Ann McKee, the Boston neuropathologist who examined Stabler’s brain. “Pretty classic. It may be surprising since he was a quarterback, but certainly the lesions were widespread, and they were quite severe, affecting many regions of the brain.”
I’ve been a football fan from boyhood, and my team has always been the Pittsburgh Steelers. They went a dismal 1-13 in 1969, but that was followed by a historic string of dominance in which they won four Super Bowls in a six-year period. Many years later, Mike Webster, the stoic, anonymous center on that team, would become famous as the first former player diagnosed with CTE, a tragic story told in the recent Will Smith movie “Concussion.”
Terry Bradshaw, the star quarterback of those Steeler teams, has felt his faculties decline and fears he has it too. “I got tested to see what condition my brain is in,” he admitted a few years ago. “And it’s not in real good shape.”
The late Frank Gifford had it. Running back Tony Dorsett, who single-handedly destroyed my high school football team, struggles with it and says he had no idea “that the end was going to be like this.” Last week it was announced that the late Tyler Sash, a 27-year-old who had played two years in the NFL, suffered advanced CTE. Former Falcons Shane Dronett and Ray Easterling, both of whom died of suicide, had the disease.
In fact, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University announced in September that it had found the brain disease in the bodies of 87 of the 91 former NFL players it had studied. Evidence of CTE has also been found in the bodies of men as young as 17, and in those who never played football beyond high school.
Once you know such a thing, you can’t “unknow” it. Watching a football game has become an exercise in guilt suppression, at least for me. I still thrill at the big hit that changes the course of the contest, then cringe when one or more players stumble to the sidelines, because now I know.
Parents now know too. Bradshaw says that he would not allow his son to play the game. Troy Aikman, the Dallas Cowboy legend, says that he would not encourage a son to play. Antwaan Randle El, a former Steelers star receiver, reports that at age 36 he too has symptoms of CTE. He now wishes that he had never played football and advises others to stay away.
“There’s no correcting it,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “There’s no helmet that’s going to correct it. There’s no teaching that’s going to correct it. It just comes down to it’s a physically violent game. Football players are in a car wreck every week.”
“Right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if football isn’t around in 20, 25 years.”
He might be right. CTE is also being diagnosed among military veterans exposed to repeated explosions, but at least in those cases, the damage has come in a cause greater than the huckstering of light beer, trucks and erectile dysfunction drugs.
