Debate on dementia attracts the headbangers

AMERICA AT LARGE:Neither the NFL nor Congress came out well of a public inquiry into the long-term effects of playing football, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

WHAT IS accepted to have been the first American football game, between Rutgers and Princeton, took place in 1869.

Over the next several decades the sport had become so concomitantly popular and dangerous that President Theodore Roosevelt summoned the head coaches of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House for a conference on improving safety.

An outdoorsman and a fitness buff, Teddy Roosevelt was no shrinking violet when it came to manly pursuits. He was one of the few American presidents who had boxed, and he enjoyed watching football as much as the next man. But a recent spate of gridiron deaths had forced his hand.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) had yet to be born, and the forerunner of what we know as the NFL wouldn’t open for business for another 15 years. And while even the Ivy League didn’t exist as a formal institution, the stature of Yale coach Walter Camp and his counterparts at Harvard and Princeton, Bill Reid and John Fine, would be influential.

The message was that football either had to clean up its house in terms of safety standards or risk having the government do it for them – up to and including the possibility of a ban altogether.

From this meeting came rules establishing the forward pass and a system requiring a team to gain 10 yards within a series of downs.

Those events of more than 100 years ago would seem to have resonated in recent Congressional hearings conducted in the wake of recent studies purporting to link NFL experience to an abnormally high incidence of dementia in later life. That the studies happened to come to light precisely at a time the NFL was seeking to renew its quasi-exemption from federal antitrust laws was, from its standpoint, unfortunate; and it is fair to say that it may not even have been a coincidence.

That blows to the head can cause brain damage should be self-evident, as should be its corollary, which is that the possibility of this incidence probably increases exponentially with each successive blow. The premature retirements of quarterbacks Troy Aikman and Steve Young and running back Merril Hoge all followed multiple concussions, and all three made their decisions to get out while they still had their wits about them well before any of the current studies were made available. All three, it should be noted, now enjoy successful broadcasting careers.

The current spate of dementia-related stories appears to have been driven by the New York Times. The best we can tell, the first salvo was fired in late September, when the Old Gray Lady breathlessly announced the existence of a study purporting to show that the incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementia among former NFL players was a startling 19 times that of the overall male population.

On even cursory examination, this initial “study” proved to be pure poppycock, and within days the Times had backed away. But in early October they did come up with another, somewhat more scientific in basis, that seemed to show fairly conclusively that an alarming number of former NFL players were exhibiting signs of dementia as early as their 50s, and that by their 60s the dementia rate among former professionals was four to five times that of the corresponding male age group overall. And, while it was not absolutely proved, repeated head blows appeared to be the likely cause.

The Times, had it been so disposed, could have conducted a similar study of old-timers at almost any boxing gym in the city, and probably saved itself a lot of time and money. But since the newspaper has all but declared boxing irrelevant, they weren’t about to sully their product with a trip to Gleason’s when the NFL version offered the prospect of a much sexier story in the guise of scientific research.

Nor did the NFL help its case by continuing to insist that the study did not constitute a provable link. For years, the league had dragged its feet in this area, all but turning its back on former players who succumbed to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia by declining to include them in its medical benefits on the grounds that they may or may not have been the result of NFL-produced injury.

And the truth be known, that is still by no means a certainty. Every study to date has used NFL players as a basis, which, any way you slice it, is a pretty damned small statistical sample. Last year, for instance, just under 1,700 players were on NFL rosters for at least one game. In the same time frame, close to 40,000 players were on college rosters, and more than a million played high school football. These latter groups were playing precisely the same sport, often with inferior equipment to the state-of-the-art gear used in the NFL.

You’d have thought someone at the Times would have figured out that just possibly some of this late-arriving brain damage might have stemmed from earlier participation. Yes, football can be a dangerous game, but it doesn’t start getting dangerous when a man signs an NFL contract.

In years gone by, concussions were treated more cavalierly, and it wasn’t unusual for a team doctor to sign off on a player’s return to a game in which he had experienced a concussion.

And it should seem apparent that the opportunity for exceeding one’s limit of debilitating head blows would increase with the number of opportunities, though that would be extremely difficult to prove in most individual cases.

Put another way, it would seem evident that the incidence of knee injuries requiring surgery is far greater among football players than it is in the general population. But are there more operations for, say, torn ACLs among NFL players in a given year than, on a per capita basis, among the 40,000 college players? I don’t know the answer to that, but I suspect not.

This did not dissuade the House Judiciary Committee from convening a series of extremely public hearings into the hot topic last week. Drooling former players were hauled out of their assisted-living facilities and put on public display as exhibits for the prosecution.

To the best of our knowledge, not a single representative from the NCAA was summoned before the committee.

William Conyers (D-Mich), who chairs the committee, accused both the league and its players’ association of “hiding behind the collective bargaining agreement” on the matter of dementia.

Maxine Waters (D-Calif), warned NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, “I believe you are an $8 billion organisation that has failed in your responsibility to the players. We all know it’s a dangerous sport. The only question is, are you going to pay for it? I know that you dearly want to hold on to your profits. And I think it’s the responsibility of Congress to look at your antitrust exemption and take it away.”

Goodell, by comparison, seemed almost rational in his responses. But then the NFL does have a policy that discourages hot-dogging in public. If only Congress – and for that matter the New York Times– could exercise similar self-restraint.