A Powerful Message

When you leave the theatre after seeing Concussion, you may not like football as much. That feeling will fade. You definitely won’t like the NFL as a corporate entity as much, and that sense will linger.

Players with claims of debilitating injuries, and not necessarily head trauma, for years derided the NFL’s foot-dragging and rejections with this ditty: Delay, deny and hope you die. Bear that in mind when seeing Concussion.

It is the story of Dr. Bennet Omalu and his discovery during autopsies of the brain damage in football players. He comes to the conclusion that repeated concussions and other damaging blows to the head through many years of play and practice lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE manifests itself during life through headaches, depression, mood swings, loss of mental acuity and may be mistaken for Alzheimer’s.

CTE can be determined after death, not before, through examination of the brain tissue. After Hall of Famer Mike Webster’s tragic passing at 50 years of age, Omalu – played by Will Smith – digs deeper into the brain tissue of that troubled warrior to find clumps of protein that essentially strangled his mind from the inside out.

The NFL delays and denies and creates panels stacked with every kind of experts but the right ones as more cases emerge. Omalu and his backers get hostile phone calls and legal threats. But the players, sadly, become supporters of his research when, in desperate search for relief from daily pain and confusion, they kill themselves and leave their brains to science for study.

We all would like to think that players know what risks they assume when they put on the helmet and pads. They probably don’t fully get it now and they surely didn’t back in the days when a concussion was called “a ding” and players routinely went back into the game with the team physician’s blessing.

The NFL has changed playing rules to cut down on shots to the head and established a concussion protocol for injured players. That’s a start. Taking care of the many badly-used players of the past should be at least as a high priority.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman