Articles

[Eric Fink]

from this link….

http://www.thehockeynews.com/articles/39355-Justin-Bournes-Blog-Four-points-that-make-up-a-great-coach.html

Justin Bourne's Blog: Four points that make up a great coach

Dan Bylsma's Pittsburgh Penguins are fourth in the East, two points out of first, despite being without Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin for long periods. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
Justin Bourne

Justin Bourne
2011-03-28 15:10:00

Great coaches operate using different systems and styles and this year’s race for the Jack Adams Award is proof of that. No fewer than a dozen names could be rightly considered for nomination, as teams across the board have been impressive given their in-season difficulties – groups such as the New York Rangers, Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings all thrived despite multiple injuries to key players.

My experience with coaches has led me to believe most of the good ones, no matter their chosen style, have a few things in common – even guys such as fiery John Tortorella and the professor Dan Bylsma.
ESTABLISH MUTUAL RESPECT

As a player, you have to feel a level of sincere respect from your coach to be committed to the team and you have to respect the man back. If you want players to pour out 100 percent energy on a daily basis, they can’t walk into the dressing room and feel like a pawn. Taking the time to get to know the players on your team (without becoming “friends”) is a key part of getting them to work hard.

To gain respect, it helps to have a good hockey background. It’s hard to take someone seriously in crunch time when he’s giving hard line “my way or the highway” type advice if you feel like he hasn’t been there before and thus wouldn’t “know.”

Great coaches don’t belittle their players, they just give honest help. They need to establish the mindset of “we the team” so it doesn’t feel so much like a king ruling over peasants as it does two co-workers coming together.

That should be the easy part. But it has to go hand-in-hand with…
INTIMIDATION

Point 1 was a bit lovey-dovey to be an effective method of managing 23 men with egos, money and agendas if used on its own.

Some of the best in the business – think Mike Babcock as Example 1A – offer a mix of intelligent, thoughtful insight with searing “oh crap, he’s mad isn’t he?” Intimidating coaches can correct sloppy passes in practice with a single look (a look you begin to understand after a few weeks) or silence the room when he walks into it.

My Dad, Bob Bourne, played for Pat Quinn in Los Angeles and has mentioned Quinn was a great coach partially because of how strong and scary the guy was; players took him seriously. As much as you need to be “co-workers” so players can comfortably ask questions, the relationship needs to be established – team decisions are made democratically only until the dictator makes the final call.

Related Links

Jack Adams Award Watch
Crosby skates again with Penguins

DON’T TALK TOO MUCH

When you hear a coach has “lost the room,” it’s usually as a result of this factor.

As a coach standing on the bench, you could flap your lips for 60 minutes and some do (which I think is more common in the minor leagues). Players aren’t entirely idiotic, they often know when they’ve messed up and know what they should’ve done differently. They can see what their teammates are doing wrong from the bench. They too can see where the open man is.

So when you’re sitting on the bench and your coach is offering a running commentary, it can devalue his words (supply and demand, brutha). You know he’s going to talk between periods in the dressing room as well and, eventually, you just tune him out. You can only say the same things so many times before they fall on deaf ears.

Good coaches pick their spots to make sure their words carry weight. They also…
BALANCE MOTIVATION WITH TECHNICAL COACHING

Certain coaches get stuck in one gear or the other, but you have to balance the two styles to a certain degree if you want to maximize your effectiveness. There are times when a guy needs a good kick in the ass and there are times when you’re losing because your systems don’t match up well against your opponents.

Coaches succeed in a variety of ways and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. But from what I’ve seen, great coaches share the aforementioned four traits.

No doubt whoever wins the Jack Adams Award will be deserving of it. And no doubt whoever wins it will fit the above mold.

[hockeygod]

Doctor believes attention to head shots will pay dividends

JAMES CHRISTIE
Toronto— From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011

International rules penalizing all head hits should be applied to hockey in North America to prevent concussions, neurosurgeon Dr. Charles Tator said on Tuesday, as his ThinkFirst Foundation presented a newly produced educational video at a packed news conference in Toronto.

“I’m optimistic that the big attention to this issue will pay big dividends,” Tator said. “We will save the game.”

International Ice Hockey Federation rule 540 mandates that a penalty be immediately assessed to any player who hits an opponent in the head or neck area, or who drives an opponent’s head into the glass or boards. The referee has the discretion to level a minor and misconduct penalty, a major and game misconduct, or a match penalty. If injury occurs, a match penalty is automatic.

The NHL, meanwhile, continues to grapple with the issue and Hockey Canada won’t address head shots until its annual general meeting in May.

“We [already] had rules that would look after hits to the head, like penalties for elbowing but, unlike the NHL, we decided to err on the side of caution and insisted the head-hitting rules be put in,” said Ottawa-based Murray Costello, vice-president of the IIHF and chairman of the organization’s medical committee. “We tell the referees if they don’t call them [head hits] there’ll be no more international assignments for them.”

Stiffer rules may mitigate the volume of head shots in North America but the more daunting issue is a hockey culture that desperately needs reform, said former NHLer Keith Primeau.

“The parents are the biggest abusers of the injury [concussion],” said Primeau, himself a victim of concussion. “Players are not only put back in harm's way but it can be dangerous, catastrophic, even fatal. … It's more about understanding the game. It's a game; it's not that important.”

Scott Oakman, executive director of the Greater Toronto Hockey League, said parents of today’s players were brought up at a time when concussion awareness was lacking. After having your bell rung, the pressure was to get back on the ice. Today, he sees too many parents pushing their children to do the same thing.

“The kids get it,” former national women’s team captain Cassie Campbell, who moderated a panel discussion, told reporters. “The kids just want to have fun. But when I go to hockey arenas, the parents are yelling and screaming at their kids, ‘Hit ’em!’ And I hate to say it [but] it’s mostly the moms.”

According to statistics compiled by ThinkFirst, 12-to-14 per cent of hockey injuries are concussions and up to 25 per cent of young hockey players who have received concussions do not receive proper post-concussion treatment.

“What was a tolerable hit 50 years ago is no longer tolerable,” Tator said, citing the sport’s increasing speed, bigger bodies and harder equipment. “The brain is very fragile and has to be protected better.”

Players, parents, even doctors need to be better educated on concussions, Tator said. He said some doctors are not aware of the most current concussion information. His organization has observed players being sent back to play before their brains had healed.

In Europe, doctors at some levels of hockey are stationed at the bench, “whereas I see players [in Canada] whose mom took them home from the rink and they never saw a doctor,” Tator said.

The educational video presented on Tuesday, Smart Hockey, is aimed at youth players. Produced with the backing of Scotiabank and Reebok-CCM Canada, it’s available as a free download at the ThinkFirst.ca website.

While Canadian provinces, the federal government and Hockey Canada ponder the concussion issue, 13 U.S. states have adopted training requirements to address youth concussions. Colorado's new law reaches further than others by requiring training in sports with athletes as young as 11.

Gov. John Hickenlooper on Tuesday signed a bill that requires even volunteer Little League and Pop Warner football coaches to take free annual training online to recognize the symptoms of a concussion. The new law also requires coaches to bench players when it's believed they suffered a concussion. They would not be able to return to games or practice unless they have medical clearance.

Oakman said that in spite of the persistent culture, building awareness is forcing change. While the organization has documented an increasing number of concussions among youth players, some of the increase is attributable to coaches and support staff being better able to recognize possible concussions. They pull a child out of a game to be examined by a doctor, he said.

Fran Rider, president of the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association, said 96 concussions have been recorded this year. She said players have tried to sidestep the built-in the system by going to walk-in clinics and getting doctors unfamiliar with their cases to give them clearance.

“Everyone needs to understand their responsibility when it comes to concussions, and they need to understand the seriousness of the issue,” Rider said.

Tator called upon the sport to instill “respect for the player’s own body, brain, teammates, opponents, rules. Deliberate hits to the head have to be eliminated.”

Better equipment won’t be enough to do the job, he said. “Virtually every concussed player is wearing a helmet.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

QMJHL not doing enough to deter shots to the head

By Pat Hickey, Montreal Gazette March 29, 2011

MONTREAL – Hall of Fame goaltender Patrick Roy weighed in on the thorny subject of violence in hockey and, once again, suggested that there’s no need for governments and the police to get involved.

I agree with Roy, particularly since the two most recent cases in Quebec – one of which involved Roy’s son, Jonathan – proved to be a waste of money and resources. Both cases ended with guilty verdicts, but the miscreants were granted unconditional discharges, which means they have no criminal records.

Roy, who is the co-owner, general manager and head coach of the Quebec Remparts, went on to say that Quebec is different from the United States and the rest of Canada in that it doesn’t have a problem with violence in hockey.

That may be because the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League simply ignores the subject. That’s the conclusion I reached after a reader pointed out to me that the Moncton Wildcats, the defending champions in the QMJHL, have had to deal with 11 concussions this season.

Three players have suffered concussions this month and, as Neil Hodge of the Moncton Times and Transcript described it, the latest injury suffered by 18-year-old Scott Trask brought back images of Max Pacioretty’s injury earlier this month.

According to Hodge: “The building went completely quiet as Trask collapsed to the ice and his body began shaking in convulsions. It took 10 doctors, paramedics and athletic trainers about 20 minutes to hold him down against his own strength in order to remove his helmet and skates and then place him on a stretcher.”

Moncton head coach Danny Flynn, who has coached in the NHL, the Ontario Hockey League and Canadian university hockey, said: “That was right up there with the most scary scenes I’ve witnessed in hockey.”

What’s even scarier is that, while Lewiston’s Étienne Brodeur received a major for boarding and a game misconduct, there was no further discipline even though Raymond Bolduc, who handles disciplinary matters for the league, witnessed the hit.

The decision wasn’t a surprise. Ted Stephens’s career is probably over after suffering his third concussion in less than a year. All three were the result of checks from behind or blows to the head, but there wasn’t as much as a penalty called.

The numbers of concussions in the NHL and the league’s willingness to write them off as part of the game is a disgrace. But the QMJHL’s reaction, which is in stark contrast to the no-tolerance policy on hits to the head in the Ontario Hockey League, is even worse.

One of the arguments put forward by NHL executives opposed to a blanket ban on head shots is that the players accept the risk which comes with playing a contact sport.

That may be acceptable when you’re making millions of dollars, but it’s unconscionable to ask a 17- and 18-year-old to accept that risk when they’re being paid $50 a week and are unlikely to ever make a living from the game.

Tough penalties for head shots serve as a deterrent and, if the QMJHL isn’t willing to protect its players, it may be time to call the cops.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Hockey Canada to look at zero-tolerance rule for headshots

ALLAN MAKI
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011

Hockey Canada is looking to adopt a zero-tolerance rule for hits to the head when it stages its annual general meeting in May.

The question, according to the governing body’s president Bob Nicholson, is determining exactly what that means. What if a player is hit then hits his head off the glass or the ice? Is that still an infraction? It’s destined to be a hot-button topic when Hockey Canada and representatives from its 13 associations meet in Calgary.

“The definition of hits to the head will come up,” Nicholson acknowledged Tuesday. “Zero tolerance is two words, but it’s how they’re defined that can change how the game is called, certainly in minor hockey. That will be looked at because there’s a need for us to be more strict than the NHL.”

Nicholson has come out in favour of revising rules and enhancing player safety and noted how Hockey Canada continues to gather information from concussion symposiums in Canada and the U.S. (Hockey Canada has produced videos on bodychecking and included information on headshots but has yet to do one solely on hitting to the head.)

Nicholson has also talked about the culture that permeates the game from the NHL on down. He pointed to Hockey Night in Canada and the other sports networks and the way they showcase the most violent aspects of the game.

“It’s how they introduce the game and show the highlights. I think there are other ways to promote the sport through the great plays and goals,” Nicholson said.

Al Hubbs, the president of the Saskatchewan Hockey Association, believes what’s happening in the NHL, the wanton disrespect and rash of head injuries, has left a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.

“The biggest thing is because of the NHL. It’s almost given the game a bad name,” he said. “Don’t think about what the NHL does and put it into minor hockey. Checking from behind was a huge thing. There are still penalties called but it’s not the item of the day.”

Nicholson was asked about the declining number of kids signing up for minor hockey. Registration numbers recently released by Hockey Canada showed a drop to 569,000 from 576,000 last year. There are several reasons for the fall-off – the high cost of equipment, the availability of ice time – as well as the safety issue, which is concerning more parents.

“Whenever [the concussion issue] comes up, they say, ‘I’m not putting my kid in hockey,’ ” Hubbs said. “But if you put it in perspective with the number of games we play [in minor hockey across Canada], it’s minimal.”

Nicholson said it wasn’t likely that come the AGM the 13 hockey associations would change their current stance on bodychecking. In nine associations, bodychecking is taught at the peewee level, ages nine to 10. In Saskatchewan, Ontario and Ottawa, it begins at atom (ages 11 to 12). In Prince Edward Island, it starts at bantam (ages 13 to 14).

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Hockey not in crisis, nor should it be

STEPHEN BRUNT
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
Published Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011

In 1909, 26 American football players died of injuries suffered in games.

Twenty-six. Dead. Over the course of a season, that’s about two a week.

They were killed in different fashion, some by spinal breaks, some by blood poisoning after the fact, and some – the largest number – because of blows to the head.

That final gory toll came at the end of what would become known as the “Football Crisis,” a five-year stretch during which many outside the sport demanded action, a time when the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, threatened to ban the game because of its danger and inherent violence. Rule changes, finally, were brought in to make the sport safer (most notably the elimination of the “flying wedge” and the incorporation of the forward pass), and in the end saved football from itself.

That would indeed be a crisis.

What we have ongoing in Canada right now when it comes to hockey and concussions is something less, spinning off in a wide variety of directions, at times comparing apples with oranges, and fuelled – as is always the case when the national game is involved – by our tendency to use it as a forum for fretting, and hand-wringing, and especially painful self-examination.

In the past, that has taken the form of agonized debates over how our players stack up against those in the rest of the world, over how the NHL enforces (or doesn’t) its rules, and over that great perennial, the place of fighting in the sport.

So this has been like a perfect storm: Reggie Fleming’s brain, Bob Probert’s brain, the best player in hockey felled for much of the season by a head injury that may have initially gone undiagnosed, Matt Cooke and his predatory cheap shots, Max Pacioretty lying facedown on the ice, a wave of anecdotal material about head injuries at all levels of the game and a new willingness to listen to the available science – all of which suggests concussions are a very bad thing indeed, with potentially grave long-term consequences.

And now, perhaps it’s time to take a deep breath, and step back. Even the best causes and best intentions can occasionally tip into overkill, if not into hysteria.

Professional hockey players, who are paid handsomely, in part to endure significant risks, are not minor-hockey players. Some of what is done in their workplace would be considered a crime on the street – but it is not a crime in context, because of implied consent. In any case, what they do to each other, no matter how violent, is not the same thing as a 10-year-old being run over in a house-league game by another 10-year-old who weighs twice as much.

When it comes to children’s hockey, and to children’s lives, the first question might be just how dangerous the sport is relative to minor football, or skateboarding, or cycling, or gymnastics, or skiing, or soccer (Can’t happen? Ask Chelsea’s Peter Cech) or sitting in the passenger seat of a moving automobile with a parent on the way to practice. All of those things, children are going to continue to do. And in all of those activities, they are occasionally going to suffer brain injuries.

If the world were run by neurologists, many things would be deemed unacceptably risky – just as, if the world were run by oncologists, smoking would surely be illegal. That’s as it ought to be. That is their job, and their ethical responsibility.

As has been noted before in this space, when it comes to paid sports entertainers, we in fact give considerable sway to individual choice, and we are, in fact, quite willing to let athletes risk concussion for our amusement, at times to revel in the very moment when it happens: the knockout blow in boxing, or mixed-martial arts, or football, or, yes (think Scott Stevens on Eric Lindros) in hockey.

Next month, when the Ultimate Fighting Championship comes to Ontario for the first time for a mammoth show at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, it might as well be billed as Guaranteed Concussion Night.

What are you going to? Ban it, having just made it legal?

This is an important conversation. Understanding what the research tells us, considering how head injuries can permanently change lives, is knowledge we all ought to possess. And there are legitimate talking points.

Fighting? That’s still No. 1, even if there remain those in the game who believe making it easier to punch players in the head will in the end make the game safer.

Equipment? Let’s take a look at hard-shell body armour.

Rink design? Obviously.

Minor hockey? Safety has to be the priority over “development.”

The NHL and its rules? Emulation aside, that’s a very different discussion than talking about children, and the players themselves ought to have the strongest say.

In the end, though, hockey won’t ever be entirely safe, not when played at high speed, on ice, with skates and sticks and pucks and body contact. It won’t ever be without risk. Some are going to get hurt, their knees and their shoulders and their brains. And they will continue to play, and we will continue to watch them.

That is not a peculiar to hockey. It is peculiar to human beings.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

MLB, players union approve seven-day DL for concussions

MINNEAPOLIS — The Associated Press
Published Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2011

Major League Baseball and its players' union have announced a new set of protocols for dealing with concussions, including the creation of a new seven-day disabled list for players with the injury.

The league and the union announced the protocols in a joint statement on Tuesday. They include mandatory baseline testing for all players and umpires and new steps for evaluating players who may have suffered the injury and for having them return to action.

The new guidelines will be in effect starting on opening day.

The new disabled list is in addition to the 15-day and 60-day DLs that already exist for players with injuries. Any player needing more than 14 days to recover will automatically be transferred to the 15-day disabled list.

“It really is comporting our disabled lists with the reality of management of concussions,” MLB senior vice president of labor Dan Halem said.

Each team will also have to designate a specialist who deals with mild brain injuries to evaluate players and umpires when needed and be required send its medical reports to Dr. Gary Green, MLB's medical director, for approval before the injured player is cleared to return to the field.

“This policy, which reflects the collective expertise of many of the foremost authorities in the field, will benefit players, umpires and clubs alike, and I am proud of the spirit of cooperation that has led us to this result,” Commissioner Bud Selig said in a statement.

It's a topic that has been on the league's radar for more than two years, Halem said.

With players such as Minnesota Twins first baseman Justin Morneau, New York Mets outfielder Jason Bay and Toronto Blue Jays infielder Aaron Hill missing huge chunks of games due to concussions in the last few seasons, baseball officials formed a committee to examine the issue this winter.

The committee was chaired by Dr. Alex Valadka, MLB's consultant on mild traumatic brain injuries and the chief of adult neurosciences and neurosurgery at the Seton Brain and Spine Institute in Austin, Texas. It included Green, head athletic trainers, team doctors, and Tony Clark, the union's director of player relations.

Halem said that several medical experts on the committee recommended the seven-day DL as a way to address one of the most fundamental challenges to evaluating players with concussions. He said medical research has shown that the average concussion — not the more serious ones suffered by Morneau, Bay and Hill, of course — clears within five to seven days.

“The problem that baseball had with the 15-day disabled list was that the clubs were reluctant to put a player on it for 15 days if he could be back in seven days,” Halem said. “So some players who maybe should have been on the disabled list probably weren't.”

The committee met at the winter meetings in December and held numerous conference calls before finishing their proposal. It was submitted to Selig, who approved it, and then sent to the players' union before it was put into effect.

“Player safety is a major concern of the collective bargaining parties, and these new protocols and procedures should enhance our ongoing efforts to protect the health of players and umpires,” MLBPA executive director Michael Weiner said in a statement.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Doc: NHL 'not denying' concussion problem

By TERRY DAVIDSON, QMI Agency March 30, 2011

Neurosurgeon Dr. Charles Tator aims to change hockey's culture so that concussions are a thing of the past, and hopes a new educational video will help do just that.

Tator, along with retired NHL star Keith Primeau and former national women's team member Cassie Campbell- Pascall, was at Scotiabank Theatre on Tuesday for the screening of "SMART HOCKEY", a video for young players about preventing concussions by both protecting themselves and having more respect for other players on the ice.

The 25-minute video, released by Tator's Think- Smart Canada, also features interviews with New York Islanders forward John Tavares and Buffalo Sabres defenceman Tyler Myers, provides basic education on the symptoms of a concussion, and advice around the often-lengthy recovery players go through.

One reason for the rise in concussions at all levels of contact hockey is that the game is faster, the players are bigger and the style of play is rougher than ever before, Tator said.

"The game has really changed from … 50 years ago, " he said. "Speed because of the long legs, and the force because of the weight of the player, produces more impact on the head. So what may have been a tolerable hit to the head 50 years ago is no longer tolerated by our poor brains."

Former Philadelphia Flyer Keith Primeau is five years removed from the game, retiring in 2006 because of repeated concussions.

The headaches aren't as bad now, but the father of three still occasionally suffers from dizziness and blurred vision — hallmarks of post-concussion syndrome.

"The mentality we are bred with is this competitive spirit," said Primeau, who spent 15 years in the NHL. "But we need to educate … kids on how to protect themselves."

Also in attendance was 15-year-old Justin Rizek, who had to hang up his skates permanently last year after suffering four concussions within two seasons while in the Greater Toronto Hockey League (GTHL).

Until recently, Rizek would find himself grounded with "dull, lingering headaches" as a result of his head injuries, not to mention memory loss and bouts of confusion.

Tator, who was the one to tell Rizek his hockey-playing days were over, agreed young players look to the pros for influence, and the NHL's endorsement of the video is an important step in helping to change the culture of the game.

"The professionals have come a long way in realizing that there is a problem," Tator said. "They're not denying it. They're supporting these educational efforts, (and) I think we've turned a corner on the professionals hoping that this is going to go away by itself."

The NHL recently has faced a firestorm of criticism from fans, politicians and its own corporate sponsors for on-ice aggression.

Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins — arguably the league's star player– remains out with concussion problems.

Earlier this month, Max Pacioretty of the Montreal Canadiens suffered a concussion and fractured vertebrae after receiving a crushing hit from Zdeno Chara of the Boston Bruins.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Tom Thompson's Blog: How Dr. Gerry Wilson changed the NHL

Tom Thompson March 31, 2011 The Hockey News

As a native and long-time resident of Winnipeg, it is my habit when visiting the city to read the obituaries in the Winnipeg Free Press. On Monday, I was shocked to see the obituary of Dr. Gerry Wilson, age 73, with a headshot of him in a Montreal Canadiens jersey.

I was too young to remember the time when Dr. Wilson was the best junior age hockey prospect in Canada, his heroics in Memorial Cup final, or his games as a teenaged callup with the Montreal Canadiens when they were in the early stages of their run of five consecutive Stanley Cups. I was also too young to recall the serious knee injuries that ended his playing career far too early.

My memories of Dr. Wilson concern his time as a prominent Winnipeg surgeon specializing in the treatment of sports-related injuries and his proud parentage of four hockey-playing sons. Carey Wilson had a successful NHL career, primarily with the Calgary Flames and Carey's son, Colin, is an exciting young player currently with the Nashville Predators.

Dr. Wilson was passionate about hockey. He could talk intelligently about all aspects of the game. He also made a significant contribution to the development of professional hockey as a global sport. In 1973-74, he took a year's sabbatical from his medical practice to do research in Sweden. While there, he saw and befriended some of the top hockey players in the country. When he returned to Winnipeg, he encouraged some of these players to join him and sign with the Winnipeg Jets as that team prepared for its third season in the World Hockey Association. Dr. Wilson also had to do a sales pitch to the operators of the Jets under their new public ownership. A bunch of "chicken Swedes" who were unknown in North America were certainly not looked upon as the foundation of a successful professional hockey franchise in the Western Hemisphere.

The rest, as they say, is history. Swedish stars such as Anders Hedberg, Ulf Nilsson and Lars-Erik Sjoberg were soon joined by Willy Lindstrom, Kent Nilsson, Thommie Bergman and many more. Together with North American stars such as Bobby Hull, Ted Green, Morris Lukowich and Terry Ruskowski, these players combined to form the foundation of a team that won three Avco Cup championships in four years, losing the fourth in Game 7 of the final. They also became the first North American club to beat the Soviet Red Army national team.

Most significantly, the team introduced North American fans to a new brand of hockey. It was a hybrid style that combined many of the most pleasing aspects of North American and European hockey. It was definitely crowd pleasing, which excited hockey fans wherever the team played. I will never forget the night in the spring of 1984 when the Edmonton Oilers won their first Stanley Cup. When Oilers GM/coach Glen Sather first talked to the assembled media and the international audience of fans, he stated he had modeled his entertaining young championship club on his old rivals from the WHA, the Winnipeg Jets.

The Edmonton Oilers became the marquee team in an era that is now considered to be the most entertaining in the history of the NHL. A number of the rule changes debated and passed in recent years have attempted to restore the hockey from that time period.

What are the essential characteristics of this style of hockey? Puck possession, quick puck movement, speed generated through the neutral zone, goals scored off the rush with exciting passing plays and an up-tempo approach to the entire game.

Many players, coaches and hockey executives contributed to the development of this type of hockey. It is vastly different from what North American and European fans had enjoyed in earlier times. Every radical change requires a visionary, a dreamer who can put the wheels in motion.

Dr. Gerry Wilson performed the role of hockey visionary. He pictured the exact type of game that would develop if the best elements throughout the hockey world were combined. Rest in peace, Dr. Wilson. All hockey fans owe you a significant debt of gratitude.

Tom Thompson worked as head scout for the Minnesota Wild from 1999-2001 and was promoted to assistant GM in 2002, a post he held until 2010. He has also worked as a scout for the Calgary Flames, where he earned a Stanley Cup ring in 1989. He currently works as a scout for the New York Rangers. He will be blogging for THN.com this season.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Two more concussion stories – both from Gregg Drinnan's blog.
—–

In the spring of 2001, Spokane swept the Kamloops Blazers from a first-round series in which Chiefs D Kurt Sauer was as dominant as a defenceman can be. He was tough and physical and absolutely ruled the ice surface through all four games. These days, he’s playing the role of Mr. Mom. Why? Because of concussion-like symptoms. He hasn’t been on the ice since September 2009. Sarah McLellan of the Arizona Republic has that story right here (below):

Phoenix Coyotes' Kurt Sauer still struggles with neck injury
Defenseman, still feeling concussion symptoms, relishes his new role as a full-time dad

Sarah McLellan – Apr. 2, 2011 The Arizona Republic

Kurt Sauer softly opens the door to his 4-year-old son Kade's bedroom and walks to the side of the bed before leaning over to whisper.

"Come on, let's get up," Sauer says as Kade curls up under a fleece blanket covered in teddy bears, a picture of Sauer in a Coyotes jersey above his headboard. "When you're ready, let's get up."

It's 3 p.m. on a Thursday, and karate lessons are at 4. Sauer heads downstairs to the living room of his Scottsdale home. His 8-year-old son Kohl needs his white belt tied around his uniform.

"This is the right way, right buddy?" Sauer asks as he wraps the belt around Kohl's waist twice before sealing it in a knot. "Beautiful, huh buddy?"

Ever since Sauer suffered a neck injury during a preseason game against the Anaheim Ducks in September 2009, the defenseman exchanged the life of a professional hockey player for that of a full-time dad to Kohl, Kade, 6-year-old Kasen and 2-year-old Kruz.

"I've been taking the nanny's spot, the babysitter's spot," Sauer joked.

Instead of heading to the rink for practice and games, Sauer helps his kids with homework. His only road trips now are to soccer practice and Costco.

"The kids love going to Costco," Sauer said. "They love the samples."

Sauer relishes the role of being a father, but the effects of his injury still linger, still disturb his daily routine and still cloud a potential return to hockey.

"I don't want to go out at 29 with a head injury that lasts the rest of my life," said Sauer, now 30. "I don't think anyone wants to be put out of hockey."

It was a routine play that shelved Sauer for all but one game last season. The puck was dumped into the corner with Sauer chasing it. He felt a player, he doesn't know who, trailing behind him. The player gave Sauer a light shove, but the impact surprised Sauer and his hands hit the boards.

His head whipped back and forth, sending a knife-like sensation through his shoulder blade, up the back of his head. The muscles around his eyes tightened, and his eyesight went blurry.

Sauer continued to play and practice, but he was struggling to follow the puck.

"The puck wasn't where I thought it was because my eyes tracked differently, and so the picture I had was messed up," Sauer explained.

During his only action of the regular season against the Los Angeles Kings, Sauer stood in front of the net, batting at pucks as players cruised around him.

"That's what I'm good at; that's what I do," Sauer said. "I don't score points, but I do break up plays really well and I couldn't do that."

He worked on his conditioning in practice, but one day he did a figure 8 and never stopped spinning. He started doing balance therapy and worked at it until the All-Star break. When he returned from a five-day hiatus, he wore an extremely loose helmet. After a brief workout, Sauer felt dizzy, and all of a sudden his helmet was hugging his skull.

That was the last time he trained on the ice.

Since then, Sauer continued therapy for a 16-week period to no avail. He's seen doctors specializing in the neck, spine and brain, and no one has a clear diagnosis.

"It's a peculiar set of symptoms," Sauer said. "It doesn't fit into one category."

When he wakes up at 6:30, it takes him an hour and a half to get out of bed. A headache persists for most of the day, and his eyes hurt and ears ring. The right side of his neck aches, as does his right shoulder. If he deals cards, his right hand turns a shade of purple, almost green, and his veins bulge. If something startles him, he feels nauseous. Whenever he helps out at Kohl's hockey practice, he leaves the ice feeling sick. He needs a nap after trying to teach Kade how to ride a bike.

"He's done treatment and never had someone say, 'Hey, this is what's wrong with you,' " Sauer's wife Carmen said. "So how do you fix something that you don't know what's wrong?"

It's shortly after 4 p.m., and Sauer is sitting with Kohl inside the Scottsdale Martial Arts Center while Kade and Kasen are bowing on the mat. He smiles.

"This is what I do," Sauer says.

But he misses the game. He misses competing. For a while, Sauer watched cooking shows on TV to compete with Carmen in the kitchen.

"I missed being measured," he said, "because every game the Coyotes get measured. You get measured every game you go out there by coaches, your teammates, but most of all by the scoreboard. I haven't got measured in a long, long time."

His family wants him back in hockey. Before every dinner, Kruz prays that Sauer will play for the Coyotes again and that he will become a better hockey player.

"They know that's where he should be," Carmen said. "They know he shouldn't be in pain, laying in bed in the morning or have to take a nap or say sorry because I can't play floor hockey with you right now, because I'm not feeling good."

If his symptoms clear up, doctors say there's no reason he can't pursue a comeback. Sauer wants that.

"He's not ready to give hockey up," Carmen said. "And we aren't, either."

But if all the rest of his life holds is soccer practices, karate lessons and trips to Costco, that's OK, too.

"My life is better right now," Sauer said. "When you view your priorities – and everybody has priorities – and my job is up there, but it doesn't come in front of my wife, kids and God. The top three already got better."

—–

Get ready to hear about CTE

CTE.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.

No, it isn’t something caused by a mosquito bite.

Get ready, because you are going to be reading and hearing a lot about CTE over the next few years.

It is going to be everywhere in sports as scientists do more and more research into what is a fairly recent discovery.

What we now know as CTE used to be known as punch-drunk syndrome and was thought to apply strictly to ‘old’ boxers; in fact, it was given its own medical name — dementia pugilistica.

But then along came Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who decided there was something more to this than slurred words and some old boxers.

In 2002, Dr. Omalu took a long, hard look at the brain that had belonged to Mike Webster, a Pro Bowl centre with the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers.

Webster was dead at 50, his fall quick, hard and unbelievable.

In a startling and frightening story that appeared in GQ in October 2009, Jeanne Marie Laskas wrote: “How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to . . . pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth?” (SEE NEXT POST FOR THAT STORY.)

Dr. Omalu examined Webster’s brain and that is how he came to discover CTE which, in a recent paper in which he was involved that was published in the journal Neurology, is described as “a progressive neurodegenerative syndrome caused by single, episodic or repetitive blunt force impacts to the head and transfer of acceleration-deceleration forces to the brain.”

Webster, it turned out, had CTE.

Dr. Omalu later examined the brain of Terry Long, a Steelers offensive lineman who was dead at 45. He drank antifreeze.

There were more brains after that, but by now you get the idea. If you don’t, chase down Laskas’s story on the Internet and read it.

CTE is all about abnormal amounts of a protein called Tau. In over-simplified terms, a hit to the head can result in this protein appearing in the brain. During recovery, the Tau disappears, swallowed up by healthy brain cells. However, more blows result in more protein and eventually the healthy brain cells become overwhelmed and surrender.

The result is CTE.

And it is because of CTE that the people who control the way hockey is played at all levels are going to have to make some adjustments.

It is why the days of fighting in junior hockey are numbered. They have to be. The OHL already has moved to ban headshots. The QMJHL and the WHL have to follow suit before another season arrives. And if you are going to ban headshots, you have to outlaw fighting.

It’s one thing to have high-salaried professionals pounding on each other and a completely different thing when adults allow teenagers to punch each other in the mush.

Granted, there is no hard-and-fast evidence right now that says fighting in hockey causes CTE. But the evidence continues to mount and you would have to be a fool to ignore it.

Last month, two former NHL enforcers, Marty McSorley and Rob Ray, acknowledged that they are experiencing memory loss. McSorley, 47, had 273 fights during his NHL career, while Ray, 42, fought 287 times. Who knows how many bouts they had on their way to the NHL?

In a New York Times story early in March, neither would acknowledge that fighting played a major part in whatever difficulties they now experience.

“Think of how many times you’re hit during a game, and your head whips back or sideways,” Ray said. “I couldn’t sit here and say that fighting didn’t play any part in the damage, but it’s such a small part compared with the play on the ice.”

Earlier this year, researchers at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at the Boston University School of Medicine examined the brain of Bob Probert, another former NHL enforcer. Yes, they found CTE.

Later, Probert’s widow, Dani, told The New York Times that her husband in his last couple of years “exhibited some behaviour uncharacteristic to him, especially memory loss and a tendency to lose his temper while driving.”

Think about that for a moment.

And then think about the hockey we witnessed at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Think about the hockey that thrills us every year at the World Junior Championship. Think about any international hockey competition.

There isn’t any fighting and the entertainment value doesn’t seem to suffer.

Concussions and headshots will be on the agenda when the WHL holds its annual meeting in June.

Those gathered will hear from the competition committee, a four-man group that is chaired by Kelly McCrimmon, the owner, general manager and head coach of the Brandon Wheat Kings, and also includes three other GMs — Scott Bonner of the Vancouver Giants, Kelly Kisio of the Calgary Hitmen and Tim Speltz of the Spokane Chiefs.

There were more than 800 fights during the WHL’s 2010-11 regular season. WHL players have experienced more than 100 concussions this season.

The WHL is to be given full marks for reporting concussions the way it does, and for the protocol it has put in place. This, no doubt, is one of the reasons why the tally has gone over 100.

But hopefully the league will take action in June that will help get that number down, way down.

After all, we wouldn’t want any of today’s players to be putting Super Glue on rotting teeth in 30 years now, would we?

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Game Brain – Let’s say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let’s say the scientific community—starting with one young pathologist in Pittsburgh and growing into a chorus of neuroscientists across the country—comes to you and says concussions are making your players crazy, crazy enough to kill themselves, and here, in these slices of brain tissue, is the proof. Do you join these scientists and try to solve the problem, or do you use your power to discredit them?

GQ Magazine October 2009 By Jeanne Marie Laskas

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner’s office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.

The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. “Iron Mike,” legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to…pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

It bothered Omalu to hear this kind of chatter—especially about a dead guy. But Omalu had always fancied himself an advocate for the dead. That’s how he viewed his job: a calling. A forensic pathologist was charged with defending and speaking for the departed—a translator for those still here. A corpse held a story, told in tissue, patterns of trauma, and secrets in cells.

In the autopsy room, Omalu snapped on his gloves and approached the slab. He noted that Mike Webster’s body was sixty-nine inches long and weighed 244 pounds. He propped up the head and picked up his scalpel and sliced open the chest and cracked open the ribs. He took out the heart and found everything he expected of a man who was believed to have died of a heart attack, as was the case with Webster. Then he made a cut from behind the right ear, across the forehead, to the other ear and around. He peeled the scalp away from the skull in two flaps. With the electric saw he carefully cut a cap out of the skull, pulled off the cap, and gently, like approaching a baby in the birth canal, he reached for the brain.

Omalu loved the brain. Of all the organs in the body, it was easily his favorite. He thought of it sort of like Miss America. Such a diva! So high-maintenance: It requires more energy to operate than any other organ. The brain! That was his love and that was his joy, and that’s why his specialty was neuropathology.

Omalu stared at Mike Webster’s brain. He kept thinking, How did this big athletic man end up so crazy in the head? He was thinking about football and brain trauma. The leap in logic was hardly extreme. He was thinking, Dementia pugilistica? “Punch-drunk syndrome,” they called it in boxers. The clinical picture was somewhat like Mike Webster’s: severe dementia—delusion, paranoia, explosive behavior, loss of memory—caused by repeated blows to the head. Omalu figured if chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer’s brain, couldn’t it also destroy a football player’s brain? Could that be what made Mike Webster crazy?

Of course, football players wear helmets, good protection for the skull. But the brain? Floating around inside that skull and, upon impact, sloshing into its walls. Omalu thought: I’ve seen so many cases of people like motorcyclists wearing helmets. On the surface is nothing, but you open the skull and the brain is mush.

So Omalu carried Mike Webster’s brain to the cutting board and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. It appeared utterly normal. Regular folds of gray matter. No mush. No obvious contusions, like in dementia pugilistica. No shrinkage like you would see in Alzheimer’s disease. He reviewed the CT and MRI scans. Normal. That might have been the end of it. He already had a cause of death. But Omalu couldn’t let it go. He wanted to know more about the brain. There had to be an answer. People don’t go crazy for no reason.

He went to his boss, pathologist Cyril Wecht, and asked if he could study the brain, run special tests, a microscopic analysis of the brain tissue, where there might be a hidden story.

There was nothing routine about this request. Another boss might have said, “Stick with the protocol,” especially to a rookie such as Omalu, who had not yet earned a track record, who was acting only on a hunch. But Wecht was famously never one to shy away from a high-profile case—he had examined JFK, Elvis, JonBenét Ramsey—and he said, “Fine.” He said, “Do what you need to do.”

A deeply religious man, Omalu regarded Wecht’s permission as a kind of blessing.

*****

it was late, maybe midnight, when Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer working in a renovated firehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, got a call from the Pittsburgh coroner’s office. It was not unusual for him to be at the office that late; he was having a bad week. He struggled to understand the man’s accent on the phone, jutted his head forward. “Excuse me? You need what?”

The brain. Permission from the Webster family to process Mike Webster’s brain for microscopic examination.

Oh brother was Fitzsimmons’s initial thought. As if the Webster case wasn’t already complicated enough.

Fitzsimmons had first met Webster back in 1997, when he showed up at his office asking for help untangling his messed-up life. Webster was a hulk of a man with oak-tree arms and hands the size of ham hocks. Fitzsimmons shook his hand and got lost in it, mangled fingers going every which way, hitting his palm in creepy places that made him flinch. It seemed like every one of those fingers had been broken many times over. Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. He really couldn’t remember whom he’d seen or when. He couldn’t remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.

“With all due respect, you’re losing your train of thought, sir,” Fitzsimmons said to Webster. “You appear to have a serious illness, sir.” Not a pleasant thing to tell anyone, and here was a hero, a famous football player Fitzsimmons once bowed to, as did all young guys worth the Terrible Towels they proudly waved in the 1970s. The Dynasty! The black and the gold! It fueled optimism here, up and down the rivers, mill towns held tight in the folds of the Allegheny Mountains. And here was Iron Mike himself.

As a personal-injury lawyer, Fitzsimmons thought what he saw in Webster was an obvious case of a man suffering a closed-head injury—the kind he’d seen plenty of times in people who had suffered through car crashes and industrial accidents. No fracture, no signs of physical damage to the skull, but sometimes severe psychiatric problems, memory loss, personality changes, aggressive behavior.

“Please help me,” Mike Webster said.

It took Fitzsimmons a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster’s medical records, scattered in doctors’ offices throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He sent Webster for four separate medical evaluations, and all four doctors confirmed Fitzsimmons’s suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.

Fitzsimmons filed the disability claim with the NFL. There are several levels of disability with the NFL, and Mike Webster was awarded the lowest one: partial, about $3,000 a month.

Fitzsimmons said, “Oh, please.” He said if ever there was a guy who qualified for the highest, it was Mike Webster. The highest level was “total disability, football-related,” reserved for those who were disabled as a result of playing the game. It would yield Webster as much as $12,000 a month. Fitzsimmons said to the NFL, “Four doctors—all with the same diagnosis!”

The NFL said no. Four doctors were not enough. They wanted Webster seen by their own doctor. So their own doctor examined Webster…and concurred with the other four: closed-head injury. Football-related.

The NFL pension board voted unanimously for partial disability anyway.

Fitzsimmons said, “You have got to be kidding me.” He filed an appeal with the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, where the pension board is headquartered. The judge reversed the decision of the NFL pension board—the first time in history any such action had been taken against the NFL.

And yet still the NFL fought. They took the case to federal court. They said Mike Webster—who had endured probably 25,000 violent collisions during his career and now was living on Pringles and Little Debbie pecan rolls, who was occasionally catatonic, in a fetal position for days—they said Mike Webster didn’t qualify for full disability.*

Mike Webster and Bob Fitzsimmons grew close during those days. In fact, Mike Webster clung to Fitzsimmons like a baby to his mamma. He took to sleeping in the parking lot, waiting for Fitzsimmons to show up for work. He would stay there all day, just watching, waiting, and when Fitzsimmons would go home, Mike Webster would go back to his truck and write him letters. Hundreds and hundreds of letters. “Dear Bob, Thank you for helping me. We’ve got to keep up the fight. We have to see this thing through.” And then he would start talking about wars. And blood splattering. The letters would inevitably trail off into the mutterings of a madman.

And now he was dead.

Bob Fitzsimmons did not know what in the world to say, in 2002, to the man with the thick accent who called from the Pittsburgh coroner’s office, four days after Mike Webster died of a heart attack, asking to study Webster’s brain. Fitzsimmons was, in truth, grieving his client’s death deeply; Mike Webster had been living for nothing but the case, the appeal, the last victory against a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry that seemed to have used him, allowed him to become destroyed, and then threw him away like a rotten piece of meat.

And now he was dead.

“Yes,” Fitzsimmons said. And he gave Omalu the brain.

*****

days and nights went by. Weekends. Slicing, staining, ordering slides. It got so Omalu was embarrassed in front of his co-workers at the morgue. “He’s gone mad!” he imagined them reasonably thinking. “He won’t stop looking at that brain! He’s here at 2 a.m.!”

So Omalu put Mike Webster’s brain in a plastic tub and took it home to his condo in the Churchill section of Pittsburgh. He put it in the corner of his living room, where he set up a table, a cutting board, some knives, and a microscope, where he could work without shame as long as he wanted and as hard as he wanted, no one looking over his shoulder except Prema, his sympathetic wife. “What the mind does not know, the eye cannot see,” he would say to her, explaining the piles of books and journal articles cluttering the house, the sheer volume of research on trauma, on football, on helmets, on Alzheimer’s disease, on concussions, on impact, on g-force, on protein accumulation, on dementia pugilistica. He had to learn more so he could see more so he could learn more so he could see. For months it’s all he thought about. It became for him a calling. He was after all a spiritual man, and he came to know Mike Webster in the most personal way. “Help me” is what he heard Mike Webster say.

One day he started on a new set of slides, prepared for him by a lab at the University of Pittsburgh where he had ordered specialized staining. He was ordering so many slides, he had to start paying for this out of his own pocket. He put the first slide from the new set under his microscope and looked in.

“What is this?” he said out loud. “Geez. Gee! What is this?”

Brown and red splotches. All over the place. Large accumulations of tau proteins. Tau was kind of like sludge, clogging up the works, killing cells in regions responsible for mood, emotions, and executive functioning.

This was why Mike Webster was crazy.

Omalu showed the slides to Wecht and to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh. Everyone agreed: This was a disease, or a form of it, that no one had ever seen before. Omalu wondered what to call it. He wanted a good acronym. Eventually, he came up with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He wrote a paper detailing his findings. He titled it “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player” and put it in an envelope and sent it to the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Neurosurgery. He thought NFL doctors would be pleased when they read it. He really did. He thought they would welcome a finding as important as this: scientific evidence that the kind of repeated blows to the head sustained in football could cause severe, debilitating brain damage. He thought they could use his research to try and fix the problem.

“I was naive,” he says now. “There are times I wish I never looked at Mike Webster’s brain. 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.”

*****

nothing was welcoming, nothing was collegial, about the NFL’s reaction to Omalu’s article that appeared in the July 2005 edition of Neurosurgery. In a lengthy letter to the editor, three scientists, all of whom were on the NFL payroll, said they wanted Omalu’s article retracted.

“We disagree,” they said.

“Serious flaws.”

“Complete misunderstanding.”

The scientists, Ira Casson, Elliot Pellman, and David Viano, were all members of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee. 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…a rheumatologist, as was the case with Pellman.

A rheumatologist? You picked a joint guy to lead your brain study?

What the NFL couldn’t have known then, of course, is that by the time Omalu’s article was published, he had already gotten a second brain, that of former Steelers guard Terry Long, who died at 45 after drinking antifreeze.

Same morgue. Same slab. Same story. Terry Long had a clinical history similar to Webster’s. Depression. 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.

Omalu took Terry Long’s brain home, sliced it, sent it in for stains, ran the same tests, found the same splotches, the same tau proteins. “This stuff should not be in the brain of a 45-year-old man,” he said. “This looks more like a 90-year-old brain with advanced Alzheimer’s.”

So Omalu wrote another paper. He called it “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part II” and put it in an envelope and sent it to Neurosurgery, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal that did not, in the end, accept the NFL’s request to retract the first one and went ahead and published the second.

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.

“Preposterous,” they said to reporters.

“It’s not appropriate science.”

“Purely speculative.”

Omalu did not like the education he was receiving. He felt he was learning something very ugly about America, about how an $8 billion industry could attempt to silence even the most well-intentioned scientist and in the most insidious ways. He was becoming afraid. Friends were warning him. They were saying, “You are challenging one of the most powerful organizations in the world. There may be other things going on that you’re not aware of. 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. He knew retired football players, was co-chairing a study at the University of North Carolina’s Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, suggesting a link between concussions and clinical depression. Bailes had experience that touched and intersected and paralleled Omalu’s research in the way of all fascinating coincidences.

On the phone, Bailes introduced himself. He said, “Dr. Omalu, I’m calling to tell you I believe you.”

It was the first time anyone who ever had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu’s work. He ran home and told his wife. She said, “How do you know? It could be a trick!” They were becoming increasingly fearful. From his village in Nigeria, Omalu’s father would call. “Stop doing this work, Bennet. I have heard not nice things about the NFL; they are very powerful, and some of them not nice!” It didn’t much help that one day Omalu got a visit from a sports reporter who had come for some quotes, who saw Webster’s and Long’s brains sitting in tubs in the living room and had said, “Get these out of your house! Someone could come in and kill you and steal these brains! Do you know what you’re dealing with?”

In the end, Omalu sent all his brain tissue to Bailes to store in his lab in West Virginia. Bailes met Fitzsimmons, and that became the team, a kind of brotherhood with a mission: to learn more about the disease, to understand the NFL’s obstinate, perilous denial, and to break them of it.

*****

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, 2006, at 44, he shot himself in the mouth.

Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.

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 1990s, 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 3,000 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.

Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.

Why these guys? Omalu and Bailes wondered. 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? Why were so many retired players suffering from depression and signs of Alzheimer’s? 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? It was a fascinating puzzle from a medical point of view—and they thought it would have been fascinating from the NFL’s point of view, too. Omalu had, in fact, asked. Way back after diagnosing Webster, he’d sent a letter to the Hall of Fame proposing a comprehensive, longitudinal study—take every Hall of Famer, get his genetic profile, get a baseline, monitor him every six months for depression and other neuropsychiatric symptoms, and look at his brain when he died.

Omalu did not get a response to that letter. So he sent a follow-up six months later. No answer.

Omalu, Fitzsimmons, and Bailes formed an organization, the Sports Legacy Institute, with the intention of studying CTE, furthering the science. 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. “We must not go running to the press with every new case!” Omalu would tell him. “We need to study, we need to learn.” Nowinski had bigger ideas. He said CTE was a public-health issue and the public had a right to know. He believed the Sports Legacy Institute—SLI—could and should make headlines.

No one could blame Nowinski, really, if he was on some sort of crusade. He was not a scientist. He was a former WWE wrestler who had fought under the stage name Chris Harvard—the only Harvard-educated wrestler in the WWE. He had played football in college, but it was the head bashing as a wrestler that did him in, especially that last one, at the Pepsi Center in Albany, when a Dudley Death Drop (“3D”) engineered by the Dudley Boyz sent poor Chris Harvard’s head smashing through a table to the cheers of thousands.

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.

He wrote a meticulously researched book, Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis, got himself on a lot of TV shows, and took the Chris Nowinski CTE show on the road.

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 2007, 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—300 participants in all.

They asked Bailes to come. They did not ask Omalu.

“Why did they not invite me?” Omalu said to Bailes. “Why does the NFL not want to speak to Dr. Omalu?”

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. “They were trying to blackball him, lock him out, marginalize him,” Bailes says. “He was the whistle-blower.”

“You will present my work, then,” Omalu said to Bailes. “You will take my slides. You will take my research. You will show them what Dr. Omalu has found!” Not that it was news. He had already published the papers. Why weren’t they listening?

So that’s what Bailes did. Packed up Omalu’s slides and downloaded his PowerPoint presentation and headed to Chicago.

By this point, the NFL had made some progress in admitting to a concussion problem. For one thing, Pellman, the rheumatologist, had stepped down as chair of the committee. Also, the committee announced a new concussion study that would blow everyone else’s out of the water. (It involved a battery of clinical testing on 120 retired NFL players and would take at least until 2012 to finish. Bailes, in fact, was already working on a similar study, due out next year.)

But there was real, actual progress. The NFL instituted standards for concussion management: “Medical decisions must always override competitive considerations.” They would do neuropsychological baseline testing on all NFL players—use that as a tool to assist in determining when, after a head injury, a player could return to the field.

(On hearing of the NFL’s concussion guidelines, Omalu said: “You mean they never had any concussion guidelines before now? Geez.”)

Perhaps most encouraging was the 88 Plan, a display of humanity on the part of the NFL and its treatment of retired players suffering dementia. The 88 Plan grew out of a letter written by Sylvia Mackey, wife of Hall of Famer John Mackey, who wore number 88 for the Colts. His existence, she said, had become a “deteriorating, ugly, caregiver-killing, degenerative, brain-destroying tragic horror,” and the $2,450 per month pension he was receiving from the NFL could not begin to cover the institutionalization he needed. And so the 88 Plan, which offered up to $88,000 per year to former players with dementia.

Not that the NFL accepted any actual responsibility for this mess. Its MTBI committee published scientific studies claiming that repeated head bashing did not cause brain damage. On a 2007 HBO special, co-chair Casson was asked six different ways if repeated football-related concussions could result in brain damage, dementia, or depression. Six times he said no.

In Chicago, Bailes stood up there with evidence to the contrary. Scientific proof. Tissue damage in the brain. He saw guys rolling their eyes. He heard the exasperated sighs. He thought about Omalu and why he was doing this—how he had nothing against the NFL, how he had barely known what the NFL was before he looked at Webster’s brain. He thought about how Omalu was about as pure a scientist as anyone could bring into this equation, and how he had spent $100,000 of his own money to get to the bottom of this.

So Bailes stood up there and he showed slides of Webster’s seemingly perfect brain on the cutting board. He showed the slices. He showed the tau, that sludge that did him in. He showed Long, and he showed Waters, and he showed Strzelczyk. He showed that he believed in Omalu’s work.

The meeting was closed to media, but Bailes remembers it well. “They didn’t say, ‘Thanks, Doc, that’s great.’ They got mad at me. We got into it. And I’m thinking, ‘This is a new disease in America’s most popular sport, and how are its leaders responding? Alienate the scientist who found it? Refuse to accept the science coming from him?’ ”

At a press briefing afterward, Omalu’s name kept coming up, and so Casson responded: “The only scientifically valid evidence of chronic encephalopathy in athletes is in boxers and in some steeplechase jockeys. It’s never been scientifically, validly documented in any other athletes.”

A total dismissal of Omalu’s work.

And what about the other studies? What about Bailes’s report in 2003 out of the University of North Carolina with Kevin Guskiewicz, a leading expert in sports medicine, which, based on surveys of thousands of retired players, found that players who had suffered multiple concussions were three times more likely to suffer clinical depression?

The NFL concluded that that study was “flawed.”

And what about the UNC follow-up study in 2005 that showed that repeatedly concussed NFL players had five times the rate of “mild cognitive impairment,” or pre-Alzheimer’s disease. That study showed retired NFL players suffering Alzheimer’s disease at an alarming 37 percent higher rate than the average guy walking down the street.

“Flawed.”

The only experiments that were not flawed, then, were the studies conducted by the scientists paid by the NFL, which just happened to disagree with a growing number of researchers. “That’s just unprecedented in science,” says Bailes. “That would be like the American Heart Association saying, ‘Hey, if it’s not our sponsored research, we don’t acknowledge it or comment on it. Only we can figure out heart disease!’ ”

Or it would be like the tobacco industry in the 1980s—everyone saying cigarettes caused cancer except for the people making money off cigarettes.

It would have been laughable, if it weren’t so irresponsible.

At stake, after all, were people’s lives. Athletes suffering head injuries, pressured anyway by a culture of machismo that says: Get back in the game! Man up! Don’t ever show it hurts. To say nothing of the college football players, the high school football players, the Pee Wee leaguers, who dreamt of going pro.

On this point alone Bailes goes ballistic:

“Here we have a multibillion-dollar industry. Where does their responsibility begin? Say you’re a kid and you sign up to play football. You realize you can blow out your knee, you can even break your neck and become paralyzed. Those are all known risks. But you don’t sign up to become a brain-damaged young adult. The NFL should be leading the world in figuring this out, acknowledging the risk. They should be thanking us for bringing them this research. Where does their responsibility begin?

“Look, there was a seminal study published by the University of Oklahoma two years ago. They put accelerometers, which measure acceleration, in the helmets of University of Oklahoma players. And they documented the g-force. So we know the g-force for a football player being knocked out is about sixty to ninety g’s. To compare, a fighter pilot will pass out at five or six g’s, but that’s over a long period of time. These football g-forces are just a few milliseconds, very brief—boom! And they found that in the open field, the dramatic cases of a receiver getting blindsided is about one hundred g’s. It knocks them out. Very dramatic, everybody sees it. But the linemen? They were actually getting twenty to thirty g’s on every play. Because they start out and they bang heads. Every play.

“Helmets are not the answer. The brain has a certain amount of play inside the skull. It’s buoyed up in the cerebral spinal fluid. It sits in this fluid, floats. When the head suddenly stops, the brain continues, reverberates back. So when I hit, boom, my skull stops, but my brain continues forward for about a centimeter. Boom, boom, it reverberates back. So you could have padding that’s a foot thick. It’s not going to change the acceleration/deceleration phenomenon. And a lot of these injuries are rotational. The fibers get torn with rotation. You’ve got a face mask that’s like a fulcrum sitting out here: You get hit, your head swings around. That’s when a lot of these fibers are sheared—by rotation. A helmet can’t ever prevent that.

“And have you seen helmets lately? In the old days of football, you had this leather cap to protect your ears. That was it. You’d never put your head in the game. You’d be knocked out after the first play! Even in the ’60s, the helmet was a light shell. The modern helmet is like a weapon.

“So I told the NFL, I said, ‘Why don’t you take the head out of the game? Just take it out of the game! Let the linemen start from a squatting position instead of getting down for head-to-head. Have them stand up like they do on pass protection. So there’s not this obligatory head contact.’

“Nothing. They had nothing to say. Who am I? I’m only a guy who has concussed hundreds of rats in the lab, a player for ten years, and a sideline doctor for twenty years. What do I know? Some stupid neurosurgeon.

“Instead of answering anything we bring to them, the NFL is ducking and shooting arrows at us. Criticizing us. Saying our work is a bunch of bunk. They have only attacked us.”

*****

the sixth case was Tom McHale, offensive lineman for nine seasons, most of them with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Depression and chronic pain in his joints had led him to discover oxycodone and cocaine. On May 25, 2008, at age 45, he died of a lethal combination of both.

Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.

He decided not to release the McHale case to the press. The NFL was already plenty pissed off. They had refused to acknowledge CTE or any of Omalu’s research or, really, Omalu himself. It seemed they wanted to simply pretend Omalu did not exist, and he was sick of it, sick of insisting that yes, Bennet Omalu is a real person who has discovered a real disease that is really damaging real people even as you sit there denying it. The public debate with the NFL was a distraction from his research. He would continue his work quietly, examining brains. He would set his sights on curing the disease. He would prepare scientific papers; the proof would be in the science.

Ideas like that caused the Nowinski connection to crumble. Continue the work quietly? But Nowinski was building SLI; he was making a name for himself. The split was abrupt, ugly, and to this day neither side agrees on what happened. Nowinski took SLI and teamed up with the Boston University School of Medicine to create the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. He started a brain bank under the direction of Ann McKee, an expert in neurodegenerative diseases, and they went on to do important work, diagnosing more cases of CTE and starting a registry of over one hundred athletes who have agreed to donate their brains for study after they die.

Indeed, the casual observer who wants to learn more about CTE will be easily led to SLI and the Boston group—there’s an SLI Twitter link, an SLI awards banquet, an SLI Web site with photos of Nowinski and links to videos of him on TV and in the newspapers. Gradually, Omalu’s name slips out of the stories, and Bailes slips out, and Fitzsimmons, and their good fight. As it happens in stories, the telling and retelling simplify and reduce.

History gets written. People shout and claim turf. Heroes get invented.

The Boston group wanted to see the Tom McHale brain, and at the request of the family Omalu agreed. So he sliced the brain in two and sent one half via UPS to Boston. He said please don’t release the diagnosis to the press; he was preparing a scientific paper identifying CTE subtypes. Nowinski remembers this conversation very differently. He says Omalu never returned calls, and to this day he vehemently defends his decision to go ahead and announce the McHale diagnosis anyway, in Tampa, during the week of the 2009 Super Bowl. He made national headlines announcing that the Boston group, and not Omalu, had diagnosed CTE in yet another NFL player. (Nowinski says he was acting on behalf of the McHale family.)

“Geez,” Omalu said, watching the CNN coverage. “That’s my brain! They are lying about who diagnosed that brain!”

It was enough to tempt a man to become wicked, to lead him to thoughts of lawsuits and vengeance.

But Omalu did not become wicked. He reminded himself of who he was. “I perform autopsies on dead people every day, so every day I’m reminded of my mortality. It has made me become very religious. I know I’m going to die someday, I know I’m going to be judged by God, and I have work to do while I am here on the earth.”

*****

morgantown, West Virginia, is surrounded by blue firs and green hardwoods, a town tucked in the folds of the Appalachian Basin, where coal still moves sleepily in and out on barges along the slim Monongahela River. The university—and its world-class health care complex—is by far the biggest thing going.

In Bailes’s office, Becky, his secretary, just accepted a package and is digging through Styrofoam peanuts. It used to disturb her to reach into a cardboard box and pull out a jar full of brains, but by now she is used to it.

In the jar is Omalu’s fifteenth confirmed case of CTE—the most dramatic he’s seen. He is not ready to release it to the press.

“Your brain made it,” Becky says to Omalu, who has himself just arrived. He doesn’t like traveling with brains. He trusts UPS. “You had a good trip?”

“Sure, sure, sure,” Omalu says. His face is walnut dark and boyishly round. His movements are smooth, calm, and efficient; the overall effect is of a nattily dressed man who might at any moment start whistling. “But my tailor was not in!” he tells Becky. Omalu moved to California two years ago—where he accepted a post as chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County—but he still buys all his suits from one tailor in Pittsburgh. Nearly all of them are wide blue pinstripe, vaguely flashy, with impeccable fit. Custom-made. Shirts, too. He does not like pockets. If you have a shirt with a pocket, you run the risk of lint collecting at the bottom of the pocket. That is his position. Do away with the pocket—no lint. This is simply logical.

Fitzsimmons arrives, slim with a broad grin and quiet attire. “How you doing, buddy?” he says to Omalu. “Got the red tie going today, huh?” The two men embrace, slap each other’s backs.

Eventually, Bailes comes flying in, still in scrubs, just out of surgery, his mask hanging half off. He is carrying a Diet Coke. “You guys want nuts? Something to eat? Crackers? I haven’t eaten.”

They stretch out in the conference room, visit like country people, tell jokes, and forget about time.

“And so this guy, he calls from some smart-guy science magazine,” Omalu is saying. “And he says, ‘Dr. Omalu, you are a brilliant man! Why did you fizzle?’ And I told him, I said, ‘Dr. Omalu did not fizzle!’ ”

“Fizzle,” Bailes says, shooting a grin at Fitzsimmons. The admiration the two share for Omalu is protective and fatherly. Even his vocabulary is raw innocence.

Then they get down to business, and Fitzsimmons pulls out the papers.

“Do I need to read it?” Bailes says.

“I’m your lawyer, and I say sign it,” Fitzsimmons says, and all three men get out their pens and find their names, which together are “hereinafter referred to as ‘The Brain Injury Group.’ ”

A brain bank. The Rockefeller Foundation. A brand-new $30 million research facility. The Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute opened a year ago across the street from Bailes’s office—a slick building, 78,000 square feet of state-of-the-art laboratory space. It’s the only nonprofit independent institute in the world exclusively dedicated to the study of human memory and memory disorders, a partnership with West Virginia University and Johns Hopkins University. Senator Jay Rockefeller named it after his mom, Blanchette, who had Alzheimer’s and died in 1992. And now, on the first floor, will be Webster’s brain and Long’s brain and all the rest—a whole laboratory dedicated to brain injuries and the study of CTE. They are gathering more brains, and more still; they would like to get Steve McNair’s brain, and the boxer Roy Jones Jr. just signed on to donate his brain when he dies. The new center launches this month.

Omalu has set his sights on curing CTE. And why not? “You pop a pill before you play, a medicine that prevents the buildup of tau,” he says. “Like you take an aspirin to prevent heart disease.” Why not? “This is how we now need to talk. Not this back-and-forth of human selfishness. Not this NFL politics and meanness. Anybody still denying the disease is out of his mind. The issue now is treatment. That is my next step, now that I understand the pathology.”

The Brain Injury Group is preparing seven new scientific papers. New findings. Subcategories of CTE. A possible genotype. Omalu has anything but fizzled. He took the conversation out of the public domain, got to work, and Fitzsimmons got to work on the Rockefeller deal, and Bailes on the scientific papers, and really, what they want is the NFL to join them in trying to figure this thing out.

It appears highly unlikely. The last they heard from the NFL was when the NFL called in 2008 in what seemed like a final attempt to disprove Omalu’s work. We have been speaking to a scientist. The world’s leading authority on tau proteins. We would like to send him to West Virginia to look at your work.

Bailes agreed.

Neuropathologist Peter Davies of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York has been studying Alzheimer’s and tau proteins for more than thirty years. He receives no money from the NFL, not even parking fare. He was more than a little doubtful about what he would find in West Virginia. He had examined thousands of brains, and he’d never seen anything even close to the degree of tau accumulation that Omalu was describing in his papers. He believed that Omalu was well-intentioned but naive and mistaken. “I was very skeptical,” he says. “I didn’t think there was anything there.”

So when Davies got to West Virginia in October 2008, he smiled politely and walked into Bailes’s lab, and Omalu handed him the first slide, and he looked in the microscope, and he said, “Whoa.” He said, “Wow.” He said, “What the hell is this?”

It went on like this for two days, slide after slide. It got to the point where the only doubt Davies had left was on the staining of the slides themselves. Perhaps the technicians were not using state-of-the-art equipment and solutions. He asked Omalu if he would give him tissue samples, pieces of brain to take back to his lab in New York, where he could make new slides with his own equipment, his own technicians, his own sophisticated stains.

“Sure, sure, sure,” Omalu said. “You take some pieces home, talk to your guys, see what you think.”

In his lab in New York, Davies ran his tests, and when he looked in the microscope, he was stunned. The tau pathology was even worse—even more pronounced—than what he’d seen in West Virginia. “Come look at this!” he said, calling in his team of researchers. “What the hell am I looking at? This will blow your socks off! And it’s not just in one case. I have three separate cases here. Bucket loads of tau pathology, and the one guy wasn’t even 40 years old.…” It was far more severe than anything they’d ever seen in the most advanced Alzheimer’s cases—and in completely different regions of the brain.

“My God, this is extraordinary,” Davies said. “We have to get involved.” He wrote to Bailes and Omalu. He said Omalu was right.

“The credit must go to Bennet Omalu,” he says today, “because he first reported this and nobody believed him, nobody in the field, and I’m included in that. I did not think there was anything there. But when I looked at the stuff, he was absolutely right. I was wrong to be skeptical.”

The NFL never released Davies’s report, never made it public. And they never talked to Omalu, Bailes, or Fitzsimmons again.

They called another meeting, much smaller than the Chicago summit, in May 2009, to talk again about concussions and the progress of the MTBI committee’s work. They invited researchers from the Boston group. They invited Davies, who told them about what he saw in West Virginia.

“There is no doubt there is something there,” Davies said. But he differs on the conclusion. He does not believe the main cause of CTE is concussion or trauma. He has even designed studies, principally on rats, to test his own hypothesis that the main cause is steroid use. He admits freely, however, that he is not a trauma expert, like Bailes, that he has not spent his career, like Omalu, looking at brains that have suffered repeated trauma. He’s an Alzheimer’s guy who believes that there has to be some reason he’s never seen brains like this, and he believes the reason is steroid use. Plenty of people, after all, suffer concussions—not just athletes. Wouldn’t he have seen some evidence of CTE in brains of regular folks over all these years? But only athletes take steroids, and so that is the link he is following.

Bailes, who co-authored a book on steroids and sports, does not rule out steroids or any other contributing factor to CTE, but points out that synthetic steroids were not even invented until 1959—thirty years after brain changes were first identified in boxers in the form of dementia pugilistica.

Either way, the steroid theory is not, in itself, a cheerful hypothesis for the NFL to consider. What of its vaunted drug-testing policy? What of the way fans have been coaxed to blithely accept that the reason these big fast guys keep getting bigger and faster every year is…natural. Not because of performance-enhancing drugs.

Whether it’s concussions or steroids or a combination of both, the NFL has a problem to solve that is becoming impossible to deny.

Ira Casson, co-director of the MTBI, was at the May meeting, and he came away from it still committed to the NFL’s talking points—the ones he had first put out in 2005 when he co-authored the letter asking for the retraction of Omalu’s article in Neurosurgery.

Has Casson’s position changed, now that scientists from across the country have come to accept the research as sound?

“No,” he says. “Nothing has happened that has changed any of our opinions about what we wrote in those letters. Is there a relationship between professional football, a career in the NFL, and changes in the brain? Well, we don’t know. Maybe.”

So why does he think so many independent scientists are saying there is?

“I think there are a lot of…gaps,” he says. The main problem, as he sees it, is that all scientists have really looked at, after all, are dead people. There has been very little clinical data, he says, collected on living people—which is what the MTBI committee’s study is designed to do.

“Essentially,” he says, “if you look at the cases that have been reported in the medical literature—and I don’t include The New York Times as medical literature—for the most part, the clinical data was collected posthumously: interviews with families, ‘people told me this,’ and so forth. You don’t see any data that says, well, here’s what a doctor found when they examined him; here’s what their psychiatric evaluation showed; here’s what their neurologist found. There’s none of that!

“To me that creates a question of what exactly is the clinical picture? I don’t think it’s fair to jump from a couple cases that were suicides to assume that some of the others that, well, the guy was driving fast down the highway, it must have been a suicide. Well, we don’t know that. I don’t think anybody can tell you that unless you had a psychiatrist who was treating the person. I think there’s a lot of people jumping to conclusions.”

*****

“very little clinical data.”

Fitzsimmons and Bailes and Omalu are sitting in Bailes’s conference room in West Virginia, contemplating what Casson has said.

“Very little clinical data?” Fitzsimmons says. But he had five doctors, including one from the NFL, who examined Mike Webster and concluded he had a closed-head injury. “I had a file this thick of clinical data.”

“Why is he doing this?” Bailes says. “I just don’t understand why the NFL is doing this. You know, pick up a textbook.” He picks up a textbook, the kind you’d find in any neurosurgery department of any medical school. “Here’s The Neuropathology of Dementia. It describes, in great detail, tau pathology. There’s a whole chapter here about trauma causing dementia. That’s why this is very quixotic to me that’s there’s even any resistance. It’s well-known that brain trauma is a risk for dementia. Why are we arguing this? Why can’t we accept this and move on and try to prevent it?”

“Clinical data?” Omalu says. “Clinical data? Pardon me, but what is the gold standard for diagnosis? Autopsy! That is the gold standard for diagnosis. Only when you open up the body, look at the tissues, do you find proof of disease.”

They have proof of the fifteenth case right here, sitting in a jar, a story still to tell.

And then there is the sixteenth case: Gerald Small, Dolphins cornerback in the 1980s. He was found dead at 52 in Sacramento, California, where he was unemployed, living with an aunt, drunk. The Sacramento coroner sent the brain to Omalu, who is by now well-known on the coroners’ circuit.

Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.

The seventeenth case is Curtis Whitley, center for the Chargers, Panthers, Raiders, in the 1990s. He was just 39 when he was found facedown in the bathroom of a rented trailer in West Texas, shirtless, shoeless, wearing blue warm-up pants.

Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.

“You would think that sooner or later, like most things in life, you have to deal with the truth,” says Bailes. “I think that was part of the NFL’s intent on sending their expert to Morgantown. Maybe they’re planning their strategy now, I don’t know.”

*On December 13, 2006, seven years after the initial filing and four years after Webster’s death, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the ruling that Webster had been totally and permanently disabled as a result of brain injuries from playing professional football. The ruling, a 3–0 decision, resulted in an award of more than $1.5 million to Webster’s four children and former wife.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Some scary stuff here… even though it's football. I am stunned to hear the short life expectancy of pro players.

Life expectancy of 55 shocks CFLers into push for safety
ALLAN MAKI Published Tuesday, Apr. 05, 2011
CALGARY— From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

Doug Brown will acknowledge it may already be too late for him. Having played more than a decade of professional football, most of it with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, the 36-year-old defensive lineman figures he has taken more than 12,000 hits to the head.

And now he’s beginning to understand what that means.

At last week’s Canadian Football League Players’ Association meeting in Las Vegas, Mr. Brown, the Blue Bombers representative, listened in stunned silence as medical findings and a University of North Carolina study painted a grim picture of head trauma and its long-term affects.

“Repeatedly concussed National Football League players,” said the UNC report, “had five times the rate of mild cognitive impairment (pre-Alzheimer’s) than the average population,” while “retired NFL players suffer from Alzheimer’s disease at a 37-per-cent higher rate than average.” Then came the kicker. Two doctors determined “that the average life expectancy for all pro football players, including all positions and backgrounds, is 55. Several insurance carriers say it is 51 years.”

The data was so compelling that the CFLPA’s board spent hours discussing player safety and expressed an interest in adopting an NFL proposal for dealing with dangerous hits. The membership needs to agree to stiffer fines and suspensions for dangerous high-impact hits before its player safety and welfare committee can make a recommendation to the league. CFL commissioner Mark Cohon and chief operating officer Michael Copeland were in Las Vegas and stressed their concern for player safety as well.

“We want to align ourselves with what the NFL is doing,” said Mr. Brown, once voted the CFL’s top Canadian player. “The NFL has identified eight key points in a football game where players are in a helpless position – when a quarterback throws the ball and is unprotected, when a receiver is catching a pass, when a kicker [is following through]. The NFL wants to bring in stronger punitive measures to stop hits on players in those situations.”

On the line, contact between opposing players produces impacts 20 to 30 times the force of gravity, Mr. Brown said. “Statistics show a player getting blindsided and not bracing himself gets 100 Gs,” he continued. “The way it’ll pan out is you start with the most detrimental, severe behaviour and examples of tremendous impact and bring in punitive action. You go from there to changing the culture of the game.”

B.C. Lions general manager and head coach Wally Buono believes the league has already done a “tremendous job” altering and enforcing its penalties to, say, protect quarterbacks once they’ve thrown a pass. As for changing the culture of football, that simply may not be possible.

“The helmet is, unfortunately, a battering ram in how the game is played. And concussions don’t come from just hitting an opponent in the head,” Mr. Buono said. “I can get one hitting you in the knee, in the back, in your shoulder. You make rules to prevent injuries but at the end of the day it’s still a violent game.”

Mr. Brown, who wrote about head injuries in Tuesday’s Winnipeg Free Press, admitted football players are set in their habits by the time they reach the pros, especially when it comes to using their helmets as a weapon. A former high-level rugby player, Mr. Brown spoke of the difference in tackling strategies between the two sports. In rugby, he was schooled on how to use a rival’s momentum against him. “You wrap [your arms] around the guy’s legs and fall backward. As he falls, you twist so you end up on top,” he said.

“But in football, you’re taught to stand your ground and not give up yards. Using the helmet is part of the game.”

By being paid to play, Mr. Brown has agreed to accept a certain measure of risk. His worries go beyond what will happen to him in his later years to the young kids who play at the grassroots level and what’s being done to inform them. To underscore the importance of the issue, the new video game Madden NFL 12 will show players suffering from a concussion and being on the sideline for the balance of the game.

The game will not show helmet-to-helmet hits but will heighten awareness of the increasing number of head injuries. Former NFL coach John Madden, who helped develop the video game, told The New York Times that kids can learn a valuable lesson while controlling their virtual players.

“It starts with young kids – they start in video games. I think the osmosis is if you get a concussion, that’s a serious thing and you shouldn’t play,” said Mr. Madden. “We want that message to be strong.”

Mr. Brown’s message is that “while it’s almost too little too late for guys who have been playing a while,” the more information on head injuries, the better, particularly for players early in their career.

“The culture of pro sports is there’s a lot of denial. It’s a young person’s game and it’s hard to see the light at the end of your career. It’s like a rock star mentality,” Mr. Brown said. “You work six months a year and play a game for a living. Unfortunately with us, it balances out. There’s a payment to be made at the end of your career.

“Sixty snaps a game, 18 to 20 games a season for 10 years. It adds up.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Players slowly killing themselves

By: Doug Brown Winnipeg Free Press Posted: 04/5/2011

Over the seven years I have attended the CFL Player's Association Annual General Meeting in the world's largest playground of Las Vegas, I have found that you can always count on a prevailing theme to emerge from the conference and inundate your thoughts after the discussions, and this year was no different.

After three days of meetings with Reebok, the commissioner and his legal representation, our legal counsel, and the CFLPA executive, I found myself concerned with one issue more than any other as I boarded the 8:30 p.m. direct flight back to Winnipeg: player safety and the future of the game of football. Period.

This obviously sounds like a dramatic assessment to make when you realize that the numbers for the CFL were better in 2010 than they have ever been. We learned this year that we beat the NHL on average viewership per game, and anytime football surpasses hockey north of the border it's a big deal. Even when it comes to merchandising, the Saskatchewan Roughriders sell the third most apparel out of any team in Canada right now, just after the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens. That being said, allow me to share with you some of the information we were run over with that led me to draw such a conclusion.

According to information from a UNC study we were shown, "Repeatedly concussed NFL players had five times the rate of mild cognitive impairment (pre-Alzheimers) than the average population." The same study also showed that, "…retired NFL football players suffer from Alzheimer's disease at a 37 per cent higher rate than average." Going into this conference we were all somewhat familiar with the long term consequences of playing football, but not to the depth that was introduced at our meetings.

Next we were shown that Time Magazine had produced a story about football called The Most Dangerous Game, and the author, Sean Gregory, concluded that, "Men between the ages of 30 and 49 have a one in a thousand chance of being diagnosed with dementia, Alzheimers, or another memory related disease. An NFL retiree has a one in fifty-three chance of receiving the same diagnosis." This was around the moment in Las Vegas where a collective 'thunk' was heard as all of our jaws hit the floor. These are not CFL statistics, but you would have to be pretty naive to think that these facts do not apply to our game as well.

By this point, morale was already at an all time low at Planet Hollywood, but then, if you can imagine, things got worse as we were shown the findings by Michael Glueck M.D. and Robert Cihak M.D. who wrote, "It is not a widely disseminated, downloaded or discussed fact that the average life expectancy for all pro football players, including all positions and backgrounds, is 55 years. Several insurance carriers say it is 51 years." According to this math, if I can live for another 19 years I will be beating the average! (Insert false enthusiasm here.) After hearing this sobering fact, I have to admit, I stopped paying so much attention to our report on the CFLPA pension plan, as it kind of defeats the purpose of saving money for retirement when you learn that most all of the people that work in your industry die 10 years before the normal age of retirement in Canada of 65.

I don't have any children at the moment, but if I do end up having a son I can honestly tell you I'm not sure right now whether he should play football and whether I would even encourage him to. Though the game has changed my life in numerous beneficial ways and afforded me opportunities, exposure, and a lifestyle I have always coveted, only in the last few years have the results of studies like these been coming out and people in our game made aware of the damage we are doing to ourselves.

These life-altering consequences and hazards of playing football are still not mainstream yet, but what do you expect will happen to participation at the grass roots level when it does? You don't have to be a professional football player to traumatize and permanently injure your brain. It happens at all levels of the game.

Before I go start working on my will this afternoon, I will leave you with the results of a Head Trauma-G-force study done by the University of Oklahoma that we also saw in Las Vegas. It tells us that, "Head to head lineman impact G-force," is 20 to 30 Gs. It also tells us that the, "G-force required for a fighter pilot to pass out," is five to six Gs. What happens to a lineman that plays 15 years of professional football and on average, experiences "head to head lineman impacts" 60 times a game, roughly 18 times a year?

I guess we are not going to have to wait too long to find out.

—–

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive tackle for the Blue Bombers and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 5, 2011 C2

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

Penguins offer free baseline concussion testing to youth players

PITTSBURGH— The Associated Press Published Tuesday, Apr. 05, 2011

The Penguins, as part of a new initiative, will offer free baseline concussion testing and educational programs to youth hockey players in the region.

“Heads Up Pittsburgh” is a combination effort with the Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation and UPMC Sports Medicine, aimed at making more hockey families aware of concussions in the sport.

Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, of course, has not played since Jan. 5, and continues to recover from a concussion. Crosby last week returned to morning skates on game days, but will not return to game action in the regular season. He may be back in time for the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, which begin next week.

The tests will be conducted starting May 1 at UPMC Sports Medicine Center on Pittsburgh's South Side.

“We are very proud that it focuses on the health, safety and education of thousands of local youth hockey players,” said Dave Soltesz, president of the Penguins Foundation.

Crosby was not immediately tested for a concussion after a hit in the Jan. 1 Winter Classic, because he wasn't experiencing any symptoms. About four days later, the symptoms were present. Crosby, still the team's leader with 32 goals and 66 points, hasn't played since.

“This time of year, about 20 per cent of our concussion clinic patients are youth hockey players — both boys and girls,” said Dr. Micky Collins of the UPMC Sports Medicine Concussion Program.

Soltesz said the program will be focused on the pee wee, bantam and midget levels of youth hockey, in addition to high school hockey, because those players are involved in body checking.

“This represents 6,000 players in those age groups in western Pennsylvania,” he said. “And our goal is to test all of them.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

THE DREGER REPORT
Darren Dreger TSN Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Neurotopia…have you heard of it?

It's an American-based training program that is focused on strengthening athletes mentally – by measuring and registering brain activity comparitively when an athlete is most alert as opposed to relaxed.

Additional tests within the program reportedly allow Neurotopia to determine the location of brain injuries following specific traumas, which is very appealing to at least one prominent NHL player agent.

CAA Sports – the agency that represents several NHL stars including Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Daniel and Henrik Sedin, along with Chicago's Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane sees tremendous potential in this technology and may introduce their stable of stars to it in the offseason.

Pat Brisson says he has had several meetings with Neurotopia and will be meeting with them again this week with the goal of introducing the program to his clients at his camp this summer.

"It's brain therapy," explains Brisson. "But, this technology may also be used as a base-line test for ultimate performance in the future."

Brisson says Crosby, who has been sidelined with a concussion since early January, has the information and is looking into the program and its potential longterm benefits.

Check back for more of the latest news and developing stories on Thursday in The Dreger Report.

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

[hockeygod]

CFL seeks context for player life-expectancy report

ALLAN MAKI From Thursday's Globe and Mail Published Wednesday, Apr. 06, 2011

The CFL wants to see proof the game puts athletes beyond the normal risks and seriously shortens their lives, as players were informed at their union meetings in Las Vegas last week.

CFL Players Association president Stu Laird passed along information to the player representatives in attendance and included a 2006 article from two U.S. doctors that stated the average life expectancy “for all pro football players, including all positions and backgrounds, is 55 years. Several insurance carriers say it is 51 years.”

The article was authored by Michael Glueck and Robert Cihak, the latter a past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers defensive lineman Doug Brown talked and wrote about the information he received in Las Vegas and how it made him wonder if he’d be around to receive his Canada Pension Plan benefits at 65.

“I was a little depressed – just by the stuff we were inundated with,” he said.

Michael Copeland, the CFL’s chief operating officer, said the league is open to all issues concerning player safety, but wanted to know how the two doctors reached their conclusion.

Was it based solely on players competing in the four-down, smaller-field NFL? Was it done over a period of years? Decades?

The Globe and Mail was unable to contact Glueck or Cihak on Wednesday.

“I think it’s always good to question things but we need to look at it in context and not draw conclusions until we see the research,” Copeland said. “Sport, all sport, has some inherent risk. What we try to do as a league is reduce that risk as much as possible. We’ve done a very good job of making this an aggressive, entertaining game played with reasonable risks.”

The CFLPA information blitz included a University of North Carolina report that stated NFL players who suffered repeated concussions had five times the rate of mild cognitive impairment (pre-Alzheimer’s disease) than the average person. Retired NFL players were also 37-per-cent more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.

Copeland outlined what the CFL has done, from implementing stricter rules to protect the quarterback to its first drug-testing program, which is already under way with random, out-of-season urine and blood tests.

“We were, as a league, ahead of al the other major leagues in 2009, when we had all our therapists observing concussion protocol policy,” Copeland added. “We work with external research associations in terms of concussion research. It’s top of mind for us. I think we’ve consistently shown a focus on health and safety.”

The life expectancy of pro football players has been hotly debated for more than a decade. In some circles, the argument is based on simple assumption: It’s a violent game, bad things happen; of course these guys don’t live as long.

Pro Football Hall of Fame offensive lineman Ron Mix, now an attorney in San Diego, once documented the lives of several hundred former NFL players, then estimated two things: the average player will be 50-per-cent to 65-per-cent disabled with back and leg injuries and that his life expectancy will be 55 years.

In contrast, the website, oldestlivingprofootball.com, has written its calculations, from 1920 until now, show the average life span to be between 63 to 68 years.

“My intention was to give the players information that was already out there on the web so we can have an awareness of what the issues may be,” Laird said. “It’s information I haven’t verified. But we take player safety seriously and I know the league does, too.”

Dean
M.Ed (Coaching)
Ch.P.C. (Chartered Professional Coach)
Game Intelligence Training
"Great education depends on great teaching."

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