CTE, Chronic traumatic encephalopathy in CFL, NFL & NHL vets

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TheLionKing
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"I just honestly want to do what's best for my health," he told ESPN. "From what I've researched and what I've experienced, I don't think it's worth the risk. ... I'm concerned that if you wait (until) you have symptoms, it's too late."
How refreshing. Can you put a price on your health ?
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Toppy Vann
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We still haven't got past entirely in sports that:

1. hockey can still be a great game to watch without fighting or huge hits that with a high probability of injuring your opponent.

2. that football has to be a bone crushing hitting game taking guys out especially laying the big hits on the QB.

We have to instill the Phil Jackson thinking - respect for the game, respect for yourself and team mates and respect for your opponent. In the CFL for the most part, they all know each other and it seems that is true but we have had head hunting of Buck Pierce for example - as early as the first pre-season game of the year. Now he'd be a great poster person for a law suit where it is a matter of public record that his HC had to remove him from the first pre-season game as a Chris Jones DEF was blitzing in the first Q.

Boxing has fallen out of favour (used to be a mainstream TV sport) and football is being challenged - albeit there is more pressure to change the name of the Redskins than there is to make the game safer.

The high profile quitters of the game like the 24 year old NFLer today might be the start of a movement OR a blip and isolated.

The non-athletic looking nerdy Malcolm Gladwell says---

Malcolm Gladwell: 'Football Is a Moral Abomination'
By Bloomberg News Nov 13, 2014

“Football is a moral abomination,” he said and predicted that the sport — currently far and away the most popular and lucrative in America — would eventually “wither on the vine.”

The NFL recently revealed that nearly a third of retired players develop long-term cognitive issues much earlier than the general population. "We're not just talking about people limping at the age of 50. We're talking about brain injuries that are causing horrible, protracted, premature death,” Gladwell told Chang, picking up a theme he first explored in a 2009 article for The New Yorker which likened football to dogfighting. “This…is appalling. Can you point to another industry in America which, in the course of doing business, maims a third of its employees?”


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-1 ... tion-.html

If the figure cited by Gladwell is right - it's worse than China's workplace safety record and that is a country trying to balance economic growth and jobs with their continued drive to eliminate poverty - President Xi says they have 200 million to go with the UN reporting that China took 680 million out of poverty over the last 3 decades but the NFL isn't about limited choices and there is no poverty problem being solved as these players are well compensated.

--- China last year lost 66,000 to workplace accidents out of 1.3 billion people. It's political season as it is called on CCTV here and this has been one area in the work report that is not a proud number. Coal mining is one of the most dangerous here and many mines shut down and coal is the cheap heating need for the northern region north of Shanghai and Beijing making the air now real bad as it's cold still there and that is the heating fuel for homes.
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Further to my post the other day of a recent CNN article on NFLers retiring early as a proactive health measure, here's an Nov 2013 National Post piece by an American writer who argues that the NFL should consider adopting some of the CFL's rules — e.g., the larger field, unlimited backs in motion and defences lining up a yard off the ball — as a move toward improving player safety. I already posted this in another thread about a month ago but in hindsight this thread is probably a better place for it.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/15 ... dian-game/
John S. Gardner: What the NFL can learn from the Canadian game

John S. Gardner, National Post | November 15, 2013 12:01 AM ET


About 20 years ago, I had occasion to drive frequently on weekends between New York and Boston, sometimes on Friday nights, and searched the radio to pass the time. In those days, it was fairly easy to get the signal of CHML Hamilton in the northeastern United States, and one evening, I found myself listening to a Hamilton Tiger-Cats game.

I was vaguely familiar with the Ti-Cats because Joe Restic, who coached at Harvard, had earlier been offensive coordinator and head coach in Hamilton, where he devised the “Multiflex” offense. Future CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin wrote that “when it works, the system can glide and accelerate like a Ferrari. The Multiflex at its best can be elegant football.” The rest of us praised or criticized it depending on whether Harvard won or lost, but it was easy to see the Canadian influence, seeking the virtues of a more open game on the smaller U.S. field (a challenging task given the sometimes erratic nature of Ivy League football).

Still, I’d never actually heard a CFL game until that first night on the radio. I thought it was great. I loved the heightened sense of action, the faster pace of play, multiple players in motion before the snap, the rapidity with which possession could change. Those extra 10 yards between the touchdown lines took some getting used to, and I’m still a bit surprised when I see a goalpost so close to the field (even though NFL goal posts also were on the goal line in my childhood). After listening to a few games, as it had been Hamilton that introduced me to the game, I decided: Here was my team.

Other than three downs rather than four, the biggest difference between the Canadian and American games is all the extra space on the field: A CFL field is 26% bigger than its NFL counterpart in total surface area. This has relevance to a challenge facing all who enjoy football: the epidemic of concussions and the mounting evidence that these brain injuries can lead to serious damage in later life.

The NFL is struggling with this issue right now, and introducing some welcome rules changes. Meanwhile, former stars such as running-back Tony Dorsett are revealing their struggles with chronic traumatic encelepathy. Calls may grow for further regulation of the sport in the interests of players’ health.

This is not new: during the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt over a century ago, there was pressure to ban college football as too violent. TR saved it, even as the rules changed to make the American game less like rugby.

Here’s where the Canadian example is instructive. Brain injuries caused by football are a concern on both sides of the border. But because of the more open style of play in Canada, there are fewer opportunities for the kind of bone-crushing and brain-knocking injuries that too often bring long, tense silences to an NFL broadcast. Of course, injuries happen in all sports, but there are ways to limit them.

I’m agnostic between the “no yards” penalty in the CFL and the American “fair catch” rule: Each helps lessen the risk of injury during kick returns. But in other respects, Canada has an advantage: Permitting multiple players in motion opens up the game; as does a wider field, deeper end zone, and wider hash marks. As well, a greater distance between teams at the line of scrimmage serves to reduce instant collisions. Perhaps it’s time for a rethink of the U.S. rules, and a move toward adopting some of the Canadian ones.

The question is not whether NFL or CFL players are “better.” It’s really more a question of the style of play. It’s the same reason I usually enjoy college and Olympic hockey more than the NHL. While I recognize the athleticism in the quick and precise movements of very large players, I generally prefer a game that leans more to speed than to brute force.

It’s been fun to follow the Ti-Cats this year. They’ve provided some exciting victories and a playoff run. Henry Burris has risen in the standings of the all-time greats. Thanks to ESPN3 and the generosity of Canadian radio stations in permitting live online listening, it’s become easy to follow the games and the league here in Virginia. I hope others will make the same discovery of how much fun the Canadian game can be. It’s perfectly possible to follow both professional North American leagues passionately — even as many of us express concern over the game’s injury record.

This weekend, I’ll be watching as Hamilton once again takes on Toronto. Eat ’em raw, Ti-Cats.

John S. Gardner is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia. He would also like to thank the Toronto Blue Jays for John Farrell.
Sports can be a peculiar thing. When partaking in fiction, like a book or movie, we adopt a "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" for enjoyment's sake. There's a similar force at work in sports: "Willing Suspension of Rationality". If you doubt this, listen to any conversation between rival team fans. You even see it among fans of the same team. Fans argue over who's the better QB or goalie, and selectively cite stats that support their views while ignoring those that don't.
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Toppy Vann
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It would be smart to make their game more complex by adopting the motion and yard off the ball BUT that might be akin to asking Canadians to move to 4 down football. I don't see yard off the ball decreasing injuries as he does though as linemen's legs are constantly tied up and open to serious injury with players falling on each other. The yard off doesn't change that I don't think.

What a larger field might do is de-emphasize the upsizing of these monster linemen whose long term health is an issue. On a tight field the 300+ guys are fine. Make them cover more ground would be a challenge.

Can their stadiums accommodate the larger field and deeper end zones which would open it up? Hey think the CFL game is better as 3 downs makes it harder to just run the ball.
I’m agnostic between the “no yards” penalty in the CFL and the American “fair catch” rule: Each helps lessen the risk of injury during kick returns. But in other respects, Canada has an advantage: Permitting multiple players in motion opens up the game; as does a wider field, deeper end zone, and wider hash marks. As well, a greater distance between teams at the line of scrimmage serves to reduce instant collisions. Perhaps it’s time for a rethink of the U.S. rules, and a move toward adopting some of the Canadian ones.
It didn't happen in HS but kickoffs that go for no return out of the end zone etc turn me off whereas a kick off in the CFL has to watched.

I think our missed FG goal rouge is fantastic too as it sets up scenarios where they have to kick it out of the end zone on a miss.

I've played both games and here I prefer the 5 yards over the fair catch rule and no yards. I hated the lack of run backs in HS as the punts were usually high and not all that long so getting to run it back didn't happen often enough for my liking and I hated having to call for a fair catch.

Actually there is nothing to stop the CFL from introducing the fair catch and keeping the 5 yards if they feared punt return injuries.
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sj-roc
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Toppy Vann wrote:It would be smart to make their game more complex by adopting the motion and yard off the ball BUT that might be akin to asking Canadians to move to 4 down football. I don't see yard off the ball decreasing injuries as he does though as linemen's legs are constantly tied up and open to serious injury with players falling on each other. The yard off doesn't change that I don't think.

To be honest, I thought the yard apart is actually something that might create more problems as it gives opposing linemen a small amount of distance to build up a head of steam, so to speak, before they collide. I know it wouldn't be much but it would nonetheless still be a greater relative velocity towards each other at the collision — who knows, it might be just enough to be the difference between a relatively innocent play and a concussion.

The main effect of the yard off the ball to me is less safety-related and more product quality-related in that it encourages more 3rd down gambles, so this creates more high-stakes plays, which adds a greater element of drama. Teams go for it the vast majority of times when it's less than a yard, and even sometimes when it's slightly more. I haven't watched a lot of NFL lately but in the times that I have I've rarely seen 4th down gambles no matter how short the distance, unless the game is on the line. Perhaps this has changed in recent years and I'd defer to closer observers on that.

I would think most NFL stadiums wouldn't fit a CFL-sized field, judging from the ones I've checked on google satellite view.
Sports can be a peculiar thing. When partaking in fiction, like a book or movie, we adopt a "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" for enjoyment's sake. There's a similar force at work in sports: "Willing Suspension of Rationality". If you doubt this, listen to any conversation between rival team fans. You even see it among fans of the same team. Fans argue over who's the better QB or goalie, and selectively cite stats that support their views while ignoring those that don't.
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JohnHenry
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sj-roc wrote:
Toppy Vann wrote:It would be smart to make their game more complex by adopting the motion and yard off the ball BUT that might be akin to asking Canadians to move to 4 down football. I don't see yard off the ball decreasing injuries as he does though as linemen's legs are constantly tied up and open to serious injury with players falling on each other. The yard off doesn't change that I don't think.

To be honest, I thought the yard apart is actually something that might create more problems as it gives opposing linemen a small amount of distance to build up a head of steam, so to speak, before they collide. I know it wouldn't be much but it would nonetheless still be a greater relative velocity towards each other at the collision — who knows, it might be just enough to be the difference between a relatively innocent play and a concussion.

The main effect of the yard off the ball to me is less safety-related and more product quality-related in that it encourages more 3rd down gambles, so this creates more high-stakes plays, which adds a greater element of drama. Teams go for it the vast majority of times when it's less than a yard, and even sometimes when it's slightly more. I haven't watched a lot of NFL lately but in the times that I have I've rarely seen 4th down gambles no matter how short the distance, unless the game is on the line. Perhaps this has changed in recent years and I'd defer to closer observers on that.

I would think most NFL stadiums wouldn't fit a CFL-sized field, judging from the ones I've checked on google satellite view.
The NFL competition committee recommended they adopt some CFL rules and field size to improve their game and make it safer. The problem is with all the new stadiums recently built, they won't fit a CFL field. They said they could widen the field to the white marker line around the field, adding 12 feet in width, I believe.
National Football Post's Sunday Blitz

The NFL has looked to a lot of places to make its game safer. It even has looked to Canada. And it may continue to look north.

As recently as a year ago, the competition committee kicked around the idea of a bigger field, CFL style. And this wasn’t the first time the committee has broached the subject. More:

http://www.nationalfootballpost.com/NFP ... Blitz-1048
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sj-roc
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Interesting read from NFP there, JH.

I would think the NFL wouldn't need to expand fully to CFL width, nor perhaps should they if they intend to maintain 11 men on the field. The largest amount that can be accommodated under current stadium restrictions would probably suffice as far as improving safety goes.

There seems to be somewhat of a parallel to NHL & int'l hockey, whereby the big hits of the NHL are not as common on the wider ice. If you have to come from farther away to make them and your target proves elusive, you'll find yourself a lot more out of position if you wind up throwing your body into air. So it becomes a riskier and less often attempted play.
Sports can be a peculiar thing. When partaking in fiction, like a book or movie, we adopt a "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" for enjoyment's sake. There's a similar force at work in sports: "Willing Suspension of Rationality". If you doubt this, listen to any conversation between rival team fans. You even see it among fans of the same team. Fans argue over who's the better QB or goalie, and selectively cite stats that support their views while ignoring those that don't.
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Toppy Vann
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I hadn't seen the story of how they looked at the CFL width. At first I thought this was a real serious look until I saw it was Bill Polian - a former CFLer thinking that. But the Texans guy is wrong on that. The wider field would make the athletes less freaking heavy.

Surprised at Moon's cumulative hits statement. It doesn't make sense in the way he says it.
It’s possible a wider field would lead to more high impact hits, because defenders could be farther from their targets and building more speed before making contact. There would more “run and hit” potential, in the estimation of two general managers who spoke with NFP.

“If you widen the field, you have more high speed collisions,” said Rick Smith of the Texans.

But Polian doesn’t see it that way. “The farther a player has to run in terms of contact, the less ferocious the contact is going to be,” Polian said. “We know the most ferocious hits come from guys who are ten yards apart and lay each other out. You have fewer higher power collisions in the Canadian League than here.”
Polian on the CFL:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/f ... le1210817/
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A NY Times article on the upcoming Will Smith movie "Concussion" from Sony Pictures (slated for December release), about the CTE expert Dr. Bennet Omalu (played by Smith) and his work identifying the disease in the brains of deceased NFLers. The article cites evidence that Sony altered the movie to allay criticisms from the NFL, although not at the league's behest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/sport ... -show.html
Sony Altered ‘Concussion’ Film to Prevent N.F.L. Protests, Emails Show
In the movie “Concussion,” Will Smith portrays Bennet Omalu, whose work helped diagnose the disease known as C.T.E. in football players.

By KEN BELSON, SEPT. 1, 2015

When Sony Pictures Entertainment decided to make a movie focusing on the death and dementia professional football players have endured from repeated hits to the head — and the N.F.L.’s efforts toward a cover-up — it signed Will Smith to star as one of the first scientists to disclose the problem. It named the film bluntly, “Concussion.”

In the end even Sony, which unlike most other major studios in Hollywood has no significant business ties to the N.F.L., found itself softening some points it might have made against the multibillion-dollar sports enterprise that controls the nation’s most-watched game.

In dozens of studio emails unearthed by hackers, Sony executives; the director, Peter Landesman; and representatives of Mr. Smith discussed how to avoid antagonizing the N.F.L. by altering the script and marketing the film more as a whistle-blower story, rather than a condemnation of football or the league.

“Will is not anti football (nor is the movie) and isn’t planning to be a spokesman for what football should be or shouldn’t be but rather is an actor taking on an exciting challenge,” Dwight Caines, the president of domestic marketing at Sony Pictures, wrote in an email on Aug. 6, 2014, to three top studio executives about how to position the movie. “We’ll develop messaging with the help of N.F.L. consultant to ensure that we are telling a dramatic story and not kicking the hornet’s nest.”

(A Sony spokeswoman, who did not make Mr. Caines available for an interview, said late Tuesday, after this article was published, that the consultant cited in Mr. Caines’s email was not an N.F.L. employee, but was hired to deal with the N.F.L.)

Another email on Aug. 1, 2014, said some “unflattering moments for the N.F.L.” were deleted or changed, while in another note on July 30, 2014, a top Sony lawyer is said to have taken “most of the bite” out of the film “for legal reasons with the N.F.L. and that it was not a balance issue.” Other emails in September 2014 discuss an aborted effort to reach out to the N.F.L.

The movie is due out in December, but the trailer was released Monday. It showed Smith as Bennet Omalu, whose work diagnosing a disease in American football players known as C.T.E. — a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head — led to one of the N.F.L.’s biggest crises: a possibility that the game itself could be lethal.

Suicides by former star players, including Dave Duerson and Junior Seau, have heightened the scrutiny on the N.F.L., which has agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by about 5,000 retired players, who accused the league of deliberately hiding the dangers of concussions.

The trailer showed several scenes depicting Dr. Omalu with jaw-dropping surprise in his lab and angrily demanding “the truth” from people who appear to be from the N.F.L. Many other scientists have built on Dr. Omalu’s work, which began in 2002, and the N.F.L. has since donated tens of millions of dollars to study the effects of concussions and develop ways of treating them.

The N.F.L. has declined to comment on the trailer or the movie, and several Sony executives, through a spokeswoman, declined to speak about the movie or its production and marketing strategy.

Mr. Landesman, who also wrote the movie, said in an interview that the email conversations do not show Sony bowing to the N.F.L., but rather trying to portray the characters and story as accurately as possible to reduce the chance that the league could attack the filmmakers for taking too much creative license.

He added that like many large companies, movie studios that take on controversial topics try to anticipate how their films might be criticized and prepare defenses. He confirmed that Sony lawyers deleted some material from the film, but he declined to elaborate on the cuts beyond saying that they did so to make the story “better and richer and fairer.”

Those changes, he said, did not alter the thrust of the story, which focuses on Dr. Omalu, a forensic pathologist who identified C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

“We don’t want to give the N.F.L. a toehold to say, ‘They are making it up,’ and damage the credibility of the movie,” Mr. Landesman said of Sony’s efforts.

He added: “There were things that might have been creatively fun to have actors say that might not have been accurate in the heads of the N.F.L. or doctors. We might have gotten away with it legally, but it might have damaged our integrity as filmmakers. We didn’t have a need to make up anything because it was powerful and revelatory on its own.”

Mr. Landesman continued, “There was never an instance where we compromised the storytelling to protect ourselves from the N.F.L.”

Still, the issue of how to portray the story of players living with the lethal hazards of the game has been fraught, even for a studio that has no substantial ties to the N.F.L. (Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the New York Giants, has a production company located at Sony Pictures, but he is not involved with the movie. Ridley Scott, a producer, and Mr. Landesman are represented by WME Entertainment, which also works with the N.F.L.)

The N.F.L. had previously pressured business partners to step back from issues that are potentially embarrassing to it.

In 2013, N.F.L. officials complained to ESPN executives about a documentary, “League of Denial,” that the network had produced with “Frontline,” detailing the league’s response to the dangers of head trauma. ESPN stopped working on the project with “Frontline,” which later broadcast it.

In 2004, the N.F.L. complained to the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, the parent company of ESPN, about a hard-hitting television series on the sports network that delivered an unsavory depiction of professional football players. The show ended after one season.

In this case, the emails, some of which were first reported on Reddit, suggested that Sony saw a dramatic story behind Dr. Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant who became a whistle-blower when he tried to warn the N.F.L. about the risk of playing football. Mr. Landesman, a former journalist who has written for The New York Times Magazine, was asked in November 2013 to join the project by Mr. Scott and his wife, Giannina, who are producing the film.

In one of the emails hacked from Sony by an unknown culprit and posted on WikiLeaks, Amy Pascal, then a co-chairwoman of Sony Pictures, called the movie “important and controversial” and said the studio was “committed passionate and enthusiastic” about making it.

But in the same email, from July 2014, she urged caution. “We need to know exactly what we can and can’t do and if this is a ‘true’ story or not,” she wrote, taking note of other movies about real events, including “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Moneyball” and “The Social Network,” all of which were later criticized to varying degrees for veering from accuracy. “I know these can be dicey waters but none more than this one,” she wrote.

In other emails, Sony executives discussed how to make the movie appear less threatening. In several emails they said that press materials should note that Mr. Smith likes football and one of his sons played the game. In another email, Hannah Minghella, a top executive, suggested that “rather than portray the N.F.L. as one corrupt organization can we identify the individuals within the N.F.L. who were guilty of denying/covering up the truth.”

Last September, Mr. Landesman wrote to Paul Hicks, the top spokesman at the N.F.L., to set up a meeting with the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell. Mr. Hicks asked Mr. Landesman for a copy of the script, but several Sony executives were aghast that Mr. Landesman had reached out to the N.F.L. independently and the idea of a meeting was scuttled.

Mr. Landesman said in an interview that in the end he never met with Mr. Hicks because it would have worked to the N.F.L.’s advantage. He never sent the N.F.L. the screenplay, but he said he thought the N.F.L. had seen it anyway because a version was in a hacked email, though a comprehensive review of the emails by The Times did not find it.

The only comment the N.F.L. has made is that it welcomes attention to health and safety issues.

“We are encouraged by the ongoing focus on the critical issue of player health and safety,” the league said in a statement when asked to comment on the film. “We have no higher priority. We all know more about this issue than we did 10 or 20 years ago. As we continue to learn more, we apply those learnings to make our game and players safer.”
Sports can be a peculiar thing. When partaking in fiction, like a book or movie, we adopt a "Willing Suspension of Disbelief" for enjoyment's sake. There's a similar force at work in sports: "Willing Suspension of Rationality". If you doubt this, listen to any conversation between rival team fans. You even see it among fans of the same team. Fans argue over who's the better QB or goalie, and selectively cite stats that support their views while ignoring those that don't.
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Tom Hanks told the key leader in the Band of Brothers series (real life Dick Winters) that they'd do their best to get things accurate and that about 17% of any movie is great at that level of accuracy.

It definitely will be a challenge as they have two problems. Not everyone likes sports movies. They don't want to get nailed as anti-football, NFL etc.
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Toppy Vann
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http://www.tsn.ca/talent/family-of-form ... t-1.360229

Rod Woodward's theft conviction shocked me as I knew him in his coaching days at SFU and it seemed so out of character. This is a sad story.

Korey Banks is in on a concussion suit.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/sport ... .html?_r=0
N.F.L. Great Ken Stabler Had Brain Disease C.T.E.
By JOHN BRANCHFEB. 3, 2016 280 COMMENTS

By AXEL GERDAU

The family of Ken Stabler, the former Raiders quarterback who died in July at age 69, speaks about his life and the effects of C.T.E., which was diagnosed posthumously. By MARGARET CHEATHAM WILLIAMS on Publish Date February 3, 2016. Photo by Al Messerschmidt/Associated Press.
Continue reading the main story
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Shortly before he died last July, the former N.F.L. quarterback Ken Stabler was rushed away by doctors, desperate to save him, in a Mississippi hospital. His longtime partner followed the scrum to the elevator, holding his hand. She told him that she loved him. Stabler said that he loved her, too.

“I turned my head to wipe the tears away,” his partner, Kim Bush, said recently. “And when I looked back, he looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘I’m tired.’ ”

They were the last words anyone in Stabler’s family heard him speak.

“I knew that was it,” Bush said. “I knew that he had gone the distance. Because Kenny Stabler was never tired.”

On a scale of 1 to 4, Stabler had high Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head, according to researchers at Boston University. The relationship between concussions and brain degeneration is still poorly understood, and some experts caution that other factors, like unrelated mood problems or dementia, might contribute to symptoms experienced by those later found to have had C.T.E.

Stabler, well known by his nickname, the Snake (“He’d run 200 yards to score from 20 yards out,” Stabler’s junior high school coach told Sports Illustrated in 1977), is one of the highest-profile football players to have had C.T.E. The list, now well over 100, includes at least seven members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, including Junior Seau, Mike Webster and Frank Gifford.

Continue reading the main story
Ken Stabler’s Brain
An examination of Ken Stabler’s brain shows evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head.


Few, if any, had the free-spirited charisma of Stabler, a longhaired, left-handed quarterback from Alabama who personified the renegade Oakland Raiders in the 1970s. Stabler was the N.F.L.’s most valuable player in 1974 and led the Raiders to their first Super Bowl title two seasons later. He ended his 15-year N.F.L. career with the New Orleans Saints in 1984.

“He had moderately severe disease,” said Dr. Ann McKee, chief of neuropathology at the V.A. Boston Healthcare System and a professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University School of Medicine, who conducted the examination. “Pretty classic. It may be surprising since he was a quarterback, but certainly the lesions were widespread, and they were quite severe, affecting many regions of the brain.”

Quarterbacks are provided more protection from hits than most football players. An offensive line’s purpose is, in part, to protect the quarterback, and leagues like the N.F.L. have special rules to discourage severe blows to players in the most important position on the field.

But Stabler’s diagnosis further suggests that no position in football, except perhaps kicker, is immune from progressive brain damage linked to hits to the head, both concussive and subconcussive.

Stabler is the seventh former N.F.L. quarterback to be found to have had C.T.E. by Boston University, which has found C.T.E. in 90 of the 94 former N.F.L. players it has examined, including the former Giants safety Tyler Sash, who died in September at age 27 and whose diagnosis was made public last week.

Because C.T.E. can be diagnosed only posthumously, and most brains are not examined for the disease, incidence rates among athletes and nonathletes are difficult to ascertain. A study by the Mayo Clinic, released last fall, found C.T.E. in 21 of 66 men who played contact sports (mostly football), but found no traces of the disease in 198 other brains of men who had no exposure to contact sports.

Scientists are quick to note that they do not understand why some football players get C.T.E. and others do not.

But the disease, once thought to mostly afflict boxers, has been found in recent years in deceased athletes who have played soccer, rugby and even baseball.


Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease, has been found in dozens of former N.F.L. players. Here are some of the most notable cases, along with New York Times coverage.

Most brains are donated by families hoping to understand why their loved one’s cognitive functions declined in later years. Symptoms of C.T.E. are similar to those of Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, including memory loss, confusion, impulsiveness and depression.

“On some days, when he wasn’t feeling extremely bad, things were kind of normal,” Bush said. “But on other days it was intense. I think Kenny’s head rattled for about 10 years.”

For decades, the N.F.L. rebutted research by independent experts that connect brain trauma to long-term cognitive impairment. Only in recent years, long after Stabler’s career ended, has the league begun to publicly acknowledge it has a problem.

Stabler is a finalist for this year’s Pro Football Hall of Fame class, to be voted upon by sportswriters and announced on Saturday, the day before Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, Calif.

He was a finalist three times before, the last in 2003, and his nomination regularly led to sturdy debate. This time, Stabler was selected posthumously as a senior finalist, along with Dick Stanfel, an offensive lineman who died in June at age 87.

Like that of other famous players, Stabler’s long career may have bolstered his case for the Hall, but also made him more susceptible to long-term brain disease.

“The very severity of the disease, at least that we’re seeing in American football players, seems to correlate with the duration of play,” McKee said. “The longer they play, the more severe we see it. But it’s also the years since retirement, to the age of death — not only the longer you play, but the longer you live after you stop playing.”

After retiring from football, Stabler worked as a broadcast analyst for the N.F.L. and for the University of Alabama, where he played quarterback under Coach Bear Bryant. His damaged knees became such a problem in the past 10 years that he rarely ventured out.

It was not until the final few years that his family recognized a rapid decline in his cognitive functions, too. Several symptoms of C.T.E. began to show themselves quickly, beginning with Stabler’s complaints of a high-pitched ringing in his head. In his final year, he once grit his teeth so hard that he broke a bridge in his mouth and had to get dental implants.

“There were days when I walked in the door and looked at his face, and I could tell,” Bush said. “He was sitting in his chair, because he was always waiting for me, and the news was on and whatnot, and he had his head laid back, and his eyes just scrunched up so tight that I used to think that would give you a headache in itself, just the pure pressure of squinting like that.”

Noise and bright lights became enemies. A lifelong lover of music, Stabler stopped listening to the radio in the car, choosing to drive hours in silence. He increasingly complained about the clanging of kitchen dishes and the volume of the television.


Family and friends found him repeating himself, sharing stories privately or during public events that he had told just minutes before. He lost his sense of direction, pointing north when he spoke about the coast just a few miles south of his home in Gulfport, Miss. Driving, he became flustered at four-way stop signs.

In the fall of 2014, he moved to Arizona to be closer to his oldest daughter, Kendra Stabler Moyes, 45, and her twin sons, 17-year-old Justin and Jack, who play high school football.

“I remember them calling me and saying, ‘Mom, Papa keeps stopping at green lights,’ ” Stabler Moyes said.

Stabler recognized his decline, but it was not his personality to talk about his problems. He did not tell his daughters as he battled prostate cancer for three years, harking to what John Madden, Stabler’s coach in Oakland, described after Stabler’s death — a player who would not go into the training room until he was sure everyone else was gone.

“His vision of what a leader is, what a strong person is, is someone who did not show signs of weakness,” said Alexa Stabler, 29, the second of Stabler’s three grown daughters. “Because it would affect the people he relied on and the people he cared about, whether that was his family or his teammates.”

In his later years, Stabler worried about the risk of concussions to his grandsons, a sign of his growing ambivalence toward football. The boys lived with Stabler for a time, and he drove them to school and went to all their practices and games. Both are now juniors in high school, and neither is a quarterback, but Justin wears his grandfather’s No. 12 on the field.

“One year one of my boys wasn’t sure he was going to play, and my dad was almost superexcited about it,” Stabler Moyes said. “He said: ‘I think that’s great. He can focus on his studies.’ He loved that they played, he loved watching them, but he was so worried about concussions. He was worried about their brains.”

Stabler wondered about his own mind years before he died. He and Bush talked about it after the 2002 death of the longtime Oakland center Dave Dalby, who mysteriously crashed his car into a tree in a parking lot. It came up again after an event where Stabler saw a struggling John Mackey, the Hall of Fame tight end. Mackey died in 2011; he was found to have had C.T.E.

“I remember Kenny looking at me and saying, ‘You ready to deal with that?’ ” Bush said.


More and more of his peers had their brains examined and were found to have C.T.E., too. And when Seau, the former linebacker, shot himself in the chest in 2012 and was later found to have had C.T.E., Stabler vowed his brain for research.

“I asked him, point blank: ‘Are you willing to participate in the study? Is that something you want to do?’ ” Bush said. “He said: ‘Yeah, I want to do that. I should definitely do that.’ ”

Stabler added his name to a class-action lawsuit brought by former players against the N.F.L., seeking damages from decades of concussions. The suit was settled last April and is under appeal. Under the current deal, though, Stabler’s family would not be eligible for compensation because Stabler’s C.T.E. was diagnosed after the April 2015 cutoff.

“He played 15 seasons in the N.F.L., gave up his body and, apparently, now his mind,” Alexa Stabler said as she fought back tears. “And to see the state that he was in physically and mentally when he died, and to learn that despite all the energy and time and resources he gave to football — and not that he played the game for free, he made money, too — without the knowledge that this is where he would end up, physically and cognitively, and for the settlement to say you get nothing? It’s hard not to be angry.”

The day after last year’s Super Bowl, shortly before scheduled surgery to replace his aching knees, Stabler learned he had Stage 4 colon cancer.

“The cancer took him away, but his mind was definitely in a pretty quick downward spiral,” Stabler Moyes said. “I’m grateful that he was still so present, still so there. Because I definitely don’t think he would have been in even three more years.”

McKee found widespread damage and the buildup of abnormal tau proteins throughout Stabler’s brain, consistent with the symptoms that Stabler tried to disguise, mostly with his sense of humor, from all but his closest friends and family.

“His changes were extremely severe in parts of the brain like the hippocampus and amygdala, and those are the big learning and memory centers,” McKee said. “And when you see that kind of damage in those areas, usually people are demented. So if he was still functioning reasonably well, he was compensating, but I don’t think that compensation would have lasted much longer.”


To N.F.L. fans, it can be hard to separate the swashbuckling image of the Snake from the man his family knew — a constant presence, a willing chauffeur, a not-so-great cook.

“Certainly my friends thought it was a cool thing to have a famous father,” Marissa Stabler, 27, said. “But to them he was just Mr. Kenny, our chauffeur and our chef. He’d drive us to Alabama games. He always took the time for any fan or any person. It didn’t matter if we were out to dinner, he always set his fork down and took time for a conversation or an autograph. That’s just the person who he was, his Southern roots.”


When Stabler was 31, a 1977 Sports Illustrated feature story detailed his penchant for honky-tonks and marinas, usually with a drink in one hand and a pretty woman in the other. Already married twice, he married again before he spent 16 years in a relationship with Bush. He pondered what he might do after football. Open a honky-tonk himself, he thought.

“My lifestyle is too rough — too much booze and babes and cigarettes — to be a high school coach,” Stabler said. “I’d hardly be a shining example to the young athletes of the future.”

His family hopes that the most powerful lesson he provides is the one delivered after he was gone.
John Madden's Team Policies: Be on time. Pay attention. Play like hell on game day.

Jimmy Johnson's Game Keys: Protect the ball. Make plays.

Walter Payton's Advice to Kids: Play hard. Play fair. Have fun.
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WestCoastJoe
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This fan fears for the future of pro football. Hockey also.

The only thing that will stop these sports is lawsuits from the families of the victims. And it seems to me that will happen. Unless real change happens.

In football, the helmets are weapons. Better to go back to leather helmets, or even no helmets. Seriously. Nothing hard in the helmets, just padding. Penalize head hits, leading with the head. Shots to the chest also.

Just IMO as a fan of football.
John Madden's Team Policies: Be on time. Pay attention. Play like hell on game day.

Jimmy Johnson's Game Keys: Protect the ball. Make plays.

Walter Payton's Advice to Kids: Play hard. Play fair. Have fun.
TheLionKing
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Joined: Sat Feb 19, 2005 10:13 pm
Location: Vancouver

What a sobering story.
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WestCoastJoe
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Joined: Mon May 22, 2006 8:55 pm

http://forum.canucks.com/topic/377243-t ... phen-peat/

An older article, from 2016, on Stephen Peat ...
John Madden's Team Policies: Be on time. Pay attention. Play like hell on game day.

Jimmy Johnson's Game Keys: Protect the ball. Make plays.

Walter Payton's Advice to Kids: Play hard. Play fair. Have fun.
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