Sunday Review: League of Denial (TV documentary)

The end of football?

By Morris Dean

Sure, it's clever scheduling to review the 2013 PBS Frontline documentary League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis on Super Bowl Sunday, but what difference does it make? We're all (who are interested) going to watch and probably enjoy the game anyway, so who cares about the head butts (and the tears and twists and strains and breaks in other body parts) suffered by the highly paid men engaged in about as ferocious combat as you can find outside the military?
    The documentary is based on a book I haven't read: League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth, by ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru (excerpted in Sports Illustrated). Both the book and the TV documentary are about traumatic brain injury in the National Football League, particularly concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
    CTE is, according to Wikipedia, a progressive degenerative disorder or disease of the brain that can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem, in individuals with a history of multiple concussions and other forms of head injury.

The disease was previously called dementia pugilistica (DP), as it was initially found in those with a history of boxing. CTE has been most commonly found in professional athletes participating in American football, ice hockey, professional wrestling, and other contact sports who have experienced repetitive brain trauma. It has also been found in soldiers exposed to a blast or a concussive injury, in both cases resulting in characteristic degeneration of brain tissue and the accumulation of tau protein. Individuals with CTE may show symptoms of dementia, such as memory loss, aggression, confusion, and depression, which generally appear years or many decades after the trauma.

    I was fascinated by the documentary's opening story about former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster and his football-related brain injuries and the pathologist who examined his brain and was subsequently pretty well outed by the NFL's stone wall of denial.
    After that harrowing opening, the documentary goes on to look closely at the efforts of researchers at Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, where the brains of a growing number of former NFL athletes have been examined. None of it is any less fascinating than Mike Webster's sad story. In other words—if you like the delivery of significant information to be fascinating—you will find League of Denial as "entertaining" as it is informative.

Mike Webster struggling to try to remember what he was saying

    The documentary's bottom line may well appear in the part where the pathologist who found Mr. Webster's CTE recalls a discussion with an NFL doctor while reviewing Webster's case. The doctor asked him, "Do you know the implications of what you're doing? If 10 percent of mothers in this country would begin to perceive football as a dangerous sport, that is the end of football." I think therein lies the motivation for the denial by the NFL, which is reported to be approaching an annual income of ten billion dollars.
    You can watch the documentary free on PBS Frontline's website. Maybe after the Super Bowl? (Or tomorrow if you party too hard and can't see straight for a while.)
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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