A powerful and hard-hitting documentary may cause football fans to think twice about the sport they love.
The Frontline show, “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis,” which aired on PBS Tuesday night, provides evidence football concussions lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease and degenerative neurological disorder known as CTE, and the NFL impeded research for nearly two decades.
The NFL, which recently reached a $765 million settlement with former players and their families, declined to take part in the show and reportedly pressured ESPN into withdrawing from a partnership with Frontline, though ESPN cited lack of editorial control in the decision. The NFL also declined to comment on the show itself.
Reported by investigative journalist brothers Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, who work for ESPN and co-wrote the documentary and a book released Tuesday by the same name, the show offers a recap of the NFL’s response — or lack thereof, according to Frontline — to the mounting evidence of a direct correlation between concussions and brain damage. It traces the slow but steady evidence repeated violent collisions in football lead to CTE and says the league ignored the discoveries by accredited doctors and attempted to discredit research in some cases.
The documentary begins with the story of former Steelers center Mike Webster, the first player to be diagnosed through autopsy with CTE. Webster, who died in 2002 at the age of 50, became a different person after 17 seasons in the NFL, according to family members in the film, his brain deteriorating along with his life.
He is just one of many sad stories told during the nearly two-hour documentary. There are reports of players suffering from dementia or depression that has led to violence and suicide, which was the case for Terry Long, who drank anti-freeze, and Junior Seau, who shot himself in the chest.
Dr. Bennett Omalu, a central figure in the documentary who diagnosed CTE in several players, is introduced as part of the Webster story. He preserved Webster’s brain and found him to have CTE.
In “League of Denial,” Omalu says he met with an NFL doctor, who tells him, “Bennett, 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.”
Later in the documentary, Omalu says as he was preparing an autopsy on Seau, the league intervened, convincing Seau’s son to interrupt the procedure.
When first confronted with the concussion issue, then NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue called it “pack journalism claims.” In 1994, he formed the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) Committee, a group the documentary depicts as a way to quiet medical research and refute those reports. The head of MTBI was Jets team doctor Elliot Pellman, who doesn’t have a background in neuroscience.
In 2005, Omalu published his findings in the journal Neurosurgery, but MTBI wrote a letter to the journal saying Omalu’s findings were inaccurate and inadequate and demanded he retract his findings.
Another doctor, Ann McKee, says she faced similar resistance from the NFL and its doctors, accusing them of sexism. A professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University and co-director of BU’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy, McKee found signs of CTE in deceased football players at the high school, college and professional levels. She gave a presentation on her findings to MTBI in May 2009 — of the 46 former players she examined, 45 had CTE — and was shot down.
Frontline depicts a major change in the NFL’s approach in October of 2009, when commissioner Roger Goodell, who replaced Tagliabue in 2006, testified in front of Congress regarding concussions and the effects it had on players later in life. As part of his testimony, Goodell said the league was committed to the safety of its players, but couldn’t answer himself about the correlation. U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) compared the NFL to the tobacco companies of the 1980s, which wouldn’t confirm or deny the effects cigarette smoking had on one’s health.
The NFL announced one month later it was changing its concussion committee, and early in 2010, MTBI was replaced by the Head, Neck and Spine Committee that includes new leadership.
In August, the NFL came to a $765 million settlement after a lawsuit accused the league of concealing the effects of concussions among players. In the settlement, however, the league does not admit liability or wrongdoing.
Former Giant Harry Carson, a Hall of Fame linebacker, says in the documentary he believes the settlement will have implications beyond the league’s bottom line.
Said Carson: “The NFL has given everybody 765 million reasons why you don’t want to play football.”