Andre Waters

Alan Schwarz has a report today in the New York Times about the suicide of former Eagles' defensive back Andre Waters, who committed suicide at age 44 back in November. As Schwarz tells it:

Since the former National Football League player Andre Waters killed himself in November, an explanation for his suicide has remained a mystery. But after examining remains of Mr. Waters’s brain, a neuropathologist in Pittsburgh is claiming that Mr. Waters had sustained brain damage from playing football and he says that led to his depression and ultimate death.

The neuropathologist, Dr. Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh, a leading expert in forensic pathology, determined that Mr. Waters’s brain tissue had degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s victims. Dr. Omalu said he believed that the damage was either caused or drastically expedited by successive concussions Mr. Waters, 44, had sustained playing football.

In a telephone interview, Dr. Omalu said that brain trauma “is the significant contributory factor” to Mr. Waters’s brain damage, “no matter how you look at it, distort it, bend it. It’s the significant forensic factor given the global scenario.”

How Dr. Omalu came to examine Waters' brain is itself an interesting story:

The Waters discovery began solely on the hunch of Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player and professional wrestler whose repeated concussions ended his career, left him with severe migraines and depression, and compelled him to expose the effects of contact-sport brain trauma. After hearing of the suicide, Mr. Nowinski phoned Mr. Waters’s sister Sandra Pinkney with a ghoulish request: to borrow the remains of her brother’s brain.

The condition that Mr. Nowinski suspected might be found in Mr. Waters’s brain cannot be revealed by a scan of a living person; brain tissue must be examined under a microscope. “You don’t usually get brains to examine of 44-year-old ex-football players who likely had depression and who have committed suicide,” Mr. Nowinski said. “It’s extremely rare.”

As Ms. Pinkney listened to Mr. Nowinski explain his rationale, she realized that the request was less creepy than credible. Her family wondered why Mr. Waters, a hard-hitting N.F.L. safety from 1984 to 1995 known as a generally gregarious and giving man, spiraled down to the point of killing himself.

ESPN.com picked up the Schwarz piece today and added some caveats to the conclusions of the Times story:

"Whatever its cause, Andre Waters' suicide is a tragic incident and our hearts go out to his family," the NFL said in a statement released to the media Thursday afternoon. "The subject of concussions is complex. We are devoting substantial resources to independent medical research of current and retired players, strict enforcement of enhanced player safety rules, development and testing of better equipment, and comprehensive medical management of this injury. This work over the past decade has contributed significantly to the understanding of concussions and advancement of player safety. We will continue with all these efforts and maintain our focus on player health and safety."

The league has a traumatic brian injury committee that will begin studying retired players later this year regarding concussions and depression.

"The connection between depression and head injuries is likely but not proven," Leszek Christowski, the Hillsborough County medical examiner, told ESPN.com's Tom Farrey on Wednesday. "Scientifically, there is no [cause-and-effect] connection. Could it play a role? Yes. But the statistical studies do not show a clear-cut connection between concussion and depression."

The NFL has come under fire before on this issue, not only because of the incidence of concussions in football but because the league has, according to some, been less than forthright in its own research in acknowledging the true extent of the adverse health affects of multiple head injuries. IN October, Bob Ley, on Outside the Lines, spotlighted the controversy surrounding NFL research on this issue.

And, I have previously offered up my own beef on this issue, which I will re-produce here:

one of the reasons why owners’ dishonesty about their finances, and the discourse surrounding labor-management negotiations in sports is so irritating, is that the risk-equation here is so one-sided. It’s the players, not the owners, who are sacrificing their bodies. It’s the players, not the owners who, in football especially, but to lesser degrees in other sports, risk the possibility of a lifetime of pain and discomfort. In this light, I find it frankly sickening that anyone would ever draw an equivalency between what the players are asking for and what the owners are asking for.

I understand where this anti-player bias in discussions of contracts and sports business comes from: it’s the athletes, not the owners, with whom we identify (or want to). It’s the athletes whose circumstances most fans want to relate to. And, given these realities, it’s the athletes who are the focus of fans’ ire. After all, how could a pro athlete, making millions of dollars, with gorgeous women throwing themselves at him all because he gets to play a game he loves ever complain about anything?. In short, millions would kill to be able to do what the professional athlete does and, it often appears, takes for granted. And, from chicken-processing to meat-packing, there are groups of workers in this country toiling for a pittance, often sacrificing life and limb while their bosses reap huge profits. I get that.

But, comparing professional athletes to other workers is not the proper context for reporting on and analyzing labor-management disputes in sports. The question is simply who is more deserving of the spoils to be divided between players and owners: the players, or the owners? All you have to do is see Dennis Byrd hobbling painfully through his life fourteen years after his last game to answer that question. There is no more spoiled or coddled group in America than owners of major sports franchises: already impossibly wealthy, they insist on every edge, every break, to guarantee their profits, all while telling their players, the only ones making real sacrifices and taking real risks that they, the players, should be grateful for what they have.

I'll keep coming back to this issue.

On a Much lighter note, kudos to college basketball color man Steve Lavin. I like Lavin, but he outdid himself on Saturday. During Brent Musburger's call of the UNC-Va. Tech game on ABC, Lavin mentioned that Tech coach Seth Rosenberg had once previously knocked off a No. 1 team. That was back in 1993, when his Cal  State Long Beach squad beat then No. 1 Kansas. As Lavin laid this out, I had no doubt that I was about to hear, for the 5000th time in my career as a sports fan, a misuse of the word "ironic." But, when Lavin brought Rosenberg's accomplishment full circle, he said "coincidentally, that Kansas team was also coached by Roy Williams." I blame Dan Patrick, above all, for the metastasis of ironic in sports reporting. No doubt Patrick used the word as part of his and Keith Olbermann's "too-clever-by-half" shtick when they were on sportscenter together. But, the word, in Patrick's hands merely meant "notably" or "interestingly" or, as Lavin understands, "coincidentally."

I apologize for having just wasted thirty seconds of your life on that, but I had to get it in somewhere.

Comments

[Mahercor]

The NFL has to come clean on what it knows about head injury . A connection to boxing is a step in the right direction. A particular jaw posistining use by the N.E Patriots has enabled them to avoid recurant concussion and symptoms believed to have contributed to Waters condition. Withholding this information has hurt many people. There Lawyers konw this and will not let the trueth about concussion out. It will cost to much. www.mahercor.com

[Johnny Hatchett]

I appreciate your take on owner-player labor relations. There's something terribly frightening about the fact that some of the most-well compensated & most-visible American workers can be so consistently rolled over by their employers. Doesn't bode well for the rest of us, who have considerably less leverage than do professional athletes.

[Mahercor]

ESPN the magazine
Even as the NFL changes rules and helmet makers improve their designs, the league says concussion rates have stayed level at about 0.4 incidents per game in recent seasons -- about 100 per year. But teams report only half of these. In the four seasons between 2000 and 2003, clubs listed a total of 203 concussions on weekly injury reports, according to data compiled by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Not all teams suffer equally. Some clubs reported multiple head injuries in each of the years. The Colts listed 20 concussions.

The Patriots listed zero.

And a small-town New England dentist, who literally has been inside Patriots players' heads for 25 years, says he knows why.
www.mahercor.com