Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion On Concussions And F

Books. Analyst are sports agent Leigh Steinberg and author and former professional Football Player Pellom Mcdaniels iii. This is an hour. So i would like to our panel. First, Steve Fainaru is a senior writerer with espn and he is the coauthor of league of denial, the nfl, concussion and the battle of the truth. The discussion on the nfl attempting to cover up the concussion and damage. We worked for the washinton post and won the pulitzer prize. He is the author of big boy rules, americas mercenary fighting in iraq, and baseball, cuba and the search for the american dream. His brother mark fainaruwada is a writer for espn and produces work for the program outside of the lines. Steve and mark serve as reporters and writing on a film of the same name for pbs Award Winning program frontline. It won the george poke and Peabody Awards and an emmy nomination. And along with Lance Williams they won National Honors in 20042005 for the coverage of the steroid scandal in baseball. And their book on berry bonds became on immediate New York Times bestseller and prompted Major League Baseball to investigate steroid use in its sports. Leigh steinberg in the white shirt is regards as one of the greatest sports agent in history. At one stretch during his career, he is the agent with six overall number one picks in the nfl draft and the number of picks he represented in his career is unmatched in nfl history. Half of the starting quarterbacks in the National Football league were Leigh Steinbergs clients. He founded a sports law practice in 1975 and since represented over 250 professional athletes including Troy Aikman Warren moon, steve young, bruce smith thermon thomas and many more. He is president and ceo of Leigh Steinberg entertainment. He has hosted two National Conferences on the subjection of concussion and the nfl. And Pellom Mcdaniels iii is our third member. He is here as a formal Football Player playing for the orb state beeveers and kansas city chiefs. He is an assistant professor of africanamerican studies at emery university. He is an author with the book of prince of jockeys examining the career of the 19th century jockey isaac burns murphy. And we would like to welcome the audience from around the country watching on cspan booktv. The issue of concussion came to the forefront because of the book steve and mark wrote. We want to ask them to issue a statement on how it came to their attention and what the status of the debate is. And we will invite leigh to pay in and pellom from a players perspective. Steve and mark i will turn it over to you. This is our second time back at the festival and it is amazing how huge it has gotten. There had been a lot of good reporting done on the issues of concussion and football prior to us jumping into the story in 2011. Our colleagues at espn Peter Keating and greg guardy did fantastic work and others but the fundamental issue that had not been addressed was what did the league know and when did it know it and how did it address the problem becoming a huge Health Crisis at the nfl and the youth level. The pressure on the nfl was getting tense. In 2011 the question was asked of the commissioner is there a connection between football and brain damage and by this time there was a number of stories about about the connection and the commissioner did what he did repeatedly and still does which is fob off the question and say we will let the medical people decide that and the representative waxman was dismissive and derisive and i think a lot of medical people were too. Because the question had been answered for them. To this day that seems to be the commissioners answer of letting the medical people decide. For us our book was an opportunity to reflect back to the beginning of this issue which really began to percolate in the nfl in the early 90s in large part because of leigh and other folks. What the book represented ultimately was presenting what had been two decades of denial. Sort of a twoprong front by the nfl in which they went after scientist raising the question about the relationship between football and brain damage and ostracized them and minimized their station and taking over a medical journal and pubishing paper after paper suggesting there no problem and no connection and nfl players have different brains and were not susceptible to concussions that caused brain damage. That was the message percolating from them for years. What came out of the book was a high level publicity around this issue accompanied by a documentary on pbs and now there is an ongoing dialogue and i will let steve talk about where we are now. Right. Thanks. I think that one of the things that for mark and me when we started to get into this was we had a real opportunity to talk to a lot of exFootball Players and get their thoughts on what was going on. So you had on the one hand as mark said the nfl with all of its power and resources trying its trying to deny this was a problem. And yet we were going from player to player to player and we were seeing the incredible devastation that had been robbed and they believe was directly attributable to their careers in the National Football league. And so you had this obvious tension where these people were feeling left out, they were feeling abandoned i think like Many Mental Health problems you saw it was not something that simply affected the players, it affected everyone around them. Mark and i tried to in as much of a granular way lay out what this looked like. We wanted to start with patient zero, mark webster, a center for the Pittsburgh Steelers during the 1970s. We chronicled what happened to webster and what happened was he had gone from being this person who was extremely conservative stable a hero in the community, a great teammate, family man to somebody who was totally unrecognizable to his friends and family. He went from somebody who was financially conservative to sending every dime his family had. He ended up living in his truck almost as a transient shuttling between wisconsin and pittsburgh sometimes living on the road or sleeping in train and bus stations. He had incredible physical problems as a result of the career in the nfl beyond the Mental Health issues. And he would go to these extremes to try to deal with them. His teeth started falling out for example so he would super glue them back into his mouth. He had incredible trouble sleeping. He could not sleep in a bed so tried a chair that didnt work and he tried his truck and when that didnt work he had purchased several mail order stun guns and had his sons or his friends literally taser him to sleep. And so it gave you an idea of sort of what the magnitude of what these issues were. And from what we saw overtime as the book came out, and he was able to dramatize all of the issues you saw a tension that exist and continues to exist today. And on one hand that tension is this is a Major Public Health problem in our country that affects thousands of kids parents all the way up to the nfl. And then you have an incredibly powerful and Lucrative Energy but you have what football means to the culture. The nfl is still incredibly poplar. Well over a Million People watched recent football. Espn has a 15 billion contract to broadcast monday night football and they have that for a reason; it generates a lot of money. It is going to be fascinating what leigh has to say about this and where we are going because i dont think anybody totally knows where it will end. Leigh, you hosted things for your clients and sports scientist and players came and what kind of reaction did you get at the conference and what came out of it and what did you learn about the issue . First of all i want to thank the festival of books. Being surrounded by others who love books is an amazing thing. And my book is the agent; my 40 year career making deals and changing the game. So i had a practice that profiled players look for role models that would retrace their roots through the high school and college community. In 1989 i had half of the starting quarterbacks in the nfl and i watched troy aikman get hit in phoenix and knocked to the ground and blood was coming out of his ear. And he looked for a while like he had died. And it petrified me. And then there was a night in 1995 dallas had beaten the San Francisco 49ers for the right to play in the super bowl and the whole city was washed with celebration. Troy suffered a concussion and i went to his room he was sitting in a darkened hospital room, and he looked at me and said where i am. I said you are in the hospital. And you suffered a concussion. Did i play that game . Yes. Did we win . What does it mean . We are going to the super bowl. And his face brightened. Five minutes later he looked at me saying where am i, why am i here did we win the game. I almost thought he was joking. This went on ten minutes later same sequence. I finally wrote on a piece of paper the answers to this concussion night questions. It terrified me and i felt a crisis of conscious. Because if my work with athletes was designed to enhance their lives and lead them into careers and fulfillment then how was it okay for me to enable players to do an activity that would lead to dementia chronic encephlitis and other things. We didnt know anything. We were told by doctors over and over again and i would go to the conferences and they would say there are no long term consequences from concussions and one hit doesnt lead to another. Two in close proximity dont do anything. I had steve young, warren moon drew blood and troy aikman there. Ironically one of the players there now has dementia. So we issued a white paper. And we did it again in 2005. War warren moon and the Concussion Institute and then we had a whole series of neurologist who had been with us from the start. And they said three concussions reaches a higher risk of als, alzheimers, parkinson depression and other things. I called it a ticking time bomb and an undiagnosed Health Crisis. And now i believe every time a hit is made it produces a low level subconcussion hit. Just a little bit of change. So you can have an offensive lineman walk out after playing high school, college, and profootball with 10,000 subconcussion hits none which have been diagnosed or he is aware of but the aggregate will do much worse brain damage than three knockout blows. What has changed . We do baseline testing. We have better diagnostic techniques. But the bottom line is it is not healthy to rattle your brain like that. I said if 50 percent of the mothers actually knew what this concussion crisis leads to they would tell their kids you can play any sport but not tackle football. And the economics of football would change. It would be impoverished people that knew they would get brain damage. I have been working on a helmet with a compression system and all ways. Stem Cell Research will help alzheimers and help this. But thank god for these two gentlemen because it was lonely for year after year. And Elliot Hellman who studied medicine at the universities guadahara and he had his brain studied and researched. I am not a doctor but i dont think rheumotology is the rain. But what this fellow told players over and over again is no risk from concussion no long term effects and one doesnt lead to another. That is what they told the players. So when you are tempted to say they knew the risks. They didnt. They were lied to. And one last thing and i will shut up. You have to stick this against the cultural of health denial that all athletes have from Little League they are taught to ignore pain real men dont get knocked out of the lineup dont complain. We would have known sooner about this it older athletes were honest and understand what it was they were suffering from. I have had players if we say Long Term Health is the biggest priority then a procareer then a season then a game and then one play the athletes turn it on their heads. It is this play. So you get athletic denial and you get young men denial and it is difficult. So none of my athletes have been happy with the way i have spoken out. And buy their books especially if you have kids thinking about collision sports. Pellom, you played in the nfl. How violent is it and were you aware of the potential dangers from concussions. I am more than just a formal Football Player. I am a historian and someone who thinks deeply about different issues besides the idea of concussions. We talk about impoverished communities and the idea that sports like football, baseball and basketball are their ways out of poverty not just for the individual but the communities and families. So this issue is going to have an impact on people. And so the nfl, like other professional sports, are billion there industries and we acknowledge and recognize that. People have more disposeable income so they can go to games purchase items, follow their athletes and if you are a kid you want to be like them. So the marketing makes us up against more than educating them about the future of their bodies and minds if they pursue sports in this particular way. If a former athletes plays he school and College Football the way we are groomed to suffer through pain and injury and have a common objective. If the teams objective is to win you want to be supportive of the teams intention and your teammates. If you sprained an ankle or did something to your knee you want to suck it up. That is how we are conditioned and you are supposed to represent your manlyness even at the age of ten. That is a social conditioning we have to address what it means to be a man if you are ten years old, in pain and the coach, parents and fans are telling you to suck it up. We have to address these issues from that standpoint. From a former athlete who played in the nfl when you are a free agent, someone who is trying to secure a position on a roster, and you know you can find your way to the sideline because of an injury you will continue to play. From leighs stand point the idea of the future, health and livelihood, all of those factors play a role in the decision to peek speak up and say coach, i cant go. You thing about the rookie behind you or the second year player wanting to make six figures every year that is a difficult decision to make. You suck it up. Not that you dont enjoy playing football. I thoroughly enjoyed playing. I enjoyed the game and sundays. I didnt enjoy training camp. But i enjoyed the game. When i go and visit i went to oregon state and forgotten first time i was at a Football Game in 15 years and forgot the charge you get from being in the space. It is a limited space. If you have been there before you know how it feels. It is very alluring of course because there are ideas you want people to think about you because you were in that space and able to perform. Thinking about my tenure i have lost very good friends. Friends committed suicide and i know the games and guys. You can imagine in my house with my children and wife we think about these things. I was a defensive end for my career and every play was a collision. If every play you are sustaining mini jarrings of the brain over a ten year period including training camps, what we are looking at is potentially the man sitting in front of you has whatever it is we are trying to understand and how it will escalate. Not everyone has the same results as the men who have passed away. Finally, leigh and i were talking earlier and he brought up troy aikman and i didnt think about it until that moment. In 1988 oregon state played against ucla in the rose bowl. Oregon state didnt win a lot of games in the 80s believe me i was there. To play against someone like troy aikman and a roster of future nfl Football Players. We got wired to play this game. Every play was important. I beat the offensive tackle bad and i ran through troy aikman the way you are supposed to. The way we are taught to play the game you make the play not run up and say you are it. You make sure the guy is down. But troy was out. I hit him so hard he was out. I didnt think about it until you. We have a highlight film that represented that play was a turnaround play for the game and potentially for the oregon state football team. Imagine being responsible for that play and now reflecting on it thinking about the person on the ground. So not everyone i think, will be able to do that. If is part of the game you dont think about the individuals you are playing against. You are doing your job. But when you know the people like i know troy it is a difficult thing to revisit because you know potentially you had a hand in what they are experiencing today. There was a group of people who came to be known as the centers willing to take on the nfl and one of them made a comment that if only half of the mothers in america understood what is at stake for their young boy they would not let them play football. That was 1012 years ago. Have you seen in terms of the number of kids playing the system and the feeder system in the nfl, have you seen an impact in that area yet . That is for all three of you. The thing that was described is there is a scene in our book where the neuro pathologist that did the autopsy on mike webster. This guy in the middle of the meeting paused and said bennett, you understand what you are doing and malo said yeah i think i get it. Then he moved on and the doctor and he said the ten percent of mothers in america believe football causes brain damage and that is the end of football. I think what we are seeing now, mark and i did a story about a year ago, about pop warner and the participation rates and it dropped