philipmartin’s posterous

The hall was long, but not wide and so the only option was a go route. I looked back and saw the ball over my left shoulder and I twisted my torso and my feet slipped and the floor slid up and cracked me in the back of the head. The ball skipped harmlessly down the hall.

I looked up into the white glow of glass globed light as a purple iris closed down my field of vision. I heard my friends far off and then there was a second or two of blackness before I swam up and broke the surface to find Father Hoppe standing over me.

He slipped, one of my fellow servers helpfully explained. He wasn’t running. Nor was he playing with yonder miniature plastic football.

Father grunted kindly, and I got to my feet and dusted myself off and that morning I was the thurifer for the 11 a.m. Mass. I swung the holy smoke gently, censing the congregates. Normally I liked its acrid perfume, but that morning it made me a little sick to my stomach. I felt sleepy. At home that afternoon I laid down on the floor and fell asleep in front of the TV.

A couple of years later, I had my legs cut out from under me as I was shooting a lay-up in a junior high school basketball game. I hit my head again and once again I saw the purple ring begin to close over my vision. But this time I fought theblackness off, and willed myself not to go under. A teammate pulled me up and I wobbled to the bench and Coach McAllister patted me on the back and said something encouraging. I’m told I went back in a few minutes and played well for the rest of the game but I don’t remember it.

Those weren’t the only times I got hit in the head as a kid, there were baseballs and one time I walked into Steve Cherry’s practice follow-through and caught the toe of his five-iron with my left temple. It raised a golf-ball sized knot on my head that was more scary than painful. In a stupid act of bravado during a practice near the end of my football career, I lowered my shoulder and rammed my helmet into a linebacker’s chest-and crumpled comically at his feet.

None of these experiences could have been good for me; and I suspect that on at least a couple of these occasions I was genuinely concussed. And I don’t imagine my experience is much different from those of other guys who grew up like me, playing sports and sometimes running down waxed hallways in our Sunday shoes. We all got knocked in the head sometimes.

But concussions seem much more serious now than they did back in the day; we understandmore and more how the damage accrues. I remember reading that Mike Webster, the nine-time Pro Bowl center on those Pittsburgh Steeler teams that won four Super Bowls in 1970s, would sometimes have to shock himself into unconciousness with a taser just to get some sleep. Webster spent the last years of hislife living in train stations and in his truck, living on dry cereal and potato chips, a broken tortured madman who couldn’t remember whether or not he was married.

After Webster died in 2002 from heart failure at the age of 50, a neuropathologist from Nigeria performed an autopsy on him. He removed Webster’s brain, and noted that it looked completely normal. But Bennet Omalu had a hunch, and so he requested and received permission to do a microscopic inspection of Webster’s brain.

It took awhile. Weeks of slicing and staining slivers of Webster’s brain. But he finally found it. Gobs of something called tau proteins, in the wrong place, overrunning parts of the brain responsible for emotions, moods and cognitive control. Omalu discovered that Webster was suffering from a neurological disorder called dementia pugilistica or chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Webster was “punch drunk.” And Webster wasn’t the only former National Football League player who was determined to be suffering from CTE after his death. Omalu foundevidence that two other Steeler offensive linemen who died in an untimely fashion, Justin Strzelczyk and Terry Long, were suffering from CTE. (Strzelczyk died in 2004 after he crashed his car into a tanker truck while driving against the flow of traffic while trying to avoid police; Long committed suicide by drinking antifreeze.)

He also examined the brain of Andre Waters, the former Philadelphia Eagles player who shot himself in 2006, and found that Waters’ brain tissue had degenerated to the point that he was like an 85-year-old man in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. After former Houston Oilers linebacker John Grimsley shot himself in 2008, he too was disagnosed with CTE. So was Tampa Bay Buccaneer offensive guard Tom McHale, who died of an apparent accidental drug overdose a few months later.

The theory is that CTE is caused by repeated blows to the head-subconcussive blows as well as those severe enough to cause concussions. Omalu and others have found evidence of CTE in the brains of college and high school players, as well as NFL players. Not everybody who gets hit in the head a lot will incurCTE; a lot of boxers don’t go punchy-Jack Dempsey retained a high degree of mental acuity until his death at 87; Joe Louis suffered from a dementia that likely had nothing to do with his boxing career (and was controlled by medication)-but a lot do.

It’s often difficult to reconcile our love for sport with sport’s obvious consequences. I am a boxing fan, but I can’t condone the sport’s inherent violence. It is not a decent thing and no civilized society should abide it.

Football is harder for me to write off-but I understand there may well be no way to make the game safer than it already is without fundamentally changing the game. Helmets only work up to a point-they protect the skull from fracturing but don’t do anything to prevent the brain from crashing into the skull.

Last month, on the heels on an internal NFL study that found retired NFL players suffered from some sort of dementia at a rate five times higher than the general population, Congress announced it would be looking into things. In a recent New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell alleges football is as bad as dogfighting in that it exploits and destroys its participants for the sake of entertainment dollars.

I know what to believe, and I know it’s not what I want to believe. I’m just glad I don’t have a son in a three-point stance, looking to knock heads with someone else’s son.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Perspective, Pages 72 on 11/08/2009