‘IT JUST CONFIRMS EVERYTHING’
Brain injury afflicted Riders great
Former Ottawa Rough Rider Rod Woodward had the progressive degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, his widow said Monday.
Kay Woodward and her family have long believed problems the all-star defensive back experienced after his football career were related to a brain disease that was, in turn, linked to trauma he suffered during his playing career.
On Monday, the family said they received the confirmed CTE diagnosis from researchers at Boston University’s CTE Center.
It’s news that gives them additional closure, Kay Woodward said.
“It just confirms everything,” she said from Vancouver. “Even if they hadn’t said, ‘Yes, it’s CTE,’ we knew something was wrong with him and he had dementia.”
It also represents new information in an ongoing legal action. The Woodwards are part of a class-action claim in Ontario seeking $200 million in damages for head injuries on behalf of all retired CFL players who participated in games and practices since 1952.
Woodward died last September at age 72 from complications after a fall. His family had placed him in long-term care because of concerns for his safety.
Rod Woodward played 11 Canadian Football League seasons between 1967 and 1978: three with the Montreal Alouettes, six with the Rough Riders and one each with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and B.C. Lions.
He intercepted 39 passes, returning two for touchdowns, and he scored a rushing TD.
He also returned 108 kickoffs and punts for more than 800 total yards. He was an Eastern Conference all-star three times and a CFL all-star in 1975.
After retiring as a player, Woodward served as Simon Fraser University head coach in 1980-82, then became a financial adviser. That career ended in disgrace, though, as he was jailed in 2009 for stealing $185,000 from clients to pay gambling debts. Three years later, doctors diagnosed him with frontotemporal dementia.
Kay Woodward disclosed in November that the family had agreed to provide Rod’s brain tissue for post-mortem examination, the only way to diagnose CTE.
Researchers at Boston University’s CTE Center relayed their diagnosis after months-long clinical and pathological assessments.
Kay Woodward said the pathological assessment revealed Stage 4 CTE, the most severe level, with buildup of abnormal tau protein “all through his brain.”
The clinical assessment focusing on behaviour involved extensive interviews with family members.
It, too, concluded that Rod Woodward had CTE.
“It was hard when we went through the clinical,” Kay Woodward said. “It was a lot of questions because they wanted to go over (Rod’s) behaviours, and so it was reliving a lot. But what it did for me was that it confirmed how proud I am of my family. They all stuck together and we were there for Rod. … We survived, we all survived.
“I guess it’s just information for our case and then information to help people as well (know) that this does exist and to let other people know that they can do this (assessment) as well, too, because it explains behaviours,” she said, “and to better the sport in that, otherwise, look at the damage it’s doing.”
Originally filed in 2015 with former defensive back Korey Banks and former running back Eric Allen as representative plaintiffs, the class action now has approximately 200 participants.
It claims former CFL commissioner Mark Cohon, the CFL and its nine current teams, Ottawa Renegades Football Club Inc., brain-injury expert Dr. Charles Tator and Krembil Neuroscience Centre in Toronto “knew or ought to have known that multiple subconcussive and concussive blows to the head lead to long-term brain injury, including but not limited to: memory loss, dementia, depression and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (‘CTE’) and its related symptoms.”
The claims have not been tested in court.
The case is on hold pending resolution of a jurisdictional battle over another concussion-related lawsuit filed by former CFL receiver Arland Bruce.
A senior National Football League official told a U.S. congressional hearing in March 2016 that his league agreed there was a link between football and degenerative brain disease, but Jeffrey Orridge, who recently left his position as CFL commissioner, said in November that any connection between repeated blows to the head and long-term cognitive disorders was “still a subject of debate in the medical and scientific community.”
According to Kay Woodward, her late husband’s brain tissue was the first from a former CFLer examined by Boston University researchers, who have found signs of CTE in post-mortem exams of dozens of former NFL players.
Former Lions defensive lineman Rick Klassen, who died of cancer in December, reportedly donated his brain tissue for examination by researchers in Toronto.