Gisele makes call: Time for Tom to stay on sidelines
Last week, super-model Gisele Bundchen sent a shiver down the spine of many a New England Patriots fan when she made an indirect plea to her husband, Tom Brady, to follow her into retirement.
“I don’t really think it’s a healthy thing,” she told Charlie Rose on CBS “This Morning,” “for your body to go through that kind of aggression, like, all the time. That cannot be healthy for you, right? And I’m planning on having him be healthy and do a lot of fun things when we are like 100 [years old], I hope.” She also claimed that the future Hall of Fame quarterback suffered a concussion last year.
While Concussiongate, unlike Deflategate, was quickly snuffed out when Brady’s agent denied that No. 12 had a concussion last season, Bundchen still raised an important question. Is Brady in fact likely to do damage to his longterm mental and physical health should he continue to play football into his mid-40s, as he has vowed to do?
Research shows that it is typically not any one hit that does extensive damage to the brain of a football player, but the impact of exposure to numerous concussive and sub-concussive events over the long haul. In a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Neurotrauma, a research team at Boston University found a dose-response relationship between the number of hits to the head and the risk of later-life impairment in several major areas of both cognitive and emotional functioning.
Likewise, a study of retired NFL players presented last spring at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology found that more than 40 percent showed signs of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, based on MRI scans. These players ranged in age from 27 to 56, and their average age was just 36. And the longer the player spent in the NFL, the higher the likelihood of TBI.
As one of the study’s authors, Dr. Francis X. Conidi, a neurologist at the Florida Center for Headache and Sports Neurology, told Reuters, “Players with TBI have a high incidence of going on to develop neurological degenerative disease later on in life.” What Conidi was referring to are such crippling diseases as Alzheimer’s and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. As Brady knows all too well, CTE was what drove his former teammate, linebacker Junior Seau, to commit suicide soon after concluding his own spectacular twodecade career in the NFL.
While linebackers tend to absorb more punishment than players at most other positions both in practice and on Sunday afternoon, quarterbacks, no matter how careful they are to protect themselves also face considerable risks. Brain exams have recently shown that the late Earl Morrall and Ken Stabler, who also led teams to Super Bowl victories during their storied careers, both suffered from CTE.
And numerous quarterbacks who have played in recent decades have reported troubling memory problems, including Joe Theismann, Jim McMahon, Randall Cunningham, Jake Plummer and Brett Favre — to name just a few.
Last year, Brady enjoyed a nearly perfect season, which was capped by leading his team to a dramatic comeback victory in the season’s final game. Brady completed over 67 percent of his passes — the highest rate in his career — and threw for 28 touchdowns and just two interceptions. Due to a love of competition and adulation, the hardest thing for star athletes is to walk into the sunset when they are at the top of their game.
But at this point in his career, the five-time Super Bowl champ, who has already carved out a niche as the best QB ever, has certainly much more to lose from playing more NFL football than from retiring.