Head cases
News’ special report on concussions & the NFL
CARROLLTON, Tex. — Tony Dorsett moves out of the passenger seat of his white SUV and cuts across his lawn from the driveway toward the front door of his home in suburban Dallas. The driver gets out and walks down the street.
He’s returning from a workout at Cowboys Fit, a health and fitness center located at “The Star,” the training facility the Cowboys moved into last year in Frisco, and having lunch at his favorite seafood restaurant in North Dallas.
Dorsett settles into a couch in his family room, picks up the remote and clicks on ESPN on the big-screen TV for background noise, looks up when the NFL news comes on. Dorsett loves talking football and has no trouble recalling details from his Hall of Fame playing career as one of the most elusive and exciting running backs in NFL history.
He can recite yard by yard his dash the length of the field on his never-to-be-broken NFL record 99-yard touchdown run in the final game of the 1982 season against the Vikings in the Metrodome. He laughs about his fullback and late friend Ron Springs failing to realize he was supposed to line up in front of him and instead remained on the sidelines, forcing the Cowboys to play with just 10 men on the field.
He can tell you what yard line Drew Pearson threw a key block and how he spiked the ball in the end zone instead of keeping it.
He just can’t tell you who dropped him off at his house no more than 10 minutes ago.
Dorsett’s long-term memory is sharp but his short-term memory has a shelf life that seems to last mere seconds.
He is suffering. He took too many hits to the head, endured too many concussions.
When asked who was driving him, he has a blank look on his face. He is stumped. “I don’t know,” he says. “TD, you just got out of the car a few minutes ago,” he’s reminded.
He fiddles with his phone for clues. He thinks for a couple of minutes and it comes to him. It was a friend who volunteers to drive him around a couple of mornings a week to his workout and errands. Dorsett still drives himself some, but having the driver makes life easier.
Tony Dorsett is 63, and except for a few grey hairs, he looks closer to 43. He still has that boyish face and devilish grin. Teammates used to call him, “Hawk,” a nickname first given to him by his father for his keen sense of vision that twisted defenders into the ground. He was always the heartbeat of the locker room, the life of America’s Team’s party.
He still has lots of personality but is more subdued.
“My memory…I have good days and I have bad days and I don’t like it,” says Dorsett. “I don’t like going places I’ve been going to for 20-25 years and all of a sudden I don’t know how to get there. That’s frustrating. That’s frustrating as hell. It’s embarrassing at times. I take it with a grain of salt and keep moving on. If I get frustrated about it, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.”
He uses a daily planner to write down appointments. He asks Siri a lot of questions on his iPhone. “It is what it is,” he says. “If you play as long as I did, you are going to have something wrong with you.”
He travelled from Dallas to Los Angeles in 2013 to take part in brain testing at UCLA. Although the only definitive test for the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy must be performed posthumously, Dorsett says he was diagnosed with CTE in Los Angeles and is receiving treatment in hopes of slowing it down. He’s been to Mexico for stem cell treatment for various ailments and prays it will also have a positive impact on his memory and hold off the disease.
“They know I got it. I’ve had some trauma to my brain. CTE is diagnosed when you are dead and gone. They can see what I have is probably what it is,” he says. “I’m being proactive. I’m trying to find ways if I could cut it off at the pass. To this point, there is not a whole lot they can do about it.”
Researchers at Boston University are hopeful they are developing a test to detect CTE in the living. “I would surely like to get that test,” says Dorsett.
He regrets being a victim/participant in the culture at the time he played that all players needed to be warriors. He’s one of many former players who played in his era who feel the NFL was not forthcoming about the long-term impact of head injuries.
He said in a 2013 interview with CNN that he was short-tempered with his daughters and they “were a little bit afraid of me,” wondering whether “Daddy would be in a good or bad mood.” He said he would never do any physical harm to his kids, but their comments “cut deep, touched me and it hurt. I looked in the mirror and said: “Who are you?””
“People ask me would I (play football) again?” Dorsett says to the Daily News. Would he? “Hell yeah, I would do it again,” he says. “But I would be a little bit smarter.
“I wouldn’t get knocked out and try to get back out there on the field again and put myself in harm’s way,” he says. “I’ve been hit a lot of times, got my bell rung and would go back out there because, for one, I wanted to go out there, and for two, I felt my team needed me. I wanted to be out there, not knowing in reality I was hurting myself in the long run.”
In a 1984 game in Philadelphia, Dorsett was knocked out cold in the first half, he said doctors thought he was “half-dead,” was checked out in the locker room and came back to rush for 99 yards in the second half.
That’s just how players rolled in the ’70s and ’80s. Even Dorsett, who at 5-10 played at just 190 pounds.
“It’s put in our brains,” he says. “I don’t know if we are brainwashed.”
Tony Dorsett represents the NFL past, present and future.
The past: He is the NFL’s ninth all-time leading rusher with 12,739 yards — he was second behind Walter Payton when he retired after the 1988 season — who put his team ahead of his health.
The present: He’s a sad and painful example of the price of playing the game.
The future: Will his memory get worse before a cure is found for making it better?
The NFL is in trouble. Maybe not next year or in five years or even in 10 years. But concussions and CTE and early Alzheimer’s and potentially — but hopefully not — more players added to the list of Junior Seau and Dave Duerson and Andre Waters who consider suicide a better alternative than living with a brain damaged by too many football concussions.