GASTINEAU’S BATTLE
Sack Exchange members sympathize with brother
HE WAS the Jets’ man-child from Oklahoma who took this big bite out of the Big Apple, a freak of nature whose sack dance both energized the fan base and alienated teammates at the same time.
Now he is 60 years old, and sharing the kind of terribly sad news that has too often led to tragic news for concussed NFL players whose health and safety were jeopardized by a league that looked the other way for too long.
“I didn’t have the protection, and like, you know, when my results came back, you know, I had dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s,” Mark Gastineau revealed during a radio interview Thursday night.
The news both shocked and saddened two of the other members of the feared New York Sack Exchange of the 1980s.
“Wow. I didn’t know that. That really is earth-shattering,” Joe Klecko told The Post. “That’s really bad. Man.”
“You wouldn’t want to wish that or hear that about your worst enemy,” Marty Lyons told The Post, “and here’s a guy that you played with for so many years. “It would be very sad if that’s his situation.” Klecko and Lyons and Abdul Salaam, the fourth member of the Sack Exchange, were with Gastineau for an autograph signing less than two weeks ago.
“None of this was mentioned,” Lyons said. “Abdul’s in a wheelchair, became a diabetic, and we were worried about Abdul being able to get around, and now you hear this about Mark. Whether you liked him or you didn’t like him or you respected him or you didn’t respect him, you should feel for him.”
Gastineau said he received the news a year ago, and has become an advocate of the Heads Up program that would help youth avoid head-to-head collisions and allay the fears of parents who may not want their children to play football.
“I don’t want to give up because I got those results,” Gastineau said.
Lyons applauded Gastineau for those efforts. They entered the NFL together, Lyons the Jets’ No. 1 draft choice in 1979 and Gastineau the team’s second-round pick. “I think that more athletes need to do it,” Lyons said.
“He’s turned his life into an advocacy role a lot,” Klecko. “I just hope that this whole situation he’s in now physically, doesn’t hinder him from doing things. It’s terrible.”
There was no concussion protocol when Gastineau, Klecko and Lyons played. Gastineau, who pursued an ill-fated boxing career after football, described practicing against offensive tackle Marvin Powell this way: “When we would hit each other, I mean you hear pops like a shotgun going off. I led with my head.”
Klecko, who somehow is not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, recalled how concussions were diagnosed during games when he played.
“Basically,” Klecko said, “you got the finger test — ‘Watch my finger.’ If your eyes moved with your finger. ‘ How do you feel?’ You weren’t throwing up, you got back in the game. So there was no protection. If you were knocked out on the sideline and you were unconscious, you couldn’t go back in. The league helped you out there, you know? But there was no protection for us as far as head injury. None.” In the movie “Concussion,” the NFL is portrayed discrediting Dr. Bennet Omalu, the forensic neuropathologist who made the first discovery of CTE, a football-related brain trauma. Klecko says he is not bitter.
“I’m not bitter because there ain’t a damn thing we can do about it,” he said. “And if you take someone who had all this money, and really knew these things, and they still did it — I feel sorry for ’ em, the owners that did it. And God bless ’ em, may they go to their graves with their billions and millions of dollars. And there’s guys out there suffering … you take all the people who have committed suicide and they’ve had their brains cut open and stuff like that and found out that they had CTE, and a lot of their problems were from it. I mean, run and hide because a $10 billion business, let’s not shut that down and save these people. It’s not that they thought maybe that the study was wrong. They knew it was right, and they still hid it. That’s just sad. That’s so unethical it’s ridiculous.
“Don’t get me wrong — we all put our name on the dotted line, and we went out there and played. But would it have been different if we knew a little more? Or if we were given some standards to go by as far as medically for head injuries? Would it be different? I don’t know that. I can’t answer that. So that’s why I’m not bitter. They gave me the opportunity as a kid that came out of Chester, Pa., who really was gonna be a truck driver the rest of his life to make a lot of money. And I did.”
So did Mark Gastineau. For whatever it’s all worth now.