FAMILY TRAUMA
In a new film, the daughter of a famous NFL star looks back at her father’s inspirational career that ultimately left him with CTE
AFTER Rebecca Carpenter’s father passed away in 2010 at the age of 78, her family received a call from Boston University asking to examine his brain and spine. “They said they were doing a study to examine the impact of concussions on former football players,” recalls Carpenter, whose father, Lew Carpenter, was a running back for the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers in the ’50s and ’60s. He played for legendary coach Vince Lombardi and later coached in the league for another three decades.
Though he never got a concussion, researchers found that the father of four still had advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma.
Carpenter’s family — whose entire world revolved around pigskin — was devastated by the news.
“This was going to possibly affect every man in my life. My father was the 17th case at BU. I thought, ‘What is the agenda here?’ ” Carpenter, a filmmaker, tells The Post. “I was angry that BU was trying to ruin football for my family and ruin my dad’s legacy. I set out hoping the study was being exaggerated.”
Armed with the new information from Boston University, Carpenter set out to make a film, looking at her dear father with more sympathetic eyes. The result is “Requiem for a Running Back,” a powerful documentary that explores the science behind CTE and tells the history of professional football through Lew’s career and personal life. (Carpenter and BU’s Dr. Ann McKee will host an evening screening at Cinema Village on Nov. 15.)
The diagnosis also shed light on her father’s changing personality. Though he was known for his humor and storytelling, his post-playing years had been marked by periods of depression and mood swings.
“The last five years [of his life] were difficult,” she says. “He became very withdrawn and he had been a really social person. And you start thinking, ‘Gosh, maybe he doesn’t like me.’ But that didn’t make any sense because I know he loved me.”
In interviews with players he coached, football greats and families of other players dealing with the debilitating disease, Carpenter reconstructs her complicated relationship with her father.
In one particularly uncomfortable scene, she interviews former Pittsburgh Steeler John Hilton, now deceased, who could barely string together a coherent sentence because he suffered from CTE. Carpenter and Hilton’s wife attempt to help him organize his thoughts.
“That’s when I realized how much of my adult life had been spent trying to fill in the gaps to make [my father] whole,” she says.
At its heart, the film is an homage to her loving father and the sport that lifted him out of poverty, but ultimately cost him his quality of life.
“I think of it as a love story and a film, as opposed to an investigative documen- tary,” says Carpenter.
After her father died, one of the players he coached for Green Bay in the ’70s and ’80s, James Lofton, now a CBS sportscaster, sent her an e-mail revealing a side of the stoic gridiron warrior she didn’t know.
“James said that he can still hear [my dad’s] voice in his ears saying, ‘You gotta love it,’ ” referring to the game, says Carpenter.
“I thought, ‘For real? My dad and the word love in the same sentence?’ I don’t know the guy that James just described. In a way, I went on the road to find the Lew who said, ‘You gotta love it.’ ”
So Carpenter dug into his poor childhood in West Memphis, Ark., where he grew up the son of a truck driver and waitress. She dissected her parents’ relationship, which began in high school but eventually dissolved. Carpenter’s mother recalls a vacant Lew leaving without so much as a discussion. But she also highlights the devoted father who coached not only NFL teams, but also her youth softball team, where he showed her tough love. “The way Lombardi would make his favorite players the example, we were his favorite players,” she says. “He thought we could handle anything. There was a real soulfulness about him. He was fun, but he was also the most competitive person you would ever meet.”
After making the film, Carpenter still finds her father’s postmortem diagnosis painful to accept. But she could feel her dad guiding her throughout the process.
“I wish every daughter had the opportunity to look at her aging parents and go back to the beginning,” she says. “Our story just happens to take place in the world of football. There are a lot of us who had a parent who was a mystery, and we can’t move on until we solve it.”
She also sees the game in a different light. Her nephew, who was a star high school player, even decided to stop playing the game after seeing the film.
“Football is such a beautiful sport, and being around a bunch of football players is the most fun,” she says. “But if you’re going to choose it, you need to understand the risks.”