The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s going to get worse
As NFL players from violent era get old, incidence of brain disease is rising.
Nick Buoniconti (above) and other former NFL players are showing signs that brain disease is rising.
The video of Nick Buoniconti struggling to put on a T-shirt was jarring. Hearing him say he would not play football if he could do it over again — that was jarring, too. Next came revelations that Jim Kiick also is suffering from serious cognitive problems.
Together, the picture they paint of the 1972 Miami Dolphins is one of anything but perfection.
Brace yourself for more bad news.
“The worst may be yet to come,” said Chris Nowinski, a leader in research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain disease detected in scores of deceased football players, including former Dolphins Junior Seau and Earl Morrall.
As troubling as it is to see Miami’s legends from the 1970s unable to enjoy their golden years, several factors appear to have conspired to expose players from the next two or three decades to even greater risks because of the length of time and the way in which they played.
“Very concerned,” said Jon Giesler, the 1979 firstround pick who played his entire 10-year career with the Dolphins and was the left tackle in Dan Marino’s first six seasons. “I’ve already been diagnosed with some cognitive issues.”
Giesler didn’t wish to elaborate. On the question of whether he’d do it over again, he wavered.
“I can answer that as a 60-year-old,” Giesler said. “It’s a tough question, a tough question. I think I would, I do. I love the game. That’s what it was all about.” He paused. “I said yes kind of hesitantly.”
For good reason.
“I know what I’m going to have to face, and unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about it now,” said Giesler, who sustained six concussions in the NFL. “It’s too late.”
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the plight of retired NFL players from these eras like the shift in the life-redo question. For years, no one answered in the negative. Few if any even hesitated. That includes players whose bodies and minds were failing them. Would I play again? Why do you even ask?
In the wake of the Buoniconti report in Sports Illustrated, Marv Fleming, a tight end on the 1972 Dolphins, said if given another chance, he’d go into real estate. A similar response came from 1982 first-round pick Roy Foster, a guard who for most of his nine seasons with the Dolphins also protected Marino.
“I would not” play again, Foster said. “And I had a very rewarding career: 12 years, couple of Pro Bowls, traveled abroad, met tons of important people, fantastic time. But nothing is more important than health. No ring, nothing.”
When a player such as Buoniconti says getting his bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame wasn’t worth it, people notice.
“If you asked him five years ago, he probably would have said he would have played again,” said Nowinski, CEO and co-founder of the Boston-based nonprofit Concussion Legacy Foundation. “I think it points to just how hard it is to live with CTE and how much effect it has on you and your loved ones.”
Bigger, stronger ...
Perhaps today’s NFL players will be better off because of rules restricting blows to the head, including in practice. But that won’t help players from the 1980s until this century.
That’s when NFL players got bigger, stronger and faster.
That’s when they left the league’s safety rules in the dust.
For years, the hits kept on coming. Nowinski argues that as violent as those collisions were, what troubles him most is that those players were subjected to those hits their entire football lives, long before they reached the NFL.
“With CTE, we’re seeing a trend that the more years that you play, the worse off you are, and we’re very aware that football players started playing younger, really, starting in the 1960s,” Nowinski said. “Prior to that, Pop Warner was not a national organization promoting youth tackle football.
“If the years of exposure hold as a driving factor of CTE risk, then those who played more years because they started younger, we would expect to be worse off.”
That’s why Nowinski firmly believes athletes should not play tackle football until reaching high school. Before then, their brains are developing and more susceptible to traumatic injury.
“I think if we’re willing to accept that very sort of obvious truth that children should not be hit in the head for any reason, sport or otherwise, on purpose, and football players can learn to play football through flag or other means, then I think football has a dramatically brighter future,” said Nowinski, who played football at Harvard before his career as a WWE wrestler was cut short by concussions.
At the very least, the sheer force of collisions in the Marino era couldn’t have helped matters. Larry Little was a Hall of Fame guard from the ’72 Dolphins who played at 265 pounds. The next generation of linemen ballooned by 40 to 50 pounds. Players got bigger, players got faster. Speed and mass equaled open season.
It wasn’t until 1990 that spearing or head-butting an opponent got you kicked out of a game. It wasn’t until 1995 that “defenseless players” received broad protection. “I just think the physicality of the game is the biggest factor,” Foster said. “Our practices with (coach Don) Shula used to be like game speed.”
Tragically, we’re beginning to see the price. Seau, who played linebacker from 1990-2009, committed suicide in 2012 at age 43. Tom McHale, a guard from 19871995, died of a drug overdose in 2008 at 45. Both had CTE.
Because the disease cannot be diagnosed in the living, scores of athletes have agreed to donate their brains to Nowinski’s foundation when they die.
“It’s a difficult subject because the stories of former football players struggling keep rolling in,” Nowinski said. “And I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve known people from when they were healthy to when they began to develop dementia to when they passed away. And it’s hard to watch people you respect die from a degenerative brain disease. It’s an ugly death.”