The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Football families tell of CTE horrors
Jim Hudson’s wife came home one day and found him sitting on a couch, clutching a golf ball, with tears streaming down his face.
The former New York Jets defensive back, a star of the team’s only Super Bowl championship, had played a lot of golf; he was a single-digit handicap at the time. But he was watching the Golf Channel because he had forgotten what the ball in his hand was for, or how to play.
“You watch the life go out of someone’s eyes,” Lise Hudson said.
A college national champion whose interception in the Super Bowl helped clinch the 1968 NFL title for Joe Namath and the Jets, Hudson was among more than 100 former football players diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a study published this week.
The disease can cause memory loss, depression, violent mood swings and other cognitive and behavioral issues in those exposed to repetitive head trauma.
Boxers. Members of the military. Football players — including not only Hudson but also Earl Morrall, whose pass he intercepted in Super Bowl III to help seal what is still considered the greatest upset in NFL history.
At Morrall’s 2014 memorial service, his family played a video with highlights from a career that included three NFL championships and the league’s MVP award. He was also shown taking horse-collar tackles and helmet-to-helmet shots that football’s custodians at all levels have since tried to curtail.
“Dad shook his head,” Matt Morrall said, “and went back in.”
In the largest update on CTE so far, Boston University and VA researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday that they found signs of the disease in nearly 90 percent of the 200 brains examined, including 110 of 111 from NFL players.
The study included quarterbacks who are taught to stay in the pocket, where they absorb crushing hits, and linemen who sustained repeated, sub-concussive blows to the head. It included kickoff specialists who sprint down the field in search of contact — a role known as “the suicide squad.”
“They were like a bunch of kamikazes,” said Virginia Grimsley, the widow of Oilers and Dolphins linebacker John Grimsley.
It included players, like Don Paul, whose family watched his body and his brain deteriorate until he was almost 90.
And it included players like Dave Duerson, who would not let that happen, killing himself at 50 — with a bullet to the chest, so that his brain could still be studied. “It’s something parents should be discussing with their kids: ‘You’re not going to feel it now, but you’ll feel it later,’” said Scott Gilchrist, the son of Bills star Cookie Gilchrist. “‘Would you like to try golf?’”
Lew Carpenter grew up poor in West Memphis, and football, though not nearly as lucrative as it is now, was a ladder to the middle class.
So when researchrs called after her father died asking for his brain, his daughter, Rebecca, did not take it well.
“My first instinct is: ‘Why is this (expletive) Chris Nowinski trying to take football away from us?’” she said.
But she talked to the people she knew, the “football family” she had acquired over her father’s 40 years in the sport.
Lew Carpenter was diagnosed with CTE six years ago. When the study was published on Tuesday, Rebecca burst into tears.
“I am not a crier,” she said, again breaking down on the telephone.
“I am so crushed by the existence of this disease that I can’t begin to tell you.”