CTE DISCOVERED IN HERNANDEZ POSES MORE QUESTIONS
Murderer played far fewer football games than others found with the brain disease
The Aaron Hernandez story is very much one of extremes.
A national champion at the University of Florida and then part of a historically good tight end duo with the New England Patriots, Hernandez would set a new standard for “off-field issues” when he was convicted of murdering a friend — a clumsy, dumb and unfathomable crime that took place after his third season in the NFL, when he was a wealthy star on the rise.
Now his brain has been discovered to show evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain-wasting disease prevalent in so many former football players. Hernandez’s lawyer said researchers told him it was the most severe case of CTE they had seen in someone his age. He was 27 when he hanged himself in prison this April, not long after his murder conviction.
But if the specifics of the Hernandez case are unusual, they are only so by a matter of degrees. Part of his arc — football player dies, has brain examined, is found to have signs of CTE — is utterly familiar. Many families of former players have observed behavioural changes, mental suffering that can lead to suicide, which is then explained, somewhat, by the CTE discovered post-mortem.
Hernandez’s lawyers will now attempt to do something unique, which is blame murderous behaviour on the damage caused by football, but it’s of a piece with the blame placed on the sport by the families of dozens of former players who harmed only themselves.
Hernandez follows a wellestablished pattern, even if his story is particularly chilling.
And yet, his experience is also a confounding one. He was finished in football at the age of 23, having played three seasons and 38 games with New England. (He also played 40 games at Florida.) A pass-catching tight end, he was not the kind of player who spent long stretches bashing into opponents in the sport’s trenches.
There is no doubt he would have taken blows to the head in his playing days, but because his career ended so early, Hernandez had simply not played that much football.
When the first discoveries of CTE in former football players were made, after the alarming post-career struggles of players such as Mike Webster and Junior Seau, their brain damage was attributed to the years of repeated hits to their heads.
Webster played in 245 NFL games over 16 years, Seau in 268 games over almost 20 years. That’s seven times as many games as Hernandez, and countless more hits.
What this means for the continuing study of football and CTE is unclear.
The Hernandez case has quickly been interpreted by some as evidence that the proper amount of football that can be safely played is none at all. If someone at a relatively young age who has played relatively few games can have “severe” CTE, how could anyone be confident they could play the game and avoid brain trauma?
But there’s another way to look at his case: Given his short career, is there another explanation for the damage to his brain other than football? Was it there all along, or is there something in his physiology that made him particularly susceptible to developing CTE?
The great unknown with the disease, because it can presently be discovered only in the brains of the dead, is whether it also lurks in the brains of the nonfootball-playing public. Are there people who are at elevated risk of the disease, people for whom contact sports would have a dramatic impact on their brain’s health in a short period of time? Was Hernandez one of them?
There aren’t going to be any satisfying answers to those questions, at least in this case. Hernandez’s lawyers have an obvious financial incentive to blame the ruin of his promising life on the sport he played, but the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd was cold and calculated. The courts will spend years sorting that out.
In the meantime, there is the unavoidable fact that someone who didn’t play that much football had the brain of someone who played for a dozen years. We say every time another study is released that shows a shocking prevalence of CTE in former football players that it adds to the growing understanding of the disease. We wonder when young men will start deciding in large numbers that the risk from the sport is too great.
Hernandez, ever the outlier, probably won’t change many minds.
But when someone with limited exposure to the game can still have such a damaged brain, it’s hard not to wonder if the safety measures being enacted, the non-contact practices and the independent concussion spotters and the like, aren’t just so much messing about in the margins. The pro leagues, when they aren’t defending themselves in court, spend a lot of time these days discussing ways to make football safe.
Every passing season, though, stories like this one make it feel more like an impossible pursuit.
The great unknown with the disease ... is whether it also lurks in the brains of the non-footballplaying public.