Majority of NFL players unhappy with medical care,
Majority of players say they are not getting proper level of care after injuries
Donte Whitner’s mom didn’t want him to play football, because when he was six years old he chased a bouncing football into the street and was hit by a car. He doesn’t remember which bones he broke, but he says there were a lot of them.
“I know parents today don’t want kids to play because of concussions, but my mom didn’t want me to play because I got broke up by a car,” says the San Francisco 49ers safety, a few days before his team meets the Baltimore Ravens in the Super Bowl. “The car never stopped. All I remember is looking up at the big sky, and waking up in a big tube. Which I now know is the tube where they check your brain, CT scan, for the MRI.”
The NFL has become the car that does not stop. Not for its players, not for anything. The NFLPA released a player survey on Thursday, and they asked players to how much they trusted their team’s medical staff on a scale of one to five, five meaning not satisfied at all. Seventy-eight per cent of respondents said five. Another 15 per cent said four, or very little. Overall, 63 per cent said they were not satisfied with their medical care. The same afternoon, it was reported that the NFL will put independent neurologists on sidelines for the 2013 season. It is a small step, a veneer of brakes squealing. It won’t stop the car.
“Now you see players getting fined for something that’s been happening for years, for decades,” says Ravens safety Ed Reed, who has been fined more than $100,000 US this season for helmet-to-helmet hits. “So now you want to fine us for something that’s part of the game? Now you implement the rule, ‘defenceless player’? You want us to let them catch the ball first? You want a defensive player to let a receiver catch the ball, let him make a move, then hit him? OK. That’s not football. That’s not football.”
Ed Reed is football. He has been one of the game’s defining defensive players for a decade, overshadowed unfairly by Ray Lewis. This week Reed, age 34, said sometimes he forgets things.
“I think some things I go through are football-related,” Reed says. “I’m not all the way concerned right now about the memory-loss thing so much being football-related, because I only had about two or three concussions in my career, maybe more that you don’t really know of. There have been some things that honestly put up a flag.”
When asked, though, Reed says the same thing that almost every single football player on earth says.
“You know what, man?” he asks, looking older than his years above his nearly-wild beard. “I’m sitting here saying: I signed up for it.” But ask him what he knew about concussions when he started playing football, or even started in the NFL back in 2002, and Reed shakes his head. “I didn’t know then,” he admits. “So yeah, I’m one of those guys who didn’t know what I signed up for. I didn’t know about the concussions, and I know now.”
We all know more now. Fully one-third of the league’s 12,000 living former players are currently suing the league over head injuries; it is becoming existential for the NFL, as staggeringly successful as it is. Reed says he would fear for his family if he degenerated after football, but said, “It’s like any other tragedy, though.” It’s not, unless you count workplaces that cause, say, cancer. Still, football isn’t stopping, not yet. There will be another Junior Seau, and another Dave Duerson. And it’s not hard to imagine Ed Reed as a Hall of Fame plaintiff one day.
Fully one-third of the league’s 12,000 living former players are currently suing the league over head injuries; it is becoming existential for the NFL, as staggeringly successful as it is.
“I didn’t know much about concussions,” Reed says. “You knew you were signing up for a violent sport, you knew you were signing up for a contact sport, you knew you were signing up for football, and injuries can come. But it’s not like they were saying well, you can get a bunch of concussions, you can get a concussion if you do this, and you do that. They need to be.”
That would be a start. Alex Smith has dutifully answered every question about losing his starting job as San Francisco’s quarterback this week; he lost it after admitting he had a concussion. That’s football.
“You can get injured, and someone can play well, and you can be out of a job,” says 49ers offensive lineman Alex Boone. “This is football. That’s the game.
“[If I get a concussion], am I gonna report it? There comes a fine line where I have a kid, and I don’t want my kid to see me drooling on myself when I’m 35. So I think that I would have to report it. But as an offensive lineman it’s different, because you do get dinged up every play, and you do get nicked up, and after a while you can’t keep complaining about every little thing. You have to ask, what’s a serious one?”
Whitner puts it more simply. “I would report it, because I have small children who need me. I don’t really play with my brain, my neck, my spine. Maybe a shoulder, maybe an ankle. I have small children who need me.”
But when asked about U.S. President Barack Obama’s comments earlier this week — he said that if he had a son, he would not want him playing football — nearly every player this week has said yes, he would let his son play. The one exception was Ravens safety Bernard Pollard, the man who knocked Patriots running back Stevan Ridley out cold in the AFC Championship Game two weeks ago.
“It’s tough to say no,” Pollard says. “But I think as far as grooming him — he’ll be five tomorrow — I don’t want to put football around him. And it’s hard, because he sees daddy playing football all the time, and he wants to play football. It’s very tough. It’s been good to me, good for my family. But I don’t want my son to go through it.”
Neither did Donte Whitner’s mom. Here he is.