Can’t deny the issues ahead
BRENT BOYD has earned the right to be cynical: When the NFL’s disability board denied his concussion claim in 2001, he says, they told him his blinding headaches, depression and lethargy had nothing to do with the injuries he suffered during his seven years as an offensive lineman for the Minnesota Vikings.
Back t hen, the NFL was still denying that brain injuries caused long-term health problem, and Boyd and other former players complained that the disability program jointly run by the league and its union was designed to stonewall players.
“Delay, deny and hope they die,” is how former Cleveland Browns cornerback Bernie Parrish puts it.
So when the NFL and lawyers for the 4,500 former NFL retirees who filed a lawsuit that accused the league of covering up the longterm consequences of traumatic brain injuries submitted a proposed settlement that lifted the cap on concussion-related damages last week, Boyd was skeptical. Will the administrators of this plan also look for ways to deny legitimate claims? Will this deal only benefit the most desperate and leave everybody else hanging?
“My fear is that they won’t give us any real remedies until we are too sick to know it or we are dead,” Boyd says.
This new settlement, the result of six months of negotiations after U.S District Court Judge Anita Brody rejected a deal that capped the NFL’s responsibility at $765 million in January, is hardly perfect. It won’t compensate Boyd for income he lost because he’s been unable to work for so many years. It won’t make whole players who have lost marriages, families and careers because of the physical and emotional pain caused by their brain injuries. It won’t bring back men like Junior Seau and others who committed suicide because they could not endure any more suffering.
But it certainly can’t be any worse than the cruelty dished out for years by the NFL’s disabilit y board, and, hopefully, it will provide medical care, support and hope to thousands of guys who have su ffered because of injuries i ncu r red playing America’s most brutal spor t at its highest level.
“At the end of the day, you can’t make the settling defendant do everything you want,” says Christopher Seeger, one of the lead attorneys for the players.
Michael Kaplen, a New York attorney who specia lizes in brain injury issues and teaches at George Washington University Law School, criticizes the proposal because the NFL is not required to acknowledge that it covered up the longter m consequences of concussions for so many years. He says the deal won’t help retirees at the low end of the dementia scale who nevertheless have experienced behavioral and emotional problems as a result of brain injuries. “A mild brain injury is only mild if it is someone else’s brain,” Kaplen says. “The silent majority of players who have cognitive, emotional, and behavioral impairments because of their reliance on the fraudulent conduct by the NFL will remain uncompensated under this settlement.”
Seeger acknowledges that players with comparatively mild symptoms may not qualify for compensation. But they will be eligible for baseline testing, and if their conditions become more severe, they will get paid. “We had to make sure the sickest players were taken care of,” he says.
Seeger understands Boyd’s fears about stonewalling panels that seem to delight in denying help to suffering people. But he says this proposal, if approved by Brody and the players, will be different. The lawyers will put together a team of independent doctors and administrators that will review claims and make payments. The league will be able to appeal what it believes are fraudulent claims, but this time it won’t be running the show.
“I want the NFL to pay for concussion-related injuries and put something new in place for these players, and we did that,” he says.
Unfortunately, Roger Goodell will never stand at the 50-yard line at MetLife Stadium and apologize to the players and families who suffered while the NFL and its medical hit men denied the damB ages of concussions. ut Seeger bristles when people blast the deal because the NFL did not have to acknowledge any wrongdoing. The $9 billion a year league spoke volumes last week, he says, when it agreed to remove the cap on concussion payments.
“Does anybody,” Seeger asks, “think they didn’t admit liability with that kind of payment?”