GOODELL TAKEN TO TASK
Lytle family upset at commissioner for insensitivity
SAN FRANCISCO Almost two months later, the insensitivity still hurts.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell might have thought it was harmless when he laughed at Roger Staubach’s lame joke about concussions during the National Football Foundation awards dinner in December. That his reaction would have no deeper meaning — certainly not to offend families who have watched their loved ones suffer in agony from the impact of head trauma.
There are grade-schoolers who know better.
Some things just aren’t funny. At any time. In any setting.
“I just felt really, really hurt,” Tracy Lytle, widow of former Denver Broncos running back Rob Lytle, told USA TODAY Sports on Monday. “I thought he was being so flippant with the whole issue.”
Cameras showed Goodell laughing after Staubach said he had mistook Goodell for Pete Rozelle at the Dec. 8 event. Staubach then apologized for his “error,” saying, “I had six concussions in the NFL.”
Goodell was criticized by many in the immediate aftermath of the dinner. But his laughter, uncomfortable as it was, cut Lytle’s family so deeply that his son, Kelly, felt compelled to write an
essay Monday taking Goodell to task for being tone deaf.
“Actions always speak louder than words,” Kelly Lytle said. “You have that notion in the back of your mind of, ‘ Does the NFL really care or are they truly just about dollars and cents?’ Then when the joke comes out and Goodell’s reaction is just laughter … it’s just kind of proof.
“While it might just be a laugh to most people, there are many other families and loved ones who are suffering because of that.”
Rob Lytle was a bruising running back who, by his own estimation, suffered more than 20 concussions during his playing days. He once said he had no recollection of getting hit by Jack Tatum at the 2-yard line in the 1978 AFC Championship Game, one of the most famous plays he was a part of, because he’d had a concussion in the previous week’s game.
By the time he was in his early 50s, Lytle was showing the effects of all those vicious hits. He would have to make lists because he was forgetting things. He’d say inappropriate things. When he came home from work, he’d shut himself in a room away from his fam- ily, something he’d never done before, Tracy Lytle said.
After Lytle died of a heart attack in November 2010, an autopsy found he had moderate to severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Doctors told Tracy Lytle they had no idea how her husband had been able to hold a job and estimated he wouldn’t have been able to feed himself in another six months. He was 56. Tracy and Kelly Lytle were at the dinner, with Tracy sitting on stage to represent her late husband. She considered getting up and leaving after hearing Staubach’s poor attempt at a joke and seeing Goodell laugh, but she didn’t feel that was appropriate, either.
But it bothered both of the Lytles. A lot.
“You see the outside. You don’t see the day-to-day of what people are going through and how they’re struggling,” Tracy Lytle said. “There’s a lot more suffering than people know. It’s affecting a lot of people, not only emotionally, but physically and financially.”
NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Goodell was laughing at the reference to Rozelle.
“No one has worked harder than Roger Goodell to make our game safer, address the concussion issue and get help to former players with medical needs,” Aiello said. “He cares a great deal and has no higher priority.”
But that wasn’t the way the Lytles took it, and who are we to tell them what they can and can’t find hurtful when it comes to the disease that robbed them of a loved one?
“The fact is, when you did react the way you did, it implies a certain level of carelessness and that you don’t care about the plight of players who have suffered to play the game you claim to protect,” Kelly Lytle said.
“At least before you act, think, take a deep breath and try not to at least publicly give off impression that you don’t care.”
Laughter doesn’t always make people feel good. In some cases, all it does is cause more pain.