League of Denial
When you hear about pro-athletes who reached such great heights, you wouldn’t think that their adult children would be delivering pizzas to make ends meet.
One time on a trip to Tahoe to see my older sister, my dad slipped on a frozen pond and slammed the back of his head on the ice. His classic baseball cap he always wore slid across the pond into my hand, and I carefully stepped across the ice to hand it back to him. When he sat up, he looked around — puzzled. When he took the hat, he said thank you and looked at me like we were meeting for the first time. I must have been six or seven years old, and he seemingly had no idea who I was. I don’t remember how much time went by before he did, but the next time I saw him was later that evening. He walked down the stairs at my sister’s house and said my name. I was relieved.
The first book I completed this year was League of Denial by Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada. The book is about the NFL’s long denial and deliberate misleading scientific “research” about the relationship between football and traumatic brain injury. It’s a long read that details the doctors that made the initial discovery of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), tragic stories of former players who shot themselves in the chest in order to preserve their brains for a proper diagnosis, and the NFL’s denial and cover up of the crisis. On more than one occasion, the authors recount stories of football players not being able to recognize their own children, except in their case it wasn’t only in the initial shock of head trauma — it was years after they retired from playing in the NFL.
I write this as I watch the Detroit Lions play the Minnesota Vikings to see who will win the NFC North and get the number 1 seed in the NFC as we go into playoffs. I’m rooting for the Lions. All my life I’ve enjoyed sports, but football was something that I didn’t appreciate until this year, and League of Denial changed the way I viewed the game in my passion’s infancy.
Brains with CTE look sort of like cauliflower, with gaping holes in the center caused by the build up of Tau protein. I’m not a doctor, so that’s all I’ll say. If you look up a picture of a brain with CTE, even if you have no medical background, you can immediately understand why it might cause issues like memory loss, depression, violent outbursts, and suicide.
The idea that football causes chronic brain injury is no longer an unpopular opinion, its widely accepted as fact although research is ongoing. CTE is relatively well known in popular culture compared to when this book was originally published in 2013. I’ve seen X users post a video of Travis Kelce doing or saying something they think is silly and refer to his brain as “scrambled eggs”. Or videos of Tua Tagoviola insisting he doesn’t have any concerns about returning back to football after yet another concussion with commenters insisting his skull is full of slop.
Those kinds of remarks are crass, and I resent them even more after reading the book and getting more detailed and intimate accounts about how traumatic brain injury destroyed the lives of individual football players and their families. But in my opinion the NFL hasn’t demonstrated any more care than the unsympathetic online commentators for the men that literally put their bodies on the line to ensure the mega profits of the team owners and NFL executives. The basic idea in the book is that if the NFL really wanted to reckon with traumatic brain injury, the sport as we know it wouldn’t exist anymore. It’s not the American way to get rid of something people find amusing and profitable even if it’s causing devastating outcomes for some of the sport’s greatest players.
The first football game I remember watching intently in my adult life was the game between the Miami Dolphins and the Cincinnati Bengals where Tua Tagovailoa laid on the field after a tackle with his hands crumpled up and raised in front of his face. Players took a knee as he was carted off the field. The person I was watching it with explained to me that he had just got a concussion the week before. People talk about Tua and his injuries a lot, but in reality his experience is not extremely unique. Before CTE was discovered, football players were regularly getting concussions and reentering play a week later, if not immediately upon standing up. Tua’s scenario sounded exactly like all the stories that were in League of Denial from the 90’s and early 2000’s. When former players were shooting themselves in the chest to preserve their brains, very little was known about CTE. In 2017, the top doctor in CTE research released her findings that 110 out of 111 former NFL players who donated their brains to her research had CTE. In League of Denial, there were football players who donated their brain to serve as a control group for the study only for their families to receive a call from neuropathologists that the brain was riddled with the disease.
Tua and the NFL can pass it off as his personal choice to keep playing, but since the NFL cleared him to play, if he opted to retire the Miami Dolphins could legally deny him the $124 million remaining on his contract. Even if the Dolphins acted in good faith and gave him the money (which might be likely), there would be a lot more than the millions he would be giving up. There’s personal choice, economic coercion, and a fun mix of the two. Because Tua is a high profile case of pretty gnarly concussions, retiring because he’s worried about long term brain damage would be a damning moment for football as a sport. He doesn’t want to retire and he doesn’t want to wear a guardian cap. I think that’s ultimately his decision, and I’m sure the NFL views that decision as fantastic for their bottom line.
Besides the politics, science, and player opinions on CTE, the stories of former players made the book difficult to put down. Fainaru and Fairanu-Wada tell the stories of several players, but the book starts and ends with Mike Webster, a former Pittsburgh Steelers center. He was the first former player diagnosed with CTE after he died in 2002. He would hit and get hit so hard a lump formed on his forehead early in his career. Despite being a Hall of Famer and winning four Super Bowls, he was periodically homeless after retiring from football. League of Denial recounted fans finding him sleeping in the Pittsburgh train station on multiple occasions. The effects of his brain injuries were apparent before he even retired from football, between the initial forgetfulness and then the outbursts of rage. The way his life fell a part after football was devastating. When you hear about pro-athletes who reached such great heights, you wouldn’t think that their adult children would be delivering pizzas to make ends meet.
I can’t really do justice to how devastating the book is, and how it’s changed the way I view the sport. Most of the time I read books like this to get a grasp of how it can be used as a base building tool for the left. There are millions of “apolitical” football fans who can learn how their favorite big business treats their heroes like shit. So, that is one reason I think the book is good.
Like every major sport, the players are not paid enough compared to the wealth they create. Many workers in the US put their bodies and mental health on the line for a lot less than football players do — but it is illuminating how little this industry regards the men that make their riches possible, especially being an industry built off individual star power and recognition. Also, kids playing tackle football is insane and dangerous, obviously. No helmet or equipment exists that can protect children from traumatic brain injury — but threatening the sport for young boys also threatens the future of the NFL… and so on and so on forever!
I’d recommend this book to anyone, not just football fans. It’s well written and very human at it’s core. It is a very long read if you have a poor attention span but it’s on Spotify Premium for free if you prefer audiobooks.