THE FACES OF CONCUSSIONS
Jim Hudson's wife came home one day and found him sitting on a couch, clutching a golf ball, with tears streaming down his face.
The former New York Jets defensive back, a star of the team's only Super Bowl championship, had played a lot of golf; he was a single-digit handicap at the time. But he was watching the Golf Channel because he had forgotten what the ball in his hand was for, or how to play.
“You watch the life go out of someone's eyes,” Lise Hudson said.
A college national champion whose interception in the Super Bowl helped clinch the 1968 NFL title for Joe Namath and the Jets, Hudson was among more than 100 former football players diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a study published this week.
The disease can cause memory loss, depression, violent mood swings and other cognitive and behavioral issues in those exposed to repetitive head trauma.
Boxers. Members of the military. Football players — including not only Hudson but also Earl Morrall, whose pass he intercepted in Super Bowl III to help seal what is still considered the greatest upset in NFL history.
At Morrall's 2014 memorial service, his family played a video with highlights from a career that included three NFL championships and the league's MVP award. He was also shown taking horse-collar tackles and helmet-to-helmet shots that football's custodians at all levels have since tried to curtail.
“Dad shook his head,” Matt Morrall said, “and went back in.”
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In the largest update on cte so far, boston universityand VA researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Tuesday that they found signs of the disease in nearly 90 percent of the 200 brains examined, including 110 of 111 from NFL players.
The study included quarterbacks who are taught to stay in the pocket, where they absorb crushing hits, and linemen who sustained repeated, sub-concussive blows to the head. It included kickoff specialists who sprint down the field in search of contact — a role known as “the suicide squad.”
“They were like a bunch of kamikazes,” said Virginia Grimsley, the widow of Oilers and Dolphins linebacker John Grimsley.
It included players, like Don Paul, whose family watched his body and his brain deteriorate until he was almost 90. And it included players like Dave Duerson, who would not let that happen, killing himself at 50 — with a bullet to the chest, so that his brain could still be studied.
This week, The Associated Press asked the surviving relatives of more than a dozen players involved in the study to describe living and dying with CTE.
These are the people who saw the disease up-close:
- The daughter who made sure her dad made it to Thanksgiving dinner.
- The children who had to remind their father that their mother had died so many times that they eventually stopped telling him, to avoid upsetting him anew.
- The wives forced to feed their husbands — many would become ex-husbands; so many families disintegrated under the strain of the disease — or push around in a wheelchair a once-imposing physical specimen.
Some said football wasn't worth the damage. Others still love the sport.
Some quit the game themselves, or forbade their children from playing.
Others just want it to be safer.
“It's something parents should be discussing with their kids: `You're not going to feel it now, but you'll feel it later,”' said Scott Gilchrist, the son of Bills star Cookie Gilchrist. “'Would you like to try golf?”'
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In an interview at her home in Austin, Texas, Lise Hudson described her husband's idyllic post-football life, breeding and training quarter horses, hunting and fishing with their kids. “If you think of the Marlboro Man, he was it,” she said.Then things changed.Jim Hudson went to the wrong school to pick up his daughter; it seemed funny, at the time. Years later, it was hand tremors, financial errors and a routine trip to the supermarket that ended with him wandering lost in a parking lot.Hudson died in 2013 with what was originally thought to be Parkinson's dementia, but was later diagnosed as CTE, which is caused by brain-killing clumps of a protein called tau. Originally studied in boxers in the 1920s, CTE has been linked to repeated head trauma; its prevalence among football players has forced the powers in the game to rethink the rules about how the sport should be played, and who should play it.“I hope it doesn't kill the game, but that it stops killing the players,” Lise Hudson said. “We'd better get on it and figure it out.”———A former Harvard football player, Chris Nowinski parlayed an Ivy League pedigree and mop of blond hair into a career as a professional wrestling heel.The wrestling was fake, he likes to say, but the concussions were real.After years of blows to the head, he developed symptoms of what is known generally as post-concussion syndrome: headaches, memory loss, sleep-walking. He, too, struggled to figure out what was wrong. In shuttling from doctor to doctor, he learned about CTE.Nowinski retired from wrestling and wrote a book, “Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis,” that was made into a movie. With his doctor, Robert Cantu, he created the Concussion Legacy Foundation and speaks to coaches and players and parents about the dangers of repetitive head trauma, from youth football to Premier League soccer.Now a Ph.D., Nowinski helps round up brains for research, usually contacting families soon after a player dies. The Boston University brain bank has received 425 donations, with more than 1,900 additional pledges from active or retired athletes. (For now, CTE can only be diagnosed posthumously.)———The first was former linebacker John Grimsley, whose wife saw Nowinski on TV. Three concussions were a lot, he said; John Grimsley said he'd had six to nine that he could remember.“He said it could've been more, because he hardly ever came off the field,” Virginia Grimsley said. “We used to always say, `He got his bell rung too many times' when he forgets things. I said, `That's not funny anymore.”'John Grimsley died in 2008 at the age of 45 from an accidental gunshot wound. It was a new gun — a Christmas present — and Virginia thinks her husband may have forgotten a bullet was in the chamber.She was at church making funeral arrangements when Nowinski called her home. A friend brought her the message.“I looked at her and said, `He wants John's brain, doesn't he?' And she said, `Yeah, he does.' I said, `What do I have to sign?”' said Grimsley, who was widowed at 46. “It was almost like it was meant to be that I had seen that show.”Although the family has held onto his Texans season tickets, Virginia has been to just a couple of games.“Anytime somebody would be hit, I would just close my eyes and cringe and think, `Please, oh God, let them get up and please don't let him have his eggs scrambled,”' she said. “I just watch it with completely different eyes.”
———Ollie Matson was a two-time Olympic medalist and a running back for the Chicago Cardinals before he was traded — for nine players — to the Los Angeles Rams.When he retired, he was second only to Jim Brown in all-purpose yards.For the last four years of his life, he barely spoke.“I'd show up and he would say, `Hi.' And he'd say `Bye' when I left. That was it,” Ollie Matson Jr. said.The Pro Football Hall of Famer washed the family's four cars almost every day, and barbecued chicken at 6:30 in the morning. He had trouble telling a $10 bill from a $100.“At first we thought it was kind of funny because we didn't know about concussions or CTE. Nobody knew,” Matson Jr. said. “We kind of laughed it off, but then it got a little worse.”Before dying of dementia complications in 2011 at age 80, Matson needed a wheelchair and a nurse.“You feel like you got cheated out of some of the best years of your life, not having your father,” Ollie Jr. said.———Many former football players, the league is quick to note, never show any symptoms of CTE. Others may play for years without a diagnosed concussion.Mike Keating, whose father and uncle both played in the NFL, warns them not to get too confident.“I'd be very, very concerned if I was a professional football player who had concussions or head hits and I'm 40 years old and I'm saying, `I'm fine,”' Keating said. “That's not how this movie's going to end.”
