When Tua Tagovailoa, quarterback of the Miami Dolphins, crumbled to the ground after a hard tackle in the middle of last Thursday night’s game against the Buffalo Bills, sports fans held their breath.
Tua is one of the stars of the National Football League. He’s also one of the good guys – a player deeply respected for his character and demeanor.
Unfortunately, he’s also someone prone to concussions. Last week marked the fourth time in his five-season career that he has sustained a violent head injury.
A number of commentators, including former players, immediately called for Tagovailova to consider retirement. Not so many years ago that would have been unthinkable. In the macho culture of professional football, you shake off injuries and keep playing – or somebody else will take your place.
But in a game that by its nature is characterized by high impact collisions, the accelerating evidence of cognitive impairment in former players has transformed the conversation.
To a significant degree that’s come about because a short, stocky Nigerian-American forensic pathologist decided to speak up.
Dr. Bennet Omalu has eight advanced degrees and board certifications. He’s also a faithful Catholic who believes he has seen ghosts in the medical examiner’s room, and who talks personally to the corpses he is dissecting. “You need to help me find the truth,” he will say. “Help me learn the story of your life.”
Omalu might have been dismissed as a quirky immigrant scientist except for his 2002 autopsy of former NFL Hall of Fame center Mike Webster, who had played 17 seasons in the NFL, mostly for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Webster had died suddenly and unexpectedly at midlife after years of struggling with intellectual impairment, mood disorders, deep depression, and suicide attempts.
Even though Webster’s brain looked normal at first glance, Omalu – who knew next to nothing about football – wondered if this American sports hero had suffered brain damage from all those years of knocking heads as an offensive lineman. “Fix the brain,” he ordered his assistant. That is, preserve the brain’s tissues so they might be examined more closely.
What happened next challenged the status quo of the National Football League and, by extension, all contact sports.
Omalu discovered that at the cellular level Webster’s brain had been afflicted by a condition he ultimately identified as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
After a few more autopsies he came to the conclusion that some of our nation’s most physically gifted athletes are playing a game that has the potential to destroy their brains. He promptly made the commitment to use his own brain to help sports stars hang on to theirs.
Omalu waited for the NFL to embrace him. Surely they would want to learn everything they possibly could about this vital discovery concerning player safety.
But as the old saying goes: “A man finds it very hard to learn something new if his livelihood depends on him not learning it.”
What if moms and dads began to steer their young sons away from playing a game that has historically exalted the Big Hit and “guys playing hurt?” With a circle-the-wagons mentality, NFL executives began to distance themselves from Bennet Omalu.
As documented in League of Denial, a book authored by a pair of ESPN reporters, the NFL at first responded to the concussion crisis in a manner reminiscent of Big Tobacco in the 60s and 70s. Even as the dangers of smoking became more and more evident, cigarette manufacturers rolled out their own scientists and a campaign of disinformation to proclaim the relative safety of tobacco.
For more than a decade, Omalu was marginalized by the NFL and portrayed as the enemy of America’s most popular game.
But the evidence kept growing. Of the 202 brains of NFL vets that have been examined to date, 87% have revealed the presence of CTE. “We’ve now found CTE in former NFL players who played every position except kicker,” says Ann McKee, a professor of neurology at Boston University.
Finally, in 2016, Jeff Miller, the NFL’s senior vice president for health and safety policy, acknowledged for the first time in a congressional hearing that the link between football and CTE seems clear. The American Medical Association simultaneously honored Omalu with the Distinguished Service Award, their highest honor.
The title of his book the following year says it all: Truth Doesn’t Have a Side: My Alarming Discovery about the Danger of Contact Sports. And yes, Bennet Omalu is one of those who this past weekend raised his voice to call for Tua Tagovailola to step aside from the game he loves.
The Bible, as perhaps no other book, exalts truth-telling. If we choose to follow Jesus, the one who claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6), we will be called to “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15).
But telling the truth – whether in marriage, in the office, within a circle of friends, or in the public square – is not always easy. Not everyone wants to be confronted with reality.
As Winston Churchill, a man with not a few enemies, once observed: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Is it sometimes hard to be the person who tells the truth in an effort to contribute to the common good?
It often is.
But be that person anyways.
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