By Matt Chaney

Posted Thursday, June 16, 2011

This is Part 3 of an analysis series titled Brain Trauma Dictates Epic Football Reform, which will culminate with independent recommendations for steps imperative to the blood sport’s survival at public schools, colleges, and likely the professional level.

Doctors and medical researchers have long agreed boxing can cause brain damage in athletes and lead to personality disorders and outbursts, through repetitive impacts both concussive and sub-concussive.

A 1973 study on postmortem evidence of 15 ex-pro boxers who suffered “punch-drunk syndrome” documented their “violent behavior and rage reaction” through interviews of relatives. Several of the boxers died in psychiatric wards.

Decades earlier, boxers who became demented and deranged were known as “slug nutty,” according to a 1928 report by Dr. Harrison Martland.

Meanwhile, yet today, the NFL and loyalist experts loathe admitting that tackle football even causes long-term impairment, much less off-field violence by players and chaos for families.

Neuropsychologist Mark R. Lovell, career NFL consultant with a PhD—and marketer of the critically rebuked ImPACT “concussion testing” pushed by the league’s media machine—helped author a 2011 review that concludes “adverse long-term neurocognitive effects of concussive injury have been demonstrated empirically in professional boxers only” [italics for emphasis].

The NFL’s stalling about brain damage in players is easy to lampoon, along with its PR measures such as arbitrary fines for helmet hits and lousy concussion assessments.

But there is legal logic for NFL absurdity in the issue, say astute observers, and especially the league’s acting innocent when an active player or retiree goes berserk.

“This shows that the NFL is frightened about getting sued,” Dr. Gabe Mirkin, sports medicine pioneer and erstwhile Redskins consultant, told Washington City Paper. “Mark my words: The NFL is going to be at the end of a lawsuit where a guy says they should be paying for this or that criminal behavior, because some guy got hit in the head too much playing football, and a jury will be convinced of that.”

“And that is a reasonable argument. The brain controls everything. And there’s accumulating evidence to show that getting hit in the head can cause anything to change—thought processes, mood, anything. The NFL has to act like it’s taking action.”

By 2009 the research team of breakthrough pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu had found brain damage, chronic traumatic encephalopathy [CTE], in four of five deceased NFL players and one professional wrestler. Elsewhere, Boston University, pathologist Dr. Ann McKee and colleagues corroborated Omalu et al, finding CTE in deceased NFL players and more athletes of sports with repetitive head impacts.

Depression and erratic behavior had marked CTE subjects in latter life, and most studied died in their 30s and 40s. Several committed suicide, including an NCAA football player at 21, Owen Thomas, and NFL retirees Terry Long and Andre Waters. Another retiree, 36-year-old Justin Strzelczyk, drove straight into an oncoming tractor-trailer while fleeing police, dying in the fiery crash. Chris Benoit, 40, the WWE star whose brain matter was analyzed by Omalu, infamously killed his wife, son and then himself.

A 2010 report by the Omalu group, of the Brain Injury Research Institute at University of West Virginia, is titled “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, Suicides and Parasuicides in Professional American Athletes: The Role of the Forensic Pathologist” and published by American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. In reviewing the cases of Long, Waters, Strzelczyk, Benoit and Mike Webster, an NFL lineman who had attempted taking his own life, the researchers concluded: “The key risk factors for suicides are depression and other mental disorders… CTE in our 5 cases may represent a common risk factor in our 5 cases.”

The NFL has bristled at Omalu findings for years, but now the league claims to advocate real research, and last year commissioner Roger Goodell committed funding to the McKee team, awarding $1 million to the BU non-profit Sports Legacy Institute founded by Chris Nowinski, celebrated speaker, brain-chaser and former Omalu associate who authored a book on concussion crisis in American football.

Recently the McKee team released findings of CTE in former NFL star Dave Duerson, who committed suicide on Feb. 17 at age 50, shooting himself in the chest to preserve the brain for analysis he requested in a final note.

“Dave Duerson had the classic pathology of [CTE] and severe involvement of all the [brain regions] that affect judgment, inhibition, impulse, mood control and memory,” McKee said.

America is grudgingly accepting that playing football may spur anti-social acts because of brain damage, not stale theory like “ ’roid rage” resulting of anabolic steroids, which the game always blames on individuals only, or of the silly assumption that former players cannot handle a simpler existence after glitter life as football star.

Anymore, very few people publicly question a link between tackle football, CTE and mental issues, and former NFL players are convinced that terror can ignite.

“Andre Waters and Duerson—these deaths aren’t just a coincidence,” said Eric Dickerson, 50, Hall of Fame running back. “That’s not something young black men do, stick a gun to our head and kill ourselves.”

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American football traditionally managed to distance itself from players exhibiting behavioral or mental disorder, and a classic NFL case is Jim Tyrer, early cornerstone lineman for the Chiefs, one of the greatest offensive tackles in history. Today Tyrer remains shut out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, more than 30 years since his tragic end, when the league and media suddenly wanted to forget him.

In autumn 1980 Tyrer was six years retired from the NFL, spiraling downward in business and health at age 41, when at dawn on a Monday morning he rousted his wife with a gunshot into her pillow. He killed Martha Tyrer on second aim then shot himself with the .38 pistol, completing the murder-suicide with three of their four children in the home near Kansas City.

The carnage was senseless, outrageous for family and friends. None could firmly grasp a motive for Tyrer, once a perennial All-Pro and most respected player in the league. “Something had to snap,” said Len Dawson, former Chiefs quarterback. “He was such a strong, stable guy. He was a great family man. Doing something like this is completely contrary to his character.”

Book author Michael Oriard, former teammate of Tyrer on the Chiefs, recounted the shock and mystery in a chapter of his The End of Autumn, an unheralded but riveting 1982 account of life in pro football.

The dignified Tyrer had worn suit and tie to work every day, an unfailing gentlemen toward everyone including unknown rookies and free agents, the clubhouse lower class from which Oriard emerged. Jim and Martha Tyrer, sweethearts since high school in Ohio, led player families as religious souls dedicated to their children and always willing to help others.

“Jim Tyrer was the unlikeliest suicide-murderer to those who knew him,” Oriard wrote. “Among all the Chiefs I played with, he seemed the most responsible, the most controlled, the most conscientious and stable. He struck his other associates in football the same way.”

Oriard continued: “In the days before the murder-suicide, Tyrer clearly seemed depressed to those who saw him. [Former teammate] Fred Arbanas had lined up an opportunity to sell national accounts for the Yellow Pages, but Tyrer never showed up to take the test. He was a college graduate, but had been out of school for twenty years. He told Arbanas that he always did poorly on those tests; he was competing with kids right out of school, barely older than his daughter. His minister and friend at the Presbyterian church he attended detected paranoia and arranged psychiatric counseling. [Former teammate] George Daney saw him on the Wednesday before the fateful Sunday. Jim was obviously down. He kept asking George how he looked; he was concerned about the forty pounds he had lost. They talked about football. Jim had continued his contact with the Chiefs’ organization, buying season tickets, attending Chiefs’ functions. That Sunday he took his eleven-year-old son, Jason, to the game in Arrowhead Stadium, won 17-16 by the Seattle Seahawks. Someone reported that Jim stayed afterward, wandering around the empty stadium before he went home. For the last time.”

‘No one knows what passed through Jim Tyrer’s mind between the end of the Chiefs’ game and five the next morning…”

The physical massiveness and brutality of Tyrer as feared lineman did not explain his final act for Oriard. “Jim Tyrer was not a violent man. And football violence is very different from murder and suicide,” Oriard wrote. “Jim Tyrer was human, not a character in a soap opera. How can we fully understand what drove him to do what he did?”

Today, some believe brain damage affected Tyrer, particularly for his 14 years as pro player that included 180 consecutive starts at offensive line for the Chiefs.

Standing 6-foot-6, weighing 280 pounds, Tyrer was a Sporting News AFL All-League tackle eight consecutive seasons, from 1962 to 1969, then a two-time AFC All-Pro following the NFL merger. He played in three Super Bowls and was named a first-teamer on the AFL All-Time Team.

But voters for the Pro Football Hall of Fame ignore great offensive tackles, anyway, having inducted only about a dozen from NFL history, and they’ve literally forgotten the decorated giant who killed his wife and himself three decades ago at Kansas City.

Tyrer was a finalist for Canton enshrinement in 1981, the Hall’s first election following his deadly rampage, but he wasn’t selected and hasn’t come close since.

The murder-suicide largely drives pro football’s snub of Tyrer, according to a family member and several former players interviewed last year by J.W. Nix, a Washington-based blogger.

“Dad belongs there [Hall of Fame], but I am unsure if the voters will ever put him in,” said Brad Tyrer, the eldest child.

“It is time to wipe the slate clean and induct [Tyrer],” said Ben Davidson, a Raiders defensive end from 1964 to 1972. “Life goes on. These types of events happen daily. We are turning him into a Pete Rose by excluding him, though everyone knows he should be in.”

“Tyrer was the pioneer of big offensive tackles,” said Elvin Bethea, Hall of Fame defensive end for the Houston Oilers from 1968 to 1983. “He was the preeminent left tackle in all of football. All other blockers in the NFL were mediocre compared to him.”

The possibility of brain damage was a prominent question in Nix’s many interviews about Tyrer, and the consensus was that he experienced depression.

Brad Tyrer said, “I felt my dad’s mental state at the end of his life must have been impaired and that very well could have been as a result of the trauma his brain experienced during his football career.”

Former Broncos defensive end Pete Duranko empathized with Tyrer, his old opponent, having battled depression himself while working with other retirees suffering emotional duress. “It creeps up on you,” Duranko said. “People, especially the [Hall] voters, do not understand mental illness. Jim was a strong man who did his best to hide his disease. He didn’t want people to know he was depressed and preferred to try to deal with it himself.”

Voices still speak up for Martha Tyrer, too, the certain victim of tragedy. Her brother, Al Lundstrom, grew up with Jim Tyrer and played football alongside him at Ohio State.

“Though he [Jim] was depressed about his financial situation, I am not convinced his depression was brought on by post-concussion syndrome,” Lundstrom told Nix.

The couple’s youngest child, Stephanie, was 11 at time of the murder-suicide. “I think about it ever day,” she recalled 24 years later, during an interview with Kansas City Star sportswriter Wright Thompson, who reported the four children grew up to lead productive and fulfilling lives.

As an adult, Stephanie Tyrer harbors complex emotions about her father and deep loss for her mother, who was beautiful, talented, endearing. “That hurts more than anything,” Stephanie said. “My dad is the focal point, and my mom is left behind. I miss my mother more, because there was an anger factor with my dad. My dad traveled a lot, was on the road a lot. My mom was the one who took us to all our practices and games. The person who made an important impact on my life was my mom.”

The author Oriard remembers Martha and Jim Tyrer and still wonders what happened. An English professor and former Chiefs lineman, Oriard follows contemporary reports on brain trauma and suicides of football players, and he considers whether ramming heads severely injured Tyrer, “but all I can do is wonder,” Oriard stated recently in email. “Jim was obviously going through personal and financial problems, but whether he was suffering from the consequences of too many hits, and that affected his reaction to his problems, we’ll never know…”

Dr. Omalu recently considered the story of Jim Tyrer and said, “He may have suffered from CTE.”

Permanent brain dysfunction of football cannot be investigated in the case of Tyrer, unfortunately, but modern research does connect CTE to the sport, so termed by Omalu during his landmark postmortem study of NFL retiree Webster in 2002 at Pittsburgh.

Omalu, then a medical examiner for the coroner’s office of Allegheny County, confirmed in autopsy the Steelers legend died of cardiac disease at age 50, and the brain of Webster appeared normal, free of damage. Then Omalu conducted microscopic pathology, examining brain cells of the Hall of Fame lineman who played 17 seasons in pro football and a quarter-century in the sport, accumulating tens of thousand hits to head.

“The heart attack cannot explain his life after football,” Omalu would remark to ABC Television. Most people around Pittsburgh knew of Webster’s personal downfall in NFL retirement, during his 40s, for media stories published local and national about his odd behavior, drug dependency, financial ruin, homelessness and estrangement from family. A teen-age son, Garrett Webster, told local media his father had suffered diagnosed “brain injuries from football.”

And so the Nigerian-born Omalu, specializing in neuropathology and working from medical literature on boxers with “dementia pugilistica,” found CTE in Webster, the brain damage he anticipated of an American football player.

Under microscope, brain slides of Webster displayed diseased “tauopathy,” brown splotching and tinting of cell tissue known as cerebral grey matter. The formerly clean blue hue of healthy brain cells was discolored as result of repeated impacts Webster sustained, replaced by a tone of dried blood with diffuse shapes—“neuritic” threads and “neurofibrillary tangles,” toxic buildups of tau protein. In Webster’s case, hardened “amyloid plaques” blocked axon fibers or white matter from transferring neuron impulses. The signs were much like Alzheimer’s Disease, although CTE produced distinct variances in tauopathy outlay.

The CTE resulted of untold metabolic cascades during brain traumas for Webster, volatile chemical reactions for the jellied organ’s attempts at healing, apparently foiled by relentless pounding of football, especially at line of scrimmage. Webster was never diagnosed for a concussion in his NFL career.

Three years later, Omalu’s research group published a report on the Webster case in Neurosurgery, titled “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player.”

The report, citing literature of traumatic head injury in boxing and elsewhere, stated, “Possible symptoms of CTE may include recurrent headaches, irritability, dizziness, lack of concentration, impaired memory, and mental slowing; mood disorders, explosive behavior, morbid jealously, and pathological intoxication and paranoia; tremor, dysarthria, and parkinsonian movement disorders.” The report continued: “Postmortem telephone interviews of close family members of [Webster]… indicated a long-standing mood disorder…”

The NFL objected strongly, allegedly having researched brain trauma itself since 1994 while managing no full autopsy of a deceased player, while never connecting its sport to dementia pugilistica in boxing and “post-concussion syndrome” in the military, and despite knowing of early onset impairments among league retirees for at least two decades.

The NFL, which Howard Cosell once described as more powerful than government, had even managed to alter medical lexicon over years, seeing that the term post-concussion syndrome was supplanted by the league’s new label, mild traumatic brain injury.

The NFL minions for shaping opinion got busy on the unknown Dr. Omalu during 2005 and years following, those “experts” and other league loyalists of research, medicine, media, PR and football. They campaigned ugly to discredit Omalu and his findings on Webster and other retirees, until CTE was found in enough deceased NFL players to finally shut them up.

“It is something shameful…,” Omalu recalled of the period during a telephone interview, “that the NFL, despite all the money they have, did not identify this disease. It was an ignominious outsider like me who makes the link. And even when I made it, they attacked me, they de-legitimatized me. They insinuated that I was a voodoo doctor from Africa and that I should not be trusted. They made some statements that had visceral undertones.”

Simultaneously, league and union officials fought family members of Webster in acrimonious lawsuit proceedings. A court judgment in favor of the Webster family withstood appeal in 2006, awarding the estate about $2 million in retroactive disability benefits, costs and interest.

*       *       *       *       *       *       *

Two years ago, Dr. McKee directed neuropathology of former defensive lineman Shane Dronett, who came close to rampaging like Jim Tyrer and the wrestler Benoit.

Dronett stood 6-foot-6, weighed 300 pounds for a 10-year career in the NFL, but he died young, violently, bereft of inner peace and terrorizing people who loved him, among eerily familiar signs.

Until beset with his declining mental state around age 35, the Dronett story seemed stuff of grid legend, Texas pride. He was the small-town boy who became All-American for the UT Longhorns, a top draft pick, and an established NFL player making big plays and appearing in a Super Bowl. At retirement from the Falcons in 2002, Dronett was by accounts a good man, an engaging personality and doting father motivated to succeed in business.

But Dronett’s family life began disintegrating a few years later, when deranged episodes overtook him. Paranoia and rage would manifest and the hulking man became capable of anything, beating loved ones and strangers, brandishing weapons, issuing death threats. His wife Chris and two daughters learned to flee their home in suburban Atlanta for extended stays in secret places.

Ultimately, in January 2009, a confrontation between husband and wife turned deadly at the home, thankfully with the children away. Chris recounted for media how an enraged Shane went outside to his truck, grabbed a 12-gauge shotgun and returned inside. Chris saw the gun and ran out as Shane shot himself to death in the kitchen. He was 38.

The McKee group found CTE in Dronett, a result recently disclosed, and everyone wonders of the effect for his alternate persona, disturbances and death. Dronett did have brain surgery in 2007 to remove a benign tumor, but case experts doubt it as prime factor, in their conclusions at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at BU.

“There’s no way we would ever know what was specifically caused by the tumor or the surgery for the tumor or CTE,” Robert Stern, co-director of the center and BU professor of neurology, told CNN. “But more than likely at least some of his behavior and symptoms were associated with the worsening of the CTE.”

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor, teacher and restaurant worker living in Missouri, USA. Email him at mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For more information, including about Chaney’s 2009 book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the homepage at www.fourwallspublishing.com.

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