Head Injuries, Progress and Pessimism

I have had this terrible thought for about a month now -- we may not see Sidney Crosby even at the start of the 2011-2012 season.

That Crosby suffered setback from his January concussion(s) mid-way through the playoff series versus the Lightning cannot be a good thing. Head injuries are funny. Not funny ha ha or funny witty, but funny sad ... really, really sad. And also tricky. There's not a straight line of recovery, the way there often is with a knee injury or shoulder injury. Brains are complicated. Months had passed and yet, Sid still had a nasty bout of symptoms. And I wonder ... if three months were not enough for his head to get better, why do we think six months will make it better? Or eight months? There are no guarantees here.


Worse yet, if he is symptom free at the start of next season, there are no guarantees that the next nasty headshot won't set him back to where he was in mid-January. And, if we've learned anything from this hockey playoff season, there will be a nasty headshot. I guarantee that, son.

I've seen way too many guys taking runs, too many elbows thrown at heads, too much blatant boarding, and too much just plain flat-out head-hunting in the playoffs this spring. And I've seen those incidents largely ignored by the braintrust of the NHL, the guys entrusted with protecting the brains of guys like Brent Seabrook and Simon Gagne. With so little punishment being meted out (or no punishment at all), it's open season on hockey player heads this spring.

So, what's the thrust here? If your name is Matt Cooke and you go after somebody's head, you get a 17 game suspension, but if you're not named Matt Cooke, then you just get one game, or no punishment at all for heinous head-hunting? I strongly supported the Cooke suspension when the league handed it down because I believed it marked a sea-change in the way the NHL dealt with head-hunting.

I could not have been more wrong about the NHL's intentions.

And that sucks.

There's a simple solution -- ban all shots to the head, regardless of whether they are accidental or not. Without doing that, all of the NHL's talk is just disingenuous hot air.

High stick penalties don't require intent to be called. You're responsible for your stick and if it accidentally whacks somebody else in the face, you still get two minutes in the box. If it looks like you brought your stick up and deliberately cracked another player across the face, it's a longer penalty or even a game misconduct.

Why not apply the same thinking to head shots? If it's an inadvertent head shot, it's a two-minute minor penalty. If it's a blatant attempt to clean somebody's clock, give them a game misconduct. And if you throw an elbow at somebody's head, you're out. Period.

This isn't hard stuff. Believe me, even if the on-ice officials caught and called every single head shot, professional hockey is in no danger of turning into badminton.

Pittsburgh defenseman Brooks Orpik is one of the best in the game. He hits as hard as anybody in professional hockey. We've all seen him have shifts where he has simply taken over the game by checking everything in his area. And yet, Orpik doesn't go head-hunting. He doesn't take runs and he doesn't throw his shoulder or elbow into anybody's ear. Do you think Orpik is a wuss? [If you do, I double-dog-dare you to say that to his face.] But Orpik is no wuss and the game is not in danger of becoming some namby-pamby pursuit if head shots are policed by the league.

No, if the NHL would take reasonable steps to protect players, ice hockey will not become touch football, it won't become figure skating and it won't become Dancing with the Stars. It will remain a physical, hard-hitting game. The only thing that will change is that we might be treated to watching guys like Sidney Crosby and Simon Gagne actually play in the playoffs. Who could be against that?

As a society, I believe we have all started to change in terms of the way we think about head injuries. Not that long ago, if somebody got a concussion, we used the dismissive term, 'dinged' -- as in, "Oh, he just got dinged. He's fine." But as science learns more about head injuries, we have all started to treat them more seriously. I think that's a good thing. But for the life of me, I cannot figure out why hockey is shrinking from taking this on, why they've taken only the tiniest of baby-steps. They won't lose fans from it. In fact, I think they could only gain a larger fanbase by making a serious commitment to protecting their players.

On the same day that I heard about Crosby's setback, I also heard about the report released on former NFL star Dave Duerson's brain. Wonder if they've read that at NHL HQ in Toronto?


[Crosby photo -- torontosportsnut.com; Seabrook photo -- cbc.ca; Lundin photo -- tsn.ca]

NFL More Cognizant About Concussions

From True/Slant on December 3, 2009:

NFL Finally Catching Up on Concussions

If you were starting an all tough guy NFL team, you would have to name Hines Ward at one of the wide out positions. No doubt, he is one of the baddest, most fearless wide receivers of the modern era. He puts his body on the line with a recklessness rarely seen at this glamor position. I have never once seen him alligator arm a pass or flinch going across the middle. He takes defenders on and most of the time he wins. He blocks so hard he has been known to break bones of defenders. He takes the fiercest hits defensive backs can dish out and comes up with a big grin on his face. Nobody would ever question Ward’s toughness.

His judgment on the other hand …

On Sunday night, before the Steelers and Ravens kicked off, Ward was interviewed by NBC’s Bob Costas and indicated that he thought, well, some of the guys in the locker room kinda sorta thought a concussed Ben Roethlisberger should maybe play, further indicating that, you know, Roethlisberger could have lied to doctors in order to be cleared to play because it was such a big game. The implication was clear: other guys lie in order to play with concussions and so Roethlisberger should have lied and played, too.

Ward has since backed off, publicly and privately apologized to Roethlisberger and to his team, which is good because those were some stupid comments. But for purposes of this column, I’m not interested in the chemistry of the Steelers roster or the relationship between Hines Ward and Ben Roethlisberger. What I am interested is the mindset Ward evidenced in that interview, because he is hardly alone in his foolish, macho thinking.

So for Ward and anybody else in any locker room from here to San Diego who thinks concussions are no big deal, I have two words: Mike Webster.

The great Mike Webster, a tough guy’s tough guy, anchored the Steelers line in the 1970’s. Webbie was old-timey and even looked like he was from another era, with thinning hair and a mug that belonged in one of those sepia photos from the leather helmet years. He was the lead blocker for Franco and Rocky and the last line of defense for Bradshaw. The guy was great at his job. The nickname Iron Mike was no gift, he earned that.

But as great as his career was, the end of his life was equally sad. Later in life, Webster suffered a whole host of dementia-like issues, most if not all of which referred back to his playing years when defensive linemen teed off on his head like it was a pinata. (There are also allegations that Webster and his linemates abused steroids, which he never admitted, but anecdotal evidence leans that way.)

At any rate, back when Webster was playing, players didn’t rest because they were concussed; if a guy got “dinged” (the popular, dismissive term for it) in the first half, he usually played in the second half. Headaches during practice? C’mon man. Nobody missed a game because of headaches. This is a tough man’s league and any hint of weakness, like being felled by a common headache, is anathema.

Webster played through hundreds, no thousands of head slaps and helmet to helmet collisions. By the end of his career, doctors estimated that his head had been through the equivalent of about 25,000 car crashes. One of the results of which was that, by the end of his shortened life, he often lived in his car.

I met Mike Webster precisely once, during training camp, in the 1970’s when I was a kid. He was nice to a little girl who was awestruck by the great and magnificent Steelers and I appreciated that. I did not know the man, just his work, but I couldn’t help but tear up when I heard of his death in the fall of 2002. Because it was so tragic and so completely unnecessary.

The NFL is finally starting to see the light on this. I hope there’s a time when there are stricter guidelines and more definite rules governing player eligibility after a closed head injury. I’d like the league to mandate at least one game off after a concussion, just so that players and coaches don’t have to take the heat, with implications being that they’re not tough enough for the sport. Okay so it took Congress looking into the matter to get the NFL to do something about it, but better late to the party than never. Here’s part of the new guidelines:

“Once removed for the duration of a practice or game, the player should not be considered for return-to-football activities until he is fully asymptomatic, both at rest and after exertion, has a normal neurological examination, normal neuropsychological testing and has been cleared to return by both his team physician(s) and the independent neurological consultant.”

And I hope that’s just the beginning. I know knee injuries and ankle injuries and shoulder injuries hurt and become arthritic and all that. But you can function on a messed up knee. You can have a pretty nice life with a few pins in your shoulders. While a knee injury can end a guy’s career, a head injury can ruin his life or prematurely end it because you can never get your brain back. Never. At least the NFL and some players are starting to realize that.

I credit Roethlisberger for telling the truth to the doctors. It evidences a level of maturity we didn’t see from him following his 2006 automobile accident. Roethlisberger played that season and seemed “dinged” throughout. Midway through the season, he was knocked cold in a game in Atlanta. He played the next week in Oakland. I was furious with Coach Cowher for letting him play that day. Maybe it was not Cowher’s fault. Perhaps Roethlisberger hid his symptoms. Maybe he lied to doctors back in 2006 because he was, in fact, “medically cleared to play” that week. Despite that, everybody who saw that game knew he should not have been out there.

So I’m glad Roethlisberger told the truth three years later, because losing one game sucks, but not as much as the long-term effects of multiple concussions.