been an all-state linebacker in high school and had gone on to play at Northwestern State University, a small Division I school in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He still lived and died for football. “I said, ‘Shit, that sounds like as good a reason as any to move to Pittsburgh,’ ” Bailes recalled. “I’m in.” He quickly adapted to his surroundings. “You know, there was no greater feeling than being a single neurosurgeon in Pittsburgh and going to the Porsche dealership and writing a check for $120,000 and driving this Porsche out and not even caring,” he said. “I went through about five of them.”
In the mid-1990s, around the same time Maroon and Lovell weredeveloping the Steelers Battery, Bailes was introduced to Frank Woschitz, a longtime official with the NFL Players Association. Woschitz had just conducted a health survey on retired players that he hoped would persuade the union and the league to give the players lifetime health insurance. It was a huge problem: Players often left the game so battered that they were unable to qualify for health insurance. But the league refused to provide it.
Bailes had agreed to look at the data for Woschitz—hundreds of questionnaires stacked in cardboard boxes—expecting that it would focus on mundane issues such as arthritis, back injuries, and heart disease. But when Bailes took a closer look, he was stunned. “Yes, they had hyperlipidemia [high cholesterol] and joint pain and cardiac disease, as expected,” he said. “But they were also having all kinds of cognitive problems. It was way out of line for what you would expect.”
Bailes shared this curious piece of information with a New York neurologist named Barry Jordan. In neuroscience circles, Jordan was already something of a legend. While attending Harvard Medical School in the late 1960s, Jordan, one of the few African Americans in his class, had decided to make up his own concentration: sports neurology. “All my classmates laughed at me,” he said. By the time he connected with Bailes, Jordan was one of the preeminent experts in sports medicine in the country and the chief medical officer of the New York State Athletic Commission.
Jordan agreed that the survey findings were off the charts. He wasn’t entirely surprised. Jordan had done a lot of research into boxing, in which the issue of chronic brain damage had been known since the 1920s, and had been expecting to see it show up in other contact sports. As early as 1999, he wrote that chronic brain damage “has been described primarily in boxers, but itmay be anticipated in other sports such as American football, ice hockey and perhaps soccer.”
Now, if Frank Woschitz’s survey was correct, retired football players were showing dramatically elevated signs of incipient dementia in huge numbers. Bailes and Jordan followed up with a survey of their own. To avoid tipping off the players that they were specifically looking at brain damage, Bailes and Jordan asked questions about a broad spectrum of injuries. Again, the numbers were dramatic.
In May 2000, Bailes and Jordan presented their findings at theAmerican Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting in San Diego. Out of 1,090 former players, 60 percent reported that they had sustained at least one concussion during their careers; more than a quarter reported more than three. The players with concussions, most in their fifties and sixties at that point, were reporting significant neurological problems: memory loss, confusion, speech or hearing problems, and headaches.
The news, preliminary as it was, was in many ways worse than what researchers such as Barth, Lovell, and Collins were uncovering. Those studies had shown that concussions had to be taken seriously, with symptoms that often lingered for days or weeks or even longer. But it was assumed that with time those symptoms eventually went away. After the release of his first paper in
JAMA
,Collins told the
Detroit News
: “If you give the
In the mid-1990s, around the same time Maroon and Lovell weredeveloping the Steelers Battery, Bailes was introduced to Frank Woschitz, a longtime official with the NFL Players Association. Woschitz had just conducted a health survey on retired players that he hoped would persuade the union and the league to give the players lifetime health insurance. It was a huge problem: Players often left the game so battered that they were unable to qualify for health insurance. But the league refused to provide it.
Bailes had agreed to look at the data for Woschitz—hundreds of questionnaires stacked in cardboard boxes—expecting that it would focus on mundane issues such as arthritis, back injuries, and heart disease. But when Bailes took a closer look, he was stunned. “Yes, they had hyperlipidemia [high cholesterol] and joint pain and cardiac disease, as expected,” he said. “But they were also having all kinds of cognitive problems. It was way out of line for what you would expect.”
Bailes shared this curious piece of information with a New York neurologist named Barry Jordan. In neuroscience circles, Jordan was already something of a legend. While attending Harvard Medical School in the late 1960s, Jordan, one of the few African Americans in his class, had decided to make up his own concentration: sports neurology. “All my classmates laughed at me,” he said. By the time he connected with Bailes, Jordan was one of the preeminent experts in sports medicine in the country and the chief medical officer of the New York State Athletic Commission.
Jordan agreed that the survey findings were off the charts. He wasn’t entirely surprised. Jordan had done a lot of research into boxing, in which the issue of chronic brain damage had been known since the 1920s, and had been expecting to see it show up in other contact sports. As early as 1999, he wrote that chronic brain damage “has been described primarily in boxers, but itmay be anticipated in other sports such as American football, ice hockey and perhaps soccer.”
Now, if Frank Woschitz’s survey was correct, retired football players were showing dramatically elevated signs of incipient dementia in huge numbers. Bailes and Jordan followed up with a survey of their own. To avoid tipping off the players that they were specifically looking at brain damage, Bailes and Jordan asked questions about a broad spectrum of injuries. Again, the numbers were dramatic.
In May 2000, Bailes and Jordan presented their findings at theAmerican Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting in San Diego. Out of 1,090 former players, 60 percent reported that they had sustained at least one concussion during their careers; more than a quarter reported more than three. The players with concussions, most in their fifties and sixties at that point, were reporting significant neurological problems: memory loss, confusion, speech or hearing problems, and headaches.
The news, preliminary as it was, was in many ways worse than what researchers such as Barth, Lovell, and Collins were uncovering. Those studies had shown that concussions had to be taken seriously, with symptoms that often lingered for days or weeks or even longer. But it was assumed that with time those symptoms eventually went away. After the release of his first paper in
JAMA
,Collins told the
Detroit News
: “If you give the
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