From Mike Webster to Junior Seau

Yesterday my wife and I walked into a local restaurant for lunch, and one of the TVs over the bar was showing an NFL team practicing.

Just practicing.

Of course it was the NFL Network. But still, practicing.

Not playing a "practice game." That happens often enough in baseball, as spring training games do get broadcast fairly often. But not even MLB Network broadcasts practice.

Of course, this is the weekend that teams actually play a game of sorts, as the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings play the Hall of Fame Game tonight, a day after a new class of players was inducted into the NFL's Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

Between the Steelers' inclusion in the game and the induction of Jerome Bettis, the city is covered in gold and black, especially with Pittsburgh not all that far away. Another inductee, though, also garnered a good deal of attention this weekend, in his case by his unavoidable absence.

Junior Seau was inducted into the Hall of Fame posthumously. One of the greatest linebackers to play the game and one of its most liked and popular players, Seau retired in 2010 after a stellar career with the San Diego Chargers and New England Patriots. About two years later, Seau was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot would in the chest. His death followed by about a year the similar suicide of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, who also shot himself in the chest; in Duerson's case he left specific instructions that his brain be taken for examination, to determine if it showed the telltale traces of what had already become well-known in the sporting world as CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. While Seau left no specific instructions, the gunshot wound to the chest had after Duerson's case already taken on the status of a signature; a means of suicide that left the brain intact for examination.

Like Duerson's, Seau's brain showed the telltale protein markers signifying CTE, which would confirm anecdotal evidence of Seau's struggle with the onset of CTE -- marked personality changes, violent mood swings, inability to focus or perform basic mental tasks -- that were already showing up before his career had ended. Sean became easily the most famous and widely popular player to have been found with CTE after his death, supplanting another Hall of Famer whose induction ceremony marked, for many sports fans, their first exposure to the debilitating effects of this particular brain trauma.


*The following is indebted to League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle For Truth, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013). I've said before you need to read this book if you give a damn at all about this issue. That still holds true, even if at times it is a difficult and even gruesome read.

Mike Webster was selected for induction into the NFL Hall of Fame in 1997, after a seventeen-year career with the Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs. Signs of deterioration, though mostly overlooked, were also showing before the end of Webster's career, but his post-football decline was both tragically quick and tragically extended. Financial collapse, constantly increasing pain, drug reliance (eventually popping Ritalin like candy, some would say), memory failure and more were the routine of Webster's life. By the time of his Hall of Fame induction, seven years after his retirement, those closest to him feared for his ability to get through his acceptance speech.

As the ceremony approached, media outlets began to seek out the inductees and do the seemingly requisite profiles of the greats, their careers and their post-career lives. The sordid details of Webster's decline created a sensation in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, after a profile by ESPN laid out the details of Webster's decline. The following weeks were peppered with headlines such as "Webster's Induction Comes Amid Chaos" (Houston Chronicle), "A Life Off-Center" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), "A Man of Steel Crumbles" (St. Petersburg Times), and "Humbled Hero: Webster Fights to Overcome Despair" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Even as Webster tried to portray the ESPN profile and the following stories as overblown and exaggerated, his own behavior undermined his claims.

The induction ceremony went about as badly as his friends and family expected. Webster's speech, extending thirteen minutes beyond his allotted eight-minute slot, was frequently incoherent, disconnected, and rambling, while also being occasionally funny and even inspiring. Still, no one who had read or heard the troubling stories about Webster were convinced by Webster's speech that his situation was not every bit as dire as those stories suggested.

Webster to Bradshaw, one last snap at Webster's Hall of Fame induction

One of the more lucid quotes from Webster's speech:

You know, it's painful to play football, obviously. It's not fun out there being in two-a-day drills in the heat of summer and banging heads. It's not a natural thing.

A little more than five years later Webster was dead. He did not commit suicide; simply put, his body failed. One wonders if the suicides that have followed in intervening years were even a little bit motivated by a desire to avoid ending up like Mike Webster.


To some degree, the current concern for the long-term effects of playing football, at least as a public concern, stem from the publicity generated by Webster's Hall of Fame induction and the reports generated by it.

Little wonder, then, that the NFL, under Roger Goodell's imperative to "protect the shield," reacted with hyperactive determination to prevent the family of Junior Seau from causing even the tiniest scene this weekend in Canton. Even given a standing policy of having no family speeches for posthumous inductions (and I have no idea if it's true or not), and even given the Seau family's wrongful-death lawsuit against the NFL, the NFL's overly aggressive policing ended up being the black mark they sought to avoid. Even NPR, basically somnolent on the concussion/brain trauma story up to now, finally trotted out a piece for the weekend.

The ceremony seems to have come off without incident, in the end. It seems the Seaus wanted to have one occasion for simply celebrating their father's life and accomplishments, and everybody managed to get out of each other's way long enough for that to happen.

Of course, one weekend of relative peace changes nothing. The NFL won't change, because nobody is really challenging it to change. The questions about brain trauma will continue.

And this question will continue to be asked.