Frank Gifford died this past August. For my generation he was the guy tasked with keeping Howard Cosell and Don Meredith at bay for years on ABC's Monday Night Football broadcasts, later pairing for another long run with the smoothly professional Al Michaels. If you were like me, you might have vaguely known he had been a player in his younger days, but not necessarily a lot more, unless one of your elders showed you this picture:
Gifford, then of the New York Giants, is the one laid out on the ground. The one standing above him, gesticulating wildly, is Chuck Bednarik, a linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles, who had just put Gifford in that position, as well as knocking him out cold, in a game in 1960.
What you probably didn't learn at the time is that Gifford was out after that ht for a total of eighteen months. First he was hospitalized for ten days, and then decided to retire, sitting out the 1961 season, before deciding to return in 1962.
That picture (for which some use the word "iconic") flashed back into public memory at Gifford's death (the man had a Hall of Fame career, and yet that career is mostly remembered for this one thing that was done to him...what?), and again this week, when Gifford's family released a statement acknowledging that Gifford's brain showed signs of the disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) upon postmortem examination. (The statement was released on Wednesday, the day after the NFL held a damage-control conference call in the wake of the Case Keenum fiasco last Sunday.)
This both is not and is surprising. It is not because Gifford played a lot of football for a long time, took more hits than just that famous one, and played both offense and defense for part of his career. The man both took and delivered a lot of hits.
It feels surprising, though, because for a lot of us Gifford was that sober voice in the broadcast booth, not a player first and foremost. He was the voice of reason and sanity between Cosell and Dandy Don. It's hard to reconcile that with the litany of symptoms associated with CTE.
Gifford brings a different generation of players into the CTE discussion. As per usual, the NFL recited its predigested litany of how the game has never been safer and how the league is not waiting for the science to be settled (shades of climate denialists) before taking action. I don't have video of Roger Goodell making such a statement, but I can't help but guess he looked a bit pale and sickly in making it.
Until now it was possible to conceive of the wave of CTE diagnoses as somehow being a curse of a more recent generation of players. Mike Webster, the first deceased player to be associated with the condition, played primarily across the 1970s and 1980s. Other players who have been posthumously diagnosed -- Ray Easterling, for example -- also played in that generation, while many of the most famous victims -- Dave Duerson, Junior Seau -- played later, in the late 1980s or into the 1990s. And of course, some were current players into the 2000 -- Chris Henry, Jovan Belcher.
If followers of the sport are now going to be confronted by the specter of an older generation having been afflicted with CTE, it will force the league's authorities and followers to consider the crisis (to the degree that they consider it at all) from a different perspective. It's not clear just how many players of Gifford's generation are still potentially to be diagnosed with CTE. It wouldn't be hard for a man in his 80s to assume that his condition was one that comes with old age, as opposed to a player in his 50s suffering symptoms more closely associated with persons in their 80s. So there's really no way to project how many of Gifford's contemporaries may yet join him on this roll of suffering. But Gifford is now there, an iconic NFL figure at least on a par with Seau, disturbing us all with a new problem to consider.
Rashean Mathis is not such an iconic figure. He's a solid veteran, age 35, who had not been diagnosed with a concussion in his pro career until early this November. The disconcerting part of this story was that the concussion was apparently actually suffered on October 25 but not diagnosed for a week and a half. "Finally," indeed.
This is not a Case Keenum story or a Shane Morris story. Mathis suffered the hit while playing for the Detroit Lions against the Minnesota Vikings on the aforementioned October 25. This piece from a Lions fan site lays out the sequence of events in detail. Mathis left the game after the hit (some accounts say he was holding his head as he came up from the hit; I can't find any video to confirm this). He was treated on the sideline, through the NFL's concussion protocol, apparently without interruption or interference in this case. He was determined not to have a concussion and returned to the game.
Later in the game Mathis suffered another hit, and this time was taken to the locker room for examination. Again, and under even more thorough examination this time, he was determined not to have a concussion. The game being out of hand, however, Mathis did not return to the game.
Mathis flew with his team to London for a game against the Kansas City Chiefs. That thursday Mathis reported headaches, but the Lions medical staff didn't think those headaches were related to the hits that had required examination on Sunday. The headaches didn't get better and Mathis was not active for the Sunday game. Finally, that following Wednesday, November 4, Mathis was diagnosed with a concussion.
This week Mathis gave an interview about his situation. He's not naive about his situation; he's undecided about continuing his career next season (the Lions placed him in injured reserve, ending his season this year), and even before this incident Mathis was enlisted in the ranks of "football players who don't want their sons to play football." As the linked interview shows, Mathis has actually been getting informed on the concussion/brain trauma issue for a few years now, and his thoughts and observations on the subject are worthy of your attention.
Mathis, one of the more thoughtful guys on the subject, has now unwittingly become an object lesson in just how difficult it is to get a grasp on the problem. In the meantine, I can only wish Mathis the best in introducing his son to golf this off-season.
Rashean Mathis, slow getting up
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