The NFL is one of the most popular and most physical team sports in this country. But there is a price to all of the hits to the head unlike the other injuries to your arm or legs or any other body part. A few reporters decided to report on it in the 80s-90’s interviewing players who were concussed and were told to retire early so there wasn’t any further damage to their brain, and the doctors who diagnosed some of the brains of deceased NFL players. The NFL dismissed the NFL concussion problem because in their minds it was a made up story by the media to get attention and that their perfect sport didn’t have any problems with it.
The reporters back then decided it wasn’t worth it to be sued over their work and to have it discredited. The NFL already was doing their own smear campaign against the doctors and scientists who were looking over the brains of deceased NFL players. They also had come out with their own concussion committee run by their own doctors and physicians to discredit the other doctors and scientists who were saying that concussions in football led to brain damage. Every time those independent researchers were presenting something, the NFL concussions committee would say they were wrong or would say they didn’t have enough proof.
Fast forward through all the findings and committees and groups of researchers that consisted of doctors and scientists from both the NFL and those that were trying to tell the public the dangers of concussions in football, the NFL was still denying it. Two brothers who are both journalists and authors teamed up to uncover the crisis and history of brain damage and its link to concussions in football. Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, one brother, Mark had a New York Times Best seller for his book about Barry Bonds and the steroid scandal in baseball, and the other brother Steve was a Pulitzer Prize winner for his work covering the Iraq war.
I think the original reporters who wrote stories about former players having brain damage from all the concussions should have kept reporting and continuing the story. I understand not a lot of people want to get discredited by a big corporation for their work, but come on, as reporters you need to report the truth. You’re not doing your job if you’re giving up after they assume your work is the media trying to make a story just to get attention. There is a reason why you reported the story in the first place right? You’re not doing what the NFL said you were. You’re reporting on something that actually is and was true at the time.
There were lots of scientists who tried to fight the NFL but like these journalists there were lawyers that didn’t want to fight a $9 billion industry. Most of the lawyers that were asked didn’t want to lose their credibility because they didn’t think they could win no matter if it was the truth. So I felt that there was a reason not to pursue the topic because you don’t want to lose your credibility but at the same time I don’t condone it. There was only one real reporter who was reporting stories about the finds from the brain researchers and examiners. But he wasn’t going out of his way to do the reporting as one of the later brain examiners used him as a source to break stories for the New York Times.
During this time the researchers were all fighting for brains to study every time a brain became available. A former wrestler Christopher Nowinski was a part of the epidemic of people studying brains but then went on his own after the NFL endorsed him over the actual scientists. When he got a brain to study he found that there was brain trauma due to concussions and would rush to his friend at the Times to report on it. When other journalists work wasn’t considered to be true he was the only one whose work was accepted because Nowinski was endorsed by
the NFL. I felt like the Times was being used by Nowinski to get all the credit for the discovery that concussions in football were the reason for brain damage in former deceased players. He shouldn’t have let them use him like that unless they both were getting something out of it.
The last issue was that the brothers are employed by ESPN, which is one the main partners of the NFL in making tons of money with Monday night football and all the NFL coverage they do. So there were rumors that ESPN wouldn’t let them come out with the book and documentary. So I commend them for not caring what ESPN would do to them, they kept to their journalist principles and reported on the truth. They wanted to let the public know the truth no matter what ESPN or the NFL goliaths did to them the Davids and because of the people studying the brains, the lawyers who fought for a settlement from the NFL and these brothers the NFL now actually cares about concussions and brain trauma in their game making it safer.