A football helmet’s health
warning sticker is pictured between a U.S. flag and the number 55, in memory of
former student and NFL player Junior Seau, as the Oceanside Pirates high school
football team prepared for a game in Oceanside, Calif., on Sept. 14, 2012.
Omalu’s discovery has
raised serious questions about whether there is any safe way for people to play
football as the game is currently conceived. Those doubts about what is
arguably the most popular sport in America reach all the way to the White
House: President Obama has repeatedly said that if he had a son, he would not
let the boy play football Smith’s decision to play Omalu is a nod to that
growing unease.
There is a particular
vindication in the idea of Smith playing Omalu, given some of the struggles
that Omalu, who is Nigerian and knew little about football when he began his
research, has faced in his efforts to study players’ brains. Omalu’s work on
CTE began when he performed the autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike
Webster. Omalu was struck by reports of changes in Webster’s personality toward
the end of his life and wondered whether they might be due to head injury.
Last year, Omalu told
Frontline reporter Michael Kirk that he had expected that the National Football
League would embrace his findings. Instead, after Omalu submitted a paper to
Neurosurgery, the journal where NFL doctors often submit their papers, the
league sent a letter to Omalu’s colleague Cyril Wecht, accusing Omalu of fraud.
“They went to the press.
They insinuated I was not practicing medicine; I was practicing voodoo,” Omalu
said. Jabs at Omalu’s place of birth were routine, he told Frontline. “Some of
them actually said that I’m attacking the American way of life. ‘How dare you,
a foreigner like you from Nigeria? What is Nigeria known for, the eighth most
corrupt country in the world? Who are you? Who do you think you are to come to
tell us how to live our lives?’ ”
That Omalu will not just
get the big-screen biopic treatment, but gets to be played by Will Smith, one
of the most successful black movie stars in the world and an icon of a certain
kind of American success, is the sort of turnabout that feels exactly like fair
play.
It is the cap on a shift in
awareness that suggests the public — and NFL players — trust Omalu and his
findings more than they trust the league. When veteran player Junior Seau
committed suicide in 2012, he did so by shooting himself in the chest so that
his brain could be studied after his death. His was the second such suicide by
an NFL player in two years.
A 2013 Marist poll,
conducted in conjunction with HBO’s Real Sports, found that 86 percent of
Americans have heard at least something about the link between concussions and
football. Thirty-three percent said that information would “make them less
likely to allow a son to participate in the game,” with 16 percent saying that
would be the most important factor in their choice. Thirteen percent reported
that they would not let their sons play the game at all.
If those numbers increase,
the NFL’s player pipeline could narrow, or even be shut off altogether, though
it will be a long time until the NFL is in serious peril. Eighty-five percent
of American families in the Marist poll would still let their boys put on pads.
Thirty-five percent of Americans who follow sports name football as their
favorite, with baseball lagging behind in second place.
In the interim, though,
Smith’s movie will continue to advance the argument that it can be just as
American to question the impact of football as it is to play the game. And if
football players are American heroes, they deserve doctors with the same sense
of determination and curiosity as Bennet Omalu looking out for them.
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