October 10, 2013 by
Frontline aired its provocative documentary League of Denial on Tuesday evening. League of Denial offers insights into the NFL’s concussion crisis with, for me, painstaking detail. It took me three sittings to finish. The subject matter was too frustrating and too close to home to absorb in a single viewing. After Dad died, my family and I donated his brain to the Sports Legacy Institute (SLI) to help advance their research into concussions, brain injuries, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). If you’ve seen the documentary, there is a segment that discusses the difficulties Chris Nowinski, SLI’s co-founder and executive director, faces when he phones the families of recently diseased players and asks about the possibility of acquiring that player’s brain for medical examination. Our family was one that Chris called, and we are thankful he did. The doctors and families in the two-hour documentary are not strangers. They are part of an extended family, one connected by the physical and mental havoc wreaked on former players by CTE.
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