On the same afternoon that Utley lost the use of his limbs, Mike Farr caught his first and only NFL touchdown pass. That’s football. Three years later, as paramedics treated Monet following a car accident, Mike saw his bloodied sister on a stretcher and cried. He immediately thought of Utley. That’s football.
Two summers ago, Monet was watching the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony with a relative. The one who suspects he has CTE. He recalled constant headaches, keeping Advil in his football pants, popping pills on the field; he remembered washing down caffeine pills with cola in the locker room after games, the better to not fall into a woozy sleep. He hardly knew what concussions were, let alone what they could do. He didn’t care. He just wanted to play the game.
That’s football too.
“I always say it’s like a drug or alcohol addiction,” Monet says. “Leaving the sport is like trying to quit cold turkey. It’s very difficult to lose it.”
Monet saw her relative’s life crumble. Weight loss. Erratic behavior. Bad decisions. Family problems. A short stint in a mental health facility. In public, he was charismatic and charming; in private, brooding and lethargic. He all but lived in a basement. No one in the family knew what was wrong. No one knew what to do about it. “At first it was just like, ‘What happened to you?’” Monet says. “‘Snap out of it. It’s not that big of a deal!’ But now we see that he can’t snap out of it.”
The family closed ranks. Wouldn’t let Monet’s relative be alone. They started reading. Talking. Reaching out. Monet contacted former NFL running back Dorsey Levens, who was producing a documentary film on football and brain damage. Mel Sr. found himself attending more and more funerals for men he played football with. Strong, proud men, like Hall of Famer John Mackey. Mackey was the first head of the players’ union . Monet’s father looked up to him. Calls him “a god.” He died at 69, after struggling with dementia. Mel Sr. started emailing articles to his daughter, stories about former players suffering from mental problems. Wow. Did you read about this guy?
Monet came across a story about the first concussion lawsuits filed against the NFL. She learned that former league commissioner Paul Tagliabue created a committee in the mid-1990s to study football-induced brain damage. That the committee put out a series of since-discredited scientific papers asserting that concussions posed neither short- nor long-term health risks, defying both independent research and common sense. That league doctors used those papers to justify and continue the longtime practice of clearing concussed players to return to action in the same games they were injured in, increasing the odds of lasting damage. That league scientists suggested in print that the same practice might be fine for college and high school players. She learned that the NFL had waged a scientific and public relations war to downplay and dismiss the link between football and brain damage, and that Goodell had presided over a pattern of ongoing denial—one that extended all the way down to youth football, and by extension, her son Parker.
This was football? Monet was furious.
“I had no idea about the first NFL committee,” she says. “I had chill bumps when I read that. My eyes turned red. Nobody wants to admit the fact that their organization is costing lives and people having decent lives. Who wants to go to bed saying, ‘That was my fault’? It’s so much easier to say it’s not.”
Last year, former NFL linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. At the league’s direction, scientists from the National Institutes of Health subsequently examined his brain. They diagnosed him with CTE. Publicly, NIH doctors declined to speculate on the cause of Seau’s disease; privately, they reportedly told Seau’s family that football was responsible.
Monet’s brother Mel Jr. played football with Seau. Monet attended the grand opening of Seau’s San Diego restaurant. Both were watching television news coverage on the day of Seau’s death, along with Mike and their mother. During a live press conference outside Seau’s home, his mother, Luisa, stood at a podium. She broke down in grief.
Take me! she sobbed. Take me!
“My whole family was in tears, watching her crying,” Monet says. “As a parent, as a mom, that was the hardest thing to watch.”
Imagine this: A pharmaceutical company invents a new drug. A drug with many benefits. It increases cardiovascular fitness, facilitates friendship, creates feelings of excitement, euphoria, and community pride. As a side effect, however, the drug also produces varying degrees of acute and chronic brain damage in an indeterminate number of users, for reasons that are only crudely understood.