League of Denial by Mark Fainaru-Wada Read Free Book Online Page B

and doubts. Maybe Barth was testing only people who weren’t very smart. Maybe they didn’t return to work because they had an excuse from the doctor. What was his control group? “I thought to myself: ‘How can I get out of this?’ ” said Barth. “ ‘Maybe I can fake a seizure.’ ”
    Barth decided he needed a more rigorous study. The important thing was to find patients who were likely to have concussions and were available for follow-up. “My initial idea was we could test all of the Psychology 101 students at the University of Virginia, follow them around campus and hit them with a two-by-four, and then test them again,” he joked. Other groups were considered, including race car drivers and boxers. Finally one of his colleagues, Bruno Giordani, said: “What about football players? They run and hit things.”
    Thus was born an entirely new field: sports neuropsychology, the study of the brain under the influence of sports. “Unfortunately, some of my colleagues who like to get at me, they don’t call me the Father of Sports Neuropsychology, they call me the
Grandfather
of Sports Neuropsychology,” Barth said.
    Barth started to perform tests on Virginia football players to measure their baseline performance—before they got conked on the head—on tasks such as word recognition and number sequencing. He and his colleagues positioned spotters at practices and games to be on the lookout for head injuries, then tested the players immediately after an injury occurred to measure differences in brain function.
    The first experiments, in 1984, were a disaster. Out of the 100 or so players who participated, there were only a few documented concussions. Virginia was terrible that year, and before he was fired, the beleaguered coach shut down Barth’s experiment in midseason. But Barth persisted. The next year, he expanded his study to include the Ivy League schools and what he referred to as “a real football team,” the University of Pittsburgh. This time,the results were startling: Out of 2,350 players who participated, 195, or more than 8 percent, sustained verifiable concussions. More than half still had headaches at least five days after theinjury occurred. About a quarter still had signs of memory loss, nausea, and dizziness. Most of the symptoms cleared within 10 days.
    What had started as an attempt to measure the effects of minor head injuries after traffic accidents had become a harbinger of football’s soon to be tumultuous future. Barth’s major discovery was that concussions might be regarded as “minor” injuries by coaches, trainers, and even doctors, but they weren’t minor to the people who incurred them. He published his results in 1989. “Through further data review and analysis, it is our hope that we can provide the football community, and sports medicine psychologists in particular, with a brief and easily administered set of neuropsychological assessment tools that will aid team physicians,” Barth wrote.
    Now, two years later, Joe Maroon was faced with exactly that scenario. Chuck Noll wanted his quarterback, Bubby Brister, back on the field. Maroon, the Steelers’ doctor, didn’t agree. But he had no real tools to justify his assessment. As it turned out, Maroon had participated indirectly in Barth’s study. In addition to his work with the Steelers, he was the neurological consultant for the Pitt Panthers—the “real football team” from Barth’s experiment. Maroon didn’t have enough concrete data to prevent Brister from playing, but perhaps here was a way to get at it.
    Maroon went to the chief neuropsychologist at Allegheny General, Mark Lovell, and explained the situation.
    “You know what, Mark?” Maroon said of Noll. “He’s right.”
    Brister ended up playing, but that was the beginning of the story for Maroon, not the end.
    To that point, the sports medical community had viewed a concussion as an invisible injury. You couldn’t x-ray it or scope it or put a