CONCUSSION
Although a trustworthy friend recommends the film
"Concussion" and the Internet trailers
featuring Will Smith are inviting, I have yet to see the
movie. Based on Jeanne Marie Laskas's September 2009 GQ article "Game Brain,"( http://www.gq.com/story/nfl-players-brain-dementia-study-memo
) the film will probably have the impact of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit
9/11," which provoked me to utter angry words about a nation of
sheep. I imagine "Concussion"
is sufficiently right-wing for no film critic to call it an "egregious
cinematic stinker," and certainly Dr. Bennet Omalu, upon whose life and
forensic work the film is focused, stood on his ground and produced testimony
regarding dementia pugilistica that even extreme, conservative critics might allow their hearts
to admit has merit. What their mouths
will say about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy is a different can of worms. For devout fans of football and other
American gladiatorial games, the film may provoke thirty seconds of anxiety
before they return to normal.
I have read Laskas's Concussion
(New York: Random House, 2015) and have cultivated more than a grain of
admiration for Dr. Omalu as a Nigerian American who poured determination and Igbo spirituality through the alembic of Catholicism
to become, despite his agon with depression, a fine role model for African and
African American males. I shall not
hesitate to say that some immigrants are better models of the excellence to
which we should aspire than are some native sons. Laskas has the prescience to grasp that Dr.
Omalu's life history is as compelling as what he discovered about tau tangle in
the brain of Mike "Iron Mike" Webster and published as the scientific
paper "Chronic Traumatic
Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player" in the July 2005
issue of the prestigious journal Neurosurgery. Laskas is an accomplished, clever
writer. Her prose is conversational and
witty. There is a delicious edginess in
her weaving of an extended parable into the book about the relationship between
Dr. Omalu and Dr. Cyril Wecht, whose mastery of hubris makes Donald Trump look
like an inept neophyte. Even more tasty
is her cultivated muckraking of the National Football League, which continues
to value billion dollar profits more than the lives of professional football
players. After all, American players
are, like Roman gladiators, expendable and replaceable.
The bottom line is to keep fans happy and money rolling in. Ethics and morality count as much in the game
as washed-up sex workers, or to use language attributed to Dr. Wecht "malicious
editorial pimps and reporter prostitutes."
Dr. Omalu's rediscovery and exposure of what had been known
in the Western world for several centuries about the effects of brain trauma
has cost the NFL a pretty penny, thanks to an April 2015 uncapped settlement
that will cost the League about one billion dollars over the next sixty-five
years (Laskas 260). That's chump
change. The NLF knows it; the retired or
discarded, brain-injured players know it; the fans know it. But the American sports industry is an
improved version of Shakespeare's Shylock.
It will plead in no court for a mere pound of flesh. It will contract athletes to man up and be
patriotic about the consequences of concussions.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. January
3, 2016
