Mar 7, 2016 5 min read

WAYNESBURG – When Cheryl McCready listened last week to author Jeanne Marie Laskas speak about her latest book “Concussion,” she wasn’t wearing her “work hat” as Greene County’s satellite coordinator for the Domestic Violence of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Instead, McCready was “there as a member of a book club.” But what she heard during the March 1 lecture through Waynesburg University’s speaker series was shocking.

“I was very surprised that domestic violence was brought up by a number of students asking questions,” she said. “So many of our abusers don’t have a football background, some are women. But those questions made me think.”

Research shows domestic violence is a learned behavior, McCready said, from family members and from the media and movies that “it’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

But what Laskas was there to report made McCready realize that concussive injuries might well be a part of the problem.

“There definitely needs to be more research,” McCready said.

Laskas pointed to random spots and dark splatters projected on a screen behind her with a stark message during her lecture.

“This is your brain on football,” she said.

The Washington County native’s latest book, “Concussion,” follows the life of Dr. Bennet Omalu, who saw in Webster’s brain the tangled protein clusters found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and “punch drunk” boxers. No one had ever thought to look for these markers in the brains of football players who died young with unmistakable signs of dementia.

Laskas spoke about the dark side of football that hid in the shadows of the 1970s glory days of Terrible Towels and Super Bowl rings in football-loving Pittsburgh.

It was a player from that era, Steelers Hall of Fame center “Iron Mike” Webster whose untimely death in 2002 at age 50 gave a young Nigerian forensic pathologist working in the Allegheny County morgue the clues to a troubling disorder, Laskas said.

Omalu named what he found in Webster and later in the brains of other players Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE. It was a condition that is profoundly changing America’s relationship with its favorite contact sport.

When GQ asked Laskas to write an article about CTE in 2009, concussive injury in retired football players was headline news and the NFL was being challenged in court for its unwillingness to pay for this disability. Others were taking credit for expanding the scope of CTE’s groundbreaking research but the name Bennet Omalu kept popping up as Laskas did her research. She began asking herself, “Who is this guy?”

She found him in happy obscurity, doing forensic research in his garage in California. And he had quite a story to tell.

It turns out that when Omalu identified and named CTE and published his findings, he faced years of punishing pushback from the NFL and the scientists on its payroll. Ultimately, he left his position in Pittsburgh and relocated to California with his family and continues his career as a forensic pathologist, far from the pubic eye.

Her book inspired the smash-hit movie Concussion, released last year, with Will Smith playing the man who challenged a national past-time when he discovered the damage that repeated concussions can do.

“Will did a fantastic job of playing him, he really caught his spirit,” Laskas said. “But, there is so much that I know about Bennet that didn’t make it into the movie.”

Omalu graduated medical school in Nigeria, escaped a genocidal civil war and moved to America in 1994. He was young, idealistic and passionately interested in the workings of the brain. His forensic gifts were put to good use in Pittsburgh, working for former Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht, his flamboyant mentor with an eye for national news.

A devout Catholic, Omalu felt a spiritual connection to his cadavers. When Webster died, homeless and alone, Omalu knew “zero about American football but nobody but Bennet asked: Why did Mike go crazy?” Laskas told her audience.

“Bennet was a man of strong faith. He felt he was doing God’s work, giving a voice to the dead.”

Webster died from an apparent heart attack but had been suffering from pain and dementia, angry, irrational and finally too debilitated to even feed himself.

Omalu took specimens of Webster’s brain home to his apartment in Penn Hills and began studying the tissue as a personal mission of mercy. The snarl of proteins that he found in the frontal lobe told him that concussive injury was real. With Wecht’s blessings he went public, sure that the NFL would be grateful for his findings. That was hardly the case.

When Omalu and other scientists published their findings, four scientists on the NFL payroll demanded a retraction. The paper was not retracted but the league’s scientists continued their billion-dollar offense against Omalu’s “voodoo science” for years.

“Omalu was deeply stunned,” Laskas said. “He believed very strongly in telling the truth.”

Concussions, big, small and repetitive, slowly but surely destroy executive function, Laskas said. Better helmets don’t stop the brain from being knocked around inside the skull. All the hits the brain takes, starting in the pee-wee football leagues in grade school though high school and college and into the pros, including all those practice games, add up. Parents are beginning to think twice about allowing their children to take this dangerous gamble, Laskas added.

Laskas lives in Scenery Hill and is the author of seven books. She is professor and director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.