Concussion deals blow to NFL's image

In 2012, retired 43-year-old National Football League (NFL) linebacker great Junior Seau committed suicide. Later that year, 25-year-old Jovan Belcher of the Kansas City Chiefs killed his girlfriend before turning the gun on himself in front of team officials. Autopsies showed both players suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a personality- and behavior-altering disease brought on by repeated blows to the head while playing football. Concussion is the story of the doctor who discovered CTE and battled the NFL to warn players and inform the public.

The film opens in 2002, with Nigerian-born forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu (played by a superb Will Smith) performing an autopsy on former Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster (David Morse). Omalu knows nothing about American football or the Hall of Fame center who had died of cardiac arrest at age 50, after spending his last years in financial ruin, abusing prescription drugs, and living out of his car.

Although Webster’s autopsy shows several disturbing self-inflicted injuries, CT scans do not reveal any brain damage. Omalu decides to pay $20,000 out of his own pocket for a series of special tests on Webster’s brain, which leads him to discover and name the disease (CTE) many NFL team doctors were calling early onset Alzheimer’s.

Tragically, Omalu must perform autopsies on more former NFL players, finding additional cases of CTE. He publishes his results, linking players’ repeated headfirst collisions to later destructive behavior.

But Omalu is up against an organization that “owns a day of the week, the same day the church used to own,” a colleague warns him. The NFL, which each week depends on dozens of “whistleblowers,” flexes its legal and public relations muscles to silence Omalu. His wife (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), however, encourages him to trust God’s wisdom.

“God put you here in this rusty city” to tell the truth, she tells her husband, who is Catholic. The film otherwise touches little on Omalu’s faith.

Concussion (rated PG-13 for thematic material, including some disturbing images and language) focuses on a gifted academic—Omalu interned at Columbia University and earned master’s degrees in business administration and public health and a graduate degree in music theory—who grew up in Nigeria in love with the idea of America. But he is “offended,” he says, that so many Americans don’t care to know the truth about CTE.

But it’s more than disinterest. Concussion, like the 2013 PBS Frontline documentary League of Denial, asserts the NFL published bogus studies to downplay the long-term impact of concussions. A congressional committee even likened NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s denials to the tobacco industry’s decades-long cover-up of research about the dangers of its products.

The score still is not settled on or off the field. The NFL has added stiff penalties for helmet-to-helmet hits, but the league and thousands of former players are still working out the details of a lawsuit that is closing in on a settlement of $1 billion. And time will tell how much influence Concussion will have on fans who might reconsider how much brutality they will support and on parents who might rethink allowing their children to play a potentially fatal sport.