Brain Trauma in the N.F.L.

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Thank you, Cindy Shaw,

for sharing this article with us.

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From the New York Times

SPORTS / PRO FOOTBALL | October 28, 2009

Gay Culverhouse, former president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who is battling terminal illness, wants to speak out on brain trauma in the N.F.L.

Ex-N.F.L. Executive Sounds Alarm on Head Injuries

By Alan Schwarz

TAMPA, Fla. — As the president of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the daughter of their owner, Gay Culverhouse was the woman in the men’s locker room. Twenty years later, she is trying to keep her former players out of the emergency room.

Sitting at a restaurant here Friday, she reconnected with a few Buccaneers retirees. There was Richard Wood, the fearsome linebacker known as Batman whose searing migraines and tendency to get lost while driving near his home leave him scared for his future. Across the table was Scot Brantley, an even harder hitter through the 1980s whose short-term memory is gone. Then there was Brandi Winans, former wife of Buccaneers lineman Jeff Winans, who slipped into such inexplicable depression, fogginess and fury several years ago that their marriage splintered.

Culverhouse looked at disability forms, listened to stories, offered counsel and expressed regret. She has done the same via telephone for another half-dozen former Buccaneers in their 40s or 50s who have increasing cognitive problems. Having followed story after story detailing how National Football League retirees are experiencing various forms of dementia at several times the national rate, and listening to the league and its doctors cast doubt that football played any role in their problems, she has emerged after 15 years to reconnect with players and sound an alarm.

She will testify before the House Judiciary Committee at its hearing on football brain injuries on Wednesday to, as she put it, “tell the truth about what’s going on while I still have the chance.”

Culverhouse has blood cancer and renal failure and has been told she has six months to live.

“I’ve got to see that someone stops this debacle before it gets any worse,” said Culverhouse, 62, the daughter of the former owner Hugh Culverhouse who held various executive positions from 1985 to 1994. “I watched our team do anything it could to get players back on the field. We have to make that right.”

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