Saturday, November 30, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt fourteen)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

Ted Johnson was a hard-hitting New England Patriots linebacker for 10 years, winning three Super Bowls before his retirement in 2005. When he saw that Andre Waters had been diagnosed with brain damage by Omalu after shooting himself in the head, he decided to tell his own dark story. It was a story both unique to Ted Johnson and now familiar, with echoes of Webster, Hoge, and countless others. Johnson, like Webster, found that he couldn’t function without gulping down huge quantities of stimulants, in his case Adderall. His addiction, depression, and self-loathing frequently confined him to his bed, where he lay in the dark for days. He had migraines and memory loss and felt certain he was losing his mind.

Johnson first told his story in 2006 to the Boston Globe’s Jackie MacMullan, who was about to publish it until Johnson was arrested for assault and battery for pushing his wife into a bookcase. After the incident, Johnson begged MacMullan to delay the piece; she reluctantly agreed, not wanting to take advantage of a man she thought was clearly unstable. What happened next revealed a lot about not only Johnson but also Nowinski, who was intent on exploiting his budding relationship with the New York Times to the fullest. With MacMullan still sitting on her exclusive, she received word that Johnson had given his story to Alan Schwarz and the Times. MacMullan was furious at Johnson, who later told her that Nowinski had advised him to spurn her because the Times would bring “the best bang for the buck.” The betrayal was so audacious that Nowinski’s embarrassed colleagues and Times editors alerted MacMullan, who, after screaming at Nowinski, scrambled to get her own story published.



Friday, November 29, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt thirteen)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

Harry Carson, the New York Giants linebacker of 13 years, had been profoundly affected by Webster’s death. He had flown to Pittsburgh to attend the funeral out of respect for his former opponent and had spent time talking to Garrett, who described in detail his father’s horrific final years. Later, when Carson learned that Omalu had diagnosed Webster with brain damage, he was heartbroken. He partly blamed himself. Carson flashed back to the brutal tactics he had employed to try to neutralize Webster’s incredible strength—how he gathered “all of my power from my big rear end and my thighs into my forearm,” which he unleashed on Webster’s head. “I’m the guy that he would fire off the ball to hit, and I would hit him in the face with my forearm, you know?” Carson said. “And so I was distributing the damage.”



Thursday, November 28, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt twelve)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

“This 6-year study indicates that no NFL player experienced . . . cumulative chronic encephalopathy [brain damage] from repeat concussions. While the study did not follow players who left the NFL, the experience of the authors is that no NFL player has experienced these injuries.”

The NFL hadn’t actually studied retired players, but that didn’t stop the league’s experts from concluding that none had sustained long-term brain damage. Pellman and his colleagues would repeat this statement, in some form, over and over and over.

Except that not even the NFL believed it to be true.



Wednesday, November 27, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt eleven)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

Nine months later came yet another NFL study in Neurosurgery. This one dealt with repeat concussions. Numerous previous studies had shown that one concussion left the brain vulnerable to another concussion if the brain wasn’t given time to heal. Guskiewicz had taken it a step further: Repeat concussions, he’d found appeared to increase the probability of dementia later in life greatly. But that wasn’t a problem in the NFL, according to Pellman et al. The league looked at how quickly players went back on the field and concluded that they were at no greater risk than if they had never been concussed at all. The logic was that because players returned to the field so quickly, they must have been okay or the medical staff wouldn’t have cleared them. This flew in the face not only of previous research but of widely known realities on an NFL sideline. First, players often didn’t report their injuries. Second, they hid their symptoms whenever they could. Third, NFL doctors often deferred to the wishes of coaches and players, just as Pellman had deferred to Parcells. As Steelers doctor Tony Yates had said: “Only a head coach can pull a player off.” The entire NFL culture was incentivized toward risk.

For the first time, the NFL also took on the issue of football and brain damage, a growing concern among researchers. The league’s scientific opinion? This wasn’t a problem in the NFL either. Boxers got brain damage. Football players didn’t. It was as simple as that. “This injury has not been observed in professional football,” Pellman and his colleagues wrote.



Tuesday, November 26, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt ten)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

The study’s conclusion was blunt: “Our findings suggest that the onset of dementia-related syndromes may be initiated by repetitive cerebral concussions in professional football players.”

Guskiewicz kept going. He now focused on the earlier finding suggesting that concussions triggered depression. He isolated players reporting at least three concussions and found that they were three times more likely to be diagnosed with clinical depression.

Guskiewicz observed these results with pity and sadness. What had happened on the field to players such as Al Toon, Merril Hoge, and Troy Aikman was certainly powerful. But Guskiewicz—in his lab at UNC, away from the fans and the pressures of the NFL—was discovering something even more profound: a persuasive argument that concussions were not only an inevitable part of professional football but often led to misery and torment later in life—not only for the players but for everyone around them. The results were “daunting,” he wrote, “given that depression is typically characterized by sadness, loss of interest in activities, decreased energy, and loss of confidence and self-esteem. Those findings call into question how effectively retired professional football players with a history of three or more concussions are able to meet the mental and physical demands of life after playing professional football.”

Guskiewicz, Bailes, and their colleagues made it clear that they believed that the game itself was causing something destructive and insidious to occur deep inside the brains of huge numbers of retired players. Football-induced concussions, they wrote, “can result in diffuse lesions in the brain. . . . These lesions result in biochemical changes, including an increase in excitatory neurotransmitters, which has been implicated in neuronal loss and cell death. A potential mechanism for lifelong depression could be this initial loss of neurons, which could be compounded by additional concussions, eventually leading to the structural changes seen with major depression.”



Monday, November 25, 2013

Rich Strenger, the sixth interview in Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"I’m kind of old school. I’m 53 years old, and I love the game of football."

I have been talking (including just this morning) and will be talking with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over concussions and other head injuries.

today we feature our interview with former Detroit Lions offensive lineman (by way of the University of Michigan) Rich Strenger.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt nine)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

The survey went out in 2001. The response was overwhelming, an indication of how badly the players wanted to be heard. Guskiewicz sent out surveys to all 3,683 living members of the NFL Retired Players Association; 2,552—over 69 percent—sent it back. The survey highlighted more completely what the original had only hinted at: More than 60 percent of the players reported sustaining at least one concussion during their careers; nearly a quarter had had at least three. More than half said they’d lost consciousness on the field or experienced memory loss at least once. But perhaps the most disturbing finding was the apparent correlation between the number of concussions and depression. Players who reported concussions were three times as likely to report that they were depressed. Guskiewicz wasn’t immediately sure why this was so, but he theorized that the concussions or the symptoms of the concussions—perpetual headaches, memory loss, erratic moods—were causing it.



Sunday, November 24, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt eight)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

“I don’t think it’s rocket science to say that there’s chronic injury from head injury in football,” Westbrook said. “I mean, we’ve all talked about it.”

It would be years before it was known publicly what Edward Westbrook had concluded about Mike Webster, a period in which the concussion issue would sweep over the NFL like a giant wave and the question of what the league knew about the connection between football and brain damage—and when it knew it—would potentially be worth millions, if not billions, of dollars.

On October 28, 1999, on Westbrook’s recommendation, the retirement board granted Webster “Total and Permanent” disability benefits on the basis of his injuries. A few months later, Fitzsimmons received a letter from Sarah E. Gaunt, the plan’s director, explaining the decision: “The Retirement Board determined that Mr. Webster’s disability arose while he was an Active Player.” The medical reports, including one from the NFL’s handpicked neurologist, “indicate that his disability is the result of head injuries suffered as a football player with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Kansas City Chiefs.” The league’s own disability committee—chaired by a representative of the NFL commissioner and managed in part by the NFL owners, who elected that commissioner—had determined that professional football had caused Mike Webster’s brain damage.

A decade later, as thousands of former players were suing the NFL for fraud, Fitzsimmons, who by then had nothing to do with the lawsuit, would describe that 1999 letter as “the proverbial smoking gun.”



Saturday, November 23, 2013

it was Friday, so I talked to retired NFL players all day long



yesterday I interviewed four former four former NFL players who have joined the lawsuit against the League over head injuries for our continuing Deadspin series. the youngest of the four retired as a player in 1999. the oldest entered the League in 1966, and this is the inside of his New Orleans Saints helmet from right around 1968.

my thanks to all for a very informative day.



the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt seven)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

The NFL, in a refrain that would seem eerily familiar years later, downplayed the crisis. Greg Aiello, the league’s director of communication, repeatedly told reporters that the rate of concussions since 1989, when the NFL began to keep track, was unchanged: one concussion every three or four games. The data, Aiello said, had been collected by the teams and passed on to an epidemiologist who had crunched the numbers of the NFL’s competition committee. “In the big picture, when you consider the number of times the head is impacted [in pro football], the number of concussions is relatively small,” said Aiello. “But hey, they do occur. And maybe there’s more we can do.”

But of course it depended on how you counted concussions. The league, Aiello acknowledged, was counting head injuries as concussions only when a player lost consciousness or was seriously dazed. Garden-variety concussions were not part of the program. Joe Maroon did his own calculations and estimated that two to four concussions occurred in every NFL game.

That discrepancy perhaps should have raised red flags. At minimum, there was a 156 percent difference between the rate of concussions reported by the NFL and the rate reported by the senior neurological expert in the league. Maroon said that he, for one, was quite concerned. But few people seemed to notice.



Friday, November 22, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt six)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

In the tenth week of the 1992 season, the New York Jets traveled to Denver to play the Broncos. The Jets’ premier receiver at the time was Al Toon, an elegant contortionist whose jazzy surname perfectly fit his improvisational style. Toon stood 6-4 and once made the Olympic trials in the triple jump. He frequently hurled himself into space to make impossible catches, climbing above defenders who lacked his speed and balletic grace. Toon often paid for it: The Steelers’ Lloyd once knocked him out cold, then slapped the turf with his palm next to Toon’s splayed body as if he were counting him out.

In Denver, Toon caught a pass and was falling near the sideline, his head about a foot off the ground, when linebacker Michael Brooks flew over him, catching the back of his head with his elbow. It was not a particularly dramatic hit—Toon would later say that Brooks “grazed” him—but the effect was like “a cannonball hitting me on the back of the head,” he said. From that point forward, what Toon recalled about the play was gleaned largely from film and information he picked up from the Jets’ trainers.

As he lay on a training table in the dank basement of Mile High Stadium, Toon found that there were many gaps in his memory. They included: How old am I? Do I have kids? What am I doing here? What year is it?

“I had to go through a process of remembering who I was,” he told ESPN’s Greg Garber.



Thursday, November 21, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt five)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

For most professional athletes, retirement is like falling off a cliff. Webster was 40. He had played 17 years in the NFL, 245 regular-season games. It had provided him with a militaristic structure for his life: train, practice, play; his work schedule was so rigid that it was printed up in the newspaper every fall. Now all of that had been ripped away. It was a struggle all professional football players went through: After so much violence, the transition was a form of post-traumatic stress. Most had trouble coping on some level, but this was different. People who came in contact with Webster found him delusional about both his career prospects and how and where he and his family would survive.

Bob Stage, the Steelers’ pilot and his close friend, flew out to Kansas City to spend a weekend with Webster. In some ways, he was the same old Webby; Mike still called him Robert, using the faux French pronunciation, and was generous to a fault. Stage knew that some of the financial problems could be traced to people who had treated Mike like an ATM: “They took his generous heart and took advantage of him.”

“You’re the only friend who’s never asked me for money,” Mike once told Stage. But in Kansas City, Stage found Webster totally unrealistic about his future. One warm evening, Webster decided he wanted to throw a baseball around. “Mike had so much nervous energy, he about wore my arm out,” said Stage. “The sad part is, he wouldn’t listen to anybody. That night when we were playing catch he told me: ‘I’m gonna become an agent.’ I said, ‘Mike, you didn’t even get your degree at Wisconsin. How are you going to do that?’ He would come up with these ideas, but the dots didn’t connect.”

“I think I’m gonna sell RVs,” Mike said to Pam one morning. The next day he announced: “I think I’m gonna go to chiropractor school.”



Wednesday, November 20, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt four)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

During an exhibition Monday-night game at Kansas City, Hoge caught a pass out of the backfield and headed toward the goal line. Several defenders closed in, including nine-time Pro Bowl linebacker Derrick Thomas. As Hoge braced himself for the collision, Thomas plowed his helmet into Hoge’s ear hole.

Hoge lay on the turf, motionless. “I’ve never been in an earthquake, but the first thing I thought was, ‘Holy cow, man, the earth is shaking,’” he said. “It was shaking so bad I couldn’t get up. I had no equilibrium. I was like, ‘This damn earth won’t quit shaking.’” Tim Worley, a former Steelers running back who had come over with Hoge, was one of the first people to arrive on the scene. “Aw, damn,” Worley said, looking down at his obliterated friend.



Tuesday, November 19, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt three)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

One of Webster’s greatest assets was his head. He used it as a battering ram, smashing it into his opponent as he exploded off the line. To stop Webster, nose tackles and linebackers tried to neutralize his head. Harry Carson, the great New York Giants linebacker, came into the NFL when Webster was in his prime. He found that his best strategy often was to bludgeon Webster as he fired off the line. “When I would explode into Mike, it was power against power,” Carson said. “I would hit him hard in the face. That’s what we were taught: to hit a guy right in the face so hard that they’re dazed and stunned.” Sullivan, who stayed friends with Webster for years, began to notice that a thick layer of scar tissue had formed on his forehead at the exact spot where he thrust his helmet into opposing linemen. Sullivan was jealous. It was a sign Webster was executing his block—play after play. “I was kind of disappointed that my forehead wasn’t, um, disfigured,” Sullivan said.

It wasn’t just the games that had hardened Webster’s head. Many Steelers considered the games a break from their normal reality. “We were a collision football team,” said Kolb. Years later, through collective bargaining, NFL players were able to cut down on contact during practice significantly, but not then. During training camp, the Steelers pounded one another for six weeks often twice a day. During the season, Wednesdays and Thursday were full-on contact. Friday brought goal-line drills—the teamwide equivalent of the Nutcracker. With the ball on the 2-yard line, the first-team offense cracked heads with the first-team defense over and over. It was one of Noll’s favorite drills.

Gerry “Moon” Mullins, who played alongside Webster for six years, thought that the players had been programmed to ignore the pain caused by the continuous violence. “They’d drag you back to the huddle: ‘Shake it off, man. We need your ass out here,’” he said. “Nobody knew any different. That’s just sort of the way you were, sort of like the GIs when they bring in young kids and they program them: ‘Rush that pillbox, that machine gun’s blazing out there!’ Nobody in their right mind would do that.”

Pam Webster said her husband often came home with searing headaches that he attributed to his job. When the headaches occurred, Webster would retreat to the bedroom and lie alone in the dark for hours.



Monday, November 18, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt two)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

Webster’s training regimen included anabolic steroids. Decades later, this would still be a matter of debate in some circles, but the evidence was conclusive. Most notable was Webster’s own admission: At least two reports in his lengthy medical file contained references to steroids. In 1993, less than three years after Webster retired, a Pittsburgh doctor reported: “He took anabolic steroids for a very short time when he was in his twenties.” Another report in 1993, based on a doctor’s conversation with Webster, asserted that he “only rarely experimented with steroid use” during his playing career. Those reports contradicted Webster’s repeated public denials and almost certainly understated the extent of steroid use.

Webster’s involvement with performance-enhancing drugs coincided with their emergence in the NFL, which didn’t officially ban steroids until 1983. At least two of Webster’s teammates, running back Rocky Bleier and guard Steve Courson, later admitted using steroids while they were legal. Courson, who was killed in 2005 when a tree fell on him while he was cutting it down, asserted “unequivocally” in his 1991 autobiography, False Glory: Steelers and Steroids, that 75 percent of his teammates on the offensive line used steroids. Bleier, in an interview, said he also saw Webster take amphetamines before and during games and wondered if his drug use later affected him. “I mean, the question with Mike has always been, the effect of steroidal use on his body—did this have an effect or not—and then taking amphetamines during the game,” Bleier said. “It was all legal stuff at the time, but there was still a stigma.”



Sunday, November 17, 2013

the last book I ever read (League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth, excerpt one)

from League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru:

Webster was born in 1952 in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, in the heart of the Northwoods, a tourist destination on the Wisconsin River where people hunt quail and deer and fish for musky, walleye, and largemouth bass. He was the second of five children: three boys and two girls. His parents met at a local bar called Tower Hill and soon afterward eloped to Michigan. “We had five kids before we even knew what was causing them,” said Bill.

For a child, it could have been idyllic. Webster was raised on a farm situated in an enchanted forest of sweet-smelling timber and folklore. The name of his high school football team was the Hodags, a mythical horned creature said to roam the Northwoods. But the reality of Webster’s early life was chaos, poverty, and shame. Bill Webster was a potato farer and a local hell-raiser, a harsh disciplinarian who was quick to anger, quick to grab a belt to punish his kids. Mike Webster later told his son Colin that his father had beaten him “with sticks, switches, belts until he was black and blue.” Bill Webster’s own family history was riddled with turmoil and mental illness, including a brother who committed suicide. Webster’s mother had mental illness on her side of the family and eventually would have a nervous breakdown. A doctor later reported that among Webster’s four siblings, “all have had manic depressive illnesses, one requiring shock therapy and one who has had several suicide attempts.” His youngest brother, Joey, would spend much of his life in prison for a variety of crimes; in 1978, Webster’s fourth year in the NFL, Joey was convicted in Michigan on charges of bank robbery and illegal possession of firearms and sent to federal prison for 15 years.



Saturday, November 16, 2013

the last book I ever read (Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon, excerpt five)



from Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon:

“I’d love to take you and Mom out for lunch, but you won’t let me.”

“You don’t make enough to be tossing around dough like that. Besides, the food’s much better and safer at home than in any restaurant. And they’re all clip joints, charging half a buck for coffee when it should be, for what it costs them to make it and their overhead, a stinking dime.”

“They have to make a profit, don’t they?”

“What do you know about profit? You’re the guy who hates money. They make too much profit as it is, is what I’m trying to explain to you, and I don’t want it to be off you or me, where we’re taken for complete jerks.”

“Another reason for going out to lunch is Mom could use a break from taking care of you.”

“She’s getting one now.”

“You know what I mean. A restaurant, outside the house, having a lunch she didn’t have to make.”

“So take her and leave me.”



Friday, November 15, 2013

the last book I ever read (Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon, excerpt four)



from Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon:

Phone rang, waking him. Room was dark. Must be very late, he thought. Felt for his watch on his night table and pressed the face-light button on it. Ten to four. Can’t be anything but bad news. Phone kept ringing. “What’s going on?” Sandra said. “What time is it?” “The phone. It’s ten to four. It must be about your father. It’s bad news, I’m sure.” “Answer it.” “You don’t want to? I’ll bring over the portable.” “Just answer it.” He went to the phone and picked up the receiver and said “Yes?” “This is Dr. Cory at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. Is Sandra Rosen there?” “It’s about her father. He died this morning, didn’t he?” “May I speak to her, please?”



Thursday, November 14, 2013

Jon Melander, the fifth interview in Deadspin's Would You Do It Again? series



"So maybe I’m being naïve. Maybe I’m justifying the fact that I played and my son wants to play and I think it’s going to be okay if he plays college. Maybe it is naïve to think that he’s going to come out on the other side okay."

I have been talking, and will be talking, with some of the more than 4500 former NFL players who have filed suit against the League over head injuries.

today we feature our interview with former New England Patriots, Cincinnati Bengals and Denver Broncos offensive lineman Jon Melander.

my thanks to Deadspin for the opportunity, and to all the former players who have shared their thoughts and time.



the last book I ever read (Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon, excerpt three)



from Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon:

Phone rang at home. He was at his worktable in the bedroom and picked up the receiver and said hello. “Good morning. May I speak to Sandra,” his father-in-law said. “I have very bad news for her” “What is it?” and he said “I have to tell Sandra first.” “She can’t come to the phone right now. And we left the portable handset off the receiver all night and it won’t be working for another hour.” “You can’t drag the phone you’re talking to me on to wherever she is?” “Cord doesn’t reach the bathroom.” “Her mother killed herself a half-hour ago. I’m waiting for the police and firemen now. That’s what they said would come when I call 911. I discovered her in her bathroom. She took pills and vodka and put a bag over her head and left a note with how she did it, I suppose to make certain everyone knew I had nothing to do with it. Tell Sandra to stop whatever she’s doing and come to the phone. She has to for me. I’m in so much shock I can barely move.” “I’m so sorry, Boris, so sorry. I don’t know what else I can say. Just a moment. I’ll get her, or maybe the handset’s working now.” He picked it up and pressed the Talk button. No dial tone and the window didn’t light up. “It’s still not working. Needs more recharging. I’ll get her, don’t worry. Hold on.” He went to the bathroom door, knocked on it and said “Sandra, your dad’s on the phone. It’s about your mother. He has to speak to you right away.” “It sounds bad. What happened?” and he said “He wants to tell you himself.” “He must have told you, so tell me.” “Can I open the door?” “Yes.” He opened it and said “I’m sorry, sweetheart. Your mother killed herself half an hour ago, or he probably means that’s when he found her.” “Portable still not working?” “Yeah.” She got off the toilet, flushed it and went to the phone.



Wednesday, November 13, 2013

the last book I ever read (Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon, excerpt two)



from Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon:

His sister called. “I’ve very bad news. There’s no way I can break it to you without it being disturbing, so I’ll just come right out with it. Mom died of a stroke this afternoon. If this is any consolation, the doctor said she never felt anything and was probably dead before she hit the floor.” Later in the call, he said “I’ll get on a train right away.” She said “No need to rush. Mom gave me written instructions a while back, saying she just wanted to be cremated, no funeral or memorial or any fuss, so we don’t have to deal with it for another couple of days. Meanwhile, I’ll take care of everything from here.”



Tuesday, November 12, 2013

the last book I ever read (Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon, excerpt one)



from Meyer: A Novel by Stephen Dixon:

Walks. Did he shut the storm door tight? Forgot to. When he comes back she might complain. “You didn’t shut the storm door as I asked you to. It was a simple request. What is it with you?” What is it with him? Maybe he did shut it tight and forgot he had. Did he? Forgets. He does things so quickly, without thinking. He’ll find out when he gets back. Door might be ajar. That so, he won’t ask. If she says, he’ll know.



Sunday, November 10, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt fourteen)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Brian Pillman was born in 1962 under one of those bad moons that people talk about. His dad died of a heart condition when he was only two months old. When Brian was two, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and his childhood was riddled with throat surgeries thereafter; he underwent more than forty when all was said and done. When something like that doesn’t kill you, a personal determination often takes hold: The high school football coaches said he was too small to play, but he ended up the team’s standout; he wasn’t heavily recruited but ended up making the Miami (Ohio) squad, where he was a two-time All-American playing as a relatively minuscule defensive tackle; told he was too small to make the pros, he still had a stint with his hometown Bengals, then almost caught on with the Bills, and finally played for the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL until a leg injury forced him out of the game. But that didn’t deter him, and that’s one of a few phrases that appears over and over again when you start reading about Brian Pillman, “The Leg Injury Didn’t Deter Him,” along with “Increasingly Unhinged” and “Before His Time.”



Saturday, November 9, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, episode thirteen)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

There have been other wrestlers to die in the ring: Mike DiBiase (“Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase’s stepfather) may be the only other wrestler that mainstream American fans have heard of; he had a heart attack midmatch at the age of forty-five. Larry Booker (a.k.a Moondog Spot) likewise died of a heart attack in the ring. Gary Albright died after a “bulldog”—his head forcibly driven into the mat by his opponent—at a local show in Pennsylvania. Indie wrestler Daniel “Spider” Quirk died when his opponent fell from the ring onto Quirk’s head against the concrete floor. Japanese standout Mitsuharu Misawa died after a belly-to-back suplex dropped him hard onto his neck, and female wrestlers Emiko Kado and Plum Mariko both suffered life-ending accidents in the ring. Mexican wrestler Jesús Javier Hernández—known as “Oro”—reacted too dramatically to a clothesline and landed on his head, ending his life. British behemoth Malcom “King Kong” Kirk had a heart attack after landing a “splash” on his opponent. Ray Gunkel died in the locker room after an in-ring punch to the chest apparently gave him a heart attack.

These tragedies—all of them nebulous incidences to the average wrestling fan—are balanced by a handful of storylines in which death, or near-death, was scripted: Fritz Von Erich’s postbeatdown collapse, Ric Flair’s midmonologue heart attack, Road Warrior Hawk’s leap off the Titantron, referee Tim White’s (numerous) suicide attempts. The list could go on to include lesser offenses: Brian Pillman pulling a gun on Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan sending the Giant (Paul Wight) off a rooftop, and, less seriously, the Undertaker’s innumerable “buried alive” and casket matches.



Friday, November 8, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt twelve)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

After the infamous Montreal Screwjob in 1997, all of the Hart family, except for Owen, left WWF for WCW, where Smith teamed with Bret’s former partner Jim Neidhart. During a match at 1998’s Fall Brawl, Smith landed on his back awkwardly; it turned out that WCW had installed a trap door for the Ultimate Warrior’s special entrance later in the night and not told any of the other wrestlers. Smith contracted a staph infection in his spine, and he was fired, via FedEx, while lying in a hospital bed recuperating from surgery.



Thursday, November 7, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt eleven)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

It must be said that scaffold matches were, in retrospect, real almost to the point of boredom. The wrestlers were so consumed with safety—both their own and that of their opponents—that most of the combat took place in prone positions, and the punches and kicks were decidedly low-impact. But twenty or twenty-five years ago, through the semicredulous eyes of the premodern wrestling fan, those matches were stunning. To win the match, you had to knock your opponents—allow me to italicize—off the platform and into the ring below. You can see the kids and adults in the audience standing in awe, necks craned. The act was one part monster movie and one part Marvel Comics, and plainly very, very dangerous: No suspension of disbelief was necessary.

I first watched “Night of the Skywalkers” belatedly, on a homemade VHS compilation tape a buddy of mine had put together. The rolling lines of static only served to up the ante: I felt like I was watching a bootlegged copy of Faces of Death. It might not have been much of a match, but it took place thirty feet in the air, and it ended with the nefarious Midnight Express duo falling from the scaffold into the ring (each was hanging from the underside of the platform, monkey bars style, to minimize the distance of free fall). They were followed in their plummet by their insufferable manager, Jim Cornette, who stupidly climbed the scaffold after the match to escape the Warriors’ manager, “Precious” Paul Ellering. Cornette—nowhere near the experienced stuntman that his Midnight-ers were—blew out both knees when he landed in the ring.



Wednesday, November 6, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt ten)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Savage’s first noteworthy feud was with Intercontinental Champion Tito Santana, and he finally wrestled the belt from Santana at the Boston Garden on February 8, 1986 with the aid of an illegal loaded punch. He soon thereafter became embroiled in an oddball love triangle with burly dimwit George “The Animal” Steele, who had developed a crush on Elizabeth, who seemed too kindhearted to reject him outright. Though the storyline was farcical, Savage’s real-life paranoia and protectiveness, especially in regards to Elizabeth, was well documented. Hulk Hogan has said that Savage would make Elizabeth keep her gaze fixed on the ground backstage at wrestling events so she wouldn’t make eye contact with any of the other guys, and it’s frequently reported that he locked their home—from the outside—when he left, sometimes shutting her inside for days at a time.

Odd (and abusive) as this may be, it’s important to note that there was minimal distinction between Randy Savage the wrestling personality and Randy Poffo the real guy. To the extent that other wrestlers knew him personally, Savage was said to be the same person outside the ring as inside, sometimes to a fault. But in terms of his on-screen persona, his personal eccentricity was rendered as maniacal psychopathy, and it found a suitable venue in the WWF ring, which was even more an “arena for angry minds” (in historian Richard Hofstadter’s phrase) than the political realm. The “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” of the average Savage interview functionally defined the Paranoid Style in American pro wrestling. He was McCarthy in spandex.



Tuesday, November 5, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt nine)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Albano’s career continued along this crowd-(dis)pleasing midcard path until an odd confluence of events landed him in an unlikely cultural spotlight. In 1983, Captain Lou Albano met pop star Cyndi Lauper on a flight to Puerto Rico. Perhaps seeing in Albano a kindred spirit—or maybe because her manager-cum-boyfriend Dave Wolff was a longtime wrestling fan—Lauper asked Albano to play her father in the video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” As legendary rock writer Richard Meltzer puts it in his devastating WrestleMania I treatise “The Last Wrestling Piece”: “Granted you might not’ve had an actual concrete rock-wrestling Connection—so-called—at least not the official horror the thing is currently saddled with, had not Lou Albano made a guest appearance in one of Lauper’s videos (and History proceeded from there).” It’s unarguable that the video instigated a wildly commercially propitious period for wrestling—the first “mania,” if you will, that the sport had seen in decades. Due to both his notoriety from the Lauper video and his electric, eccentric personality—to say nothing of his shaggy, bloated accessibility—Captain Lou would serve as the mascot and ambassador of pro wrestling to the world at large.



Monday, November 4, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt eight)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

In 1980, Andre first faced an up-and-comer named Hulk Hogan. This was Hogan’s first WWF run, and he was then playing a villain—he came to the ring flexing in a metallic cape and headband accompanied by his manager “Classy” Freddie Blassie—but he already had visions of superstardom. Andre looked at Hogan and saw a presumptive bodybuilder more interested in fame than in wrestling, and in their first matches, he took it out on Hogan in the ring. But after the two men toured Japan together and Hogan had shown sufficient deference to the Giant, acting as his personal barback and even offering up a case of fine French wine in fealty to Andre on his birthday, the men reached a sort of détente. And in mid-1980, when the two did battle at the Philly Spectrum and later at Shea, Andre won both matches but gave Hogan the gift of a disqualification ending in the former bout and a postmatch bloodying in the latter. The degree to which this established Hogan’s career can’t be easily quantified, but the effect was profound. When Andre broke his ankle getting out of bed the next year—it was sold to wrestling fans as the result of a diabolical attack by Killer Khan—a newly ascendant Vince McMahon rehired Hogan and elevated him to the role of top star in the new world of the WWF.



Sunday, November 3, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt seven)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Frank Goodish was a college football player at Iowa State and later at West Texas State, the latter of which churned out wrestlers in those days the way that gamma rays produced comic book superheroes: Tully Blanchard, Ted DiBiase, Manny Fernandez, Dory and Terry Funk, Stan Hansen, Dusty Rhodes, Tito Santana, and Barry Windham were all alums. (Maurice Cheeks and Georgia O’Keeffe went there, too, for the record.) Goodish had a cup of coffee with the Redskins and a brief tour in the CFL before he was discovered by Texas wrestling mogul (and fellow Texas college footballer) Fritz Von Erich. He had successful runs through a few of the regional territories until Vince McMahon Sr. brought him in and renamed him “Bruiser” Frank Brody. “Frank” soon went by the wayside. Bruiser Brody was a legend from the moment he came into existence. He was huge; he sported a feral black mane; he fought viciously. In the ring he seemed near lunatic, but in interviews he was shockingly coherent, his growl often bordering on eloquent. Which made him all the more frightening—like, wow, this guy has made a logical and empirically sound decision to dismember somebody.



Saturday, November 2, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt six)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Not long before Bruiser Brody was killed in 1988, he gave a no-holds-barred interview on the state of wrestling and what goes on behind the scenes. He talked at length about his days producing the WCCW telecast. After the interviewer asked if anybody outside the business knew that he had done that, Brody paused, mild consternation creasing his grotesquely scarred forehead. “I don’t think it’s good that anybody knows that I produced that show,” he said. And then, suddenly remembering that he had said his real name earlier in the conversation: “I don’t think it’s good that anybody knows I’m Frank Goodish.”



Friday, November 1, 2013

the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt five)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

On November 17, 1985, Moolah regained the championship in one of modern wrestling’s most overlooked controversies. Richter was set to defend her title against the masked Spider Lay, only to have Moolah come out in the Spider Lady’s outfit. As she enters the ring, you can see Richter’s real-life anger; she can tell who’s under the mask and begins to realize something’s afoot. When wrestling was at its most popular, its fakeness was most pronounced, or at least most widely presupposed. At this peak of pop-cultural relevance, wrestling was so widely known to be “fake” that that euphoric awareness clouded the fact that an actual double cross—and an actual shoot—was taking place. Moolah muscled Richter into submission, and the complicit referee counted a quick three. Richter yanked off the mask and exposed Moolah, but to little avail; Richter was never seen in the WWF again, and Moolah’s malevolent star rose all the more for her deception.