‘Concussion’ recounts how doctor challenged NFL’s culture of denial

“Concussion” by Jeanne Marie Laskas; Random House (288 pages, $16)

It took a complete outsider to pierce the National Football League’s institutional denial about the traumatic brain injuries of its former players.

Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian immigrant, barely knew what American football was. He became a forensic pathologist autopsying the dead because he found dealing with living people challenging. In high-pressure American situations, such as courtroom testimony, Omalu could come across as naive and unfiltered.

But Omalu was also a spiritual man and a dedicated scientist whose own struggles with depression made him determined to investigate the neuropathology of suicides and self-destructive people.

In “Concussion,” Jeanne Marie Laskas describes the game-changing discovery that Omalu made about the brains of former NFL players — and how the NFL tried to marginalize and discredit him. Her book builds on “Game Brain,” a 2014 article she wrote for GQ about Omalu’s work. Will Smith portrays Omalu in “Concussion,” a film also based on that article, which is scheduled for release on Christmas.

Omalu was the pathologist on duty when the body of Mike Webster arrived at the Pittsburgh morgue in 2002. A native of Tomahawk, Wisconsin, Webster was a star lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers and an NFL Hall of Famer. But in the years before his untimely death at age 50, Webster acted bizarrely, living in his pickup truck, Super-Gluing teeth back into his mouth and Tasering himself unconscious so he could sleep.

Hearing about Webster’s behavior, Omalu wondered if the player might have had the same kind of brain injury a punch-drunk boxer sustains. Initial visual inspection of Webster’s brain didn’t reveal anything unusual, but Omalu still felt uneasy. Later, when he looked at tissue samples from Webster’s lobes, he found the kind of damage also found in brains with Alzheimer’s. His scientific paper “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player” named the syndrome and launched him into years of research on the brains of other players – and plunged him into unwelcome conflict with the damage-control apparatus of the NFL.

The NFL launched its own group to investigate concussion problems, the euphemistically named Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee, led by the New York Jets team doctor and including none of the scientists around the nation doing actual brain research in this area. Omalu, not emotionally invested in football, looked askance at this committee’s focus on helmet biomechanics: “Basic laws of physics told you that the brain sloshing around inside that skull was going to bash into the skull walls no matter how much padding you nestled the head in.”

Doctors paid by the NFL attacked the quality of Omalu’s science, even though none of them practiced his specialty. When NFL resistance to the subject began eroding and the league convened gatherings of relevant researchers, Omalu was pointedly excluded. The NFL hired an independent researcher to go over Omalu’s work. When that doctor confirmed Omalu’s findings, the NFL buried his report.

Laskas’ book compares the NFL’s activities to the shenanigans of Big Tobacco, and reasonably so. Omalu began to suspect racism in the way he was treated; even an ally told the pathologist that he didn’t have “the believability factor.”

Omalu confirmed additional cases of CTE in other deceased players. More hard-charging activists and researchers entered the fray, leading to the incongruity of three different groups vying for the right to examine the late Junior Seau’s brain.

Laskas is not the first person to write about Omalu’s research: Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru’s “League of Denial” explores it, and Omalu has written his own explanatory book, “Play Hard, Die Young: Football Dementia, Depression, and Death.” But Laskas tells this story from Omalu’s point of view with a novelist’s skill, grounding the pathologist’s work in his remarkable life: born in the wake of the horrible Biafra war, experiencing the culture shocks of learning how to live in America, apprenticing under the outrageous coroner Cyril Wecht, shyly finding true love.

By American standards, Omalu is a true eccentric. Like Donald Mallard, the fictional medical examiner in TV’s “NCIS,” Omalu talks to the bodies he’s working on. More than once, he rues putting himself in the NFL cross hairs through his research.

But this religious man, with compassion for the mentally ill, believed he heard Webster’s spirit “ask for help explaining what had happened to his brain.” Perhaps, because Omalu listened to that request and persevered, future football players may be safer, or at least better cared for.