RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's hard to talk about football without talking about concussions. And with football season nearing its end, we're hearing about these injuries on a somewhat regular basis. Take, for example - today, Cleveland Browns' star quarterback Johnny Manziel will sit out the game against the Pittsburgh Steelers because he got a concussion in a game last week. Scientific studies have shown the kind of repeated hits NFL players take are linked to a degenerative brain disease. The first person to publish research on this condition was Dr. Bennett Omalu. He's portrayed by Will Smith of the new movie "Concussion."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CONCUSSION")
WILL SMITH: (As Bennett Omalu)I found a disease that no one has ever seen. Repetitive head trauma chokes the brain.
MARTIN: Dr. Omalu has argued that kids shouldn't play football until their brains are fully developed, and that means holding off until they're at least 18 years old. But some doctors, including Dr. Omalu's own colleague, disagree. They say changes already made to youth football to reduce risk are sufficient. Here's Jon Butler. He's the executive director of Pop Warner Little Scholars, the youth football organization. He says there's a keen awareness about concussions, but he insists the risk is no more than any other typical childhood mishap.
JON BUTLER: If you take a typically active boy or girl - 8, 10, 12 years old - and you - they want to play football, and you say, you can't play football, it's not like they're going to sit on the couch, wrapped in bubble wrap. They're going to be active. They're going to go out and fall off a roof or bicycle into a concrete bridge abutment by accident or something. So, yes, I mean, concussions certainly have always been around, always been part of not only football, but all kids' activities and all sports.
MARTIN: For the Record, today, we are revisiting a segment we aired last year that is still relevant today - football's reckoning. We begin with Tregg Duerson.
TREGG DUERSON: My father took his own life in 2011 in his Miami home.
MARTIN: Tregg's dad was Dave Duerson. He was a defensive back who played most of his professional football career with the Chicago Bears. He was part of the legendary '85 team that won the Super Bowl, and five years later, helped the New York Giants win their own championship. He retired from the NFL after the 1993 season and started working in the business world. He had some successes, some failures, but nothing that his family thought would drive him to kill himself. Tregg remembers that day five years ago.
DUERSON: And when we went to the scene of the event, we were given a suicide note that was handwritten for the most part.
MARTIN: In that note, Tregg says his dad detailed a devastating decline.
DUERSON: He described having trouble with spelling, blurred vision, short-term memory problems, issues with putting full concepts and sentences together.
MARTIN: Was he suggesting in his note that the cognitive problems he was going through had something to do with football?
DUERSON: Directly. There's direct sentences in there that are talking about the hits that he took during the game. He said at one point that he is thinking about other NFL players that have similar issues.
MARTIN: Duerson shot himself in the chest, and he made a request in the letter. He asked his family to donate his brain to science in hopes that it could help others understand the connection between concussions and traumatic brain injuries. That's where Chris Nowinski comes in. He's co-director of the Boston University research group that studied Duerson's brain. Now he's the head of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, an advocacy group focused on what they call the sports concussion crisis. And the conclusion they found when they looked at Duerson's brain...
CHRIS NOWINSKI: He did have advanced CTE. So Dave had damage on his frontal lobe, throughout his medial temporal lobe, which controls things like memory and emotional control.
MARTIN: CTE - that's chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that's associated with memory loss, impulse control problems, depression and dementia. Nowinski started his work in 2006.
NOWINSKI: At the beginning, I was literally reading obituaries. And so I'd have to track down a phone number and, in most cases, just cold call the house.
MARTIN: As of September, Nowinski's group had studied 91 brains of former football players. Eighty-seven of them showed signs of CTE.
NOWINSKI: We're still kind of guessing. We don't know what is actually triggering the beginning of it. Is it a - one hard hit? Is it one hard hit that you - followed by a bunch of small hits? Is it two concussions close together? Like, what is - you know, because not everybody gets this.
MARTIN: But what he is sure about is the connection between the number of hits a player takes over a career and the incidence of CTE. Nowinski says the longer someone plays football, the higher the chances of getting multiple concussions that could lead to CTE. And for Nowinski, that means waiting until kids are in high school to let them start playing the game.
NOWINSKI: And to think that we would hit kids in the head a few hundred times each fall under some concept that we're teaching them lessons through this sport that are better than any other way we could teach them is insane to me.
MARTIN: The rules for kids' football have changed. In 2012, Pop Warner started limiting the contact allowed in practice. They don't allow full-speed, head-on tackling and blocking, no straight-ahead hits and no intentional head-to-head contact. Chris Nowinski says all this is good, but he says the whole culture of the game has to change.
NOWINSKI: We're not teaching kids or encouraging them to report when they do get symptoms. And so the kids are staying quiet, and the coaches are coaching the game and don't really have - they can't see inside a kid's head. And so we have this kind of culture of silence around the injuries.
MARTIN: Tregg Duerson understands that. He himself played college football for Notre Dame.
DUERSON: You want to be in the game. You want to be in the game with your friends. You don't want to let them down. You don't want to leave over a concussion. Taking yourself out of the game is something that's just not in most people's DNA.
MARTIN: He shared that instinct with his dad, along with a love of the game.
DUERSON: We'd go in the backyard. We'd run sprints. We'd work on technique. We'd go through different formations on a notebook because football's a very structured game. And if you can understand the formations, you can really start understanding the bigger picture.
MARTIN: Tregg still lives in Chicago. He's got a job in finance, and he works for a mental health advocacy group now, too, but his dad's suicide has left a big void.
DUERSON: Whenever I see a cab with 22, I think of my father.
MARTIN: I asked him if he still has the same love for football that he did when he was growing up.
DUERSON: I'm very conflicted, to be honest. I probably speak for a lot of people when I say that I still know the game very well. I still love the game. I think it's just people going in with complete eyes open that there is risk out here and that, you know, no matter what we do, the risk is still going to be there. So for me, I still like the game, but would I want my child to play it in the future? No.
MARTIN: Tregg Duerson, talking about his father, former NFL defensive back Dave Duerson, who killed himself in 2011. We also heard from Chris Nowinski of the Concussion Legacy Foundation.