All-American retired football player, Tony Dorsett recalls a 1984 game against the Philadelphia Eagles when he was streaking up the field and an opposing player slammed into him. One helmet plowed into another.
Dorsett’s head snapped back, his helmet was knocked askew.
“He blew me up,” Dorsett said. “I don’t remember the second half of that game, but I do remember that hit.” Dorsett compared the hit to a freight train hitting a Volkswagen. That may explain his recent behavior nearly 20 years later.
These days Dorsett is worried about the cumulative effects of hits like the one Ray Ellis laid on him that day. In the past two years, Dorsett’s memory has given him increasing trouble. Doctors at UCLA told Dorsett, 59, he has chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the Hall of Famer said. CTE is a progressive degenerative brain disease found in some athletes with a history of repetitive brain trauma. The only way to definitely diagnose CTE is after death, by analyzing brain tissue and finding microscopic clumps of an abnormal protein called tau, which has been found in the brains of dozens of former NFL players.
However, a pilot study at UCLA may have found tau in the brains of living retired players. Some scientists say finding the disease in the brains provides a means to diagnose and treat it, and the UCLA study may be an important first step.
Dorsett said the diagnosis explains a lot about his forgetting where he is driving and his mood swings. “Memory loss, more so than anything it’s been my big deal,” he said. “Sometimes you can have sensitivity to light and things like that. But my thing was not remembering. I’ve been taking my daughters to practice for years and all of a sudden I forget how to get there.” His daughters are afraid, he said. They wonder which father they will get. Will he be the happy dad or the one in a bad mood.
For others known to have had CTE, symptoms include depression, aggression and disorientation.
Tony won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player in 1976 and became an instant NFL star on the league’s most popular team, the Dallas Cowboys. He played 11 seasons and gained 12,739 yards, eighth best of all time. His 99-yard run in 1982 is an NFL record. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994. Now he looks in a mirror and wonders.
“And I say who are you? What are you becoming?” he said. “It’s very frustrating to be a person that’s been so outgoing, then all of a sudden, I’m like a couch potato.”
“I’m going to beat this. Trust me,” he said. Dorsett pins much of the blame for his health issues on team owners. He said a $765 million settlement of a concussion lawsuit with the NFL was not enough. “I can’t put a price on my health. The owners knew (about the dangers of concussions) for years and they looked the other way, and they kept putting us players in harm’s way.”
The deal calls for the NFL to pay for medical exams, concussion-related compensation, medical research for retired NFL players and their families, and litigation expenses, according to a court document filed in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. We wish him along with other players the best of health as more information continues to unfold.
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