Lewis faces the uncertainties of brain injury
Former Browns running back Jamal Lewis faces the uncertainties of brain injury from concussions
There are alarming holes in Jamal Lewis's memory these days, scary out-of-the-blue failures, like when the 32-year-old is driving around his native Atlanta and forgets where he is.
The landscape suddenly turns unfamiliar, and he has to stop and tell himself not to panic, to wait until his brain somehow reboots and the recollections come trickling back.
Thousands of head blows will do that.
The standout former Cleveland Browns and Baltimore Ravens running back figures he averaged 15 full-speed, helmet-to-helmet collisions per game, 16 games a year, during his decade in the National Football League. It's the equivalent of running head-first into a brick wall 2,400 times. The number doesn't include all the skull-rattling hits Lewis took in practices and pre-season games, or while playing in college and high school.
Concussions? Many of the impacts probably were, but nobody diagnosed them. Nobody even called them that.
"You got your bell rung," Lewis says. "You got dinged. You don't know that, 15 years from now, this hit or this situation can actually hurt you for a lifetime. Somebody's always fighting for your spot. So it's like, 'Suck it up. Get me back out there. Put me in, coach.' "
They put him back in.
It was Sept. 13, 2009, a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon. Browns versus Vikings. The first game of the season. The beginning of the end of Jamal Lewis's football career. The catalyst for a lawsuit that now pits him and more than 2,200 other ex-NFL players against their former employer for concealing the risks of concussions.
Early in the second quarter, the running back grabbed a handoff from quarterback Brady Quinn and sprinted to his left. A Vikings safety shucked his blocker and closed on Lewis like a missile.
"Usually in the first half, I take guys on more, just to kind of, you know, get some respect," the 245-pound Lewis says.
Both players lowered their helmets and collided with a crack. Lewis's head twisted violently, as if he'd been punched. He spun in the air and landed limply on his back, near the Vikings bench. His hands involuntarily clutched at his facemask.
"Normal" football head hits feel like someone's whacked your helmet with a hammer, Lewis says. This one was frighteningly worse, like nothing he'd experienced before.
"My head was just ringing, and everything was like complete silence," Lewis remembers. "I could hear the [Vikings] coach saying, 'Jamal! Jamal!', asking if I was all right. But that's the only person I could really hear. It was like I was zoned out."
Minutes later, though, when his replacement got hurt, he was back on the field. "They asked me the [concussion diagnostic] questions on the sideline, which I'm not even sure if I answered half of, but, you know, the culture of the game is, 'Gotta go.' "
The rest of the game was a blur. He ran patterns by rote, trying to protect his head. "My main thing was [to] get down."
The next day, an MRI showed a neck bruise, but no one, he says, mentioned a concussion or ordered a neurological exam. Though he played in subsequent games that season, he knew something was seriously wrong. He had migraines. Insomnia. Blurry vision. Bright lights bored into his skull like an ice pick. He couldn't keep food down, including his traditional pre-game steak. His brain was woozy, his concentration shot. When the quarterback called two plays at a time in the huddle, Lewis would repeat the assignments over and over, trying to hold them in his head.
He didn't tell Browns coaches or trainers, partly because he says he didn't realize the symptoms' significance, and because he wanted to keep playing. "They're already trying to bench me," he says. "Why give them another excuse?"
After the Browns' bruising 30-6 loss to Chicago on Nov 1– a game in which Lewis became the NFL's 21st leading rusher – he announced plans to retire after the season.
A month later, on the morning of the Browns-Bengals game, Lewis awoke with a ringing headache and an intensified sense of unease.
"I really wasn't feeling like myself," he remembers. "My routine was just thrown off." At the Cincinnati stadium before the game, he went to the training room and asked if he could be tested for a concussion. The trainer, he says, responded, "Well, not right now."
Lewis played the entire game. In the third quarter, the lethargy lifted and he felt a sudden burst of mental clarity and energy, "like a light switch clicked on." His one-yard carry with 14:02 left in the fourth quarter turned out to be the last of his career.
On Monday back in Cleveland, Lewis underwent a brain scan that he says revealed what doctors initially thought was a blood clot. The Browns – who declined to comment for this story– put him on injured reserve. Follow-up tests ruled out brain bleeding, but doctors diagnosed post-concussion syndrome – lingering symptoms from Lewis's early-season head blow, aggravated by additional brain stress from continuing to play.
The doctors advised him to retire, immediately. Lewis says one told him, "You get out there and get hit again like this, who knows what could happen?" Another said, "You want to be able to run around with your kids. We don't want, 15 years from now, for you to develop Alzheimer's."
No one knows if the damage to Lewis's brain is permanent, and whether the symptoms he continues to suffer more than two years after quitting football – the bouts of memory loss, headaches, nausea, sleeplessness and light sensitivity – eventually will fade, or are the precursors of something worse.
He's read about Dave Duerson, the former NFL all-pro safety whose life unraveled and who suspected his numerous football concussions were to blame. Duerson, killed himself last year. He aimed the gun at his chest rather than his head, leaving instructions that doctors examine his brain. They did, and found it was riddled with the dementia-causing damage characteristic of multiple concussions. Duerson was 50.
"I'm 32," Lewis says. "Thank God I'm 32, but it's like, where is this thing going? You wonder what you've already done."
Joining the tide of concussion-related lawsuits against the NFL, Lewis says, is a way of trying to hold the league accountable, while also sending a message to current and future players to protect themselves.
"The NFL has a responsibility," he says. "It's a game that a lot of guys want to participate in, but just because it's a privilege . . . doesn't mean that you should be shorted the information. I know I can go out and tear up my knee or my ankle or my shoulder. But I never knew that from these constant hits to your head, they could cause long-term effects.
"I probably wouldn't have done some of the things I did. A lot of the hits I went to take on for one yard, when I already got 30, I wouldn't have done. I looked at a lot of [running] backs who used to jump out of bounds like, 'You sucker!' But now I look at that guy and say, 'You were a smart runner.' "
As a kid, Lewis played football in Atlanta's hardscrabble neighborhood parks, on playing fields that were more rocks and dirt than grass. "I think that's what made me pretty good," he laughs, "because I didn't want to hit the ground. So I found a way to get out of tackles and keep going."
Sometimes now, he cringes when he watches youth football. "I can take you around here in Atlanta and you would think you were at a dog fight," he says. "You're trying to break kids and make them tough. You want your team to intimidate everybody else's team, and it's all about hitting."
He tries to temper that message, with his own youth team and in talks with parents, coaches and players. He emphasizes proper tackling techniques – no lowering the head – and the importance of removing players from games after head blows, getting proper medical attention, and watching them closely through the season for behavioral changes.
Choosing not to play is OK, too.
A couple of years ago, Lewis's son, then 6, took up his father's sport. He played tight end and nose guard on a team that won a championship.
"At the end of the season," Lewis says, "I asked him if he was going to play again, and he said no. I [asked] why, and he said, 'I keep getting headaches, and I get tired of getting headaches.' When he said that, I was like, no problem."
(source Cleveland Plain Dealer)
(Getty Images)
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