“PROFESSIONAL
FOOTBALL PLAYERS DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN ON A REGULAR
BASIS.”
So
concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on
concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to
a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of
neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a
deadly new scourge: A chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number
of players -- including some of the all-time greats -- to madness.
League of
Denial reveals how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to
cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and
brain damage.
Comprehensively,
and for the first time, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark
Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of a public health crisis that
emerged from the playing fields of our 21st century pastime. Everyone knew that
football is violent and dangerous. But what the players who built the NFL into
a $10 billion industry didn’t know – and what the league sought to shield from
them – is that no amount of padding could protect the human brain from the
force generated by modern football; that the very essence of the game could be
exposing these players to brain damage.
In a
fast-paced narrative that moves between the NFL trenches, America’s research
labs and the boardrooms where the NFL went to war against science, League of
Denial examines how the league used its power and resources to attack
independent scientists and elevate its own flawed research -- a campaign with
echoes of Big Tobacco’s fight to deny the connection between smoking and lung
cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh
Steelers center Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he
fantasized about shooting NFL executives; and former Chargers great Junior
Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of an unseemly scientific battle
between researchers and the NFL. Based on exclusive interviews, previously
undisclosed documents and private emails, this is the story of what the NFL
knew and when it knew it – questions at the heart of crisis that threatens
football, from the highest levels all the way down to Pop Warner.
Get more details @ http://www.ypcart.com/buy/league-of-denial-the-nfl-concussions-and-the-battle-for-truth-0770437540/
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