League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth
Written by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru
Narrated by David H. Lawrence XVII
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
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.
Mark Fainaru-Wada
Mark Fainaru-Wada is an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. After fifteen months of covering steroid use in sports, in December 2004 they reported in the Chronicle on the secret grand jury testimony of pro baseball players Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds, making headlines around the world. Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams won the Dick Schaap Excellence in Sports Journalism Award, the George Polk Award, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Edgar A. Poe Award for their reporting. Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada are reporters on the investigative team at the San Francisco Chronicle. Together, they broke a series of exclusive stories on the BALCO scandal and earned a string of national honors, including the George Polk Award, The Edgar A. Poe Award of the White House Correspondents’ Association, The Dick Schaap Excellence in Sports Journalism Award and The Associated Press Sports Editors award for investigative reporting. Williams has written on subjects including the California cocaine trade, Oakland’s Black Panther Party and the career of San Francisco mayor and political power-broker Willie Brown. His journalism also has been honored with: the Gerald Loeb Award for financial writing; the California Associated Press’ Fairbanks Award for public service; and, on three occasions, the Center for California Studies' California Journalism Award for political reporting. He was the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California Journalist of the Year in 1999. Born in Ohio, he graduated from Brown University and the University of California-Berkeley and attended University College, London, U.K. Before joining the Chronicle, he worked as a reporter at the Hayward Daily Review, the Oakland Tribune, and the San Francisco Examiner. He was a University of Michigan Journalism Fellow in 1986-87.
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Reviews for League of Denial
30 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow, this is a wonderful book. League of Denial is journalism at it's absolute finest. I couldn't put it down. For anyone that loves football and wants to begin to understand the NFL cover up of football related brain injury, this is a must read. Some of the personal stories are painful to read about, but they need to be told. It's still too early to know for sure if recent efforts by the NFL will decrease the likelihood of future brain injuries in football athletes at any level.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I love football. One of my earliest memories (and one of the very few I have of my maternal grandfather) is sitting in the living room, watching the news, and learning that the Bengals (my team) had just drafted Boomer Esiason. I live orange and black on the professional level (scarlet and gray on the college level - O-H-!). My sister and I, although we root for different teams (she somehow picked up the Browns), do nothing but talk about football during football season - which games were surprises, which ones weren't, who the best quarterback is, if Manning is actually going to not choke in the post-season this year, if it's possible for Andy Dalton to throw more touchdowns than interceptions in a post-season game (hint: no), etc.So this book was very difficult for me to read.I knew that football players got concussions. I also knew that multiple concussions could predispose them toward dementia or maybe, even, violence. But I'd not heard much about Iron Mike Webster; he was "before my time," and I had somehow I had missed most of what had happened after his death. And the other players who had killed themselves were mainly off my radar, old names that I couldn't connect with teams or faces. That is, until Junior Seau. And the horrible events that led to Jovan Belcher putting a bullet into his head in front of his managers and coaches after killing his girlfriend. My sister, the fellow football nut, is the one who recommended that I read this book. She'd read it for a paper she had written for a college class. "I didn't know it was this bad," she'd said. "Now I feel guilty for watching football." Feeling guilty for watching football? What? Yeah, now I do too.It's incredibly disheartening to see how the NFL went out of their way to protect their brand at the expense of their players' health, families, well-being, and lives. And now, as in the case of Jovan Belcher, to realize that CTE is affecting even young players (he was only 25 years old)...well, what can I say? Suddenly I realize how deadly the sport that I love can be. Suddenly I understand that while I'm rooting for the big plays (I can't even remember how many times my sister and I were like, "oh man, [insert player's name] just MURDERED [other player's name]! Did you see [player's name]'s head whip back?" and thought it was just, well, football) and, consequently at times, the big hits, that might be the concussion that knocks that player out or irreversibly damages his brain. Well shit, man. The book is incredibly readable and has a lot of information that I'll be ruminating over for a long time.