Welcome to the Machine (Episode 2: The End of Fall)

For the listener to begin to understand where I am coming from, you need to know how I arrived at this point, the place I am today. But in order for you to be able to do that, I must necessarily begin at the end with the most recent events, then work back. Maybe after I have done that, you will understand. Maybe.

The house I grew up in on High Star in Houston still looms in my memories. Across the freeway from our neighborhood, I was born in a hospital that no longer stands and brought home to the house as an infant.

I lived my first twelve years in that house. And because I have this encyclopedic, linear memory, I can remember pretty much every important event that happened between the first memory I ever have when I was almost three years-old up to the day we moved in the late summer of 1980.

My first memory is being at an Oilers game in the Astrodome. I was with my mother. I was very little and I kept falling between the back and the seat that moved up and down. The Astrodome was the first sports stadium to have cushioned, swiveling seats.

I was eating raw peanuts at some point, trying to strip off the shell to get at the nuts inside, and throwing the shells on the ground, which meant the narrow aisle in front of my chair, which seemed to me a violation of the rules I had been taught; we don’t throw thing on the floor. The big man sitting behind me told me it was okay though, so I was doing it.

I couldn’t see Dad; I was too little. Everyone seemed to stand up from their seats anyway on every play and there was no way I was going to be able to find him out there anyway, because he was an offensive tackle.

On every play, he fired off leading with his head into a mass of human bone and flesh. I was there for the experience. I would talk to Dad when he got home anyway. We’d probably go out in the front or backyard and he would toss the ball to me. I remember that too; playing catch with Dad when I was three, or whatever age I was.

Or is all of what I just related a memory I have created and added to over all these years? The experts say it is possible.

No. It was real. It really happened. Because I have corroborating evidence.

My mother remembers the game, as do some of the people who were there with us. And I found the ticket stubs in an old scrap book decades later. The people who were there still can’t believe I remember being there.

Because I was not yet three years old.

I remember my parents bringing my sister home from the same hospital in the spring of 1972. I remember something bad happening during the summer Olympics at Munich. I can remember seeing Jim McKay on TV. I remember watching footage of Apollo 17, the final moon landing in December of that year and listening to mission commander Gene Cernan, whose autograph my mother had because Dad had gotten for her when Cernan had traveled to an Oilers game.

The house on High Star had these two huge oak trees in the backyard that grew up along with me. And as I grew and got older, they formed a canopy that shaded most of the backyard during the summer. The oak leaves would fall slowly in the fall until we raked them up, into piles to jump into, and then into bags for placement out front so the men could haul them off, until new ones budded the next spring.

I remember the house late in fall, which was also late football season: The grass a dormant brown against the frost; dead, fallen leaves rasping and scattering silently in the wind; towering, bare oaks in the back that somehow still stand today like stoic, old sentinels; off on the horizon, a few stripped maples silhouetted against a bleak November sky as the sun set on the western horizon; and Dad in his jeans and flannel, tossing me passes out in front, still a young man — much younger than I am even now — but even then, older, somehow.

He would throw me passes until it was too dark to see the ball, and we would head in.

I am a former football player. The last time I put on the pads was in 1990, thirty years ago. I played full-contact football from age 8 through 23. I played on the 5A level in high school in the state of Texas (back when that was the highest level), then four years on the Division One level at two different schools in the old Southwest Conference. I have a Southwest Conference championship ring (1989), and I played in the Cotton Bowl. The ring has sat mostly untouched in a jewelry box now for over thirty years.

I am also the son of a former NFL All-Pro player who was an All-American lineman in college, member of a National Championship team in 1964, and who played eight seasons in the National Football League. He was All-Pro twice. Several years ago, he was diagnosed with advanced dementia with probable chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) the latter of which cannot be conclusively diagnosed until the brain is analyzed post-mortem. His doctors concluded his neurological disease was the result of his football career.

He rapidly declined physically and mentally during the last few years of his life. It became difficult for him to drive, he lost almost all short-term memory, had trouble reading things, and lost the ability to follow and comprehend sports telecasts, movies and TV shows. He might be watching a baseball game, for instance, but he had no idea who the teams or the players were. If you visited him at his house for an hour, he would routinely repeat the same conversations five or six times in an hour, never remembering he had already mentioned the subject multiple times. These were just a small fraction of his problems. But as recently as 2016, he remained attuned enough to donate his brain for analysis to the Boston University CTE Center.

But then, after a serious physical injury a few days after Christmas, 2018, he quickly took a turn for the worse and passed away on February 1. It took barely five weeks. We were given a very few days of relatively peaceful interaction with him before the end. This was in the two months before his death.

One Saturday after our last Christmas with him, we went to see him in the secured facility where he spent his last weeks. When I walked into his room, he was facing the window. It had snowed lightly that morning, and the scene was almost something out of a Rockwell painting, but not quite. On this occasion, he actually seemed like he recognized me. He looked at me and then looked back out the window.

“Archie came to see me.” This had to be Archie Manning. I knew this was impossible, but I played along. My Dad had played for the Saints in 1971 and 1972, Archie Manning’s first two seasons in the National Football League. I actually remember Archie coming over to our apartment in Metairie and being excited beyond measure that the Saints’ young, new quarterback was coming over. Dad was Archie’s strong-side tackle, and Dad was impressed with the rookie from Ole Miss. He had always spoke in glowing terms of Archie Manning.

But now Dad trailed off. He seemed like he was going to say what he and Archie had talked about, but the words never came. Dad continued to stare out the window — into the past, into oblivion, or at the snow on the trees outside the window — I had no idea which one it was.

And then all of a sudden. “He’s doing a really good job. We just don’t have a very good team right now.” And it hit me; we had been transported back to 1971, Archie’s rookie year. Dad’s sixth after having been traded from Houston to New Orleans. To Dad, it was 1971. But it was actually 2019.

Up to that point, football was already on life support for me. For many years, I had stopped following the game. When my own playing days were done, I went on with my life and found I wasn’t much of a fan. It was a strange, if not internally surprising thing to realize and admit to myself.

Sure, I played along over the years. I grew up and was raised in Texas after all. I played like my father before me in one of the great football conferences of the 20th century, the Southwest Conference. And so you expected that I would be a fan when I was finished playing. So I watched when I was at your house. I came to a few tailgate parties. It’s a tribal, subtly coercive kind of thing; cultish in many ways. “When in Rome,” as the saying goes.

I met you there because you were my friend. You invited me. I enjoyed being with you; the game droning on the big screen was a somewhat distracting background diversion.

But as for the rest of it, I was acting. As the son of a football legend and a player with one of those rings myself, I am really good at it. I can speak your football language, even if I am not really paying attention to the subject matter.

Ask yourself. On those occasions where we showed up at the tailgates, did you ever see us inside the stadium afterward?

No. We quietly withdrew under the cover and cacophony of the rush into the colosseum.

Call me a pretender. But I pretend so that we can be friends. I’m trying to be nice. After all, there is a different conversation we could have, and at the end of it, we probably wouldn’t be very good friends anymore.

Do you extend me the same courtesy? Do you acknowledge any of this?

When the NFL settled its lawsuit with former players, we thought Dad would finally get the treatment he needed. But we were naive.

We submitted everything mandated under the settlement, including numerous medical evaluations and reports from board-certified doctors who diagnosed Dad with serious neurological disease and opined it directly resulted from his football career, the last eight seasons of which were played in the National Football League. But the league played the slow-down game. They kept sending the claim back and asking for things we had already given them. Having been an attorney for over two decades, this correspondence resembled what an insurance company does in order to avoid paying a claim they don’t want to pay. This was confirmed by other NFL families who were being treated the exact same way. It was a concerted effort by the NFL to run out the clock on these men. And in the end, it worked. And it continues to work to this day.

I am convinced that if the NFL had done the right and legal thing, my father would have gotten the care he so desperately needed. His daily life might be significantly reduced, but he would likely still be with us. But he isn’t, and I hold the NFL responsible. But they don’t care, about him or any other former player. They only “care” about players as long as they are useful to the bottom line.

A friend of mine succinctly summed all of this up a few years ago by observing, “Basically, the football industry killed your father,” and although I agree with his assessment, it’s much worse than that. The football industry and the culture that feeds it ruined much of his life and hastened his death before his time.

Three weeks before his death, we visited him in that same sad facility he was in, and when I walked into his room, he didn’t know who I was. The only person he recognized was my mother.

That memory is burned into my mind, like a brand or a scar.

To the doubters, I will anticipate and answer your question: No; after the Boston University CTE Center completed the post-mortem analysis of his brain almost 14 months after his death, slice by slice, each piece scoured over by doctors and experts under powerful microscopes, there was no evidence of Alzheimer’s. None whatsoever. There was no evidence of any “inherited” or other disease from a source other than football.

But the CTE was everywhere, even in places that surprised the doctors:

“Neuropathology Report. Date of death: February 1, 2019. Date brain received: February 3, 2019. Date report issued: January 28, 2020. From: Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Diagnosis: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Stage IV/IV.

Comments: There is cortical and hippocampal atrophy as well as marked pallor. Microscopically, the pathological findings of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy are present. There is abnormal tau present within neurons, gila, and cellular processes in irregular and patchy distribution and at marked depths and around blood vessels. There are tangles present throughout the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices. There is severe neuronal loss in the right hippocampus. There are abnormal phosphorylated inclusions. The marked tau pathology and involvement of most structures are consistent with high stage (IV) CTE. Overall, CTE pathology was widespread and most likely accounted for his cognitive decline.”

My father didn’t recognize me because he had stage-four CTE, the most-advanced and severe form of the disease.

These last events took place in a local emergency room and at that “facility” my poor mother had to put him in after the League and its owners rejected his thoroughly-supported and documented claim for better care under the terms of the concussion “settlement.”

Those involved in that dirty, despicable episode — those who played delaying games with his request for medical treatment so they could run out the clock and the people who orchestrated this sordid arrangement — will all get their due, but the what, where, and when is not something for me to decide. But I know who they are, and I’m watching. It will all come back to them eventually. You reap what you sow.

The last clearly coherent thing I remember him saying to me before he went into the hospice days later was in the emergency room at the hospital he was in and out of in the weeks before his death. (When the staff at the secured facility couldn’t handle what was happening with him, they would transport him by ambulance to the emergency room, and if the ER could get him stabilized, they would send him back to the facility.)

He was confused, upset, and couldn’t understand why he was there. He had been stripped of all dignity and I will not describe what the situation was like. He couldn’t even make it down the hall to the restroom. He had to try to do it right there in the room with his oldest son present to keep him from falling. What he said simultaneously broke my heart and enraged me. “I wish I could make all this stop.” I wished I could too. I wished I could heal him. But I was as helpless and powerless in that room as he was at that moment.

The end stages of CTE are hellish, for both the victim and those who love him. The experience is burned into the recesses of your brain. And you will never forget it. It permanently changes you. And you are never the same person you were before.

I will leave it at this: On that day when my father looked me straight in the eyes and I saw something there in those steel-blue eyes I had never seen before in my fifty-one years of life — a look I cannot describe in words — a look of someone utterly helpless, who has no idea who they are looking at, struggling to understand, it murdered the sport of football in cold blood for me. It killed football and its culture so completely I can’t come up with an analogy that would do justice to what I felt.

Football as I had known it up to that moment dropped to the ground as if shot with a high-powered rifle, in that strange, collapsing puppet-type of a fall when a target is struck center-mass with a rifle shot, and falls into that hideous, jumbled-up heap.

Football collapsed dead at that moment and quickly bled out all over the floor.

To be continued.

Glen Hines is the author of the Anthology Trilogy of books — Document, Cloudbreak, and Crossroads — and the highly regarded Bring in the Gladiators, Observations From a Former College Football Player Who Was Never Able to Become a Fan, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has also been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, and the Human Development Project.

This series, Welcome to the Machine, is being simultaneously run on Amazon Kindle and the Welcome to the Machine Podcast, available on Anchor, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.