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[MUSIC PLAYING]

Now let's go back through the 1953 season

as the Detroit Lions fought their way to the championship.

I grew up in a football family.

That guy running with the ball--

that's my dad.

He won three NFL championships.

He played for one of the greatest coaches ever, Vince

Lombardi.

This is my dad at his most beautiful,

and he really was beautiful.

Lew Carpenter carries this time and dents the Detroit defense

for nine more yards.

My dad loved the game of football, and more so the men

he played with.

They were like family to us.

Brothers, uncles.

I'm not sure there was ever a family that was more defined

by football than we were.

In fact, everything that was good in our lives

seemed to come from football, even our social standing.

He was part of something so much bigger than us.

The big hits didn't take away from that.

Lew Carpenter gets a hand off and carries to Detroit 35.

But there was something else going on with my dad that

had really bothered me.

And when I say bothered me, I mean really, really bothered me.

Affect Regulation.

The Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome.

I never saw my dad drink heavily,

but the slurring, the staggered behavior, the forgetting

to come home, traumatic stress, maybe

some of dad's erratic behaviors might be related to PTSD.

Well, he was a very talented athlete.

He had a temper.

You just knew how to stay away from it.

I mean, he was funny.

These are my binders filled with articles.

Throughout my childhood, my father could be normal,

but he could also be explosive, childlike, or distant.

Behaviors which grew more pronounced over the years.

Depression, kind of odd disinhibited behaviors,

paranoia, hair-trigger temper.

But he loved the Green Bay Packers.

He could go off on a rant, then and the one thing

would lead to another, and it was just like, What the heck?

Narcissism and Intimacy.

How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior.

Put up this big crusty shield--

But he was a hell of a football player.

When he died, my mom asked me to write his obituary.

I wrote the story of his professional life in football.

The rest was too complicated to describe.

The dangers of the sport were a distant memory.

My father's death could have been the end of the story,

but a research group from Boston University

found dad's obituary on the internet

and called to ask us for his brain.

They were doing a study on the impact

of concussions in former NFL players

and needed control subjects.

He had never had a concussion.

So we knew he would be a great control for the study.

Months later, they diagnosed dad with chronic traumatic

encephalopathy, or CTE, A disease I had never heard of.

Were they really telling us that his odd behaviors

had been caused by football?

Ann McKee was the neuropathologist

who diagnosed my father.

Did you ever notice any symptoms or signs in your dad?

Because it usually is a very slow, insidious sort of creeping

deterioration that goes unnoticed really

because it's just these odd little things like maybe

a temper and maybe irritability, maybe not

able to multitask in a busy situation, not able to focus,

and then just sort of this slow creeping

increase in those symptoms.

You know, so they just try to bluff their way through it,

and they're struggling with a lot of injury.

So if you hit that--

that's your dad's brain, actually.

I don't know.

It's a little-- maybe too much information.

So that's the undersurface of your dad's brain.

And we have the whole brain to work with,

and then we prepare these slides.

So what we do is we cut it.

We cut the brain in what we call coronal sections.

It's a cross-section.

You can see, just holding up the slide,

that there's a lot of damage.

I mean, there shouldn't be any of this brown discoloration.

And the brown discoloration is really throughout the brain.

Now we're starting to get into hippocampus, which

is the part of the brain that controls memory and learning,

and it's very damaged.

A really pretty classic case of CTE.

We grade it now on a four-tiered scale,

with one being the mildest and four being the worst.

And to me, he's a four.

He's all the way up there.

So he was doing remarkably well considering

that he has really pretty substantial pathology

in his brain.

You can see it under the scope.

And just to give you an idea what a normal brain looks like,

this is what a normal brain looks.

Wow.

And here's your dad down here.

Those are just the tangles of his tau protein.

OK.

So--

Wow, it's there.

OK.

So we've used a lot of it.

That's his amygdala.

That's small.

What position did your dad play?

He's a running back.

A lot of times, they have a lot of holes in the septum.

Is the amygdala being small--

that can be caused by other things there, right?

Yeah, but in your dad's case, it was caused by that.

Right.

Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I didn't understand the relationship

between these mysterious tau deposits, my dad's behavior,

and football.

The CTE researchers had called my sister Lisa the day

after my dad died.

I said, Well, could he have had this

from the time he was 35 or 40?

And could have some of the symptoms he had as a father

raising us--

could those have been an effect of an early progression

of this disease?

They said, Yes, it could, but it's

impossible to make that deciding factor at this stage in game.

You just can't.

And they had a lot of questions about,

Did he have concussions that had been documented or not?

And basically, dad didn't have documented concussions.

So what we understood is they were really

at the beginning stages of gathering information

because he was a very early case.

We stumbled across an article about a former player

named Mike Webster, who was the first NFL player

to be diagnosed with CTE.

He had died in 2002, and the behaviors related to his disease

were extreme.

Iron Mike, legendary Steelers center for 15 seasons.

His life after football had been mysterious and tragic,

and on the news, they were going on and on about it.

Soon, Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck.

One of his windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

How does a guy go from four Super Bowl

rings to pissing in his own oven and squirting superglue

on his rotting teeth?

I'm like going, OK, that's not my dad.

No.

Featured in the film Concussion, Dr. Bennet Omalu

was the first person to diagnose CTE in a former NFL player.

I caught up with him in Las Vegas,

where he was presenting his findings to a group of retirees.

So please, whenever you're talking about CTE concussions,

don't call CTE.

I was reading it, and I was thinking, Oh, my God.

I love this guy.

He takes the brain home to his apartment.

And I'm sure he's got like the stainless steel like island--

I mean, imagine--

No, I didn't really have anything.

I actually did it on my dining table.

But it was clean.

Using an obscure staining process,

Dr. Omalu identified the same tau pathology

that had been linked to punch-drunk syndrome

in former boxers.

Omalu made similar discoveries in two more retired NFL players.

The ones I saved, they were exact reproductions

of one another.

So I said, Oh no, Bennet, Bennet, there's a trend here.

There's a trend.

There's no question about it.

There's a trend.

I needed to know why Mike Webster's symptoms were

so severe and why my father's were comparatively mild.

Between the exposure to trauma and the manifestation

of incapacitating symptoms--

in between there is a subtle, progressive manifestation

of non-incapacitating symptoms.

So the person is functional.

Only people who are close to him,

like his wife, his immediate family, will notice subtle--

they're very subtle-- subtle but progressive changes

in his personality and in his behavior,

and in his level of functioning.

His findings were published in Neurosurgery,

a major peer-reviewed medical journal.

The NFL suggested or insinuated I was practicing voodoo.

Yesterday, they used the word mystical.

Then I stopped.

I couldn't believe it.

I said to myself, These are retired NFL players

in the United States of America.

I had grown up as part of the NFL family.

I needed to hear about CTE from a doctor who

understood football.

You were a team doctor for the Steelers.

I'm guessing you did that because you love football

not because you didn't like football.

The first four cases--

I knew them all fairly well.

Mike Webster, I knew extremely well.

Terry Long, and the fourth case was Justin Strzelczyk.

After leaving his wife and kids, who I always

thought he was very close to, and complaining

of hearing voices from the evil ones and things of that sort,

so I think that personal side of it made me more intrigued

and made me more determined to try to figure out

for myself if this was something real or something spurious,

as others had suggested.

I've come to think that the real problem is not so much hitting

your head as it is the movement of the brain inside the skull.

Homo sapiens brain floats in a bath

of fluid called cerebral spinal fluid,

and when the even helmeted cranium suddenly stops,

the brain is able to continue forward.

Hits the inside of the skull.

It bounces back.

Probably reverberates the second time.

There's probably microscopic vacuums which are pulled.

This is what I like to refer to as brain slosh.

And I think it leads to tearing of fibers,

and I think it leads to microscopic injury

at the structural level and then inside the cells.

And the brain tries to repair itself, and usually it does.

But the rub comes based on the severity

and the repetitive nature.

If you have played college football,

by the time you complete that, you've had approximately 8,000

blows to your head.

The question is raised, Well, how

do you know that's what it is?

To me, you can't say, No, that doesn't

cause it, but yet not offer an alternative explanation

or a theory.

So I can say, You know what?

Smoking, in fact, I don't think it causes lung cancer,

but I can't tell you what does.

My nephew Parker started playing football when he was five.

Now, he's fighting for a starting quarterback position

on his high school team.

Personally, I really like the competition, the crowd,

moments where someone depends on me and me having

to come through.

I've always thought about being a professional player--

quarterback, but D1 school-- that'd be a dream come true.

I was the one that was playing sports,

and he like really was in it with me.

He was never like really quick to show love,

but he would just talk to me, and there

was nothing else going on.

He would get out a napkin and just draw up plays and try

to make sure that I understood those

and making sure that everything you do is just perfect.

And he said that to be a quarterback,

you have to be perfect at everything you do.

I felt like he wanted me to succeed.

Do you ever worry about concussions

and that you could actually get brain damage

from playing football?

It's kind of like a secondary thing.

My main worry is making sure that I

succeed in what the coaches and what the players--

my teammates are expecting out of me.

Parker was heading to football camp

at the University of Arkansas, where my dad went to college.

Why Arkansas?

And this is a special place for the family,

and I would like it to be a special place for me too.

[DISTANT BUSTLING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I can't shake the image of Parker

absorbing the thousands of blows that Bailes had described.

I'd heard about a retired player named John Hilton, who

had been diagnosed with frontal lobe dementia at the age of 62,

and he more closely resembled my dad than Mike Webster did.

You look like your dad.

Yeah, I'm good.

I'm Penny.

This is John.

John, hi.

This is Lew Carpenter's daughter.

John Hilton was only 69 years old when we sat down to talk.

Up until our conversation, I don't

think I thought that there were other people out there

that lived the same life-- that had the same experiences.

Was there a time, Penny, when you remember thinking,

What's John doing?

About the time we moved to Richmond, 25 years ago,

he would get upset about something that was not

worth getting upset about.

And he would be ballistic.

I mean out-of-control ballistic.

He was putting a bike rack on the back of his car,

and he was having issues, and it was a Sunday morning.

Quiet neighborhood.

He picked up the entire box of nuts and bolts

and things threw it down the street,

and at the top of his lungs, yelled an expletive.

And I just stood there and thought, He's nuts.

He's lost it.

I just had never seen this, but I was seeing it

over and over and over again.

This temper.

And one minute everything's fine and the next minute he's

going off like a rocket.

Do you know why you're here, John?

I don't really know what's going on with everything

but I'm well aware of what the good and the bad is.

It was wonderful because the--

Special teams?

No.

No, no, no, no.

It was-- let me get this right.

Sure.

Take your time.

Oh, Jesus.

He got-- I

[DISTANT CHATTER]

With all this noise, I can't--

well, what happened was I forgot now.

That's OK.

She said you can come back to it.

OK?

Do you miss Penny?

Yes, I miss her immensely.

(SINGING) Reindeer pulling on the reins

Bells are ringing, children singing, all is merry and bright

So hang your stockings and say your prayers,

'cause Santa Claus comes tonight

What is it?

Is it that you're missing your dad?

No.

I'm sad to think that he went through it alone

without us knowing.

And I'm sad about how many parts of my childhood

might have looked different.

And so now I think, OK, so how do

I use his life to make some meaning

to make it worth something?

I understood.

I had been raised by a father who had a serious brain disease.

I had to go back.

I had to look at everything that I

had believed to be true about football

and about my dad and my mom--

about me and my dad.

Now, I needed to look at all of it

through the lens of this disease.

Could I go back in time and bring us back together?

For four hours here, picked forces fought expertly

on both sides for every inch of ground.

My mom grew up on a steady diet of World War II movies,

and she aspired to be a commando like her cousins.

A high school journalist and basketball player.

I was lucky to find that she had quietly recorded our family's

history in detail.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When I was in the 10th grade, Lewis was a senior.

And his team in West Memphis and my team in Earl

were playing in the Crittenden County basketball tournament.

And the girls were talking about, Ah,

that Lewis Carpenter, woo.

They were leaning out of the bus, yelling, and screaming,

and I sat there and said, That's ridiculous.

So that's how we met.

Well, lo and behold, I got a call from him

like two days later, and that was

the spark that started it all and never went away.

Did he give you this picture?

Yeah, he did.

He did.

Believe it or not, we would talk for hours.

What we talked about?

I can't imagine.

Things got really exciting when dad was

drafted to play pro football.

Now, let's go back through the 1953 season

as the Detroit Lions fought their way to the championship.

I had no idea what NFL meant, what it was.

First time he touches the ball, Lewis intercepted it.

Rookie fullback Lew Carpenter of the Lions short circuits

the spiral and behind perfect blocking legs at 73 yards.

He ran the whole field and made a touchdown.

We were so thrilled.

He signed for $8,500.

I mean, that was a lot of money.

My idea of NFL parties or whatever was everybody

walked around with champagne and their glass and mink coats.

The first time they went out of town,

I got a call from Bobby Layne's wife

asking me to come to their apartment hotels

that night for wives get together.

Here I am, rookie wife, not knowing what to do.

I thought, Oh, my God.

What do you wear?

And knocked on the door, and Caroline opens the door.

Hi.

She's got her pajamas on and a housecoat or whatever.

They're washing somebody's hair and putting it up in rollers.

Two little kids are running around like crazy.

There's all kinds of food on the table for snacks.

I just laughed.

That was my indoctrination to pro ball.

I wanted a family.

That was my whole goal in life-- to have a family,

be loved, and love.

With Lewis and me, there was an electricity.

There was a union.

I was married to him forever.

Dad got another surprise draft notice and was shipped overseas.

I found a stash of photos that dad had sent to mom.

She was back home in Arkansas, pregnant with my oldest sister.

I was amazed to see the amount of detail

he'd included on the back of each one.

When he got back home, he learned that he'd

been traded to the Browns.

Long enough with Jim Brown to break through for an 18-yard

gain.

After three years as a star in Detroit,

now he would block for the best in the business.

Two years later, when Vince Lombardi

was named head coach of the Green Bay Packers,

dad was the first player he brought to Green Bay.

There was no guarantee he'd make the team.

I remember something Coach Vince Lombardi told us when he first

came to Green Bay.

He said, Fellas, there are planes and trains and buses

leaving here all the time.

And if you don't produce for me, you're

going to find yourself on one of them.

The men who wanted to stay--

they are still here.

And let me tell you this, Green Bay

is a great town for football.

I knew that winning was central to who my dad was,

and I knew that Lombardi had made him a winner.

But dad had never spoken to me about what it

was like to play for Lombardi.

Here's where a man finds out what he's all about.

Now, look closely at what really happens here.

Watch that number 64.

That's Jerry Kramer.

Jerry Kramer and dad were teammates

for five years when the Packers legend was just beginning.

Can I actually do a clap?

[CLAP]

That was a pretty weak clap.

Oh.

Oh, my God.

[CLAP]

There you go.

I didn't know my dad had played football

until I was 10 years old.

Oh, my darn.

He never spoke of it.

You probably didn't know that he and I were roommates

for a short period of time.

No.

What the hell's going on out here?

Training with Coach Lombardi was all about commitment,

preparation, proper preparation, consistency, repetition,

over and over and over and over again until you got it perfect.

The discipline, the perseverance, the pride,

the character, all of those things which a lot of people

don't have.

We had this wonderful bond against Lombardi,

and I think he did that purposely.

It's kind of like the drill sergeant in the military

that just wears you out and he binds you together

in your resentment of him.

He got in my face like about 10 inches from my nose one day,

and he, Mister, the concentration

period of a college student five minutes,

high school three minutes, kindergarten is 30 seconds.

You don't even have that.

So where does that put you?

And he comes in the locker room, and it's pretty much empty.

So he comes down there.

Pats me on the back.

Messes up my hair.

Son, one of these days you're going

to be the best guard in football.

Vavoom!

Something started in here, Becky.

Something warm started in here.

Something started spinning.

I think approval is an incredibly powerful force.

And we live for approval, and we desperately crave it.

It's an addictive thing.

The game, the applause, the lights, the crowd,

the roar of the stadium--

and it's a wonderful experience, but it's not you.

My dad had played professional football for 10 years,

and yet he was only 33 years old when he retired.

What would it have been like for a guy

like dad to walk away from that?

You get out of football, and it's a dwindling effect.

First year out, you're still Mr. Wonderful, and the second year,

you're Mr. OK, and the third year, you're Mr. Fine,

and the fourth year, you're who?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In fact, my dad loved football so much

he didn't leave the game.

He became a coach for the Minnesota Vikings.

And he also became my dad.

I was born when his pro-coaching career began.

Up in the North country they have a total belief

about the Vikings.

The promise of leather hitting leather-- of man and man meeting

head on.

A bruising burling football.

One thing you can be sure of when the Vikings come to play,

they don't run away from violence.

The football I grew up with was an action-packed violent

consumer spectacle.

The dad I knew was on the ground floor

of a burgeoning new business.

NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle created a merchandising arm

using Madison Avenue techniques.

He lobbied Congress for antitrust exemption

to create the first national television contract.

He created NFL films to dramatize

the game using spectacular slow-motion photography.

And when a bunch of millionaires created a competing league that

was stealing some of the top college recruits

and driving up salaries, Rozelle went back to Congress.

This time because he needed antitrust exemption to merge

the two leagues into one.

It all came together in 1967 at the Super Bowl,

starring dad's old teammates.

Football had come of age.

My dad had gone from dirt poor Delta kid

to being part of the coolest, hippest culture in the country.

And with the success of this new league came critics as well.

[PLANE SWOOSH]

Dave Meggyesy could not have been more different from my dad.

He was a huge personality who went on talk shows,

wrote a tell-all book, and was vocal

in his criticism of this newly branded game.

I wanted to understand what Meggyesy

was doing that my father found so unsettling.

My next guest is one of pro football's most--

was one of pro football's most ferocious linebackers,

and then he decided that football was not only

too violent for him but maybe corrupting

himself and the country.

Dave Meggyesy.

Football is the only major sport in this country

whose bases is violence.

By the time the fans are through with 60 minutes,

they're kind of wrung out.

And I think it does serve that function in this society.

You know this thing Konrad Lorenz talks

about with the ritual among animals

and that football, in a sense, is

the acting out of that ritual?

It's been deprived of defending your territory

and defeating someone.

It's kind of like you take people's minds off

of what's really bugging them and their real problems

that they have to face in their own personal lives.

And it's like, as I've said, middle America's theater.

It's Nixon's theater.

That is better than that.

I'm learning a lot here tonight, I must say.

The first time I ever heard your name was when my dad said,

That's son of bitch-- he's going to get himself cut.

Yeah, and he did.

Every guy really knows deeply I'm an injury away.

My life is in the hands of coach, who says,

Sit on the bench, you play.

So on and so on.

And it really is a very powerless position.

And your dad-- when you told me he was a coach, I was thinking,

God, I knew how much shit he had to put up with.

Dad quit his first two coaching jobs

because he thought the head coach was abusing players.

Civil rights was really percolating,

and the anti-war movement was starting.

And then I began to see how the game was supporting the war.

The massive Super Bowl flyovers and all the patriotic stuff

that was going on.

Frank Gifford, Willie Davis, Sam Huff, and John Unitas

arrived, bringing the NFL--

And then came down in '69--

it was an order from Pete Rozelle

that while the National Anthem was playing,

we all had to line up along the sideline

and put our hand over our heart and put

our helmet under our left arm.

Look at the flag.

And I did not do the saluting.

I held my helmet down.

Bowed my head.

And I was keying off of the Tommie Smith, John Carlos,

'68 Olympics-- what they called The Black Gloved Fist.

I didn't do that one, but that was the slippery slope,

and then I was benched.

Unlike Meggyesy, Dad believed that good leadership

could solve any problem.

So when Vince Lombardi invited him to join the coaching staff

in Washington, DC, he was sure that his football career

was back on track.

His dream was to become a head coach like his mentor.

That's him leading the exercises.

He's 38 years old.

Deep in summer in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,

the Washington Redskins gathered to work,

to laugh, and live together, and become a team.

The league was putting cameras everywhere.

Players weren't just performers on the field.

Every aspect of life was available for consumption.

(SINGING) Tell razor-toting Jim

To tell butcher knife-toting Annie

To tell fast-talking Fanny

We gonna pitch a ball

Down to the Union Hall

Viewers were eating it up.

And for the first time, television audiences

preferred NFL football to baseball and college football.

(SINGING) Tell the razor, Don't.

The country and football were changing.

I think, man-- we all must decide right now whether we want

to provide a full life for humanity

or destroy ourselves with our own problems.

And the test of this next century

is going to be where the man mistakes the growth of wealth

and the growth of power with the growth of spirit and character

or like some irresponsible child playing with dangerous toys,

destroys the very house he may have inherited.

But the biggest change for my dad was the death of his mentor.

On a personal level, dad had lost a father figure, a guide,

and a protector.

On a professional level, the grim gray dirt and mud game

of my dad's era was gone forever.

Dad would have to find his way in a sport that

was becoming part of an entertainment universe.

And so would we.

NFL football goes nighttime.

You can't overemphasize what Monday Night Football meant.

You said in your book guys were carpooling,

they had off-season jobs.

This at a time when players were making $18,000, $19,000.

In the headbanger's era-- the 1970s,

that's going to grow until the average salary is more

into the $100,000 figure at the end of that time.

This is a new game that's more recognizable as a modern NFL.

It's a faster-moving game.

It's a more violent game.

The game is going to be an air game, much more

than it's ever been before.

There's nothing more exciting than a big pass play.

It's also a thing that carries a great deal of danger to it.

It was a conscious choice by the NFL,

and the coaches who stayed in the game had to adapt to that.

And they were very frank, sitting in their off-season

conferences.

They realized that the drama of the game

is what you're going to sell.

They deployed many more cameras than had ever been used before.

And they got mics where you could hear the impact.

And it really is when television starts

to drive popularity and money in sports that the NFL really

takes over the world.

It was thrilling at the time.

Meanwhile, academic journals published

articles documenting the dangers of head trauma in football.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Unnoticed by the general public, these articles

were published at the same time as dad

began showing a temper at home.

I was seven the first time I saw him explode.

I would hide in my closet until his rage subsided.

To help me better understand what was going on with my dad

at this time, one of his former players

suggested I meet Mary Ann Easterling, whose husband Ray

played from 1972 to 1979.

His CTE symptoms began shortly after he retired.

Like my dad, Ray had started exhibiting

odd behaviors that were completely out of character.

And just like our family, his family

was at a loss to understand what was happening to him.

It was incomprehensible that a man who

was so confident and clear about walking

with the Lord and the authority that it held in his life

and then, all of a sudden, that meant absolutely nothing.

There were glimpses of, Yes, that still is important to me,

but it didn't get carried out in the life.

Something always came up that would drive him impulsively

to do something totally against what he believed.

It never clicked with me until I saw that case study

online from Boston.

That was when, all of a sudden, it went, Ding.

That's it.

That's what might have happened.

He has brain damage.

I always compare it to living with a rattlesnake.

I never felt like I could let down my guard.

Ray was public about his decline.

I don't know the timeline of how much quality of life

I have left.

It's probably anywhere from 12 to 18 months.

Had I known what it was for him, I

would have wanted to get some kind of help.

Not knowing and not having any answers

was like living in a private hell.

Three months after he was diagnosed with dementia Ray's

quality of life had declined so profoundly

that he killed himself at the age of 62.

In 1975, dad moved us back to Green Bay

with his former teammate Bart Starr at the helm.

Five world championships.

Now, as head coach, Bart Starr's mission to bring

Packer fans winning football once again.

The Packers entered a long losing streak.

A sense of doom and gloom permeated everything.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

By this time, dad's mood swings at home had become more extreme.

The man going through all the antics

is Lew Carpenter, wide receiver coach for the Packers.

Lew is one of the more colorful and vocal members of the staff.

So what does Coach Lew do during his spare time?

Well, this summer, he coached a girls softball team here

in Green Bay.

And Lew was his colorful self at the helm.

[DISTANT CHEERING]

I was willing to do anything to please him,

even if it meant learning to play ball his way.

Sometimes you seem a little confounded out here.

Maybe I coach wrong at this level,

and maybe I don't, but I would never

coach a girl to lose and be satisfied and happy

with the mistake.

I don't care what game you're at.

Working, golf, or anything else, it's just

a challenge to be a winner, and everybody wants to be a winner.

And I'm going to coach these girls and try to win.

You know I have a daughter playing for me,

and I think she takes most of my abuse

because I kind of use her as an example.

Why?

He picks on me too much.

He thinks you should be the best player?

Well, yeah.

He-- I don't know.

He what?

I'm the example for everyone else.

So when something goes wrong, I'm the one who gets it.

Did my dad know that something was happening to his brain?

Did he hide it out of pride, fear, or ambition?

Or did his incredible drive obscure it even from him?

He was fun and he was funny, and he was magnificent,

and he had the biggest heart on the planet

and yet there were these moments where it would be like,

I would say that something sort of dark overtook him.

And it was easier to just pretend like it didn't happen.

I can remember thinking, I can't tell

anybody what's going on here because everybody adores him

and everybody loves the Packers.

Oh, I was the same way, exactly.

To begin with, you don't want to admit

when your marriage isn't good or when things aren't good.

And when you're coach's wife, you certainly

don't want to say or do anything that's

going to involve your husband.

And in Green Bay know everybody was aware of everything

that went on.

There were things that happened in those years

that I can't even talk about.

And there just wasn't any answer for it.

When we were living in Green Bay,

mom was a substitute teacher.

And this one night, some of the teachers at school

had asked her to go out and just do whatever.

I don't know if they went to a movie and went out afterwards.

Mom doesn't hardly drink at all or anything.

And that night, while she was gone and he came in

and, Where's your mom?

Well, she went out with some of the teacher friends from school.

He got so mad.

So mad.

And he went and put Coke cases up against the garage

door so that when she got home, she wouldn't

be able to get in the house.

And it was like, Dad, what are you doing?

I mean, she just went out.

It was like, What's going on with dad?

My mom introduced me to Sarah Naylor,

who happened to live down the street from my sister Lisa.

Her dad, Greg Lenz, also exhibited strangely paranoid

behavior.

The grief is immense.

I didn't cry.

I knew there was something weird about my father.

There was also something great about him.

So I just learned to live, saying, Ignore the weird stuff.

Focus on the great stuff.

And then the amount of father that

was available to me went from here to here to here

to here to here till there was like this much dad,

and I had to add a lot to get a dad.

And even then, I had become so habituated to filling

in all the blanks that I didn't even notice it anymore.

He was OK until one day, when he wasn't anymore.

In those times, Van Brocklin could still see as big a talent

as defensive tackle Greg Lenz, number 72--

Lenz played for the Atlanta Falcons for just two seasons.

And like my father, never had a recorded concussion.

He was a big, 6 foot 5 teddy bear.

He cried John Wayne films.

So what happened?

So he had a constant paranoia.

Went and withdrew all the money out

of bank accounts, things like that.

To do what?

Well, because he thought she was going to leave him.

My mom was sleeping in another room,

and she woke up with a pistol in her face

and him saying, I know you're trying to leave me,

and it's not going to happen.

And she said, I would never leave you.

Please leave the room.

She got him to go out the room and went back to bed.

In the morning, she woke up in her morning routine.

And right before she walked out of the house,

the neighbors called and said, Don't leave the house.

Coach Lenz is standing behind a telephone pole

with a rifle or a shotgun and aiming it at the house.

And they said, We've already called the police.

Well, then the police show up, and it's

one of his old football players that he coached in high school.

Hey, coach Lenz.

Everything going OK over here?

And my mom came out at that time, and they said,

Do you want to take him in?

And you want us to take him in?

She said, No, no.

I'm just going to go to work.

He'll be fine here.

The part that's so crazy about that is by this point, this

was not so aberrant that she didn't say,

That was the craziest thing that ever happened.

I know.

My mom always told me, He's not going to do anything to hurt me.

And I just kept saying, I know that my dad would never

do anything to hurt you.

But this is not him.

And he ended up going into the mental ward in a hospital.

From there, it was just a seven-month roller coaster ride.

We were told that he'd end up having

to be kind of strapped down and things like that.

Strapped down 24 hours a day?

No, no, no, no.

Just mostly at night.

He went through, I think it was about seven nursing homes

until he ended up in the geriatric psych

unit in San Antonio and died of pneumonia

after two weeks of being there.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

I'm just sorry.

It was like you-- sometimes people will say something

and, I'll all of a sudden, have a flash.

Yeah.

I know.

How long until you got a CTE diagnosis?

That was in-- so he died November 18,

and I think in June is when we got our diagnosis.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

By 1986, my father's unpredictability

had become crazy-making.

I had gotten tired of never knowing

when he was going to show up, what state he was going

to be in if he did show up, and how my mom was going to respond

to him when he got home.

It appeared that dad's behaviors were

beginning to impact his work.

He was offered a position in the front office

and refused to take it.

He quit.

Was it a healthy decision to leave the team and the city

he loved?

I think he knew a lot more than we knew.

He just wouldn't tell us.

He never wanted anybody to have to take care of him.

I wouldn't want my children to stop their lives

to take care of me.

We argued, and he told me to pack my bags.

I was enraged by the man he was becoming.

The following year was the most harrowing.

Dad spent his first season in over 30 years out of football.

And my mother struggled to hold him together.

It seemed that without football, he couldn't function at all.

Some friends had suggested that I meet with Jim Cohn.

He was using MRIs to gather data on the parts of the brain

activated in relationships.

The prefrontal cortex, where your dad had most of the damage

to his brain, prefrontal cortex is, in many ways,

the most human part of our human brain.

It monitors time.

It holds things in working memory.

It inhibits impulses.

It's not only what's generating our sense of self

and what's allowing us to hold abstract concepts in working

memory.

It's also regulating our emotions

and processing vigilance for potential threats.

And if it's not functioning well,

you're going to be disinhibited, you're

going to have hard time managing your own feelings

of intense emotion.

And it's a resource that is literally

pummeled in NFL players.

So, what do you do?

You depend on your social resources

to do that on your behalf.

Your coach, the people that are in charge of the team.

When you become really close with someone--

you spend a lot of time with someone

they become part of your regulatory mechanism.

They become an extension of your self-regulatory brain.

You take them away, and it's like you

go to lean on something that's not there anymore.

Some people will run around in a manic frenzy

and buy drinks for everyone at the bar

and lose all their money.

Some people will become very angry.

There's lots of different ways that you'll respond.

So a woman who is married to a guy who

has raging episodes, who has unpredictable behavior, and who

starts to isolate because she's ashamed of her husband's

behavior-- what starts to happen to that family?

What starts to happen to a family that becomes isolated

is that the processing load on everybody's prefrontal cortex

goes up.

So here's the other reason that you may

have been sent to talk to me.

One of the things that we know about child development

is that it's highly dependent upon the quality

of the parental relationship.

Women who are in crappy relationships

where the guy is not attentive at all--

they take a hit.

They're better off being alone.

He had tried to retire, but he couldn't function

outside of football and returned to coaching the following year.

In 1992, he moved into his own apartment

in Philadelphia, while my mother stayed in Texas with my sisters

and their children.

Around the same time, hoping to make sense of my relationship

with my father, I made my first movie about him.

She can't actually come out and say

that she instigate because she's the ex-athletic director at UT?

UT, University of Tennessee?

No, Texas.

Yeah.

I mean, she's the one who's now the--

What's she doing now?

She's the head of the sports--

Over there in New York?

He was physically there, but emotionally, I

couldn't seem to reach him.

Because the people in Texas are just really digging your heels

and say, Football--

dad was almost 62.

The age when both Ray Easterling and Greg Lenz died.

He was the same age that John Hilton

was when his dementia became so severe

that his general practitioner was able to diagnose him.

He felt he didn't want a dummy.

You're family, Lew.

Hey, you can lie.

Can you say, what a great guy?

I want to be just like Lew when I grow up.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

Hey, dad?

Can you do the interview now?

What?

Can we do an interview now with you?

Yeah.

Can you tell me about when you first started playing football?

Do you remember?

Basically, I guess because you didn't

have anything else to do and keep out

of mischief so your whole time was tied up in sports

and that type of thing.

I have played basketball and been an All State basketball

player, and I actually went to Arkansas

on a basketball scholarship.

I didn't know that.

I was such a poor student in my first year.

You have to make a decision whether you

want to be a decent student and continue or don't go to class

and be back in the Arkansas fields plowing the corn fields

and picking cotton, which I didn't

think I'd be very good at.

I wanted to do, but the big thing

is that sometimes you have to wake up.

I looked at it as a job commitment type of thing.

And since they're giving me a free ride or a scholarship

that you should provide the best of your ability

to form in a winning situation, you possibly could.

We didn't know what it was like to really have

to work when we were kids, and that kind of mentality.

Well, I think the big thing about it

is that I think you reflect back and not that your life was that

bad when you grew up because I just wanted

you to be very comfortable.

I wanted you to have three hots and a cot

and clothes on your back, and maybe some sense of the being,

and be able to project your own self into what you'd like.

My mom had told me that he'd signed a contract

to play baseball but that she had talked him out of it.

Baseball was always my first love.

Why did you end up in football?

What you wanted to do was baseball.

At the end of my senior year in college,

I signed a baseball contract with the St. Louis Cardinals.

And playing about 60 or 70 games in the minor league,

but the contract stipulations that I could try both and then

make my mind after one year.

And after traveling on those small buses and everything

else down at Minor League Baseball

and playing a night game and jumping

a bus and travel 10 or 12 hours and playing a doubleheader

the next day.

And of course, I went to Detroit.

They had won the World Championship before,

and of course, we won it that year too.

And after that one year, I saw all the nice extra living

accommodation you're going to have and travel,

and everything else.

And I said, To heck with baseball.

So I ended up trying baseball and just chose football instead.

When we grew up with the Lombardi Credo on the wall,

and you guys are talking about how he rides you.

I'll tell you what, your dad would

die if he couldn't come see.

And some of your guys said now that they

think the game has really changed

and that all you guys who played for Lombardi

have a really different ethic than they do because that you

all really love the game and probably would have done it

even if it hadn't been something you could necessarily

make a real living at.

But that now it's such big business,

they feel like they have a little more leeway

and how much freedom they have.

When I played, the situation was a lot different

because we only had 12 football teams.

And I think that you always felt that if you bucked

the management that type of thing

they could go out and get a guy that

was equally as good as you were out in there it was available.

So take the bad with the good and say,

I'm going to make it go.

It sounds like, as opposed to just wanting to win, win, win,

win, you felt like you had made these commitments that you were

going to make good on what you believed in your mind

was your responsibility.

I love my job.

And I think that the people I've worked with and--

it gives me a feeling of satisfaction

over the period of years that the receivers-- the people

I've worked with have reached heights that they probably

wanted to reach.

And sometimes, regardless of what talent they had,

you think that you had something to do with it.

My daughter, Becky.

You there--

This is my man, Carpenter.

If you don't get any rewards or any satisfaction

out of what they do, then you feel like maybe it's

a lost cause too.

[BUSTLING CROWD]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I didn't understand how it was possible that dad could still

work at a point when so many other former players

his age were already completely disabled.

By this time, my dad should have had significant degeneration.

I wanted to talk to an expert in brain plasticity.

David Hovda was presenting the league with evidence

that concussion could have long term consequences.

We started in 1989.

So you would have patients that would

come in that had had several concussions,

and you would say, OK, what's wrong?

Well, I can't remember, or I don't sleep well,

or I am depressed a lot of the time.

And so they would start to think, OK, well then

you probably have a bipolar disorder,

or you have a psychiatric disorder, or a sleep disorder.

So we're going to run these types of tests,

and this is your medication.

We're going to work on this.

To put concussion and the consequences of concussion

or repeat concussion into that diagnosis

was never thought about except in boxing, where it was repeat.

The football players-- they didn't look like that at all.

They didn't sit around and drool.

I mean, they just had these issues

that people say, Well, are these psychological issues

or are these mental issues, or are these physiological issues?

So now we have these wonderful tools

like magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission

tomography imaging.

So now we can actually measure how

the brain changes to behavior or how the brain changes

to repeat concussions.

In the 1990s, we thought we may have an image of concussion,

which could show that concussion actually did something

physically to the brain.

So as these things started to come out,

there was a lot of people that said, My goodness.

Dave, that can't be right.

It can't be right.

It's too dramatic.

It can't be right.

And as a good scientist, you say, Gosh, it can't be right.

So you redo it.

And you redo it again.

And you use different protocols and measurement tools.

And you say maybe it's just UCLA.

So let's wait until we hear from--

so all of a sudden, Cambridge, England--

you're right.

Pittsburgh-- You know?

Gosh, they're right.

And then the NFL started to hear about it.

Commentator Leigh Steinberg, who managed several high profile

players, learned about it.

And so they wanted to have just talks about what

is all this stuff about concussion and is it really a--

are we making punch drunk syndrome out of these players?

How serious is this?

How did they respond when you said, We've observed this?

Nobody would listen to us.

Nobody thought that this was a problem.

I know I described what concussion

was-- the neuroscience of concussion,

but this was not very high on the radar screen for them

because they had so many other types of injuries

that they were trying to work on.

Anterior cruciate tears, shoulder problems,

other types of things that happen.

And I said, This is the picture of concussion.

It is not some psychological problem.

We're talking about a physiological thing that

happens to the human brain.

They have personality disorders, or they have bipolar disorder.

This is all smoke and mirrors.

This isn't real.

And you're not what's going to happen to you,

and you're not going to what they're going

to do to your dad's reputation.

People have suffered that have looked

into this both emotionally, financially,

and their reputations have suffered.

What I could see in my father was

that he would go through some kind of weird period,

and then he'd be back.

You could always come up with an excuse or a reason

so things were available if we had--

the thing I get really stuck on is, I just wish I'd known.

I just wish I'd known.

Maybe I wish he'd known.

I would have been nicer.

Head injury doesn't occur to one person.

It happens to the entire family.

Families become financially, emotionally distraught,

torn apart, unrepairable.

They never get back to the way they were before.

What a great loss that is.

After 30 years of coaching and 10 years of playing,

my dad finally retired from the NFL in 1994.

My entire life, we had belonged to something bigger than us.

A team, a city, a league.

In the void that had once been filled with championship

football and a quest for excellence,

we searched for a new normal.

At that time, he quit talking.

He just left me.

He quit talking.

I just pretty much wasn't there.

The last time he left, he had his bags packed and got

in the car, and started to back out of the garage.

And I went to the door, and I said, Wait, wait.

And he started pulling away, and I said, Wait.

If you leave without talking to me,

I won't be here when you get back.

And he waved his hand, and he drove away.

And the next morning, I thought it was over.

I had to try to save myself, and I did.

How did you save yourself?

By leaving him.

Message received at 4:53 PM.

Yeah, just check it out.

I see you all packed and ready to go,

and looking forward to seeing you.

It's going to be a big plus.

All right, Beck.

Love you.

Bye, bye.

I asked my dad to take me on a trip

to Crittenden County, where he and my mom had grown up.

We drove the 22 miles of curvy old road

that dad had hitchhiked to see mom in high school.

Poverty, drugs, and crime had taken over their small delta

towns.

He gave me directions to the first house he had lived in.

But there was no house there.

In that house, he said his mother

had killed their duck on Thanksgiving day

and served it for dinner.

My father wept, having believed that the duck was his pet.

He wouldn't eat it, enraging his mother.

Now, disoriented, he didn't know why he couldn't find the place.

Later, I found the census report for that year,

and I understood why dad was confused.

The house he was looking for wasn't in West Memphis.

It was in Hayti, Missouri, 90 miles north.

We continue to 211 East Jackson Street, where

Dad had lived in high school.

It too was in ruins.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I imagine myself growing up in this place

and what my prospects would have been.

For the first time, I felt the gravity of dad's decision

to play football.

And I was grateful.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Three years later, my father's health was in steep decline.

Former players demanded that Congress open an investigation

into the growing number of retirees

struggling with dementia.

Don't make proud men beg.

Don't make them jump through hoops.

They have dignity.

Let people live out their lives with some respect.

That's all I'm asking.

I request a chance to explain my invisible disability because it

affects my testimony.

I do have brain damage.

It's been located on brain scans.

And the damaged part of the brain, when I'm under stress,

gets less blood instead of more like normal people.

And besides causing problems communicating,

it causes excruciating pain.

Although I just turned 50 this year,

I'm already on medications for dementia and Alzheimer's.

As is all too common for NFL players,

the snowball of dementia has started rolling.

At this point, the league had not yet

acknowledged the link between concussion and dementia

in later life.

Retirees told me that Delay, Deny, Hope They Die,

was the disability board's motto.

The game is better than it has ever been,

and the players are compensated at unprecedented levels.

This Capitol Hill is not the proper venue

for this discussion of how do we improve disability benefits.

Fortunately, the vast majority remain active and productive

and do not need to be involved in the disability system.

While former players were fighting for their lives,

the New York Times launched a blistering series

about this growing epidemic.

Meanwhile, NFL wife Sylvia Mackey

took matters into her own hands, advocating for former players

like her husband John, whose late-stage dementia had

become unmanageable.

35 years ago, John Mackey ran into history

catching a touchdown pass to help the Baltimore

Colts win the Super Bowl.

And in a condo outside Baltimore,

he still talks about it.

Well, I went 75 yards.

75 yards?

I went to the Hall of Fame.

Problem is, that's all he talks about.

Sylvia Mackey convinced the NFL and the NFL Players Association

to start the 88 plan.

It made no sense that the league created a plan

to help players diagnosed with dementia at the same time

as they denied any link between brain damage and football.

Wives were asking me questions about their husbands strange

behaviors.

They wanted to know what strange behaviors did John exhibit.

And I could tell in their minds they

were comparing what I was telling them to what

they were seeing at home.

And the common denominator here is football.

One day you wake up and you think,

I don't have a husband anymore.

I mean, he's sitting next to me but--

After 20 years of struggling, Mike Pyle

had finally qualified for the 88 plan.

I asked you earlier if you were angry,

and you said you weren't so much angry as you felt cheated.

You always think that when you get to be in your 60s that

you'll do all kinds of things that you couldn't do while you

were working.

It's very lonely.

What is the prognosis for you in terms of being able to retire?

No, I won't be able to.

Why is that?

Well, because I'm the sole breadwinner,

and I have been for a long time.

And we have no savings.

You did have savings at one point, though.

Do you strike me as a really together person who is a planner

and who--

I am a planner.

Right?

Yeah, there were a bunch of poor financial decisions

that were made, and at that time,

I think I was still in denial that there was anything wrong.

How did it feel to win the game?

Well, 19-- we won the 1963 champion Bears.

Many of the good things in my life came to me from the fact

that football was in our lives.

It's really been tough.

This game that I love and that did

bring so many wonderful things to my life

also is ruining my life.

I was mad at him then all the time.

And that's one of my big regrets was

that I would have been more patient, more loving.

I think I thought there was something wrong with me

or our relationship, because now that we were at a time in his

life when he could have and should have had the time

to start building a better relationship with me and he

still, at the time, I thought, didn't want to, but now I think

that it was more of a case of couldn't.

Do you remember why you wanted to play football?

Well, any boy anywhere would get a chance.

Mike Pyle and Mike Ditka were roommates

when they played for the Bears.

There were so many things.

I was so angry at my dad because he'd call

and he'd forget what I'd said, or I had so much attitude.

Don't tell me that.

Oh, I know.

So you spoke in 2007 before Congress.

Why did you do that?

Well, we tried to create some awareness.

They haven't done anything.

So that would be too important to take care of former athletes

or to help them or find a way to do it.

It's funny.

I'm watching your hands.

And your hands remind me-- he would have done the same things

during a conversation.

Well, you got to move things around.

You got to keep things organized.

When Lew played and I played, the helmet

was a simple plastic helmet with foam rubber in it.

It wasn't a sophisticated weapon.

These things have become technically so

advanced they become weapons, and when

people strike and two heads hit or the helmet is contacted

in a certain way, I don't care how strong you are

or how big are, something's got to give.

So what do you want the league to do?

When you talk about the league, most people talk about it,

and the league to them probably is the players.

You talk to the other groups, and the league is the owners.

Then, if you talk to another group of people,

they might say, Well, the league is the commissioner.

But you'll never hear of the league being the ex-players.

But the ex-players built that league.

They had a lot to do with it.

Now, I'm just saying that you're asking me who the league is.

It's everybody the game is the blame and everybody

should take credit for helping.

There's so many of them that genuinely just need help.

I won't remember a hell of a lot about this interview

in about 10 minutes.

I'm having problems.

My quality of life deteriorates every day.

My daughters understand that I love them,

and I would do know no physical harm to them,

but the thing is, just the fact that

to have that mentioned to me that sometimes they're

afraid of me it really cut deep.

It really touched me.

It hurt.

The Super Bowl winning safety, Dave Duerson, took his own life.

And in a suicide note, asked that his brain be studied.

Duerson asked his brain be examined

for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

Junior Seau was found dead in his Southern California home.

Police say Seau died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot

wound.

Take me.

Leave my son alone.

He could not get away from the sound in his head.

For our viewing pleasure, they pay for it with their bodies,

and now we're finding out with their brain.

Aaron Hernandez, once an unstoppable tight end

for the New England Patriots, took his own life in 2017

while serving a life sentence in Massachusetts

for the murder of his friend Odin Lloyd.

Late one night in October 2018, a car

hit and killed Kevin Ellison as he walked along the Interstate 5

Freeway in the San Fernando Valley.

Former quarterback Phillip Adams had stage II CTE.

The 32-year-old died earlier this year by suicide after

allegedly shooting and killing six people.

We are learning more about the tragic death of former football

star Vincent Jackson.

Lindsay says for years her husband suffered

with memory loss, erratic behavior,

and kept turning to alcohol.

He shared with me once that alcohol

made him feel calm and made him feel like himself

and that his brain was really fuzzy,

and that this made it not fuzzy.

After losing our beloved husband and father, Frank Gifford,

we as a family made the difficult decision

to have his brain studied in hopes

of contributing to the advancement of medical research

concerning the link between football and traumatic brain

injury.

When we found Frank that morning,

I tried to resuscitate him.

So did Cody.

It's a very chaotic moment.

We didn't know, of course, until later.

We assumed there was quite a bit of brain damage.

But we knew that a decision needed

to be made regarding what we were going to do with his brain.

Cody said to me, What do you think we should do, mom?

And I said, I think we should do what Jesus would want us to do,

which is help people with it.

If there's a way for Frank's brain

to be studied and help others, that's what Jesus would want.

And Cody rightfully said, And that's exactly what

Daddy would want too.

We knew he was gone, and he was never

going to come back to a world that's full of pain,

full of tears, full of sorrow, and broken-heartedness.

Frank Gifford, the NFL Hall of Famer

and husband of our friend and colleague Kathie Lee Gifford,

passed away suddenly yesterday of natural causes

at their home in Connecticut.

After the initial report diagnosed Frank

with stage IV CTE, the Giffords had

a second forensic neuropathologist

verify his diagnosis.

You know, I was really afraid to talk about what

had happened to my dad.

Were you afraid you would be shunned

by people who revered him?

Why?

Be shunned because he had brain damage that wasn't caused by him

but was caused by a brutal game.

Why stigmatize this thing that is just another type of injury?

You're not stigmatized when you break your arm

or you snap your ankle.

You're not stigmatized for it.

That's part of the game.

Did you know that there are more commandments in the entire Bible

about fear than any other thing.

Fear not.

Do not let your heart be troubled.

Do not be afraid.

All through the Old Testament.

All through the new.

What did Jesus say?

Peace be with you.

Don't be afraid.

It's me.

There you are, ladies and gentlemen.

When you can learn to embrace your faith over fear

you are on your way towards not bliss but peace.

Shalom.

Hebrew word for-- people think it just means peace.

It doesn't.

It means all the attributes of Jehovah God.

There have been other athletes-- other football players we found

out had CTE but for some reason today,

when the news came out about Frank Gifford,

it just seemed like a bigger deal.

It did, John.

Absolutely, I agree.

It's one of those moments where sports takes us

to a national conversation, and you need, in many ways,

a national figure, someone who crosses over

from sports into entertainment-- into our culture.

Frank Gifford is that person.

We wanted to respectfully make that disclosure in the hopes

that other people could make more informed decisions

about really what they do with their kids.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You did it so well.

Good job.

This is our baby, everybody.

This is our baby.

Well, the baby's been kicking a lot

while you've been talking so I feel like Frank is here with us.

Have you thought a little bit about this legacy of football

and how you want to frame it for your child?

Why do kids have to play contact football before the age of 14?

And I'm just taking the word of people much smarter than I am

and who are educated on this subject.

Why not just wait?

This was put out by Boston University and the Concussion

Legacy Foundation.

Says, "Meet the all-time greatest NFL offense and defense

made up entirely of athletes who didn't play tackle football

until high school."

Guy named Jim Brown, Tom Brady, Michael Strahan,

Lawrence Taylor.

So to me, it pretty definitively undercuts the argument

that you can't have success in the NFL

unless you play contact football before the age of 14.

Cody was reminding me of this particular note

from Roger Goodell.

He says, "Kathie Lee, I was so saddened to learn

about the passing of Frank and wanted to let my thoughts

and prayers are with you.

John Mara rightfully called Frank the face of the Giants,

but to me he was always the face of the NFL."

I'm from football and unconditional love,

from Ann and Lewis.

I'm from passion and loyalty, from come eat and stay close.

I'm from Carpenter and Schriever football family descent.

Ribs off the barbecue and sauce from heaven.

From the legacy my grandfathers left to the path I pursue,

the good my soul seeks guided by all that is good.

Do you worry about the concussion thing now

that we've seen the connection with dad

and what happens at the higher levels?

No, I'm confident in our equipment and the rules that

have worked down into high school and middle school--

all different levels of football.

You feel confident that your coaches and the refs

are going to keep you safe?

I do.

I do feel confident in that.

I could understand why my nephew felt protected by new protocols.

USA Football and the NFL holds clinics

to introduce concerned mothers to heads up tackling techniques.

[CHEERING]

However, there is no data proving that heads up tackling

prevents the neuronal shearing or Dr. bales brain slosh that's

the likely cause of CTE.

Knowing everything that now about dad and everything

that we've seen.

You don't worry at all about long-term repercussions

about this?

I do and I've told Parker that.

And he said he didn't care.

That he was going to do it anyway.

And I just feel like he's almost a man-- a young man

and if that's his choice, then I'm

just going to hope that he's taken care of.

My job, first of all, is the safety of these kids.

But I'm a pawn in this whole thing,

and I have to take the information I'm given

and the guidelines that I have to work with,

and the common sense that God gave me

and try to make a good decision.

There's not a magic wand on when or if it happens.

Did it happen at that hit?

Or did it happen with this hit?

Or does it happen at all?

17-year-old Nathan Styles is the youngest reported case of CTE.

A first of its kind study released today,

looking specifically at young players 8 to 13 years old.

The study discovered that football players

at this young age are hitting each other hard enough and often

enough to cause actual changes in the structure

of their brains, even without getting concussions.

Warnings like this had started to create

a complex moral dilemma for Keith Johnson, a youth

coach whom I had long admired.

I've been coaching youth football for over 25 years.

I can recount two incidents where

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt

that a kid had a concussion.

But then the LA84 foundation was putting on a conference,

and we had the discussion about cumulative hits.

So after this seminar, it changed everything.

And I'm like, OK, it's not the big hit.

It's all the small hits.

Hey, look, don't lead with this, man.

[CHATTER]

All right?

No.

OK.

Don't lead with this, but with that.

OK?

And I'm like, Oh, my God.

It's interesting because what we would say in the stands

without any wisdom was we want to hear the helmets banging.

What the heck?

I'm like, No, I don't want to hear the helmets banging.

Is this going to wind up being the cross on which football

is nailed?

Let me ask a question better than that.

If you had an eight-year-old kid now,

would you tell him you want him to play football?

I wouldn't.

Would you?

Nope.

That's sad.

I wouldn't.

My whole life was football.

I think the risk is worse than the reward.

I really do.

NFL star Chris Borland.

Chose to retire after one pro season.

Now, he's being called the most dangerous man in football.

We met in my edit room to compare notes

on what we were learning.

I read When Pride Still Mattered in sixth grade,

and I dressed up as Vince Lombardi

and gave a speech to my class.

I had "Success demands singleness of purpose."

written on the front of my door.

I had a moment in camp where I sustained a mild concussion.

It was just a ding, or getting your bell rung.

And it wasn't anything gravely serious

or immediately dangerous.

It just caused me to approach my thinking with CTE

and brain trauma differently.

Weren't you supposed to self-report that concussion?

I was.

Well, the percentage of concussions

reported is very low.

You're incentivized to do harm to yourself.

A lot of guys think, I'll get out before anything happens.

And then they talk themselves into year two and year three

and--

I want to be 75 and healthy if that's possible.

Seven years later, I checked in with him

to see if he regretted his decision.

Part of my looking into the science was to just understand,

Do I have damage already?

What damage might occur if I play for a long time?

Part of that process was having a spec scan done.

And the scan revealed that I had blood flow consistent of a man

in his mid-60s.

So that was arresting to see.

I'm 31 now.

I quit when I was 24.

I deal with some of the unknowns.

I have tinnitus, a little bit of sensitivity to light,

emotionally, some depression that related to concussion.

But the way it was covered was that Chris

quit before he got hurt.

10 years of football.

10,000+ collisions at a high G-force.

I probably had the surplus of head collisions.

We can't diagnose CTE in the living yet.

So without that, it's not as though you get tested

and then there's a protocol of treatment.

Chris began to research ways to optimize his brain health.

Knowing there was no cure for CTE,

he landed at the Center for Healthy Minds

at the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater.

I met with Richie Davidson, who is a neuroscientist and studies

meditation and its benefits.

Richie was the first person that I

talked to that said if you have this particular pathology

or other consequences of brain injury,

meditation may not change that structurally.

What it might allow you to do is give yourself a better

relationship with the injury.

Together, Chris and Richie created a first

of its kind mindfulness pilot program for retired NFL players.

Participants reported feeling better about their ability

to manage pain, improved decision-making,

a positive impact on sleep, and greater capacity

to work through post-retirement challenges

like defining self-worth beyond the job.

One clear outcome was also the importance of the group.

I think of your dad or Mike Webster, that probably

had just a much harder time navigating life,

and I'm sure I thought like, I'm just weak,

or I'm not tough enough, or I need to do something better.

12 years after my father's diagnosis,

the National Institutes of Health

made a major announcement stating that repeat head

injury is the cause of CTE.

I think it's important as a football community, wherever you

lie, to have a shared reality.

CTE is real.

It's causal.

It's going to affect many players.

It already has.

And if things don't change, many more.

I think our game has never been more exciting.

It's never been more competitive.

And I don't think it's ever been safer.

Tagovailoa suffered some type--

Despite new safety protocols in week three of the 2022 season,

Tua Tagovailoa exhibited signs of head injury

but returned to the game after halftime.

Awful sight to see.

They will take him to the sideline.

Four days later, in week four, he

was stretchered off the field after signs of injury

to his brain's cortex.

He comes down on the back of his head.

Could see both his hands.

Right away, you get concerned.

They're bringing a stretcher out right now.

Retired players were speaking out

on behalf of the active players.

Now he's had two concussions in five days,

and I don't care what they diagnosed it

as-- it is his back, his ankle.

I know what I saw.

If that was your son, would you have

allowed him to go out there and play after you

saw what happened on Sunday?

Would you have allowed him to play on Thursday?

Because sometimes, Skip, you got to make it a personal.

What was going through your mind when

you saw what happened with Tua?

Anger.

It's that simple.

Anger.

And we need to be better about erring

on the side of caution as opposed

to erring on the side of risk.

You only have one brain.

I know what injuries like that can do.

And this is not anything that we should play with.

This is nothing that we should scoff at.

We have to all be righteously frustrated

in order to make change.

The 44-year-old Tua is going to look back at the 24-year-old Tua

and say, Why did I do this?

In week 16, Tua suffers a third head injury

and enters the concussion protocol once again.

The following week, Damar Hamlin dropped

to the ground in cardiac arrest after a routine hit in a Monday

Night Football game.

As emergency medical teams rushed to save his life,

the game was stopped then canceled.

The first time since 1935.

I wept for Damar and his family.

And thought about the slow-motion emergency

of brain injuries like my dad's that occur unnoticed every week

and persist long after the game has ended.

So dad passed away on the 14th of November.

It was right before Thanksgiving.

And out of the blue, he said, Girls,

do we have a place in the cemetery for all of us to go?

And we said, Well, no, dad, we don't have one.

We haven't even thought about it.

He goes, Well, what are we going to do?

How many of us are there?

I go, Well, there's about 11, including the grandkids.

He goes, Heck with the grandkids.

I don't care about them.

I want the six of us together.

He goes, Will you promise me that we'll all be together?

And I said, I promise, dad.

When I decided to build this wall for my dad,

I asked all the sisters if they would take a stone and something

that was important to their life or something

at the time in their life that depicted who they were.

We had taken a picture of dad a few days before he passed away.

Although they had been apart in marriage for 15 years,

he had his arm around her as if in the protective mode.

Actually, that's where Lewis fell and hurt himself.

That kind of led to the end of his life.

I got him in the car.

And of course, we were waiting in the emergency

room for three hours.

And the minute we get in there, he

had his Packer ring on, and even the technicians

that would take him back--

he would flash that ring, and they'd say, Ooh,

that looks like a NFL ring.

And he said, Oh, yeah.

It's my Packer NFL ring.

And he would start his war stories,

and he would go on and on and on,

and I would sit there and think, Oh no.

He's doing it again.

He was number 33, huh?

Yeah, he was.

That was six weeks before he died.

Wow.

Yeah, they did the last alumni gathering.

So part of the reason we're here was because, first of all,

you sent this very intriguing email after dad died.

And you got love--

I was like, My old man and the word love?

I don't get it.

Well, you got to remember that Lew Carpenter loved the Green

Bay Packers.

And he loved football.

And I can still hear him saying it in my ears.

He says, You got to love it, Mister.

Tell me-- because no one has ever described to me this.

What's the point?

What's so great about it?

Because it strips away everything

that you come in with.

Doesn't care about your background.

It doesn't care about your socioeconomic status.

It levels the playing field, so to speak.

And when you go out there, it's one-on-one in the small battles,

and you sacrifice a lot.

There's the pain.

There's the mental anguish.

But if you can just do what you're asked to do,

you can be successful.

One of the reminders that I have of your dad pretty often

is, as a player, get a trading card.

Picture that they took me for my rookie year.

And in the background, kind of blurred out, is your dad.

I see that, and I'll sign the card.

I'm at a card show.

I'll go, That's Lew Carpenter.

That was my coach.

And when I say, That was my coach,

he wasn't anybody else's coach.

He was my coach.

So I kind of take pride in possession of it.

We were like his other kids.

He had the daughters at home, and he had the sons at work.

The fact that I knew that he cared about me, that

supersedes everything else.

My mother sold this house.

I wanted to go home one last time.

I could hear my father's voice quoting his mentor,

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

I could see that in many ways, my father

had viewed me and my sisters the way he saw his players.

Late in his illness, he pointed to me and said,

See that one there?

She's fierce.

It was the complement I had waited for my entire life.

It made me feel proud.

And I realized that maybe he'd been able to see me all along,

and it was me who hadn't been able to see him.

I had been afraid to go public with what

had happened to my father because I'd

been afraid of losing my tribe, my connection to the sport that

had defined us, and the people who mattered most to us.

But I had found a new tribe.

A tribe of truth tellers, of seekers, and risk takers

whose commitment to a life of integrity

was more important than a sport.

In confronting my own fears and secrets,

my football family had grown to include not only the champions

but the fallen as well.

Look at that.

It's a whole thing of game films.

We made him these when I was seven.

Yeah.

It's amazing, like what somebody keeps.

I was ready to move forward in my life,

understanding my parents heroism in the face

of a crippling and mysterious disease.

Dude, we're done.

Simple as that.

I understand how hard it had been

for him to give us normal when normal had been so hard for him.

Rest in peace, dad.

You know I have a daughter playing for me,

and I think she takes most of my abuse

because I kind of use her as an example.

And I don't know whether that's right or not,

but still she does a good job, and I want her to know that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It's a Spartan game.

I mean by that, it requires Spartan qualities

in order to play it.

In order to be a part of it even.

I'm speaking of the Spartan quality of sacrifice

and self-denial and not the Spartan quality

of leaving the weak to die.

[MUSIC PLAYING]