Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

In a Miami courtroom today, a panel of federal judges are scheduled to hear arguments in a case with implications for athletes here in Oregon suffering from traumatic brain injuries. According to the Associated Press, the judges are “considering whether to consolidate lawsuits filed around the country by more than 300 former NFL players seeking damages for concussions they suffered.” The list of defendants includes some players, such as Tony Dorsett and Jim McMahon, who were once among the game’s biggest stars.

With the NFL fully engaged in the annual hype surrounding the Super Bowl the timing is, perhaps, unfortunate for the league. It serves, however, as an important reminder of risks of the game, even as it seems likely to revive the bad publicity the league has received for what some former players, attorneys and doctors describe as its lack of attention to long-term mental health issues. Granted the example that professional players set for other football players, and aspiring players, at every level the implications of the suit are significant. The growing public realization here in Oregon and elsewhere of the seriousness of traumatic brain injuries is surely not something the NFL wants to remind fans of in the run up to February 5’s clash between the Giants and the Patriots.

As ESPN notes, the number of players filing or joining traumatic brain injury suits has grown rapidly in recent months. The suits have been filed across the country, and today’s hearing in Miami deals with the narrow legal issue of whether all of these cases should be consolidated and go forward as a single legal action. The NFL denies charges that it failed to protect the players both during and after their careers. The players counter with painful personal stories all too familiar to any Oregon brain injury victim or their family: memory loss and more serious conditions including, as reported by ESPN, “headaches, dizziness and dementia.”

Any Oregon brain and spinal cord injury lawyer knows all too well how serious such injuries can be. The toll taken by Oregon brain injuries extends far beyond the victims and their immediate families. By publicizing the dangers inherent in the game, these retired football players are doing parents and young people throughout the country a service. Making the game safer, particularly for children and teens, must be a priority for us all.

AP via the Miami Herald: US panel mulls merge of NFL concussion suits

ESPN: NFL, retirees eye unified concussion suit

Kevin Pierce’s long journey back to snowboarding is an object lesson for everyone here in Oregon concerned about traumatic brain injuries in sports. Once one of the world’s top riders and a likely member of the 2010 US Olympic team, the snowboarding star was severely injured “when he fell and hit his head on the icy wall” of a halfpipe where he was training.

A few weeks short of the second anniversary of that accident, Pierce got back on a snowboard, last week according to the New York Times. The paper reports that his road to recovery has been long and slow. That first run, at a ski resort in Colorado, was a slow cruise down an easy slope: “No tricks. No big air,” the newspaper reported.

Even now, Pierce’s life remains marked by “an unsteady walk, blurry vision and a diminished memory.”

And this, remember, is the portrait of an elite athlete coping with the after-effects of a traumatic brain injury. For almost anyone else it is safe to say that the road to recovery could well be longer and more difficult.

Pierce’s story is also a reminder to the rest of us that even the most talented athletes can suffer horrendous injuries – a fact that, in turn, places a special burden on equipment manufacturers and those who run athletic facilities: to offer the safest gear and the safest environment possible. From an Oregon product liability attorney’s perspective, it is unfortunate to ever see a person suffer because of someone else’s negligence. Particularly when the injury involves a traumatic brain or spinal cord injury. The law can be an important force in helping ensure that justice is done after tragedy strikes, but any Portland brain injury lawyer will affirm that it is better when things function smoothly in the first place, ensuring that lawyers and courts need not get involved.

New York Times: Pearce to ride for first time since 2009 accident

An article published this week in the New York Times offers details of a “class-action suit that claims the NCAA has been negligent regarding awareness and treatment of brain injuries to athletes.”

According to the newspaper there are currently four plaintiffs involved in the suit – three football players and, unexpectedly, a soccer player. As the newspaper notes, the suit is particularly interesting because it targets the NCAA, the body that oversees most college athletics here in the United States, rather than the individual schools for which the plaintiffs played.

The focus of the article is a former University of Central Arkansas football player, described in the piece as once having been a three-sport athlete, straight-A student and talented trumpet player. Following a severe hit as he was returning a punt last year he has been unable to play. Heeding doctors’ advice he has now permanently abandoned contact sports, the newspaper reports.

As the Times observes, one of the key problems facing those who believe they have suffered traumatic brain injuries here in Oregon or elsewhere while playing a college sport is the unique status of college athletes. They are not, legally speaking, children, like players in High School or Middle School games. But they are not employees either (at least not in a formal sense) like pro players in the NFL. That is one reason why the Washington State brain injury lawyer in charge of the case says he is focused on arranging “insurance that would provide for training and evaluation for players and follow-up care for athletes,” as part of any resolution of the lawsuit. The NCAA, rather than individual schools, is the focus of the suit because the plaintiffs want to change the way severe brain trauma is handled across the world of college sports, not merely in any particular sport or institution.

From an Oregon traumatic brain injury lawyer’s perspective the approach these plaintiffs are taking is particularly interesting. If we start from the premise that the real purpose of going to court is to see justice done, we must also acknowledge that justice that only looks backwards is, philosophically speaking, incomplete. Victims and their families should know that the people responsible for an injury have moved to ensure that the injury will not be repeated. Any suit that seeks to improve the way the world of college sports handles all athletes is a welcome addition to our national discussion of the problem of sports-related head and brain injuries.

New York Times: College Athletes Move Concussions into the Courtroom

The National Hockey League’s 2011-12 season kicked off last night with both the defending Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins and the team they edged out last summer, the Vancouver Canucks, losing close fought, first-night match-ups.

Those games (along with a Montreal-Toronto contest) were the first official ones to be played under new NHL rules that severely restrict (but do not entirely ban) hits to the head during play. Long known as a fast and violent game, professional hockey has shown increasing concern for the long-term health of its players in recent years. Concussions and traumatic brain injuries emerged as a concern partly because of changes in the game itself – players are larger, skate faster, hit harder and wear better padding than their predecessors a generation (let alone half a century) ago, and the wear and tear on their bodies shows. The issue became especially salient for the league in the wake of several high-profile injuries that have sidelined star players for extended periods of time.

The most notable examples are Boston’s Marc Savard who has never completely recovered from a grade 2 concussion sustained in March 2010, and Pittsburgh’s Sydney Crosby, arguably the league’s most famous active player, who has not played since the beginning of the year after suffering two hits to the head in rapid succession during games on January 1 and January 5.

During the off-season the league hired a recently retired star, Brendan Shanahan, as its Senior Vice President in charge of player discipline. In a video distributed to all teams before the season began (and readily available to any fan on the NHL website) Shanahan outlined the new, stricter, rules on contact to the head last month. As soon as pre-season games began he indicated he was serious about his new job by passing out an eyebrow-raising number of suspensions for illegal contact, several of which will extend into the regular season.

From the perspective of a Portland concussion and traumatic brain injury attorney the NHL’s attempt to keep its game rough and fast while improving safety must be applauded. Whatever the League’s shortcomings, at least it is making a serious, public effort to cut down on dangerous plays that may lead to brain or spinal cord injuries. The NHL opted not to go as far as college and international hockey and ban hits to the head entirely, but it is hard not to see the new rules as a step in that direction. The game remains rough, even violent, but at least there is the acknowledgement that in the wake of so many traumatic brain injuries, something in the hockey world needs to change.

New York Times: With stricter rules on hits to the head, some NHL stars are split on a full ban

New York Times: Shanahan is enforcing Rules with Gusto

A poignant reminder of the long-term effects of concussions on football players cane over the weekend when Terry Bradshaw revealed in a blog post that “he is suffering from deficits in short-term memory and impairments in his hand-eye coordination,” according to the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper reports that the former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, a long-time NFL commentator on television, attributes his ever-worsening problems to “at least six concussions” sustained during his NFL career.

Bradshaw, of course, played in the 1970s and it might be argued that today’s players are better-trained and use better equipment than their predecessors. Two minutes watching NFL films from that era, however, will show any viewer that while today’s equipment may be better, today’s players are bigger, stronger, play the game faster and hit much, much harder than those of a generation ago.

Bradshaw’s revelations of the ongoing effects of brain injuries come at a time when the league is trying to improve its less-than-stellar record of caring for players once their careers are over. It also, as the paper notes, arrives at a time when team officials and players in the worlds of football and hockey are increasingly aware of the damage lesser hits can cause. The Times cites a doctor at UCLA who mentions the cumulative effects of multiple less-than-concussion-level hits – an issue that the NHL has recently begun paying particular attention to.

The lives and long-term health of professional athletes are important not only for their impact on those individuals’ health and the well-being of their families, but because of the signals they send to young athletes.

As a Portland sports injury lawyer, it is especially heartening to see both professional sports and society at large paying more attention to these issues. As I have said before, the legal system is there to help victims an their families obtain justice in the wake of an Oregon brain or spinal cord injury – but when athletes and their families are forced to go to court to protect their rights that is an unfortunate sign that the system has failed in broader, more important ways.

Los Angeles Times: Football concussions catching up with Terry Bradshaw, he says