NYTimes- Ex-Gator’s Concussion Sheds Light on Tebow’s
By ALAN SCHWARZ
The player looked up woozily through his face mask at University of Florida medical personnel peering through, asking if he was O.K. He wasn’t. He had sustained a concussion, a serious one and it was going to be a very, very big deal.
This player was not Tim Tebow, the Heisman Trophy-winning Gators quarterback who was knocked unconscious during a game on Sept. 26 and was still not cleared to play Saturday night in a crucial game against Louisiana State. The player was Scot Brantley, a star linebacker in Gainesville from 1976 until a September 1979 afternoon when a similar knee to the head ended his Florida football career.
Brantley is now 51. He has severe short-term memory loss, most likely because of the persistent football head trauma from high school, college and then eight seasons in the N.F.L. And he is living proof of how much has changed, and perhaps not, over 30 years with regard to the management of high-profile college football concussions.
As the science has expanded, so have the stakes.
They can take a human heart out of your body and fix every valve, redo it completely, and put it back in but they still know so little about the brain, said Brantley, who lives in Tampa, Fla. The concussions that people talked about in Florida for all these years were usually the ones that I had. Now all the attention is going to Tim, which it should.
Debate over Tebow’s concussion treatment began just as a study commissioned by the N.F.L. found that dementia-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in its former players vastly more often than in the national population. This lent an eerie backdrop to what was already a high-profile injury. Since the dangers of football concussions rose to prominence in recent years, none not even the one that threatened Ben Roethlisberger’s leading the Pittsburgh Steelers to a Super Bowl championship last winter has received the renown of Tebow’s.
No. 1 Florida (4-0) and No. 4 L.S.U. (5-0) are undefeated. Saturday night’s game was already pickled in national championship intrigue the winner of the Gators-Tigers game the last three years has won the Bowl Championship Series title. Millions of dollars in bowl purses and years of recruiting prestige could be affected.
Then there are the stakes for Tebow personally. Although his professional future is somewhat unclear because he is more of a scrambling, bruising quarterback than a prototype N.F.L. passer, he is months away from receiving an eight-figure pro contract. He risked that by returning for his senior season in Gainesville he has a $2 million insurance policy against career-ending injury, according to Florida Today and only the most selfishly shortsighted person would ask him to do so again for the sake of one early October game, in which another concussion could knock him out for the season and perhaps court the long-term cognitive effects Brantley is now experiencing.
Brantley’s situation had one vital difference: he had a long concussion history before his final college collision, whereas Tebow has had just one notable incident. But they share the same team physician in Dr. Peter Indelicato. And 30 years ago, long before concussions received the respect they do today, it was Indelicato who ended Brantley’s college career two games into his senior season, and advised that he never play football again.
Back then it was basically back in the Dark Ages, but we did seek the advice of a very knowledgeable neurosurgeon, and his advice was to take the helmet away, Indelicato recalled in a telephone interview. We’re not talking about the worst-case scenario where in 30 years someone will have an arthritic knee or need a hip replacement. You’re talking about the brain. You’re talking about permanent, irreversible damage. When it comes to head and neck injuries, I can be a real S.O.B.
Florida officials would not discuss any specifics of Tebow’s concussion treatment, and Tebow has been protected from swarms of news media members. When Tebow was cleared on Tuesday for noncontact practice but not yet for the L.S.U. game a college news release reassured that he had multiple imaging scans, a battery of concussion tests and was not allowed to participate in football activities, meetings or practices until his symptoms had fully subsided.
At 22, Tebow is considered past any danger for second-impact syndrome, a risk among teenagers where even a minor impact before a first concussion has healed can lead to coma or death. But Tebow’s returning too soon could leave him susceptible to another concussion with more significant neurological effects. And perhaps financial ones: Dr. Henry Feuer, the neurosurgeon for the Indianapolis Colts who has overseen the N.F.L. combine in that city for more than 20 years, has said in interviews that teams routinely downgrade players who appear to be concussion-prone.
On Wednesday, Meyer reported that team doctors would probably not decide on Tebow’s availability until soon before kickoff Saturday night in Baton Rouge. If Tebow cannot play, his position will be filled by the third-year sophomore John Brantley none other than the nephew of Scot Brantley, the former Gator who believes he is a living example of ignoring the risks of football head trauma.
I hit everything that moved that’s the reason I played, Brantley said. I would hit everything with all I had. I lived with headaches. That was part of what I did.
Brantley did so long after Indelicato told him to stop. He fell from a first-round draft prospect to the third round and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for whom he played eight seasons as one of the hardest-hitting linebackers in the league. In 1985, his violent head-to-head hit on the scrambling Detroit Lions quarterback Eric Hipple separated Hipple from both his wits and helmet, and it remains one of the league’s most spectacular tackles.
Already experiencing severe short-term memory problems, Brantley had two small strokes last year that cost him most of the sight in his left eye. (He said that doctors were still unsure what role football trauma might have played in the strokes.) He had to take a leave of absence from his job as a Tampa Bay sports-radio personality, costing his listeners the perspective he could now lend to the Tebow situation and the pull of Gator football.
It’s going to be interesting what the decision is going to be, Brantley said. He was then asked what he would tell Tebow directly if they were sitting across from each other.
Timmy, you listen to the doctors and what they tell you, Brantley said. You do exactly what you’re told to do.
