Hall of Famer warns athletes of brain damage

MANILA, Philippines –  Pro football Hall of Famer Carl Eller is at the forefront of a campaign cautioning athletes, prone to head contact, to closely monitor their brain condition with doctors and avoid a life of impairment when they retire from sports.

Eller, 68, was recently in Manila to speak about brain injury concerns of retired football players and other athletes at a two-day seminar organized by the UP College of Medicine, Department of Neurosciences, in the Diamond Hotel. Eller was tapped for the seminar by Filipino neurologist Dr. Patricio Reyes, director of Alzheimer’s Disease and Cognitive Disorders at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. Dr. Reyes, a UP graduate, is known as one of the first to establish rapid autopsy brain banking in the US and the first to build Alzheimer’s and dementia centers in Texas, Pennsylvania and Nebraska.

Dr. Reyes, who is often consulted by the National Football League (NFL) retired players association and the American Association of Professional Ringside Physicians, was scheduled to speak at the seminar but canceled at the last minute due to emergencies at work.

Eller, who played in four Super Bowls with the Minnesota Vikings, is president of the NFL retired players association.

“As athletes, we don’t really pay too much attention to other things except the game we love,” he said. “With our association, we want to provide information on playing safe to athletes. We’re promoting education. Our concern is life after football. Players play because they love the game, the thrill, the competition. But we want to make sure that when athletes leave the game, they can enjoy quality of life not go through retirement as cripples.”

Eller said the NFL retired players association is an independent group whose priority is to care for former players. “Realistically, we need funding from the NFL,” he went on. “We’ve thought of the one percent plan where players give one percent of their salaries to the association. We can continue to be independent even if the NFL decides to support us through the one percent plan. This is, after all, for retired football players who are in need.”

Eller said he’s an advocate of brain banking. A former Vikings teammate, Wally Hilgenberg, donated his brains after his death in 2008 at the age of 66 due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. 

“From what I know, there have been 30 to 50 players who’ve donated their brains for research,” said Eller. “The research is vital to find ways to cure Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. The research is also applicable to boxers.”

Former World Boxing Union lightwelterweight champion “Irish” Micky Ward, whose life story inspired the movie “The Fighter,” recently announced he will donate his brains to a bank when he dies.

It is not certain how many retired fighters end up with dementia puglistica, a condition attributed to repeated concussive and subconcussive blows to the head. Symptoms include progressive cognitive decline, abnormal behavior, cerebellar deficits and Parkinsonism. “The incidence of the syndrome among retired boxers is unknown though based on a previous early retrospective study, approximately 17 percent of former boxers developed dementia pugilistica,” wrote Dr. Reyes in a paper with Dr. L. A. Nowak and Dr. G. G. Smith. The statistic was based on a 1969 study. With the technological developments and safety measures instituted in boxing, the percentage should be far lower today.

But neurologist Dr. Robert Cantu said the rate of chronic brain damage among fighters is at least one in five and more likely, one in two, wrote Pablo Torre in Sports Illustrated.  Dr. Ira Casson, chairman of the NFL’s committee on concussions, was quoted as saying that boxers with at least 50 pro bouts often show “MRI and psychological test abnormalities” as well as “obvious symptoms of brain injury.”

Eller said the NFL can learn a lot from studies of brains in banks. He called it a breakthrough for football that more and more players are donating their brains for research so that doctors may get to the bottom of head trauma cases. Research can provide early detection signals, ways to retard the progress of dementia and counsel for athletes as to when to retire from sports with a high incidence of physical contact.

“We want athletes to know what the price is for the exposure to physical contact,” said Eller. “We want them to understand the implications to their future.”

Eller said he knows boxing and basketball are the most popular sports in the Philippines. “Maybe, someday, I could convince an NFL team like the Vikings to go to the Philippines for training camp,” he said. “That way, we could expose Filipino fans to the beauty of pro football.” 

Eller played for the Vikings and the Seattle Seahawks in a storybook NFL career from 1964 to 1979. He saw action on the Minnesota squad that won the NFL title in 1969. Throughout his career, the legend nicknamed “Moose” missed only three games and started 209 out of 225 regular season outings.   Eller was named to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2004 and to the College Football Hall of Fame two years later.