NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A "meticulously documented and endlessly
chilling" (The New York Times) exploration of the NFL's decades-long
attempt to deny and cover up mounting evidence connecting football and
brain damage.
"A first-rate piece of reporting [that] adds crucial detail,
texture, and news to the concussion story, which despite the NFL's best
efforts, isn't going away."--Time
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, NPR
"Professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows
to the brain on a regular basis." So concluded the National Football
League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America's
most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan,
also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who
worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new
scourge: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a chronic brain disease
that was driving an alarming number of players--including some of the
all-time greats--to madness.
Everyone knows that football is violent and dangerous. But what the
players who built the NFL into a $10 billion industry didn't know--and
what the league sought to shield from them--is that no amount of padding
could protect the human brain from the force generated by modern
football.
In League of Denial, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark
Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru expose the public health crisis that
emerged from the playing fields and examine how the league used its
power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its own
flawed research--a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco's fight to deny
the connection between smoking and lung cancer. They chronicle the
tragic fates of players like Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers center
Mike Webster, who was so disturbed at the time of his death he
fantasized about shooting NFL executives, and former San Diego Chargers
great Junior Seau, whose diseased brain became the target of a
scientific battle between researchers and the NFL.
Based on exclusive interviews, previously undisclosed documents, and
private e-mails, League of Denial is the story of what the NFL knew
and when it knew it--questions at the heart of a crisis that threatens
American football--and of the battle for the sport's future.
