The only thing perhaps more harmful to your health than playing football is smoking cigarettes, and I think the Surgeon General’s first notices were posted on packs of smokes back in the mid-’60s. But if a small story I recently read on ESPN.com by Adam Rittenberg regarding a lawsuit by an ex-Notre Dame football player named Douglas Randolph has legs, college football could really be in for a rough ride.
By now, you’d have to be as much of a miscreant and hermit as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski to not know about the dangers that pro football poses for the brave warriors that parade for us on fall Sundays, Monday nights and Thursday evenings. Their chances for serious brain injuries and traumas be damned, America and all the other outposts have to have their pigskin football. If not, how would they know how their fantasy teams were doing?
To this point in time, almost all of the bad PR has surrounded NFL players and the head scrambling that comes along with this nearly indisputable supposition — if you play professional football long enough and suffer the consequences in multiple concussions, you most assuredly will wind up with some level of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
As we now know, league officials were duplicitous about when they knew what they knew and how forthcoming they were with their players. The NFL Players Association was equally aware, and that’s where the rub comes in — as that lack of candor on quality-of-life issues for current members of the Players Association and the long line of ex-members of the NFLPA has bred a level of contempt by players that isn’t simply washed away by sharing a larger piece of the pie.
And we can go back to 1979 and the novel-turned-into-a-movie written by the late ex-wide receiver Pete Gent of the Dallas Cowboys, “North Dallas Forty,” to see how team doctors really used to be in the hip pockets of the teams. Gent’s novel portrayed a ruthless lack of candor or concern for the players as anything more than pieces of meat.
But Douglas Randolph, who played 19 games for current Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly in the 2014 and 2015 seasons, is filing a suit against the school, its head coach, head football athletic trainer Rob Hunt and several team doctors.
The basis for the suit is that Randolph felt numbness in his upper extremities after a hit in a September practice. He had an MRI, which the school never provided the results from. He played the entire 2015 season and even in the New Year’s Day Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 1, 2016.
His suit — and I am quoting from Rittenberg’s piece — asserts, “If he had been told the truth about the results of this [first] MRI scan, his football career would have ended on that date and all subsequent injuries and permanent damage he has endured would have never occurred.”
According to Rittenberg, Randolph’s lawsuit further alleges that the plaintiff experienced numbness in both arms and both legs in that bowl game, but was told to go back in the game by the team’s trainer.
After the game, he was sent for another MRI that showed Randolph suffered from spinal stenosis, a sometimes severe narrowing of the spinal column.
To hear Randolph and his legal representation’s description of events, it seems pretty straightforward that they have quite a case against all the defendants.
I said at the outset that college football could be in for a rough ride if Randolph’s suit has legs. Notre Dame will surely argue that they did everything according to a code of ethics we’d like to think they’d have adhered to.
The school and the other defendants likely will attempt to argue the case in their own defense based on their proven protocols. However, in doing so they’ll try to puncture Randolph’s claims as nothing more than a creative money grab crafted by a very slick personal injury lawyer looking for yet another revenue stream that rails against the inhumanity of football.
Doesn’t sound like too much is at stake, does it? This is just one guy, Douglas Randolph, vs. Notre Dame University, and in a roundabout way the game of football. Does anyone remember the Paul Newman film “The Verdict,” directed by Sidney Lumet? In it, Newman played the down-on-his-luck, alcoholic lawyer who gets a huge medical malpractice suit against a big hospital in Boston.
This sure has all the earmarks of that underdog vs. power brokers case. Randolph’s lawyer may need to be every bit as good as Paul Newman’s Frank Galvin character to win this case.
Stan “The Fan” Charles is the founder and publisher of PressBox.
Also see: Former Colt John Mackey was Just One Victim of CTE
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