Speaker 1: Pushkin. Before we begin, a warning this episode contains material
Speaker 1: that may be upsetting to some listeners. What Ways, tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit about what Owen was like. When
Speaker 1: Nolan was born, he was screaming and his neck veins
Speaker 1: were out, and the doctor said, this is a Viking.
Speaker 1: And I think that's kind of the way he lived
Speaker 1: a lot, you know, that kind of passion. So that's
Speaker 1: that's the way he lived. The man speaking is Tom Thomas.
Speaker 1: He's sitting with his wife, Kathy Brearley. She's English. Both
Speaker 1: she and Tom are United Church pastors. They met when
Speaker 1: they were missionaries in Zambia. They have a son named Morgan,
Speaker 1: and we're all at Morgan's house just outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: a bungalow in a tidy subdivision. There are two little
Speaker 1: children running around, the big friendly dog being big and friendly.
Speaker 1: Everyone has gathered to talk about Owen, the Viking, the
Speaker 1: son and brother. Who isn't there. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
Speaker 1: and misunderstood. This episode is about Owen Thomas, a young
Speaker 1: man I never had the chance to meet, about what
Speaker 1: happened to him and why we shouldn't forget about it.
Speaker 1: I went to see Owen's family on a cold winter evening.
Speaker 1: We knew that he was kind of feeling down, feeling depressed.
Speaker 1: Um in the last well, what would you say, last
Speaker 1: month or so? I didn't know that. Well, I didn't
Speaker 1: know he was depressed. I knew he was stressed. He
Speaker 1: was stressed, he was knew he was stress school classes.
Speaker 1: Owen went full out all the time at everything. His
Speaker 1: older brother Morgan says he couldn't keep up. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we were sort of like opposites. I was real good
Speaker 1: at given like eighty and he was not everything. But
Speaker 1: just like for example, school schooling, he would not take
Speaker 1: anything less than a plus, a minus. He was pissed
Speaker 1: a plus. But now we don't know if he was
Speaker 1: having difficulty remembering things because we never even asked We
Speaker 1: never asked him that, We never we never even thought
Speaker 1: that there might be anything cognitive. We just thought this
Speaker 1: was a somebody who's a type a person who's kind
Speaker 1: of like demanding so much of himself. In retrospect, I
Speaker 1: guess when things this happened in retrospect, you can always
Speaker 1: try to look back and say, oh, I should have
Speaker 1: seen this, I should have seen that. But the Sunday
Speaker 1: night he called, he really sounded depressed them. He really,
Speaker 1: he really did. And you know, now you look back,
Speaker 1: we should have just gotten the car gone right down.
Speaker 1: What did he talk about in that past, Well, it
Speaker 1: was my it would be my birthday, so he was
Speaker 1: he was wishing, he was wishing me happy birthday. I
Speaker 1: don't know what did he talk to you about, Tom?
Speaker 1: He said, he I'm failing everything. That's really say. When
Speaker 1: I said at the beginning that we shouldn't forget about
Speaker 1: Owen Thomas, I'm talking about this, that we shouldn't forget that,
Speaker 1: he went from clarity and purpose to failing everything. In
Speaker 1: twenty and thirteen, I was invited to give a lecture
Speaker 1: at the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome. It is my great
Speaker 1: pleasure on behalf of Penn's four hundred and fifty Benjamin
Speaker 1: Franklin scholars to welcome you to the twenty thirteen Benjamin
Speaker 1: Franklin Lecture Show. The talk was at a big auditorium
Speaker 1: at the Penn Museum. I had been assigned a theme
Speaker 1: proof and that's obviously a big topic. So I thought
Speaker 1: that this afternoon I would start by asking a relatively
Speaker 1: simple question, which is what level of proof do we
Speaker 1: need about the harmfulness of some activity before we act?
Speaker 1: I decided to tell the story of a man named
Speaker 1: Frederick Hoffman, a remarkable man born in eighteen sixty five
Speaker 1: in Germany immigrated to the United States. Hoffman rose to
Speaker 1: the position of senior statistician at the Prudential Insurance Company.
Speaker 1: At the time, that was a hugely important job. This
Speaker 1: was in the years before Social Security or Medicare. Private
Speaker 1: insurers were the safety net, and because they had to
Speaker 1: figure out what to charge for life insurance premiums, they
Speaker 1: had to closely monitor the health of Americans. And that
Speaker 1: was Hoffman's job. He set out and he would cover
Speaker 1: the entire country, and he would go and visit towns
Speaker 1: and cities and villages all across this land. And he
Speaker 1: would interview doctors and hospitals and funeral directors, and he
Speaker 1: would visit all the major employers, and he would go
Speaker 1: to the cemeteries and he would talk to people, and
Speaker 1: he would walk around the town and he would try
Speaker 1: and get a sense of what people are dying of.
Speaker 1: Hoffman was one of the first people to sound the
Speaker 1: alarm about smoking. He was one of the first to
Speaker 1: describe the terrible health conditions on Indian reservations, but perhaps
Speaker 1: his most important work concerned what was known at the
Speaker 1: time as miners asthma. I give a fair number of talks,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that you can usually tell
Speaker 1: is if you've lost your audience. And I remember that
Speaker 1: day pen thinking that I had no idea. Twenty minutes
Speaker 1: in I began to panic a little because I'm going
Speaker 1: on and on about Hoffmann about coal mining, about how
Speaker 1: big a deal coal was the turn of the century,
Speaker 1: but how much dust the process of coal mining created,
Speaker 1: About how coal miners would have coughing fits and spit
Speaker 1: up this black, inky substance, and they would cough more
Speaker 1: and more of it the more they mined in the
Speaker 1: more time they spent in the coal mines. That was
Speaker 1: absolutely beyond question. The audience is incredibly quiet, And I
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out if that was because they found the
Speaker 1: subject as fascinating as I did, or if they were thinking,
Speaker 1: what on earth The thing that no one could agree
Speaker 1: on wasn't that whether that was dangerous? Did it harm
Speaker 1: the health of someone to inhale all of this dust?
Speaker 1: From coal mining miners asthma wasn't bothering the medical community
Speaker 1: and the mining companies. They said, look, miners have lower
Speaker 1: rates of tuberculosis than everyone else. T B is a
Speaker 1: respiratory disease, so maybe cold dust is protective in some way.
Speaker 1: Another argument was if miners were coughing up dust particles,
Speaker 1: then their lungs were functioning as they should. So for
Speaker 1: years and years and years, nobody paid particular attention to
Speaker 1: the problem of coal dust because they had all of
Speaker 1: these arguments that they used to convince themselves that it
Speaker 1: wasn't a health risk. And then along comes Frederick Hoffman.
Speaker 1: Prudential insured a lot of miners, and if they're dying young,
Speaker 1: then that was a real problem for Prudential. So Hoffmann
Speaker 1: investigated and in nineteen eighteen he publishes this famous report
Speaker 1: was called Mortality from Respiratory Diseases in the Dusty Trades,
Speaker 1: and it comes out. It was published by the Bureau
Speaker 1: of Labor Statistics by the government federal government in nineteen eighteen.
Speaker 1: Hoffman was methodical. First, he looked at the government statistics
Speaker 1: on culosis. He found no evidence miners had lower rates
Speaker 1: of TB. Then he looked at asthma death rates. They
Speaker 1: were five times higher for coal miners than for other
Speaker 1: working men. Hoffmann looked at census data who was still
Speaker 1: working after the age of forty five. For farmers at
Speaker 1: the time, almost a third were still working. For miners
Speaker 1: it was a fifth. If mining was so healthy, why
Speaker 1: were all the miners disappearing from their profession. So he
Speaker 1: adds all this up, but he says, look, I don't
Speaker 1: buy it. I think that this miners asthma's thing is
Speaker 1: something that we should be concerned about. So here we
Speaker 1: have the senior statistician from one of the most powerful
Speaker 1: and important institutions in the country publishing a report on
Speaker 1: the health of workers in one of the most important
Speaker 1: and critical industries in the country and saying there's a problem.
Speaker 1: So what do you think happens? Nothing happens, nothing thing whatsoever,
Speaker 1: and why does nothing happen? Because all kinds of people
Speaker 1: stood up and read Hoffman's report and said, you've got
Speaker 1: no proof. Let's give the students at pen credit for
Speaker 1: their patience. Because this part of my talk went on
Speaker 1: for a very long time. But I was trying to
Speaker 1: answer the question at the core of proof, At what
Speaker 1: point do you act. People argued after Hoffmann published his
Speaker 1: report that we still didn't know quite enough, that he
Speaker 1: had a lot of suggestive evidence but not definitive evidence.
Speaker 1: And that was true, but it was also irrelevant because
Speaker 1: if you wait until the evidence is perfect and complete,
Speaker 1: you'll never act. It was not until the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: that people suddenly realized that tens of thousands of miners
Speaker 1: were dying horrible deaths, vastly prematurely because of the dust
Speaker 1: they inhaled while working in the minds. Now, I think
Speaker 1: we can all agree that that is an appalling story, right,
Speaker 1: that should never have happened. We should have acted on
Speaker 1: this in nineteen eighteen. Instead, we acted on this in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five. We look around the room and we
Speaker 1: say to ourselves, we would never do that, would we
Speaker 1: We're much too educated and sophisticated and empathetic to ever
Speaker 1: look at the suffering of someone else and say, oh,
Speaker 1: we're not going to act until we have proof. But
Speaker 1: we do do that. All of us do that. Everyone
Speaker 1: in this room is doing that even as we speak. Now,
Speaker 1: what am I talking about? I'm talking about football. Owen Thomas,
Speaker 1: the Red Headed Viking, was a football player. So was
Speaker 1: his father Tom. It was the nineteen sixties. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I was a fullback, which in the backfield. If you
Speaker 1: know anything about Omergan football, Owen's grandfather played for Millersville University.
Speaker 1: His older brother, Morgan, played offensive tackle for East Stroudsburg University,
Speaker 1: and then Owen played. So I guess we're kind of
Speaker 1: a football family. Yeah. On the dining table right in
Speaker 1: front of me are Owen's helmets from middle school and
Speaker 1: high school and college, all scratched and battered, lined up
Speaker 1: in a row. It's hard for a lineman to be
Speaker 1: a star, you know, like he's running back, quarterback, those
Speaker 1: are really the stars. But he was definitely a feared
Speaker 1: player from all angles, and people knew who he was,
Speaker 1: so he was definitely one of the one of the stars.
Speaker 1: He couldn't wait for the season to begin. You know,
Speaker 1: most most of the football players say, oh, I just
Speaker 1: the first day of practice was would would just be
Speaker 1: like running, putting on the uniform and running. But he say,
Speaker 1: I just can't wait to hit somebody. I just want
Speaker 1: to hit something. And that was that's his own team.
Speaker 1: That's his own team that he hit. When it came
Speaker 1: time for college Ohen Thomas went to the University of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: He was just kind of guy that on a on
Speaker 1: a bad day when they had to wake up at
Speaker 1: six seven o'clock in the morning to do a workout
Speaker 1: and everyone you know, had class and everything. He was
Speaker 1: a kind of guy that would get everybody motivated to
Speaker 1: complete the workout and then go on with your day.
Speaker 1: He was named captain of the football team. Seventy six
Speaker 1: out of the eighty players voted for him. Then, one
Speaker 1: day out of the blue, in the spring of his
Speaker 1: junior year, he hung himself in his apartment. Tom sent
Speaker 1: me a text message, except I was listened to an lecture,
Speaker 1: so he kept saying, call me. There are all these messages,
Speaker 1: call me, call me, call me. So they drove down
Speaker 1: to Philadelphia. They went to identify their son's body in
Speaker 1: the hospital, and in the car on the way back
Speaker 1: on this terrible, terrible day, they got a call from
Speaker 1: someone named Chris Nwinski. Nwinski is a former college football
Speaker 1: player with a PhD in neuroscience who runs the Concussion
Speaker 1: Legacy Foundation. He works with a group of researchers at
Speaker 1: Boston University. For more than a decade, they've been autopsying
Speaker 1: the brains of people who have, in the course of
Speaker 1: their lives suffered repeated blows to the head, looking for
Speaker 1: something called chronic traumatic encephalopathy CTE. Getting hit in the
Speaker 1: head causes your brain to twist and bruise if you
Speaker 1: get hit enough times, that bruising causes the accumulation of
Speaker 1: a protein called TAO, and that TAW slowly works its
Speaker 1: way through the brain like a poison. So far, Lewinski's
Speaker 1: group has autopsied the brains of one hundred and eleven
Speaker 1: former NFL players one hundred and ten head CTE. Seven
Speaker 1: of eight former Canadian Football League players had it, so
Speaker 1: did nine of fourteen semipro players, forty eight of fifty
Speaker 1: three college players, three out of fourteen high school players.
Speaker 1: The symptoms of CTE include difficulty thinking, impulsive behavior, depression,
Speaker 1: short term memory loss, difficulty planning, emotional instability, and suicidal
Speaker 1: thoughts and behavior. It's not pleasant. One of the first
Speaker 1: pro players diagnosed with CTE was Mike Webster. He was
Speaker 1: a Hall of Fame center with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He
Speaker 1: died at fifty. In his house, his family found page
Speaker 1: after page of scribbled notes written by Webster to document
Speaker 1: his mental state like this deep confusing, twisting, fishing line,
Speaker 1: tangled up mess of confusing things go on all the time?
Speaker 1: Or Junior Sayal and Dave Durson, two of the great
Speaker 1: football players of their generation, both shot themselves in the
Speaker 1: chest at the ages of forty three and fifty Why
Speaker 1: in the chest to make sure their brains were intact
Speaker 1: for autopsy to make the pathologist's job easier. Now our
Speaker 1: case is like this absolute proof of a connection between
Speaker 1: CTE and football players getting hit in the head. No.
Speaker 1: The research group at Boston University has just published a
Speaker 1: study which looked at players who had started playing tackle
Speaker 1: football before the age of twelve. I'm quoting youth exposure
Speaker 1: to tackle football may reduce resiliency to late life neuropathology
Speaker 1: may reduce Remember they're working from a non representative sample
Speaker 1: autopsies conducted on players whose families believe something was wrong.
Speaker 1: Proof would be if you identified two thousand people, half
Speaker 1: of whom play football and half of whom do not,
Speaker 1: followed them over the course of their lives and compared
Speaker 1: the autopsies of their brains at death. Did the football
Speaker 1: players have on average more the protein TAO in their brain?
Speaker 1: Tissue than the non football players. The problem is that
Speaker 1: the average American male life expectancy is seventy five years.
Speaker 1: If we start that study now, we'll have definitive proof
Speaker 1: somewhere around the turn of the next century. The much
Speaker 1: much harder question is what you do in the interim,
Speaker 1: and the answer is that you do what Chris Niwinski
Speaker 1: of the Concussion Foundation does. You plug away. You call
Speaker 1: people up at the height of their grief and ask
Speaker 1: them for brain tissue before the body of their loved
Speaker 1: one is buried or cremated. You call up people like
Speaker 1: Owen Thomas's parents. This is a day when it was
Speaker 1: like poured and poured and poured with rain the whole day,
Speaker 1: and so we were going back. It was must have
Speaker 1: been about like ten o'clock at night, right driving at
Speaker 1: the turnpike, and suddenly this I get this phone call
Speaker 1: from this person whose name I can hardly understand. The
Speaker 1: Thomas's were too stunned to say no. But he still
Speaker 1: had to do quite a lot of work because he
Speaker 1: had to then call the undertaker and get the undertaker
Speaker 1: to get the brain matter which had been just like
Speaker 1: dumped in a bag by the medical examiner. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: has something to answer for all. Well, the medical examiner
Speaker 1: did an autopsy, right, so this was a football player
Speaker 1: who had committed suicide and didn't he didn't make any
Speaker 1: attempt to preserve the brain matter, which now I look
Speaker 1: back on it and I think, how crazy is that
Speaker 1: that that the brain matter was just like all mixed
Speaker 1: up with all the rest of the bits and pieces
Speaker 1: and just thrown in a bag. Owen Thomas died in April.
Speaker 1: The following September, his parents got a second call. Owen
Speaker 1: had CTE and suddenly it all made sense. Why they're focused, joyful,
Speaker 1: high spirited. Sun had suddenly called and said, I'm failing
Speaker 1: at everything. How did that news change you? What was
Speaker 1: the impact on me on hearing that you said? You
Speaker 1: said you were league in some sense, that there was
Speaker 1: a contributing factor, that it wasn't just depression, That there
Speaker 1: was a cause that you could medical cause that you
Speaker 1: could maybe say that contributed to it. Well, it gave
Speaker 1: us a something to hold on. He gave us a purpose,
Speaker 1: not an answer, because there's still too much unknown for
Speaker 1: that a purpose. Now what am I talking about? I'm
Speaker 1: talking about football. What do we know about football? We
Speaker 1: know about football, approximately what Frederick Hoffman knew about old
Speaker 1: dust in nineteen eighteen. So there I was in the
Speaker 1: Harrison Auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania. It was twenty
Speaker 1: and thirteen. Owen Thomas had been dead for three years.
Speaker 1: There were students in the room who had known him,
Speaker 1: who remembered him. So I told the story of how
Speaker 1: he was found hanging in his apartment, and I asked them,
Speaker 1: is that enough proof for you? Is the death of
Speaker 1: someone you went to school with who was the captain
Speaker 1: of your football team enough evidence to walk away from
Speaker 1: the game? I sometimes think about that moment. When I
Speaker 1: met Boebe's Library at New York University, I do a
Speaker 1: lot of my research there. The library has a massive,
Speaker 1: multi story atrium at its center, and a few years
Speaker 1: ago a student jumped over one of the railings overlooking
Speaker 1: the atrium, and immediately, immediately, and at great expense, the
Speaker 1: university put up high plexiglass screens in front of every railing.
Speaker 1: Then a few years after that, a student found a
Speaker 1: way to wriggle over the plexiglass and jump to his death.
Speaker 1: So the university installed an even more expensive and elaborate
Speaker 1: and fool proof metal screen that was impossible to get
Speaker 1: around or over. Two suicides, and they spent millions of dollars.
Speaker 1: Why Because the job of a university is to watch
Speaker 1: out for the welfare of the students under its care.
Speaker 1: An NYU didn't need any more evidence to act two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine eight and a crowd by coming together
Speaker 1: in order to overcome the adversity's plans shaking the field
Speaker 1: in North Ambersity Ridge. Here is what Penn did in
Speaker 1: response to the suicide of Owen Thomas and the results
Speaker 1: of his brain autopsy. They honored him with forty seconds
Speaker 1: of silence before the season opener the next fall against Lafayette,
Speaker 1: Owens Jersey had been number of forty. His teammates wore
Speaker 1: decals on their helmets with the number forty on them.
Speaker 1: Winking hand in hand, Powell to the sideline, standing for
Speaker 1: a forty second moment of silence and tribute to their
Speaker 1: former teammate Owen Thomas, who passed away on Monday, April
Speaker 1: the twenty six This passed off season and here is
Speaker 1: the statement the university issued upon hearing that Owen Thomas
Speaker 1: had been diagnosed with CTE. I read it to the
Speaker 1: audience when I was at Pen in twenty thirteen. While
Speaker 1: we will never know the cause of Owen Thomas's depression
Speaker 1: and subsequent suicide, we are aware of and deeply concerned
Speaker 1: about the medical issues now being raised about football head injury,
Speaker 1: and will continue to work with the Ivy League and
Speaker 1: the medical community in addressing these issues. Owen's untimely death
Speaker 1: was a terrible tragedy, and we continued to grieve for
Speaker 1: his loss. Where to start. Let's start with the statement
Speaker 1: we will never know the cause of Owen Thomas's depression
Speaker 1: and subsequent suicide. Are you kidding me? What is there
Speaker 1: more to know? A healthy young man with no previous
Speaker 1: history of depression hangs himself in his apartment and when
Speaker 1: they do an autopsy on his brain, they find he
Speaker 1: has the beginnings of a debilitating neurological disorder caused by
Speaker 1: taking too many hits on the football field. And then
Speaker 1: the statement we are aware and deeply concerned about the
Speaker 1: medical issues being raised about football head injuries. We are
Speaker 1: so aware and deeply concerned about the medical issues being
Speaker 1: raised about football head injuries that three years after Owen
Speaker 1: Thomas's death, Penn continues to play football In my book.
Speaker 1: That does not count as concern. That is moral indifference.
Speaker 1: Not long ago, I went to see Al Begnoli. He's
Speaker 1: the head football coach at Columbia University. Before that he
Speaker 1: was at Penn. He was Owen Thomas's coach, and he
Speaker 1: reminded me I'd left someone out. Owen Thomas wasn't the
Speaker 1: only one. Oh, we had too. We had Kyle Ambrosie too.
Speaker 1: They're both traumatic. But Kyle's was unbelievable because that happened
Speaker 1: right in mid season. So it happened after he scored
Speaker 1: two touchdowns or we'd be buck now fifty one or something.
Speaker 1: Kyle Ambrosie star running back on the Penn football team
Speaker 1: and a student at the Wharton School of Business. Just
Speaker 1: like Owen Thomas. He shot himself at his mother's house
Speaker 1: in October two thousand and five. There wasn't an autopsy
Speaker 1: on Kyle Ambrogie's brain in two thousand and five. CTE
Speaker 1: just wasn't on people's radar in the same way that
Speaker 1: it is now, So we'll never know whether he suffered
Speaker 1: from the disease the way we know with Owen Thomas.
Speaker 1: We don't have proof, but what happened to Kyle Ambrogie
Speaker 1: sounds very much like what happened to Owen Thomas. All
Speaker 1: his life, a young man plays a sport that involves
Speaker 1: repeated blows to his brain until suddenly he fell apart
Speaker 1: in a way that looks an awful lot like the
Speaker 1: way people fall apart after they've had repeated blows to
Speaker 1: their brain. You know, there was even physical changes, like
Speaker 1: his eye color got lighter, and you can just see
Speaker 1: that he was fighting demons and he couldn't explain them.
Speaker 1: That's Kyle Ambrogie's brother Greg. I asked him, and he,
Speaker 1: you know, would try to explain them, and he just
Speaker 1: would run out of words. He would open his mouth
Speaker 1: and nothing would come out, and I would just look
Speaker 1: at him and I didn't. Yeah. The only thing he
Speaker 1: said to me his mummy, it's so dark, it's scary.
Speaker 1: And it was very frightening to him because he was
Speaker 1: always used to being in control, and this isn't out
Speaker 1: of control, feeling Kyle's mother, Donna, listening to the Ambrogies
Speaker 1: was like listening to the Thomas's. Someone you know becomes
Speaker 1: someone you don't know right in front of your eyes,
Speaker 1: and they haven't done anything, they haven't been in a
Speaker 1: terrible accident or overdosed on drugs or squandered their life away.
Speaker 1: They've just played a game, played it well. And if
Speaker 1: you're always, like I said, the internally driven, you know,
Speaker 1: never had to say, Kyle, do your homework, go practice,
Speaker 1: go whatever. He always had it done ahead of time.
Speaker 1: That was him. This is what he wanted to do.
Speaker 1: So if you're used to being in control and your
Speaker 1: mind is you're having thoughts that you don't have control over,
Speaker 1: it's very scary. Had anything you've done as a coach
Speaker 1: prepared you for I mean, that's a really tough position
Speaker 1: to be. No, no, no, nothing you can do. What
Speaker 1: did you say to your players basically we're here for you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, anytime you get that kind of trauma,
Speaker 1: to deal with it, because again, it kind of brings
Speaker 1: you back to, Okay, what's really important and what isn't important?
Speaker 1: You know, you've been so much premium on Okay, you
Speaker 1: gotta win this game, you gotta win that game. You're
Speaker 1: trying to win the title, and yeah, when it comes
Speaker 1: to human life, that's rather trivial. I'm a seeming The
Speaker 1: full team went to the funerals in both cases that
Speaker 1: must have been. Yeah, unbelievable. It's it's very sad because
Speaker 1: again it's hard to explain. Not that it's any easier
Speaker 1: to lose somebody in a car accident, but you can
Speaker 1: explain it. Or someone who suffers from terminal cancer. It's
Speaker 1: just as traumatic, but you can explain it. When you're
Speaker 1: a teammate of a kid who commits suicide, you're you know,
Speaker 1: could I have Why didn't I see this? Could I
Speaker 1: have done something? Why? You know? I think you always
Speaker 1: question yourself, what could I have done that? Maybe in
Speaker 1: some other ways of death you kind of accept. I've
Speaker 1: thought a lot about that talk. I gave it penn.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I won them over. The students listened
Speaker 1: politely and at the end ask thoughtful and skeptical questions.
Speaker 1: I talked about the costs of football. Why didn't they
Speaker 1: talk about the benefits? They asked, doesn't everything come with
Speaker 1: a risk? Shouldn't people be free to make their own choices.
Speaker 1: A student who was on the football team stood up
Speaker 1: and said, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for football.
Speaker 1: When I met with coach Bagnoli, he talked about rule changes,
Speaker 1: how they are now much more vigilant about concussions, how
Speaker 1: they don't tackle in practice like they used to, How
Speaker 1: he doesn't believe that little kids should play tackle football.
Speaker 1: I got the sense that a lot of students were
Speaker 1: thinking about those things too. Maybe we can just manage
Speaker 1: this problem, reduce the risk to some more acceptable level.
Speaker 1: After the speech, as I walked to the post event reception,
Speaker 1: one of the big deans at PENN looked at me
Speaker 1: and shook his head. He said, we're not stopping football,
Speaker 1: of course not. And it won't stop at least not
Speaker 1: until the third suicide, or maybe the fourth suicide or
Speaker 1: the fifth, at which point the students in Alumnia Pen
Speaker 1: will finally say that's an awfully high price to pay
Speaker 1: for a game. Al Begnoli brought up one more name
Speaker 1: that's unfortunately becoming more and more prevalent, and I just
Speaker 1: saw the kid from Washington State whose brother actually was here.
Speaker 1: The name of the kid from Washington State was Tyler Helenski.
Speaker 1: He was supposed to be the twenty nineteen starting quarterback
Speaker 1: for the Washington State Cougars. A few days before my
Speaker 1: interview with Begnoli, Helenski borrowed a teammate's rifle and shot
Speaker 1: himself in the head. A bright, outgoing kid with a
Speaker 1: big smile, no motive. It's unfortunately becoming more and more prevalent.
Speaker 1: But I guess we don't have enough proof. Well, it's
Speaker 1: your classmates who are dying, right, It's your classmates who
Speaker 1: are putting their lives at risk by playing this game.
Speaker 1: I think all of you has to think about has
Speaker 1: to consider boycotting football games at Penn. And I think
Speaker 1: you have to convince your friends to boycott football games
Speaker 1: at Pen. And I think you have to pick it
Speaker 1: outside football games at Pen. And I think you have
Speaker 1: to go to the administrators of this university and you
Speaker 1: have to ask them, why is a world class institution,
Speaker 1: one of the finest universities of higher learning in this planet,
Speaker 1: exposing its own students to the risk of injury and death.
Speaker 1: And if they ask for proof, tell them you don't
Speaker 1: need proof. Sometimes proof is just another word for letting
Speaker 1: people suffer. Thank you. Revisionist History is a Panoply production.
Speaker 1: The senior producer is Mia Lobelle with Jacob Smith and
Speaker 1: Camille Baptista. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Fact checking by Beth Johnson, original music by
Speaker 1: Luis Gara. Special thanks to Andy Bowers In Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glad. Suicide is a difficult topic. It can
Speaker 1: be hard for people to talk about suicide or get
Speaker 1: help if they're in danger, but there are resources available
Speaker 1: people want to help. The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is
Speaker 1: one excellent resource. It's free, confidential, and available twenty four
Speaker 1: hours a day. The number in the US is one
Speaker 1: eight hundred two seven three, eight two five five one
Speaker 1: eight hundred two seven three Talk