Nigerian-born Catholic has crashed the American wedding of faith and football by refusing to hold his peace. Bennet Omalu—who is played by Will Smith in the movie Concussion—believes that providence was at work in the series of serendipitous events that brought the bodies of former professional football players to his slab when he served as the Allegheny County medical examiner.
Mike Webster was a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who after his storied career lived an anguished life characterized by erratic and troubling behavior before his death in 2002 at age fifty. Omalu was initially shocked and puzzled when he found a peculiar tangle of tau proteins in Webster’s brain, a pattern of disease now referred to as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). After Omalu found abnormal protein patterns in the brains of other deceased players, he released research that had the potential to seriously undermine America’s most well-heeled national pastime, and which produced a firestorm of persistent opposition from the league’s medical consultants.
Read Full Article »