The World According to Ron 5.21.08: An Interview with Chris Nowinski

Posted by Ron Gamble on 05.21.2008

The World According to Ron returns for a special purpose!

Today would have been Chris Benoit's birthday. It would have been a day of celebration in two countries; in Canada, his home country, and in the US, his place of residence. Instead, we can only reflect on what is, what was, and what might have been.

I spoke with Chris Nowinski this morning about Benoit and concussions in general. You may remember Nowinski from his wrestling days on Raw. He was forced to retire in 2003 after his fourth concussion in a wrestling career that lasted less than two years. He is now the President of the Sports Legacy Institute, the group that was fundamental in study of the brains of Benoit and NFL players Mike Webster, Justin Strzelczyk, Terry Long, and Andre Waters, who all died following mysterious circumstances. We spoke on his cell phone on his way to a speaking engagement. There are a couple points where the reception made his answers impossible to understand, and I do apologize for those.

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Ron Gamble: We were talking about going from football to wrestling, and you spent time with Chris Benoit while training in the HWA. How did you find him at that time?

Chris Nowinski: I found him to be a great guy. He was a teacher to me. While he spent his time down there he was humble, just a very kind person.


RG: You said that he helped train you a little bit while you were both there.

CN: Right. We were there together with Ray Steele, and Ray and I would go in and do a little extra work. So I was there when the two of them were working – he just got back from his neck injury – and he let me get in the ring with him, even though it was only the first day he was back at full speed. Even though I was green as grass, he let me work with him with headlock takeovers and developing a usable forearm to the head, some moves that were, um, I can imagine they weren't easy to take on his new neck, but he was willing to risk it for me.


RG: You had four concussions during your wrestling days, you had two that you can remember while playing football at Harvard, and who knows how many before that. I know this is the wrong way to put this, but are there "typical" signs of someone who has had a concussion?

CN: Someone can tell if they've had one if they are confused, or have a headache, or have some visual changes – whether it's double vision or blurry vision, something like that – if they're nauseous, vomiting. The list of symptoms of a concussion is about forty things long. Your brain controls everything, so if something changes about your perception of the world, it could happen.


RG: Are there any outward signs where someone else looking at you could say, "I think you have a concussion right now?"

CN: Sure. It's not a perfect science, but some of the giveaways are if you're slow to answer questions, for football players it would be if you're forgetting plays, wandering around the huddle, if you're having trouble looking people in the eye, that sort of thing.


RG: Let's talk a little about the Sports Legacy Institute. How did your participation come about in the Institute?

CN: The concept came about after the group that we working together prior, working on our fourth case, which was Justin Strzelczyk. That was the deal where he had died a couple years before, and I remembered reading the newspaper reports about a pretty traumatic death. And I said, let's see if they kept his brain, because they usually do for a certain amount of time after an unexplained death. When we found it and found it was positive – we tracked it down to a coroner in upstate New York – we realized this disorder [chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE] was much more widespread than we knew, and it was also extremely important to study it more formally. So the basic transition of the group of us working on the side during off-hours to something that was well funded, and hopefully, the idea was university affiliated.


RG: As for the Institute, was it a case of the doctors coming to you, or did you go to them?

CN: I was already working with Dr. [Bennet] Omalu and Dr. [Robert] Cantu, who was my treating physician who turned into my mentor, on the book [Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis], and any work that I had done. The original people were almost all people that I had worked with. And when I pitched them the idea, they were all passionately behind it.


RG: Yesterday, I was listening to a radio station in Columbus, and they were talking to Dr. Robert Guthrie from the Ohio State University School of Medicine. He was talking about a study they had done that has shown young female athletes are getting concussions more and more often. One of his suggestions was to put helmets on kids playing soccer, or any contact sport. Is there anything in your research that would show if this is a good idea or not?

CN: I am currently on the side that that would be a bad idea. Anybody who has studied sports from a historical perspective understands that the primary reason concussions are such a problem with football and hockey is that there are helmets. And, athletes hit each other in the head in football, usually with their own head. That's the number one cause of concussions in football. And because we've taken pain out of the equation, and taken skull fractures out of the equation, which is all helmets are there for, there's no disincentive to deliver 100 G's of force to someone else's head. Unfortunately, those helmets are not good enough to absorb the force to keep it from going almost entirely to the brain. That's why we're not finding any NHL cases yet, because they only mandated helmets, I can't remember the year, but only a couple decades ago.


RG: What suggestions would you have for anyone trying to prevent themselves from getting a concussion?

CN: Well, prevention is a tricky game. There's no sure-fire way other than removing yourself from the sport or eliminating risky activities. There are some simple things. If you're playing a sport with a helmet, make sure it's a newer helmet, a fitting helmet. The things that we are promoting, we're starting a "Coaches Concussion Clinic," it involves for a contact sport, less contact in practice, and creating a culture of respect for the head. When I played football, it was considered a good idea to blindside somebody in the head; you know, that was a great hit. You do those kinds of things to your teammate. You know, competition is competition, but in practice, you may want to start laying off a little bit. It's also important to start enforcing the rules of the game…. [lost reception] What we're focused on is proper treatment of concussions. Because when you get down to the neuroscience, it's well understood that most concussions don't kill brain cells, they injure them. And further trauma and even further physical activity can actually kill those brain cells.


RG: I'd like to talk a little about Chris Benoit now. I know that in the results of the autopsy of his brain, the memorable line was that he had the brain of "an 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient." How was his brain different from that of a typical 40-year-old male?

CN: I'll tell you, the "85-year-old Alzheimer's patient" phrase was used over my objections, and some of the others in our group. It doesn't apply, and it created a false understanding of the disorder. His brain was abnormal in the sense that, you know, to a standard pathologist, a standard autopsy, it looks completely normal. Only when we performed a very specialized technique for antibodies actually on the tissue, and then look at it under a microscope at 600x, do you see that the neurons are dead, a lot of the axons are dead. And what they find is an abnormal protein called TAU protein, that is never supposed to exist in the brain of a 40-year-old. [garbled], who is an expert on the oldest of the old brains, 89-year-old people, and it's even rare in those brains. It is something that you find in Alzheimer's brains. But in Alzheimer's brains you find a whole lot of other things; you find plaque, you find it atrophies. In Alzheimer's, the damage starts usually in the middle of the brain and works out. With this disorder, it's very often mostly on the surface, probably because of the brain bashing against the skull. So basically, the thing that you find is a lot of cell death, a lot of brain structure death, due to this protein, and the protein usually comes about due to trauma.


RG: I know that a part of [Benoit's] autopsy also showed that he had ten times the normal level of testosterone in his bloodstream. Is there any chance that any of that damage might have been caused by excessive testosterone or steroid use?

CN: There is no medical evidence supporting that steroids could have caused the creation of the protein.


RG: My last question is about Chris' father, Michael Benoit. I know that you've talked a lot with him, trying to convince him to do this study, and I read on your website that he was happy when the results came out, he's now helping you to start the Chris Benoit Foundation [actually, the Benoit Family Fund for Brain Injury Research]. I don't know if you've had any contact with him in the last six months or so, how he has been?

CN: We're in touch every week. It's tough to say how he is. I don't know if the pain or whatever goes away. But, he's very supportive of our efforts; he wants this information to spread further to prevent similar tragedies.

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Every year, while writing for 411, I would write on the weekend before this date, reminding everyone to take a sign to the local arena where Chris was wrestling and wish him a happy birthday. I would also tell you, in the same way an eight-year-old hints to his parents that he wants a pony, that my birthday was the very next day, that we were born less than 24 hours apart, and that it would be nice if someone would do the same for me. I would always see lots of signs for Mr. Benoit, but none for me. Oh, well.

This year, however, it's different. On Thursday, I'll turn 41, but I have no wrestling compatriot doing the same on Wednesday. As I wrote last year, with all my health problems, I never thought I would outlive him. I never met him, but I always felt that he wrestled exactly the way I would have, if I had ever been in the ring.

In what was my farewell column in November 2007, I wrote," When I heard of the deaths [of Chris, Nancy, and Daniel], I was upset. The next day, when I heard of the alleged series of events, I went into a deep funk for almost two days." In September, thanks to the work of Chris Nowinski, Dr. Robert Cantu, Dr. Bennet Omalu, Dr. Julian Bailes, and others at the Sports Legacy Institute, we found out the truth. There was no "roid rage," and that these injuries to Chris' brain were caused by multiple concussions. In fact, Chris Nowinski has said in other interviews that Benoit told him he had "more concussions than I can remember."

One question I meant to ask Nowinski is what can be done in wrestling to reduce the incidence of concussions. The obvious answer is to eliminate it altogether, but there are some equally obvious steps to take for prevention. Number one is the reduction, if not outright elimination, of chair shots, cookie sheets, and other foreign objects to the head. Too many wrestlers today like to take them without putting their hands up for protection, to make their reaction look "more real." That makes sense. If you get hit in the head and get a concussion, you're going to stagger around like you have a concussion.

On the Sports Legacy Institute's website, they have a page dedicated to the Benoit Family Fund for Brain Injury Research. At the top of the page is a message from Michael Benoit, which is a much more meaningful message than anything I can write.



Once again, I want to thank Chris Nowinski for his time this morning and Tuesday, when we talked for about ten minutes before he needed to give a speech and I found out my recorder wasn't working.

Happy birthday, Chris.

Ron