During his time as NFL Commissioner, Paul Tagliabue did all he could to dismiss head trauma. That’s why he should not be in the Hall of Fame
Linebacker Luke Kuechly’s surprise retirement on Tuesday was part of a larger trend of late, also espoused by players like Chris Borland and Andrew Luck, with the primary theme of increased awareness of the dangers of the game informing those players’ life choices.
Were it not for Paul Tagliabue, who served as NFL Commissioner from 1989 through 2006, more players would have been far better-informed, and would have been able to make their own life choices, free from league propaganda that served up disinformation for decades on the ultimate price of playing the game at the highest level.
Less than 24 hours after Kuechly’s retirement, which came in part because of Kuechly’s own concussion history, the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Centennial Slate Blue-Ribbon Panel chose Tagliabue for induction as part of its expanded Class of 2020, in celebration of the NFL’s 100th anniversary.
There could not possibly be a more conflicted message sent to the players of Tagliabue’s era, and to the players of today. The modern NFL is one that claims to care about the effects of head trauma and other injuries as regards the full lives of NFL players. During his tenure, Tagliabue could not have cared less. Instead, Tagliabue did all he could to move the needle in the direction of the old-school “rub some dirt on it, and get back out there” mentality. He was no less dangerous than a tobacco lobbyist.
This was during a 1994 summit at the New York City YMCA called “Major League Commissioners Tackle the Future of Major League Sports.” NBA Commissioner David Stern and NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman were also on the panel, which was moderated by the late Pulitzer Prize-Winning David Halberstam, When Halberstam turned the talk to the effects of head trauma, especially as it pertained to the retirements of Troy Aikman, Steve Young, Merrill Hoge, and Al Toon, Tagliabue was not pleased at all. He dismissed the increased furor as “one of those pack-journalism issues.” He also said then that the number of concussions “is relatively small; the problem is the journalist issue.”
In the same year, Tagliabue established the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee, ostensibly to study the effects of head trauma. To lead this Committee, Tagliabue appointed Elliott Pellman, a Guadalajara-educated rheumatologist with no expertise in head trauma. No results from this group were published until 2003. It soon became apparent why that was.
Pellman, who became one of the worst shills imaginable, and his colleagues, wrote in January 2005 that returning to play after a concussion “does not involve significant risk of a second injury either in the same game or during the season.” The group also stated repeatedly that there was “no evidence of worsening injury or chronic cumulative effects of multiple MTBIs in NFL players.”
It is not an exaggeration to state that without Pellman in charge of the Committee, and with a more qualified and more independent physician at the helm (Pellman also served as Tagliabue’s personal physician), NFL players would have known the full measure of their eventual fates years before they did. The NFL’s eventual settlement with more than 4,000 former players and their families, was the result of a series of lawsuits seeking to stamp the NFL with its own liability in this regard. One of the conditions of the settlement was a gag order on years of malfeasance; a huge boon for a league that would rather forget Pellman ever existed in a public relations sense.
In 2017, Tagliabue tried to stop the bleeding in an interview with the Talk of Fame Network in which he provided a perfunctory apology for his 1994 remarks.
“Obviously,” he said, “I do regret those remarks. Looking back, it was not sensible language to use to express my thoughts at the time. My language was intemperate, and it led to serious misunderstanding. I overreacted on issues which we were already working on. But that doesn’t excuse the overreaction and intemperate language.
“Bottom line, it sounded like I was shooting the messenger, which was the concussion issue. My intention at the time was to make a point which could have been made fairly simply: That there was a need for better data. There was a need for more reliable information about concussions and uniformity in terms of how they were being defined in terms of severity.”
Tagliabue also addressed Pellman’s appointment — a move recommended by then-New York Jets owner Leon Hess.
“Hess said that he was a hard worker, he was highly intelligent, he was a good organizer and he could work effectively with coaches and players,” Tagliabue explained, “and he was willing to stand up for the medical point of view and not be cowed. So I put Dr. Pellman in charge, knowing what his specialties were.”
“It was truly based on track record that these men had with their teams and what I thought they could help us accomplish with internal change,”
Perhaps the fact that it took a special committee to shoehorn Tagliabue into the Hall of Fame should be an indicator of the extent to which the former Commissioner has carried this black mark. During Tagliabue’s time in office, the NFL expanded from 28 to 32 teams and enjoyed a span of previously unimaginable prosperity that continues to this day.
There is no other reason to shut Paul Tagliabue out of Canton except for his callous and uninformed refusal to accept the effects of the game he ran and championed, but that reason is the only one required to keep him out forever. His Canton induction is an insult to all the players from his era, and the players of today, who would not be able to manage their futures as well as they do were he still in office.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”
