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Boston Globe
By John Powers, Globe Staff | July 15, 2007

WALTHAM -- The e-mails come from strangers who've seen him on TV talking about concussions and the terrible damage they can cause. The mother of an NFL player who is worried because her son is no longer the same guy. A soldier asking for the name of someone who can help him. Recently, an old Illinois high school teammate called.

"He said, 'Remember me? I used to block you in practice,' " Chris Nowinski says in a conference room where he works as a consultant for Trinity Partners, a biotech and pharmaceutical consulting firm. "Now, he's suicidal."

As the issue of sports concussions has been spotlighted amid evidence that brain trauma from their playing days may have been linked to the deaths of four former NFL players, the 28-year-old Nowinski has become a prominent voice on the subject, appearing on an HBO special, talking on CNN and National Public Radio, and being quoted in major newspapers.

Nowinski has solid credentials because he's also a victim, a former Harvard football player and World Wrestling Entertainment performer who suffered at least a half-dozen concussions that eventually ended his career.

"That gives him a lot of legitimacy because he's been there and done it," says Dr. Julian Bailes ," who chairs the Department of Neurosurgery at West Virginia University and is medical director at the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes at the University of North Carolina. "He's a sufferer, also."

Nowinski has had migraine headaches, memory loss, sleeping problems, and depression. As he grows older, he could develop the more serious dysfunctions that come with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. "I'm at high risk for everything we're looking at," observes Nowinski, who says that he's still "on a lot of drugs with high copays" four years after he quit wrestling.

Nowinski's research into concussions led to his writing "Head Games," a book about what he calls football's concussion crisis, which was published last fall. Since then, he has become a visible activist, having brain samples from deceased former NFL players Andre Waters and Justin Strzelczyk analyzed to show that concussions likely contributed to their deaths.

"It's one of the few big public health issues that is easily preventable that is left out there and nobody's really taking it up," says Nowinski, who is helping establish the Sports Legacy Institute to do formal research on sports-related brain trauma. "I know all the stories. I just can't sit back and not do it."

Repeated concussions can lead to irreversible neurological damage and dementia. Yet until recently, players who'd been "dinged" or "had their bell rung" were encouraged to shrug it off and get back into the game.

"That culture works for body injuries, where it makes sense to play through bruises, because it makes you tougher," says Nowinski, who finished out a game with a broken hand in high school. "But no one ever separated that for brain injuries. I believe we're smart enough to understand the difference -- if we're told it."

Personal experience

Nowinski says he didn't understand the difference the first few times he absorbed jarring head shots. The first came during a Harvard practice when he was rushing the passer and was leveled by a helmet under his chin. "I remember feeling fuzzy that night," he says. "I kept calling people by the wrong names in the dining hall."

The second time was a helmet-to-helmet smash from a linebacker as Nowinski was returning a short kickoff during a preseason scrimmage. "When I opened my eyes, it was the first time the sky turned orange on me," he remembers. "I took a knee, I went to the sideline, and the next time my number was called, I was ready to go. I didn't know it was worth talking about."

Nowinski ended up playing for the league-champion varsity in 1997 and made second-team All-Ivy as a defensive lineman. Then, as a lark, he tried out for "Tough Enough," WWE's reality show on MTV.

"One of the trainers wanted to send me a welcome-to-the-business message," says Nowinski. "He threw me into the ropes and gave me a clothesline. I remember feeling very strange and off balance. We had a blue ceiling and it went orange on me."

But Nowinski kept wrestling and quickly made a name for himself as "Chris Harvard" (until his alma mater objected), the supercilious H-Man everyone loved to hate. His fellow members of the Class of 2000 who'd gone to New York's investment banks and trading pits were jealous, he'd joked. They were working 100-hour weeks and stressing
out while he was cavorting with Tommy Dreamer, Goldust, and his WWE playmates and making big money.

"I know this is something I could do for 10 or 20 years," Nowinski said in November 2002, just before he performed at the FleetCenter. "I wake up in the morning looking forward to my job -- that's never happened before. I don't see where this will ever get boring."

Two months later, his wrestling career was over. Nowinski just didn't realize it. During the Royal Rumble in Hartford in January, he took a kick to the chin from Bubba Dudley that knocked him halfway into December.

"When I hit the mat I had a massive headache, to the point where I forgot who was supposed to win the match," Nowinski recalls. "I was fuzzy for three weeks, but I still wrestled because I didn't know any better. I just kept trying to be a tough guy."

Soon came the headaches. Memory problems that became progressively worse. Sleepwalking. Depression set in. Yet Nowinski wrestled nearly two dozen times during the next five months, taking on Maven and Hurricane and the rest of the cast until it became obvious he was having severe problems.

"Dude, you're [messed] up," the tag-team manager told Nowinski en route to an Indiana show. "You shouldn't be wrestling anymore." That night in his hotel room, after a violent sleepwalking episode, Nowinski awakened to find himself face down on the floor amid broken glass, overturned furniture, and a terrified girlfriend.

Lasting effects

Wrestling was finished for him, but his post-concussion symptoms continued and worsened. That fall, Nowinski began doing medical research into causes and effects. "To see what was wrong with myself," he says. "Because I wasn't getting any good answers from doctors as to why I wasn't bouncing back."

Every concussion made the next one worse, Nowinski learned, and opened the door to lifelong neurological problems. And from what he gathered by talking to football buddies at Saturday tailgates and from interviewing former pros, concussions had become a crisis in the sport. "Everyone's getting them," he concluded, "and getting a lot of them."

Nowinski had agents shop around his book idea, "but the publishers thought it was too small a market," he says. Last October, Drummond published "Head Games," which has received critical applause but underwhelming sales. "People do not want the responsibility of knowing the information," Nowinski says.

But after Waters committed suicide last year, the subject suddenly became timely. Nowinski asked the player's family for a sample of his brain tissue, which Dr. Bennet Omalu , a neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh, analyzed.

Omalu, who'd done similar examinations on the brains of former Steelers Mike Webster and Terry Long, determined that Waters's tissue resembled that of an 85-year-old man and showed early indications of Alzheimer's disease.

Nowinski quickly found himself a go-to guy for TV and radio bookers. He'd just authored a book on the subject, he was a familiar name from his WWE days, he was a Harvard grad, and he was well-spoken and camera-friendly. "No question, having been an entertainer helps," Nowinski says.

>From the media coverage he's seen, the NFL's belated interest in concussions and recent congressional hearings on the problems of retired players, he senses that the message finally is getting through.

After former wrestler Chris Benoit killed himself and his family last month, some observers pondered whether he might have suffered brain damage during his career. "People were saying, I wonder if . . . ," says Nowinski, who knew Benoit from their WWE days. "They're open to the idea. In less than six months, it's part of the lexicon."

While Nowinski says it's "rewarding to know that so much has changed so quickly and that people are open to change," he acknowledges that institutional progress on the athletic side has been coming slowly.

"The awareness is there," Nowinski says, "but changing the culture is another undertaking."

Though the NFL held a concussion summit in Chicago last month and will establish mandatory neuropsychological testing for players, Nowinski questions whether the league will take the logical next step -- diagnosing concussions when they occur and keeping players off the field while they recover. "Concussions certainly aren't going away," he says.

Football is more violent than ever, Nowinski says, with bigger and faster people slamming into each other, and that's not likely to change. "The game is based on hitting other people as hard as you can," he says.

But the damage from multiple concussions can't be mended in the same way a blown-out knee can. "People thought, they retired, so they're fixed," Nowinski says. "They retired because they're ruined."

If medical evidence and headlines about dead former players aren't enough to change things, one big lawsuit from a player could be the catalyst. "The liability issue is a big hammer that will probably be used somewhere by somebody," Nowinski says.

It would be unfortunate, he says, if that's what it takes to make football less of a head game and stop the parade of players with neurological problems. "How many bodies do we have to find," Chris Nowinski asks, "before people take it seriously?"