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by Tom Pelissero
Green Bay Press Gazette
July 14, 2007

Merril Hoge has advised many NFL players in private, but he's never had a large group sit and listen to his story.

The one where his facemask gets busted in at Soldier Field.

The one where he stops breathing in the training room.

The one where he's rushed to the ER, spends two days in intensive care and never plays football again.

Hoge wishes more people would have listened in 1994, when his NFL playing days ended at age 29. But with the league convening a meeting about concussions last month and launching a study of retired players to gauge long-term effects, Hoge is optimistic he soon will get his chance to reach a broader audience.

"Would you rather give up four weeks, or four years or 10 years or a career?" Hoge said in a phone call this past week. That's the message he sends to any player who asks about concussions, the brain injuries usually caused by blows to the head that are common in this country's most violent mainstream sport.

"Once you weigh (the options) out, four weeks is not that big a deal. Does it mean that you're not going to be losing your mind, and it's going to be hard to sit out a month? Absolutely not. It's still going to kill them."

Hoge - who will be at Oneida Golf & Country Club on Monday for the Ray Nitschke NFL Players Golf Classic, which benefits Options for Independent Living and the Jackie Nitschke Center - never missed an NFL game until the final blow.

He suffered a couple of concussions during his days with the Pittsburgh Steelers, with whom he racked up most of his 5,272 career rushing and receiving yards and 34 touchdowns. But the beginning of the end didn't come until his third preseason game with the Chicago Bears, on Aug. 22, 1994.

Hoge says he never properly was re-evaluated after suffering what he calls a "major head trauma" in that game. So, when he stumbled to the locker room and lost vital signs after cut-blocking two Buffalo Bills in a game Oct. 2 of that year, "it was over for me."

A month after he retired, Hoge went blind for 15 seconds at a wine-tasting event because the part of his brain controlling vision had been traumatized. He still has trouble at times with bright lights, concentration and memory.

"It is, in a sense, more dangerous than paralysis," Hoge said. "(If)you had a fractured vertebrae, and I said, 'Listen, you take a play, you take another shot like that, there's a good chance you're paralyzed,' there's probably not a fool in America that's going to continue to risk that."

In 2000, a jury awarded Hoge $1.55 million in a lawsuit against a former Bears team physician, but the verdict was overturned.

The NFL founded a committee on concussions the year Hoge's career ended. However, the extent of the problem will be re-examined this year because doctors and other independent researchers are linking concussions to everything from depression to death.

Now 42 and an analyst for ESPN, Hoge has met with new commissioner Roger Goodell and expects to remain involved as the NFL continues its research. He's urging the league to "create a formula that keeps players from danger and puts the pressure on the people that are responsible, which are the gatekeepers, which are the medical people,
and create another avenue where they cannot be influenced or pressured by (management) or ownership or coaching.

"I think those things are materializing," he said.

The biggest issue may be getting through to players in the tough-guy culture of pro football who know sitting out with an injury can cost them their jobs.

Hearing Hoge's story is a start.