As soon as Westbrook was awakened on the field by head trainer Rick Burkholder, nearly the only question asked aloud about the Eagles' running back concerned when he would be able to again play football.
That is normal in his business. Players "get dinged" or "get their bell rung," and it is considered part of the job. Westbrook suffered what is commonly called a concussion, in this instance a blow severe enough to put him to sleep. It might be normal for pro football, but it is decidedly not normal.
"When your lights go out after taking a hit, something really bad happened in your head," said Douglas H. Smith, the director of the Penn Center for Brain Injury and Repair. "It has to be something bad to make you go off-line like that."
Smith, a doctor and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, is a leading researcher in the correlation between traumatic brain injuries, which include concussions, and their long-term effects on the victims.
"What happens in some cases looks like Alzheimer's disease in people who have had repeated concussions," Smith said. "This is what our group studies, and it appears that when you damage the nerve fibers in the brain, the ongoing changes last for years and can ultimately manifest themselves that way."
The House Judiciary Committee brought representatives of the NFL into hearings last month to ask about this kind of thing and to inquire what the league intended to do about it. There were horror stories of the cumulative brain injuries that have plagued former players, of once vital men who couldn't hold jobs, who drifted into homelessness, who, as in the case of former Eagles safety Andre Waters, took their own lives.
