Last week, the BU group announced that their analysis of former Penn football player Owen Thomas' brain indicates that the 21-year-old, who committed suicide in April, had the beginning stages of that disease.
The finding came about because Nowinski called Thomas' mother the day before Owen's funeral. She agreed to donate his brain tissue.
"Owen could be anyone's kid," Nowinski said, talking this week in an office at BU's medical school. "If it doesn't rattle you, then you're not paying attention."
On the wall of the office, there was a painting clearly depicting The Catch, Dwight Clark's famous reception in the 1982 NFC championship game. Less clear is what is depicted in the background of the painting. The sky is not made of clouds but of bright and healthy neural tissue. Instead of a crowd looking on, the darker colors inside the stadium are deposits of "tau proteins," the kind which have been discovered postmortem in the brains of athletes who had suffered repeated head trauma. The painting was made by an assistant college football coach who suffered five concussions during his playing days.
You're not likely to see all that in the painting without taking a close look and then getting an explanation of the science behind it.
That's more or less the mission of Nowinski and his colleagues: to focus on more than the glory of the game. Nowinski, who turned 32 on Friday, isn't looking to ban contact sports. He only wants restrictions on the contact.
"One hundred percent, tomorrow, if you stop them from getting hit in the head over and over," Nowinski said, referring to stopping CTE.
Kicked in the head
Nowinski pulled up a file on his laptop. It showed an action-packed wrestling match. One wrestler was basically beating up the other.
The one getting beat up was Nowinski.
