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As a physician, I'm somewhat an advocate of patients. How come, before Mike Webster, no NFL player was told or knew that there was an intrinsic risk of brain damage from playing football?

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what's known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.

Literally thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the NFL by retired players, many of whom say that information on brain injury in football was withheld from them.

Concussions have brought the consciousness to the problem, but I think the problem is football-related injuries, period, and the lack of support from the league of those players who have suffered those injuries. The denial factor has been unbelievable. I'm here because I'm a fighter to try to bring attention to this fact.

All the NFL players I have examined pathologically, I have not seen one that did not have changes in their brain system with brain damage.

I would hope this experience would help me if that NFL opportunity were to arise. But I also know that it's a totally different league. There's a lot more to it.

In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting.

Yes, the concept that blunt-force trauma of the head causes brain damage is a generally accepted principle of medicine. That is why I was so appalled by the NFL doctors who were denying my work.

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.