Dangers of the game: Hits leave football player legally blind

OAK CREEK, Wis. — Hold an empty toilet paper roll to your eye and peer through it. Your view is confined to what’s at the end of a narrow tunnel smudged by shadows.

For almost eight years now, ever since he took a ding to the side of the head in a Division III college football game, that’s how Justin Greenwood has seen the world. His thick glasses with their prisms on the sides help, giving him peripheral vision — “They’re like rearview mirrors on your car.” But, at 29, he is legally blind.

He golfs and skis, but cannot drive a car. He travels on his own, but uses a cane to help him navigate the uneven terrain and obstacles in his way when he goes somewhere unfamiliar. He reads books and works puzzles, but struggles with his memory.

And his dreams of playing professional football or using that marketing degree he was working toward when he got hurt are over, replaced by a desire to protect other youngsters from a similar fate.

“What’s good about me is I can laugh about it. A lot of people can’t accept the life they have now,” said Greenwood, an eternal optimist with an infectious smile. “A big part of it is acceptance with this life. I have to accept my challenges and my difficulties and my inability to do the same things people around me are doing.

“It’s challenging, but it’s doable.”

It’s a situation that also is preventable.

Greenwood has become an ardent advocate of brain injury awareness since he got hurt, and is the spokesperson for the new “Play Smart Wisconsin” campaign. While he’d never tell anybody not to play football — or any other sport, for that matter — he hopes his experience will teach kids why it’s important to be honest about injuries as soon as they happen.

He also wants to make sure coaches are teaching proper technique and following guidelines that keep players with head injuries off the field until they’re cleared by a medical professional. There needs to be adequate medical staff at all games, too, so kids who do get hurt get immediate treatment.

“It’s about what you’re going to do after you’re done,” Greenwood said. “When you’re playing ball, it’s just a short time in your life. But a brain injury can affect you for the rest of your life.”

Fears about the catastrophic and long-term damage from concussions and other head trauma have dominated the sports world over the last few years, particularly in pro football. Dave Duerson, a Pro Bowl safety on the nasty defense that was the backbone of Chicago’s 1986 Super Bowl champions, is the latest former player to show signs of brain trauma resulting from blows to the head. Researchers announced earlier this month that Duerson had “moderately advanced” chronic traumatic encephalopathy when he committed suicide in February.

The NFL is cracking down on improper hits and putting new emphasis on prevention and care, and similar precautions are being implemented at the game’s lower levels.

Yet football remains a dangerous, and sometimes deadly, game.

There have been 115 deaths directly related to football at all levels since 1986, including five last year, according to the 2010 Annual Survey of Football Injury Research. Since 1986, when 12 players died, the average has been just over four deaths a year directly related to football. There were no deaths in 1990, the only time since 1931 that’s occurred.

Of the five deaths last year, all but one was caused by a brain injury.

Those numbers don’t even take into account the catastrophic injuries, defined as those that aren’t fatal but cause brain or spinal cord injuries or fractures. There were 24 such injuries last year, including four brain injuries that resulted in disabilities and seven cervical cord injuries.

“What’s sad is almost all of these things are preventable,” said Dr. Mark Lovell, a founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Sports Medicine Concussion Program and co-creator of the ImPACT concussion evaluation test.

“There have been a number of cases I know about where kids were clearly having symptoms and told their friends that they were having symptoms. But coaches didn’t know, and the kids lied to their doctors. If we do a better job of educating kids and their families, that won’t happen as much.”

Said Greenwood, “If I knew then what I knew now, I’d have been like, ‘Coach, I’m hurt. I’m not feeling too well. I need to get looked at.”’

The nephew of David Greenwood, a safety at Wisconsin who played three years in the NFL, Justin Greenwood was a standout athlete. He once pitched a no-hitter for his high school team and qualified for the state finals in track and field the same day. In the fall of 2003 he was a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, playing linebacker and special teams.

“I was the wedgebreaker on kickoffs. I’d come down and just, ‘POW!”’ Greenwood said.

He suffered a stinger during the second game of that season, but didn’t think much of it. Oh, he might have had some headaches in the days that followed. But he couldn’t even tell you when he got hit, and he never mentioned it to his mother or any of his coaches. He certainly didn’t think about sitting out the next game.

But the hit had made the vascular system in his brain “really, really, really weak and fragile.” So much so that when Greenwood took a minor hit on the side of his head during a kickoff return Sept. 27, 2003, it nearly killed him.

Blood vessels in his brain ruptured, shattering the fragile network of connections that keeps the human body working. Disoriented, Greenwood made his way to the sidelines and threw up. He wobbled and swayed as he talked to the trainer, then collapsed. Though there was a physician at the game, there was no ambulance and, thus, no way to immediately clear an airway and keep precious oxygen flowing to Greenwood’s brain.

“They almost didn’t operate on me,” he said. “My eyes responded to light the second time, that’s why they did surgery. Otherwise, they would have pronounced me dead on the doctor’s table right there.”

Greenwood was taken to a nearby hospital and then flown to a trauma center in St. Paul, Minn., where he was in a coma for about three weeks. When he came out of it, it was as if someone had wiped the slate of his life clean.

Tasks he’d mastered as a child, like walking and talking, had to be relearned.

The memories and experiences that make each individual unique were gone.

“I look at the picture of the old me and it’s like I’m looking at somebody else. I ask (my sister), ‘Am I kind of like the same person?”’ Greenwood said. “I hear people talking, ‘When I was 3 years old, I remember ...’ Even grade school, they can remember a long way back in their life. It’s sad for me because I don’t remember when I was a kid. Like my mom says, I had to relearn a lot of my life again.”

Greenwood was hospitalized for three months, including two weeks in intensive care. He spent four more months at an extended care facility before moving to the Courage Center, a rehab center in Minneapolis. There, in addition to rebuilding his physical strength, he relearned the basics of day-to-day adult life.

How to use the Internet. Open a bank account. Make phone calls. Do household chores. Pay bills.

And repeat almost every grade he’d gone through in school.

“When I started, I was at a third-grade level,” he said.

It was a daunting challenge, every bit as difficult as his physical recovery. But within five years of getting hurt, Greenwood was making appearances and giving speeches for the Brain Injury Association of Minnesota, golfing, going on road trips by himself.

He even got a job as a receptionist at an organization devoted to helping people with traumatic brain injuries.

“The hardest thing to relearn? To relearn how to live again,” Greenwood said. “How do I fit in? Accepting where I am. Comparing myself to other people and I can’t do those things but trying not to let it get me down. The hardest thing to learn is how to cope with it. How to deal.

“You can’t do the things you used to do,” he added. “You can’t go the places you used to go. You can’t remember things you used to remember, in the complexity you used to. So a lot of it is acceptance.”

Greenwood can trace his optimistic outlook to his mother, Glenda. She began a website journal of her son’s recovery the day he got hurt, faithfully posting cheery updates about his progress and prognosis. She did exhaustive research on which facilities and therapies would help him most. She spent hours at the hospital and rehab centers, there to witness every milestone and record it in the notebook she kept.

“I can’t change anything. What’s (being negative) going to do?” Glenda Greenwood said. “There’s so much good that has come from this, and we’ve basically just tried to find whatever was good or whatever the lessons that we were supposed to learn from all of it.”

Greenwood and his mother moved to suburban Milwaukee about a year ago to be closer to family and friends. He’s looking into buying a house, and spends most of his days reading, working out and doing puzzles and other exercises that help improve his memory. If the weather’s nice, he can be found on a golf course.

And he shares his story as often as he can, speaking to any athletes or school groups who will listen.

“I just want to help people with my story,” Greenwood said. “The only cure for a brain injury is prevention.”