League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth Audiobook (Free)

“PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS USUALLY DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN FREQUENTLY.”

So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper about concussions in America’s most popular sport. That view, implausible actually to an informal fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who proved helpful in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a lethal brand-new scourge: A chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming variety of players about Group of Denial: The NFL, Concussions as well as the Battle for Truth — including a number of the all-time greats — to madness.

League of Denial reveals how the NFL, more than an interval of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny installation evidence of the connection between football and brain harm.

Comprehensively, as well as for the first time, award-winning ESPN investigative reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru tell the story of the public health crisis that emerged in the playing fields of our 21st hundred years pastime. Everyone understood that football is definitely violent and dangerous. But the actual players who built the NFL right into a $10 billion industry didn’t know – and what the league searched for to shield from them – is usually that no amount of padding could protect the mind from the pressure generated by modern football; that the very essence of the game could be exposing these players to mind damage.

Within a fast-paced narrative that goes between the NFL trenches, America’s study labs as well as the boardrooms where the NFL visited war against technology, Group of Denial examines the way the league used its power and resources to attack independent scientists and elevate its flawed research — a campaign with echoes of Big Tobacco’s battle to deny the bond between smoking and lung cancer. It chronicles the tragic fates of players like Hall of Popularity Pittsburgh Steelers middle Mike Webster, who was simply so disturbed at the time of his death he fantasized about shooting NFL executives; and previous Chargers great Junior Seau, whose diseased human brain became the target of an unseemly scientific fight between researchers as well as the NFL. Predicated on special interviews, previously undisclosed files and private email messages, this is actually the story of the actual NFL knew and when it knew it – queries in the centre of crisis that threatens soccer, from the highest levels completely down to Pop Warner.