[This post originally appeared on cleveland.com. It has been edited to highlight Jason’s involvement]
Story by Stephanie Kuzydym | @stephkuzy | skuzydym@cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio – Located 135 miles southeast of Cleveland’s First Energy Stadium is among the world’s most well-known concussion laboratories, disguised under the name Heinz Field.
In 1990, the Pittsburgh Steelers became the epicenter of football-related concussion issues after quarterback Bubby Brister got knocked out one Sunday. Coach Chuck Noll wanted to know why his team’s brain specialist, Joe Maroon, was telling him his quarterback wouldn’t be starting the following week.
“I told him the concussion guidelines say (Brister) needed to stay out a minimum of two weeks,” Maroon recalled.
Noll asked who wrote the guidelines. Maroon told the legendary Steelers coach that Maroon himself was on the committee.
“He looked at me and said, ‘if you want me to sit a player from a game, I want objective data, not guidelines drawn up by a committee with poor facts,'” Maroon said. “He was right.”
That’s the day the kid who grew up in Bridgeport, Ohio, began to change the way everyone, from the National Football League to youth leagues, perceived concussions.
Maroon took the challenge to Mark Lovell, whom he called a “brilliant neuropsychologist.” They came up with a series of questions on reaction time and the brain’s ability to process information.
They took the baseline test to Noll and Steelers owner Art Rooney and said they’d need to test the entire team in order to get the “objective data” Noll requested.
Nearly 25 years later, the Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing, known as ImPACT, is the standard of baseline concussion testing in the NFL, NHL, MLB, MLS, NASCAR, U.S. Olympic teams and more.
“We’ve baselined over 5 million kids and athletes in 12,000 high schools,” Maroon said.
And some of the biggest game changers – from doctors and scientists to lawyers and former football players – don’t stop with Maroon and Lovell. These 14 people and their work have helped make Cleveland and Pittsburgh hotbeds in concussion research.
Jason Luckasevic, law associate at Goldberg, Persky and White
Why he is important: Originator of the NFL concussion lawsuit. The core of his case: the NFL had plenty of notices that football can cause brain damage, but the league’s response was deny, deny, deny and then cover it up.
How he came on the scene: Luckasevic was motivated to sue the NFL to protect his friend Omalu, whom the league was trying to discredit. Looked for a loophole that would make not just the teams, but the league liable. Found it in Brown, et al, v. N.F.L, where former Browns offensive tackle Orlando Brown sued the league after a penalty flag hit his right eye during a 1999 game vs. Jacksonville, temporary blinding him. He sued the league on the terms that the referee was a league employee whose negligence superseded the protection of the collective bargaining agreement. Brown sued for $200 million and the NFL settled the case a year later for an estimated $15 to $25 million.
“Besides Bennet being a friend, the reality of it is I know what a forensic pathologist does,” Luckasevic said. “My brother’s a forensic pathologist who interned under Bennet so I know that all he was doing was looking at tissue under a microscope and saying, ‘There’s something there.’ You don’t make that up. It’s not something you’re just kidding around about when you say that.
“I also know sports. I know football, I know hockey. I’m familiar with what hockey was doing at the time in the early ’90s and now football was closing their eyes to the issues. Not only closing their eyes, but sending out false information to their players and to the public at large. They had pretty much three things against them and I was their worst nightmare for three reasons: No. 1, I understood forensic pathology; No. 2, I understood sports; and No. 3, I was young and naive.”
By 2010, after lawyers in his own firm had laughed at his ambition, Luckasevic teamed with Herman Russomanno, a personal injury attorney in Miami, and Tom Giradi, who was part of the Erin Brockovich lawsuit, to take on the NFL.
What he says now: “My life has changed dramatically over the last seven years. It’s been very difficult. It hasn’t been easy. … It’s very consuming. So consuming that I don’t even watch football anymore because my life is football so it doesn’t interest me.”