Turns out that the head injury that is the bane of the NFL reaches back further than Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster — subject of the film “Concussion” — or running back Frank Gifford:
It goes all the way back to Henry VIII.
The king whose erratic behavior (he executed two wives, one more than O.J. Simpson allegedly managed) is the subject of such works as “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” and “Wolf Hall” may have suffered from traumatic brain injury similar to CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the same brain injury Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered in the cadaver of Webster, a Hall of Famer, in 2002.
The bizarre mood swings, temper tantrums and memory loss that are the stuff of Henry’s legend are consistent with chronic brain injury such as CTE, argues Yale neurologist Dr. Arash Salardini in a clinical paper the university began publicizing this week.
Henry’s love of jousting involved repeated head collisions much like those that take place in today’s NFL, Salardini notes. “The resemblance is uncanny,” he writes.
The Tudor king suffered two major head injuries in the 1520s, both due to his vigorous sporting life. In 1524, a lance actually penetrated the visor of his helmet during a jousting match and dazed him, and he was knocked out cold the following year when he tried to vault over a stream and instead fell into it head-first. In January 1536, he suffered an even more traumatic injury when a horse fell on him during a joust. Unconscious for fully two hours, he was believed dead, which inspired a key scene in “Wolf Hall.”
After that brush with death, Henry withdrew from jousting and began adding pounds to his formerly athletic frame. Historians say his behavior made a sharp turn. Before 1536, he was generally considered a reasonable and even wise man. After that, he was prone to self-contradiction, fits of rage and unexplained memory lapses, all of which have characterized NFL players later found to have CTE.
That very first month of 1536, his second wife, Anne Boleyn, miscarried a son and four months later he ordered her beheaded. A decade later he reassured wife No. 6, Catherine Parr, that he would not have her executed even as soldiers arrived to arrest her. Henry lashed out at the soldiers, apparently forgetting he had told them to arrest Catherine just the day before; she ended up outliving him.
Among the NFL stars posthumously diagnosed with CTE are Philadelphia Eagles safety Andre Waters, who Omalu said had brain decay typical of a 90-year-old man when he killed himself at 44 in 2006; Pittsburgh Steelers tackle Justin Strzelczyk, who, after a period of inexplicable behavior, ended his life at 36 by driving at 90 mph into oncoming traffic; and Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson and San Diego Chargers Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau, each of whom committed suicide with a gunshot to the chest, apparently intending to preserve their brains for medical study.
Salardini’s paper is to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience.