Down in Great Falls, Montana, there’s an entire wall in the local Applebee’s Bar and Grill devoted to the not inconsiderable accomplishments of Dave Dickenson. They’ve framed and hung photographs of his football career at Charles M. Russell high school (two state championships) and the University of Montana in Missoula (one national AA championship) and there’s also an autographed Calgary Stampeder jersey. People in Montana call Dickenson The Legend of the Fall, which is no overstatement because Sports Illustrated magazine named him one of the state’s most outstanding athletes, ever.
Last summer I was taking a look at the Applebee wall and the manager came along and said Dickenson is also known as Super Dave but “y’know he’s up in Canada now.”
He is, has been for 13 years except for 2001 and 2002 when he tried the NFL and bounced from one team to another, four in all, and according to most of the sports writing fraternity never did get a decent look. So one of the best quarterbacks we’ve seen in Canada came back north to the CFL. He signed with the B.C. Lions in 2003 and had another good run until two years ago, when a Saskatchewan Roughrider named Fred Perry hit him so hard his brain went pinball on him and it took – by Dickenson’s own admission – several weeks to get unscrambled, get his senses back.
The B.C. front office and coaching staff figured that was it for Dickenson and released him. He got a contract with the Stampeders, but when he absorbed another comparatively innocuous hit early in the 2008 season the writing was on another wall. Dickenson took a long hard look, and decided it was time to leave football.
He’s 36 years old, and it’s over because Dickenson suffered four concussions while playing professional ball, and in his earlier high school and university days there were probably two or three or a half dozen more not detected, not diagnosed. But let’s stay with what we know for sure: four shots to Dickenson’s head, including the one from Perry which was not unlike getting nailed with a wrecking ball. The cumulative impact of those hits appears to have caused what’s typically been called post concussion syndrome (PCS) and that’s why Dickenson is now out of a game which by definition is unremittingly violent.
Medical researchers are increasingly concerned about PCS, which they have lately begun to describe as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In plain English, what they’re talking about is permanent brain damage. Scientists at Boston University say it’s been discovered, post-mortem, in a number of former pro football players who after retirement displayed symptoms reminiscent of Alzheimer’s disease and died young. All of them had sustained repeated concussions.
The Boston U research draws a disturbing conclusion. The signs of CTE – impairment in motor and thinking skills – “represent a distinct disease with a distinct cause, namely repetitive head trauma.” One or two concussions and the player will probably be relatively unharmed if given proper treatment and recovery time, but more mean trouble. “It may not require that many events to lead to a long-term problem.”
Whether Dave Dickenson ends up with a “long-term problem” remains to be seen, but he’s not unaware of the possibility. “I was getting paid and I knew the risks and I thought I was well taken care of, and y’know, I’ll just move on. Hopefully I’m not stuttering and stammering here in a few years and you guys can understand me.”
What that says to us is Dave Dickenson accepts what could be, might possibly be waiting for him down along the line. For now, though, he has a wife who regards his decision to retire as a blessed relief, and he has two small children who’ll doubtless reach the same conclusion when old enough to reflect on it.
It need not be said that the rest of us would wish Dickenson nothing but the best as he proceeds with the balance of his life. All the sports networks declared as much in their tributes to his achievements, but then in a grotesque lapse of judgement one of them moved directly from the piece on Dickenson, concussions, head trauma, a career shortened by injury to “And now, THE HITS OF THE WEEK!”
Given the time of year, they were all hockey hits, of course, one of which had an NHL player, I can’t remember who, doesn’t matter, smashed head first into the boards. The announcer’s voice was vibrating with excitement: “He doesn’t know what planet he’s on.”
Dave Dickenson knows what planet he’s on and he’s decided he wants to stay aboard for a good long while. But it’s worrisome, I think, that he didn’t arrive easily at the decision to give the game up. “Anybody doing this is gonna do it until they pretty much tell you to move on……and if it was just concussions, maybe I would’ve even kept trying.”
Dave. It wasn’t “just concussions.” It was four concussions, including one that made coleslaw out of your brain for a while, and the front office people did indeed tell you to move on. They declared you medically unfit to play any longer. More than anything, you need to be grateful to them, and you need to be grateful too for a head with the capacity, still, to understand and accept the undeniable truth.
After all, there’s no space on that Applebee’s wall for a premature epitaph, and I’m thinking the good folks in Great Falls would be loathe to create one.
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