CLEVELAND — The Union Home Mortgage Cleveland Marathon is set for this weekend in Downtown Cleveland, bringing thousands of runners to Northeast Ohio and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities and causes. Among them involved in Saturday's 5K walk and run is the Concussion Legacy Foundation's Race to End CTE.
CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is the progressive and fatal brain disease associated with repeated traumatic brain injuries, including concussions. Leading the fundraising effort on Saturday will be former Cleveland Browns quarterback Bernie Kosar, whose life in the NFL came at a price.
"Forty surgeries, 80 broken bones, a hundred concussions," recalled Kosar. "15 seizures, the last two being in a coma for 72 and 96 hours."
The concussions, though, are the most troubling.
"I mean, I was diagnosed a little more than four years ago with five years left of cognitive brain function," he said.
For years, Kosar has given News 5 a glimpse into his journey to improve his health by following a holistic diet regimen, high-dose vitamins and other therapies that have improved his fitness and outlook. It also put him in contact with Dr. Chris Nowinski, head of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, one of the nation's leading voices on concussions and CTE, conducting research and providing guidance to those in Bernie's position.
"None of this is inevitable," Nowinski told News 5. "Even if you think you have the symptoms, you can get help, and you can live a much better life. I think Bernie Kosar is a great example of that, he has been down and out, and he right now is doing really well, and I'm really proud of him."
Nowinski will be walking with Bernie in Saturday's 5K, which raised $168,000 for the Concussion Legacy Foundation in 2021 and $278,000 last year.
"Our partnership with the Cleveland Marathon is so important to what we do; it is our biggest peer-to-peer fundraiser of the year," Nowinski said. "It's our best partnership. I'm so honored to be able to walk with Bernie. Our goal is to raise $400,000, and one of the big uses for that money is to fund our helpline; we actually have four people full time helping people who are fighting suspected CTE, helping people with concussion issues find the right doctors, find the community to understand what's happen to them and find a way to get through it."
Nowinski is a former football player from Harvard who went on to become a professional wrestler in the WWE, but when he saw his career cut short because of concussions, he went back to school to get his Ph.D. in Neuroscience. He's been one of the leading voices in the fight to reduce the risks caused by multiple hits to the head.
"I think because I lived it, it's hard to care more than me. A concussion is one of those things that, until you go through it, it feels like it's nothing. I remember thinking of my college teammates who had concussions that they were soft, and when I had it, I was like, wow, this is all invisible inside my head. So I started dedicating myself to trying to figure out how to get myself better after concussions ended my career, and I just kept at it," he said. "I still remain surprised at the resistance of the sports community to address this honestly."
Over the last 15 years, though, Nowinski has been forcing the conversation and shining a light on the problem through his research and work. Among his goals is to help parents make better decisions about the sports their children play and how they are played.
"CTE is entirely preventable. If we stop hitting kids in the head, we will have far less CTE in the world, and that's how we try to break it down to people; it's that simple. We created these sports for adults because they're entertaining, but we shouldn't be doing the same things to our children," Nowinski said. "Their brains are very fragile, very vulnerable, and you send them down a path that all of these good things you think you're building in them can be derailed because their brain could be rotting from all these hits to the head."
He continued, "We don't have to end football. I'm a former professional wrestler who let people hit me in the head with chairs and garbage cans; like if you're an adult and you want to make a living as an entertainer, you can do dangerous things, that's fine. But the idea that we think that children should also take those same risks to take to me doesn't make sense.
"So we say kids should play those sports different but in a different version like flag football until they're in high school, and then frankly, I think we have to look at high school and say, can we still make it safer because those kids still aren't old enough to understand the risks they're taking."
That's where he says the helpline and the work of the Concussion Legacy Foundation come in.
"On the positive side, as more people learn about CTE, as families go forward to tell the stories of their loved ones or heroes like Bernie Kosar share their stories, it helps people connect the dots and realize the struggle that they might be having could be due to all of the traumatic brain injuries or possible CTE that they have and it helps them get help," Nowinski said.
Kosar, for his part, remains focused on today, on helping himself to heal and on helping his former teammates and players improve the quality of the life they are living.
"You know, I thought my mission was to play football and to age out as I was a football player," Kosar said. "I almost think now that football was the reason why I'm here now to create and show people, not just football players, that there's a healthy way to deal with these issues and come out the other side."
Kosar said he believes, based on the number of hits he took in his life, that he has CTE, which can only be diagnosed after death. He views himself as "in the late 3rd quarter" of his life, though with a lot of time still on the clock.
"I'm not really focusing on what the end outcome is because I'm trying to delay the end outcome and try to be able to live and help people live with these types of issues so that what days you have remaining, one be able to enjoy them and two be able to bluntly remember them," Kosar said.
