Bobbie Goulding, one of nearly 50 former members of the Washington Football League — whose creation prompted the NFL to form its first independent team in 1963 — are preparing to file a class-action lawsuit alleging league officials failed to warn players about the risk of concussions.
The group’s attorney, Robert Anderson, said his clients have received five or six concussions each since 1991, when they started with the WFL. The league folded earlier this year.
“It is a legitimate concern that these players may be permanently injured,” said Anderson, a Washington attorney whose duties include oversight of the player-brain injury law firm at the American Medical Association. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has required pharmaceutical companies to make injury reports available to the public. There is the possibility that the NFI had those reports and they did not make them public. We’re not asking for an apology — we’re asking for a thorough examination of the sources of the information that they were relying on to make their decisions.”
Anderson, a neurosurgeon, is working with retired Washington fullback Bob Kanner. The two were doing research in the NFI’s “Parlor” at the Mitchell Sports & Stadium Technology Center at George Washington University, when they said they were struck by the concept of liability claims filed in lawsuits over the concussion risk posed by contact sports.
“It hit us,” Kanner said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, this is a big deal, and it’s been brewing for quite some time.’”
The duo said they wanted to join the list of Washington players who signed a petition several years ago to the NFL players union requesting that the NFL share research from a 2009 report authored by former ESPN journalist Robert Hirsch. The report catalogued the possible consequences of repeated hits to the head. The WFL had not yet been created when the report was released.
Kanner said the two still have the full file from the Hirsch report but don’t intend to release it as evidence.
“They have a right to get it,” Kanner said of the Hirsch findings. “They can show us where it led them. If the NFL was aware, as we say, that it’s a human body, we believe it’s more serious than a player eating a bad sausage, right? It took years to develop the relationship that the NCAA, for example, has with its athletes. The National Football League, other professional sports and the NCAA have a relationship with their athletes much, much shorter. It might have come through (the Hirsch report) if it was used effectively.”
Anderson said he is interviewing former WFL players for his class-action lawsuit, including Kanner, Goulding, veteran NFL and college punter Tom Feathers, who pleaded guilty to a felony count of aggravated assault and battery in a dispute with his live-in girlfriend, ex-Miss Tennessee USA Tiffany McLemore, in 1993, according to media reports. The altercation led to McLemore losing her title, his subsequent dismissal from the University of Tennessee and ultimately his reinstatement. The two met last month for coffee on Capitol Hill in the Schofer Building.
Feathers, who went on to become the punter at BYU, said he’s confident he won’t be implicated in a lawsuit.
“Well, guess what,” Feathers said. “I told you from the beginning of my playing career and throughout my career that I have not played with a helmet that fit me properly and that I’ve had to reduce my wear and tear on the helmet every year. I’ve worked so hard to ensure that if I ever got a concussion, that it wouldn’t be detrimental to my playing career.”
Feathers added, “When you went through four years of (football), your head is kind of pretty worn down, and they haven’t been able to deal with the helmets over the years. Things weren’t changed in the NFL until the last five years, until they came in and changed the helmets.”
Feathers is currently a boxing analyst for ESPN.
