Most football fans have already seen the footage of what filmmaker Sean Pamphilon calls “a night in this film.”
On August 23rd, they’ll be able to see the other three years that went into the making of The United States of Football, the documentary Pamphilon was working on when he captured the infamous clip of New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams instructing his team to “kill the head” in January 2012.
While the Williams clip and resulting fallout took on a life of its own, it’s just one small element in a tapestry of personal stories that Pamphilon elicits in a project that originally stemmed from his own desire to research the potential consequences of letting his own 12-year-old son play football.
What it became was something much bigger.
“I had interviewed [former St. Louis and New Orleans tackle] Kyle Turley in 2004 for Run Ricky Run and I thought he was incredibly awesome,” Pamphilon told For The Win. “Afterwards we had this expansive conversation about the NFL and its disability policy. I was fascinated by how these guys were sort of discarded but it didn’t hit home until I heard about Kyle’s unbelievable seizure where he thought he was going to die.”
Armed with the knowledge of what Turley and numerous of his former peers were facing, Pamphilon’s quest for the answer to a simple personal question suddenly turned into a larger mission to find out the toll that repetitive head trauma was having on players from the NFL to Pee Wee youth leagues.
Turley, 37, who had two diagnosed concussions and numerous ones that he says were undiagnosed during his ten-year career, has experienced troubling physical and mental symptoms since his retirement from the NFL in 2007.
“It’s difficult to get any average Joe to care about the NFL player because it’s so fantasized,” Turley said. “This dream life that most guys would give their right arm to be in your position. Everybody thinks they would take on these wounds and battle scars and wear them with the pride we wear them with. That’s the thing. I wear them with great pride. What we didn’t know was going on was the damage we were doing to our brains and that was going to be the biggest injury to battle in your post football career.”
One of the most compelling elements of the film includes interviews with the widow and children of late Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Justin Strzelczyk, who died at age 36 in 2004 after driving his car at 100 miles an hour down the wrong side of the New York State Thruway. An autopsy later revealed that Strzelczyk had suffered from brain damage. Despite this knowledge, Strzelczyk’s son still decided to play high school football.
“Everybody has their conflicts in this,” Pamphilon said. “I didn’t want to see any of this. I was a huge hardcore football fan sitting on my couch every Sunday. I didn’t want to know this stuff. In the terms of the guy who’s telling the story, I know some people are going to be critical and be like ‘What’s he talking about football for?’ I’ve been talking about football for a long time. Just like any other fan. Just like any other dad. I didn’t set out to make a film to hurt football.”
Neither did Turley.
“I don’t want to change the game of football,” Turley said. “I don’t think any player does. It’s violent in its nature and we love it because of that. We want to be treated professionally when that happens and fairly when it happens so we don’t continue to reinjure the brain.”
NFL senior vice president of communications Greg Aiello told For The Win via email Wednesday that none of the league’s executives have screened the film yet, including commissioner Roger Goodell. Pamphilon is hoping to get that opportunity at some point this month, even though the league refused to license official footage for the film, an obstacle the filmmaker worked around with the help of a lawyer specializing in fair use issues.
The NFL announced Thursday that its Heads Up youth football program is teaming up with Pop Warner Football in an attempt to better teach youth players and coaches better tackling techniques and how to reduce head injuries. Goodell detailed the reasons behind the partnership in a USA TODAY op-ed. The first meeting of the Heads Up Football Advisory Committee, which features ex-players and coaches including Bill Cowher, Barry Sanders, Deion Sanders and Merrill Hoge as well as a number of youth football coaches, parents and medical professionals, took place in May. The league has also mandated that an independent neurologist be on the sidelines of all games this season.
“They’re putting all these things together to make it look like they’ve done something moving forward,” Turley said. “What they’re going to use that for you can speculate and say they’re going to do a lot of good with it. They’ve done a lot of things in the past where they’ve put things together and haven’t seen fit to put those things into motion at all.”
“I don’t take anything the NFL says at face value. They really are going to have to prove themselves that they are trying to combat this.”
