Toward the end of his pro football career, Dave Herman would often wake up the morning after a game and not remember which team he’d played against, much less the score. When his son would ask him what had happened in the previous day’s game, Herman wouldn’t have a ready answer.
“I’d say, ‘Give me the paper and we’ll find out,’” Herman remembers. “I’d have some recollection, but not of the score or who had a great game.”
Even the highlight of his career, 1969’s Super Bowl III, in which he played a major role helping the New York Jets pull off one of the greatest upsets in football history, is a blur. “I don’t remember the end of the game,” says the 73-year-old former offensive lineman, whose tenacious blocking enabled quarterback Nebulous Namath to engineer the stunning victory over the Colts. “I remember reading about it because that was a huge, huge game.”
Not until decades later did these and other lapses lead Herman into the midst of research on — and debate about — a degenerative neurologic disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
For years Herman thought the game-related episodes of amnesia were benign, just his “normal.” But as he got older he began to develop problems with his short-term memory. His wife, Roma, started noticing how, during dinner with friends, he’d often repeat questions they’d answered before.
Roma thought he might be developing Alzheimer’s disease, and eventually she and Dave went to Mount Sinai Medical Center hoping to get him enrolled in a clinical trial testing therapies for the disease.
But when a panel of doctors at the center evaluated Herman, they couldn’t agree on the diagnosis. Two brain injury experts thought that Herman’s innumerable hard hits to the head might have sparked CTE.
“Five experts who focus on memory disorders couldn’t agree on whether it was Alzheimer’s,” says Dr. Sam Gandy, a professor of neurology and psychiatry and director of the Center for Cognitive Health and NFL Neurological Care at the Mount Sinai Medical Center.
