By Sarah Sommer and Elizabeth Murray
Don Macek (62) was a tough and valued center for San Diego. (Photo: Fanbase.com)
Thinking about the future is painful for Don Macek, a former San Diego Chargers center. The pain is not due to headaches, though he has suffered plenty of those. It’s not because of memory loss, though he experiences that sometimes. In Macek’s case, the pain exists because of the unknown — the possibility that in the future, the brain trauma that he sustained as a football player will lead to damage like dementia or even chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the brain disease found in some former NFL players.
“I was playing football for my whole career knowing that injuries were possible, but never at all even imagining that we could be suffering brain trauma,” Macek said in a telephone interview. “That was never something that even was an inkling for me. Nobody ever mentioned it, I never thought of it, and so we’re getting hit in the head constantly and yet we never had any awareness of what we may be doing to our brains.”
Now, Macek is aware, and he is concerned. He is one of about 4,000 former NFL players in a class action lawsuit in federal court in Philadelphia charging that the league failed to warn them of the risks associated with head trauma. Macek played for the Chargers from 1976 to 1989 and was inducted into the Chargers Hall of Fame in 2004.
“Macek suffered repeated and chronic head impacts during his career in the NFL and is at an increased risk of latent brain disease,” said his complaint filed Jan. 9, 2012. “As a result, [he] has experienced cognitive difficulties including, but not limited to headaches, loss of memory, sleep problems, irritability, neck and cervical spine arthritis and associated numbness/tingling.”
Macek, 58, does not like to talk about the chance that his brain’s condition will worsen. In April 2013, he said he was experiencing some memory loss. He sometimes forgets the names of people he knows, or he will walk into a room and forget what he went there to do. He is not sure if his difficulties are due to age or to head trauma.
“It’s always a concern for all of us, just wondering hey, is this just age coming on and it’s normal, or is this the onset of something that could possibly be a lot worse?” Macek said. “That’s the unknown that we live with every day.”
Ed White, a former Chargers teammate who usually sees Macek once a month, has not noticed changes in Macek’s personality. He described Macek as talented but humble. “The great football players have the same sort of kindred spirits, and they’re quiet, smart, unassuming type of guys, live less off their egos and just more on what’s important in life,” White said in a telephone interview. “Donnie’s one of those kind of guys, very quiet and unassuming and a great, great football player.”
Macek (62) was inducted into the Chargers’ Hall of Fame. (Photo: Myspace.com)
Rubin Carter, who played noseguard for the Denver Broncos and played against Macek twice a year for at least a decade, said in a phone interview his longtime opponent “was kind of a mild-mannered guy. He wasn’t real vocal. I thought he really just went about his business and tried to be the very best he could be. He was an underrated player. He was strong, aggressive, smart. Even though we played against each other twice a year for so long, you still had to prepare because he could change like a chameleon.
“One of the things about Don was that he had excellent quickness. I had to constantly be able to adjust and move my feet to get around him. I never got a cheap shot from him. He never did anything like that.
“One particular game where he got the best of me, he blocked me pretty well and I didn’t make a lot of tackles. I remember my defensive line coach coming up to me the next day and being like, ‘Wow, I didn’t think Don Macek was that good.’”
Carter, who is now the defensive line coach at Purdue, and Macek, were the subjects of a 1985 Sports Illustrated story that detailed their longtime rivalry that was a model of how two professionals approached their positions and the game. “I have not seen him since we retired,” Carter said.
Macek began playing organized football as a seventh-grader on a Pop Warner team. He was too big to play football in eighth grade, he said. Macek was a four-year varsity starter at Manchester (N.H.) Central High School before playing for Boston College, where he started from his sophomore year through his senior year.
Injuries — to the head and to other parts of the body — did not concern Macek in high school. “I was the biggest and strongest and fastest guy in the state, so I never even thought about injury very much,” he said. “I think my last game I hurt my back, and that was about it.”
In college, Macek said, one of the team’s usual drills involved repeated head-to-head collisions. One player would stand, and another player would run into him, trying to knock him out of place. Then, the players would switch roles. Each player was the runner three times, for a total of six hits. “You’d be kind of woozy and [see] stars after, but at that point, I never thought it was a concussion,” Macek said. “And it never was bad enough that we weren’t able to continue practicing.”
When Macek was in college, “Concussions were something that was not considered even a real injury, I don’t think,” he said. “You got dinged, and you had to deal with it, and you were supposed to kind of shake it off and get back to practice.”
When Macek played for the Chargers the attitude was similar. “They weren’t addressed at all,” he said. “I just know people that would have concussions, and they’d be woozy for a couple of days and then by Wednesday I think the expectation is that you should be back at practice.”
Macek was diagnosed with a concussion once during his career with the Chargers, he said. He did not remember in which season he sustained it, but the injury left him with “terrible, terrible headaches” for several weeks. He missed one game due to the headaches. But Macek also suffered other head injuries throughout his years as a professional football player.
“I can’t tell you how many times that I was either kicked in the head, kneed in the head, just got hit, I mean, head-to-head collisions so hard that your whole brain goes fuzzy for a period of time,” he said. “It’s called getting your bell rung, basically. But I played for 14 years, and that happened dozens and dozens of times over my career.”
Macek suffered all sorts of injuries that still affect his life. He had back surgery about three years ago, he said. He had his right hip replaced on May 6 and will have his left hip replaced in about a year. Doctors told him to have his left shoulder replaced soon after he retired from professional football, but he has not done that, nor does he plan to do so.
Macek lives in Escondido, Calif. with his wife of 36 years, Jan. He owns four car washes in the San Diego area and works three to four days a week. Jan Macek joined the lawsuit on Apr. 11, 2012. “As a result of [Don] Macek’s impairments, his wife has been deprived of marital services including, but not limited to, loss of companionship, affection, and support,” said the amended complaint filed that day. She declined to be interviewed for this story, according to her husband.
Don Macek still enjoys watching NFL football, but he also wants to hold the league accountable. “The NFL just basically wanted to just brush this under the rug,” he said. “We all have suffered brain trauma to some degree, and unfortunately some people are really, really bad and completely, at an early age, debilitated.”