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MELBOURNE, Australia — Australian rules football is one the world’s most violent sports. Thirty-six players careen across a massive field, where they are exposed to blindside hits and errant elbows, bruising shoulders and airborne knees. Their protection is a mouthpiece and sometimes a padded cap. Collisions can be cringe-inducing. Concussions are common.
So when retired players in their 30s and 40s started complaining about memory loss, struggles with paying attention and anger management, Alan Pearce tried to help. A neurophysiologist, he began to measure the former players’ brain waves to determine if their brains were functioning properly.
The players “were saying, ‘I just thought I was getting old, but I’m only 47,’” Pearce said.
The Australian Football League took note. In 2015, it gave Pearce 30,000 Australian dollars (about $20,000) to help cover the cost of more tests. But after Pearce spoke on a television program about the cognitive struggles of former players, Paul McCrory, a neurologist who was once closely aligned with the league, told him he had crossed a line. Soon after, Pearce lost his lab space, hindering his research.
A decade after retired American football players struggling with neurological problems forced the N.F.L. to confront its traumatic brain injury crisis, a narrative that will be very familiar to sports fans in the United States is playing out on the other side of the world.
Retired players from the A.F.L., which will hold its Grand Final on Saturday, are coming forward with horrific tales of cognitive deterioration in what should still be the prime of their lives. At the same time, the league in which they endured so much damage is attempting to avoid culpability by playing down any link between head hits and brain trauma even as it tries to make the game safer by changing the rules of the sport and adding concussion protocols.
More than 100 retired A.F.L. players are accusing the league of failing to protect them from the known dangers of repeated collisions and of resisting calls to pay for their health care costs.
“We have retired players now in their 50s and 60s with structural damage to their brains — exactly what has happened in the States — but we have a position of continual denial from the A.F.L.” said Peter Jess, a player agent and advocate for the players. “The A.F.L. is throwing everything at this.”
The A.F.L. declined to make its chief medical director, Peter Harcourt, or another executive available to discuss the league’s strategy for dealing with its retired players.
In a statement, the league said it was “on the public record in acknowledging that neurodegenerative disease is associated with head trauma.”
Also in the statement, Andrew Dillon, the league’s general counsel and general manager for game development, said, “The A.F.L. is committed to world-leading management of head trauma in sport.”
“At every stage,” he added, “our decisions have been guided by research, and we have had a conservative approach, putting players’ health first.”
With players contemplating litigation, Jess met informally with the A.F.L. in recent weeks, but talks stalled. Several former players feel the league is more focused on helping active players rather than retirees.
The debate over the health of retired A.F.L. players has grown louder in recent years as a growing list of younger players, citing repeated “head knocks,” have retired after just a few years in the league. Retired players, who for years were loath to criticize the league that made them famous, have also begun to speak out about their health.
“They’ve got their heads in the sand,” John Barnes, a 16-year veteran of the A.F.L. and its predecessor, the Victorian Football League, said of the A.F.L. leadership. “Until one of their sons gets knocked out and can’t remember anything, they won’t change.”
During the past decade, the A.F.L. has increased penalties for dangerous tackles and going after players on the ground. It also began discouraging players from using their heads as weapons. To some, this was the league acknowledging the game was too dangerous.
“If it wasn’t the case that head knocks were serious, then why did they change all the rules to make the game safer?” Barnes said.
A Brutal Game and Its Consequences As a ruckman and a forward, Barnes’s job was to play in the middle of the field and jump for loose balls as bodies flew at him from every direction. Flying elbows left him bruised and battered after every game.
“You’d come off the field with a broken nose, two cuts above your eyes, your jaw would be sideways but wouldn’t be broken, and you’d have five eggs on the back of your head,” Barnes said. “If you’re scared, you can’t play footy. That’s just how it was. Dog eat dog mentality.”
The hits to the head took their toll, he said, because players felt they had to shrug off concussions to stay in the lineup. Barnes, now 50, began having seizures when he was 42. They come without warning. He will drift in and out of consciousness for about five minutes and regain his memory in 20 minutes or so. Doctors have said his epilepsy was caused by repeated hits to the head.
He must wait six months without a seizure before he can drive again, so his wife, Rowena, takes him to his job as a garbage collector in the morning and picks him up in the afternoon. She watches him shower in case he falls and hits his head. Barnes’s memory has slipped, too. He will leave the gas on after he stops cooking. He puts cereal in the refrigerator and milk in the cupboard. His medication makes him agitated.
“Life will never ever be the same for us, and we know in our hearts it has to do with the concussions he suffered playing footy,” Rowena Barnes said.
While retired players like John Barnes stew, the A.F.L. has taken steps to make the game safer. It has strengthened penalties for hits to the head. Cameras are used to spot potential concussions.
Identifying concussions is complicated, though. In Australian rules football, play is continuous for 20-minute segments or longer, unlike in American football, which has stoppages after every down.