November 24, 2024
When the Chiefs selected Michigan State defensive lineman Ed Lothamer 26th overall in the 1964 AFL Draft, they weren’t to be deterred when Baltimore also chose him in the rival NFL’s fifth round.
Even though Lothamer anticipated playing in the well-established league instead of for the upstart AFL, ever-resolute Chiefs (and AFL) founder Lamar Hunt had his own notion.
So he went to East Lansing, Michigan and knocked on Lothamer’s dorm room door, as Lothamer would tell the story, clad in a torn coat and looking like a graduate student of meager means.
Apparently thinking this was a joke, Lothamer slammed the door.
But Hunt kept knocking, and Lothamer finally opened the door again and became convinced Hunt really was who he said he was. Then Hunt offered Lothamer a $14,000 signing bonus and a pair of cowboy boots to come to Kansas City.
“‘How could I turn Lamar Hunt away?’” Lothamer’s wife of 51 years, Elisabeth, recalled him saying.
Lothamer never got the boots. But he got the $14,000 and all the glamour, glory and camaraderie of a momentous eight seasons in Chiefs history.
At 6-foot-5, 270 pounds, Lothamer was an overshadowed stalwart on a defense renowned for its six future Pro Football Hall of Famers. Despite endless injuries, he played in 88 games and started 35 as the Chiefs appeared in two of the first four Super Bowls.
“World champions,” he told The Star in the locker room in New Orleans in 1970, after the Chiefs beat the Vikings in Super Bowl IV. “Just roll that around on your tongue a while and see how it sounds.”
It soon sounded like a good note to go out on.
Not yet 30, the affable, thoughtful and industrious Lothamer understood life was about more than football. In an era when most NFL players needed outside jobs to support themselves and their families, he already was working in concrete sales and owned two nightclubs: The End Zone and Ed Lothamer’s Instant Replay.
So he decided to retire just before 1970 training camp, telling reporters, “I would rather go out proud than just fade away.”
He could stay proud in so many ways: earning a lifetime achievement award from the American Concrete Pumping Association for his role as a principal in Concrete Placement Inc., which the citation noted he grew through his “business sense, hard work and engaging personality”; as a dedicated Chiefs Ambassador; as an adoring husband to Elisabeth and “hero who could do no wrong” to his daughter, Ryan Lothamer-Welch.
(Lothamer also had three children from a previous marriage.)
But beneath and behind it all, alas, the insidious die had been cast for Lothamer to be fading inside all along.
No matter how he bore up or how often he joked about “getting hit in the head too many times.”
“It would be like living with someone with cancer,” Elisabeth said, “only cancer of the brain.”
Lothamer by all indications now was suffering for decades from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that can only be diagnosed with certainty by autopsy after death.
When he died in 2022, his family honored his wish with the excruciating but crucial decision to donate his brain to the UNITE Brain Bank — a partnership of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, Boston University and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
CTE was present not only in the frontal cortex of the brain, BU neuropathologist Thor Stein said in a phone interview, but also was evident in other lobes.
“So he really had the most severe form, stage four out of four of CTE, involving, really, many, many structures in his brain,” said Stein, noting that Lothamer also suffered from other issues.
Such pathologies, he added, often are developing “many decades before clinical symptoms are present. … We see CTE developing in the brains of people who are in their 20s. It doesn’t happen for everybody, but it can.”
When Stein called to reveal the diagnosis, family members held hands and cried.
Both in anguish over what had befallen what was once his “wonderfully incredible brain,” as Ryan put it, and with relief they could put a name to what he’d gone through — and have his death certificate amended to account for CTE.
How dark it would have been otherwise, Ryan said.
“That was a closure I didn’t think we’d ever get,” said Elisabeth, who is hopeful that more former NFL players will donate their brains to help advance the science.
But they’re still stranded waiting for another dimension of closure: through the labyrinth of Catch 22s baked into the NFL Concussion Settlement that was written to minimize, even neutralize, compensation for CTE.
Among the caveats in the 161-page settlement filed in 2015 is Article VI, Section 6.3 (f):
“A Qualifying Diagnosis of Death with CTE shall be made only for Retired NFL Football Players who died prior to the Final Approval Date, through a post-mortem diagnosis made by a board-certified neuropathologist prior to the Final Approval Date, provided that a Retired NFL Football Player who died between July 7, 2014 and the Final Approval Date shall have until 270 days from his date of death to obtain such a post-mortem diagnosis.”
In other words, there was a virtually instant expiration date on the very disease that was the greatest impetus for the lawsuit.
Despite Lothamer being a plaintiff in the settlement and being formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016, his case has been among many that the NFL has managed to avoid a payout for or even acknowledged.
(As of last week, according to the NFL Concussion Settlement web site, 20,580 former players were registered in the settlement class, 4,122 claims packages had been received and payable monetary awards had been issued to 1,827.)
To the Lothamers, that’s part of a willful strategy even as they hold out hope of working through an attorney to receive compensation and what might perhaps be called the dignity of NFL validation.
Instead, they’ve felt discouraged even by the lawyers they’ve gone though — including one office that asked for his death certificate but indicated it was less to help present a case than to close his file — and feel left in limbo by the process and shunned by the NFL.
An NFL spokesman did not respond to an emailed interview request last week. But the family’s experience is consistent with — and part of — an exhaustive and troubling investigation published earlier this year by The Washington Post.
A sub-headline of the piece, which was based on interviews with more than 100 people involved with the settlement and more than 15,000 pages of associated documents, refers to “the broken promises of NFL’s ‘landmark’ settlement.”
The gist: “Hundreds of former players who were diagnosed with dementia have been denied help because of strict guidelines and aggressive reviews in a system plagued by delays.”
According to the Post, Lothamer was among at least 14 players who failed to previously qualify for settlement money or medical care and died only to have CTE confirmed.
He also was among eight diagnosed with dementia or a related memory disorder who still failed to qualify for settlement benefits.
And among 5,000 who went through the settlement’s network of doctors and came away without a diagnosis, per court records obtained by the paper.
Leaving the family of the man once so coveted by Lamar Hunt, a man who returned to the Chiefs in 1971 because of coach Hank Stram’s beseeching only to suffer a grim leg injury in 1972 and retire for good, feeling like he was callously discarded.
“I felt like they treated a lot of the guys that built that league on their backs like they were throwaways …” Ryan said. “It’s just human nature. I mean, people care about what’s happening today. They’re not so interested in what happened yesterday or what’s going to happen 10 years down the road.”
While this is deeply personal for the Lothamers, it’s also a microcosm of a matter of epidemic proportions for past generations — as we’ll come back to through the lens of the Chiefs — with still-ominous implications for posterity.
Because it’s fresh testimony to the ever-lurking potential cost of life in the NFL in particular, and football in general, among other sports associated with repetitive head trauma.
In the most updated data released by the Boston University CTE Center in February 2023, 345 of 376 former NFL players (91.7 %) studied were diagnosed with CTE.
The release refers to Lothamer and former Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Rick Arrington having been diagnosed in the previous year.
While the study notes it “should not be interpreted to suggest that 91.7 percent of all current and former NFL players have CTE (since) brain bank samples are subject to selection biases,” that doesn’t diminish the the specter hovering over even these dynastic days of the Chiefs.
“I was thinking about Travis Kelce, just as an example (and what his) life is today,” Ryan said. “He’s dating a celebrity. He’s got all these endorsements. He’s in movies, he’s on TV, he’s on the internet. …
“I wonder what that’s going to look like in 40 years for Travis, if he’s going to look back at the damage that the game has done to him, if all of this will have been worth it.”
She added: “When you see a man who can no longer feed himself, when you see a man who can no longer complete a sentence, is it worth it? Is it worth that? Everybody has to make that decision for themselves, (but) at least now they have the education … to base their decisions off of.”
Like many NFL players, only more so, Lothamer was frequently injured during his career. To combat that, he turned to such measures as judo, karate and, ahead of his time among NFL players, acupuncture.
“You just wish you could play football and not worry about injuries,” he told The Kansas City Times in 1968. “You wish the body was built so it could resist injury.”
Instead, he missed weeks with an ankle injury as a rookie. A year later, he was out nearly half the season, including the Super Bowl, with a shoulder injury.
After surviving a one-car crash in July 1966 that The Associated Press reported “almost decapitated” him, Lothamer returned … only to miss much of that season with the ongoing shoulder issue.
Then there was the broken hand that sidelined him for weeks in the 1969 preseason. And the ghastly leg injury suffered in practice in 1972, that reports at the time said left him hospitalized because it was too swollen to be drained of fluid.
It was much worse behind the scenes. Because of clotting, Elisabeth said, doctors suggested amputation may be necessary. Lothamer had accepted they should do “whatever it takes” to save his life before it became clear that was unnecessary.
If only that had been the worst of it all.
While Ryan noted the car wreck “didn’t help the situation,” Stein reiterated that the “data is pretty overwhelming” that CTE is caused by repetitive trauma — including both concussive and sub-concussive.
Like getting your “bell rung,” as the euphemism used to go, several times in one game, as Lothamer told his family he’d experienced.
And, in fact, just playing a game that was far more perilous than it was understood to be then.
After a 25-20 win over Houston in 1968, Lothamer spoke of the intensity with which the Oilers were hitting.
“When I got in there, boom!” he said after the game, according to The Star. “They were higher than a kite.”
As Elisabeth and Ryan look back, alarming signs were there for decades before anyone knew what to call it or how to understand it.
Within a decade or less after the end of Lothamer’s career, for instance, it became common for him to lose his keys or his briefcase.
Or forget to put back on a Super Bowl ring when he washed his hands in a public restroom.
And almost never be able to sleep, as Ryan remembers witnessing any time she’d wake up in the middle of the night and venture downstairs. It might be 3 a.m., but he would just be watching TV, never actually asleep, in the library.
As much as the family initially was inclined to downplay all that in real time, one episode remains ingrained in Elisabeth Lothamer’s mind as a dividing line between what seemed to be just how he was and something quite more worrisome.
One day, in what she recalled as 1982, Ed was supposed to meet her for lunch at Andre’s near Country Club Plaza — where he’d been “a million times,” she said.
As she ate with another friend, Ed called the restaurant.
Not to say he was late or postponing.
But that he was lost and didn’t know how to get there.
So whatever stage he might have been in then, no matter how he could gather himself in many instances and remained the essentially giving man he was, Ryan believes now that she never knew her father without the disease she had never heard of until just over a decade ago.
Among the reasons he sold his businesses in 1999, Ryan said, was that his symptoms and anxiety were intensifying even as he was able to camouflage that in brief times around others.
While he never behaved with the volatility often associated with CTE, Elisabeth and Ryan said, and never became mean or frightening, he began to demonstrate more irritability and moodiness in the ensuing years. And his cognitive abilities declined enough to be discussed openly when the concussion lawsuit began being organized in 2011.
Skeptical as Ryan remembers being about the suit, which ultimately was marked by convoluted standards and contoured to be binding and effectively prevent plaintiffs and their families from pursuing justice outside it, her father declined to opt out of it.
“He said, ‘What, am I going to sue the NFL?’ (on his own),” she remembered him saying with a laugh.
Two years after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016 by the University of Kansas Health System, Ryan said, the family took him for a Baseline Assessment Program (BAP) test with what she called an NFL-appointed doctor.
After a multi-hour test she called “completely inept,” the administering doctor suggested it was unlikely her father would qualify by the NFL bar for compensation.
Because of complications and misunderstandings about how to see the test result, six years later the Lothamers have yet to be able to see that themselves and are working through an attorney simply to get that.
All of which echoes The Washington Post project’s finding that “the settlement’s definition for dementia required more impairment than the standard definition used in the United States.”
“That’s the problem with the testing that they do on those guys; they leave out a human factor there,” Ryan said. “My dad could rally when necessary. But what’s the true rumination of a human being?
“Is it the fact that they can recall a set of numbers or letters for three minutes that they asked him to? Or is it that my dad would walk outside of that test and not remember where he lived or how to get there?
“How do you assess that?”
Elisabeth assessed it thusly:
“They are just waiting for everybody to die,” she said. “I mean, it’s just what they’re doing.”
Ed Lothamer was born in Detroit in 1942 and raised by his maternal grandmother after his mother was diagnosed with cancer and with his father effectively out of the picture.
As “a kid from the streets of Detroit,” as Ryan put it, a football scholarship and a pro career made for a path up and out.
“To make as much out of his life as he could from where he came,” Elisabeth said.
In so many ways it was a wonderful life, entwined with — but not merely defined by — football and distinguished by his self-effacing ways.
As Lothamer was dying, he made it known he didn’t want a funeral or memorial. (Instead of a formal obituary, Ryan wrote an eloquent tribute for the Concussion Legacy Foundation.)
Because of his size, when they’d travel people often would ask if he’d played football. He’d acknowledge it but deflect.
“My dad was more interested in finding out who that person asking him the questions was than he was in telling him about his football career, you know?” Ryan said. “And he would try to find something, a commonality between him and the people asking him the questions.
“(Football) was a part of my dad, but it certainly wasn’t who he was.”
As for the consequences of the game for Lothamer and so many players over the years, well …
“Those guys, they came from a generation and an era where stuff just happened in life,” Ryan said. “You accepted it wasn’t something you could research.”
Nearly 60 years since that first Chiefs Super Bowl, age itself helps account for why at least 20 men from that team have died — including stars Fred Arbanas, Ed Budde, Len Dawson and Otis Taylor in recent years.
But for a project I did in 2016 on whatever became of players on that team, I was jarred by how many by their 50s had suffered from such issues as Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart issues, multiple sclerosis, strokes and various forms of dementia.
More than a dozen died by their mid-50s. And as many or more were long dealing with cognitive issues by that age.
That was most evident in the plight of Taylor, who was incapacitated most of the last 20 years of his life before he died in 2023.
But those issues, specifically CTE, also may account for Jim Tyrer murdering his wife, Martha, and killing himself in 1980.
Tyrer film biographer Kevin Patrick Allen recently discovered that Martha Tyrer took her husband to a specialist two days before the murder-suicide. Internist Douglas Paone told Allen he’d never forgotten that visit and has since concluded, “He had CTE. There’s not a doubt in my mind.”
And as Allen was making the film that led to broader and deeper research for a yet-to-be-released documentary, “Beneath the Shadow,” Concussion Legacy Foundation leader Chris Nowinski told him there was a “greater than 95 percent chance” Tyrer had CTE.
In 2020, Tyrer’s son, Brad, told me that CTE merely gave a name to something he’s known all along: “That wasn’t him … It was somebody else who did that.”
Having learned intimately about the disease, Ryan believes CTE was at play in the case of Tyrer — who along with Taylor and former Chiefs defensive back Albert Lewis is among 31 players in this year’s Pro Football Hall of Fame class soon to be cut down to three.
“I mean, of course, Jim Tyrer had CTE; of course …” she said. “He loved his family. He had those children. He loved his wife. Why would he have killed himself?
“Why would he have killed his wife unless it was a brain injury that provoked it?”
In 2014, pathologist Piotr Kozlowski reported that the brain of former Chief Jovan Belcher revealed findings consistent with CTE. That study was done after an exhumation of the body requested by the family of Belcher, who in 2012 murdered Kasi Perkins before killing himself in the parking lot of the Chiefs training facility.
It’s unclear whether that study ever was independently corroborated.
Shortly before her husband was no longer able to speak, walk or eat and in his final days at a rehab facility, Elisabeth asked him if he would play football all over again.
“He said, ‘In a minute …’” she recalled through tears as she spoke. “ ‘I wouldn’t quit what I loved.’”
Small wonder his family sees it differently.
“My father made $42,000 during his final season in the NFL,” Ryan wrote in her tribute to him. “Which we now realize was the price he exchanged for his brain.”
While she still says to each his own about playing football, she wonders how anyone might feel if they went to see former players who can’t speak or urinate or eat on their own mere decades after playing.
As for the franchise that wanted her father so much that Lamar Hunt went to sign him in person, she won’t watch games anymore.
And the Super Bowl rings that epitomize those glory days now are stored out of sight in a safety deposit box.
“They’ll stay there now …” she said. “It just has no meaning in my life anymore.”