Jeanne Marie Laskas

The new disease was named chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and the NFL fervently and repeatedly denied that such a thing had anything to do with the league or its players.

Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'

The ESPN complex is a 255-acre playland, as beautiful and perfect as the Magic Kingdom itself down the road - except it's sports!

Football is in a guy's DNA. A primal thing. You should play it so you can talk about the glory days when you get older and drink Bud with the guys from the office. Get it done when you're young, while you have the chance.

In Arizona, anyone over 18 can buy an assault rifle, at 21 you can get a pistol, and you can carry your gun, loaded or unloaded, concealed or openly, just about anywhere.

Getting a gun should be easy for good people and impossible for bad people. The only trick is telling the difference.

Working in a gun store is hard on your feet and your back.

The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data.

The LeBron 11, for $200, has hyperposite construction - a combination of Foamposite material and performance synthetics - and a new layer of Lunarlon cushioning; and anyway, Nike generates about $300 million off the sneakers.

By 2012, Dan Gilbert was well over his LeBron James-abandonment hissy fit. He opened Cleveland's first casino, with 1,900 slot machines and eighty-nine table games.

Ndamukong started out playing soccer, like his sister before him. She excelled at it, played for Mississippi State, made the Cameroon national team.

It's the subconcussive hits, the constant bam, bam, bam that linemen like Suh give and receive. Those are the hits scientists say cause the lasting damage to the brain, the kind of injuries that made guys like Mike Webster, Terry Long, and so many others go crazy. The subconcussive hits - every single play.

Mike Webster lost all his money or, maybe, gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon, Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. 'Iron Mike,' legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons.

On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player.

In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting.

Bob Dole is not a romantic, at least not an immediate one. Bob Dole is not one to waste a lot of time on metaphor.

You can't think 'Dole' without thinking 'Bob Dole' and cartoons and third-person good times. He was one of those politicians: the kind you jabbed but were happy enough to have around.

When he emerged Lou Dobbs the populist, he was so hard to peg. A mishmash of contradictions: anti-outsourcing, anti-globalization, pro-international-trade, pro-free-enterprise, anti-corporatism, pro-choice, pro-Second Amendment, pro-gay-marriage, pro-gays-serving-openly-in-the-military, pro-military, anti-war-in-Iraq-and-Afghanistan.

Fallon tells me about first starting 'Late Night': how he knew audiences were dubious.