Mackey defined by greatness, illness

LITTLE ROCK — As John Mackey described the biggest game he won, he merely demonstrated all he had lost.

In March 2007, in his Hall of Fame golf shirt and trademark black cowboy hat, Mackey proudly recounted how in Super Bowl V,he caught a 75-yard touchdown pass that fueled his Baltimore Colts’ 16-13 victory over Dallas. The problem was, the question was only, “Where do you live, John?”

When asked about that 75-yard catch, he answered with clipped non sequiturs like, “They put me in the Hall of Fame” and “I want a cookie.” He used a spoon to drink his coffee, thinking it was soup.

The legacy of Mackey, who died Wednesday at 69, will derive less from how his muscles revolutionized the tight end position from 1963 to 1972, or how his heart fought for players’ free-agency rights, but from how his brain atrophied before football’s eyes. No player so vividly advertised the growing problem of early-onset dementia among veterans of his era, or so unknowingly spurred the NFL to recognize it.

Mackey was first found to have frontal temporal dementia in 2000, the same year that the owner of the Cowboys, Jerry Jones, told ESPN he would push his oft-concussed quarterback Troy Aikman into crucial games because “there is no evidence of any long-term, lasting impact” from head trauma in the NFL. A few years later, a committee of doctors appointed by the league published several papers making the same claim, to the howls of more independent experts.

As this unfolded, Mackey deteriorated to the point that he needed continual in-home care. He could no longer fly after becoming so enraged at an airport security checkpoint - agents asked him to remove his Super Bowl V and Hall of Fame rings - that he burst toward the gate and had to be wrestled to the ground, screaming, by armed officials. He kept mumbling, “I got in the end zone.”

While the NFL minted videos featuring the hallowed Colts of Unitas and Moore and Mackey, Sylvia Mackey, John’s 60-year-old wife, became a United Airlines flight attendant to pay mounting medical bills. She grew so distraught that she wrote a three-page letter to Paul Tagliabue, the departing NFL commissioner, to alert him to what was happening to one of the game’s legends.

Sylvia Mackey’s haunting description of dementia - “a slow, deteriorating, ugly, caregiver-killing, degenerative, brain-destroying tragic horror,” she called it - almost brought Tagliabue to tears. He and the players union swiftly created a fund that would pay up to $88,000 in medical expenses to the families of retired players with dementia. Why $88,000? John Mackey wore No. 88. It continues today simply as the 88 Plan, forever identified with Sylvia as much as John.

The move was not entirely magnanimous. The NFL - and,curiously, the players union of which Mackey was once president - continued to claim that football and dementia were not related, that the 88 Plan was merely an effort to help players in need. (Dementia, a league spokesman explained, was a condition “that affects many elderly people.”) But the fuse was lit, and an explosion loomed.

Dozens of applications poured in, demonstrating the wide population of NFL veterans with cognitive decline. Sylvia Mackey became the nexus of a growing support network of NFL wives whose husbands were mentally vanishing in middle age. She offered them expertise and empathy, often during layovers in Denver or elsewhere. She signed off e-mails as Mrs. 88.

A total of 166 players have benefited from the 88 Plan over four years, receiving almost $13 million and counting. Their age distribution also helped confirm that NFL players were, indeed, receiving diagnoses of dementia or other memory-related diseases earlier and more often than other American men, prompting congressional hearings and safety-related reform from the professionals to the peewees.

Whether John Mackey’s condition actually resulted from football will probably remain a mystery. Sylvia Mackey pledged last year to donate his brain to researchers at Boston University to see if he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the collision-induced disease that compromises cognitive function and has been discovered in almost two dozen retired NFL players. But even a positive diagnosis cannot definitively confirm her suspicions of football’s role.

“I can’t say I do know for certain,” Sylvia Mackey said. “In an exhibition game in Hershey, Pa., he ran into the goal post headfirst. Well, he has frontal temporal dementia, but how can I prove it? I can’t even find a record of that. I just remember the incident because I was there.”

In his mid-60s, Mackey’s downturn became more poignant. He petulantly refused to brush his teeth or shower until Sylvia printed out a fake NFL directive - she signed Paul Tagliabue’s name at the bottom - and taped it to his bathroom door. (He immediately followed orders.) He would forget which mailbox was his until being reminded it was Johnny Unitas’ uniform number, 19.

Linked to football or not, Mackey’s dementia became the most resonant among scores of more anonymous cases dotted across the United States. It was the elephant in reunion rooms, with some players changing the subject if the name came up. In some ways John Mackey became the Lou Gehrig of football, a legend defined by his demise.

In the end, mercifully, the only football insider who did not know John Mackey’s fate - and lasting impact - was No. 88 himself.

“John doesn’t know what’s happening to him,” Sylvia Mackey said in March 2007, sitting beside her husband as he swallowed a dozen Oreos. “John is happy, everything is fine, he is above ground, he is having a good time, he is enjoying life, and he played football.”