In 2019, Anita Frawley was at her lowest ebb. Her husband Danny Frawley, a successful Melbourne media identity and legendary AFL footballer who played for St Kilda from 1984 to 1995, had been killed in a car crash near Ballarat.
At the time of his death, he was suffering from a slow and painful deterioration of his brain.
Previously diagnosed with depression, Danny Frawley began experiencing something he couldn’t explain in recent years.
“It’s not just depression: I’ve got brain fog, I can’t think properly, I can’t remember things,” he told Anita.
Desperately looking for answers, Anita Frawley donated Danny’s brain to the Australian Sports Brain Bank hoping its executive director, Michael Buckland, would be able to shed light on what was happening to her husband before he died.
In September 2020, she had an answer — Danny Frawley’s years as a tough, uncompromising defender in one of football’s most brutal eras had caused chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
The disease can present like Alzheimer’s but can also cause the sufferer to be impulsive or severely depressed, which has often led people with the disease to suicide.
For Anita, the diagnosis made sense.
“I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t know what it was, so getting that diagnosis, it was like a relief,” she said.
Over the course of the next few years, while continuing to grieve the loss of her husband, Anita Frawley began to learn more about the disease and sought to raise awareness of CTE.
Motivated also by her passion for Australian Rules Football, she says the game needs to fully accept the risks.
“If we turn a blind eye to it [concussion risks] we could hurt the game more,” she said.
Sports leagues ‘owe it to the players’ to do more
In Australia, research into CTE is still in its infancy. The Australian Sports Brain Bank, where the brains of Danny Frawley and Heather Anderson were diagnosed with CTE, has studied about 60 brains, neurophysiologist Alan Pearce told the ABC.
At the University of Boston, in the US, neuropathologist Ann McKee and her team have studied the brains of hundreds of athletes.
“We’ve reported CTE in soccer, rugby, ice hockey, American football,” said Dr McKee, who is considered the world authority on CTE and leads the Boston University Brain Bank.
“As a child, I just thought football players, and especially the Green Bay Packers [football team] were just the greatest thing on earth and I became an enormous football fan,” Dr McKee said.
Her two great passions, football and brain research, were combined when she was asked in 2008 to look at the brain of a former NFL player who died at the age of 45 with the tell-tale signs of severe CTE.
What she saw stunned her, but she said her findings were initially dismissed by the governing body of America’s National Football League.
“I think they sensed it was going to be a financial threat to them, I think they were concerned about how much they’d have to pay out in terms of looking after players,” Dr McKee said.
In 2013, the NFL did eventually pay its former players out to the tune of $US780 million ($1.17 billion).
In Australia, there are currently four lawsuits including two class actions against the AFL by players who are suffering the effects of head knocks.
Dr McKee believes leaving sports leagues to manage the issue is inadequate.
“Sports organisations that are gaining so much from these sports financially, we really shouldn’t expect them anymore to be able to govern themselves or develop rules or regulations to limit what they do,” she said.
“I think it’s going to take an outside group, perhaps government, perhaps legislature, to say that these sports are dangerous, that the sports leagues owe it to the players … to do more.”
No major sporting code has provided financial support to the Australian Sports Brain Bank. According to Anita Frawley, that’s a mistake.
“We should be using it more and funding it and helping them: we’d be able to get more information out there quicker,” she says.
“I don’t want any family to go through what we went through … but the solution is right in front of us and it’s the donation of brains and the research, that’s the only way we can learn more about what’s happening in people with CTE brains.”
A spokesperson for the AFL told the ABC it was supportive of its players donating their brains.
“We continue to encourage football players to consider donating their brains to further research in this area and reiterate that the health and safety of ALL players is the AFL’s utmost priority,” the statement said.
The AFL also added: “We continue to learn about the impact of concussion and head trauma, including through various research projects, and make the informed adjustments to rules and protocols to ensure the game remains accessible and as safe as possible for everyone.”
The next challenge for scientists, Dr McKee said, was to find a way to diagnose CTE in living patients and then treat the degenerative disease.
“We’re on a very fast pace, I think, to make some very substantial discoveries in the near future,” Dr McKee said.
Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7.30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV
dan