Original NFL Concussion Quack, Elliot Pellman, Was Commissioner Tagliabue’s Doc: ESPN’s ‘Outside the Lines’
A Twitter Dialogue on Max Boot’s Miserable Wall Street Journal Essay, ‘In Defense of Football’
August 17, 2013‘National Conference of State Legislatures’ (Huh?) — Yet Another Client of USA Swimming’s PR Firm, Ground Floor Media
August 19, 2013It’s time for more than left-handed compliments to ESPN’s Outside the Lines on the football traumatic brain injury story. Today the investigative unit’s Steve Fainaru, John Barr, Mark Fainaru-Wada, and Greg Amante have the down-low on the National Football League’s founding concussion guru Dr. Elliot Pellman — a quack with an offshore medical degree and no neurology credentials, whose renewed and continuing prominence in NFL advisory circles can’t be killed with a helmet-to-helmet hit.
The New York Times busted Pellman for resume hype years ago. Earlier this year Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth updated the new-and-improved Pellman (http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/47668524/) — though Patrick held off on using the line I fed to him about Pellman via LBJ: “The NFL would rather have Pellman inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”
One of the new howlers in ESPN’s excellent piece is that Pellman had a doctor-patient relationship with then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue.
To reiterate, Outside the Lines and PBS’s Frontline have an upcoming documentary, League of Denial, whose principal writers, the brothers Fainaru, will pile on with a book of the same title.
Choose your favorite mallard on the NFL pond. With my pro wrestling pedigree, I’ll always be partial to Dr. ImPACT Dr. Resveratrol Dr. Sports Brain Guard Supplements, Joe Maroon, and his fellow Anitidae at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (at least one of whom is a convicted growth hormone trafficker). I recommend to you — in addition to the video and print versions of League of Denial and Sean Pamphilon’s new film United States of Football — my itty-bitty (but a bargain at any price!) 2012 ebook UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero (http://amzn.to/A0Hq2g).
Irv Muchnick