Paul Kent: Steve Mortimer dementia diagnosis creates more heartache in NRL concussion debate

Steve Mortimer’s dementia revelation should be a wake-up call. Instead, concussion critics remain ignorant as the Players Association uses the debate to leverage other complaints against the NRL.

And so, collectively, hearts broke on Tuesday.

Steve Mortimer was a hero for a generation. A generation too late to change, a generation left with consequences.

Mortimer confirmed that he is suffering from dementia.

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He was informed in March but he also conceded, which many around the game knew, that signs have been there for a considerable time.

Who knows how long? Who knows how quickly it will attack him?

Rugby league legend Steve Mortimer has been diagnosed with dementia. Picture: David Swift

Yet still the debate around concussion in the game, and the NRL’s attempt to minimise it, rages.

Still there are too few prepared to accept, or to try and understand, the long-term ramifications of a game that allows the brutality to continue with a sketchy, but increasingly incriminating, science to support concussion syndrome.

Some say that if the crackdown continues it could kill the game. Others know that if they don’t, it most certainly will.

And yet the rage continues.

Tuesday’s The Daily Telegraph front page was the worst advertisement the NRL could have.

It should have been the wake-up call to a playing group using the debate for political pointscoring.

And yet still they fight.

On the same day the Blues went into camp to kickstart their Origin campaign the man who led NSW to its first series victory in State of Origin, back in 1985, was confirming he has dementia.

Mortimer believes his dementia, which came along uncommonly early, was brought about by head knocks during his playing career.

There is no way to know if that is true.

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) can be diagnosed only in a post mortem. The brain has to be put on a table and injected with dye to reveal the protein deposits called Tau that is believed responsible for brain diseases like CTE and dementia and Alzheimer’s.

True, Mortimer could have a predisposition for dementia, making his concussions completely unrelated to the dementia he suffers.

Or he could not.

The latest evidence, which is far from conclusive or comprehensive, suggests the higher incidence of brain injury in athletes in contact sports is from head knocks.

That is not the end, but where the evidence is heading.

Once this is understood, the uncertainty of the science, despite the increasing certainty, the NRL has no choice but to put in best practices for the safety of players.

And yet still they fight.

The long-term consequences for the game could be crippling.

Blues coach Terry Fearnley and captain Steve Mortimer lap up the 1985 series win.

The Rugby League Players Association needs to mature and stop using the concussion debate to leverage its other complaints against the NRL.

Nobody is dismissing their battle for consultation to help improve the game. Just the battlefield.

With each denial an NRL player makes about concussion, somewhere, a player is lost to the game.

The players should be doing all they can to comply with the NRL’s directive, buying in and continuing to sell the game to the broader public by making it safer.

Instead, they cloud it in misinformation and anonymous quotes.

Daly Cherry-Evans does not know what he is saying anymore.

“The media always try and put it all on one person,” he said on Tuesday.

“I’m a voice for the RLPA and a voice for the playing group.

“I haven’t personally come out and said I want V’landys sacked. People can assume all they want, I’m just voicing the concerns for the broader playing group.”

Maroons captain Daly Cherry-Evans is a man of many voices.

Poor Daly, always misunderstood.

His quotes make sense only if he was the player who anonymously called for the head of ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys, which he denies.

So go figure.

If anybody was looking for proof of the difficulty the NRL faces to change public opinion it took only a quick look at the comments section underneath Mortimer’s online story on Tuesday to confirm the worst of us.

There they were, the cartoon doctors arguing their opinion overrules the evidence.

“Premature to point to head knocks,” said someone named Dion.

“This is not about protecting players,” moaned Willjo, who somehow knows this before complaining the crackdown is “severely reducing the entertainment for the fan”.

“The latest crackdown is a farce,” wrote Derek.

The impact for anyone with dementia is significant. My father died after a long battle with dementia. He wasn’t a footballer. He never had a concussion in his life. Look up https://t.co/IvCy5pnhg8 to study causes of dementia. https://t.co/K7SyTqTppk

— Phil Gould (@PhilGould15) May 31, 2021

Good grief.

There was a time when, for sport, we once put men in colosseums with lions.

The stupidity of nowadays, and for Dion and Willjo and the rest of the Dereks, is that if we tried to introduce colosseum sports again it would be PETA protesting, concerned about the welfare of the lion.

Then on Tuesday, Phil Gould tweeted about how dementia took his father’s life and how, “If I get dementia I won’t be blaming it on head knocks from playing football”.

No, no, no, no, no.