The Big Interview: Jerome Bettis on concussions, Ben Roethlisberger, Dancing With the Stars and being a cool dad

Steelers football great Jerome Bettis, a sufferer of numerous concussions in his playing days, will serve as national spokesperson for the Dick’s Sporting Goods PACE Program, which will donate $2 to PACE’s concussion research program for every athletic shoe purchased at Dick’s Sporting Goods. We were lucky enough to sit down with the future Hall of Famer to discuss the issue.

OFF THE BENCH: I actually talked to an NFL player recently, Jason Short of the Philadelphia Eagles. who said he had about 20 concussions in his career but he only reported four or five because he was scared that as a special teamer, they’d just cut him. Is that a big fear for a lot of players?

JEROME BETTIS: Oh, I’m sure it’s a HUGE issue for a lot of players, because initially the thought was that if you reported every ding and every concussion, you were soft. That came from a lack of education about concussions. In the last five years or so, the education about concussions has finally come to the forefront. Before that there was very little information about the risks of concussions and playing after having one. That’s why the program I’m doing with Dick’s is so important. We create awareness through education so the youth know how bad the concussion problem is in the NFL. Teams are stepping on the football field before they’re ready, and the baseline testing will prevent that.

How about your concussion history? Have you ever suffered one that you never reported?

All the time. I only reported a couple of them through the course of my career, but there were concussions through my whole career. Maybe not every game but you got dinged around quite a bit. Numerous times where it wasn’t reported.

What do you think about Dave Duerson, the Bears safety who knew he wasn’t thinking right so he killed himself and donated his brain to the NFL concussion research facility? Does that scare players?

Yeah, it does scare me. Had I been educated about concussions maybe I may have made different decisions in that moment. If I knew it could lead to problems later in life, that would really give me the impetus to step up and say, you know what? I want to get the word out and make some change. I can use myself as a testament to younger guys and say, hey, I didn’t know. There are going to be long term ramifications for me and I don’t want that to be the case for the next generation of young athletes. I don’t want them to fall into the same trap I’ve fallen into.

As a player, when did you realize how dangerous concussions were? A lot of guys are floating through because the NFL isn’t education players very well…

I didn’t know until the end of my career! Troy Aikman had to retire from the concussions, Steve Young too. That’s when you start to see, oh, wait a minute. This is serious. There’s two superstar players who have to retire because of the concussions and I think that’s what raised the awareness about concussions. That was pretty significant.

When I was a kid in the third grade and I heard a kid brag about how he was skiing and suffered a concussion and was talking about how, “Oh man, I hit my head and now I can’t think right!” All the kids were thinking, woah, this kid is so cool. Because of that I thought, “Oh, concussions are nothing, man. Just something you can joke about to make all the girls really excited.”

Exactly. Guys were thinking, if you report it, you aren’t macho. You aren’t a tough guy. A lot of things went unreported because linebackers aren’t supposed to get concussions, they get their bell rung and move on. When you get your bell rung, that’s a minor concussion. Still a concussion.

As a player, how did you lead? With your head? Shoulder?

As a running back you run with your shoulder pads. You don’t lead with your head because you’re trying to see with your head. As a linebacker, that’s where you lead with the helmet. I’d use my head to figure out where I’m going. Defensive guys have a much higher risk in terms of concussions.

Did you ever get angry at defensive players who gave you unnecessary helmet to helmet hits? Just to mess you up, as a star player?

Ah, with every hit you took you realized they were trying to take you out of the football game so the only hits you got upset about were hits after the whistle. If it was inside the whistle, that’s fine. You understood what his goal was. Get me out of there so they can have a better chance of winning the football game. I tried to get out of my way when I needed to so I could get away from some of those unnecessary hits.

You spent a couple years with the young Ben Roethlisberger in the locker room. Everybody was saying he was brash and inconsiderate, not a great leader. Do you know the real facts? Was he a good kid?

Oh, he was a young football player. He had a lot of success early and he wasn’t asked to be a leader. A lot of people are saying, “Ah, he wasn’t a leader.” He wasn’t asked to be a leader. He had veterans all around him. He was asked to be a role player who made a couple plays, and that’s all he needed to do, and all that was asked of him. He got a raw deal early on because of that. If you look at some teams and a young quarterback is asked to be a leader? That wasn’t the case for young Ben. There were some issues he had to deal with about being a better teammate and I think he rectified that and handled all those issues, and he’s clearly developed into a leader of that football team. He leads by example now and and he’s doing a great job.

What are your kids more impressed by, your football career or your appearance on The Office?

Hahaha, actually my kids are more impressed that I was on Dancing With the Stars! They don’t know much about the football. They’re always asking why daddy has to sign these autographs, haha. That’ll be for another day. I’ll show them some old footage of me and show them daddy was a good football player in his day.

Do you know how many concussions you’ve suffered?

I wish I could tell you as a true number but not knowing, I’d say probably ten to fifteen without being educated about it back then.

Were there a lot of mornings where you woke up and your head was a little different?

Probably not a little different in the morning, but maybe after a play my vision was a little blurry or there were some issues remembering something after the game. Maybe a headache after a game or something along those lines should’ve told me, hey, this is an issue I need to address. Without the education and awareness it went right by.

You looked like a prototypical fullback. Who was the guy who believed in you as a running back instead?

Lou Holtz was the first one who thought I could be a tailback because there was a time when most of the starting tailbacks were hurt so he decided to put me back there, and I’ll never forget it. We were playing Air Force and he put me back there, the first time I ever played there, and he gave me 20-25 carries and I had a career day and from that point on, he’d start the other guys and then bring me in during the fourth quarter to pound the defense. That’s how the thought that I could play tailback was born. And when I went to the Rams, Chuck Knox thought I had the speed and the skills to be a tailback, so he moved me rookie year to tailback and I never looked back.

How did you learn as a player to continue playing at a spectacular level as your skills declined? It’s a big adjustment for a lot of players and a lot of them don’t understand it.

Well for me, I was fortunate, because speed wasn’t my game (laughs). So when my speed started diminishing it didn’t look like much because it wasn’t speed for me. It was about being smart and understanding the football field. It didn’t look like I was slowing down when I was.

For more information on the PACE Program including times and locations of tour stops and how schools can apply to receive ImPACT software, please visit the Dick’s Sporting Goods Facebook page or www.dickssportinggoods.com/PACE.