CTE diagnosis gives Sash family clarity

Tyler Sash's family continued Thursday to tell the story of a former athlete who struggled with brain injury.

On ESPN's 'Outside The Lines,' Barney and Josh Sash, Tyler's mom and brother, spoke about their reaction to learning last week that Tyler Sash was diagnosed posthumously with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated trauma that has been found in dozens of former NFL players.

The New York Times reported this week that Dr. Ann McKee, chief of neuropathology at the V.A. Boston Healthcare System and a professor of neurology and pathology at the Boston University School of Medicine, conducted an examination on Sash, who died at the age of 27 of an accidental overdose of pain medications at his Iowa home on Sept. 8, that the severity of the CTE in Sash's brain was about the same as the level found in the brain of the former NFL star Junior Seau, who committed suicide in 2012 at age 43.

Doctors grade CTE on a severity scale from 0 to 4. Sash was at Stage 2, according to the report.

'First of all, after they explained what kind of damage it does to the brain, I had a deep sadness thinking that my son suffered his last couple of years and we really couldn't put a finger on what was wrong,' Barney Sash told ESPN's Bob Ley. 'We thought it was his need of a surgery and pain medication that was causing him to conduct himself in a way that was different from the Tyler that we knew and loved was.

'The sadness was that he was kind of alone in this. He couldn't explain it. He never complained. He said, 'I got this, mom.' In another way, it was clarity. It helped us to understand what was going on. Things seemed to make sense when we realized the parts of the brain that were affected by this disease, the center for impulses and for decision making and for emotions. Over the last couple of years, as we saw things go on, we just knew that it made a lot more sense to us, so it gave us clarity.'

OTL: CTE at age 27 - ESPN Video

The show then quoted a 2012 interview between Sash, an all-Big Ten safety at the University of Iowa, and Gazette sports columnist Mike Hlas before the New York Giants 2012 Super Bowl victory. In the interview, Sash called concussions 'part of the game.'

'. . . I know they're trying to do everything that they can with the rules to protect players, but at the end of the day it's a bunch of grown men playing a game where it's legal to go hit people. I feel I've dished out a lot more than I've received,' Sash said.

The statement is all the more difficult to hear now, said Josh Sash, an assistant men's basketball coach at Indian Hills Community College in Ottumwa.

'I think at that time, I don't think a lot of us knew the repercussions of ongoing concussions,' Josh Sash said. 'I think as the research has been furthered in recent years, you've started to see the things that can really happen. I think at the time, he probably thought a concussion was a concussion. You sit out for a week or whatever the protocol was at the time and then you moved forward and continued to play the game, a game he played his whole life.'

Barney Sash said the family became increasingly frustrated with Sash's erratic behavior late in his life, which included a public intoxication arrest in his hometown of Oskaloosa.

'He wasn't so far gone that he didn't realize he did some of these things,' Barney Sash said. 'He would apologize or say 'I don't know why I did that.' It just makes me deeply sad that my son suffered with something that he really couldn't put his finger on or have any control over.'

Ley asked the Sashes, 'Who bears responsibility?'

'I think that's something we're looking at each other as a family and we're trying to digest that a little bit,' Josh Sash said.

Sash was cut by the Giants in the 2013 preseason after what was at least his fifth concussion, according to the Times report. Sash wanted to keep his NFL career and started a search for the next team.

'I don't exactly feel that maybe when he did have that preseason concussion that was exactly handled correctly,' Josh Sash said. 'I believe the concussion occurred on a Wednesday in a preseason game and then he heard Saturday morning that he was cut from the team. At that point, when that's your job and that's your livelihood, he was sought out by some other teams as far as a tryout. He did fly several places probably too soon after a concussion to have workouts with different teams.

'But I think he was caught in a situation where he didn't know what to do. He was not feeling right and he knew he didn't feel right and he didn't think he could perform maybe the same way he did before, but he felt like, 'If I don't, they'll call somebody else and I don't have a job and this is my life right now.''

l Comments: (319) 398-8256; marc.morehouse@thegazette.com