Roger Zatkoff ran a successful business into his 70s.
He took vacations, sometimes traveling by himself to places like California and Florida, in his 80s.
The former Detroit Lions linebacker and member of the team’s 1957 championship team lived a normal enough life that he was sure he did not have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head that has impacted many football players from his era.
But as part of his commitment to brain research, Zatkoff, who made a large donation to the University of Michigan to fund CTE research, wanted to find out.
Zatkoff, who died last November at age 90, was diagnosed with Stage 3 CTE by researchers at Boston University, findings his family hopes will help bring about a deeper understanding of the disease.
“It was their dad’s legacy to contribute to the health and safety of active and future players and I think their dad did that, and his contribution is significant,” said Dr. Ann McKee, director of the Boston University CTE Center. “They’re all significant, but he was able to withstand this disease for a considerable long time. He died at age 90, he did well, so he’s an example of relative resistance or resilience. We are discovering genetic factors that seem to make some people more susceptible and some people more resilient, so he’ll go in and contribute in those ways.”
Zatkoff told the Free Press in 2017 at a 60-year reunion for the 1957 Lions team that he suffered “my share of concussions” during his six-year playing career. He was knocked unconscious during one game he played for the Green Bay Packers in the mid-1950s and played the next week through persistent headaches.
In retirement, though, Zatkoff was largely able to avoid some of the most serious problems players who have been diagnosed with CTE have encountered.
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Mike Webster, a Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman in the 1970s and ‘80s and one of the first NFL players found to have CTE, battled dementia and depression and was homeless for a period of time. Junior Seau, Dave Duerson and Aaron Hernandez are among those who were diagnosed with CTE after committing suicide.
Zatkoff had a stroke in his 70s, but Gary Zatkoff, Roger’s son, said his father lived by himself for a year after his mother passed away and exhibited only mild signs of CTE, which can only be diagnosed post-mortem.
“(We associate CTE with) either you’re young and you’ve got Alzheimer’s or you’ve gone nuts, you committed suicide or you did all these nasty things,” Gary Zatkoff said. “And I think my dad — and the family, if you interview any of the family members, we thought he might have had it, but we didn’t know for sure. We always joked that he probably had it, but we didn’t really know.”
Zatkoff said his father could be forgetful, occasionally talked without a filter and sometimes exhibited “a Jekyll-Hyde type” personality, but nothing that seemed out of the ordinary for his age.
“Just as a family we joked, this is CTE, but the funny thing, I don’t say that with my mother-in-law because she doesn’t have CTE, at least we don’t think so,” he said. “But he was always a big believer that he wanted to know and he wanted people to — he always believed there’s people that don’t have it and he wants to know what’s the difference with those people, so it was kind of ironic that he did really have it.”
McKee said her research team has studied nearly 1,200 of the 1,300 brains it has collected through its brain bank, with around 70% of the donations coming from ex-football players.
She declined to say how many of those brains had CTE, but she said community studies and international groups that have looked at the prevalence of CTE in standard brain banks have found 3% or less of subjects with the disease while “we’re seeing it in 90-plus percent of NFL players.”
Along with Zatkoff, Lou Creekmur, Mel Farr, Wally Hilgenberg and Tommy Vaughn are among the ex-Lions who were diagnosed with CTE by McKee’s group.
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“I think we have a very good handle on what this disease is and it’s very consistent,” McKee said. “There’s always going to be variations between people, but there’s a very consistent story. A lot of them, our focus is on trying to diagnose it during life because that’s what we think is the critical need right now. Even if a person is older and we can’t treat it in any way, just the idea that they have an injury or an illness related to injuries, is very comforting to families. A lot of times the feeling that this person is just behaving in these horrible ways and they can’t understand it is very, very — well, the person themselves, they feel shame and guilt and the family’s really alienated, so that’s what we’re focusing on is diagnosis during life and obviously treatment.”
McKee said researchers are close to being able to diagnose CTE in the living.
“It’s hard to predict the future,” she said. “Is it five years? Is it seven years? But I think we’re close.”
As part of his father’s legacy, Gary Zatkoff said he hopes more people donate their brain to science, including a bigger cross-section of people to help study CTE.
“My dad would have said all along, he says only people that have it donate their brain, and he’s a little bit right,” Zatkoff said. “A lot of people do that. They donate their brain after they’re dead and they knew they had it, they most likely had it. In my dad’s case, he could have had it or not had it, it wouldn’t have surprised us either way.
“That’s why I think my dad’s story is kind of a very unique story. I mean, he is a survivor, he lived with CTE, and I don’t think that really gets — I don’t think you hear about that. You only hear about the crazy people.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.