Cincinnati Bengals great Tim Krumrie's brain: A work in progress

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colorado – The tan leather of the steering wheel of his Ford F-250 slides through Tim Krumrie’s thick hands. He jokes he’ll break yours if he wants. He wheels the truck down his favorite back way, the less trafficked Howelsen Parkway along the Yampa River to the base of sun-splashed Emerald Mountain. Here, on the eastern side of the Rockies, are hiking and biking trails, a ski slope and the home of a pro rodeo series. 

It’s where he goes to walk. A place to drift into a reverie.

It’s good to daydream, he says.

An hour earlier the smile had faded for a few minutes, the jokes subdued. His eyes intensified. His night visions once weren’t so beautiful.

“Bad dreams. Wrong dreams. Can’t repeat ‘em. Wake up and wonder if you did something wrong.”

He set his jaw. Just below his bottom lip, but above his chin, there’s a quiver. 

“Ugly.”

Such terrors are symptoms of a damaged frontal lobe, which resulted from a 12-year NFL career with the Cincinnati Bengals,  two years of wrestling and four years of football at the University of Wisconsin that put him in the College Football Hall of Fame and playing linebacker and wrestling in his youth.

He sure as hell doesn’t want any pity. 

Instead, he wants to talk about it. 

“It was just sleeping. Just sitting there. Doing nothing,” he said of his brain. “The blood flow wasn’t getting there. The people have to understand you have to get educated on some of this a little bit. I am not a doctor. All I’m doing is telling you my story. And this s--- is true. I don’t know the fancy words or all that other stuff. That’s not my job. My job is to tell the people of the world it’s OK. This stuff happens. Until you come over across the tracks and say hey, I have a problem. I have a problem, I’m screwed up. 

“You have a to get the correct doctor and find out. So we found out.” 

The eyes say it all.

Well, almost.

Toss in the broken nose, the blood. That says it all.

The color photo is huge, life-sized, if that can be believed. 

Now 57, Krumrie is a fit 226 pounds. He’ll steel his gaze and challenge anyone to give him a shot to the oblique. Stone, he says. A few hundred crunches will do that. Voted the third best player in the 50-year history of the franchise and a five-time team leader in tackles, he’s wearing a black Bengals hat, a thin, long-sleeved performance Bengals shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. 

“A bad day at the office,” he laughs, looking at the print of himself in his workout room. 

This is where his two Pro Bowl jerseys are framed. There’s a scarred Bengals helmet. The 1988 Super Bowl champion Wheaties Box that never was. The photo faces the treadmill, the bike and the resistance bands, right around the corner from the rack that holds over a dozen cowboy hats. 

It’s where he lost 60 pounds in 100 days. It’s where he rehabbed a double knee replacement in 2013, a surgery where the surgeons tried and failed, to wrench out the 15-inch titanium rod in his left leg. He returned to coach the East-West Shrine Game nine weeks later.

He never missed a game in his life, from high school through the moment he rode off the turf at Riverfront Stadium on a Harley Davidson gifted from Mike Brown. He is most famous for suffering the worst injury at the worst time: The shattered left tibia, fibula and ankle on the choppy turf of Super Bowl XXIII at Joe Robbie Stadium in Florida on Jan. 22, 1989.

There are no regrets. He proudly accepts the costs of his life’s work. And he’d do it again.

“In a second. In a second,” he said. “You put me in the Super Bowl you can break my leg – two of ‘em! It’s that important.”

He loves football. He loves the National Football League. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger advocate for the sport. 

“He is so pro-NFL,” his wife, Cheryl, said. “He talks to (NFL executive vice president) Jeff Miller. He talks to (executive vice president) Troy Vincent. He talks to (commissioner) Roger (Goodell). He just loves the game and he loves the league. He wears his NFL hat all the time because that’s the shield and (you) always protect the shield. He doesn’t want to play the blame game. 

“I would love for him to be the poster boy for this, the poster boy for saying 'go and take care of yourself, figure out how to live and how not to be mad.'”

Tim Krumrie is into his third year of a new chapter of his life, one he hopes can be an example for those stuck in the early drafts of theirs.

He sets his jaw again. The quiver returns, too.

“Do you go to the doctor if you get the flu? Yes. You break your leg? You go to the doctor? Yes. Why can’t you go to the doctor to see if your brain is OK?” he said. “Why can’t you do that? Nothing wrong with it.”

Make no mistake. It took some time for him to come to that realization.

The Krumries say they first noticed symptoms of brain trauma after Tim wasn't able to find another coaching job after his contract with Kansas City expired after the 2010 season. He had coached the defensive lines in Cincinnati, Buffalo and Kansas City for 15 years, a nearly three-decade career in the NFL was suddenly over.

“That’s when it becomes, really, kind of scary,” he said. 

Routines were broken. His brain and body slowed down. 

“It all just kind of hit me,” he said. “When I was always into the football stuff, I always had that brain part working. Now, you’re gone, and then that’s when all that stuff started coming out. It was after the fact.

The flushes of anger stemmed from his persistent unemployment, they figured. The long-term memory loss? How could he possibly remember the thousands of teammates and plays and over 400 games he played or coached in?

His once otherworldly balance was off-kilter. Ah, that’s due to his deteriorating knees. They also prevented him from working out, so his weight ballooned to 270 pounds – but not the healthy 270 he carried as a player. 

As far as he knew he never suffered a concussion – because he was never knocked out. That was the measure then. Was his bell rung? Sure. Ever see stars? Sure, a couple times a game. Whatever. 

As they lived through the post-career years, Cheryl read literature the NFL sent the house about concussions and the potential for long-term brain trauma and its effects. But the dots never quite connected to her, at least initially. She believed his reasons, too. And her high-school sweetheart wasn’t too interested in knowing what real truths lie beneath his truths. 

“He was extremely resistant to anything with people saying … the NFL will send you all the information,” Cheryl began. “You can do this, you can go here, you can do that and I would read it and look at it and he basically said ‘Why the f--- would I want to know if there is anything wrong with me?’ That attitude. ‘Why the f--- would I want to know that?’ And I was like 'OK, maybe you don’t.'”

The tipping point came in 2015. 

“He just stopped working out,” she said, which included no desire to even ride his bicycle. “That was the most dramatic thing. That’s when I was like, 'OK, there’s something wrong with him.'”

So Cheryl arranged a “business” meeting with friend and entrepreneur Randall Reed. Reed was on the board of directors of CereScan, a brain scan imaging facility in Littleton, Colorado.The idea was to get Krumrie to acknowledge there might be more to what he was experiencing than surface-level issues like unemployment and knee pain. 

In the meeting, Krumrie was told how a simple scan of his brain could point them in the direction of treatments. 

The test was called a SPECT scan, which is a type of nuclear imaging that tracks where blood is and isn’t flowing from in the brain. Simply, it’s a test of how well the brain is functioning. 

“The assumption being the more that you use a part of the brain the more blood flow you’re going to require,” Brent Masel, the National Medical Director for the Brain Injury Association of America (BIAA) said. “So if you increase blood flow to that part of the brain, the assumption is that that part of your brain is more active.” 

The SPECT scan is not a tool for detecting chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), and it is different than an MRI or CT scan, which captures the anatomical structure of the brain in both health and disease. 

An MRI, which the NFL has used in its testing of former players, had shown Krumrie’s brain was normal. 

On the three-hour drive back through the mountains to Steamboat Springs from Littleton, Cheryl figured there were two outcomes of her husband's testing. 

“One, there’s something wrong and you can treat it,” she said. “Two, there’s nothing wrong and you’re just being an a-----. And that’s the way we approached it.”

If members of the military could go through this type of testing, Krumrie felt he could handle it as well. Ready for answers, the Krumries sat with Dr. Gregory Hipskind and director of clinical operations Hilary Morris at CereScan. In the company’s conference room, Krumrie’s brain was displayed on the wall. 

There was heavy damage all over. 

Cheryl quickly looked for anything opaque, the one color she knew there was no coming back from. There were none to be found, but the swaths of deep purples, blues and greens concerned her. 

Dr. Hipskind asked if Krumrie had mood swings, if his balance was off, if he lacked the motivation to do physical activity and if he didn’t sleep well. And if he did sleep, if he had vivid, terrible dreams. 

“It was the most humbling experience you ever had,” Tim Krumrie said. 

 He then straightened up in his chair. It scared him.

“I was up like this, like, 'What in the Sam-you-know-what is going on here? I’m screwed up.' And all of a sudden, reality hit. Yeah, I have those things. He said, 'Yeah, you have it. We can help you.'”

In that moment, Krumrie woke up. 

“Doc, get ‘er started up. Let’s go.” 

In that moment, he was familiar again to Cheryl.

“That’s part of a professional athlete’s demeanor, their psyche, that when they decide to do something, it’s just do it and no halfway,” she said.

Krumrie had never gone half way. But to do this his way – all the way – he needed teammates.

“Your wife is the most important part of the whole thing,” he said of Cheryl. “They realize that day after day and day in and out. They see what you went through. It’s hard on them. Simple things. Short term memory. Go to Starbucks, I don’t know.”

He paused and shrugged to signify he would forget the order. 

“Little things. Things like that. They have to be so patient with people like myself. And if you don’t have a good, solid wife, like I have, that understands what is going on and the improvement that went on from remembering things, day-to-day activity..."

"She has been terrific.”

He noted his adult children, Kelly and Dexter, know he’s different than he was. They’ve come to understand him, though it has been tough.

“Knowing what I have to deal with and now keeping abreast of what’s going on, yes, that’s very comforting,” Cheryl said. “But it’s also scary as hell to know where this can lead to.” 

Committing to the new goal of a better future, armed with family support, information and a true cause for his problems, Krumrie set about finding a way to fight it. Reed played a role in this, too, as a partner for inLight, a Food and Drug Administration-approved Polychromatic Light Therapy (PLT) system that uses infrared light to stimulate blood flow. 

The company outfitted Krumrie with a light-filled cap, which he had to use for 30 minutes a day for three months. 

On the first night, he dreamed. There were no fights in the trenches. No violence. Instead, it was of high school coaches and teammates. He woke up recalling names for the first time since … well, he couldn’t recall.

At the end of that months-long treatment cycle, Krumrie got another scan of his brain. 

He taps the screen to wake up his iPad. 

He had fiddled with it for over an hour before this moment, flipping open its case, spinning it around on the countertop. He scrolls through the before and after images. It is startling. The purples aren’t as intense. Some blues turned to greens, some greens returned to normal grey.

And with each color change, his brain reawakens a little.

Heavy on the gas, Krumrie shifts the truck into third gear to climb the roads of the Alpine Mountain and Ranch Club, with an elevation of about 6,800 feet. He does some work up here in the snowfall, clearing and marking snowshoe paths for guests.

Now it’s time for the downhill.

“Wanna go faster?” he asks. “I have a big suspension.” 

He laughs. 

Krumrie is still a farm kid from Wisconsin and loves manual labor around the house. He’ll clear snow off roofs, detail his cars, clean whatever needs to be cleaned. And the treatments, which serve to wake up the blood cells and increase their flow, has him happily telling you about his high school teammates, teachers, bus drivers and coaches. There are other tales from college and with the Bengals.

“I couldn’t tell those stories,” he said. “Couldn’t remember ‘em. College? Couldn’t remember ‘em. Pros? Couldn’t remember ‘em. I lost memory. I’d go to a party and I’d be tapping my wife on the butt.”

He laughs. He wasn’t flirting. It was a silent signal for her to help remind him who he was speaking to.

He is better at that now, but he isn’t cured. The Krumries will be the first to admit that.

“Blood flow does not equate to better brain function – within the normal parameters,” National Brain Injury Association director Masel said. 

“I can’t say that it doesn’t help. But it’s one patient.”

Krumrie needs his sticky notes to remind him of things, a detailed calendar and pictures of the food he needs to pick up at the grocery store. He says if you asked him to read four paragraphs, he probably won’t remember the first one. He wore his AFC Championship ring on Nov. 26 when he was honored at halftime as one of the Bengals’ greatest players, and it was still new to him. He knows his manner of speaking – he says he jumps around a bit – takes some getting used to. 

“That stuff is still in the works,” he says.

To help make it work, though, Krumrie is doing more than just the infrared treatments. He no longer drinks alcohol or his favorite Diet Cokes. He eats healthier. No candy. He’s back to a regular workout regimen.

Masel couldn’t agree with that game plan more – practicing good physical shape is essential in keeping the brain healthy. He did a study of about a dozen former players involved in the lawsuit against the NFL that was settled for $765 million in 2013 and found only one led a healthy lifestyle. The rest had abused their bodies and minds with poor diet, heavy alcohol use and lack of activity. 

Krumrie, who was not part of the initial filing of the lawsuit but was lumped in with all former players in the class action settlement, knows this, lived it, and wants the league – someone – to map out a course of action once that money is paid out.

“I hope you get millions of dollars,” he said. “I hope you do. But God darnit I hope you take care of yourself, too.”

An unexpected byproduct of the physical work Krumrie has put in and his greater understanding of his situation is that a new side of him has emerged.

“There’s a definite sensitive side to him that has come out that is really freaky weird,” Cheryl said with a smile. “He is extremely sensitive to people and their feelings. He’s very empathetic to people, where probably as a player most of the guys around him probably said he’s an a-----. And he probably was.”

Her husband is using his rediscovered persona, his coaching instincts and this new understanding to convey an important message to former players: Advanced tools are out there. Use them. 

“Hey, the reason I say this is because I can,” he said. “I’m not scared. I’m scared of nothin’. I overcome everything.”

But Krumrie stresses every football player needs his own scan and to find his own treatment. 

Such tests would include the SPECT scan, but also the more specific PET scan, which is another form of nuclear medicine that can track specific harmful proteins in the brain – like the Tau proteins that cause CTE. 

“Absolutely,” Masel said. “If you know your disease and understand your disease you can manage your disease better. Absolutely and positively unquestionable.”

There’s no finality here, even against the starkness of the outcropping. 

“This is the same ol’ Tim that’s gonna say, 'Hey, I’m going to make the team. I’m going to kick your ass every play.' I’m going to do it. I beat this thing.”

Ligaments and muscle shred. Bones break. They can be reformed, replaced. This is his brain, though, so he intends to do what he can to enjoy whatever the future holds. 

This is not the end.

Krumrie wheels his truck onto a gravel pull off, with a clear view of the mountain range. He gets out and takes it all in, smiling.

It’s a long sunrise east of the Rockies, ascending slow and high over the top of Steamboat Springs. It brings a lot of joy, that view. Krumrie’s not afraid, and he has a big suspension.