Lockout Could Cost Former Lineman Care at Dementia Facility
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Bruce Schwager, with his wife, Bette, spends most waking hours staring at the NFL Network.
By ALAN SCHWARZ
Published: June 14, 2011
SUGAR LAND, Tex. — The potential casualties of the N.F.L.’s work stoppage include players, owners and, eventually, parking-lot attendants and many others whose work is tied to the sport. The lockout’s first victim, however, could be a former merchant seaman from Brooklyn who once worked on the Apollo lunar module but today lies inert in Room 12 at the Silverado dementia-care facility here.
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Schwager played football at the United States Merchant Marine Academy and attended professional football training camps after college.
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
Schwager's financial support from the N.F.L. players union ended when the lockout began, and he is scheduled to be evicted from his care facility on July 2.
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Since July 2009, the charitable arm of the N.F.L. players union had voluntarily paid Schwager’s medical bills, which eventually topped $250,000. Schwager never played in a regular-season game — he joined the union by attending two training camps — and the players association treated him as one of its own.
But on March 14, the first day of business after the N.F.L. lockout began and the union prepared for what could be a long and costly work stoppage, a union official called Schwager’s son and said the aid would cease immediately.
With his family unable to pay for continuing care at Silverado, Schwager is scheduled to be evicted on July 2. Bette Schwager said she had yet to find a facility that would care for her husband, who remains large, strong and combative when agitated. Schwager’s doctor said in an interview that forcing him to move from his familiar surroundings, given his advanced coronary disease, could bring on a fatal heart attack.
The Schwager situation comes as football’s players association faces the prospect of tumbling revenues during negotiations for a new labor contract — in which it is seeking increased benefits for retired players — and while all of football wrestles with how to compensate veterans whose neurological disease is increasingly attributed to football.
Three players association officials, including the executive director, DeMaurice Smith, did not respond to messages requesting comment about Schwager’s case. In an April 4 letter to the Schwagers’ lawyer, Cy Smith, DeMaurice Smith wrote, “We have been and remain deeply concerned about the financial and medical well-being of Mr. Schwager and his family during this crisis,” but he added that there was no “agreement to pay those expenses indefinitely into the future.”
DeMaurice Smith did not refer to the lockout in his letter. But Schwager’s son, Joshua, said that the aid ceasing so soon after the work stoppage began “cannot be a coincidence.”
Bette and Joshua Schwager acknowledged that the union had been under no legal obligation to help their family two summers ago through the Players Assistance Trust. The aid appeared to derive in part from how the union’s director of retired players, Andre Collins, played briefly with Joshua Schwager at Penn State in the late 1980s and knew the family.
Bette and Joshua Schwager contend, however, that Collins never mentioned any limit on the assistance the Players Assistance Trust would provide, and that they relied on his promises. In e-mails she shared with The New York Times, Collins initially wrote that “The NFLPA’s PAT Fund will be responsible for the hospice bill” and, eight months later, that the union was “still fully committed” to Schwager’s care.
“We based everything in our lives on what they told us — that they’d take care of him,” Bette Schwager said while packing her husband’s belongings. “I sold my home and signed a rental lease right around the corner from here so I could be near him. Now my whole world is falling apart.”
Schwager grew up in Brooklyn near two soon-to-be prominent football families, the Lombardis and the Paternos, as Jewish as they were Italian. (To this day, good friends call Schwager “Ben,” short for his Hebrew name, Binyomin.) He grew to 6 feet 3 inches and 260 pounds and turned down scholarships at several prominent college programs to enroll in the engineering program at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., mostly for the discipline a military environment would provide.
The Chicago Cardinals selected him late in the 1955 draft, cut him in his first camp, then refused to trade him off their reserve list despite his requests for a chance with another team. The Cardinals kept him under contract throughout his service in the Navy from 1956 through 1958 and refused to release him until April 1959, when teams felt he was no longer in game shape.
Schwager played one year in Canada and attended camp with the expansion New York Titans (now the Jets) in 1960, but he was injured and cut before the season began. He went on to work for Grumman, a prominent supplier of aircraft to the military, then moved to Houston to work with NASA, for which he helped on the design for the lunar landing module that eased Neil Armstrong and others onto the Moon. He later went into the restaurant business, and in his mid-60s he began showing signs of early-onset dementia; he was institutionalized two years ago.
A relative technicality kept Schwager from qualifying for the N.F.L.’s retirement program, which would have made him eligible for the league and union’s 88 Plan, which assists the families of veterans with dementia by paying up to $88,000 a year for medical expenses. Knowing this, Joshua Schwager said, Collins arranged for the Players Assistance Trust essentially to treat his father as if he qualified for the 88 Plan and more.
At the time, Joshua Schwager said, Collins had been told his father had been given two to six months to live. His living for two years and counting has surprised everyone, he said.
“It was amazing the way they stepped up,” Joshua Schwager said. “But the way they did this now, with no warning, just perplexes us. They say they’re going through the lockout to help players from the past, present and future, and that the little guy is as important as the big guy. But are you really going to follow through on that?”
DeMaurice Smith did not refer to Schwager’s surprising longevity in his letter, but wrote, “No agreement, either orally or in writing, has ever been made” to pay his hospice care expenses “for an indefinite period of time.”
Silverado, with Schwager’s bills unpaid since May, has given the family until July 2 to find another facility. Even if one is found, however, one of Schwager’s physicians, Dr. David Aguilar of the Baylor College of Medicine, said in a letter that a move from Silverado could lead to “worsening heart and neurologic disease and possible death.”
“If he became agitated, he could have a heart attack,” Dr. Aguilar said in a telephone interview. “The Bruce I know, you’d have to hold him down to get him out of there. We don’t know what he understands that could be rationalized.”
Bette and Joshua Schwager have told Bruce nothing about the fight with the players association, assuming he would not comprehend it anyway. He is barely communicative. He does not recognize himself in the pictures on his walls, from the shot of him playing line at Merchant Marine to the group photo of Houston-area N.F.L. veterans from 2005 titled, “Honoring Houston’s N.F.L. Legacy.”
The closest he and Bette get to conversing came when he raised his hand, touched her face and mumbled, “I won’t be able to drive home.”
Later, seeing Joshua pack up a Nerf football from a shelf, he gestured for him to bring it over and let him hold it.
His massive right hand, with fingers mangled from years on football’s lines, gripped the ball perfectly on the seams. As Joshua sat cross-legged on the floor to continue packing, Schwager forced his arm forward and tossed the ball. It went straight to his son, a perfect, downward spiral.
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