ASHBURN — At one point last September, when daylight continued to make his temples throb and his eyes narrow, Martrell Spaight took a permanent marker and blacked out the lenses of a pair of thick, tinted sunglasses.

It had been weeks since Spaight last participated in any type of football-related activities and the effects of a hit that he had made in the preseason lingered with him. Leaving the apartment caused discomfort. The constant motion of a television triggered dizziness.

Then the depression set in.

Spaight, for years, had been defined by football, a high school standout who had turned a stint at a community college into an all-conference selection at Arkansas. Yet, for the first time in more than a decade, Spaight faced the prospect of a fall without football.

He should have been fighting for playing time as a rookie with the Washington Redskins. Instead, at times, he found himself struggling with his own existence.

“I was like, ‘Man, what do I do with my life now?’” Spaight recalls. “I was trying to deny it in my mind.”

Spaight was, of course, recovering from a concussion — something he knew he had sustained immediately, once he “blacked out for a second,” as he said, on the field. It was a feeling he had once before, when, as a sophomore at Coffeyville Community College in rural Kansas, he hit an opponent so hard that he lost consciousness, forcing him from the game and from playing the following week in a playoff defeat.

The second time was different. Spaight stood up after the impact, finished his preseason game against the Baltimore Ravens, played the next week against the Jacksonville Jaguars and then prepared for the season-opener against the Miami Dolphins, a game in which he played a total of nine snaps on special teams.

He ended up playing roughly 63 percent of all defensive snaps during the preseason, including 35 of 45 against the Jaguars — four days after he believes he sustained the concussion.

“I’m brought up in the old-school way where if you get knocked out, that’s normal,” says Spaight, who earned a reputation in college for his hard hits. “This time, they got the best of me.”

That’s when the symptoms became too much to bear. That’s when Spaight, placed on injured reserve nearly a month after the concussion, all but disappeared.

Assesing the damage

Three days after the Redskins lost to the Dolphins, coach Jay Gruden ran down a list of names of players who were recovering from injuries. Spaight, who had not been previously included on any injury report, was one of them.

“He had concussion symptoms, so he’s in the protocol,” Gruden said that day, then acknowledged that he did not know when the concussion occurred.

Spaight said he chose not to report the situation to the Redskins‘ medical staff immediately in part because he was aware of the possibility that, as a fifth-round draft pick on the roster bubble, he might not make the team if he could not play.

Exactly when the concussion happened isn’t clear. Spaight said he remembers making helmet-to-helmet contact with a Ravens player who was trying to block him on a running play.

He had no clue that an impact that he considered trivial would afflict him for weeks.

“I really didn’t think nothing of it at the moment,” Spaight says. “I got up, finished the game, played the next preseason game and Week 1, and then I started feeling kind of out of it. I told them what happened and you know, the next thing, IR came.”

For the past five seasons, the NFL has had independent observers in the press box monitor players’ actions to help identify any player who may have sustained a concussion. Last year, it granted those individuals the ability to stop the game and subject an afflicted player to additional medical testing.

Yet, a review of the television broadcast of that game does not clearly show a point where Spaight made helmet-to-helmet contact and then struggled to get to his feet. The absence of so-called “visible symptoms” underlines how difficult real-time assessments can be.

Spaight made the Redskins when rosters were finalized in early September and with his symptoms persisting. Only after the game against the Dolphins did Spaight realize he would be unable to continue playing.

“It just got to the point where I couldn’t really focus in the meeting room or retain any of that information,” Spaight says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s probably what happened. I’m sure that’s what happened.’”

An NFL spokesman said after Spaight was put on injured reserve that the league did not investigate the Redskins‘ handling of Spaight’s concussion. The Redskins did not grant requests in recent days to speak to members of their medical and athletic training staffs regarding the diagnosis and treatment of the injury.

In the weeks after the season opener, Spaight was subject to a battery of neurocognitive tests and also underwent an MRI exam to evaluate any lesions or bleeding on his brain. At the time, teammates worried about over Spaight’s well-being, with one expressing concern over what he thought was Spaight’s abnormal sensitivity to light.

The Redskins eventually placed Spaight on injured reserve on Sept. 22, seven days shy of a month after he said the injury occurred.

“It was hard for a while, seeing it scroll on the bottom line and seeing ‘Martrell Spaight out with a concussion,’” he says. “Then it hit me like, ‘Man, I do have a concussion.’”

‘The most precious part’

Although Spaight acknowledged knowing he had sustained a concussion in the moments after the hit, his willingness to keep playing may not have been his own choice.

According to Douglas Smith, the director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, the moments directly after a concussion can be marked by memory loss and impaired decision-making.

What may come across as what is considered the “warrior mentality” may actually be the result of an individual temporarily being unable to process simple choices.

“You have a problem in that the players themselves are often a really bad judge,” Smith said. “Independent of their motivation, they may not have the right cognitive status to decide whether they should stay in the game or not — or to even recognize that they have a problem.”

Spaight, though, decided to keep playing each of the next two weeks, even while saddled with concussion symptoms. According to a study of 700 Division I college players published in the Journal of Neurotrauma in 2014, only one in 28 ever reported having exhibited signs of a concussion.

That’s without financial compensation at stake — unlike in the NFL, where injured players can be discarded at a team’s whim.

“Players who are not the stars, or who are not being underpaid, have consequences if they report a concussion,” said Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, which works in partnership with Boston University to advance research into neurological disorders.

“There are plenty of anecdotes of players who can no longer be signed after having multiple concussions. They’re labeled a ‘concussion case.’ That might gloss over the reality that, most players that I speak to who understand concussions and are honest about them, have to play though concussions all the time.”

For players to no longer feel compelled to play through trauma, Nowinski believes the NFL should start by fully guaranteeing all contracts. That would ensure players such as Spaight, who would have seen only a fraction of the four-year, $2.5 million contract he had signed had he not made the Redskins, would be physically and financially secure.

“If you damage your leg or your arm playing sports, it’s a real bummer that you’re disabled, possibly even for life,” said Smith, the neurosurgery professor. “But, when you damage your brain, that’s who you are. That’s the most precious part of you. That’s you. How much are you willing to put on the line of you for a game? This is always a conundrum.”

Spaight’s symptoms, including his depression, finally dissipated in early October, but only after minimizing his sensory stimulations. He was cleared for physical activity and resumed his training and weightlifting shortly thereafter, and he rejoined his teammates for the start of the Redskins‘ offseason workouts in April.

He has tried to shy away from discussing the concussion and his recovery, believing that his willingness to move on has helped him recover. He never thought about giving up football, even after the recent high-profile retirements of Chris Borland and A.J. Tarpley, linebackers who retired after their rookie seasons.

“Every athlete knows the consequences of playing this sport,” Spaight says. “We all know the consequences, but I just choose to play the game that I love.”

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