Gay Culverhouse, who set aside his career focused on special education and child psychiatry to join the family business, the NFL Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and who continued to champion the cause of former weakened professional football players by dementia and other health problems, died Wednesday at his home in Fernandina Beach, Florida. She was 73 years old.
A family spokesperson said the cause was complications from myelofibrosis, a type of chronic leukemia that inhibits the production of red blood cells.
Ms. Culverhouse spent almost a decade as a senior executive with the Buccaneers when they belonged to her father, Hugh Culverhouse Sr., who brought them into the NFL as an expansion team in 1974. (Their first match took place in 1976.)
Although she loves sports, she never intended to make football a career. Before joining the Bucs in 1986, she obtained a master’s and doctorate in mental retardation research from Columbia University, and she was an instructor at the University of South Florida College of Medicine, as an education specialist specialized in child psychiatry, from 1982 to 1986.
She resigned as president of the Buccaneers in 1994, then made a resounding comeback on the professional football scene 15 years later when she lent her voice, supported by her money, to the cause of retired players. suffering from brain disorders that could have resulted from the concussions on the ground largely ignored by their teams.
After finding former players with neurological disorders, Ms. Culverhouse testified in October 2009 at a hearing of the Chamber’s judicial committee on brain damage from football.
She described the team doctors as management figures whose main concern was to keep an injured player on the field to win matches. Calling for the hiring of independent doctors and mandatory guidelines for the removal of concussion gamers, she shared what she had found among retired gamblers who were incapacitated.
“When these men played, there were no huge wages,” she said. “They are no longer under siege for autographs. They walk in our lives like old men paralyzed by arthritis and, in some cases, dementia.
“My men have headaches that never stop. They cannot remember where they are going or what they want to say without writing it down. Some are on the welfare of the government. Some are addicted to pain relievers. Some have died. “
Ms. Culverhouse subsequently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to found and fund the player education program of Gay Culverhouse, now known as the Retired Player Assistance Program.
Based in Tampa and opened a month after her testimony to Congress, she locates former players with dementia, provides them with medical assistance and helps them apply for a program, jointly managed by the NFL and the players’ union and adopted in 2007, which provides up to $ 130.00 per year in financial assistance for the long-term care of people with dementia.
The NFL and its alumni association announced in October 2010 that they would work with Ms. Culverhouse’s organization to expand its efforts.
Shortly before her testimony at the congressional hearing, Ms. Culverhouse met with several former Buccaneer players who were suffering from neurological disorders. They included Scot Brantley, a linebacker with the team for eight seasons in the 1980s, who had lost short-term memory.
“What I have always admired about Gay is that she is a rebel with a cause,” Brantley told the New York Times. “Football was a world of men. Is still. I’ve always said, if you want something done and done right, involve a woman.
“No one else was interested in us for a second,” he said. “We might as well have the plague.”
Gay Culverhouse was born on February 5, 1947 in Montgomery, Alberta. Her father and mother, Joy (McCann) Culverhouse, met while studying at the University of Alabama.
She graduated from the University of Florida in 1969 with a diploma in special education before pursuing graduate studies at Columbia.
At her father’s request, she set aside her career to join the Bucs, overseeing community relations and finance. She became vice-president and treasurer in 1990 and team chair responsible for business affairs later that year. She has been one of the highest ranked women in the NFL for years
She resigned from her position as team chair in May 1994. Her father died in August and, in 1995, the estate trustees, estimated at approximately $ 380 million, sold the team to Malcolm Glazer, a Florida businessman, whose family still owns.
Ms. Culverhouse left Florida in 1995 after being traumatized by the arrest of an ex-convict, convicted of conspiracy to kidnap her or her daughter, a student at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a $ 1 million ransom.
She was briefly president of Notre Dame College in the suburbs of Cleveland, a women’s school at the time. She also continued to work in special education and was one of the main competitors on the Paso Fino equestrian circuit.
Culverhouse said she was called upon to help former players with dementia after Bucs’ offensive lineman Tom McHale during his time at the team’s front office died of a drug overdose in May 2008 at 45 years old and had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head.
“I became very worried and started to study concussions more carefully,” she told ESPN. “And I thought, ‘I have to do something. I can’t let this fester. “
She wrote on the subject in “Throwaway Players: NFL Pee Soccer Concussion Crisis” (2011).
In 2009, he was told that blood cancer and kidney failure left him only six months to live. Surviving this decade-long prediction, she often said that she knew she was on a loan.
In addition to her daughter, Leigh Standley, Mrs. Culverhouse’s survivors include a son, Chris; one brother, Hugh Jr., a lawyer in Miami; and several grandchildren. Her mother, Joy, died in 2016. Ms. Culverhouse had been married three times but was not married at the time of her death.
In April 2010, Ms. Culverhouse was asked if she felt guilty for helping to lead the Buc organization at a time when players’ concussions were barely treated and dismissed for little more than a whim .
“None of us really knew what was going on,” she told The Times. “Now I’m going to stand in front of a truck to fix things.”
Ken Belson contributed to the report.
