- The Unforgettable Norman Hadley: A Larger-Than-Life Rugby Star
- An Enigmatic Death: Suicide or Result of Head Trauma?
- Searching for Answers: Exploring the Possibility of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
Stormin’ Norman Hadley was a man resembling a bear. “‘Big?'” says his closest friend Eddie Evans. “‘Big’ is too small of a word.” Hadley was 6 feet 7 inches tall, weighed approximately 280 pounds, and could bench press more weight. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he won 15 caps for Canada as a lock forward and should have won more. He played four Tests for the Barbarians and spent the finest years of his career at Wasps, where his teammate Lawrence Dallaglio recalls him as “the hardest man I’ve ever had to lift.” Dallaglio believes Hadley “must have been one of the largest players in the history of the sport.”
And one of the most brilliant. Evans states, “His intelligence was terrifying.” Hadley had an honors degree in economics and an MBA from the top of his class, which he parlayed into a multimillion-dollar finance career. Evans relished it whenever an outsider made the error of underestimating Norman. “They’d look at him and assume he was a typical jock as if he were a big fool, and then he’d say one of his lines.” He lowers his pitch by an octave. “Like, ‘Don’t engage me in a battle of wits, sunshine, because you’re pathetically unprepared.'”
Hadley was and remains a man about whom people enjoy retelling humorous anecdotes, typically ones that make them chuckle out loud once more.
“Did you hear the one about him and Jason Leonard?” Or, “What about the time he spent on the train fighting those two thugs?” This made the newspaper. “Sneers Earn Lout Some Clout.” But these are not the stories that Norman’s family wishes to share. David, his older sibling, would prefer to never hear any of them again. “They always glorify violence,” he declares. “Now that I look back, I see each blow as another nail in his coffin.”
David has his anecdote about Norman, but few rugby players are interested in hearing it. When it is brought up, conversations cease and emails mentioning it go unanswered.
On March 26, 2016, police discovered Norman’s body in a Tokyo hotel room. He was 51. David’s emergency contacts page in his passport was left blank, but the Canadian embassy traced his number and called him. The police had not yet determined the cause of the death, but rumors were already circulating within Norman’s social circle that it was a heart attack. Evans told people this, it was stated in the initial obituaries, and there are still friends, colleagues, and teammates who believe this to be the case.
David never believed it. He always believed that Norman had committed suicide. He was correct. A month later, the autopsy revealed that he had fatally overdosed.
David believes that Norman arranged his final days so that no one would know how or why he died, and that he asked his closest friends to claim he died of a heart attack. Evans denies this. David, however, recalls a conversation he had with Norman ten years ago in which he detailed in great detail his plan to commit suicide. “The attention to detail, the meticulous planning, and the entire plan’s focus on evading detection were incredibly surprising.”
Every untimely death leaves queries unanswered, but Norman’s has left the most.
By the end, David and Norman had stopped communicating. Since David’s wedding, when Norm, this great, gregarious man, arrived late, “sullied and angry,” and declined to speak to the bride, they had not seen each other. It was not solely David. In the final two years of his existence, Norm severed all ties with his family. Michael and Anita, their parents, called and wrote, but Norm never responded. Anita Hadley states, “I have an entire stack of emails that I sent to him before he passed away.” “How are you? Please inform us?” At the very least, let us know if you’re healthy.” Norm’s responses became shorter and shorter until they eventually ceased. He then terminated the account.
Anita asks, “You always wonder, ‘What did I say? What did I do?'” “I don’t know.”
They are aware that he has been in immense physical and mental suffering for quite some time. They are aware that he was severely depressed and had become paranoid, withdrawn, and volatile. And they are aware that he stopped working and began traveling the globe in search of a cure. Over time, he abandoned Western medicine. Anita reports that he spent the last two years of his life traveling to China, Brazil, and “some very out-of-the-way places,” where he visited “secular monasteries, experimental medicines, and weed shops” because “he was convinced that Western medicine was inadequate for the task.”
His travels eventually brought him back to that Tokyo hotel room.
There are still no obvious explanations for what happened to Norman Hadley seven years later, and there never will be. David, however, believes he knows. He is a physician. He specializes in emergency and trauma medicine. And he believes that his sibling was afflicted with chronic traumatic encephalopathy due to repeated head trauma.
“The constellation of symptoms, the age at which it manifested, and his history of head trauma all fit the classic pattern.” David believes that Norm arrived at the same conclusion in the end.
David is aware that Norm watched Will Smith’s Concussion, a film about the disease, and discussed it with a friend afterward. Norm and David have never discussed this topic.
Norman could not have been certain at the time, as CTE can only be definitively diagnosed postmortem. And David cannot be certain at this time because the test must be conducted within 72 hours of mortality. He attempted to have Norman’s body sent to Boston University for examination at its specialized CTE Centre, but Tokyo is too far away and there were too many bureaucratic obstacles. He wonders if that was intentional as well.
“I believe his plan at the end was not to have an autopsy because, as he told me years earlier, he didn’t want people to know he had depression and anxiety, and I think this CTE thing scared him to death and he didn’t want people to know he had it.”
There is no evidence of a causal connection between CTE and suicide. Current research indicates that the suicide rate among retired professional athletes is lower than the suicide rate among the general population and that the suicide rate among those diagnosed with CTE is lower than the suicide rate among those diagnosed with other maladies. In 2019, a group of prominent experts in the field was so concerned with how the media reported isolated cases of CTE in athletes that they penned an open letter to the Lancet.
They explained that “often a false impression is conveyed that CTE is clinically defined, that its prevalence is high, and that pathology evaluation is a simple yes-or-no decision.”
None of these things are true, and the suggestion that they are means that “individuals with potentially treatable conditions, such as depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, may make decisions about their future based on a mistaken belief that their symptoms inevitably portend an incurable, degenerative brain disease leading to dementia.” The symptoms of Norman’s mental illness may have been treatable.
The experts I consulted for this piece said his symptoms were not caused by CTE.
So much of this is still up for debate. At the beginning of the month, the Concussion in Sport Group, which influences global sport policy, issued its most recent consensus statement. It was widely criticized by campaign groups because it still refuses to acknowledge a causal link between head trauma, contact sport, and CTE, a stance that places it at odds with the US National Institutes of Health and families like Norman Hadley’s.
The Hadley family is struggling to understand CTE and Norman’s death after months of reporting. In a sea of uncertainty, his loved ones had to find solutions.
Evans possesses his. He states, “We know he committed suicide, but we do not know that he did so because he was struck in the head.” Evans won 49 caps for Canada, and he played alongside and against Norman the entire time. He guards his companion and the game that brought them together. Evans says, “I would love for it to be so black and white.” I know Norm’s head wasn’t twisted up and he didn’t hate everyone.
He recalls a conversation he had with David following the funeral of Norm. “He told me, ‘Eddie, it’s crucial that you inform people that he had this post-concussion syndrome. We won’t be able to help anyone unless you explain that.’ I’m not convinced that’s what Norm had. I believe that it was a confluence of factors. Since he was a child, Norm has been perpetually gloomy, a trait he, unfortunately, maintained throughout his existence.
