LOS ANGELES — In a verdict that could affect countless claims by athletes who sue sports organizations for head injuries, a Los Angeles jury on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit seeking $55 million by the widow of a former USC football player who said the NCAA failed to protect him from repeated head trauma that led to his death.
Matthew Gee, a linebacker on the 1990 Rose Bowl-winning squad, endured an estimated 6,000 hits as a college athlete, lawyers for his widow said. They alleged these impacts caused permanent brain damage, and led to cocaine and alcohol use that eventually killed him at age 49.
The NCAA, the governing body of U.S. college sports, said it had nothing to do with Gee’s death, which it said was a sudden cardiac arrest brought on by untreated hypertension and acute cocaine toxicity. A lawyer for the NCAA said Gee suffered from many other health problems not related to football, such as liver cirrhosis, that would have eventually killed him.
Hundreds of wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits have been brought by college football players against the NCAA in the past decade, but Gee’s was the first one to reach a jury. The suit alleged that hits to the head led to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease known by the acronym CTE.
Judge Terry Green told jurors in Los Angeles Superior Court they “made history” in the first case of its kind.
“We are gratified that the jury, after considering four weeks of evidence and testimony, agreed overwhelmingly with our position in this case,” Scott Bearby, NCAA senior vice president of legal affairs and general counsel, said in a statement. “The NCAA bore no responsibility for Mr. Gee’s tragic death, and furthermore, the case was not supported by medical science linking Mr. Gee’s death to his college football career. We express our deepest sympathies to Mr. Gee’s family.”
The statement also said the organization “will continue to aggressively defend against cases like this that wrongly try to…
