Briana Scurry, a women’s soccer star, almost lost her two gold medals after a traumatic brain injury. Now she’s an advocate for better care for athletes. She spoke on Sunday, Dec. 8, at the Purdue Northwest Sinai Forum, wrapping up this year’s series of lectures. Scurry trained hard to realize her childhood dream of becoming an Olympian, first in football then in soccer. Her goal was to compete in the Olympics in 1996. She was the starting goalkeeper for the U.S. women’s national soccer team in the 1996 Summer Olympics, winning a gold medal. She won another gold medal in the 2004 Olympics. In addition, she won the World Cup in 1999 and third place at the World Cup in 1995 and 2003. In 2017, she was elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame, the first woman goalkeeper and the first Black woman to do so. Scurry’s jersey from the 1999 World Cup competition is on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African American History and Culture. That’s a story in itself. In 2016, when the Smithsonian was creating the museum, the curators were looking to put amazing stuff in it. “I didn’t know how my career sport was affecting my community. I didn’t know how it was being received by the African American community. I was playing a sport that was predominantly white, predominantly suburban,” she said. At a soccer convention, the son of one of Scurry’s former coaches told her, “These people from the Smithsonian have been reaching out to me trying to get ahold of you. Here’s the card.” “I thought he was joking, so I took the card and gave it to my wife. She’s also my manager. She called them, and sure enough, they wanted me to be in the game changers exhibit on the third floor,” Scurry said. The jersey was worn during the American team’s final 1999 game. “There’s a 10-minute video clip that runs through, and I’m in it with my penalty kick save against China,” she said. “When you go into the exhibit, I’m also in the game changers right next to Althea Gibson, Tiger Woods, Serena and Venus Williams.” Scurry called the dedication ceremony “the most humbling thing that I’ve ever experienced.” Scurry met her future wife at one of the darkest points in Scurry’s life. Two-time Olympic gold medalist Briana Scurry speaks at Purdue University Northwest on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024, in Westville as part of the PNW Sinai Forum lecture series. Scurry’s stellar soccer career ended in 2010 with a traumatic brain injury. (Doug Ross/for Post-Tribune) In 2010, playing in the Women’s Professional Soccer League, Scurry was reaching for a save near the ground. An opposing player from the Philadelphia Independence was there to kick the ball. “Instead of getting the ball, she crashed in the side of my head. I remember my first thought was did I make the save. I remember having the ball in my hands and standing up and the backs of the jerseys were blurry, and I kept listing to the left,” Scurry recalled. “I was standing there with the ball, and the referee’s like, ‘Come on, keep, come on.’” “It was so bizarre because he had to tell me kick the ball, to put the ball back in the play, and so for the next several minutes I continued to play and as I’m getting shot after shot, I could see like the frames of the ball coming at me. Instead of it being one solid thing, it was like it had a shadow or a tail on it. I remember just trying to stand and just kind of listing to the left. I knew I was in trouble, but I wanted to wait until halftime,” she said. As she walked off the pitch, the trainer held her hand and asked if she was OK. “I’ve suffered many concussions before that, probably way more than I want to admit, because sometimes as an athlete you don’t talk about it; you just keep it on the down low. You don’t want to say anything.” Now Scurry knows the difference a head injury makes. “You can fight through injury, ankle, shoulder, wrist, knee,” she said, but not a head injury. “I came out of the game in April 2010. I have not played soccer since. That was not only the end of that game for me, it was the end of that season for me. It was the end of my career and the start of an odyssey into the depths of hell for the next three years.” “I had misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis,” Scurry said. “I kept telling my doctors there’s something really wrong. I had all the basic symptoms that you all know very well. I had insomnia, I had headaches, I had loss of memory, I had difficulty with light, I had difficulty with motion. I struggled with physical symptoms but also emotional symptoms. I had anxiety. I couldn’t focus. I can focus with 90,000 people in 107 degrees on the stage of the women’s World Cup final, and the panel of the ball I could focus on that, but I couldn’t focus.” Scurry would wake up day after day “hoping the veil of fog, of disconnect, would go away. Every day, I woke up feeling worse and worse and worse.” She was in a spiral. “I kept going deeper and deeper and deeper into depression. I burned through all my savings. I couldn’t work. I could barely have any inspiration or passion or energy to do much of anything. I started to withdraw into myself. I started to get really, really depressed. I knew I was in trouble.” “One night, very, very late after self-medicating, I saw an advertisement for precious metals and valuables,” Scurry said. The only things she had of any value were her Olympic gold medals, she said. She needed the money because the insurance company was fighting her over paying for treatment, so she pawned the medals. Soon after that, one of Scurry’s friends called her with contact information for a woman who might help her battle the insurance company. At that point, Scurry hadn’t told anyone she had pawned the gold medals. Scurry was too proud to ask for help but her friend threatened to break off contact with her if Scurry still refused to call that woman for help. That woman wanted to do a documentary featuring Scurry and wanted the gold medals in the video. Scurry said she didn’t have them, that they were at her mother’s house. Fine, the woman said, we’ll go to your mother’s house to get them. Scurry had to confess she pawned them. The woman then decided to pay for them. “That woman is now my wife,” Scurry said. “In my darkest day, in my darkest hour, I don’t know where she came from or why, because my friend went to bat for me.” “I know there’s people in this room who are struggling, and the reason I tell my story about my head injuries is because it’s important and I want to expose it. “I want to make sure that you know I’m authentic and know that you, too, can have help, but you have to be willing.” Every now and then, her injury flares up. This week, she was heading to Boston for additional tests. “I have committed my brain to science when I don’t need it anymore,” Scurry said. She’s participating in a study for athletes in the NFL. Other athletes can go and get treatment there. Scurry said some protective gear is starting to come to market. One is a collar worn around the neck. “There’s a theory, and there’s some good science behind it, that if you have a little bit of pressure on either side of these arteries on the side of your neck, that there’s more blood in the brain and somehow that helps the concussion not be as severe,” she said. “What would help is if the big names wear them and then everybody would see it. Everybody would want it,” she said. The other promising gear is a sort of headband that dissipates the hit. That would have helped her, she said. If FIFA, the international soccer association, were to mandate its use, that would be a boon, she said. In the NFL, some players have more padding on their helmets, which is starting to help. Scurry said she didn’t know of an organization to help people with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. She mused that she might need to start one. Doug Ross is a freelance writer for the Post-Tribune.