When Mike “Iron Mike” Webster got hurt, it was Julian Bailes’s job to get him back out on the field. Amid the crunching collisions and spectacular crashes of professional American Football, Bailes, the team doctor, ensured that Webster was able to continue to carry the hopes of his home city.
So it was that even as industrial decline brought depression to Pittsburgh, Webster helped the city to soar — becoming one of the NFL’s greatest players in the process.
Webster, then, is more than worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, and now he has got one.
But this muscled all-American star is not the hero of the film; in Concussion the quietly dogged Bailes — played by Alec Baldwin — is. And scientists here in the