At the far end of a palm-lined strip mall in Boca Raton, Florida, a crowd waits in line for a miracle. Roughly 300 people — mostly men, from high-school jocks to potbellied dads — know just what they're here for: more muscle, more energy, more libido. "I want to get really vascular," says a guy in his thirties, referencing the pipelike veins coursing beneath the skin of pro bodybuilders. He has short brown hair, hairless arms, and a T-shirt that reads, I may look alone, but really I'm just that far ahead. An older, balding man next to him says he just wants to feel younger.
Working the line is a bouncy brunette pouring plastic shot glasses full of Windex-blue liquid. Most of the guys grab one and toss it back, no questions asked. "It's a preworkout," she says, "and it's $35 inside." By "preworkout" she means it's designed to give you a jolt of energy before the gym. Exactly how it does this isn't a question anyone seems to be asking. Inside the store, Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar, are pills and powders that claim to do everything from boost sex drive to increase muscle mass and dissolve fat.
Boca Nutrition's owners, PJ Braun and Aaron Singerman, are greeting customers like old friends, with bear hugs and handshakes. Both men are absurdly muscular. Singerman, 36, is 6-foot-2 with slicked-back brown hair. He has a goatee and narrow-rimmed glasses, and his bulky frame fills out his blue T-shirt like an overstuffed bag. Braun, 35, who has black hair gelled into short spikes, is shorter and bulkier. Stretch marks scar his arms.
In addition to Boca Nutrition, the pair owns the supplements manufacturer Blackstone Labs, which they started in 2012. Since then the company has hawked tens of millions of dollars' worth of products promising to make men stronger, bigger, last longer in the sack, and even gain a mental edge. For the most part, their over-the-counter powders do exactly what they claim to do, in part because they sometimes include compounds not approved or even banned by the FDA. It's a legally dubious but common practice — and an easy way to make a killing while giving people the results they want. (Braun calls this a mischaracterization: "We have always tried to produce nothing but cutting-edge and compliant products. As soon as we have any direction from the FDA on an issue it has not spoken on before, for better or worse, we respect its statement and adjust our products accordingly.") Blackstone has grown by 100 percent every year since opening shop five years ago. Its sales now top $20 million annually, and it's featured in Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing companies. And Braun and Singerman are far from done.
"I am not even fucking close to satisfied with Blackstone Labs," Braun boasted in a video posted to Facebook last year. "I want to be the biggest company in the world."
Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar is their newest venture, a retail store that serves up various protein-packed shakes and sells Blackstone's full line of supplements. The sleek space, with shelves full of oversize bottles and racks of workout gear, is like a Whole Foods for gym rats. They opened the first store seven months ago in West Boca. Today is the grand opening of their second location, and devotees have shown up for discounted supplements and to meet a handful of celebrity bodybuilders flown in for the occasion, including Kai Greene, the most famous weightlifter since Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But among this crowd, Braun and Singerman are the real stars. They pose for photos and hype their cars, a Corvette and a Ferrari, both black and parked prominently out front. One of the fanboys is a 24-year-old named Brett, who drove four hours to attend the event. "I couldn't help but show my support for PJ and Aaron," he says. A personal trainer from Palm Coast, Florida, Brett has used a wide variety of Blackstone products, including one called Ostapure, a supplement that contained steroid-like drugs called SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators). The unlicensed drugs were developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck as a potential treatment for muscle wasting in cancer patients. But it was the drugs' muscle-mass-building properties that made them a big hit among weightlifters like Brett. Blackstone recently stopped selling Ostapure after being sued by another supplements maker hoping to clean up the industry. "The strongest product of theirs," Brett says a bit wistfully.
Inside the store, Braun shows me one of his latest creations, muscle-building pills inside a black bottle labeled brutal 4ce in blocky letters that drip with blue icicles. "It'll make you a lot stronger and more aggressive in the gym," he says. "Let's say you're 35, 40 years old and your testosterone isn't as high as it used to be. This will keep your testosterone so high that you'll be like an 18-year-old!"
When I ask Braun how, he launches into a chemistry lecture. "Your body converts it into 4-andro [a testosterone booster], so it'll bulk you up," he says, noting that Brutal 4ce has the side effect of creating estrogen, which could give you what bodybuilders call "bitch tits." This can be countered, however, by taking an estrogen blocker. "Most of our customers are pretty knowledgeable," he says, "so they know they need to do that."
As the festivities wind down, I grab a $46.99 bottle of Cobra 6 Extreme, an amped-up version of their top-selling Cobra 6, a preworkout supplement formulated with various stimulants. At the checkout, a slim guy in his twenties, part smoothie barista, part pharmacist, looks at what I'm buying and asks me if I've tried it before. No, I say.
"So you don't know what you're getting yourself into?"
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"If you're not used to taking a lot of stimulants, you should start with the regular Cobra 6. You might not like the way this makes you feel."
In the U.S., dietary supplements are a $38-billion-a-year industry. Sixty-five percent of men in America take one, whether to lose weight, grow hair, gain muscle, or keep an erection long into the night. There's a wide range of products, and most veer toward opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side are the homeopathic cures and the herbal remedies like echinacea, products that may not do much of anything besides drain your bank account. On the opposite end are the products that work precisely because they rely on pharmaceutical ingredients, many not listed anywhere on the label. In 2014, for example, the FDA recalled several weight-loss supplements with names like Super Fat Burner because they contained the prescription drug sibutramine, as well as phenolphthalein, a banned laxative linked to genetic mutations — but not before a rash of hospitalizations.
It's the supplements laced with prescription drugs that are more troubling. They result in 23,000 emergency room visits every year, and more than 2,000 hospitalizations. The supplements are often sold under names like Lean FX and Stiff Nights, and the ingredients are a list of acronyms only a chemist could decipher: DMAA, 17b-hydroxy 2a, or 17b-dimethyl 5a-androstan 3-one azine.
"We're talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. "The more likely it helps your workout," Cohen says, "the more likely it's going to adversely affect your health."
The FDA oversees the industry, but it's woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don't bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there's effectively no punishment if they don't. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients. ("Blackstone continues to innovate by researching new products and new ingredients," says Braun. "If anything, we would welcome clearer guidance from the FDA so we don't have to discontinue any products.")
"It's the Wild West," says Dan Fabricant, who was the FDA's director of the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs from 2011 to 2014. "In weight loss, sexual enhancement, and bodybuilding categories, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Blackstone, according to its critics, has exploited this system better than most, and exactly how it does this is a case study in how to game a failing regulatory system. For one, Braun and Singerman aren't shy about marketing their legally ambiguous products: They often advertise the active ingredients right on the label and promote them with ads full of young women who could moonlight in beer commercials. They're also constantly active online. Blackstone has some 25,000 Instagram followers; Braun has over 100,000. His account is littered with shirtless selfies and videos of him driving his Ferrari or pimped-out Jeep. He's also the star of a weekly YouTube show with his wife, the former pro wrestler Celeste Bonin, titled Beauty & Braun, which covers the daily lives of the couple, from gym sessions to discussions about breast implants. Until recently he also hosted a daily question-and-answer session on Periscope called "Cardio Q&A," featuring Braun on a treadmill, chugging orange Pedialyte and answering a wide range of queries from Blackstone users. One time he doled out advice ("No matter how mature you think they are, it's not good to settle down with a 19-year-old girl"), but usually he just hyped his products. During one appearance, Braun announced the "dick pills" Blackstone was working on weren't coming along the way he wanted. "I've been working on that for a long time," he said. "But they will eventually come out."
Two days after the Boca Nutrition opening, I visit Braun and Singerman at Blackstone HQ, an unbranded, 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Boca Raton. The office walls are covered in photos and framed bodybuilding-magazine covers, several of which feature Braun in full flex. On Singerman's desk is a bronze statue of a seminude Adonis-like man holding a barbell. It's a first-place trophy from the Mr. Olympia contest, which Singerman got at auction. "You hate to see that, because it means the guy who sold it was struggling financially and was forced to sell it," Singerman says. "But I love it."
Braun and Singerman each have a long history in bodybuilding. Singerman, from New Orleans, started hitting the gym when he was 13 and kept working out, even through a cocaine and heroin habit he picked up after dropping out of high school. At 27 he witnessed a friend overdose and die, so he got clean and doubled down at the gym. In 2005, he got a job as a personal trainer and started writing thousands of posts on bodybuilding message boards and eventually became marketing director for Ironmag Labs, a supplements company owned by businessman Robert Dimaggio, who had become notorious for selling sketchy supplements. Singerman convinced Dimaggio to bring on Braun, whom he'd met at a bodybuilding competition, as the company's top sponsored athlete.
Braun, who grew up in Connecticut, had taken to the gym in order to try to impress his absentee father. "My father wouldn't be proud or say, 'Good job,' " says Braun. "He would just say, 'Oh, you know, there's always somebody better. You can do better.' " Braun went to the University of Connecticut but dropped out to become a personal trainer. Then he took up professional bodybuilding.
Blackstone's genesis was in 2012, when Braun helped Singerman sell 7,000 units of something called Super DMZ. The product contained two designer steroid-like ingredients, dymethazine and methylstenbolone, that few outside bodybuilding circles knew much about. Braun and Singerman, however, recognized that these prohormones, as they're called, were groundbreaking at helping gym rats get ripped. Their boss, Dimaggio, had helped create Super DMZ but turned it over to Braun and Singerman to hawk. "We were able to sell those 7,000 units in five weeks," Singerman explained in an online interview. "We gave Robert his money back and each made $75,000." But prohormones hadn't yet been banned, so the pair ordered more and continued selling under the name Blackstone Labs. In just 10 months they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and moved operations from a makeshift office in Braun's townhouse into their current warehouse. "We bought more of the Super DMZ, sold it, and created a second product, third product, fourth product, fifth product, etc.," Singerman says in the same video. By the time prohormones were finally banned, in 2014, Blackstone was up and running with a full line of supplements, from postworkout muscle builders to meal-replacement formulas. "We've been fortunate enough to be the hot company," says Braun.
In their office, Singerman points to a small photo of the two men leaning against brown shipping boxes piled up to their armpits. "That's all Super DMZ," Singerman says proudly. "This was our original shipment."
The reason Super DMZ and prohormones finally became illegal has something to do with Blackstone's supplier. The product was being manufactured by a New York company called Mira Health Products. In 2013, at least 29 people developed varying levels of liver disease after taking a vitamin called B-50 sold by the company. After investigating, the FDA discovered B-50 and many of Mira's other products included high levels of prohormones, which were not listed anywhere on the label. The FDA forced Mira to recall all those pills and officially banned prohormones, including the ones in Super DMZ — which Blackstone listed on the bottle. None of that stopped Blackstone from continuing to sell them. In fact, at nearly the same time, the company released a new product called Metha-Quad Extreme, which contained prohormones. It wasn't until September 2014 that Blackstone stopped selling prohormones altogether to abide by FDA regulations.
"We lost 30 percent of our total revenue," Singerman says. "But the following month we went back up, because the truth is that people always want the next best thing."
Back in their warehouse, Braun and Singerman lead me up a flight of stairs to an open space with a long brown table and black swivel chairs. Here they're formulating the "next best thing." Another muscle-bound man, this one with a pink Mohawk and a lip ring, is scribbling symbols and numbers on a whiteboard. "This is our chemist, Bryan," says Singerman. "We're doing some really cool stuff with Bryan."
Bryan Moskowitz joined Blackstone in early 2015. Before that, Braun and Singerman formulated all the company's supplements. Neither of them has any formal education, so they hired Moskowitz, who has a master's degree in organic biochemistry from Georgia Tech and calls himself the "Guerilla Chemist." Moskowitz counts among his role models Patrick Arnold, who's infamous for creating three hard-to-detect steroids, two of which were distributed by balco, the lab linked to disgraced athletes Jose Canseco and Marion Jones — and whose founder, Victor Conte, was sentenced to four months in prison. Moskowitz looks up to Arnold enough that he even posted an Instagram photo of his and Arnold's faces Photoshopped onto an image of Breaking Bad's Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in hazmat suits, having just finished cooking a batch of crystal meth.
Arnold is also credited with introducing the powerful stimulant DMAA to the supplements market. Eli Lilly created the drug in 1944 as a nasal decongestant but removed it from the market in 1983 because it caused headaches, tremors, and increased blood pressure. Arnold reintroduced it years later, in 2006, as a way for its users to get a jolt of energy before the gym. In one month alone, in 2013, the FDA received 70 reports of liver disease and one death caused by OxyElite Pro, a popular supplement with DMAA.
In the boardroom, Braun explains that Moskowitz helped design the company's latest product, Brutal 4ce. The steroid that powers it, DHEA, is banned or prescription-only in just about every country except the United States. When I ask Oliver Catlin, the president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute and the Banned Substances Control Group, why it's still legal, he simply says, "I don't know. Ask Orrin Hatch."
Orrin Hatch is the powerful seven-term senator from Utah who pushed through a 1994 law in Congress called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (dshea). The bill defines what a dietary supplement is: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or amino acid (basically, anything found in nature). And while it explicitly states that it can't be a drug, the law also prevents the government from prescreening and preapproving supplements. So supplements don't require FDA approval the way, say, a cancer drug might, even though they may have the same active ingredient. Utah is one of the major producers of supplements. In fact, it is the state's third-largest industry, earning $10 billion per year. Back when the law was written, the industry was mostly homeopathic products, but it has since boomed, and the law created cover for aggressive manufacturers willing to flaunt the regulations.
Also written into dshea are a series of loopholes that allow steroids sold prior to the law's passing to be grandfathered in, like the DHEA in Blackstone's Brutal 4ce — even though it'll get you banned by nearly every sporting league on the planet, including MLB, the NFL, and the NCAA.
"That's one of those things," says Singerman about sports testing. "When a high school athlete asks if it's OK to take [Blackstone's] Dust V2, I go, 'No, probably not.' "
Braun and Singerman are similarly unfazed about SARMs, the unapproved cancer drugs in Ostapure. "If you look at the actual literature," says Singerman, "it's all positive. I've used it plenty of times, and I like putting out products that I actually use."
When I ask them whether they're worried about the potential side effects of their products, Singerman is quick with a scripted answer. "We go through the available literature and studies," he says. But when I press him, his next response seems more honest.
"I am a libertarian," Singerman says. "I believe that it's the person's decision. As long as they're an adult."
But they have no way of knowing how different people might react. "One person could be fine, and another person could have a heart attack," says Dr. Armand Dorian, an ER physician in Los Angeles who often treats patients injured by dietary supplements. "It's rolling the dice."
Take Jesse Woods. In 2009, the 28-year-old went online and ordered a bottle of M-Drol pills from a Texas-based company called TFSupplements. Woods, who weighed 150 pounds, was looking to add muscle. "I'm a small-framed guy," he says, "so I was trying to bulk up." He did. In just four weeks, he'd packed on 20 pounds of muscle. "I got big for a minute," he says. "Then I got sick."
Five weeks into taking M-Drol, Woods left work early because his stomach was bothering him. When his wife came home, she noticed his eyes were yellow. "I'm taking you to the emergency room," she said. Doctors performed a battery of tests, ultimately determining that Woods was experiencing liver failure. What Woods didn't know is that M-Drol contained the steroid-like prohormone Superdrol.
Woods spent 32 days in the hospital. He threw up nearly every meal he ate, lost 30 pounds, and developed a pungent odor, a common side effect of liver disease. "I never felt old until after that," says Woods, who's now 35. "Now I feel sluggish. I just feel like I aged. My liver has scar tissue on it. Doctors can't say how long I'll live."
When he was released from the hospital, Woods sued both TFSupplements and its supplier, Competitive Edge Labs, settling for an undisclosed amount. But the lawsuit didn't stop companies from selling Superdrol.
Blackstone has yet to be sued by any of its customers, and the FDA has generally left the company alone. "We haven't really had problems with the FDA," says Braun. But that may be simply because the agency is backlogged. It's also far more effective to go after the companies supplying the illegal ingredients than the ones marketing the final product. It's the former that are dealing with the overseas suppliers that produce the untested or illegal drugs. Singerman admits to purchasing Chinese ingredients but says it's something that's taken care of by the plants that manufacture Blackstone's products. I ask him who they are.
"Well, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is one."
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is the best example of a duplicitous company thriving in a broken system. Its founder, Jared Wheat, has a history of hawking high-demand substances. In the early '90s, he ran a high school ecstasy ring in Alabama and served 32 months in prison for it. He started Hi-Tech in 1998, and by 2003 the FDA had already warned the company about its dietary supplements, some of which contained an unlicensed drug similar to the one used in Cialis. But that didn't stop Wheat. By 2005 he was selling supplements that contained the banned stimulant ephedra. In early 2006 government officials raided his offices and seized 200 cases of supplements valued at $3 million, and in 2008 Wheat pleaded guilty to selling adulterated supplements and committing mail and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison, but he continued to operate Hi-Tech from his cell.
When I ask Pieter Cohen how Hi-Tech continues to conduct business in such a manner, he says that allowing any company to regularly sell synthetic ingredients as supplements is due to a major failure on the part of the government. "They're not doing their job," he says.
For their part, Braun and Singerman maintain that everything in their supplements appears right on the label.
To test that claim, I sent the Cobra 6 Extreme I purchased at Boca Nutrition to Oliver Catlin's Banned Substances Control Group. When I received the test results, it turns out Braun is right: The product is now devoid of the banned DMBA, a stimulant very similar to DMAA, that powered it.
"So is it safe to take?" I ask.
"Not necessarily," says Catlin. The readings revealed a powerful mix of new stimulants. That could be due to a combination of the ingredients listed on the label — a formula that includes caffeine and theobromine (an alkaloid of the cacao plant that can be deadly in large doses). "Or it could be something else," he says. "We target drugs we are concerned about, like DMBA, when we screen products like these. But sometimes there are new, unknown compounds present that we can't see."
Soon after my visit to Blackstone Labs, and after four years of working together, Braun and Singerman are at war. Singerman leaves Blackstone to pursue other projects. "But he still owns half the company," Braun explains, insinuating that the split is amicable. But the tone of their relationship quickly changes. "When the companies first split, I hoped we'd be friends again," Braun says during one of his online Q&A sessions. "But he did too many things."
Braun has since divested himself of Boca Nutrition, and Singerman has gone on to start a supplements company called RedCon 1. He is also rebranding another, Prime Nutrition, with none other than Hi-Tech's Jared Wheat, who was released from prison in 2011. Braun has taken over day-to-day control of Blackstone, and despite the schism, the company is thriving. Blackstone has moved into a much larger, 14,000-square-foot space, and Braun has introduced several new products, including a long-awaited libido booster called Entice. But the most surprising of his new releases is Dust Extreme, a preworkout supplement with DMAA, the infamous, banned stimulant popularized by chemist Patrick Arnold. It's a curious decision to sell the illegal ingredient, but Braun justifies it in a long video on Facebook.
"I believe that people should be allowed to take what they want to take," he says. "Are you completely safe if you have health conditions? No. If your blood pressure is high, should you be taking a product like this? Probably not. But these are things you should look at yourself. I believe we should all have the choice to put what we want in our body. You can go and buy cigarettes at any fucking gas station and they're guaranteed to kill you. You will die. So how dare the FDA come in and take away ingredients from us that give us awesome workouts?"
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For most parents, indulging the kids with some cocoa would pose no dilemma. But Taubes, one of America's leading and most strident nutrition writers, is no ordinary father. His new book, The Case Against Sugar, seems destined to strike fear into the hearts of children everywhere. Taubes' argument is simple: Sugar is likely poison, and it's what is making our country fat. And not just fat but sick. So don't eat it. Ever.
A little much? Perhaps. But the kids did get the cocoa — on this one special occasion.
For Taubes, the cocoa conundrum is an occupational hazard for someone who describes his current mission as "the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas." But Taubes, 60, has never been one to shy away from extreme positions. His last two books, 2007's Good Calories, Bad Calories and 2010's Why We Get Fat, launched a nationwide movement to shun bread and embrace butter. Both argued that it's not how many calories we consume, but where they come from, and that eating fat doesn't actually make us so. These were bold statements at the time, and they had a big impact. "I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Thanks to Taubes' pro-fat pronouncements, Pollan says, "millions of Americans changed the way they eat. Doughnut, bread, and pasta sales plummeted, and we saw a change in the food conversation, the effects of which are still being felt today."
Now, with The Case Against Sugar, Taubes launches his toughest crusade yet: to prove that we've been bamboozled into thinking that cookies and soda are simply "empty" calories and not uniquely toxic ones. That's the result, he argues, of a long history of deception from the sugar industry and its support of shoddy science.
The audacity of those arguments makes Taubes an anomaly among nutrition writers, says John Horgan, director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. "He isn't content just to do public relations for scientists," Horgan says, meaning he doesn't rewrap scientists' findings with the simple, shiny packaging of journalism. Instead, he digs deep into the research, and if he finds it lacking, he attacks it. "He'll come right out and say if he thinks someone is an idiot," Horgan says.
With his new book, Taubes will likely have his largest platform, and an audience poised to listen. By now, nearly everyone believes that Americans eat too much sugar. Most experts agree that it's a major contributor to our nation's grim health: More than a third of adults are obese, and one in 11 has diabetes. This understanding has spurred campaigns for soda taxes nationwide — five measures were approved by voters in November — and moves by big companies to ban sugary drinks from workplace cafeterias. In August 2016, three class-action lawsuits were filed against General Mills, Kellogg's, and Post, alleging that the companies falsely claimed their cereals are healthy when, in fact, they're loaded with sugar.
Anyone else would be encouraged, but ever the brawler, Taubes points out flaws: Even these new anti-sugar crusaders, he says, are motivated by a naive, and ultimately dangerous, "less is better" view of sugar. To Taubes, the answer to our obesity crisis isn't more expensive soda and less sweetened cereals. It's to stop poisoning ourselves altogether.
"Sugar is like heroin to me," Taubes says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
Like the control room on a battleship, Taubes' office perches atop the Craftsman-style house he shares with his wife, the writer Sloane Tanen, and their sons. His office is a small, book-filled space with views of the surrounding Oakland hills. He guides me to a low seat near his desk.
I knew of Taubes' aggressive reputation and had seen his brash, combative videos on YouTube — densely reasoned, contrarian lectures about everything from the physiology of how insulin works in the blood to why we should eat meat and avoid carbs (which the body converts into sugar). His videos get hundreds of thousands of views and provoke both cheers and hisses in the blogosphere. I am surprised to find him quiet and soft-spoken.
He pulls out a package of Nicorette gum and pops a piece in his mouth.
"Do you smoke?" I ask.
Not for more than 15 years. "Nicotine is a great drug for writing," Taubes says. "I keep thinking once life calms down, I'll quit." His most vexing addiction, however, is the stuff he's spent five years researching. "Sugar is like heroin to me," he says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
He tries to eat no sugar at all, including honey and agave syrup, and limits fruit. But he insists, "I'm not a zealot." The family pantry — stocked by his wife, not incidentally — has an assortment of what he calls "crap snack health-food bars and juice boxes that Sloane says we have for kids who come over, because they expect it." When Taubes wants a treat, he nibbles on 100 percent chocolate. Because who wouldn't prefer a bar of compressed bitter paste to Godiva?
"The type I buy isn't that bad," he assures me, and then immediately recounts a story of a taxi driver he once gave some to who had to pull over to spit it out. While telling me this, he replaces his now well-chomped Nicorette with a new one. He will continue chain-chewing throughout the day.
Sugar and nicotine, he points out, are connected in more ways than we may think. The Case Against Sugar documents that in the early 1900s, tobacco companies began adding sugar to their products, which allowed people to inhale the smoke deeply, making cigarettes more palatable as well as more addictive and deadlier.
While Taubes has been writing and talking about sugar in one form or another since the early 2000s, with this book he wants to do something he says no one yet has: reveal the bad science that has enabled the sugar industry to mislead the public. By rooting through archives and obscure textbooks, he has uncovered, he says, evidence that sugar is not just the harmless, empty calories we indulge in, but that it may well be toxic, dangerous even in small amounts. It's a possibility that might make you hesitate handing your kids a mug of hot cocoa, too.
To get — and stay — lean and healthy, the conventional nutritional wisdom is simple: Eat less and exercise more. That's what the sugar industry would have us believe, too. (Coca-Cola, for example, now offers smaller-size cans to help consumers drink less soda — or just buy more cans of soda.) That's false, according to Taubes, and the reasoning is part of an industry-driven campaign that goes back to the 1950s. It was then that Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist at the University of Minnesota, first stated that fat — not sugar — causes the high cholesterol levels that lead to heart disease. What few people knew, however, is that Keys' research was funded by the sugar industry.
Taubes details how this pattern of influence ramped up in the 1960s and '70s, as the industry funneled money to scientists and public health officials to combat the notion that sugar was a unique cause of obesity and chronic illness. One of those recipients was Fred Stare, whose work as the founder and chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health was supported financially for decades by sugar purveyors like General Foods. The most public defender of sugar, Stare repeatedly asserted, even as late as 1985, that it is not "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
The industry's campaign scored a coup in 1976, when the FDA classified sugar as "generally recognized as safe" and thus not subject to federal regulations. In 1980, the U.S. government released its dietary guidelines, drafted by a team led by Mark Hegsted, who spent his entire career working under Fred Stare at Harvard. Taubes writes that those guidelines assured us: "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes."
The PR work paid off in other ways, too. Americans now consume 130 pounds of sugar a year, twice the amount we did in 1980. And while the industry told us to embrace sugar, dietary experts preached the gospel of low fat. Both groups assume all calories are created equal, whether they come from apples or apple pie. Such logic implies that a calorie of sugar is no more or less capable of causing obesity and diabetes than a calorie from any type of food.
Taubes presents a wholly different role for what sugar does in the body. "A calorie of sugar and one of meat or broccoli all have vastly different effects on the hormones and enzymes that control or regulate the storage of fat in fat cells," he says. But unlike pork or veggies, sugar has a uniquely negative effect: It causes the liver to accumulate fat and, at the same time, prompts the body to pump out insulin. Over time, Taubes insists, these elevated insulin levels lead to weight gain, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases. Which is to say, we don't blimp out or get sick because we eat too much and fail to exercise. It happens because we eat sugar.
At this point you may be wondering why we haven't put this whole debate to bed with broad, well-conducted research. The problem is that studies about nutrition are notoriously difficult to orchestrate. Most research has been observational: Scientists ask a group of people what they ate over a period of time and then try to tease out associations between their food intake and any diseases they contract. Obviously this approach is problematic. Even if subjects report their eating habits accurately (though they almost never do), it's difficult to know which foods initiate a given problem. If an association is found between hamburgers and heart disease, how would anyone know whether the problem is in the burgers or the buns? The best-run studies require confining subjects to a metabolic ward in a hospital for weeks, where researchers can control all the food they take in and measure all the energy they expend. It's incredibly expensive and nearly impossible to find someone willing to fund it.
Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold are among the few who are. After hearing Taubes on a 2011 podcast discuss the kinds of obesity experiments he'd like to see done, John Arnold, a former hedge-fund manager in Houston, reached out. It led to an Arnold Foundation grant of $35.5 million — money bestowed to Taubes to establish a foundation that would find answers to some of nutrition's toughest questions. In 2012, Taubes paired up with Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins trained physician and star in his field, and launched the nonprofit Nutrition Science Institute (NuSI). Taubes and Attia wanted NuSI to be a beacon, an institution with the experts, resources, and clearance to do the precise experimental science no one else had been willing to. "I thought there needed to be specific studies done to resolve what causes obesity and diabetes once and for all," Taubes says. "I wanted to put the issue to rest, have it recognized by people who could influence the medical establishment."
As late as 1985, Harvard nutritionist Fred Stare asserted that it is no "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
Taubes says he has always had issues with authority, beginning with his father, who was a photoelectric engineer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Xerox copying process. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Gary also lived in the shadow of his elder brother, Clifford. "He excelled at everything," says Taubes. "It was either give up or be supercompetitive."
When Clifford went to Harvard for physics, Gary followed suit. But after receiving a C minus in a quantum physics class, he switched to engineering. (Clifford went on to be a celebrated professor of mathematical physics at his alma mater.) It was then that Taubes read All the President's Men, which tells the story of the Watergate scandal, and he realized he could make a living kicking against authority. He became an investigative journalist, focusing on bad science. Nutrition was a natural fit. No other arena offers more complex or thornier issues to tackle or is so dear to the public's heart. Calling out the idiots here meant Taubes could influence what people put in their mouths every day.
While at Harvard, Taubes channeled his competitive fervor into sports. He played football and in the off-season he boxed. By 1987, when he moved to Venice Beach, California, Taubes worked out constantly, climbing the steps in Santa Monica canyon, roller-blading to Malibu and back, or running a five-mile loop. At the time he believed the cardio would allow him to eat whatever and how much he wanted. But despite all that calorie-burning, he began putting on pounds. It wasn't until 2000, when he adopted the low-carb recommendations of cardiologist Robert Atkins, that Taubes succeed in controlling his weight. That experience colored his thinking about the roles of diet and exercise in obesity.
Exercise, he now believes, plays no role in staying lean. Taubes doesn't dispute that exercise is good for the body and soul; it's just no way to lose weight. Yet he does look the part of a gym rat. His face is lean, his frame muscular. But if anything, Taubes says, avoiding sugar and carbs has allowed him to keep trim. His lunch order at a local burger joint: A one-pound slab of ground beef (no bun) heaped with bacon and smothered in guacamole — the only concession to the color green on the plate.
When I visited Taubes in October, a number of houses on his street had yard signs in support of Oakland's Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax. These are positive signs for the success of The Case — a good thing, because its author could use a win. It's been a tough year for Gary Taubes.
In December 2015, his partner Peter Attia abruptly left NuSI. (In a podcast a few months later, Attia disclosed that he's no longer interested in talking about nutrition.) Taubes calls it an amicable divorce, but he also says the Arnolds had invested in his ideas and Attia's competence, and after Attia left, things began to fall apart.
In January 2016, Kevin Hall, a National Institutes of Health scientist who was the lead investigator on the first NuSI study, recused himself from involvement with the foundation. He and Taubes had clashed on how to set up the pilot study — research that was supposed to address whether carbs were the primary driver of obesity — and when the results came out last summer, the two men couldn't agree on the interpretation of the findings or the quality of the study. NuSI, which was founded to bring clarity to the wildly complicated field of nutrition, ended up mired in the basic processes of scientific research. By late summer, the Arnolds had cut their funding. Taubes considers the episode "a learning experience in how easy it is for experiments to go wrong. Peter and I were like the Hardy Boys of not-for-profit research."
NuSI remains afloat, though barely. Taubes and two other employees continue on as volunteers, and he says the foundation still has unfinished studies awaiting results. He will also continue to solicit funding from wealthy investors, but the main hurdle he faces hasn't been lowered: Spending his career attacking the leading scientists in a field has made working with them rather difficult.
But in light of recent sugar-tax initiatives in Berkeley and San Francisco — both of which passed — Taubes seems to be at the front in the charge against sugar. During our interview, his desk was littered with literature from those trying to tax sugary beverages in cities across the country, along with articles on lawsuits being brought against cereal makers. Taubes hopes The Case will provide more ammo for these fights.
Still, he notes with some exasperation that such efforts continue to speak the language of Big Sugar: If we all just drank less soda and ate less cereal, the rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease would drop. Wrong. Taubes points to the public health initiative of putting calorie counts on menus. "That doesn't lead to any significant decrease in weight or consumption," he says, "because they're identifying the wrong problem."
This is key to Taubes' outlook on sugar. While you may eat desserts and drink sodas only occasionally and add just a sprinkle of sugar to your daily coffee — while maintaining a normal weight — he will tell you that you don't know what even that amount of sugar does to your body. As he puts it in The Case: "How much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we'll ingest."
In an ideal world, Taubes says, his book would lead people to force the FDA to investigate whether sugar is safe, as the agency proclaimed in 1976. That, he admits, is improbable, given the influence Big Sugar wields. Not that it will stop him from waging the war. "Once you've said publicly that the conventional thinking is wrong on something so profound as obesity and diabetes, you either move on to something else or you decide the injustice is such that you have to keep doing this work," he says. "And if you have to keep doing it, then you have to take the shit that comes with it."
Just don't sugarcoat it.
","tag_ids":[4748,23195],"publish_date":"2016-12-13T17:55:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","keywords":"sugar, big sugar, the case against sugar, health, feature, interview, problem with sugar, gary taubes, ","description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?"},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hrChGN","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Gary Taubes","caption":"In the 1980s, Taubes trained for New York City's Golden Gloves amateur boxing championship. He was knocked out cold in the second bout.","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_b-1e59e7eb-f6b5-42f9-8968-9305f13ea4eb.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photograph by Cody Pickens ","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_h-35217730-738e-4d8d-a617-041de2d0e40f.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/health-fitness/health/is-sugar-the-new-tobacco-20140723","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Is Sugar the New Tobacco?","contentId":174502,"contentHeadline":"Is Sugar the New Tobacco? "},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/michael-moss-on-the-birth-of-the-triple-double-oreo-20130318","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Birth of the Triple Double Oreo","contentId":168360,"contentHeadline":"Michael Moss on the Birth of the Triple Double Oreo"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454811,"old_id":null,"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","short_title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","slug":"/features/articles/the-long-game-of-liam-neeson---liam-neeson-interview-w454811","body":"Early one autumn evening, Liam Neeson strolls into a restaurant near Central Park, two blocks from his apartment, with one hand in his pocket and the other clutching a green Stanley travel mug.
Neeson carries this mug everywhere: movie sets, red-carpet premieres, New York Rangers games, even the occasional interview. "It's a specific kind of English black tea," he says when I ask what's inside. "Decaf. It's the only thing I drink." He's not kidding: When the waitress comes over to take his order, Neeson reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Ziploc full of tea bags, which he unzips and hands to her. "Could you make me a fresh one of these, please?" Then he hooks a finger into the mug, fishes out the old tea bag, and drops it in his water glass with a plunk. "Thanks, love."
Neeson folds himself into the leather booth as comfortably as is possible for a 6-foot-4 Irishman with shoulders like an armoire. He's feeling a little out of sorts today: He has just finished shooting two movies back-to-back — one in Atlanta, the other in London — and he is in New York for the first time in five and a half months. "It's nice to be home," he says. "But I'm feeling a bit like a three-legged stool." (Which, technically, would be the most stable stool, but you get his drift.) He brings up one of the movies he's here to promote — Silence, a historical epic directed by Martin Scorsese — and asks me how long it's currently running. I tell him the version I saw was just over two and a half hours. Neeson shrugs. "For Martin, I guess that's quite short."
Silence is a passion project of Scorsese's, one he's been trying to make for more than 25 years. It's based on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo about Jesuit missionaries — Neeson plays one named Ferreira — in 1640s Japan, where Christians are being systematically persecuted by the Buddhist dictatorship. The film has been through multiple writers and actors, but Scorsese stuck with it, and it's finally hitting theaters this month.
Neeson understands the value of playing the long game. It's a little hard to remember now that he's entrenched on the A-list, but for most of his career he was a solid leading man, though rarely much more. He was already 41, with 17 years' worth of film roles behind him, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Schindler's List, a role he'd reportedly beaten out Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford to get — but even that failed to give him Ford's or Costner's movie-star career. Neeson spent the next two decades turning in great performances in as many hits as misses (Batman Begins on the one hand, The Haunting on the other), until his late-period pivot toward ass-kicking made him one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. "Liam's ambition wasn't to do all the classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company," his old friend Richard Graham once said. "He wanted big parts in big movies." Now, in the fifth decade of his career, he has his pick of them.
Neeson keeps his coat on for our entire time together, either as a sort of armor or in case he decides to make a quick getaway. He's agreed to talk for 90 minutes, which I tell him isn't long for an in-depth cover story. "Well it's about 88 minutes more than I want to be here," Neeson says. "So."
That this rejoinder — delivered in his peaty growl — does not incite an immediate pants-shitting is due mostly to the fact that, intimidating though he may be, there's an obvious gentleness to Neeson, a vulnerability and tenderness that's plain on his handsome, timeworn face. Before he went around punching Albanians for a living, Neeson was usually cast in more introspective roles — professors, sculptors, and other sensitive types — wounded romantics who, like him, tended toward brooding and self-doubt. Women, naturally, went crazy for him: the lumberjack's body with the poet's heart. "It's not about looks, although he's a terrific-looking guy," his late wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, once said. "It comes from somewhere deeper than that. You feel that he's been through a history."
These days everyone knows that he has. Neeson is a widower, having lost Richardson seven years ago, following a skiing accident. Since then he has raised their two sons alone. Now the younger son is away at college and Neeson is home by himself. He still has his property in upstate New York, a big 1890s farmhouse he bought before he and Richardson were married. "He likes being there on his own, with his pool and his gym," Graham says. "He's always been very happy with his own company.
In many ways Neeson was born to play a priest. Tall, austere; slightly stooped yet unflaggingly upright; those searching eyes, that troubled soul. He's done it half a dozen times already: in 1985's Lamb (Brother Michael); 2005's Breakfast on Pluto (Father Liam); 2002's Gangs of New York (Priest Vallon, who wasn't an actual priest but wore the collar and wielded a crucifix in battle); even an episode of The Simpsons, on which his Father Sean taught Bart the way of the Lord.
Neeson was born William John but called Liam (short for William) after the local priest. He grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, the only son of Barney and Kitty Neeson, a school custodian and a school cook. His mother walked two miles to work each way and brought leftovers home to their council house; his father, according to Neeson's sister, "never said five words when two words would do."
Neeson learned the Mass in Latin as an altar boy: In nomine Patris, Dominus vobiscum, the whole deal. Church is where he first felt the magic of performance, the ceremony and theatricality of it — the robes, the candles, the liturgy; costumes, lighting, a script. His parish priest, Father Darragh, taught him to box when he was nine; a scrappy jabber with a strong left, Neeson eventually became the Ulster Province boys champion in three different weight divisions. But secretly he was afraid of getting hurt and, moreover, of hurting someone else. So when a blow to the head during a fight left him concussed, the 16-year-old hung up his gloves — but not before winning the fight.
It wasn't easy being Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and '60s. "You grew up cautious, let's put it that way," he says. "Our town was essentially Protestant, but there were a few Catholics on our street. The Protestants all had marches and bands and stuff. I didn't quite understand what it was about — 'Remember 1690? When Catholic King James was defeated by Protestant William of Orange?' Who gives a fuck?" As he got older, the situation got grimmer. "The Troubles started in '69 and then really kicked in from '70 to '71," he says. "Drive-by shootings, bombs. I was at university for one abortive year, and we were so fucking naive. You'd be in a bar, drinking a glass of cider, and suddenly soldiers would come in and say, 'Everybody out — there's a bomb scare.' We'd order more drinks to take across the street, then the soldiers would go off and we'd filter back into the bar. Fucking stupid."
Neeson reconnected with his Catholic roots in 1985 when he filmed a movie called The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. The three of them played Catholic missionaries in 18th-century South America. They had a priest with them on set in the jungle, and every Sunday he'd "say a simple little Mass, break a piece of bread, and read the Gospel for the week," Neeson says. "We'd discuss the passage and what it meant in today's world. It was very intimate and very cathartic in a lot of ways." A devilish grin: "Then you'd go home, have a few glasses of Guinness, and get laid. The delights of the flesh."
Neeson's part in The Mission was small but instrumental to his career. De Niro, whom he befriended, introduced him to an American casting director. When she needed an IRA operative for an episode of Miami Vice, she thought of Neeson. That got him a work visa and a foothold in the States.
He's still grateful. "A lovely, lovely man," Neeson says of De Niro. "He's a man of few words — I like that. He's the sort of guy who says, 'I'll call you Thursday at 3 o'clock' — and if he can't call, he'll call you Wednesday to say he can't. When he makes a commitment, he sticks to it. That's rare these days."
It was Neeson's longtime interest in the Jesuits that prompted him to take the role of Father Ferreira in Silence. We first meet Ferreira in the film's opening scene: He's dirty, bearded, his raiments caked in mud — a thoroughly broken man. He's forced to watch as Japanese Christians are crucified and tortured.
Neeson was eager for the chance to reunite with Scorsese, after the very brief experience working with him on Gangs of New York. "Martin demands real focus," Neeson says admiringly. "If there was a grip working a hundred meters away and Martin heard a piece of scaffolding fall — which doesn't even make a noise! — he would stop, turn to the first AD, and say, 'I've asked for silence. Why have you not got it?' Terrific."
(Unlike just about anyone with even a tenuous connection to the legendary director, Neeson calls Scorsese by his full given name. "I just feel I haven't earned the right to call him Marty." he says. "Everybody's always like, 'Marty this, Marty that.' You don't know him. I don't know him.")
Scorsese says that Neeson was one of the key elements to finally getting Silence made. "I needed someone with real gravity to play Ferreira," he says. "You have to feel the character's pain."
Now Neeson doesn't consider himself much of a Catholic. "I admire people with true faith," he says. "Like my mother, who's 90 and gets annoyed if she can't walk to Mass Sunday morning. 'Mom, you're 90! It's OK! God will forgive you.' " These days he isn't even sure if he believes in a God.
I ask if there was a specific incident that precipitated his doubt, and his face darkens. "So this is probably leading toward the death of my wife?"
Neeson is understandably wary on the subject of Richardson. It must be gut-wrenching to have to revisit the worst moment of your life again and again, every time an interviewer needs a new quote. But this was just an open-ended question, I insist. It wasn't leading toward anything.
"OK," he says, sounding unconvinced. "It wasn't." Anyway, as far as his waning faith goes: "I think it was gradual."
When he's in town and the weather is good, Neeson loves to walk around Central Park. "Power walk," he says. "Get a good sweat going." He even has a walking buddy — "a real-estate lady" he met on his walks. "You see the same people, you nod, you say hello," Neeson explains. "Six months later, you're saying, 'How's your kid?' It's nice," he says. "We text each other: You free tomorrow? The usual spot? We do the whole loop — usually six miles, sometimes eight. Fifteen minutes a mile. It's good."
Three years ago, Central Park was the unlikely battleground for one of the most heated fights of Neeson's public life. The topic? Horses. During his 2013 election campaign, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to enact a ban on horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. (The measure was billed as an animal-rights issue, though questions have been raised about the role political donors and real-estate interests played in the proposed ban, and Mayor de Blasio's actions were later investigated.) The horse ban was supported by famous animal advocates like Miley Cyrus and Alec Baldwin. Neeson, who grew up caring for horses on his aunt's farm in County Armagh, waded in to defend the drivers.
"I'm in the park every day," he explains. "I see these guys; I know these guys. There were so many celebrities supporting [the ban], I was like, 'These guys need a celebrity or two.' "
"He really put himself in the line of fire," says Stephen Malone, a second-generation carriage driver and spokesman for the horse-and-carriage industry. "It was a complete game-changer. He hosted a stable visit for the city council on a Sunday afternoon, and if he wasn't there, we might have gotten one or two [members]. We ended up with about 20. They got to take their selfies with Liam Neeson, but they also got to meet the children of the drivers and to see how the stable hands care for the horses. It completely swayed public opinion. That was the moment we knew we were gonna be OK."
Colm McKeever, an Irish-born carriage driver and longtime friend of Neeson's, says, "There's a framed picture of him in every stable. It's the Pope and then Liam Neeson." McKeever says Neeson's support of the drivers wasn't due to their friendship: "We've been fast friends for a number of years, but that has nothing to do with Liam's convictions. He stands up for what he believes in. It's as simple as that."
The proposal was eventually defeated, and now Neeson is a hero to the 300-odd drivers, who often stop him to say thanks. "It's almost like he's part of the tour," jokes McKeever. " 'There's the carousel — and that's Liam Neeson.' " Malone adds: "Liam Neeson is the biggest Hollywood star going right now, and he walks through Central Park and stops to talk to carriage guys. Only a true gentleman would do that."
It's a working-man's solidarity that's apparently characteristically Neeson. "If you speak to film crews, they all love him," says Richard Graham. "He's got friends from crews he still corresponds with — and I'm not talking about higher-ups, just ordinary blokes. It sounds like I'm blowing smoke up his ass, but he truly is an honorable guy."
Ellen Freund was the prop master on two Neeson films, Leap of Faith and Nell — the latter when Neeson and Richardson were still dating. "They had a lovely house with a chef," Freund recalls, "and every weekend they would invite six members of the crew and cook this fantastic dinner, with beautiful wines. It was just the most lovely treat. It wasn't just the upper echelons, either — a grip or an electrician, it didn't matter."
It was Freund who introduced Neeson to his favorite outdoor pastime: fly-fishing. They were shooting Nell on a lake and needed something for Neeson to do in his downtime; Freund had just come off A River Runs Through It, so she showed Neeson how to cast. He was hooked. "He just loved it," she says. "Once we gave him the rod and set him up out there, he wouldn't come off the lake. Every time you looked for him, he was down there practicing."
"When he said he'd discovered fly-fishing," says Graham, "my first thought was, 'My God, that is the perfect hobby for you.' It's peaceful. It's in nature. There's a lot of skill. And the time goes by like you wouldn't believe. So I think that's kind of therapeutic. You've got nothing in your mind, other than trying to catch the fish."
Neeson cites the kind of pastoral tranquility that will be familiar to anyone who's heard an angler wax lyrical about the sport. "Eight times out of 10, I won't catch anything," he says. "The thrill for me is being on a river with my pouch and rod, and I know there's a fish over there, or at least I think there is, so I'll do five or six casts. That fly's not working, take it off, put on another one, try again. Before you know it, three hours will have gone past." It's the opposite of relaxing. "You're trying to outwit a fish that's been around since the Triassic with a piece of yarn or your own hair, he says. "You're working all the time — but it's a different kind of work."
Neeson and Graham have fished together all over the world: Patagonia, arctic Quebec, the Tomhannock Reservoir in upstate New York. "New Zealand, that's the mecca," Neeson says. "Big trout. Stunning. Some of these rivers, we'd take little choppers in, and you're six feet over the rocks and you jump out. You're thirsty, so you put your head in the river and drink, and it's pure." Neeson seems energized by the memory. "Fuck. I haven't done a big trip in a long time," he says. "I'm thinking of going to Brazil, up the Amazon. Heard they have big peacock bass. That'd be a trip." He would also like to get back down to the Bahamas for bonefish. "The phantom of the shallows," he says. "Silvery color. They turn a certain way and disappear. Hence 'phantoms.' But you need a guide, that's the only trouble." He'd rather go alone? "Yeah," he says.
(Says Graham: "We can be fishing side by side, 50 feet apart, and not say a word to each other for hours.")
I ask Neeson if he's learned anything from fly-fishing that he's been able to apply to his career or to the rest of his life. "Patience, I think," he says. "Just taking your time. I remember in the early days, if I was casting and I missed, I'd be very quick to cast again. But trout stay where they are — they like the food to come to them. The fish isn't going anywhere. Take your time."
Neeson's other new movie is A Monster Calls, a live-action tearjerker in which a CGI tree (the titular Monster) visits a boy whose mother is dying. Neeson plays the tree, a yew — "the most important of all the healing trees." He's ancient and massive, twice the size of a house, with gnarled roots, spiky branches, and a voice like a bottomless coal pit. The first time he shows up, he kicks down the boy's house. It's kind of terrifying. Still, you know the Monster is good, because he's played by Liam Neeson.
It's not surprising that Neeson makes a great tree, given that a noted Broadway critic once literally compared him to a sequoia. (He actually called him a "towering sequoia of sex." It was a compliment.) He spent two weeks filming motion-capture in a special room with cameras surrounding him on every side. "What do they call it? Not the space. The volume," he says with a little laugh. "Computer nerds." The end product looks something like a woodsy Transformer — which, weirdly, makes sense, given that Transformers director Michael Bay has said that Neeson's regal bearing was his inspiration for Optimus Prime. ("Really?" says Neeson. "That's news to me.")
A Monster Calls is structured on a series of visits from the Monster, in which he tells fairy tales to the boy to help him work through his grief. The stories are designed to divine meaning from a meaningless world — a world where, as the Monster says at one point, "Farmers' daughters die for no reason." It's a movie, in other words, about death, loss, mourning, and the ways we help one another cope. And this, I warn Neeson, is when I'm leading toward the death of his wife.
Neeson met Richardson when he was a 40-year-old bachelor who'd already dated Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, and Brooke Shields. In 1993 Richardson and Neeson co-starred in a play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and then, before long, were a couple. Two years later they were married in the garden of their farmhouse, and the boys soon followed. Then, in 2009, Richardson was skiing near Montreal when she fell and hit her head. Everything seemed fine at first: "Oh, darling — I've taken a tumble in the snow" is what she told Neeson on the phone that night. But unbeknownst to the doctors, her brain was slowly bleeding. She fell into a coma and died the next day.
Since Richardson's passing, Neeson's grief has colored several of his onscreen characters, a number of which are dealing with some kind of tragic familial backstory. The similarity in A Monster Calls is awful and impossible to ignore: a beautiful young mother struck down before her time. And Neeson's own sons were just 13 and 12 when Richardson died, about the same age as the boy in the movie. Did he think about that at all when preparing for the film?
"Yeah, I don't want to go into that," Neeson says politely but firmly. "It's not fair to them. I'd rather not talk about my boys, other than that they're doing well, college, all that stuff."
By all appearances, the boys are thriving. Micheál, now 21, is an aspiring actor who appeared with Neeson in an LG Super Bowl commercial last year. And Daniel, 20, is a sophomore theater and digital-media production major. "There's a saying," says Neeson. " 'You're only as happy as your unhappiest child.' And the kids are happier than I — so that's a blessing."
We've been talking for a while when Neeson realizes his tea has gone cold. He flags down the waitress. "Sorry, love," he says. "Could you ask the kitchen for some boiling water when you have a second?"
"Boiling-hot water," she says, nodding. "No problem."
Neeson stops her. "But not hot," he says. "If you could make it boil. Tell them it's for me," he adds. "Tell them I will come for them. I will find them. . . ."
Upon recognizing his famous Taken monologue, the waitress cracks ups. "Absolutely," she says, skipping off. After she's gone, I tease Neeson for shamelessly trotting out his shtick. He laughs: "Pathetic, isn't it?"
When Neeson made the first Taken movie in 2009, he had low expectations. " Straight to video is what I thought," he says. No one is more amused than he that eight years later — after The Grey (Taken with wolves), Non-Stop (Taken on a plane), Run All Night (Taken at night), and, of course, Taken 2 and 3 — he's still getting offered this kind of role. He's even reached the point of self-parody, turning in comically self-aware, Neeson-esque cameos in a commercial for the role-playing game Clash of Clans (as vengeful gamer AngryNeeson52) and on Inside Amy Schumer, as a scarily intense funeral-home director whose motto is "I don't bury cowards."
But in a way, Neeson is just fulfilling an opportunity he first had more than two decades ago, when he was being courted to become the new James Bond in the mid-'90s. "I was being considered," Neeson says. "I'm sure they were considering a bunch of other guys, too." He says he would have loved to be 007, but Richardson said she wouldn't marry him if he was. I ask why, and he smiles like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Women. Foreign countries. Halle Berry. It's understandable." Also, Schindler's List had just come out. "She was like, 'You're going to ruin your career,' " Neeson says. "But it's no big deal. It's nice to be inquired after."
Neeson sometimes feels a little embarrassed that he's Social Security–eligible and still pretend-fighting for a living. "Maybe another year," he says of his action-star shelf life. "The audiences let you know — you can sense them going, 'Oh, come on.' But by the way," he hastens to add, "I've never felt fitter in my life."
Neeson doesn't box anymore. ("I'll train — the bags and stuff. But I don't spar. There's always someone coming up to you like, 'Hey, you're that actor Lyle Nelson right?' They want a chance to hurt you a little. 'Guess who I beat up today? He's a pussy.' ") But he proudly points out that he does all his own movie fights. I read him a quote from Steven Seagal — "Look at Liam Neeson. He can't fight. He's a great dramatic actor, a great guy. . . . Is he a great fighter? A great warrior? No" — and Neeson seems amused. "I don't know how to answer that," he says, smiling. "Am I an action guy? Not really. But I do know how to fight. So fuck him."
One thing Neeson absolutely won't do anymore is ride a motorcycle — ever since a horrifying crash in 2000 nearly killed him. "I've read a couple of scripts where the character's on a motorbike, and I'm like, 'Is this important to the script?' 'Yeah, it is.' 'OK, I'm not in.' "
I tell him about a recent spill I took on a bike, and he turns serious. "You have to watch yourself," Neeson tells me. "Get it out of your system. Make a pact with your wife. And don't cheat on it."
Neeson has few vices left these days. He quit the Marlboro Lights years ago and gave up drinking a while back — first the Guinness, then the pinot noir — after he found himself partaking too much in the wake of Richardson's death. He tries to keep busy lest he wallow. "I need to work," he says. "I'm a working-class Irishman. I'm fucking lucky: A stranger gets in touch with my agent and says, 'Could you send Liam Neeson a script?' I'm still flattered by that. So I'll keep doing it till the knees give up. It beats hiding in a basement in eastern Aleppo."
(As Richardson once put it: "I think he probably, on some level — although he wouldn't say it — wakes up every morning thinking, 'Isn't it great I'm not driving a forklift?' ")
Now that he's back in New York, Neeson looks forward to lying low for a while. "Just recharge the batteries," he says. "I don't want to see the inside of an airplane." He'll take in some Broadway shows, catch up on all the programs on his Apple TV: Fargo, Ray Donovan, Breaking Bad. He's also got a big stack of books he wants to tackle — two Ian McEwan novels and a box of classics he recently received as a gift, which included War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
And then, of course, there are those walks in the park.
It all sounds nice, I say. But I'm not sure it's enough to fill up a day.
Neeson smiles. "You'd be surprised."
","tag_ids":[4748,4794],"publish_date":"2016-12-12T16:07:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson - Liam Neeson Interview","keywords":"liam neeson, interview, feature, profile, liam neeson magazine cover, silence, martin scorsese,","description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hvX3IR","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Neeson with Richardson in London, October 2008.","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_b-8f9a8a98-433a-4b2d-8ff5-ed182b83326c.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Marc Hom","caption":"","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_g-6285b0f9-fcaa-4ed9-8955-6792bf4dc162.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photographs by Marc Hom","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_a-cb7e2101-2367-478c-ac0e-e10d94efd88b.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/mark-ruffalos-good-life-formula-3-kids-1-rabbit-47-acres-2-764-miles-from-hollywood-20130509","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood","contentId":168305,"contentHeadline":"Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/features/articles/norman-reedus-the-wild-one-w209199","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Getting to Know Norman Reedus","contentId":209199,"contentHeadline":"Norman Reedus: "}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454117,"old_id":null,"title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","short_title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","slug":"/features/articles/how-companies-like-kuiu-made-hunting-the-new-action-sport-w454117","body":"It's just before dusk in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and Jason Hairston is getting pummeled. The light is fading, and he's hiking up a ridgeline at 11,000 feet, higher than he's ever been. A cold front is passing through, and wind gusts are reaching in excess of 60 miles per hour. Every few steps another blast hits, knocking him sideways. Hairston's companions, Brendan Burns and Willie Hettinger, aren't faring much better, stumbling around in front of him like a couple of drunks.
The wind is howling with such force that it's almost comical, so Hairston, who's on the mountain hunting sheep, breaks out his iPhone to record an Instagram post, looking like one of those hackneyed meteorologists reporting from the middle of a hurricane. "We saw a group of rams on the far mountain, and now we're heading up to check out another area," he shouts into his phone. "We're just getting hammered by the wind."
Hairston, the 45-year-old founder of the hunting-gear company Kuiu, is after his first Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, a sure-footed ungulate that lives primarily above tree line, often in locations so steep and rocky that they're impossible to negotiate on two feet. "It's the pinnacle of big-game hunting," Hairston says. "You have to go farther and harder for them than for any other species."
Among a segment of hardcore big-game hunters, no brand is as revered as Kuiu. The company's high-performance fabrics — bonded fleece and waterproof breathable synthetics — are pulled directly from the mountaineering world, and its distinct Tetris-like camo pattern looks more like standard-issue SEAL gear than the fake shrubbery so common at Walmart. Today Kuiu camo is as much a status symbol in hook-and-bullet culture as Louis Vuitton's monogram is among the Hamptons set. And it has as many celebrity boosters: UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a fan. Metallica's James Hetfield owns a guitar emblazoned with Kuiu camo, and Kid Rock has a piano wrapped in it.
On Instagram, Hairston has some 21,000 followers who track his far-flung hunts and gear updates and tag their own posts with #kuiunation. Detractors, of which Hairston has a few, occasionally use the comments section to rail against his trophy shots and what they see as hunting for the 1 Percent. But it's hard to say how much Kuiunation or Hairston's critics will get from this impromptu weather report: With the thin air, he inhales heavily between sentences, and his voice is almost entirely drowned out by the wind's roar. After stashing his phone in his pocket, he wipes snot from his nose.
"Ain't sheep hunting great!" he says.
The three hunters spend the next hour scouting and see a group of promising rams, but with darkness creeping over the eastern plains, we call it quits for the night and head back to camp. The next morning, conditions are far more favorable, so we load up our backpacks and set off in the violet predawn looking for a sheep to shoot.
When it comes to finding big rams, Burns and Hettinger are two of the best in the business. Burns works for Kuiu as its lead product tester and resident hunting guide. Hettinger's main gig is as a personal hunting guide for rich clientele; he's here because he knows these mountains better than just about anyone.
Once outside of camp, it takes Burns and Hettinger less than 10 minutes to spot the same group of rams two ridgelines over, a straight-line distance of maybe a mile. Hairston has a rare management tag from the Taos Pueblo, a 120,000-acre tribal homeland in northern New Mexico, which requires him to shoot an old ram, eight to 11 years old, that probably won't survive another winter or two, its molars ground down so far that it'll eventually starve. Based on its horns, the largest in the group looks like a shooter, but to get within range we have to hike up and over a 13,000-foot peak, then down and around the back side of the ridge where the sheep were first seen. Doing so takes most of the morning, stopping and starting to catch our breath and continually watch the movement of the rams. Now, as the three hunters prepare to clamber to the edge of a slight rock outcropping to take a closer look, Hairston unlatches a custom-made .300 WSM rifle from the side of his backpack and loads a 200-grain bullet into the chamber. "It feels good to finally get some lead in the pipe," he says.
But in the four hours we've been on the move, the sheep have wandered into the upper reaches of a grove of pine trees, behind a slight knoll. No shot. The three reassess. They settle on crawling to the edge of the knoll, knowing that Hairston will be within 150 yards of the animals, a strategy that could easily spook them.
"We can roll right over the top," Hettinger says, "but we won't have much time to decide whether to shoot."
"If we push them," says Burns, "we won't see them again — not on this trip."
Both turn to Hairston to make the call. "That's fine," he says with grin. "We're professionals. This is what we do for a living."
You'll be forgiven if your idea of hunting is paunchy old dudes rumbling down back roads in beat-up pickup trucks. Plenty of sportsmen still shoot whitetails out of tree stands or wait on the edge of sloughs for a flock of mallards to decoy in. But these days, hunting has been embraced by a new breed of devotees: athletic, tech-savvy, ethically minded professionals who like to play year-round in the mountains. They're often the same mountain bikers and runners on the trails outside Moab or Bozeman in summer. But come fall, they trade Lycra for camo and pick up a rifle or bow, many for the first time.
Tim Ferriss, the 4-Hour Work Week guru, is a recent convert to hunting. So is actor Chris Pratt. Even Facebook king Mark Zuckerberg has boasted about killing the meat he eats. Much of hunting's newfound appeal is because the payoff is a year's supply of organic, antibiotic-free backstraps — the new ethical eating. But it's also a way for mountain lovers to get deep into the outdoors, tempting people who have no desire to sit in a duck blind.
"It's a totally different way of interacting with these wild places," says Kenton Carruth, co-founder of the performance-hunting apparel company First Lite. "I know plenty of pro mountain guides who are in the woods every day and they've never seen a wolf, but that's because hikers or climbers are always walking around. They're never silent, still, taking in every sound and smell. As a hunter, I've seen a wolf quite a few times."
For adventure athletes, hunting is a challenge that's every bit as difficult as finishing an ultramarathon — stalking animals for miles on end, packing out hundreds of pounds of meat, navigating through the backcountry in snowstorms. It also offers the rush that comes with having to make consequential decisions in the mountains, just like in climbing.
"The athletic world is very physical but pretty sterile," says Mark Paulsen, a former strength and conditioning coach who has worked with NFL players. "Whether you're on a football field or on a basketball court, it's a known event. Whereas you go into the woods, you have no idea what you might be heading into. For people who love the mountains, that's the beauty of it."
Paulsen now owns Wilderness Athlete, which creates nutritional products like meal-replacement powders for these new so-called backpack hunters. Twenty years ago he was training athletes at the University of New Mexico when a friend took him bow-hunting for elk, hiking six miles into the mountains with 70 pounds of gear. The weight and altitude nearly killed him. "I wanted to throw up, lie down, crawl under a tree," he says. "I thought, 'This the most athletic thing I've ever done in my life.' " On the last day of the hunt, a bull elk bugled so close that Paulsen could feel it in his rib cage. He felled the bull with an arrow from 15 yards. "It was the single most exhilarating experience of my life," he says.
If backpack hunting can be said to have a celebrity, Hairston is it. Much of that has to do with his seemingly endless series of big hunts, which he regularly posts about on Instagram, much to the dismay of anti-hunters and even some in the hunting world. In the last six months alone, he has bagged a trophy room full of animals. In July, he shot a 3x4 blacktail buck in northern California. In August, he flew to the Yukon's far north and killed a 10-year-old Dall sheep with perfectly symmetrical 42-inch horns. In September, on private land just north of Bozeman, Montana, while hunting with his eight-year-old son, Cash, and his 72-year-old father, he brought down a monster bull elk with a compound bow.
"It's in our DNA," says Hairston. "It's two million years of genetics. Whenever I hear criticism online I just respond to them: 'Before you knock it, get out and do it.' "
Up close, bighorn rams register less as living creatures than as props in a prehistoric diorama in a natural history museum. Their tousled, purplish coats gleam in the sun, and the growth rings on their horns are demarcated by clear, dark lines. With a good spotting scope, you can age a sheep by counting the rings at a distance of a few hundred yards or more. Few people are better at this, or enjoy it as much, as Hettinger and Burns.
Hairston met Burns at a trade show a decade ago. At the time, Burns had become something of a phenom in the hunting world by besting Montana's archery record for a nontypical elk. He'd tracked the animal for three days before sneaking within 12 yards and shooting it with an arrow. The horns alone weighed 54 pounds. He was just 22 at the time. Burns has racked up an impressive series of kills — two of which landed him on the Boone and Crockett Club's record list, essentially the Billboard music charts for hunters. But these days his knowledge of and obsession with sheep has earned him the nom de guerre Sheep3PO. "The only way to get him to shut up about sheep," Hairston says, "is to turn him off."
Burns and Hairston hunt together multiple times a year, taking pride in going farther afield than nearly anyone. Lately that's meant to Canada's far north for 10-day expeditions with a local guide — a prerequisite when buying a sheep tag up there. "The guides are often excited, because they've never been able to take clients to some of these places," says Hairston. "They're too difficult to access, but with us they know we can go." On their Yukon hunt this year, they flew to a remote airstrip near the Arctic Circle, crossed a river via boat, and then hiked three days into the mountains before they were even in sheep territory.
This New Mexico hunt is a far cry from those expeditions, but it's a better bet for scoring an old bighorn. As we crawl to the edge of the knoll for a closer look at the group of five rams that moved off downhill, it becomes clear the oldest one is perfect. He has a massive body, probably 300 pounds, with thick horns that end in flat stubs, the product of years of bashing heads with rivals during the rut. He's nine, maybe 10 years old based on his growth rings. Hairston drops his backpack and lies flat on his belly, propping the rifle up on his bag to take aim.
"The one on the left," Burns says. "He's the one." The rams are grouped together tightly, and they clearly sense that something is amiss. At first they dart one way, then another. Finally, they disappear into the trees. Hairston never pulls the trigger.
"Fuck," says Burns. "Fuck."
Hairston slowly gets up and looks back with a pained smile. "I never had a shot," he says as way of explanation. Now the animals are gone, maybe for good. "Come on," Burns says. "Let's get ahead of them." So we take off side-hilling it across the mountain, doing our best to catch up to an animal that can run uphill faster than most NFL cornerbacks can on AstroTurf.
Like many hunters, Hairston views the sport as the ultimate proving ground. It's part of the reason he is so fond of the idea of backpack hunting, which may be the sport's purest, most self-reliant expression. Before setting out, he often fills out spreadsheets with each piece of gear and its corresponding weight listed in ounces. "You've got to," he says. "Every once adds up over a 10-day period to thousands of extra calories burned." He budgets two pounds of food per day, divvied up by day in Ziploc bags. He also trains year-round, spending 10 to 15 hours per week in the gym or hiking with sandbags in his backpacks. For mountaineers, none of this is new, but in the hunting world there are only a handful of people who prep the way he does.
Hairston has been hunting in one form or another since he was a kid growing up in Southern California. Like his father, Hairston took up football in high school and then college, playing linebacker. He was good enough that the San Francisco 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1995. He stayed with the team for a season without playing a down, then retired a year later after suffering an injury to his C5 and C6 vertebrae during a mini-camp with another team. His career as an NFL player was over before it even began. "I couldn't really watch football for a few years," he says. "I was angry about what it had done to me."
Hairston then sold commercial real estate, flipped a few franchises, and became increasingly focused on hunting. Around that time he was often out with Jonathan Hart, a friend from college. On their first backcountry hunt together, in Idaho's White Cloud Mountains, the weather fluctuated wildly — cold and snowing one day, sunny and 80 degrees the next — and their gear was soaked nearly the entire time. Both knew there had to be something better.
Hart thought about the gear he used for other outdoor activities. "In my garage I'd have shotguns and rifles and bows and arrows, but I also had kayaks and climbing gear and ice axes," he says. The apparel options for each of those sports, he noticed, was far superior to anything he had for hunting. Hairston had a similar epiphany when realized he was shopping for his gear more in REI than Bass Pro Shops.
So in 2005 Hairston and Hart decided to make high-performance synthetic gear specifically for hunters. They named it Sitka, after a town in Alaska. They designed a new camo pattern, made some sample jackets and pants, and then convinced mail-order catalog Schnee's to take a chance on the line. Sitka was a hit from the get-go, finding a home with sportsman looking for an upgrade from the subpar cotton offerings. By 2008, Sitka topped $4 million in sales and its products were on store shelves across the country, including Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's. In 2009, W.L. Gore & Associates, the $3 billion behemoth behind Gore-Tex, acquired Sitka for an undisclosed sum. Today it's one of the largest brands in the performance-hunting space.
The deal was worth millions, but the partnership between Hairston and Hart unraveled. Hairston never wanted to sell, he says, and his misgivings became apparent during a meeting about the acquisition. Execs wanted to expand Sitka's footprint, making new camo patterns for whitetail and duck hunters. In Hairston's view, this was unthinkable. "You lose the core appeal," he says.
Increasingly frustrated, Hairston left Sitka (Hart says he was simply not offered a job after the sale) and immediately got to work on Kuiu. With Kuiu, which he named after a game-rich Alaskan island — perhaps not coincidentally located across an icy strait from Sitka — Hairston decided to sell online, directly to consumers; that way, he'd be able to control everything and avoid retail markup. He worked with an engineer to create a carbon fiber backpack frame that was lighter and more ergonomic than anything on the market — and that could comfortably carry 120 pounds of fresh meat. He teamed up with the Japanese company Toray, a competitor to Gore-Tex, to develop a line of apparel. During the 18 months it took to produce everything, Hairston blogged obsessively about the process, building anticipation and earning trust among a dedicated contingent of hunters.
Kuiu launched in 2011 and was an immediate success. It now sells everything from $300 rain jackets to backpacks, game bags, and tents. Sales are approaching $50 million, at least according to Hairston, and the company is expanding its offerings beyond hunting. The Navy SEALs, he says, have reached out to develop a line of tactical gear (to be released to Kuiu customers in 2017), and even Disney hired Kuiu to create a backpack frame for its costumed performers. Hairston has plans for the company's first brick-and-mortar store in 2018, and a traveling pop-up store will be hitting the road this summer.
With Kuiu's success, Hairston has fielded a number of offers to buy the company, but says he'd rather be good than big: "I made that mistake with Gore. I won't make clothes for women, and I won't make clothes for fat guys, because then the skinny guys won't look good in them. I want Kuiu to be an aspirational brand."
After passing on the shot on the big ram, Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger get into position atop another rock outcropping, just up-valley from where the rams disappeared. The vantage point offers a clear sight line into the bowl below. But the sheep never show up.
The hunters are silent, pondering the next move — if there is one. Earlier in the morning, Burns had checked his phone and noticed a photo about an acquaintance's recent, unsuccessful hunt. The post basically said the experience of hunting in the mountains was reward enough. "That's great and all," Burns said, "but I'd rather get something. You either win or you lose."
Hairston does not like to lose. In the business world his competitiveness has earned him a fair amount of flak, including criticism by competitors for misleading claims about the performance of his products. But much of the concern centers around conservation. Whereas most of the new hunters packing rifles into the backcountry are doing so on public land, with tags won in public lotteries, many of Hairston's hunts are through private landowners or outfitters. To some this resembles the pay-to-play hunting model so common in Europe, where it's a rich man's sport. Walter Palmer, the dentist who shot Cecil the lion, placed a big order from Kuiu before he jetted off to Zimbabwe. And Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who have been photographed at length with their kills, are Kuiu customers and friends of Hairston's.
Kuiu donates a fair amount of money to conservation organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which have been a boon for those species. But a central tenet of organizations like these and many state wildlife agencies is protecting species with funds raised by auctioning off premium hunting tags, some that sell for upwards of $100,000. It's an effective strategy in some areas, but it's also controversial because it's hard to know just how much money is going to conservation. It can also come at the expense of public-draw hunters.
"We start to get into trouble," says Land Tawney, director of the nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, "when more and more tags are allocated in the name of raising money, and then we turn into a system where only the rich and elite have the opportunity to get those tags."
Plus, selling high-dollar licenses tacitly feeds a trophy-hunting mentality that continues to flag the sport — warranted or not — as hunters go after animals simply because they'll score well on a record list.
"When the pursuit of an animal as a status symbol becomes more important than the experience surrounding it," says author and TV host Steven Rinella, a respected figure in the outdoors world, "you enter into very troubling terrain."
Hairston has turned Kuiu into a cult favorite by transforming his camo apparel into a hardcore-lifestyle brand, much like CrossFit, and making himself the face of the company. That plays well when you're selling products and prepping for big trips, but it can come off as self-aggrandizing once an animal is on the ground.
Jonathan Hart, Hairston's former business partner, sums him up this way: "It's like in Seinfeld, the J. Peterman catalog that Elaine works for. It's all about him. Jason is about Jason."
After losing the rams in the trees, Hairston and Burns discuss their options. By now, the animals may be long gone. The wind is blowing, circling around the mountain, and we start moving back to where we last saw the rams. Hettinger sets off to track where they went. Then suddenly, there they are, just a hundred yards downhill. Hairston and Burns take up nearly the exact same positions they had an hour earlier, while Hettinger creeps closer to spook them out of the trees. This time, the big ram shows itself clean, broadside to Hairston. He shoots.
The report, like a door slam, quickly dissipates in the wind. From below the ridge, the sound of snapping branches rings out — the ram stumbling at full gait into a tree. Then it's just wind. Burns reaches over and fist pumps Hairston. "You got him," he says. "You got him." Burns grabs his spotting scope and runs downhill toward where the ram disappeared. Within seconds he lets out a high-pitched yip. "Yeaaooo! He's right down here."
By the time Hairston arrives, Burns and Hettinger are already marveling at the ram's thick, almost violet cape. "That is as an awesome of a cape as you will find on a bighorn," says Burns. "Look at the mass on that thing!"
"Awesome," Hairston says. "That is awesome."
After admiring the ram for a solid 15 minutes, the hunters drag him under a few big trees for photos. Burns breaks out a bottle of Super Glue to affix the ram's mouth shut, so it doesn't hang lose. Then we spend the next hour shooting photos: Hairston alone with his kill; Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger with the ram; a close-up of the animal's horns. After they're sure there are enough good pics, Burns and Hettinger break out knives no bigger than X-Actos and carefully start removing the hide, everything from the hoofs to the head, to preserve for the taxidermist. Hairston wants a full-body mount to display in Kuiu's offices. As his partners cape the animal and cut off each quarter, Hairston quickly debones the meat, making it lighter for the pack out. Still, the meat, horns, and cape weigh a combined 150 pounds or so, and it takes three and a half hours to get it the mile or two back to camp.
Once there we all unpack our bags into our tents, then regroup around a fire. Soon everyone is emailing about the day's events. Hairston texts with Joe Rogan about an upcoming elk hunt. Eventually, we call it a night. Hairston heads off to his Kuiu tent, tucking the sheep's cape and head into the vestibule so a bear doesn't get it in the night. It's a strange sight, but it's hard to blame him: even sticking out of the top of his pack, the ram still looks regal.
Earlier in the day, shortly after shooting the sheep and walking down to where it lay, Hairston did something almost all hunters do. He set his gun and backpack down and crouched beside the animal, with his hand on its shoulder, clearly in awe. And then a silence came over him. Everyone stopped and let him have the moment.
Finally, Burns weighed in. "That thing is just the perfect sheep," he said.
After a few more seconds of silence, taking in the animal before him, Hairston looked up and agreed. "It's good to be a winner."
","tag_ids":[4748,5099],"publish_date":"2016-12-08T15:42:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"How Companies Like Kuiu Made Hunting the New Action Sport","keywords":"kuiu, hunting, jason hairston, bighorn sheep, big-game hunting, conservation, feature, profile, interview","description":"Cult gear company Kuiu is outfitting a new wave of superfit, adrenaline-craving, tech-savvy athletes who are transforming hunting into the next extreme sport. And critics are taking aim."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2gFOwPz","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"The hunters on their way to the top of 13,113 foot Old Mike Peak.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_d-f370f5f3-b934-4fc1-a047-b4fc27364744.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"The prey: a Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_c-d9522c1a-5aef-4392-9978-4992b42a153a.jpg"},"photo_3":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Hairston taking aim.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_v2_a-105ee416-8e4f-46f7-afe1-d78c4655f75c.jpg"},"photo_4":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Filling up in town before heading to the mountains for three days.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_e-5e658036-2829-4b00-8a5d-54b9b190687d.jpg"},"photo_5":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Packing out his ram.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_f-17988db9-2711-44eb-b1d4-e9d080b78961.jpg"},"photo_6":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Scouting bighorn rams at 11,000 feet in Sangre de Cristo Mountains.","filename":"m0117_fob_toc_a-eb1140de-f638-4778-888c-88e59ad8fd86.jpg"},"photo_7":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Jason Hairston","caption":"Hairston's wife, Kirstyn, with Cash and Coco.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_i-d6be904c-48bf-4f2c-b95b-1b313c1ed525.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":"Kuiu founder Jason Hairston scans the ridgeline for big ram.","credits":"Photographs by Paul Bride","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_a-cab418d7-f527-47c6-8424-61cee5c90d32.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/features/articles/the-last-whale-hunt-for-a-vanishing-village-kivalina-alaska-w443825","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village","contentId":443825,"contentHeadline":"The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/travel/articles/alaskas-wildest-weirdest-frontier-w431953","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: Alaska's Wildest, Weirdest Frontier","contentId":431953,"contentHeadline":"Alaska's Wildest, Weirdest Frontier"},"inset_3":{"slug":"/adventure/articles/the-fight-for-europes-last-wild-river-w444231","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Fight for Europe's Last Wild River","contentId":444231,"contentHeadline":"The Fight for Europe's Last Wild River"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Cult gear company Kuiu is outfitting a new wave of superfit, adrenaline-craving, tech-savvy athletes who are transforming hunting into the next extreme sport. And critics are taking aim.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":448984,"old_id":null,"title":"A Climber's Cure for Addiction","short_title":"A Climber's Cure for Addiction","slug":"/adventure/articles/a-climbers-cure-for-addiction-w448984","body":"Ryan Burke emerges from his sleeping bag at 3 o'clock in the morning. After three days in Wyoming's Teton Range, his limbs are brown with dust and marred with cuts and scrapes. He takes a few bites of a cold breakfast burrito and shoulders his pack, wincing as he picks up the 40-pound bag. "Oof," he says. "It's not light." Though he's slept only five hours, he seems energized. "Let's do this," he says, flicking on his headlamp to set off for the summit of 12,326-foot Teewinot Mountain.
It's a Tuesday in late August, and Burke, who's 34 and lives in nearby Jackson, has been climbing nearly nonstop for the past 72 hours. Teewinot will be the 18th ascent he's made since Saturday. His goal is to climb to the top of the most prominent 50 peaks of the Teton Range — 102 miles and 112,000 feet of elevation gained and lost — in one contiguous push. It's never been done, and Burke believes he can do it in seven days.
This is not Burke's first feat. In 2012, he ran up and down the 13,775-foot Grand Teton in three hours and 35 minutes. (It takes most people two days.) The following year he set the record for the Picnic, an unofficial race made up of a 21-mile bike ride from Jackson to Jenny Lake, a 1.3-mile swim across the lake, then 10 miles of trail running to the top of Grand Teton — and then doing the whole course in reverse. He completed it in 11 hours and 30 minutes.
But this outing has been much more difficult. He began on the north end of the range, where the Tetons are thick with bushes and scree, loose rocks that slide beneath your feet.
"I've been falling five times a day he says. "I'd make it two feet up and then slide backward a foot." On day two on Mount Moran, while unroped, he ripped a microwave-size boulder from an overhang 800 feet above the ground. He saved his life by latching on to another rock and holding on with just his fingertips. Smoke from forest fires 20 miles away is also causing Burke to cough up a "weird yellow mucus" each morning.
What makes Burke's traverse seem even more improbable is that he's not a professional mountaineer. During the week, he works as a drug and alcohol rehab counselor, trying to curb Jackson Hole's growing opioid problem. The drugs have become a scourge just about everywhere in the country, but mountain towns like Jackson are uniquely affected. They're home to oft-injured adventure athletes — skiers, climbers, and bikers — who tend to follow a similar pattern: They get hurt, have surgery, and are placed on prescription opioids; when those opioids run out, the athletes often turn to cheaper, more readily available heroin to scratch that itch.
"Adventure athletes are kind of always on a high," says Burke. "So when they can't jump off a cliff anymore to get that high, drugs are there to replace it."
In 2014, local authorities reported a 30 percent increase in heroin-related seizures in Tahoe, Nevada; from 2013 to 2015, there were almost 40 deaths in Boulder, Colorado, due to heroin overdose. And in tiny Jackson, police report dozens of opioid-related incidents in the past year. This summer, Burke devised a long-term outpatient program, which he calls the Mind Strength Project, to help addicts by pairing intense exercise routines with cognitive challenges — say, tying a climber's knot while holding your breath underwater. Burke hopes the program will "rewire drug addicts' brains so that they're producing a natural dopamine high."
As we make our way up Teewinot, Burke shows no sign of fatigue. Last summer, two climbers fell to their deaths from here, but Burke strides like an Olympic speed walker. He'll summit another six peaks today, including Grand Teton, which looms in front of him. After a final scramble to the pinpoint tip of Teewinot, I ask why he does it. "To test my limits," he says. "To see what my potential is."
Ryan Burke could easily have been a victim of the heroin epidemic. He grew up in Rumford, Maine, a working-class town whose primary industry — paper mills — shrouds the vicinity in a distinct odor. "It smells like shit," Burke says. He lived with his single mother in a trailer park and spent most of his youth around family, some of whom suffered from drug and alcohol addictions. After high school, he took out a loan and enrolled at New York's Hamilton College, where he says he was the biggest drinker in his class and saw a future in which things would get worse. "I was headed down a road of substance abuse," he says. Instead, he turned to athletics.
When Burke graduated, in 2004, he helped start a nonprofit called Coast to Coast for Hope, which solicited money for cancer research. He raised $40,000 riding his bike across the country. He also fell in love with Jackson along the way. After the ride was over, he packed up his car and moved to the Tetons.
In 2007, he met Jarad Spackman, a Jackson native who was active in the climbing, mountaineering, and backcountry-skiing communities. Burke was anxious to learn how to do all these things. The two began spending several days a week together, and Spackman slowly taught Burke how to negotiate the mountains, encouraging him to try harder routes on climbing trips. On backcountry ski tours, Spackman would patiently wait for Burke to catch up. "Early on, he took me skiing on Teton Pass and I fell way behind," Burke recalls. "He could've become irritated and never called me again, but he didn't. He saw potential in me."
For Burke, mountaineering was a healthy way to get his endorphin hit. And, eventually, he became good at it. "I don't have an incredible VO2 max or anything," he says. "But I don't get tired." After setting the record for the Picnic, the modified triathlon up Grand Teton, Burke played in a pickup soccer game later that day, and "that's when I knew I hadn't hit my limit," he says. "I decided the only way to do that was to make up my own challenges."
But in 2013, tragedy struck. While skiing in Grand Teton National Park, Spackman was killed in an avalanche. "It was the hardest thing that ever happened to me," says Burke. He left Jackson for eight months, "to do some soul-searching" — and spent that time climbing mountains in Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and China. "Death makes you pretty introspective," he says. "Athletic pursuits are often about you, and I wanted to do something that took some focus off me and put it on helping others." Burke's mother had been a drug counselor, and he appreciated the way she made people feel safe — no matter what they'd done in the past. It was similar to the way Spackman had made him feel in the mountains. "I decided I wanted to be a counselor," he says.
When Burke began thinking about how he could help, he drew from his own experiences. He used the physical and mental stresses of climbing mountains — and the rush it induces — to stay off drugs. Perhaps he could devise a program that mimicked those highs, and help addicts kick their habit.
A few weeks before Burke set out on this Teton traverse, he was working with 12 of his patients at the Mountain Tactical Institute, a gym that trains pro athletes and loans him its facility. As the group ran between circuits of wall climbing, sandbag lifts, and shuttle runs, Burke challenged their mental fortitude by blowing whistles and throwing rubber balls at them. This is the testing ground for his vision. If it shows promise, the goal is it may serve as a model for other drug-ridden towns.
"I can't say right now that this program is going to save the world," says Trudy Funk, executive director at the Curran-Seeley Foundation, the drug and alcohol rehab clinic where Burke works. "But we're hopeful that this helps teach them how to think clearly when faced with taking drugs. And we'll continue to look into how well it might work to keep people off drugs."
Danny is one of the first lab rats. Making his way up a wall climb, Danny looks down and shakes the pain out of one of his hands. "This is gonna kill me," he says. Danny, an avid snowboarder, is 24 with short blond hair. He looks like an all-American kid — which he was. Then he broke his arm in eighth grade, was placed on opioids, and became addicted to heroin. Despite years of traditional therapy, he relapsed 10 months ago.
While Danny stands on a balance ball trying to find the differences between two pictures, I ask if he thought Burke's unconventional therapy was working. "I think it's exactly what I needed," he says. "When I was active in my addiction, I avoided confrontation and problems. Now I'm able to face those things. I don't feel scared anymore."
On day seven of the traverse, I meet Burke at the top of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. He's gaunt, having lost 10 pounds over the course of the week; his gray shorts are tattered; the rubber on the bottom of his shoes has almost completely worn off, and he's developed a powerful stench. The past few days have been rough. He encountered a snowstorm on Static Peak and 65-mile-per-hour winds on the north face of the Grand, and he didn't sleep one night because he was freezing. "Every step feels like I'm going up Everest," he says as he shovels spoonfuls of Nutella into his mouth.
But as we leave, Burke begins to jog, leaping over logs and boulders as though he's just spent a restful night on his Sealy Posturepedic. The end is near, and thoughts of a warm shower and pizza bring a second wind. He's also motivated by thinking about his patients. "You can see the look in their eyes in the gym, like they've accomplished something," he says as he tiptoes over more scree. "Maybe this is something they can aspire to."
Atop the knife-edge summit of Rendezvous Peak, Burke peers out and spots a few couloirs he likes to ski. "Jarad showed me all of this," he says. "I wouldn't be up here if it wasn't for him." I ask if this is it — has he found his limit? "I thought so," he says. "But there's still a sense of yearning."
Seventeen miles and five peaks later, we approach the final summit, appropriately named Mount Glory. "Holy shit!" Burke shouts. He sprints to the top and spikes his pack like a football. "That's a long fucking way." He pulls a plastic baggie from his pocket and sits on a rock. The baggie contains ashes — Spackman's ashes — and Burke has spread some of them on each of the peaks he's summited. "I wanted to share the experience with him," he says, "to show him what I'd become."
He takes a handful from the bag, pushes a clenched fist into his lowered forehead, and whispers to himself. After a minute, he looks up and lets out a big sigh. Then he tosses the ashes into the wind.
","tag_ids":[5798,5611],"publish_date":"2016-11-09T17:26:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"A Climber's Cure for Addiction","keywords":"addiction, mountaineering, feature, climbing, ryan burke, wyoming, teton range, opiates","description":"Jackson Hole's hardest-charging mountaineer summited the Tetons' 50 highest peaks in seven days. But his greatest feat may be helping adventure athletes kick opioids."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2fyDuff","label":"PROFILE","media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer"},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Andy Bardon","caption":"","filename":"m1216_nb_drugcounselor_b-f7e1a107-3cad-4191-9258-08f44785335b.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Drills like underwater knot tying, Burke believes, help addicts develop coping mechanisms.","filename":"m1216_nb_drugcounselor_c-4944a43f-4252-43c7-a351-6a1c98beee71.jpg"},"photo_3":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Andy Bardon","caption":"On the peaks of his traverse, Burke dispersed the ashes of his close fried Jarad Spackman, who died in an avalanche.","filename":"m1216_nb_drugcounselor_e-a1129205-b9de-4822-9b9d-3a4cd0a28a18.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photographs by Andy Bardon","filename":"m1216_nb_drugcounselor_a-07b692b7-6975-497f-bd87-37328ca14242.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/entertainment/articles/tk-mishka-w200414","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: Running Away From Addiction","contentId":200414,"contentHeadline":"Running Away From Addiction "}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Jackson Hole's hardest-charging mountaineer summited the Tetons' 50 highest peaks in seven days. But his greatest feat may be helping adventure athletes kick opioids.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":448627,"old_id":null,"title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","short_title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","slug":"/features/articles/how-an-11-year-olds-brain-injury-rattled-a-football-family-w448627","body":"It was a crisp Sunday afternoon in Missoula, Montana, and Mike Callaghan stood in the blustery sunshine, doing the thing he loved best: coaching his 11-year-old son's football team. Brogan Callaghan was the Panthers' quarterback and was shaping up as a real leader on the field. Mike, still athletic at age 52, couldn't help but think back to his own days on these fields, with his own father watching.
On that day, the Panthers were playing their archrivals, the Chargers, and were down 14–7 in the second quarter. Brogan took the snap and rolled left, twisting his upper body to throw right. As soon as he released the ball, he was flattened by a defender, so he didn't see that the receiver had made the catch and scored, the bleachers erupting into cheers.
Brogan jumped right up from the hit and jogged into formation for the extra point before switching to linebacker, a position his father once played with the Montana State Bobcats over in Bozeman. As the offense lined up, Mike noticed the Chargers' running back go into motion early. "Sweep!" Callaghan yelled from the sidelines, but Brogan was already on it, slipping left around the Chargers' big right tackle. Brogan was just about to take down the runner when he was slammed from behind — an illegal hit that flexed his spine, snapped his head forward, and sent him colliding into one of his own teammates. He went down hard, banging the back of his head into the dirt.
As a coach, Callaghan generally kept his cool. But now he went straight for the referee, screaming that this was the second time that player had made the same illegal block. "That's twice," Callaghan yelled. "You've got to call that."
But another Panthers coach, Eric Dawald, noticed something more alarming: Brogan wasn't getting up. Dawald rushed onto the field and found the boy on his back, barely conscious. Brogan opened his eyes and looked up. "I can't see," he said.
Brogan's mother, Shannon, was chatting with friends in the bleachers when she heard somebody say, "I think that's Brogan." She ran to the field, arriving at the same time her husband did.
Brogan looked up at his parents. "I can't feel my legs," he said. Shannon glanced at her husband and thought, "Brogan has to be done with football forever. It has to end now."
An ambulance drove onto the grass, and a paramedic removed the face mask from Brogan's helmet. They asked him what day it was, and Brogan answered incorrectly. They asked his birthday, and he couldn't answer that, either. One of the paramedics asked him if his neck hurt. "I can't feel my legs," the boy repeated.
Callaghan had been coaching youth football for 22 years without witnessing anything worse than a broken arm. Certain that Brogan's paralysis was momentary, he knelt beside his son and grabbed a patch of skin on the back of his calf. "You're going to feel this, Brog," he said. "You're fine. You'll feel this." Callaghan pinched, hard, but Brogan did not respond.
Some of his teammates were crying as the paramedics strapped their quarterback to a backboard, placed an oxygen mask over his face, and loaded him into the ambulance. Shannon climbed in, and they sped the boy across the Clark Fork River to St. Patrick Hospital.
Callaghan drove separately, his mind racing through worst-case scenarios: "We'll buy a one-level house. I'll change jobs so I can be home more, learn to care for a paraplegic child." Another thought intruded: "I was the coach. This happened on my watch. How did I do this to my kid?"
While the emergency room doctors evaluated Brogan, Shannon's and Mike's parents arrived at the hospital. After filling them in about Brogan's condition, Shannon turned to Callaghan's father. James Callaghan was an oral surgeon who had played football in college and loved watching his grandson play as much as he had loved watching Mike. In fact, in all of Mike's years of playing youth football, his father missed just one game, when Mike was in the sixth grade. "I don't ever want Brogan to play football again," Shannon told her father-in-law. "And you have to back me up on this." James Callaghan told her that it was none of his business.
Back in the emergency room, Brogan looked at his father and asked, "Am I paralyzed?"
"I think you are," Callaghan thought. "You're going to be all right," he said. He watched a tear roll down his son's cheek and thought, "He knows."
Brogan looked up at Callaghan and said, "Who are you?"
Before the injury, it had been a typical fall weekend for the Callaghans. Friday afternoon at 5, Mike left his office to meet Dawald and Brogan and the rest of the Panthers for practice. Afterward, they jumped into Callaghan's truck and drove across town to Loyola Sacred Heart High School, where they ate hot dogs, sipped Pepsis, and watched one of Callaghan's old MSU teammates coach his own son in a game against Troy High. On Saturday morning, Callaghan and Brogan watched an NCAA game while eating breakfast. If Montana State had been playing at home, they would have driven to Bozeman, where Callaghan did TV color commentary. As it happened, they were away, so Callaghan and Brogan watched the game on TV while plotting the next day's attack against the Chargers. Win or lose, after the game they'd head home to catch the Steelers play the 49ers and dig in to their usual chip buffet — three flavors of Ruffles, tortilla chips, seven-layer dip, and guacamole.
"We might be nuts," Callaghan says. "But so much of our week is taken up by football."
Plenty of other fathers could say the same thing. The NFL and NCAA get all the attention, but the vast majority of football in America is played at the youth level. There are about 2,000 men in the NFL, and 73,000 play on college teams. But more than 3 million boys between the ages of six and 18 play for teams like the Panthers and the Loyola Rams, in towns like Missoula, where football is deeply woven into the fabric of local life.
But that fabric is starting to fray, riven by a growing stack of research linking football to chronic head trauma. In college and the pros, players are consenting adults who make their own choices about that risk. But for those younger than 18, the decision rests with parents — more and more of whom are saying no to tackle football. Between 2010 and 2015, youth-league participation cratered nearly 30 percent.
Even NFL legends have reservations. Casey "Big Snack" Hampton, who played tackle for 12 years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, told me that he refused to let his son play tackle football before high school. "I made him wait," Hampton says. "I've seen little kids get concussions." Other stars, including Brett Favre and Troy Aikman, have expressed similar reservations. "I would not want my child out there," Terry Bradshaw told Jay Leno in 2012. "The fear of them getting these head injuries . . . it's just too great for me."
That stance has football leagues, both amateur and pro, scrambling. Earlier this year, Pop Warner, the nation's oldest youth football league, eliminated kickoffs for kids younger than 11, to limit open-field contact. USA Football, a nonprofit partially funded by the NFL that offers training, education, and equipment subsidies to youth leagues, has introduced a set of practice guidelines for coaches, designed in part to teach safer tackling techniques and to minimize hits to the head. The NFL also holds free "moms clinics" at pro stadiums, where so-called master trainers put mothers through tackling drills in an effort to convince the women that tackling is safe for kids.
Yet new research on head trauma continues to undermine that case. A report in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma found that the likelihood of developing cognitive and emotional problems is linked to a football player's overall exposure to contact and not just to his diagnosed concussions. In other words, every little hit adds up, which explains why NFL veterans who started playing before the age of 12 are more likely to have cognitive problems than those who picked up the game later. These days, many players start earlier — and the truly dedicated scrimmage all year long.
Risk, of course, is part of life, and kids suffer serious injuries doing all kinds of things. What's more, researchers still cannot say what percentage of football players end up suffering long-term cognitive harm.
All of which puts football families in a uniquely confounding position. For Callaghan and his high school and college teammates, football is one of the most important things in their lives. It's the source of their self-confidence and closest friendships, of indelible memories of victory and loss, of their very notion of what it means to be a man. And despite taking their share of hits to the head, they've gone on to lead fulfilling adult lives — lives that continue to be enriched by football. "It would rock me to the soul to learn that football has been bad for all these kids," says Callaghan. "I love the game. It's the greatest avenue that I know to get great life lessons."
Ultimately, the true battle for the future of America's favorite pastime is being waged not in the media or in high-profile court cases, but at public parks and on high school fields nationwide. And the instant Brogan was hit that fall day in Missoula, Mike and Shannon Callaghan joined countless other parents in staring down questions they never wanted to ask.
"I'm your dad." Back in the emergency room, Callaghan answered Brogan's question.
Brogan looked confused, so Callaghan pointed to Shannon and said, "Do you know who that is?" Brogan shook his head. Callaghan felt the life go out of him.
For hours they sat at Brogan's side, hoping for something to change. Then suddenly Shannon spoke up. "His toes moved," she said. "I just saw them. He moved his toes." Relief swept through the room. Mike felt something close to elation, thinking, "He has a concussion, but he will get better."
By evening Brogan could move his legs, sit up in bed, and walk across the room. The family spent that night in the hospital. The following morning Callaghan woke up feeling optimistic. He told his wife that he thought Brogan might be back at practice within a week. Then a doctor arrived and asked Brogan his name. Brogan got his first name right but couldn't remember his last name — or why he was in the hospital.
For years many doctors believed that children were less likely than adults to suffer serious head injuries in football, for the simple reason that they weigh less and run more slowly than adults do. Now it's well understood that until about age 14, a kid's head is much larger than an adult's compared with his body, yet the neck is weaker, which means the head bounces around more in response to collisions. Researchers at Virginia Tech found that seven-year-old football players experienced head blows comparable in force to the impacts suffered by college players.
To make matters worse, the nerve fibers in children's brains are not yet coated with the protective sheathing known as myelin. As a result, "it's easier to tear apart neurons and their connections in children at lower impact," says Dr. Robert Cantu, the author of Concussions and Our Kids and a leading researcher of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain-wasting disease that has been diagnosed in dozens of deceased football players. The threat to emerging neural connections is particularly problematic at Brogan's age. "If you injure your brain during that time," Cantu says, "there is a high likelihood that you will not reach your maximal genetic endowment intellectually, and you'll perhaps not have the same personality with regard to depression, anxiety, and panic attacks."
Brogan's doctors were unsure about the cause of his temporary paralysis, but they agreed that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Still, after two days in the hospital, they determined him well enough to go home. They gave Mike and Shannon a strict rehab protocol that called for avoiding anything that might stimulate brain activity: bright lights, computer screens, video games, even reading. The doctors also cautioned them that irritability and depression are common after a concussion. The Callaghans set up beds for Brogan and themselves in the basement. Shannon went to the local Target to stock up on board games and drawing supplies.
A week later the Callaghans returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit. When the doctor said that Brogan would have to sit out the rest of football season, Callaghan found himself unexpectedly relieved. "I remember being thankful that the doctor told him so I wouldn't have to," Callaghan says. "I was sort of off the hook."
Missing a single season was one thing. But the idea that Brogan might never play again — clearly what Shannon wanted — was nearly impossible for Callaghan to contemplate. For one thing, Brogan loved the game and had the makings of a real standout. What's more, the sport had been central to Callaghan's life for as long as he could remember. He started as a fifth grader in the Little Grizzly league; his coach from those days remained one of his closest confidants. Among his closest friends were teammates from Hellgate High or Montana State. During Callaghan's junior year, in 1984, the MSU Bobcats won the NCAA Division I-AA national championship — a feat Montana football fans still talk about.
Of course, football ends hard: You wake up one day and it's over. Nobody plays tackle ball in middle age. But Callaghan took up coaching, even though he was just a few years out of college with no kids of his own. He started with his nephew's team of fifth and sixth graders. Soon, a few of his old football buddies, including Eric Dawald, came to help. They loved having a reason to hang out after work, teaching the fundamentals, and feeling that old excitement on game days. When one of the group had a son, the others promised to keep coaching as long as the kid played, a pact that soon extended to every son any of them might ever have. And they built something, three nights a week on snow-dusted fields. Their team was undefeated for 15 straight seasons. Boys they'd coached went on to play at local high schools, the University of Montana, Montana State, even the pros.
Callaghan mostly had given up on having children of his own when, at age 40, he met and married Shannon Brown. An interior architect and former competitive swimmer, Shannon had grown up in tiny Havre, Montana, with a pair of football-obsessed brothers. She loved the way Callaghan welcomed Griffin, her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage, onto his team. When Brogan was born, in 2003, Callaghan insisted that his buddies renew their vow to keep coaching.
Brogan started playing flag football in the fourth grade, in 2013. By that time, the relationship between football and brain trauma was well established. Two years earlier, a Missoula kid named Dylan Steigers, who'd started out in local youth leagues, went off to play at Eastern Oregon University and took a big hit in a scrimmage. He died the next day.
Shannon, meanwhile, had been getting warnings from her older brother, Scott Brown, a former high school running back and now an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Portland, Oregon. "I'd see these 40-year-olds coming in just maimed, having these big surgeries from playing football in high school, college, the pros," he says. Brown became convinced that letting a kid play tackle football was akin to child abuse. He implored his siblings to keep their kids off the field.
The youngest, Shannon's brother Howard, got the message; his son plays only flag football. But Shannon felt trapped — nobody could tell her husband what to think about football. All the CTE research, Callaghan argued, had been done on the brains of guys known to have problems. He had attended one of USA Football's Heads Up Football clinics, where he'd been schooled in the latest safe-tackling techniques. And he would never consider letting a concussed kid play before a complete recovery.
So in 2014, Brogan, now a fifth grader, joined Callaghan's team. He knew his dad's track record and dreamed of exceeding it with a Stanford scholarship and a career in the NFL — just like Jordie Tripp, a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks who played on Callaghan's team 10 years earlier.
Brogan, it turned out, had the makings of a natural quarterback, with a great arm and an instinct for reading the field and seeing weaknesses in the opposing team's defense. But as the 2015 season rolled around, a handful of Brogan's teammates did not return. "The moms and I talked," Shannon says, "and they were like, ‘I wouldn't let Brogan play.' "
Similar conversations were happening nationwide, in part due to the efforts of women like Kimberly Archie. Her son, Paul Bright Jr., grew up playing Pop Warner ball in Sparks, Nevada. He was living in Los Angeles, working as an assistant chef, when his behavior grew erratic. Then, on a September evening in 2014, Bright drove an unlicensed motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a car and was posthumously diagnosed with early-stage CTE. Archie began to speak out on radio and television. The American commitment to youth tackle football, she says, "is like letting our kids ride down the highway in the back of the truck at 80 miles per hour because we're afraid we'll make them weak if we stop."
Last September, Archie launched a class action lawsuit in conjunction with Jo Cornell, whose son played Pop Warner football and was found to have CTE after committing suicide. The lawsuit defines members of the plaintiff's class as anyone who has ever played, or had a child play, youth tackle football, and suffered a head injury since 1997. It alleges negligence and fraud by Pop Warner, USA Football, and the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which develops voluntary safety standards for youth-football helmets. The complaint does not specify damages, but the number could amount to billions of dollars.
This isn't the first lawsuit Pop Warner has faced: The league has already settled two others. Pop Warner now requires that each practice session runs no longer than two hours a day and that no more than 25 percent of practice time is devoted to full-speed contact, or scrimmaging. "There's risk in anything kids do, and football's getting a really bad rap," says Pop Warner executive director Jon Butler.
These lawsuits, of course, are the stuff of nightmares for the NFL, which reached its own billion-dollar settlement with 20,000 former players last year. "It's the best game that's ever been invented, and we've got to make sure that moms get the message — because that's who's afraid of our game right now," Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians said recently. "It's not dads. It's moms."
Predictably, the NFL has stepped up its outreach to mothers. It sponsors the Facebook page Touchdown Moms, where NFL employees post heartwarming anecdotes about the mothers of youth players. USA Football sponsors a Team Mom of the Year Award. And then there are those free mom's clinics. Nearly every NFL franchise has hosted at least one such clinic, generally treating mothers to on-field drills and a concussion-awareness presentation.
Archie, who was already working as a sports-safety consultant, attended one of these clinics in Ohio in 2014. This was a month before her son's accident, and even then she was not impressed. "It's condescending to think you can just trick moms," she says.
Three weeks after his injury, Brogan was cleared to go back to school, but he could last only an hour or so a day. He sometimes flew into sudden, inexplicable rages and Shannon mostly stopped working to care for him. Callaghan spent his days at the office and continued to coach the Panthers in the evening. He coached out of a sense of obligation, both to his fellow coaches and to players. But now it felt different: He watched every tackle with anxiety, waiting for the child to get up and walk it off.
Both Shannon's brothers, meanwhile, were relentless. Howard sent his sister one news article after another about kids like Evan Murray, a 17-year-old New Jersey quarterback, Ben Hamm, a 16-year-old linebacker from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and 17-year-old Kenny Bui, from the Seattle suburbs, all of whom died within a month of one another early that fall. All told, more than a dozen kids died playing football that season, and Shannon's brothers made sure she knew about each one.
One night she tried to share these stories with her husband.
"We are not talking about this," he said.
It wasn't until seven weeks after his injury that Brogan was able to form new memories. He started neurological rehab therapy and scored terribly on cognitive tests that included closing his eyes and touching his nose. Math worksheets that would have taken five minutes before the injury now took an hour and left Brogan exhausted. Spinning on a stationary bicycle gave him a headache.
In February, Callaghan and Brogan sat on the couch to watch the Super Bowl. Shannon overheard Brogan begin a sentence with the phrase, "When I play in the NFL . . ."
"That's not going to happen," Shannon said.
Later she heard her husband tell Brogan, "But when you play in high school . . ."
"It's not going to happen," she said.
"We don't have to decide this now," Callaghan replied.
Later still, Brogan asked his mom, "Why won't you let me play?"
"Because God gave you that big brain so you can do something amazing in this world."
"He also made me a good football player," Brogan said.
"But that can't be your future."
Callaghan turned to Shannon. "But what about his dream?"
Shannon thought, "Whose dream is it?"
The last football game Mike Callaghan ever played was against Washington State in 1985, the less memorable season after that epic championship year. The Bobcats were struggling and in the first quarter, he suffered a concussion after being hit by a running back. The team's trainer ordered him out of the game, but Callaghan returned to the field anyway, determined to play every minute of his last college game. At that point somebody grabbed his helmet, locked it in an equipment bin, and sent him to the showers, where he wept uncontrollably. "That's how football ended for me," Callaghan says. "I didn't go out in a blaze of glory. Some guy ran me over. We lost."
As Brogan recovered, Callaghan couldn't help but think of all the concussions he'd suffered in his football career. By his senior year of college, he had experienced so many that he sometimes lost the right side of his visual field during games and had agonizing headaches, to the degree that the team's trainer ordered a brain scan. It came back clean, but the trainer asked Callaghan why he still played. He knew he wasn't NFL material, so what was the point? Why take the risk?
He was now asking similar questions about Brogan — but Mike could not let go of football. He thought about all the things he wanted his son to experience: the friendships, the teamwork, the victories. "I love watching Brogan play the game," he told me. "I love it."
Despite their differences, Shannon understands. "It's like a death," she says. "Mike wants his kid to be a football star. And Brogan would be the star. He's a leader and damn good, and everyone looks up to him."
Callaghan struggled to imagine what his own life would be like without football. What would he do on weekday nights and Sunday mornings in the fall? When would he see his friends? Who would he be? "Every time I thought about it, my mind just went blank," he says.
In August, Callaghan got a call from officials at Missoula Youth Football: Did he plan to coach the 2016 season? After months of agonizing, almost entirely to himself, he'd finally made a decision. "Brogan's not going to play, and I'm not going to coach," he said.
Callaghan couldn't bear to think of it as a permanent decision, telling his son that it was only for the coming season. But Brogan was unconvinced and angry. "You know it's forever," he said. "Mom's never going to let me play again."
Callaghan called Dawald and apologized for leaving the team. Two weeks later, he told his father.
Upon hearing the news James Callaghan said, "I didn't want to ask." Then he said, "Is that your decision or your wife's?"
"We're on the same page for this year," Callaghan said.
"Geez," James said. "That's going to be tough."
"Dad, it may be tough for us," Mike said. "But what I'm starting to figure out is there's a whole other world out there. There's a lot of people who don't consider playing, and they still get through the fall somehow."
Mike and brogan still watch football together — high school games on Friday, Montana State on Saturdays, and his former team on Sunday afternoons. "It's kind of hard, because I'm not playing," Brogan says. "I think about what I would do against the teams when I watch. But there isn't really anything that I can do." He's hurled himself into basketball and recently asked if he could take tennis lessons. Callaghan bought him his first rifle and is planning an elk hunt.
Brogan admits that he hasn't yet fully recovered. Schoolwork doesn't come as easily as it once did, but Shannon isn't worried. "Brogan missed 247 classes in the sixth grade," she says, "and he finished with three A-pluses and three As." Now, instead of going to Stanford to play football, he wants to go to Berkeley to study architecture — his mother's passion — on an academic scholarship.
Callaghan says he often thinks back to a day last November, weeks after Brogan's injury. League officials asked how he wanted to handle that unfinished game with the Chargers. "A big part of me was, ‘I don't want to handle it,' " Callaghan said. But the kids cared, and Callaghan felt it would have been selfish to refuse.
That meant bringing the teams back to the field behind the county fairgrounds. The Chargers and the Panthers lined up exactly where they'd been the moment Brogan was injured — but with Brogan now on the sidelines with his father. The referee set the game clock to where it had stopped and blew the whistle, and they played the remainder of the game. The Panthers lost, and for the first time in his life Callaghan didn't care.
All Brogan's teammates went home, except for two boys, Charlie and Cole. Charlie picked up a football and threw it to Brogan, who caught it and tossed it back. Charlie then passed it to Cole. Ten minutes went by, then 20, and still the kids continued to play. The parents lingered off to the side, making it clear there was no rush. "Brogan was kind of running around," Callaghan says. "Normal isn't the right word, but the normalcy of it, seeing him be a kid again. The game was over, we got beat, and it was good for me. Our kids were fine."
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Dessert, anyone?","author":[{"id":23195,"old_id":null,"name":"Daniel Kunitz","slug":"/contributor/daniel-kunitz","data":{"ads":{"mobile":{"trigger":null,"overwrite":{"date":{"end":null,"start":null},"active":0,"trigger":null}},"tablet":{"trigger":null,"overwrite":{"date":{"end":null,"start":null},"active":0,"trigger":null}},"desktop":{"trigger":null,"overwrite":{"date":{"end":null,"start":null},"active":0,"trigger":null}}},"meta":{"title":null,"description":null},"last_name":"Kunitz","first_name":"Daniel","google_url":null},"updated_at":"2016-12-12T18:50:51.912Z","tag_type_id":4,"site_id":3,"TagType":{"id":4,"name":"contributor","data":{"slug":{"default":"/contributor"}}}}],"reviewArtists":"","body":"This past fall, Gary Taubes took his wife and two sons on a trip to a wildlife preserve in Sonoma County, California, the kind of place where guests learn firsthand about the species of the Serengeti. They slept in tents and spent the day among giraffes, zebras, antelope, and the like. One morning, Taubes and his boys awoke early. "It was 50 degrees out — freezing by our standards," he recalls. "I took the kids to breakfast, and" — his face takes on a pained expression — "how can I not give them hot chocolate?"
For most parents, indulging the kids with some cocoa would pose no dilemma. But Taubes, one of America's leading and most strident nutrition writers, is no ordinary father. His new book, The Case Against Sugar, seems destined to strike fear into the hearts of children everywhere. Taubes' argument is simple: Sugar is likely poison, and it's what is making our country fat. And not just fat but sick. So don't eat it. Ever.
A little much? Perhaps. But the kids did get the cocoa — on this one special occasion.
For Taubes, the cocoa conundrum is an occupational hazard for someone who describes his current mission as "the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas." But Taubes, 60, has never been one to shy away from extreme positions. His last two books, 2007's Good Calories, Bad Calories and 2010's Why We Get Fat, launched a nationwide movement to shun bread and embrace butter. Both argued that it's not how many calories we consume, but where they come from, and that eating fat doesn't actually make us so. These were bold statements at the time, and they had a big impact. "I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Thanks to Taubes' pro-fat pronouncements, Pollan says, "millions of Americans changed the way they eat. Doughnut, bread, and pasta sales plummeted, and we saw a change in the food conversation, the effects of which are still being felt today."
Now, with The Case Against Sugar, Taubes launches his toughest crusade yet: to prove that we've been bamboozled into thinking that cookies and soda are simply "empty" calories and not uniquely toxic ones. That's the result, he argues, of a long history of deception from the sugar industry and its support of shoddy science.
The audacity of those arguments makes Taubes an anomaly among nutrition writers, says John Horgan, director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. "He isn't content just to do public relations for scientists," Horgan says, meaning he doesn't rewrap scientists' findings with the simple, shiny packaging of journalism. Instead, he digs deep into the research, and if he finds it lacking, he attacks it. "He'll come right out and say if he thinks someone is an idiot," Horgan says.
With his new book, Taubes will likely have his largest platform, and an audience poised to listen. By now, nearly everyone believes that Americans eat too much sugar. Most experts agree that it's a major contributor to our nation's grim health: More than a third of adults are obese, and one in 11 has diabetes. This understanding has spurred campaigns for soda taxes nationwide — five measures were approved by voters in November — and moves by big companies to ban sugary drinks from workplace cafeterias. In August 2016, three class-action lawsuits were filed against General Mills, Kellogg's, and Post, alleging that the companies falsely claimed their cereals are healthy when, in fact, they're loaded with sugar.
Anyone else would be encouraged, but ever the brawler, Taubes points out flaws: Even these new anti-sugar crusaders, he says, are motivated by a naive, and ultimately dangerous, "less is better" view of sugar. To Taubes, the answer to our obesity crisis isn't more expensive soda and less sweetened cereals. It's to stop poisoning ourselves altogether.
"Sugar is like heroin to me," Taubes says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
Like the control room on a battleship, Taubes' office perches atop the Craftsman-style house he shares with his wife, the writer Sloane Tanen, and their sons. His office is a small, book-filled space with views of the surrounding Oakland hills. He guides me to a low seat near his desk.
I knew of Taubes' aggressive reputation and had seen his brash, combative videos on YouTube — densely reasoned, contrarian lectures about everything from the physiology of how insulin works in the blood to why we should eat meat and avoid carbs (which the body converts into sugar). His videos get hundreds of thousands of views and provoke both cheers and hisses in the blogosphere. I am surprised to find him quiet and soft-spoken.
He pulls out a package of Nicorette gum and pops a piece in his mouth.
"Do you smoke?" I ask.
Not for more than 15 years. "Nicotine is a great drug for writing," Taubes says. "I keep thinking once life calms down, I'll quit." His most vexing addiction, however, is the stuff he's spent five years researching. "Sugar is like heroin to me," he says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
He tries to eat no sugar at all, including honey and agave syrup, and limits fruit. But he insists, "I'm not a zealot." The family pantry — stocked by his wife, not incidentally — has an assortment of what he calls "crap snack health-food bars and juice boxes that Sloane says we have for kids who come over, because they expect it." When Taubes wants a treat, he nibbles on 100 percent chocolate. Because who wouldn't prefer a bar of compressed bitter paste to Godiva?
"The type I buy isn't that bad," he assures me, and then immediately recounts a story of a taxi driver he once gave some to who had to pull over to spit it out. While telling me this, he replaces his now well-chomped Nicorette with a new one. He will continue chain-chewing throughout the day.
Sugar and nicotine, he points out, are connected in more ways than we may think. The Case Against Sugar documents that in the early 1900s, tobacco companies began adding sugar to their products, which allowed people to inhale the smoke deeply, making cigarettes more palatable as well as more addictive and deadlier.
While Taubes has been writing and talking about sugar in one form or another since the early 2000s, with this book he wants to do something he says no one yet has: reveal the bad science that has enabled the sugar industry to mislead the public. By rooting through archives and obscure textbooks, he has uncovered, he says, evidence that sugar is not just the harmless, empty calories we indulge in, but that it may well be toxic, dangerous even in small amounts. It's a possibility that might make you hesitate handing your kids a mug of hot cocoa, too.
To get — and stay — lean and healthy, the conventional nutritional wisdom is simple: Eat less and exercise more. That's what the sugar industry would have us believe, too. (Coca-Cola, for example, now offers smaller-size cans to help consumers drink less soda — or just buy more cans of soda.) That's false, according to Taubes, and the reasoning is part of an industry-driven campaign that goes back to the 1950s. It was then that Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist at the University of Minnesota, first stated that fat — not sugar — causes the high cholesterol levels that lead to heart disease. What few people knew, however, is that Keys' research was funded by the sugar industry.
Taubes details how this pattern of influence ramped up in the 1960s and '70s, as the industry funneled money to scientists and public health officials to combat the notion that sugar was a unique cause of obesity and chronic illness. One of those recipients was Fred Stare, whose work as the founder and chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health was supported financially for decades by sugar purveyors like General Foods. The most public defender of sugar, Stare repeatedly asserted, even as late as 1985, that it is not "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
The industry's campaign scored a coup in 1976, when the FDA classified sugar as "generally recognized as safe" and thus not subject to federal regulations. In 1980, the U.S. government released its dietary guidelines, drafted by a team led by Mark Hegsted, who spent his entire career working under Fred Stare at Harvard. Taubes writes that those guidelines assured us: "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes."
The PR work paid off in other ways, too. Americans now consume 130 pounds of sugar a year, twice the amount we did in 1980. And while the industry told us to embrace sugar, dietary experts preached the gospel of low fat. Both groups assume all calories are created equal, whether they come from apples or apple pie. Such logic implies that a calorie of sugar is no more or less capable of causing obesity and diabetes than a calorie from any type of food.
Taubes presents a wholly different role for what sugar does in the body. "A calorie of sugar and one of meat or broccoli all have vastly different effects on the hormones and enzymes that control or regulate the storage of fat in fat cells," he says. But unlike pork or veggies, sugar has a uniquely negative effect: It causes the liver to accumulate fat and, at the same time, prompts the body to pump out insulin. Over time, Taubes insists, these elevated insulin levels lead to weight gain, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases. Which is to say, we don't blimp out or get sick because we eat too much and fail to exercise. It happens because we eat sugar.
At this point you may be wondering why we haven't put this whole debate to bed with broad, well-conducted research. The problem is that studies about nutrition are notoriously difficult to orchestrate. Most research has been observational: Scientists ask a group of people what they ate over a period of time and then try to tease out associations between their food intake and any diseases they contract. Obviously this approach is problematic. Even if subjects report their eating habits accurately (though they almost never do), it's difficult to know which foods initiate a given problem. If an association is found between hamburgers and heart disease, how would anyone know whether the problem is in the burgers or the buns? The best-run studies require confining subjects to a metabolic ward in a hospital for weeks, where researchers can control all the food they take in and measure all the energy they expend. It's incredibly expensive and nearly impossible to find someone willing to fund it.
Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold are among the few who are. After hearing Taubes on a 2011 podcast discuss the kinds of obesity experiments he'd like to see done, John Arnold, a former hedge-fund manager in Houston, reached out. It led to an Arnold Foundation grant of $35.5 million — money bestowed to Taubes to establish a foundation that would find answers to some of nutrition's toughest questions. In 2012, Taubes paired up with Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins trained physician and star in his field, and launched the nonprofit Nutrition Science Institute (NuSI). Taubes and Attia wanted NuSI to be a beacon, an institution with the experts, resources, and clearance to do the precise experimental science no one else had been willing to. "I thought there needed to be specific studies done to resolve what causes obesity and diabetes once and for all," Taubes says. "I wanted to put the issue to rest, have it recognized by people who could influence the medical establishment."
As late as 1985, Harvard nutritionist Fred Stare asserted that it is no "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
Taubes says he has always had issues with authority, beginning with his father, who was a photoelectric engineer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Xerox copying process. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Gary also lived in the shadow of his elder brother, Clifford. "He excelled at everything," says Taubes. "It was either give up or be supercompetitive."
When Clifford went to Harvard for physics, Gary followed suit. But after receiving a C minus in a quantum physics class, he switched to engineering. (Clifford went on to be a celebrated professor of mathematical physics at his alma mater.) It was then that Taubes read All the President's Men, which tells the story of the Watergate scandal, and he realized he could make a living kicking against authority. He became an investigative journalist, focusing on bad science. Nutrition was a natural fit. No other arena offers more complex or thornier issues to tackle or is so dear to the public's heart. Calling out the idiots here meant Taubes could influence what people put in their mouths every day.
While at Harvard, Taubes channeled his competitive fervor into sports. He played football and in the off-season he boxed. By 1987, when he moved to Venice Beach, California, Taubes worked out constantly, climbing the steps in Santa Monica canyon, roller-blading to Malibu and back, or running a five-mile loop. At the time he believed the cardio would allow him to eat whatever and how much he wanted. But despite all that calorie-burning, he began putting on pounds. It wasn't until 2000, when he adopted the low-carb recommendations of cardiologist Robert Atkins, that Taubes succeed in controlling his weight. That experience colored his thinking about the roles of diet and exercise in obesity.
Exercise, he now believes, plays no role in staying lean. Taubes doesn't dispute that exercise is good for the body and soul; it's just no way to lose weight. Yet he does look the part of a gym rat. His face is lean, his frame muscular. But if anything, Taubes says, avoiding sugar and carbs has allowed him to keep trim. His lunch order at a local burger joint: A one-pound slab of ground beef (no bun) heaped with bacon and smothered in guacamole — the only concession to the color green on the plate.
When I visited Taubes in October, a number of houses on his street had yard signs in support of Oakland's Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax. These are positive signs for the success of The Case — a good thing, because its author could use a win. It's been a tough year for Gary Taubes.
In December 2015, his partner Peter Attia abruptly left NuSI. (In a podcast a few months later, Attia disclosed that he's no longer interested in talking about nutrition.) Taubes calls it an amicable divorce, but he also says the Arnolds had invested in his ideas and Attia's competence, and after Attia left, things began to fall apart.
In January 2016, Kevin Hall, a National Institutes of Health scientist who was the lead investigator on the first NuSI study, recused himself from involvement with the foundation. He and Taubes had clashed on how to set up the pilot study — research that was supposed to address whether carbs were the primary driver of obesity — and when the results came out last summer, the two men couldn't agree on the interpretation of the findings or the quality of the study. NuSI, which was founded to bring clarity to the wildly complicated field of nutrition, ended up mired in the basic processes of scientific research. By late summer, the Arnolds had cut their funding. Taubes considers the episode "a learning experience in how easy it is for experiments to go wrong. Peter and I were like the Hardy Boys of not-for-profit research."
NuSI remains afloat, though barely. Taubes and two other employees continue on as volunteers, and he says the foundation still has unfinished studies awaiting results. He will also continue to solicit funding from wealthy investors, but the main hurdle he faces hasn't been lowered: Spending his career attacking the leading scientists in a field has made working with them rather difficult.
But in light of recent sugar-tax initiatives in Berkeley and San Francisco — both of which passed — Taubes seems to be at the front in the charge against sugar. During our interview, his desk was littered with literature from those trying to tax sugary beverages in cities across the country, along with articles on lawsuits being brought against cereal makers. Taubes hopes The Case will provide more ammo for these fights.
Still, he notes with some exasperation that such efforts continue to speak the language of Big Sugar: If we all just drank less soda and ate less cereal, the rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease would drop. Wrong. Taubes points to the public health initiative of putting calorie counts on menus. "That doesn't lead to any significant decrease in weight or consumption," he says, "because they're identifying the wrong problem."
This is key to Taubes' outlook on sugar. While you may eat desserts and drink sodas only occasionally and add just a sprinkle of sugar to your daily coffee — while maintaining a normal weight — he will tell you that you don't know what even that amount of sugar does to your body. As he puts it in The Case: "How much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we'll ingest."
In an ideal world, Taubes says, his book would lead people to force the FDA to investigate whether sugar is safe, as the agency proclaimed in 1976. That, he admits, is improbable, given the influence Big Sugar wields. Not that it will stop him from waging the war. "Once you've said publicly that the conventional thinking is wrong on something so profound as obesity and diabetes, you either move on to something else or you decide the injustice is such that you have to keep doing this work," he says. "And if you have to keep doing it, then you have to take the shit that comes with it."
Just don't sugarcoat it.
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Working the line is a bouncy brunette pouring plastic shot glasses full of Windex-blue liquid. Most of the guys grab one and toss it back, no questions asked. "It's a preworkout," she says, "and it's $35 inside." By "preworkout" she means it's designed to give you a jolt of energy before the gym. Exactly how it does this isn't a question anyone seems to be asking. Inside the store, Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar, are pills and powders that claim to do everything from boost sex drive to increase muscle mass and dissolve fat.
Boca Nutrition's owners, PJ Braun and Aaron Singerman, are greeting customers like old friends, with bear hugs and handshakes. Both men are absurdly muscular. Singerman, 36, is 6-foot-2 with slicked-back brown hair. He has a goatee and narrow-rimmed glasses, and his bulky frame fills out his blue T-shirt like an overstuffed bag. Braun, 35, who has black hair gelled into short spikes, is shorter and bulkier. Stretch marks scar his arms.
In addition to Boca Nutrition, the pair owns the supplements manufacturer Blackstone Labs, which they started in 2012. Since then the company has hawked tens of millions of dollars' worth of products promising to make men stronger, bigger, last longer in the sack, and even gain a mental edge. For the most part, their over-the-counter powders do exactly what they claim to do, in part because they sometimes include compounds not approved or even banned by the FDA. It's a legally dubious but common practice — and an easy way to make a killing while giving people the results they want. (Braun calls this a mischaracterization: "We have always tried to produce nothing but cutting-edge and compliant products. As soon as we have any direction from the FDA on an issue it has not spoken on before, for better or worse, we respect its statement and adjust our products accordingly.") Blackstone has grown by 100 percent every year since opening shop five years ago. Its sales now top $20 million annually, and it's featured in Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing companies. And Braun and Singerman are far from done.
"I am not even fucking close to satisfied with Blackstone Labs," Braun boasted in a video posted to Facebook last year. "I want to be the biggest company in the world."
Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar is their newest venture, a retail store that serves up various protein-packed shakes and sells Blackstone's full line of supplements. The sleek space, with shelves full of oversize bottles and racks of workout gear, is like a Whole Foods for gym rats. They opened the first store seven months ago in West Boca. Today is the grand opening of their second location, and devotees have shown up for discounted supplements and to meet a handful of celebrity bodybuilders flown in for the occasion, including Kai Greene, the most famous weightlifter since Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But among this crowd, Braun and Singerman are the real stars. They pose for photos and hype their cars, a Corvette and a Ferrari, both black and parked prominently out front. One of the fanboys is a 24-year-old named Brett, who drove four hours to attend the event. "I couldn't help but show my support for PJ and Aaron," he says. A personal trainer from Palm Coast, Florida, Brett has used a wide variety of Blackstone products, including one called Ostapure, a supplement that contained steroid-like drugs called SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators). The unlicensed drugs were developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck as a potential treatment for muscle wasting in cancer patients. But it was the drugs' muscle-mass-building properties that made them a big hit among weightlifters like Brett. Blackstone recently stopped selling Ostapure after being sued by another supplements maker hoping to clean up the industry. "The strongest product of theirs," Brett says a bit wistfully.
Inside the store, Braun shows me one of his latest creations, muscle-building pills inside a black bottle labeled brutal 4ce in blocky letters that drip with blue icicles. "It'll make you a lot stronger and more aggressive in the gym," he says. "Let's say you're 35, 40 years old and your testosterone isn't as high as it used to be. This will keep your testosterone so high that you'll be like an 18-year-old!"
When I ask Braun how, he launches into a chemistry lecture. "Your body converts it into 4-andro [a testosterone booster], so it'll bulk you up," he says, noting that Brutal 4ce has the side effect of creating estrogen, which could give you what bodybuilders call "bitch tits." This can be countered, however, by taking an estrogen blocker. "Most of our customers are pretty knowledgeable," he says, "so they know they need to do that."
As the festivities wind down, I grab a $46.99 bottle of Cobra 6 Extreme, an amped-up version of their top-selling Cobra 6, a preworkout supplement formulated with various stimulants. At the checkout, a slim guy in his twenties, part smoothie barista, part pharmacist, looks at what I'm buying and asks me if I've tried it before. No, I say.
"So you don't know what you're getting yourself into?"
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"If you're not used to taking a lot of stimulants, you should start with the regular Cobra 6. You might not like the way this makes you feel."
In the U.S., dietary supplements are a $38-billion-a-year industry. Sixty-five percent of men in America take one, whether to lose weight, grow hair, gain muscle, or keep an erection long into the night. There's a wide range of products, and most veer toward opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side are the homeopathic cures and the herbal remedies like echinacea, products that may not do much of anything besides drain your bank account. On the opposite end are the products that work precisely because they rely on pharmaceutical ingredients, many not listed anywhere on the label. In 2014, for example, the FDA recalled several weight-loss supplements with names like Super Fat Burner because they contained the prescription drug sibutramine, as well as phenolphthalein, a banned laxative linked to genetic mutations — but not before a rash of hospitalizations.
It's the supplements laced with prescription drugs that are more troubling. They result in 23,000 emergency room visits every year, and more than 2,000 hospitalizations. The supplements are often sold under names like Lean FX and Stiff Nights, and the ingredients are a list of acronyms only a chemist could decipher: DMAA, 17b-hydroxy 2a, or 17b-dimethyl 5a-androstan 3-one azine.
"We're talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. "The more likely it helps your workout," Cohen says, "the more likely it's going to adversely affect your health."
The FDA oversees the industry, but it's woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don't bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there's effectively no punishment if they don't. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients. ("Blackstone continues to innovate by researching new products and new ingredients," says Braun. "If anything, we would welcome clearer guidance from the FDA so we don't have to discontinue any products.")
"It's the Wild West," says Dan Fabricant, who was the FDA's director of the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs from 2011 to 2014. "In weight loss, sexual enhancement, and bodybuilding categories, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Blackstone, according to its critics, has exploited this system better than most, and exactly how it does this is a case study in how to game a failing regulatory system. For one, Braun and Singerman aren't shy about marketing their legally ambiguous products: They often advertise the active ingredients right on the label and promote them with ads full of young women who could moonlight in beer commercials. They're also constantly active online. Blackstone has some 25,000 Instagram followers; Braun has over 100,000. His account is littered with shirtless selfies and videos of him driving his Ferrari or pimped-out Jeep. He's also the star of a weekly YouTube show with his wife, the former pro wrestler Celeste Bonin, titled Beauty & Braun, which covers the daily lives of the couple, from gym sessions to discussions about breast implants. Until recently he also hosted a daily question-and-answer session on Periscope called "Cardio Q&A," featuring Braun on a treadmill, chugging orange Pedialyte and answering a wide range of queries from Blackstone users. One time he doled out advice ("No matter how mature you think they are, it's not good to settle down with a 19-year-old girl"), but usually he just hyped his products. During one appearance, Braun announced the "dick pills" Blackstone was working on weren't coming along the way he wanted. "I've been working on that for a long time," he said. "But they will eventually come out."
Two days after the Boca Nutrition opening, I visit Braun and Singerman at Blackstone HQ, an unbranded, 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Boca Raton. The office walls are covered in photos and framed bodybuilding-magazine covers, several of which feature Braun in full flex. On Singerman's desk is a bronze statue of a seminude Adonis-like man holding a barbell. It's a first-place trophy from the Mr. Olympia contest, which Singerman got at auction. "You hate to see that, because it means the guy who sold it was struggling financially and was forced to sell it," Singerman says. "But I love it."
Braun and Singerman each have a long history in bodybuilding. Singerman, from New Orleans, started hitting the gym when he was 13 and kept working out, even through a cocaine and heroin habit he picked up after dropping out of high school. At 27 he witnessed a friend overdose and die, so he got clean and doubled down at the gym. In 2005, he got a job as a personal trainer and started writing thousands of posts on bodybuilding message boards and eventually became marketing director for Ironmag Labs, a supplements company owned by businessman Robert Dimaggio, who had become notorious for selling sketchy supplements. Singerman convinced Dimaggio to bring on Braun, whom he'd met at a bodybuilding competition, as the company's top sponsored athlete.
Braun, who grew up in Connecticut, had taken to the gym in order to try to impress his absentee father. "My father wouldn't be proud or say, 'Good job,' " says Braun. "He would just say, 'Oh, you know, there's always somebody better. You can do better.' " Braun went to the University of Connecticut but dropped out to become a personal trainer. Then he took up professional bodybuilding.
Blackstone's genesis was in 2012, when Braun helped Singerman sell 7,000 units of something called Super DMZ. The product contained two designer steroid-like ingredients, dymethazine and methylstenbolone, that few outside bodybuilding circles knew much about. Braun and Singerman, however, recognized that these prohormones, as they're called, were groundbreaking at helping gym rats get ripped. Their boss, Dimaggio, had helped create Super DMZ but turned it over to Braun and Singerman to hawk. "We were able to sell those 7,000 units in five weeks," Singerman explained in an online interview. "We gave Robert his money back and each made $75,000." But prohormones hadn't yet been banned, so the pair ordered more and continued selling under the name Blackstone Labs. In just 10 months they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and moved operations from a makeshift office in Braun's townhouse into their current warehouse. "We bought more of the Super DMZ, sold it, and created a second product, third product, fourth product, fifth product, etc.," Singerman says in the same video. By the time prohormones were finally banned, in 2014, Blackstone was up and running with a full line of supplements, from postworkout muscle builders to meal-replacement formulas. "We've been fortunate enough to be the hot company," says Braun.
In their office, Singerman points to a small photo of the two men leaning against brown shipping boxes piled up to their armpits. "That's all Super DMZ," Singerman says proudly. "This was our original shipment."
The reason Super DMZ and prohormones finally became illegal has something to do with Blackstone's supplier. The product was being manufactured by a New York company called Mira Health Products. In 2013, at least 29 people developed varying levels of liver disease after taking a vitamin called B-50 sold by the company. After investigating, the FDA discovered B-50 and many of Mira's other products included high levels of prohormones, which were not listed anywhere on the label. The FDA forced Mira to recall all those pills and officially banned prohormones, including the ones in Super DMZ — which Blackstone listed on the bottle. None of that stopped Blackstone from continuing to sell them. In fact, at nearly the same time, the company released a new product called Metha-Quad Extreme, which contained prohormones. It wasn't until September 2014 that Blackstone stopped selling prohormones altogether to abide by FDA regulations.
"We lost 30 percent of our total revenue," Singerman says. "But the following month we went back up, because the truth is that people always want the next best thing."
Back in their warehouse, Braun and Singerman lead me up a flight of stairs to an open space with a long brown table and black swivel chairs. Here they're formulating the "next best thing." Another muscle-bound man, this one with a pink Mohawk and a lip ring, is scribbling symbols and numbers on a whiteboard. "This is our chemist, Bryan," says Singerman. "We're doing some really cool stuff with Bryan."
Bryan Moskowitz joined Blackstone in early 2015. Before that, Braun and Singerman formulated all the company's supplements. Neither of them has any formal education, so they hired Moskowitz, who has a master's degree in organic biochemistry from Georgia Tech and calls himself the "Guerilla Chemist." Moskowitz counts among his role models Patrick Arnold, who's infamous for creating three hard-to-detect steroids, two of which were distributed by balco, the lab linked to disgraced athletes Jose Canseco and Marion Jones — and whose founder, Victor Conte, was sentenced to four months in prison. Moskowitz looks up to Arnold enough that he even posted an Instagram photo of his and Arnold's faces Photoshopped onto an image of Breaking Bad's Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in hazmat suits, having just finished cooking a batch of crystal meth.
Arnold is also credited with introducing the powerful stimulant DMAA to the supplements market. Eli Lilly created the drug in 1944 as a nasal decongestant but removed it from the market in 1983 because it caused headaches, tremors, and increased blood pressure. Arnold reintroduced it years later, in 2006, as a way for its users to get a jolt of energy before the gym. In one month alone, in 2013, the FDA received 70 reports of liver disease and one death caused by OxyElite Pro, a popular supplement with DMAA.
In the boardroom, Braun explains that Moskowitz helped design the company's latest product, Brutal 4ce. The steroid that powers it, DHEA, is banned or prescription-only in just about every country except the United States. When I ask Oliver Catlin, the president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute and the Banned Substances Control Group, why it's still legal, he simply says, "I don't know. Ask Orrin Hatch."
Orrin Hatch is the powerful seven-term senator from Utah who pushed through a 1994 law in Congress called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (dshea). The bill defines what a dietary supplement is: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or amino acid (basically, anything found in nature). And while it explicitly states that it can't be a drug, the law also prevents the government from prescreening and preapproving supplements. So supplements don't require FDA approval the way, say, a cancer drug might, even though they may have the same active ingredient. Utah is one of the major producers of supplements. In fact, it is the state's third-largest industry, earning $10 billion per year. Back when the law was written, the industry was mostly homeopathic products, but it has since boomed, and the law created cover for aggressive manufacturers willing to flaunt the regulations.
Also written into dshea are a series of loopholes that allow steroids sold prior to the law's passing to be grandfathered in, like the DHEA in Blackstone's Brutal 4ce — even though it'll get you banned by nearly every sporting league on the planet, including MLB, the NFL, and the NCAA.
"That's one of those things," says Singerman about sports testing. "When a high school athlete asks if it's OK to take [Blackstone's] Dust V2, I go, 'No, probably not.' "
Braun and Singerman are similarly unfazed about SARMs, the unapproved cancer drugs in Ostapure. "If you look at the actual literature," says Singerman, "it's all positive. I've used it plenty of times, and I like putting out products that I actually use."
When I ask them whether they're worried about the potential side effects of their products, Singerman is quick with a scripted answer. "We go through the available literature and studies," he says. But when I press him, his next response seems more honest.
"I am a libertarian," Singerman says. "I believe that it's the person's decision. As long as they're an adult."
But they have no way of knowing how different people might react. "One person could be fine, and another person could have a heart attack," says Dr. Armand Dorian, an ER physician in Los Angeles who often treats patients injured by dietary supplements. "It's rolling the dice."
Take Jesse Woods. In 2009, the 28-year-old went online and ordered a bottle of M-Drol pills from a Texas-based company called TFSupplements. Woods, who weighed 150 pounds, was looking to add muscle. "I'm a small-framed guy," he says, "so I was trying to bulk up." He did. In just four weeks, he'd packed on 20 pounds of muscle. "I got big for a minute," he says. "Then I got sick."
Five weeks into taking M-Drol, Woods left work early because his stomach was bothering him. When his wife came home, she noticed his eyes were yellow. "I'm taking you to the emergency room," she said. Doctors performed a battery of tests, ultimately determining that Woods was experiencing liver failure. What Woods didn't know is that M-Drol contained the steroid-like prohormone Superdrol.
Woods spent 32 days in the hospital. He threw up nearly every meal he ate, lost 30 pounds, and developed a pungent odor, a common side effect of liver disease. "I never felt old until after that," says Woods, who's now 35. "Now I feel sluggish. I just feel like I aged. My liver has scar tissue on it. Doctors can't say how long I'll live."
When he was released from the hospital, Woods sued both TFSupplements and its supplier, Competitive Edge Labs, settling for an undisclosed amount. But the lawsuit didn't stop companies from selling Superdrol.
Blackstone has yet to be sued by any of its customers, and the FDA has generally left the company alone. "We haven't really had problems with the FDA," says Braun. But that may be simply because the agency is backlogged. It's also far more effective to go after the companies supplying the illegal ingredients than the ones marketing the final product. It's the former that are dealing with the overseas suppliers that produce the untested or illegal drugs. Singerman admits to purchasing Chinese ingredients but says it's something that's taken care of by the plants that manufacture Blackstone's products. I ask him who they are.
"Well, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is one."
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is the best example of a duplicitous company thriving in a broken system. Its founder, Jared Wheat, has a history of hawking high-demand substances. In the early '90s, he ran a high school ecstasy ring in Alabama and served 32 months in prison for it. He started Hi-Tech in 1998, and by 2003 the FDA had already warned the company about its dietary supplements, some of which contained an unlicensed drug similar to the one used in Cialis. But that didn't stop Wheat. By 2005 he was selling supplements that contained the banned stimulant ephedra. In early 2006 government officials raided his offices and seized 200 cases of supplements valued at $3 million, and in 2008 Wheat pleaded guilty to selling adulterated supplements and committing mail and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison, but he continued to operate Hi-Tech from his cell.
When I ask Pieter Cohen how Hi-Tech continues to conduct business in such a manner, he says that allowing any company to regularly sell synthetic ingredients as supplements is due to a major failure on the part of the government. "They're not doing their job," he says.
For their part, Braun and Singerman maintain that everything in their supplements appears right on the label.
To test that claim, I sent the Cobra 6 Extreme I purchased at Boca Nutrition to Oliver Catlin's Banned Substances Control Group. When I received the test results, it turns out Braun is right: The product is now devoid of the banned DMBA, a stimulant very similar to DMAA, that powered it.
"So is it safe to take?" I ask.
"Not necessarily," says Catlin. The readings revealed a powerful mix of new stimulants. That could be due to a combination of the ingredients listed on the label — a formula that includes caffeine and theobromine (an alkaloid of the cacao plant that can be deadly in large doses). "Or it could be something else," he says. "We target drugs we are concerned about, like DMBA, when we screen products like these. But sometimes there are new, unknown compounds present that we can't see."
Soon after my visit to Blackstone Labs, and after four years of working together, Braun and Singerman are at war. Singerman leaves Blackstone to pursue other projects. "But he still owns half the company," Braun explains, insinuating that the split is amicable. But the tone of their relationship quickly changes. "When the companies first split, I hoped we'd be friends again," Braun says during one of his online Q&A sessions. "But he did too many things."
Braun has since divested himself of Boca Nutrition, and Singerman has gone on to start a supplements company called RedCon 1. He is also rebranding another, Prime Nutrition, with none other than Hi-Tech's Jared Wheat, who was released from prison in 2011. Braun has taken over day-to-day control of Blackstone, and despite the schism, the company is thriving. Blackstone has moved into a much larger, 14,000-square-foot space, and Braun has introduced several new products, including a long-awaited libido booster called Entice. But the most surprising of his new releases is Dust Extreme, a preworkout supplement with DMAA, the infamous, banned stimulant popularized by chemist Patrick Arnold. It's a curious decision to sell the illegal ingredient, but Braun justifies it in a long video on Facebook.
"I believe that people should be allowed to take what they want to take," he says. "Are you completely safe if you have health conditions? No. If your blood pressure is high, should you be taking a product like this? Probably not. But these are things you should look at yourself. I believe we should all have the choice to put what we want in our body. You can go and buy cigarettes at any fucking gas station and they're guaranteed to kill you. You will die. So how dare the FDA come in and take away ingredients from us that give us awesome workouts?"
","tag_ids":[4748,5611],"publish_date":"2017-01-31T20:16:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T14:05:21.179Z","updated_at":"2017-01-31T21:51:59.078Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","keywords":"supplements, dietary supplements, blackstone labs, boca nutrition & smoothie bar, bodybuilding, muscle supplements, muscle building, ","description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jzRkyi","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Magazine Photograph by Shana Novak","caption":"P.J. and Celeste Braun were featured on the May 2015 cover of 'Iron Man Magazine.'","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_c-9c57d3e1-802d-4480-a15c-67a5c8a98ac5.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Newswire / Aaron Singerman","caption":"Braun, left, and Singerman turned Blackstone Labs into a a powerhouse earning more than $20 million a year.","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_b-b074ced0-e2a7-47ab-a93b-9835ef973f0c.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photo Illustration by Emily Shur","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_a-7a018373-b943-436b-8215-40db3942a4af.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/the-truth-about-herbal-supplements-20140102","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: The Truth About Herbal Supplements","contentId":168069,"contentHeadline":"The Truth About Herbal Supplements"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/the-dawn-of-bodybuilding-20121118","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Huge","contentId":168456,"contentHeadline":"Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Bodybuilding"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454811,"old_id":null,"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","short_title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","slug":"/features/articles/the-long-game-of-liam-neeson---liam-neeson-interview-w454811","body":"Early one autumn evening, Liam Neeson strolls into a restaurant near Central Park, two blocks from his apartment, with one hand in his pocket and the other clutching a green Stanley travel mug.
Neeson carries this mug everywhere: movie sets, red-carpet premieres, New York Rangers games, even the occasional interview. "It's a specific kind of English black tea," he says when I ask what's inside. "Decaf. It's the only thing I drink." He's not kidding: When the waitress comes over to take his order, Neeson reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Ziploc full of tea bags, which he unzips and hands to her. "Could you make me a fresh one of these, please?" Then he hooks a finger into the mug, fishes out the old tea bag, and drops it in his water glass with a plunk. "Thanks, love."
Neeson folds himself into the leather booth as comfortably as is possible for a 6-foot-4 Irishman with shoulders like an armoire. He's feeling a little out of sorts today: He has just finished shooting two movies back-to-back — one in Atlanta, the other in London — and he is in New York for the first time in five and a half months. "It's nice to be home," he says. "But I'm feeling a bit like a three-legged stool." (Which, technically, would be the most stable stool, but you get his drift.) He brings up one of the movies he's here to promote — Silence, a historical epic directed by Martin Scorsese — and asks me how long it's currently running. I tell him the version I saw was just over two and a half hours. Neeson shrugs. "For Martin, I guess that's quite short."
Silence is a passion project of Scorsese's, one he's been trying to make for more than 25 years. It's based on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo about Jesuit missionaries — Neeson plays one named Ferreira — in 1640s Japan, where Christians are being systematically persecuted by the Buddhist dictatorship. The film has been through multiple writers and actors, but Scorsese stuck with it, and it's finally hitting theaters this month.
Neeson understands the value of playing the long game. It's a little hard to remember now that he's entrenched on the A-list, but for most of his career he was a solid leading man, though rarely much more. He was already 41, with 17 years' worth of film roles behind him, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Schindler's List, a role he'd reportedly beaten out Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford to get — but even that failed to give him Ford's or Costner's movie-star career. Neeson spent the next two decades turning in great performances in as many hits as misses (Batman Begins on the one hand, The Haunting on the other), until his late-period pivot toward ass-kicking made him one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. "Liam's ambition wasn't to do all the classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company," his old friend Richard Graham once said. "He wanted big parts in big movies." Now, in the fifth decade of his career, he has his pick of them.
Neeson keeps his coat on for our entire time together, either as a sort of armor or in case he decides to make a quick getaway. He's agreed to talk for 90 minutes, which I tell him isn't long for an in-depth cover story. "Well it's about 88 minutes more than I want to be here," Neeson says. "So."
That this rejoinder — delivered in his peaty growl — does not incite an immediate pants-shitting is due mostly to the fact that, intimidating though he may be, there's an obvious gentleness to Neeson, a vulnerability and tenderness that's plain on his handsome, timeworn face. Before he went around punching Albanians for a living, Neeson was usually cast in more introspective roles — professors, sculptors, and other sensitive types — wounded romantics who, like him, tended toward brooding and self-doubt. Women, naturally, went crazy for him: the lumberjack's body with the poet's heart. "It's not about looks, although he's a terrific-looking guy," his late wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, once said. "It comes from somewhere deeper than that. You feel that he's been through a history."
These days everyone knows that he has. Neeson is a widower, having lost Richardson seven years ago, following a skiing accident. Since then he has raised their two sons alone. Now the younger son is away at college and Neeson is home by himself. He still has his property in upstate New York, a big 1890s farmhouse he bought before he and Richardson were married. "He likes being there on his own, with his pool and his gym," Graham says. "He's always been very happy with his own company.
In many ways Neeson was born to play a priest. Tall, austere; slightly stooped yet unflaggingly upright; those searching eyes, that troubled soul. He's done it half a dozen times already: in 1985's Lamb (Brother Michael); 2005's Breakfast on Pluto (Father Liam); 2002's Gangs of New York (Priest Vallon, who wasn't an actual priest but wore the collar and wielded a crucifix in battle); even an episode of The Simpsons, on which his Father Sean taught Bart the way of the Lord.
Neeson was born William John but called Liam (short for William) after the local priest. He grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, the only son of Barney and Kitty Neeson, a school custodian and a school cook. His mother walked two miles to work each way and brought leftovers home to their council house; his father, according to Neeson's sister, "never said five words when two words would do."
Neeson learned the Mass in Latin as an altar boy: In nomine Patris, Dominus vobiscum, the whole deal. Church is where he first felt the magic of performance, the ceremony and theatricality of it — the robes, the candles, the liturgy; costumes, lighting, a script. His parish priest, Father Darragh, taught him to box when he was nine; a scrappy jabber with a strong left, Neeson eventually became the Ulster Province boys champion in three different weight divisions. But secretly he was afraid of getting hurt and, moreover, of hurting someone else. So when a blow to the head during a fight left him concussed, the 16-year-old hung up his gloves — but not before winning the fight.
It wasn't easy being Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and '60s. "You grew up cautious, let's put it that way," he says. "Our town was essentially Protestant, but there were a few Catholics on our street. The Protestants all had marches and bands and stuff. I didn't quite understand what it was about — 'Remember 1690? When Catholic King James was defeated by Protestant William of Orange?' Who gives a fuck?" As he got older, the situation got grimmer. "The Troubles started in '69 and then really kicked in from '70 to '71," he says. "Drive-by shootings, bombs. I was at university for one abortive year, and we were so fucking naive. You'd be in a bar, drinking a glass of cider, and suddenly soldiers would come in and say, 'Everybody out — there's a bomb scare.' We'd order more drinks to take across the street, then the soldiers would go off and we'd filter back into the bar. Fucking stupid."
Neeson reconnected with his Catholic roots in 1985 when he filmed a movie called The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. The three of them played Catholic missionaries in 18th-century South America. They had a priest with them on set in the jungle, and every Sunday he'd "say a simple little Mass, break a piece of bread, and read the Gospel for the week," Neeson says. "We'd discuss the passage and what it meant in today's world. It was very intimate and very cathartic in a lot of ways." A devilish grin: "Then you'd go home, have a few glasses of Guinness, and get laid. The delights of the flesh."
Neeson's part in The Mission was small but instrumental to his career. De Niro, whom he befriended, introduced him to an American casting director. When she needed an IRA operative for an episode of Miami Vice, she thought of Neeson. That got him a work visa and a foothold in the States.
He's still grateful. "A lovely, lovely man," Neeson says of De Niro. "He's a man of few words — I like that. He's the sort of guy who says, 'I'll call you Thursday at 3 o'clock' — and if he can't call, he'll call you Wednesday to say he can't. When he makes a commitment, he sticks to it. That's rare these days."
It was Neeson's longtime interest in the Jesuits that prompted him to take the role of Father Ferreira in Silence. We first meet Ferreira in the film's opening scene: He's dirty, bearded, his raiments caked in mud — a thoroughly broken man. He's forced to watch as Japanese Christians are crucified and tortured.
Neeson was eager for the chance to reunite with Scorsese, after the very brief experience working with him on Gangs of New York. "Martin demands real focus," Neeson says admiringly. "If there was a grip working a hundred meters away and Martin heard a piece of scaffolding fall — which doesn't even make a noise! — he would stop, turn to the first AD, and say, 'I've asked for silence. Why have you not got it?' Terrific."
(Unlike just about anyone with even a tenuous connection to the legendary director, Neeson calls Scorsese by his full given name. "I just feel I haven't earned the right to call him Marty." he says. "Everybody's always like, 'Marty this, Marty that.' You don't know him. I don't know him.")
Scorsese says that Neeson was one of the key elements to finally getting Silence made. "I needed someone with real gravity to play Ferreira," he says. "You have to feel the character's pain."
Now Neeson doesn't consider himself much of a Catholic. "I admire people with true faith," he says. "Like my mother, who's 90 and gets annoyed if she can't walk to Mass Sunday morning. 'Mom, you're 90! It's OK! God will forgive you.' " These days he isn't even sure if he believes in a God.
I ask if there was a specific incident that precipitated his doubt, and his face darkens. "So this is probably leading toward the death of my wife?"
Neeson is understandably wary on the subject of Richardson. It must be gut-wrenching to have to revisit the worst moment of your life again and again, every time an interviewer needs a new quote. But this was just an open-ended question, I insist. It wasn't leading toward anything.
"OK," he says, sounding unconvinced. "It wasn't." Anyway, as far as his waning faith goes: "I think it was gradual."
When he's in town and the weather is good, Neeson loves to walk around Central Park. "Power walk," he says. "Get a good sweat going." He even has a walking buddy — "a real-estate lady" he met on his walks. "You see the same people, you nod, you say hello," Neeson explains. "Six months later, you're saying, 'How's your kid?' It's nice," he says. "We text each other: You free tomorrow? The usual spot? We do the whole loop — usually six miles, sometimes eight. Fifteen minutes a mile. It's good."
Three years ago, Central Park was the unlikely battleground for one of the most heated fights of Neeson's public life. The topic? Horses. During his 2013 election campaign, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to enact a ban on horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. (The measure was billed as an animal-rights issue, though questions have been raised about the role political donors and real-estate interests played in the proposed ban, and Mayor de Blasio's actions were later investigated.) The horse ban was supported by famous animal advocates like Miley Cyrus and Alec Baldwin. Neeson, who grew up caring for horses on his aunt's farm in County Armagh, waded in to defend the drivers.
"I'm in the park every day," he explains. "I see these guys; I know these guys. There were so many celebrities supporting [the ban], I was like, 'These guys need a celebrity or two.' "
"He really put himself in the line of fire," says Stephen Malone, a second-generation carriage driver and spokesman for the horse-and-carriage industry. "It was a complete game-changer. He hosted a stable visit for the city council on a Sunday afternoon, and if he wasn't there, we might have gotten one or two [members]. We ended up with about 20. They got to take their selfies with Liam Neeson, but they also got to meet the children of the drivers and to see how the stable hands care for the horses. It completely swayed public opinion. That was the moment we knew we were gonna be OK."
Colm McKeever, an Irish-born carriage driver and longtime friend of Neeson's, says, "There's a framed picture of him in every stable. It's the Pope and then Liam Neeson." McKeever says Neeson's support of the drivers wasn't due to their friendship: "We've been fast friends for a number of years, but that has nothing to do with Liam's convictions. He stands up for what he believes in. It's as simple as that."
The proposal was eventually defeated, and now Neeson is a hero to the 300-odd drivers, who often stop him to say thanks. "It's almost like he's part of the tour," jokes McKeever. " 'There's the carousel — and that's Liam Neeson.' " Malone adds: "Liam Neeson is the biggest Hollywood star going right now, and he walks through Central Park and stops to talk to carriage guys. Only a true gentleman would do that."
It's a working-man's solidarity that's apparently characteristically Neeson. "If you speak to film crews, they all love him," says Richard Graham. "He's got friends from crews he still corresponds with — and I'm not talking about higher-ups, just ordinary blokes. It sounds like I'm blowing smoke up his ass, but he truly is an honorable guy."
Ellen Freund was the prop master on two Neeson films, Leap of Faith and Nell — the latter when Neeson and Richardson were still dating. "They had a lovely house with a chef," Freund recalls, "and every weekend they would invite six members of the crew and cook this fantastic dinner, with beautiful wines. It was just the most lovely treat. It wasn't just the upper echelons, either — a grip or an electrician, it didn't matter."
It was Freund who introduced Neeson to his favorite outdoor pastime: fly-fishing. They were shooting Nell on a lake and needed something for Neeson to do in his downtime; Freund had just come off A River Runs Through It, so she showed Neeson how to cast. He was hooked. "He just loved it," she says. "Once we gave him the rod and set him up out there, he wouldn't come off the lake. Every time you looked for him, he was down there practicing."
"When he said he'd discovered fly-fishing," says Graham, "my first thought was, 'My God, that is the perfect hobby for you.' It's peaceful. It's in nature. There's a lot of skill. And the time goes by like you wouldn't believe. So I think that's kind of therapeutic. You've got nothing in your mind, other than trying to catch the fish."
Neeson cites the kind of pastoral tranquility that will be familiar to anyone who's heard an angler wax lyrical about the sport. "Eight times out of 10, I won't catch anything," he says. "The thrill for me is being on a river with my pouch and rod, and I know there's a fish over there, or at least I think there is, so I'll do five or six casts. That fly's not working, take it off, put on another one, try again. Before you know it, three hours will have gone past." It's the opposite of relaxing. "You're trying to outwit a fish that's been around since the Triassic with a piece of yarn or your own hair, he says. "You're working all the time — but it's a different kind of work."
Neeson and Graham have fished together all over the world: Patagonia, arctic Quebec, the Tomhannock Reservoir in upstate New York. "New Zealand, that's the mecca," Neeson says. "Big trout. Stunning. Some of these rivers, we'd take little choppers in, and you're six feet over the rocks and you jump out. You're thirsty, so you put your head in the river and drink, and it's pure." Neeson seems energized by the memory. "Fuck. I haven't done a big trip in a long time," he says. "I'm thinking of going to Brazil, up the Amazon. Heard they have big peacock bass. That'd be a trip." He would also like to get back down to the Bahamas for bonefish. "The phantom of the shallows," he says. "Silvery color. They turn a certain way and disappear. Hence 'phantoms.' But you need a guide, that's the only trouble." He'd rather go alone? "Yeah," he says.
(Says Graham: "We can be fishing side by side, 50 feet apart, and not say a word to each other for hours.")
I ask Neeson if he's learned anything from fly-fishing that he's been able to apply to his career or to the rest of his life. "Patience, I think," he says. "Just taking your time. I remember in the early days, if I was casting and I missed, I'd be very quick to cast again. But trout stay where they are — they like the food to come to them. The fish isn't going anywhere. Take your time."
Neeson's other new movie is A Monster Calls, a live-action tearjerker in which a CGI tree (the titular Monster) visits a boy whose mother is dying. Neeson plays the tree, a yew — "the most important of all the healing trees." He's ancient and massive, twice the size of a house, with gnarled roots, spiky branches, and a voice like a bottomless coal pit. The first time he shows up, he kicks down the boy's house. It's kind of terrifying. Still, you know the Monster is good, because he's played by Liam Neeson.
It's not surprising that Neeson makes a great tree, given that a noted Broadway critic once literally compared him to a sequoia. (He actually called him a "towering sequoia of sex." It was a compliment.) He spent two weeks filming motion-capture in a special room with cameras surrounding him on every side. "What do they call it? Not the space. The volume," he says with a little laugh. "Computer nerds." The end product looks something like a woodsy Transformer — which, weirdly, makes sense, given that Transformers director Michael Bay has said that Neeson's regal bearing was his inspiration for Optimus Prime. ("Really?" says Neeson. "That's news to me.")
A Monster Calls is structured on a series of visits from the Monster, in which he tells fairy tales to the boy to help him work through his grief. The stories are designed to divine meaning from a meaningless world — a world where, as the Monster says at one point, "Farmers' daughters die for no reason." It's a movie, in other words, about death, loss, mourning, and the ways we help one another cope. And this, I warn Neeson, is when I'm leading toward the death of his wife.
Neeson met Richardson when he was a 40-year-old bachelor who'd already dated Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, and Brooke Shields. In 1993 Richardson and Neeson co-starred in a play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and then, before long, were a couple. Two years later they were married in the garden of their farmhouse, and the boys soon followed. Then, in 2009, Richardson was skiing near Montreal when she fell and hit her head. Everything seemed fine at first: "Oh, darling — I've taken a tumble in the snow" is what she told Neeson on the phone that night. But unbeknownst to the doctors, her brain was slowly bleeding. She fell into a coma and died the next day.
Since Richardson's passing, Neeson's grief has colored several of his onscreen characters, a number of which are dealing with some kind of tragic familial backstory. The similarity in A Monster Calls is awful and impossible to ignore: a beautiful young mother struck down before her time. And Neeson's own sons were just 13 and 12 when Richardson died, about the same age as the boy in the movie. Did he think about that at all when preparing for the film?
"Yeah, I don't want to go into that," Neeson says politely but firmly. "It's not fair to them. I'd rather not talk about my boys, other than that they're doing well, college, all that stuff."
By all appearances, the boys are thriving. Micheál, now 21, is an aspiring actor who appeared with Neeson in an LG Super Bowl commercial last year. And Daniel, 20, is a sophomore theater and digital-media production major. "There's a saying," says Neeson. " 'You're only as happy as your unhappiest child.' And the kids are happier than I — so that's a blessing."
We've been talking for a while when Neeson realizes his tea has gone cold. He flags down the waitress. "Sorry, love," he says. "Could you ask the kitchen for some boiling water when you have a second?"
"Boiling-hot water," she says, nodding. "No problem."
Neeson stops her. "But not hot," he says. "If you could make it boil. Tell them it's for me," he adds. "Tell them I will come for them. I will find them. . . ."
Upon recognizing his famous Taken monologue, the waitress cracks ups. "Absolutely," she says, skipping off. After she's gone, I tease Neeson for shamelessly trotting out his shtick. He laughs: "Pathetic, isn't it?"
When Neeson made the first Taken movie in 2009, he had low expectations. " Straight to video is what I thought," he says. No one is more amused than he that eight years later — after The Grey (Taken with wolves), Non-Stop (Taken on a plane), Run All Night (Taken at night), and, of course, Taken 2 and 3 — he's still getting offered this kind of role. He's even reached the point of self-parody, turning in comically self-aware, Neeson-esque cameos in a commercial for the role-playing game Clash of Clans (as vengeful gamer AngryNeeson52) and on Inside Amy Schumer, as a scarily intense funeral-home director whose motto is "I don't bury cowards."
But in a way, Neeson is just fulfilling an opportunity he first had more than two decades ago, when he was being courted to become the new James Bond in the mid-'90s. "I was being considered," Neeson says. "I'm sure they were considering a bunch of other guys, too." He says he would have loved to be 007, but Richardson said she wouldn't marry him if he was. I ask why, and he smiles like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Women. Foreign countries. Halle Berry. It's understandable." Also, Schindler's List had just come out. "She was like, 'You're going to ruin your career,' " Neeson says. "But it's no big deal. It's nice to be inquired after."
Neeson sometimes feels a little embarrassed that he's Social Security–eligible and still pretend-fighting for a living. "Maybe another year," he says of his action-star shelf life. "The audiences let you know — you can sense them going, 'Oh, come on.' But by the way," he hastens to add, "I've never felt fitter in my life."
Neeson doesn't box anymore. ("I'll train — the bags and stuff. But I don't spar. There's always someone coming up to you like, 'Hey, you're that actor Lyle Nelson right?' They want a chance to hurt you a little. 'Guess who I beat up today? He's a pussy.' ") But he proudly points out that he does all his own movie fights. I read him a quote from Steven Seagal — "Look at Liam Neeson. He can't fight. He's a great dramatic actor, a great guy. . . . Is he a great fighter? A great warrior? No" — and Neeson seems amused. "I don't know how to answer that," he says, smiling. "Am I an action guy? Not really. But I do know how to fight. So fuck him."
One thing Neeson absolutely won't do anymore is ride a motorcycle — ever since a horrifying crash in 2000 nearly killed him. "I've read a couple of scripts where the character's on a motorbike, and I'm like, 'Is this important to the script?' 'Yeah, it is.' 'OK, I'm not in.' "
I tell him about a recent spill I took on a bike, and he turns serious. "You have to watch yourself," Neeson tells me. "Get it out of your system. Make a pact with your wife. And don't cheat on it."
Neeson has few vices left these days. He quit the Marlboro Lights years ago and gave up drinking a while back — first the Guinness, then the pinot noir — after he found himself partaking too much in the wake of Richardson's death. He tries to keep busy lest he wallow. "I need to work," he says. "I'm a working-class Irishman. I'm fucking lucky: A stranger gets in touch with my agent and says, 'Could you send Liam Neeson a script?' I'm still flattered by that. So I'll keep doing it till the knees give up. It beats hiding in a basement in eastern Aleppo."
(As Richardson once put it: "I think he probably, on some level — although he wouldn't say it — wakes up every morning thinking, 'Isn't it great I'm not driving a forklift?' ")
Now that he's back in New York, Neeson looks forward to lying low for a while. "Just recharge the batteries," he says. "I don't want to see the inside of an airplane." He'll take in some Broadway shows, catch up on all the programs on his Apple TV: Fargo, Ray Donovan, Breaking Bad. He's also got a big stack of books he wants to tackle — two Ian McEwan novels and a box of classics he recently received as a gift, which included War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
And then, of course, there are those walks in the park.
It all sounds nice, I say. But I'm not sure it's enough to fill up a day.
Neeson smiles. "You'd be surprised."
","tag_ids":[4748,4794],"publish_date":"2016-12-12T16:07:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson - Liam Neeson Interview","keywords":"liam neeson, interview, feature, profile, liam neeson magazine cover, silence, martin scorsese,","description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hvX3IR","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Neeson with Richardson in London, October 2008.","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_b-8f9a8a98-433a-4b2d-8ff5-ed182b83326c.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Marc Hom","caption":"","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_g-6285b0f9-fcaa-4ed9-8955-6792bf4dc162.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photographs by Marc Hom","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_a-cb7e2101-2367-478c-ac0e-e10d94efd88b.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/mark-ruffalos-good-life-formula-3-kids-1-rabbit-47-acres-2-764-miles-from-hollywood-20130509","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood","contentId":168305,"contentHeadline":"Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/features/articles/norman-reedus-the-wild-one-w209199","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Getting to Know Norman Reedus","contentId":209199,"contentHeadline":"Norman Reedus: "}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454117,"old_id":null,"title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","short_title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","slug":"/features/articles/how-companies-like-kuiu-made-hunting-the-new-action-sport-w454117","body":"It's just before dusk in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and Jason Hairston is getting pummeled. The light is fading, and he's hiking up a ridgeline at 11,000 feet, higher than he's ever been. A cold front is passing through, and wind gusts are reaching in excess of 60 miles per hour. Every few steps another blast hits, knocking him sideways. Hairston's companions, Brendan Burns and Willie Hettinger, aren't faring much better, stumbling around in front of him like a couple of drunks.
The wind is howling with such force that it's almost comical, so Hairston, who's on the mountain hunting sheep, breaks out his iPhone to record an Instagram post, looking like one of those hackneyed meteorologists reporting from the middle of a hurricane. "We saw a group of rams on the far mountain, and now we're heading up to check out another area," he shouts into his phone. "We're just getting hammered by the wind."
Hairston, the 45-year-old founder of the hunting-gear company Kuiu, is after his first Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, a sure-footed ungulate that lives primarily above tree line, often in locations so steep and rocky that they're impossible to negotiate on two feet. "It's the pinnacle of big-game hunting," Hairston says. "You have to go farther and harder for them than for any other species."
Among a segment of hardcore big-game hunters, no brand is as revered as Kuiu. The company's high-performance fabrics — bonded fleece and waterproof breathable synthetics — are pulled directly from the mountaineering world, and its distinct Tetris-like camo pattern looks more like standard-issue SEAL gear than the fake shrubbery so common at Walmart. Today Kuiu camo is as much a status symbol in hook-and-bullet culture as Louis Vuitton's monogram is among the Hamptons set. And it has as many celebrity boosters: UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a fan. Metallica's James Hetfield owns a guitar emblazoned with Kuiu camo, and Kid Rock has a piano wrapped in it.
On Instagram, Hairston has some 21,000 followers who track his far-flung hunts and gear updates and tag their own posts with #kuiunation. Detractors, of which Hairston has a few, occasionally use the comments section to rail against his trophy shots and what they see as hunting for the 1 Percent. But it's hard to say how much Kuiunation or Hairston's critics will get from this impromptu weather report: With the thin air, he inhales heavily between sentences, and his voice is almost entirely drowned out by the wind's roar. After stashing his phone in his pocket, he wipes snot from his nose.
"Ain't sheep hunting great!" he says.
The three hunters spend the next hour scouting and see a group of promising rams, but with darkness creeping over the eastern plains, we call it quits for the night and head back to camp. The next morning, conditions are far more favorable, so we load up our backpacks and set off in the violet predawn looking for a sheep to shoot.
When it comes to finding big rams, Burns and Hettinger are two of the best in the business. Burns works for Kuiu as its lead product tester and resident hunting guide. Hettinger's main gig is as a personal hunting guide for rich clientele; he's here because he knows these mountains better than just about anyone.
Once outside of camp, it takes Burns and Hettinger less than 10 minutes to spot the same group of rams two ridgelines over, a straight-line distance of maybe a mile. Hairston has a rare management tag from the Taos Pueblo, a 120,000-acre tribal homeland in northern New Mexico, which requires him to shoot an old ram, eight to 11 years old, that probably won't survive another winter or two, its molars ground down so far that it'll eventually starve. Based on its horns, the largest in the group looks like a shooter, but to get within range we have to hike up and over a 13,000-foot peak, then down and around the back side of the ridge where the sheep were first seen. Doing so takes most of the morning, stopping and starting to catch our breath and continually watch the movement of the rams. Now, as the three hunters prepare to clamber to the edge of a slight rock outcropping to take a closer look, Hairston unlatches a custom-made .300 WSM rifle from the side of his backpack and loads a 200-grain bullet into the chamber. "It feels good to finally get some lead in the pipe," he says.
But in the four hours we've been on the move, the sheep have wandered into the upper reaches of a grove of pine trees, behind a slight knoll. No shot. The three reassess. They settle on crawling to the edge of the knoll, knowing that Hairston will be within 150 yards of the animals, a strategy that could easily spook them.
"We can roll right over the top," Hettinger says, "but we won't have much time to decide whether to shoot."
"If we push them," says Burns, "we won't see them again — not on this trip."
Both turn to Hairston to make the call. "That's fine," he says with grin. "We're professionals. This is what we do for a living."
You'll be forgiven if your idea of hunting is paunchy old dudes rumbling down back roads in beat-up pickup trucks. Plenty of sportsmen still shoot whitetails out of tree stands or wait on the edge of sloughs for a flock of mallards to decoy in. But these days, hunting has been embraced by a new breed of devotees: athletic, tech-savvy, ethically minded professionals who like to play year-round in the mountains. They're often the same mountain bikers and runners on the trails outside Moab or Bozeman in summer. But come fall, they trade Lycra for camo and pick up a rifle or bow, many for the first time.
Tim Ferriss, the 4-Hour Work Week guru, is a recent convert to hunting. So is actor Chris Pratt. Even Facebook king Mark Zuckerberg has boasted about killing the meat he eats. Much of hunting's newfound appeal is because the payoff is a year's supply of organic, antibiotic-free backstraps — the new ethical eating. But it's also a way for mountain lovers to get deep into the outdoors, tempting people who have no desire to sit in a duck blind.
"It's a totally different way of interacting with these wild places," says Kenton Carruth, co-founder of the performance-hunting apparel company First Lite. "I know plenty of pro mountain guides who are in the woods every day and they've never seen a wolf, but that's because hikers or climbers are always walking around. They're never silent, still, taking in every sound and smell. As a hunter, I've seen a wolf quite a few times."
For adventure athletes, hunting is a challenge that's every bit as difficult as finishing an ultramarathon — stalking animals for miles on end, packing out hundreds of pounds of meat, navigating through the backcountry in snowstorms. It also offers the rush that comes with having to make consequential decisions in the mountains, just like in climbing.
"The athletic world is very physical but pretty sterile," says Mark Paulsen, a former strength and conditioning coach who has worked with NFL players. "Whether you're on a football field or on a basketball court, it's a known event. Whereas you go into the woods, you have no idea what you might be heading into. For people who love the mountains, that's the beauty of it."
Paulsen now owns Wilderness Athlete, which creates nutritional products like meal-replacement powders for these new so-called backpack hunters. Twenty years ago he was training athletes at the University of New Mexico when a friend took him bow-hunting for elk, hiking six miles into the mountains with 70 pounds of gear. The weight and altitude nearly killed him. "I wanted to throw up, lie down, crawl under a tree," he says. "I thought, 'This the most athletic thing I've ever done in my life.' " On the last day of the hunt, a bull elk bugled so close that Paulsen could feel it in his rib cage. He felled the bull with an arrow from 15 yards. "It was the single most exhilarating experience of my life," he says.
If backpack hunting can be said to have a celebrity, Hairston is it. Much of that has to do with his seemingly endless series of big hunts, which he regularly posts about on Instagram, much to the dismay of anti-hunters and even some in the hunting world. In the last six months alone, he has bagged a trophy room full of animals. In July, he shot a 3x4 blacktail buck in northern California. In August, he flew to the Yukon's far north and killed a 10-year-old Dall sheep with perfectly symmetrical 42-inch horns. In September, on private land just north of Bozeman, Montana, while hunting with his eight-year-old son, Cash, and his 72-year-old father, he brought down a monster bull elk with a compound bow.
"It's in our DNA," says Hairston. "It's two million years of genetics. Whenever I hear criticism online I just respond to them: 'Before you knock it, get out and do it.' "
Up close, bighorn rams register less as living creatures than as props in a prehistoric diorama in a natural history museum. Their tousled, purplish coats gleam in the sun, and the growth rings on their horns are demarcated by clear, dark lines. With a good spotting scope, you can age a sheep by counting the rings at a distance of a few hundred yards or more. Few people are better at this, or enjoy it as much, as Hettinger and Burns.
Hairston met Burns at a trade show a decade ago. At the time, Burns had become something of a phenom in the hunting world by besting Montana's archery record for a nontypical elk. He'd tracked the animal for three days before sneaking within 12 yards and shooting it with an arrow. The horns alone weighed 54 pounds. He was just 22 at the time. Burns has racked up an impressive series of kills — two of which landed him on the Boone and Crockett Club's record list, essentially the Billboard music charts for hunters. But these days his knowledge of and obsession with sheep has earned him the nom de guerre Sheep3PO. "The only way to get him to shut up about sheep," Hairston says, "is to turn him off."
Burns and Hairston hunt together multiple times a year, taking pride in going farther afield than nearly anyone. Lately that's meant to Canada's far north for 10-day expeditions with a local guide — a prerequisite when buying a sheep tag up there. "The guides are often excited, because they've never been able to take clients to some of these places," says Hairston. "They're too difficult to access, but with us they know we can go." On their Yukon hunt this year, they flew to a remote airstrip near the Arctic Circle, crossed a river via boat, and then hiked three days into the mountains before they were even in sheep territory.
This New Mexico hunt is a far cry from those expeditions, but it's a better bet for scoring an old bighorn. As we crawl to the edge of the knoll for a closer look at the group of five rams that moved off downhill, it becomes clear the oldest one is perfect. He has a massive body, probably 300 pounds, with thick horns that end in flat stubs, the product of years of bashing heads with rivals during the rut. He's nine, maybe 10 years old based on his growth rings. Hairston drops his backpack and lies flat on his belly, propping the rifle up on his bag to take aim.
"The one on the left," Burns says. "He's the one." The rams are grouped together tightly, and they clearly sense that something is amiss. At first they dart one way, then another. Finally, they disappear into the trees. Hairston never pulls the trigger.
"Fuck," says Burns. "Fuck."
Hairston slowly gets up and looks back with a pained smile. "I never had a shot," he says as way of explanation. Now the animals are gone, maybe for good. "Come on," Burns says. "Let's get ahead of them." So we take off side-hilling it across the mountain, doing our best to catch up to an animal that can run uphill faster than most NFL cornerbacks can on AstroTurf.
Like many hunters, Hairston views the sport as the ultimate proving ground. It's part of the reason he is so fond of the idea of backpack hunting, which may be the sport's purest, most self-reliant expression. Before setting out, he often fills out spreadsheets with each piece of gear and its corresponding weight listed in ounces. "You've got to," he says. "Every once adds up over a 10-day period to thousands of extra calories burned." He budgets two pounds of food per day, divvied up by day in Ziploc bags. He also trains year-round, spending 10 to 15 hours per week in the gym or hiking with sandbags in his backpacks. For mountaineers, none of this is new, but in the hunting world there are only a handful of people who prep the way he does.
Hairston has been hunting in one form or another since he was a kid growing up in Southern California. Like his father, Hairston took up football in high school and then college, playing linebacker. He was good enough that the San Francisco 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1995. He stayed with the team for a season without playing a down, then retired a year later after suffering an injury to his C5 and C6 vertebrae during a mini-camp with another team. His career as an NFL player was over before it even began. "I couldn't really watch football for a few years," he says. "I was angry about what it had done to me."
Hairston then sold commercial real estate, flipped a few franchises, and became increasingly focused on hunting. Around that time he was often out with Jonathan Hart, a friend from college. On their first backcountry hunt together, in Idaho's White Cloud Mountains, the weather fluctuated wildly — cold and snowing one day, sunny and 80 degrees the next — and their gear was soaked nearly the entire time. Both knew there had to be something better.
Hart thought about the gear he used for other outdoor activities. "In my garage I'd have shotguns and rifles and bows and arrows, but I also had kayaks and climbing gear and ice axes," he says. The apparel options for each of those sports, he noticed, was far superior to anything he had for hunting. Hairston had a similar epiphany when realized he was shopping for his gear more in REI than Bass Pro Shops.
So in 2005 Hairston and Hart decided to make high-performance synthetic gear specifically for hunters. They named it Sitka, after a town in Alaska. They designed a new camo pattern, made some sample jackets and pants, and then convinced mail-order catalog Schnee's to take a chance on the line. Sitka was a hit from the get-go, finding a home with sportsman looking for an upgrade from the subpar cotton offerings. By 2008, Sitka topped $4 million in sales and its products were on store shelves across the country, including Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's. In 2009, W.L. Gore & Associates, the $3 billion behemoth behind Gore-Tex, acquired Sitka for an undisclosed sum. Today it's one of the largest brands in the performance-hunting space.
The deal was worth millions, but the partnership between Hairston and Hart unraveled. Hairston never wanted to sell, he says, and his misgivings became apparent during a meeting about the acquisition. Execs wanted to expand Sitka's footprint, making new camo patterns for whitetail and duck hunters. In Hairston's view, this was unthinkable. "You lose the core appeal," he says.
Increasingly frustrated, Hairston left Sitka (Hart says he was simply not offered a job after the sale) and immediately got to work on Kuiu. With Kuiu, which he named after a game-rich Alaskan island — perhaps not coincidentally located across an icy strait from Sitka — Hairston decided to sell online, directly to consumers; that way, he'd be able to control everything and avoid retail markup. He worked with an engineer to create a carbon fiber backpack frame that was lighter and more ergonomic than anything on the market — and that could comfortably carry 120 pounds of fresh meat. He teamed up with the Japanese company Toray, a competitor to Gore-Tex, to develop a line of apparel. During the 18 months it took to produce everything, Hairston blogged obsessively about the process, building anticipation and earning trust among a dedicated contingent of hunters.
Kuiu launched in 2011 and was an immediate success. It now sells everything from $300 rain jackets to backpacks, game bags, and tents. Sales are approaching $50 million, at least according to Hairston, and the company is expanding its offerings beyond hunting. The Navy SEALs, he says, have reached out to develop a line of tactical gear (to be released to Kuiu customers in 2017), and even Disney hired Kuiu to create a backpack frame for its costumed performers. Hairston has plans for the company's first brick-and-mortar store in 2018, and a traveling pop-up store will be hitting the road this summer.
With Kuiu's success, Hairston has fielded a number of offers to buy the company, but says he'd rather be good than big: "I made that mistake with Gore. I won't make clothes for women, and I won't make clothes for fat guys, because then the skinny guys won't look good in them. I want Kuiu to be an aspirational brand."
After passing on the shot on the big ram, Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger get into position atop another rock outcropping, just up-valley from where the rams disappeared. The vantage point offers a clear sight line into the bowl below. But the sheep never show up.
The hunters are silent, pondering the next move — if there is one. Earlier in the morning, Burns had checked his phone and noticed a photo about an acquaintance's recent, unsuccessful hunt. The post basically said the experience of hunting in the mountains was reward enough. "That's great and all," Burns said, "but I'd rather get something. You either win or you lose."
Hairston does not like to lose. In the business world his competitiveness has earned him a fair amount of flak, including criticism by competitors for misleading claims about the performance of his products. But much of the concern centers around conservation. Whereas most of the new hunters packing rifles into the backcountry are doing so on public land, with tags won in public lotteries, many of Hairston's hunts are through private landowners or outfitters. To some this resembles the pay-to-play hunting model so common in Europe, where it's a rich man's sport. Walter Palmer, the dentist who shot Cecil the lion, placed a big order from Kuiu before he jetted off to Zimbabwe. And Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who have been photographed at length with their kills, are Kuiu customers and friends of Hairston's.
Kuiu donates a fair amount of money to conservation organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which have been a boon for those species. But a central tenet of organizations like these and many state wildlife agencies is protecting species with funds raised by auctioning off premium hunting tags, some that sell for upwards of $100,000. It's an effective strategy in some areas, but it's also controversial because it's hard to know just how much money is going to conservation. It can also come at the expense of public-draw hunters.
"We start to get into trouble," says Land Tawney, director of the nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, "when more and more tags are allocated in the name of raising money, and then we turn into a system where only the rich and elite have the opportunity to get those tags."
Plus, selling high-dollar licenses tacitly feeds a trophy-hunting mentality that continues to flag the sport — warranted or not — as hunters go after animals simply because they'll score well on a record list.
"When the pursuit of an animal as a status symbol becomes more important than the experience surrounding it," says author and TV host Steven Rinella, a respected figure in the outdoors world, "you enter into very troubling terrain."
Hairston has turned Kuiu into a cult favorite by transforming his camo apparel into a hardcore-lifestyle brand, much like CrossFit, and making himself the face of the company. That plays well when you're selling products and prepping for big trips, but it can come off as self-aggrandizing once an animal is on the ground.
Jonathan Hart, Hairston's former business partner, sums him up this way: "It's like in Seinfeld, the J. Peterman catalog that Elaine works for. It's all about him. Jason is about Jason."
After losing the rams in the trees, Hairston and Burns discuss their options. By now, the animals may be long gone. The wind is blowing, circling around the mountain, and we start moving back to where we last saw the rams. Hettinger sets off to track where they went. Then suddenly, there they are, just a hundred yards downhill. Hairston and Burns take up nearly the exact same positions they had an hour earlier, while Hettinger creeps closer to spook them out of the trees. This time, the big ram shows itself clean, broadside to Hairston. He shoots.
The report, like a door slam, quickly dissipates in the wind. From below the ridge, the sound of snapping branches rings out — the ram stumbling at full gait into a tree. Then it's just wind. Burns reaches over and fist pumps Hairston. "You got him," he says. "You got him." Burns grabs his spotting scope and runs downhill toward where the ram disappeared. Within seconds he lets out a high-pitched yip. "Yeaaooo! He's right down here."
By the time Hairston arrives, Burns and Hettinger are already marveling at the ram's thick, almost violet cape. "That is as an awesome of a cape as you will find on a bighorn," says Burns. "Look at the mass on that thing!"
"Awesome," Hairston says. "That is awesome."
After admiring the ram for a solid 15 minutes, the hunters drag him under a few big trees for photos. Burns breaks out a bottle of Super Glue to affix the ram's mouth shut, so it doesn't hang lose. Then we spend the next hour shooting photos: Hairston alone with his kill; Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger with the ram; a close-up of the animal's horns. After they're sure there are enough good pics, Burns and Hettinger break out knives no bigger than X-Actos and carefully start removing the hide, everything from the hoofs to the head, to preserve for the taxidermist. Hairston wants a full-body mount to display in Kuiu's offices. As his partners cape the animal and cut off each quarter, Hairston quickly debones the meat, making it lighter for the pack out. Still, the meat, horns, and cape weigh a combined 150 pounds or so, and it takes three and a half hours to get it the mile or two back to camp.
Once there we all unpack our bags into our tents, then regroup around a fire. Soon everyone is emailing about the day's events. Hairston texts with Joe Rogan about an upcoming elk hunt. Eventually, we call it a night. Hairston heads off to his Kuiu tent, tucking the sheep's cape and head into the vestibule so a bear doesn't get it in the night. It's a strange sight, but it's hard to blame him: even sticking out of the top of his pack, the ram still looks regal.
Earlier in the day, shortly after shooting the sheep and walking down to where it lay, Hairston did something almost all hunters do. He set his gun and backpack down and crouched beside the animal, with his hand on its shoulder, clearly in awe. And then a silence came over him. Everyone stopped and let him have the moment.
Finally, Burns weighed in. "That thing is just the perfect sheep," he said.
After a few more seconds of silence, taking in the animal before him, Hairston looked up and agreed. "It's good to be a winner."
","tag_ids":[4748,5099],"publish_date":"2016-12-08T15:42:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"How Companies Like Kuiu Made Hunting the New Action Sport","keywords":"kuiu, hunting, jason hairston, bighorn sheep, big-game hunting, conservation, feature, profile, interview","description":"Cult gear company Kuiu is outfitting a new wave of superfit, adrenaline-craving, tech-savvy athletes who are transforming hunting into the next extreme sport. And critics are taking aim."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2gFOwPz","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"The hunters on their way to the top of 13,113 foot Old Mike Peak.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_d-f370f5f3-b934-4fc1-a047-b4fc27364744.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"The prey: a Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_c-d9522c1a-5aef-4392-9978-4992b42a153a.jpg"},"photo_3":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Hairston taking aim.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_v2_a-105ee416-8e4f-46f7-afe1-d78c4655f75c.jpg"},"photo_4":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Filling up in town before heading to the mountains for three days.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_e-5e658036-2829-4b00-8a5d-54b9b190687d.jpg"},"photo_5":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Packing out his ram.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_f-17988db9-2711-44eb-b1d4-e9d080b78961.jpg"},"photo_6":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Scouting bighorn rams at 11,000 feet in Sangre de Cristo Mountains.","filename":"m0117_fob_toc_a-eb1140de-f638-4778-888c-88e59ad8fd86.jpg"},"photo_7":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Jason Hairston","caption":"Hairston's wife, Kirstyn, with Cash and Coco.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_i-d6be904c-48bf-4f2c-b95b-1b313c1ed525.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":"Kuiu founder Jason Hairston scans the ridgeline for big ram.","credits":"Photographs by Paul Bride","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_a-cab418d7-f527-47c6-8424-61cee5c90d32.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/features/articles/the-last-whale-hunt-for-a-vanishing-village-kivalina-alaska-w443825","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village","contentId":443825,"contentHeadline":"The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/travel/articles/alaskas-wildest-weirdest-frontier-w431953","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: Alaska's Wildest, Weirdest Frontier","contentId":431953,"contentHeadline":"Alaska's Wildest, Weirdest Frontier"},"inset_3":{"slug":"/adventure/articles/the-fight-for-europes-last-wild-river-w444231","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Fight for Europe's Last Wild River","contentId":444231,"contentHeadline":"The Fight for Europe's Last Wild River"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Cult gear company Kuiu is outfitting a new wave of superfit, adrenaline-craving, tech-savvy athletes who are transforming hunting into the next extreme sport. And critics are taking aim.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":448627,"old_id":null,"title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","short_title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","slug":"/features/articles/how-an-11-year-olds-brain-injury-rattled-a-football-family-w448627","body":"It was a crisp Sunday afternoon in Missoula, Montana, and Mike Callaghan stood in the blustery sunshine, doing the thing he loved best: coaching his 11-year-old son's football team. Brogan Callaghan was the Panthers' quarterback and was shaping up as a real leader on the field. Mike, still athletic at age 52, couldn't help but think back to his own days on these fields, with his own father watching.
On that day, the Panthers were playing their archrivals, the Chargers, and were down 14–7 in the second quarter. Brogan took the snap and rolled left, twisting his upper body to throw right. As soon as he released the ball, he was flattened by a defender, so he didn't see that the receiver had made the catch and scored, the bleachers erupting into cheers.
Brogan jumped right up from the hit and jogged into formation for the extra point before switching to linebacker, a position his father once played with the Montana State Bobcats over in Bozeman. As the offense lined up, Mike noticed the Chargers' running back go into motion early. "Sweep!" Callaghan yelled from the sidelines, but Brogan was already on it, slipping left around the Chargers' big right tackle. Brogan was just about to take down the runner when he was slammed from behind — an illegal hit that flexed his spine, snapped his head forward, and sent him colliding into one of his own teammates. He went down hard, banging the back of his head into the dirt.
As a coach, Callaghan generally kept his cool. But now he went straight for the referee, screaming that this was the second time that player had made the same illegal block. "That's twice," Callaghan yelled. "You've got to call that."
But another Panthers coach, Eric Dawald, noticed something more alarming: Brogan wasn't getting up. Dawald rushed onto the field and found the boy on his back, barely conscious. Brogan opened his eyes and looked up. "I can't see," he said.
Brogan's mother, Shannon, was chatting with friends in the bleachers when she heard somebody say, "I think that's Brogan." She ran to the field, arriving at the same time her husband did.
Brogan looked up at his parents. "I can't feel my legs," he said. Shannon glanced at her husband and thought, "Brogan has to be done with football forever. It has to end now."
An ambulance drove onto the grass, and a paramedic removed the face mask from Brogan's helmet. They asked him what day it was, and Brogan answered incorrectly. They asked his birthday, and he couldn't answer that, either. One of the paramedics asked him if his neck hurt. "I can't feel my legs," the boy repeated.
Callaghan had been coaching youth football for 22 years without witnessing anything worse than a broken arm. Certain that Brogan's paralysis was momentary, he knelt beside his son and grabbed a patch of skin on the back of his calf. "You're going to feel this, Brog," he said. "You're fine. You'll feel this." Callaghan pinched, hard, but Brogan did not respond.
Some of his teammates were crying as the paramedics strapped their quarterback to a backboard, placed an oxygen mask over his face, and loaded him into the ambulance. Shannon climbed in, and they sped the boy across the Clark Fork River to St. Patrick Hospital.
Callaghan drove separately, his mind racing through worst-case scenarios: "We'll buy a one-level house. I'll change jobs so I can be home more, learn to care for a paraplegic child." Another thought intruded: "I was the coach. This happened on my watch. How did I do this to my kid?"
While the emergency room doctors evaluated Brogan, Shannon's and Mike's parents arrived at the hospital. After filling them in about Brogan's condition, Shannon turned to Callaghan's father. James Callaghan was an oral surgeon who had played football in college and loved watching his grandson play as much as he had loved watching Mike. In fact, in all of Mike's years of playing youth football, his father missed just one game, when Mike was in the sixth grade. "I don't ever want Brogan to play football again," Shannon told her father-in-law. "And you have to back me up on this." James Callaghan told her that it was none of his business.
Back in the emergency room, Brogan looked at his father and asked, "Am I paralyzed?"
"I think you are," Callaghan thought. "You're going to be all right," he said. He watched a tear roll down his son's cheek and thought, "He knows."
Brogan looked up at Callaghan and said, "Who are you?"
Before the injury, it had been a typical fall weekend for the Callaghans. Friday afternoon at 5, Mike left his office to meet Dawald and Brogan and the rest of the Panthers for practice. Afterward, they jumped into Callaghan's truck and drove across town to Loyola Sacred Heart High School, where they ate hot dogs, sipped Pepsis, and watched one of Callaghan's old MSU teammates coach his own son in a game against Troy High. On Saturday morning, Callaghan and Brogan watched an NCAA game while eating breakfast. If Montana State had been playing at home, they would have driven to Bozeman, where Callaghan did TV color commentary. As it happened, they were away, so Callaghan and Brogan watched the game on TV while plotting the next day's attack against the Chargers. Win or lose, after the game they'd head home to catch the Steelers play the 49ers and dig in to their usual chip buffet — three flavors of Ruffles, tortilla chips, seven-layer dip, and guacamole.
"We might be nuts," Callaghan says. "But so much of our week is taken up by football."
Plenty of other fathers could say the same thing. The NFL and NCAA get all the attention, but the vast majority of football in America is played at the youth level. There are about 2,000 men in the NFL, and 73,000 play on college teams. But more than 3 million boys between the ages of six and 18 play for teams like the Panthers and the Loyola Rams, in towns like Missoula, where football is deeply woven into the fabric of local life.
But that fabric is starting to fray, riven by a growing stack of research linking football to chronic head trauma. In college and the pros, players are consenting adults who make their own choices about that risk. But for those younger than 18, the decision rests with parents — more and more of whom are saying no to tackle football. Between 2010 and 2015, youth-league participation cratered nearly 30 percent.
Even NFL legends have reservations. Casey "Big Snack" Hampton, who played tackle for 12 years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, told me that he refused to let his son play tackle football before high school. "I made him wait," Hampton says. "I've seen little kids get concussions." Other stars, including Brett Favre and Troy Aikman, have expressed similar reservations. "I would not want my child out there," Terry Bradshaw told Jay Leno in 2012. "The fear of them getting these head injuries . . . it's just too great for me."
That stance has football leagues, both amateur and pro, scrambling. Earlier this year, Pop Warner, the nation's oldest youth football league, eliminated kickoffs for kids younger than 11, to limit open-field contact. USA Football, a nonprofit partially funded by the NFL that offers training, education, and equipment subsidies to youth leagues, has introduced a set of practice guidelines for coaches, designed in part to teach safer tackling techniques and to minimize hits to the head. The NFL also holds free "moms clinics" at pro stadiums, where so-called master trainers put mothers through tackling drills in an effort to convince the women that tackling is safe for kids.
Yet new research on head trauma continues to undermine that case. A report in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma found that the likelihood of developing cognitive and emotional problems is linked to a football player's overall exposure to contact and not just to his diagnosed concussions. In other words, every little hit adds up, which explains why NFL veterans who started playing before the age of 12 are more likely to have cognitive problems than those who picked up the game later. These days, many players start earlier — and the truly dedicated scrimmage all year long.
Risk, of course, is part of life, and kids suffer serious injuries doing all kinds of things. What's more, researchers still cannot say what percentage of football players end up suffering long-term cognitive harm.
All of which puts football families in a uniquely confounding position. For Callaghan and his high school and college teammates, football is one of the most important things in their lives. It's the source of their self-confidence and closest friendships, of indelible memories of victory and loss, of their very notion of what it means to be a man. And despite taking their share of hits to the head, they've gone on to lead fulfilling adult lives — lives that continue to be enriched by football. "It would rock me to the soul to learn that football has been bad for all these kids," says Callaghan. "I love the game. It's the greatest avenue that I know to get great life lessons."
Ultimately, the true battle for the future of America's favorite pastime is being waged not in the media or in high-profile court cases, but at public parks and on high school fields nationwide. And the instant Brogan was hit that fall day in Missoula, Mike and Shannon Callaghan joined countless other parents in staring down questions they never wanted to ask.
"I'm your dad." Back in the emergency room, Callaghan answered Brogan's question.
Brogan looked confused, so Callaghan pointed to Shannon and said, "Do you know who that is?" Brogan shook his head. Callaghan felt the life go out of him.
For hours they sat at Brogan's side, hoping for something to change. Then suddenly Shannon spoke up. "His toes moved," she said. "I just saw them. He moved his toes." Relief swept through the room. Mike felt something close to elation, thinking, "He has a concussion, but he will get better."
By evening Brogan could move his legs, sit up in bed, and walk across the room. The family spent that night in the hospital. The following morning Callaghan woke up feeling optimistic. He told his wife that he thought Brogan might be back at practice within a week. Then a doctor arrived and asked Brogan his name. Brogan got his first name right but couldn't remember his last name — or why he was in the hospital.
For years many doctors believed that children were less likely than adults to suffer serious head injuries in football, for the simple reason that they weigh less and run more slowly than adults do. Now it's well understood that until about age 14, a kid's head is much larger than an adult's compared with his body, yet the neck is weaker, which means the head bounces around more in response to collisions. Researchers at Virginia Tech found that seven-year-old football players experienced head blows comparable in force to the impacts suffered by college players.
To make matters worse, the nerve fibers in children's brains are not yet coated with the protective sheathing known as myelin. As a result, "it's easier to tear apart neurons and their connections in children at lower impact," says Dr. Robert Cantu, the author of Concussions and Our Kids and a leading researcher of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain-wasting disease that has been diagnosed in dozens of deceased football players. The threat to emerging neural connections is particularly problematic at Brogan's age. "If you injure your brain during that time," Cantu says, "there is a high likelihood that you will not reach your maximal genetic endowment intellectually, and you'll perhaps not have the same personality with regard to depression, anxiety, and panic attacks."
Brogan's doctors were unsure about the cause of his temporary paralysis, but they agreed that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Still, after two days in the hospital, they determined him well enough to go home. They gave Mike and Shannon a strict rehab protocol that called for avoiding anything that might stimulate brain activity: bright lights, computer screens, video games, even reading. The doctors also cautioned them that irritability and depression are common after a concussion. The Callaghans set up beds for Brogan and themselves in the basement. Shannon went to the local Target to stock up on board games and drawing supplies.
A week later the Callaghans returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit. When the doctor said that Brogan would have to sit out the rest of football season, Callaghan found himself unexpectedly relieved. "I remember being thankful that the doctor told him so I wouldn't have to," Callaghan says. "I was sort of off the hook."
Missing a single season was one thing. But the idea that Brogan might never play again — clearly what Shannon wanted — was nearly impossible for Callaghan to contemplate. For one thing, Brogan loved the game and had the makings of a real standout. What's more, the sport had been central to Callaghan's life for as long as he could remember. He started as a fifth grader in the Little Grizzly league; his coach from those days remained one of his closest confidants. Among his closest friends were teammates from Hellgate High or Montana State. During Callaghan's junior year, in 1984, the MSU Bobcats won the NCAA Division I-AA national championship — a feat Montana football fans still talk about.
Of course, football ends hard: You wake up one day and it's over. Nobody plays tackle ball in middle age. But Callaghan took up coaching, even though he was just a few years out of college with no kids of his own. He started with his nephew's team of fifth and sixth graders. Soon, a few of his old football buddies, including Eric Dawald, came to help. They loved having a reason to hang out after work, teaching the fundamentals, and feeling that old excitement on game days. When one of the group had a son, the others promised to keep coaching as long as the kid played, a pact that soon extended to every son any of them might ever have. And they built something, three nights a week on snow-dusted fields. Their team was undefeated for 15 straight seasons. Boys they'd coached went on to play at local high schools, the University of Montana, Montana State, even the pros.
Callaghan mostly had given up on having children of his own when, at age 40, he met and married Shannon Brown. An interior architect and former competitive swimmer, Shannon had grown up in tiny Havre, Montana, with a pair of football-obsessed brothers. She loved the way Callaghan welcomed Griffin, her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage, onto his team. When Brogan was born, in 2003, Callaghan insisted that his buddies renew their vow to keep coaching.
Brogan started playing flag football in the fourth grade, in 2013. By that time, the relationship between football and brain trauma was well established. Two years earlier, a Missoula kid named Dylan Steigers, who'd started out in local youth leagues, went off to play at Eastern Oregon University and took a big hit in a scrimmage. He died the next day.
Shannon, meanwhile, had been getting warnings from her older brother, Scott Brown, a former high school running back and now an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Portland, Oregon. "I'd see these 40-year-olds coming in just maimed, having these big surgeries from playing football in high school, college, the pros," he says. Brown became convinced that letting a kid play tackle football was akin to child abuse. He implored his siblings to keep their kids off the field.
The youngest, Shannon's brother Howard, got the message; his son plays only flag football. But Shannon felt trapped — nobody could tell her husband what to think about football. All the CTE research, Callaghan argued, had been done on the brains of guys known to have problems. He had attended one of USA Football's Heads Up Football clinics, where he'd been schooled in the latest safe-tackling techniques. And he would never consider letting a concussed kid play before a complete recovery.
So in 2014, Brogan, now a fifth grader, joined Callaghan's team. He knew his dad's track record and dreamed of exceeding it with a Stanford scholarship and a career in the NFL — just like Jordie Tripp, a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks who played on Callaghan's team 10 years earlier.
Brogan, it turned out, had the makings of a natural quarterback, with a great arm and an instinct for reading the field and seeing weaknesses in the opposing team's defense. But as the 2015 season rolled around, a handful of Brogan's teammates did not return. "The moms and I talked," Shannon says, "and they were like, ‘I wouldn't let Brogan play.' "
Similar conversations were happening nationwide, in part due to the efforts of women like Kimberly Archie. Her son, Paul Bright Jr., grew up playing Pop Warner ball in Sparks, Nevada. He was living in Los Angeles, working as an assistant chef, when his behavior grew erratic. Then, on a September evening in 2014, Bright drove an unlicensed motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a car and was posthumously diagnosed with early-stage CTE. Archie began to speak out on radio and television. The American commitment to youth tackle football, she says, "is like letting our kids ride down the highway in the back of the truck at 80 miles per hour because we're afraid we'll make them weak if we stop."
Last September, Archie launched a class action lawsuit in conjunction with Jo Cornell, whose son played Pop Warner football and was found to have CTE after committing suicide. The lawsuit defines members of the plaintiff's class as anyone who has ever played, or had a child play, youth tackle football, and suffered a head injury since 1997. It alleges negligence and fraud by Pop Warner, USA Football, and the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which develops voluntary safety standards for youth-football helmets. The complaint does not specify damages, but the number could amount to billions of dollars.
This isn't the first lawsuit Pop Warner has faced: The league has already settled two others. Pop Warner now requires that each practice session runs no longer than two hours a day and that no more than 25 percent of practice time is devoted to full-speed contact, or scrimmaging. "There's risk in anything kids do, and football's getting a really bad rap," says Pop Warner executive director Jon Butler.
These lawsuits, of course, are the stuff of nightmares for the NFL, which reached its own billion-dollar settlement with 20,000 former players last year. "It's the best game that's ever been invented, and we've got to make sure that moms get the message — because that's who's afraid of our game right now," Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians said recently. "It's not dads. It's moms."
Predictably, the NFL has stepped up its outreach to mothers. It sponsors the Facebook page Touchdown Moms, where NFL employees post heartwarming anecdotes about the mothers of youth players. USA Football sponsors a Team Mom of the Year Award. And then there are those free mom's clinics. Nearly every NFL franchise has hosted at least one such clinic, generally treating mothers to on-field drills and a concussion-awareness presentation.
Archie, who was already working as a sports-safety consultant, attended one of these clinics in Ohio in 2014. This was a month before her son's accident, and even then she was not impressed. "It's condescending to think you can just trick moms," she says.
Three weeks after his injury, Brogan was cleared to go back to school, but he could last only an hour or so a day. He sometimes flew into sudden, inexplicable rages and Shannon mostly stopped working to care for him. Callaghan spent his days at the office and continued to coach the Panthers in the evening. He coached out of a sense of obligation, both to his fellow coaches and to players. But now it felt different: He watched every tackle with anxiety, waiting for the child to get up and walk it off.
Both Shannon's brothers, meanwhile, were relentless. Howard sent his sister one news article after another about kids like Evan Murray, a 17-year-old New Jersey quarterback, Ben Hamm, a 16-year-old linebacker from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and 17-year-old Kenny Bui, from the Seattle suburbs, all of whom died within a month of one another early that fall. All told, more than a dozen kids died playing football that season, and Shannon's brothers made sure she knew about each one.
One night she tried to share these stories with her husband.
"We are not talking about this," he said.
It wasn't until seven weeks after his injury that Brogan was able to form new memories. He started neurological rehab therapy and scored terribly on cognitive tests that included closing his eyes and touching his nose. Math worksheets that would have taken five minutes before the injury now took an hour and left Brogan exhausted. Spinning on a stationary bicycle gave him a headache.
In February, Callaghan and Brogan sat on the couch to watch the Super Bowl. Shannon overheard Brogan begin a sentence with the phrase, "When I play in the NFL . . ."
"That's not going to happen," Shannon said.
Later she heard her husband tell Brogan, "But when you play in high school . . ."
"It's not going to happen," she said.
"We don't have to decide this now," Callaghan replied.
Later still, Brogan asked his mom, "Why won't you let me play?"
"Because God gave you that big brain so you can do something amazing in this world."
"He also made me a good football player," Brogan said.
"But that can't be your future."
Callaghan turned to Shannon. "But what about his dream?"
Shannon thought, "Whose dream is it?"
The last football game Mike Callaghan ever played was against Washington State in 1985, the less memorable season after that epic championship year. The Bobcats were struggling and in the first quarter, he suffered a concussion after being hit by a running back. The team's trainer ordered him out of the game, but Callaghan returned to the field anyway, determined to play every minute of his last college game. At that point somebody grabbed his helmet, locked it in an equipment bin, and sent him to the showers, where he wept uncontrollably. "That's how football ended for me," Callaghan says. "I didn't go out in a blaze of glory. Some guy ran me over. We lost."
As Brogan recovered, Callaghan couldn't help but think of all the concussions he'd suffered in his football career. By his senior year of college, he had experienced so many that he sometimes lost the right side of his visual field during games and had agonizing headaches, to the degree that the team's trainer ordered a brain scan. It came back clean, but the trainer asked Callaghan why he still played. He knew he wasn't NFL material, so what was the point? Why take the risk?
He was now asking similar questions about Brogan — but Mike could not let go of football. He thought about all the things he wanted his son to experience: the friendships, the teamwork, the victories. "I love watching Brogan play the game," he told me. "I love it."
Despite their differences, Shannon understands. "It's like a death," she says. "Mike wants his kid to be a football star. And Brogan would be the star. He's a leader and damn good, and everyone looks up to him."
Callaghan struggled to imagine what his own life would be like without football. What would he do on weekday nights and Sunday mornings in the fall? When would he see his friends? Who would he be? "Every time I thought about it, my mind just went blank," he says.
In August, Callaghan got a call from officials at Missoula Youth Football: Did he plan to coach the 2016 season? After months of agonizing, almost entirely to himself, he'd finally made a decision. "Brogan's not going to play, and I'm not going to coach," he said.
Callaghan couldn't bear to think of it as a permanent decision, telling his son that it was only for the coming season. But Brogan was unconvinced and angry. "You know it's forever," he said. "Mom's never going to let me play again."
Callaghan called Dawald and apologized for leaving the team. Two weeks later, he told his father.
Upon hearing the news James Callaghan said, "I didn't want to ask." Then he said, "Is that your decision or your wife's?"
"We're on the same page for this year," Callaghan said.
"Geez," James said. "That's going to be tough."
"Dad, it may be tough for us," Mike said. "But what I'm starting to figure out is there's a whole other world out there. There's a lot of people who don't consider playing, and they still get through the fall somehow."
Mike and brogan still watch football together — high school games on Friday, Montana State on Saturdays, and his former team on Sunday afternoons. "It's kind of hard, because I'm not playing," Brogan says. "I think about what I would do against the teams when I watch. But there isn't really anything that I can do." He's hurled himself into basketball and recently asked if he could take tennis lessons. Callaghan bought him his first rifle and is planning an elk hunt.
Brogan admits that he hasn't yet fully recovered. Schoolwork doesn't come as easily as it once did, but Shannon isn't worried. "Brogan missed 247 classes in the sixth grade," she says, "and he finished with three A-pluses and three As." Now, instead of going to Stanford to play football, he wants to go to Berkeley to study architecture — his mother's passion — on an academic scholarship.
Callaghan says he often thinks back to a day last November, weeks after Brogan's injury. League officials asked how he wanted to handle that unfinished game with the Chargers. "A big part of me was, ‘I don't want to handle it,' " Callaghan said. But the kids cared, and Callaghan felt it would have been selfish to refuse.
That meant bringing the teams back to the field behind the county fairgrounds. The Chargers and the Panthers lined up exactly where they'd been the moment Brogan was injured — but with Brogan now on the sidelines with his father. The referee set the game clock to where it had stopped and blew the whistle, and they played the remainder of the game. The Panthers lost, and for the first time in his life Callaghan didn't care.
All Brogan's teammates went home, except for two boys, Charlie and Cole. Charlie picked up a football and threw it to Brogan, who caught it and tossed it back. Charlie then passed it to Cole. Ten minutes went by, then 20, and still the kids continued to play. The parents lingered off to the side, making it clear there was no rush. "Brogan was kind of running around," Callaghan says. "Normal isn't the right word, but the normalcy of it, seeing him be a kid again. The game was over, we got beat, and it was good for me. Our kids were fine."
","tag_ids":[4748,4790],"publish_date":"2016-11-04T16:27:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","keywords":"football, concussions, head injury, traumatic brain injury, mike callaghan, kids, sports, ","description":"For Mike Callaghan and his son Brogan, football was everything. But when the 11-year-old QB was sidelined by a head injury, Callaghan faced an agonizing, all too common choice."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2fjP8dM","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Large Vertical Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer"},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Brogan at age 11","filename":"m1216_ft_football_c-2a36e793-c615-4d6d-9de2-7e5a00d1b9ad.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Shannon Callaghan","caption":"Mike Callaghan playing for Montana State.","filename":"m1216_ft_football_b-3e109603-4f13-4726-95d4-c1d85678c14f.jpg"},"photo_3":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Jake Chessum","caption":"Brogan and his mom, Shannon, catching up after school.","filename":"m1216_ft_football_e-7cc09309-f388-4372-97a7-22850b2c4a69.jpg"},"photo_4":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Jake Chessum","caption":"Brogan is the third generation of Callaghans to play tackle football.","filename":"m1216_ft_football_d-f875828b-a9a4-49cd-9929-4c820559a170.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photographs by Jake Chessum","filename":"m1216_ft_football_a-f10cee90-4f15-4522-ae04-2bea3fb9aea4.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/health-fitness/articles/what-to-do-if-your-kid-gets-a-concussion-during-the-game-w443772","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: What To Do If Your Kid Gets a Concussion During a Game","contentId":443772,"contentHeadline":"What To Do If Your Kid Gets a Concussion During a Game"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"For Mike Callaghan and his son Brogan, football was everything. But when the 11-year-old QB was sidelined by a head injury, Callaghan faced an agonizing, all too common choice.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":448002,"old_id":null,"title":"Is Bill Clinton Our New Model Husband?","short_title":"Is Bill Clinton Our New Model Husband?","slug":"/features/articles/is-bill-clinton-our-new-model-husband-w448002","body":"Win or Lose on Tuesday, Hillary’s husband has taken a supporting role in his marriage. Should You? What all American husbands can learn from one of the worst husbands ever.
Hi, guys. Can we talk? No? Tired of talking? I get that. You’ve probably heard more than enough about how you’re doing as a husband — how well you’re balancing earning money, contributing at home, and not acting like an entitled jerk.
So let me start with a story instead.
One recent Sunday night, while in our compact hybrid — which my husband calls our vagina car — driving to a friend’s for dinner, I reminded Dan (said husband) that I was leaving on a work trip the next day and that he’d need to attend back-to-school night by himself. This was, I knew, horrendous news, and sure enough, he stopped the car, turned toward me, and his face became a 3-D GIF, looping through paroxysms of pain and nausea. His You’re-fucking-kidding-right? face.
I know that face well — it’s the man-face of our times. Now, Dan will surf triple overhead waves and dangle off cliffs, but he’s crippled by certain domestic obligations. Among them: sitting in a classroom, being treated like a sixth grader. He’ll snap and yell or decide his life is worthless, then tumble into his default mantra: You suck you suck you suck.
I feel for you guys, really I do. The American Husband is tiptoeing through unmapped, land-mine–filled territory. More is being asked of you, and you’re doing it, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes awkwardly. And of course sometimes you’re falling behind. Your status has declined a bit lately — like, say, that of a certain former president who may soon be serving tea to the wife of the Uruguayan president — and still you’re getting feedback (so much feedback!), reminders that you’re still blithely exploiting male privilege. But if you veer too far into domesticity . . . then men, perhaps yourself included, will think you’re a compact hybrid–driving wuss. There’s no comfortable place, no known haven. Your wife thinks you’re an oaf, and your inner monologue says you’re whipped and you’re exhausted by — to borrow the phrase women are profoundly sick of — trying to do it all.
“Women started talking about ‘the second shift’ when they went into the workforce in large numbers and their role at home didn’t change much,” says Gayle Kaufman, a sociologist at Davidson College. “Men are now experiencing that, in reverse. They have this work role, and now they’re taking on a family role, and it adds a lot of stress.”
This has already been a rough decade for the American Husband. In 2012, Hanna Rosin declared in her pointedly titled The End of Men that men are the new ball and chain. The demise she outlined was a many-pronged fork stuck in the American male ass. One tine was economic: Men lost far more jobs than women did in the 2008 recession. Another was educational: Women now earn more college degrees than men do. A third tine was psychosocial: The world changed, and women embraced it. (Thanks in part to an endless supply of think pieces — verbal grenades tossed across the front lines of the gender wars — intended to shine a blowtorch on how screwed women have been for human history.)
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of the superheroic American Wife, who accomplishes more before 9 a.m. than her husband does all day. An expert multitasker, strutting around in her the future is female T-shirt, she seems to update her OS daily and is now capable of doing approximately 10 bazillion things at once. Meanwhile, you’re overwhelmed, possibly nostalgic (though your cargo shorts are not yet hipster-retro), sputtering along like a Commodore 64.
For years we’ve seen this in pop culture, the American Husband portrayed as a dope. He’s the guy who doesn’t know how to turn on the washing machine or who needs his six-year-old to tell him how to pack her school lunch. The caricature has persisted and now seems not just ungenerous but downright cruel.
The change is disorienting, as until quite recently, husband was the far better gig. Master of the House! He had all the money, all the power; he threw a baseball around with his son in the driveway because he wanted to, not because he was “on duty.” The couple’s lives revolved around him. But that old model has given way to what’s known as the companionate marriage, in which men and women marry their equals, for love.
Now, as Kate Jennings writes, “When I think about the dynamics of our marriage, sumo wrestling comes to mind.”
Great, you want a smart, strong wife. You’re all for equality, philosophically. You maybe even have daughters, and you’ll breathe hellfire on anybody who tries to keep them down. Still, your wife’s rise makes it feel like you fell. You don’t get any top-dog perks. No one gives you sympathy, let alone a scotch, as a reward for a long, hard workday. Instead you’re handed a toddler. Or a text: “Hey babe, running late. What’s for dinner?” Your sex appeal is based on . . . what? Choreplay? A 2016 study on housework and intimacy defined a truly oxymoronic-sounding new eroticism of fairness. Couples who share domestic duties equitably have more sex. And it’s not just quantity: Women report more sexual satisfaction in egalitarian relationships than in so-called conventional ones. Exhibit A: Porn for Women. It’s filled with photos of shirtless men vacuuming and changing toilet paper rolls, and it has sold a half-million copies.
Swiffer, anyone?
Marriage is exhausting, which you doubtlessly know, but the particular kind of exhaustion we’re facing right now can be chalked up, at least in part, to this idea of fairness and the endless accounting toward it: Who’s up, who’s down, who emptied the dishwasher, who moved to what city for whose job, who interrupted whose sister six times at Thanksgiving, who mansplained, who manspread. Some infractions are obvious, others not. Take Matt Lauer. He’s an ass? Yes, he’s an ass. That toxic male culture is the fog you grew up in, and you’re trying to see your way through it, but it’s still easy to get lost in the miasma.
Which brings us to Bill Clinton, the man to lead us out of the marital murk.
I know, I know: counterintuitive choice. In his autobiography, My Life, he writes that “nothing in my background indicated I knew what a stable marriage was all about.” His father married four times (and died at 28). His mother married five times. Bill’s stepfather abused Bill’s mother, and Bill still loved him. Then, of course, there was the infidelity. So much infidelity. So much lying. A nation forced to picture certain acts that are impossible to unsee. This was a horrendous husband performance. On top of that, Hillary had to stand by his side, humiliating herself in that special way only politicians’ wives seem to endure.
But now this famous marriage fuckup could well become America’s First Husband. By all rights this should be a disaster. Our First Gentleman is a megalomaniacal, power-tripping dirty old man. But did you see that speech he gave at the convention? He looked wizened, sure, a tad too vegan, and he did some rambling, but he nailed it.
He did the single thing that working American women — which is to say, pretty much all American women, since they make up 47 percent of the workforce — have been wanting their husbands to do for years: He told the world in painstaking, occasionally boring detail that his wife is slaying her career and that he’s 100 percent behind her promotion to the most powerful position in the land — because she’s earned it. She’s the best person for the job. No discussion of gender required. The next day the headlines came out saying Bill, while delivering his convention speech, looked fetching in his navy pantsuit — payback for the decades of brutal fashion policing perpetrated on Hillary. But the teasing was fine. Fine. Bill returned to the stage the following night and looked not just unperturbed but thrilled by the entire experience. He marveled at his wife, the nation, the miracle of balloons. Never have you seen a husband happier to be attending his wife’s work events.
Bill has been reticent about the possibility of a title change. He doesn’t talk about being the first First Man, or Adam, as some like to call him. The closest Bill has come to admitting in public that he, along with Hillary, is a gender warrior poised to take American husbands into an unmapped future, was at a rally in Des Moines in late 2015.
“There has been a lot of talk about breaking the glass ceiling,” he said, warming up the audience for the headliner, his wife. “I want to break a ceiling. I am tired of the stranglehold that women have had on the job of presidential spouse.”
Femininity is a bitch: You’re frigid or you’re a slut. You don’t smile the right amount. Your body has the half-life of a cake in the rain. But masculinity is a bitch, too. “What we call masculinity is often a hedge against being revealed as a fraud,” writes Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University and author of Guyland and Manhood in America: A Cultural History, “an exaggerated set of activities that keep others from seeing through us, and a frenzied effort to keep at bay those fears within ourselves.” Masculinity, in other words, is a fundamentally defensive posture that you have to prove again and again.
Earning money, or rather, earning more of it than your wife, has been de rigueur. And this breadwinning component of masculinity is where a lot of men are now getting into trouble. If their wives outearn them (God forbid), men feel emasculated, and when men feel emasculated, you get Mike Tyson.
Researchers at Stanford University gave male subjects feedback suggesting they were feminine. And? Those subjects overcompensated with extreme displays of masculinity, expressing increased support for the Iraq War, more homophobia, and newfound desire to purchase SUVs. At the University of Connecticut, sociologist Christin Munsch also found that when men earn less money than their spouses, they overcompensate, too, in some less attractive ways, namely by cheating on their wives. “Their theory is: I’m already feeling emasculated, I’m not making a lot of money, I’m not going to clean the toilet, too,” Munsch told me. (Erotics of fairness be damned.) At the same time, women who outearn their husbands overcompensate as well — minimizing their accomplishments, deferring to their spouses, performing more housework. In short, they act extra feminine, says Munsch, “to maintain their own gender conformity, decrease interpersonal conflict, and shore up their husbands’ masculinity.” Oof.
The way out is forward. Retrenching helps no one, not even you guys. The state of feeling threatened is awful. So is feeling desperate to make more money. More to the point, a husband uncomfortable with his wife’s achievements comes across as pathetic. Sad to revisit it now, but in Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg wrote that people often asked about her husband, himself a tech CEO, who died at age 47: “How is Dave? Is he okay with, you know, all your [whispering] success?”
No man wants such whispers. Besides, the pity is misplaced, at least for younger men. Primary financial responsibility is a burden — that’s just a fact. The pressure takes its toll. Among millennials, men who make significantly more money than their wives are worse off physically and psychologically, while women who make more are happier. Still, the tradition of valuing men’s careers over women’s persists. A study of 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates found that women reached their professional goals less frequently than men do. The reason? Even among this powerhouse crowd, husbands’ jobs took precedence over their wives’.
Note: This doesn’t mean the husbands won. This means their wives are pissed.
The past few years have been disorienting for men and women, husbands and wives: up, down, action, reaction, action, reaction, the seesawing oscillations growing faster and more violent. She’s a bitch; he’s a wuss. Women are put out; men are stuck. Everybody’s rebounding; everybody’s trapped. Some claim this is intrinsic to marriage, that marriage is all about power dynamics, who’s got the upper hand. That it’s basically a competition for whose needs get met. As Michael Vincent Miller writes in Intimate Terrorism, “Marriage consists of two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one.”
But that’s an outdated story, a theory that might have represented the best thinking of its day but which time has proved wrong. That zero-sum game serves no one well now. Winning isn’t possible in the battle of the sexes. The whole match is doomed. The only available victory is to change the terms of the game. And now weirdly, almost miraculously, we have just the guy to do it, a man to guide husbands out of the wilderness — a man so secure in his masculinity that he’s ready and eager to quit his job at the foundation he built, no less, to support his commander-in-chief wife.
Gentlemen, your new hero: Bill Clinton.
I look forward to the inaugural pantsuits.
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Neeson carries this mug everywhere: movie sets, red-carpet premieres, New York Rangers games, even the occasional interview. "It's a specific kind of English black tea," he says when I ask what's inside. "Decaf. It's the only thing I drink." He's not kidding: When the waitress comes over to take his order, Neeson reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Ziploc full of tea bags, which he unzips and hands to her. "Could you make me a fresh one of these, please?" Then he hooks a finger into the mug, fishes out the old tea bag, and drops it in his water glass with a plunk. "Thanks, love."
Neeson folds himself into the leather booth as comfortably as is possible for a 6-foot-4 Irishman with shoulders like an armoire. He's feeling a little out of sorts today: He has just finished shooting two movies back-to-back — one in Atlanta, the other in London — and he is in New York for the first time in five and a half months. "It's nice to be home," he says. "But I'm feeling a bit like a three-legged stool." (Which, technically, would be the most stable stool, but you get his drift.) He brings up one of the movies he's here to promote — Silence, a historical epic directed by Martin Scorsese — and asks me how long it's currently running. I tell him the version I saw was just over two and a half hours. Neeson shrugs. "For Martin, I guess that's quite short."
Silence is a passion project of Scorsese's, one he's been trying to make for more than 25 years. It's based on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo about Jesuit missionaries — Neeson plays one named Ferreira — in 1640s Japan, where Christians are being systematically persecuted by the Buddhist dictatorship. The film has been through multiple writers and actors, but Scorsese stuck with it, and it's finally hitting theaters this month.
Neeson understands the value of playing the long game. It's a little hard to remember now that he's entrenched on the A-list, but for most of his career he was a solid leading man, though rarely much more. He was already 41, with 17 years' worth of film roles behind him, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Schindler's List, a role he'd reportedly beaten out Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford to get — but even that failed to give him Ford's or Costner's movie-star career. Neeson spent the next two decades turning in great performances in as many hits as misses (Batman Begins on the one hand, The Haunting on the other), until his late-period pivot toward ass-kicking made him one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. "Liam's ambition wasn't to do all the classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company," his old friend Richard Graham once said. "He wanted big parts in big movies." Now, in the fifth decade of his career, he has his pick of them.
Neeson keeps his coat on for our entire time together, either as a sort of armor or in case he decides to make a quick getaway. He's agreed to talk for 90 minutes, which I tell him isn't long for an in-depth cover story. "Well it's about 88 minutes more than I want to be here," Neeson says. "So."
That this rejoinder — delivered in his peaty growl — does not incite an immediate pants-shitting is due mostly to the fact that, intimidating though he may be, there's an obvious gentleness to Neeson, a vulnerability and tenderness that's plain on his handsome, timeworn face. Before he went around punching Albanians for a living, Neeson was usually cast in more introspective roles — professors, sculptors, and other sensitive types — wounded romantics who, like him, tended toward brooding and self-doubt. Women, naturally, went crazy for him: the lumberjack's body with the poet's heart. "It's not about looks, although he's a terrific-looking guy," his late wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, once said. "It comes from somewhere deeper than that. You feel that he's been through a history."
These days everyone knows that he has. Neeson is a widower, having lost Richardson seven years ago, following a skiing accident. Since then he has raised their two sons alone. Now the younger son is away at college and Neeson is home by himself. He still has his property in upstate New York, a big 1890s farmhouse he bought before he and Richardson were married. "He likes being there on his own, with his pool and his gym," Graham says. "He's always been very happy with his own company.
In many ways Neeson was born to play a priest. Tall, austere; slightly stooped yet unflaggingly upright; those searching eyes, that troubled soul. He's done it half a dozen times already: in 1985's Lamb (Brother Michael); 2005's Breakfast on Pluto (Father Liam); 2002's Gangs of New York (Priest Vallon, who wasn't an actual priest but wore the collar and wielded a crucifix in battle); even an episode of The Simpsons, on which his Father Sean taught Bart the way of the Lord.
Neeson was born William John but called Liam (short for William) after the local priest. He grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, the only son of Barney and Kitty Neeson, a school custodian and a school cook. His mother walked two miles to work each way and brought leftovers home to their council house; his father, according to Neeson's sister, "never said five words when two words would do."
Neeson learned the Mass in Latin as an altar boy: In nomine Patris, Dominus vobiscum, the whole deal. Church is where he first felt the magic of performance, the ceremony and theatricality of it — the robes, the candles, the liturgy; costumes, lighting, a script. His parish priest, Father Darragh, taught him to box when he was nine; a scrappy jabber with a strong left, Neeson eventually became the Ulster Province boys champion in three different weight divisions. But secretly he was afraid of getting hurt and, moreover, of hurting someone else. So when a blow to the head during a fight left him concussed, the 16-year-old hung up his gloves — but not before winning the fight.
It wasn't easy being Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and '60s. "You grew up cautious, let's put it that way," he says. "Our town was essentially Protestant, but there were a few Catholics on our street. The Protestants all had marches and bands and stuff. I didn't quite understand what it was about — 'Remember 1690? When Catholic King James was defeated by Protestant William of Orange?' Who gives a fuck?" As he got older, the situation got grimmer. "The Troubles started in '69 and then really kicked in from '70 to '71," he says. "Drive-by shootings, bombs. I was at university for one abortive year, and we were so fucking naive. You'd be in a bar, drinking a glass of cider, and suddenly soldiers would come in and say, 'Everybody out — there's a bomb scare.' We'd order more drinks to take across the street, then the soldiers would go off and we'd filter back into the bar. Fucking stupid."
Neeson reconnected with his Catholic roots in 1985 when he filmed a movie called The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. The three of them played Catholic missionaries in 18th-century South America. They had a priest with them on set in the jungle, and every Sunday he'd "say a simple little Mass, break a piece of bread, and read the Gospel for the week," Neeson says. "We'd discuss the passage and what it meant in today's world. It was very intimate and very cathartic in a lot of ways." A devilish grin: "Then you'd go home, have a few glasses of Guinness, and get laid. The delights of the flesh."
Neeson's part in The Mission was small but instrumental to his career. De Niro, whom he befriended, introduced him to an American casting director. When she needed an IRA operative for an episode of Miami Vice, she thought of Neeson. That got him a work visa and a foothold in the States.
He's still grateful. "A lovely, lovely man," Neeson says of De Niro. "He's a man of few words — I like that. He's the sort of guy who says, 'I'll call you Thursday at 3 o'clock' — and if he can't call, he'll call you Wednesday to say he can't. When he makes a commitment, he sticks to it. That's rare these days."
It was Neeson's longtime interest in the Jesuits that prompted him to take the role of Father Ferreira in Silence. We first meet Ferreira in the film's opening scene: He's dirty, bearded, his raiments caked in mud — a thoroughly broken man. He's forced to watch as Japanese Christians are crucified and tortured.
Neeson was eager for the chance to reunite with Scorsese, after the very brief experience working with him on Gangs of New York. "Martin demands real focus," Neeson says admiringly. "If there was a grip working a hundred meters away and Martin heard a piece of scaffolding fall — which doesn't even make a noise! — he would stop, turn to the first AD, and say, 'I've asked for silence. Why have you not got it?' Terrific."
(Unlike just about anyone with even a tenuous connection to the legendary director, Neeson calls Scorsese by his full given name. "I just feel I haven't earned the right to call him Marty." he says. "Everybody's always like, 'Marty this, Marty that.' You don't know him. I don't know him.")
Scorsese says that Neeson was one of the key elements to finally getting Silence made. "I needed someone with real gravity to play Ferreira," he says. "You have to feel the character's pain."
Now Neeson doesn't consider himself much of a Catholic. "I admire people with true faith," he says. "Like my mother, who's 90 and gets annoyed if she can't walk to Mass Sunday morning. 'Mom, you're 90! It's OK! God will forgive you.' " These days he isn't even sure if he believes in a God.
I ask if there was a specific incident that precipitated his doubt, and his face darkens. "So this is probably leading toward the death of my wife?"
Neeson is understandably wary on the subject of Richardson. It must be gut-wrenching to have to revisit the worst moment of your life again and again, every time an interviewer needs a new quote. But this was just an open-ended question, I insist. It wasn't leading toward anything.
"OK," he says, sounding unconvinced. "It wasn't." Anyway, as far as his waning faith goes: "I think it was gradual."
When he's in town and the weather is good, Neeson loves to walk around Central Park. "Power walk," he says. "Get a good sweat going." He even has a walking buddy — "a real-estate lady" he met on his walks. "You see the same people, you nod, you say hello," Neeson explains. "Six months later, you're saying, 'How's your kid?' It's nice," he says. "We text each other: You free tomorrow? The usual spot? We do the whole loop — usually six miles, sometimes eight. Fifteen minutes a mile. It's good."
Three years ago, Central Park was the unlikely battleground for one of the most heated fights of Neeson's public life. The topic? Horses. During his 2013 election campaign, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to enact a ban on horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. (The measure was billed as an animal-rights issue, though questions have been raised about the role political donors and real-estate interests played in the proposed ban, and Mayor de Blasio's actions were later investigated.) The horse ban was supported by famous animal advocates like Miley Cyrus and Alec Baldwin. Neeson, who grew up caring for horses on his aunt's farm in County Armagh, waded in to defend the drivers.
"I'm in the park every day," he explains. "I see these guys; I know these guys. There were so many celebrities supporting [the ban], I was like, 'These guys need a celebrity or two.' "
"He really put himself in the line of fire," says Stephen Malone, a second-generation carriage driver and spokesman for the horse-and-carriage industry. "It was a complete game-changer. He hosted a stable visit for the city council on a Sunday afternoon, and if he wasn't there, we might have gotten one or two [members]. We ended up with about 20. They got to take their selfies with Liam Neeson, but they also got to meet the children of the drivers and to see how the stable hands care for the horses. It completely swayed public opinion. That was the moment we knew we were gonna be OK."
Colm McKeever, an Irish-born carriage driver and longtime friend of Neeson's, says, "There's a framed picture of him in every stable. It's the Pope and then Liam Neeson." McKeever says Neeson's support of the drivers wasn't due to their friendship: "We've been fast friends for a number of years, but that has nothing to do with Liam's convictions. He stands up for what he believes in. It's as simple as that."
The proposal was eventually defeated, and now Neeson is a hero to the 300-odd drivers, who often stop him to say thanks. "It's almost like he's part of the tour," jokes McKeever. " 'There's the carousel — and that's Liam Neeson.' " Malone adds: "Liam Neeson is the biggest Hollywood star going right now, and he walks through Central Park and stops to talk to carriage guys. Only a true gentleman would do that."
It's a working-man's solidarity that's apparently characteristically Neeson. "If you speak to film crews, they all love him," says Richard Graham. "He's got friends from crews he still corresponds with — and I'm not talking about higher-ups, just ordinary blokes. It sounds like I'm blowing smoke up his ass, but he truly is an honorable guy."
Ellen Freund was the prop master on two Neeson films, Leap of Faith and Nell — the latter when Neeson and Richardson were still dating. "They had a lovely house with a chef," Freund recalls, "and every weekend they would invite six members of the crew and cook this fantastic dinner, with beautiful wines. It was just the most lovely treat. It wasn't just the upper echelons, either — a grip or an electrician, it didn't matter."
It was Freund who introduced Neeson to his favorite outdoor pastime: fly-fishing. They were shooting Nell on a lake and needed something for Neeson to do in his downtime; Freund had just come off A River Runs Through It, so she showed Neeson how to cast. He was hooked. "He just loved it," she says. "Once we gave him the rod and set him up out there, he wouldn't come off the lake. Every time you looked for him, he was down there practicing."
"When he said he'd discovered fly-fishing," says Graham, "my first thought was, 'My God, that is the perfect hobby for you.' It's peaceful. It's in nature. There's a lot of skill. And the time goes by like you wouldn't believe. So I think that's kind of therapeutic. You've got nothing in your mind, other than trying to catch the fish."
Neeson cites the kind of pastoral tranquility that will be familiar to anyone who's heard an angler wax lyrical about the sport. "Eight times out of 10, I won't catch anything," he says. "The thrill for me is being on a river with my pouch and rod, and I know there's a fish over there, or at least I think there is, so I'll do five or six casts. That fly's not working, take it off, put on another one, try again. Before you know it, three hours will have gone past." It's the opposite of relaxing. "You're trying to outwit a fish that's been around since the Triassic with a piece of yarn or your own hair, he says. "You're working all the time — but it's a different kind of work."
Neeson and Graham have fished together all over the world: Patagonia, arctic Quebec, the Tomhannock Reservoir in upstate New York. "New Zealand, that's the mecca," Neeson says. "Big trout. Stunning. Some of these rivers, we'd take little choppers in, and you're six feet over the rocks and you jump out. You're thirsty, so you put your head in the river and drink, and it's pure." Neeson seems energized by the memory. "Fuck. I haven't done a big trip in a long time," he says. "I'm thinking of going to Brazil, up the Amazon. Heard they have big peacock bass. That'd be a trip." He would also like to get back down to the Bahamas for bonefish. "The phantom of the shallows," he says. "Silvery color. They turn a certain way and disappear. Hence 'phantoms.' But you need a guide, that's the only trouble." He'd rather go alone? "Yeah," he says.
(Says Graham: "We can be fishing side by side, 50 feet apart, and not say a word to each other for hours.")
I ask Neeson if he's learned anything from fly-fishing that he's been able to apply to his career or to the rest of his life. "Patience, I think," he says. "Just taking your time. I remember in the early days, if I was casting and I missed, I'd be very quick to cast again. But trout stay where they are — they like the food to come to them. The fish isn't going anywhere. Take your time."
Neeson's other new movie is A Monster Calls, a live-action tearjerker in which a CGI tree (the titular Monster) visits a boy whose mother is dying. Neeson plays the tree, a yew — "the most important of all the healing trees." He's ancient and massive, twice the size of a house, with gnarled roots, spiky branches, and a voice like a bottomless coal pit. The first time he shows up, he kicks down the boy's house. It's kind of terrifying. Still, you know the Monster is good, because he's played by Liam Neeson.
It's not surprising that Neeson makes a great tree, given that a noted Broadway critic once literally compared him to a sequoia. (He actually called him a "towering sequoia of sex." It was a compliment.) He spent two weeks filming motion-capture in a special room with cameras surrounding him on every side. "What do they call it? Not the space. The volume," he says with a little laugh. "Computer nerds." The end product looks something like a woodsy Transformer — which, weirdly, makes sense, given that Transformers director Michael Bay has said that Neeson's regal bearing was his inspiration for Optimus Prime. ("Really?" says Neeson. "That's news to me.")
A Monster Calls is structured on a series of visits from the Monster, in which he tells fairy tales to the boy to help him work through his grief. The stories are designed to divine meaning from a meaningless world — a world where, as the Monster says at one point, "Farmers' daughters die for no reason." It's a movie, in other words, about death, loss, mourning, and the ways we help one another cope. And this, I warn Neeson, is when I'm leading toward the death of his wife.
Neeson met Richardson when he was a 40-year-old bachelor who'd already dated Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, and Brooke Shields. In 1993 Richardson and Neeson co-starred in a play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and then, before long, were a couple. Two years later they were married in the garden of their farmhouse, and the boys soon followed. Then, in 2009, Richardson was skiing near Montreal when she fell and hit her head. Everything seemed fine at first: "Oh, darling — I've taken a tumble in the snow" is what she told Neeson on the phone that night. But unbeknownst to the doctors, her brain was slowly bleeding. She fell into a coma and died the next day.
Since Richardson's passing, Neeson's grief has colored several of his onscreen characters, a number of which are dealing with some kind of tragic familial backstory. The similarity in A Monster Calls is awful and impossible to ignore: a beautiful young mother struck down before her time. And Neeson's own sons were just 13 and 12 when Richardson died, about the same age as the boy in the movie. Did he think about that at all when preparing for the film?
"Yeah, I don't want to go into that," Neeson says politely but firmly. "It's not fair to them. I'd rather not talk about my boys, other than that they're doing well, college, all that stuff."
By all appearances, the boys are thriving. Micheál, now 21, is an aspiring actor who appeared with Neeson in an LG Super Bowl commercial last year. And Daniel, 20, is a sophomore theater and digital-media production major. "There's a saying," says Neeson. " 'You're only as happy as your unhappiest child.' And the kids are happier than I — so that's a blessing."
We've been talking for a while when Neeson realizes his tea has gone cold. He flags down the waitress. "Sorry, love," he says. "Could you ask the kitchen for some boiling water when you have a second?"
"Boiling-hot water," she says, nodding. "No problem."
Neeson stops her. "But not hot," he says. "If you could make it boil. Tell them it's for me," he adds. "Tell them I will come for them. I will find them. . . ."
Upon recognizing his famous Taken monologue, the waitress cracks ups. "Absolutely," she says, skipping off. After she's gone, I tease Neeson for shamelessly trotting out his shtick. He laughs: "Pathetic, isn't it?"
When Neeson made the first Taken movie in 2009, he had low expectations. " Straight to video is what I thought," he says. No one is more amused than he that eight years later — after The Grey (Taken with wolves), Non-Stop (Taken on a plane), Run All Night (Taken at night), and, of course, Taken 2 and 3 — he's still getting offered this kind of role. He's even reached the point of self-parody, turning in comically self-aware, Neeson-esque cameos in a commercial for the role-playing game Clash of Clans (as vengeful gamer AngryNeeson52) and on Inside Amy Schumer, as a scarily intense funeral-home director whose motto is "I don't bury cowards."
But in a way, Neeson is just fulfilling an opportunity he first had more than two decades ago, when he was being courted to become the new James Bond in the mid-'90s. "I was being considered," Neeson says. "I'm sure they were considering a bunch of other guys, too." He says he would have loved to be 007, but Richardson said she wouldn't marry him if he was. I ask why, and he smiles like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Women. Foreign countries. Halle Berry. It's understandable." Also, Schindler's List had just come out. "She was like, 'You're going to ruin your career,' " Neeson says. "But it's no big deal. It's nice to be inquired after."
Neeson sometimes feels a little embarrassed that he's Social Security–eligible and still pretend-fighting for a living. "Maybe another year," he says of his action-star shelf life. "The audiences let you know — you can sense them going, 'Oh, come on.' But by the way," he hastens to add, "I've never felt fitter in my life."
Neeson doesn't box anymore. ("I'll train — the bags and stuff. But I don't spar. There's always someone coming up to you like, 'Hey, you're that actor Lyle Nelson right?' They want a chance to hurt you a little. 'Guess who I beat up today? He's a pussy.' ") But he proudly points out that he does all his own movie fights. I read him a quote from Steven Seagal — "Look at Liam Neeson. He can't fight. He's a great dramatic actor, a great guy. . . . Is he a great fighter? A great warrior? No" — and Neeson seems amused. "I don't know how to answer that," he says, smiling. "Am I an action guy? Not really. But I do know how to fight. So fuck him."
One thing Neeson absolutely won't do anymore is ride a motorcycle — ever since a horrifying crash in 2000 nearly killed him. "I've read a couple of scripts where the character's on a motorbike, and I'm like, 'Is this important to the script?' 'Yeah, it is.' 'OK, I'm not in.' "
I tell him about a recent spill I took on a bike, and he turns serious. "You have to watch yourself," Neeson tells me. "Get it out of your system. Make a pact with your wife. And don't cheat on it."
Neeson has few vices left these days. He quit the Marlboro Lights years ago and gave up drinking a while back — first the Guinness, then the pinot noir — after he found himself partaking too much in the wake of Richardson's death. He tries to keep busy lest he wallow. "I need to work," he says. "I'm a working-class Irishman. I'm fucking lucky: A stranger gets in touch with my agent and says, 'Could you send Liam Neeson a script?' I'm still flattered by that. So I'll keep doing it till the knees give up. It beats hiding in a basement in eastern Aleppo."
(As Richardson once put it: "I think he probably, on some level — although he wouldn't say it — wakes up every morning thinking, 'Isn't it great I'm not driving a forklift?' ")
Now that he's back in New York, Neeson looks forward to lying low for a while. "Just recharge the batteries," he says. "I don't want to see the inside of an airplane." He'll take in some Broadway shows, catch up on all the programs on his Apple TV: Fargo, Ray Donovan, Breaking Bad. He's also got a big stack of books he wants to tackle — two Ian McEwan novels and a box of classics he recently received as a gift, which included War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
And then, of course, there are those walks in the park.
It all sounds nice, I say. But I'm not sure it's enough to fill up a day.
Neeson smiles. "You'd be surprised."
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Roughly 300 people — mostly men, from high-school jocks to potbellied dads — know just what they're here for: more muscle, more energy, more libido. "I want to get really vascular," says a guy in his thirties, referencing the pipelike veins coursing beneath the skin of pro bodybuilders. He has short brown hair, hairless arms, and a T-shirt that reads, I may look alone, but really I'm just that far ahead. An older, balding man next to him says he just wants to feel younger.
Working the line is a bouncy brunette pouring plastic shot glasses full of Windex-blue liquid. Most of the guys grab one and toss it back, no questions asked. "It's a preworkout," she says, "and it's $35 inside." By "preworkout" she means it's designed to give you a jolt of energy before the gym. Exactly how it does this isn't a question anyone seems to be asking. Inside the store, Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar, are pills and powders that claim to do everything from boost sex drive to increase muscle mass and dissolve fat.
Boca Nutrition's owners, PJ Braun and Aaron Singerman, are greeting customers like old friends, with bear hugs and handshakes. Both men are absurdly muscular. Singerman, 36, is 6-foot-2 with slicked-back brown hair. He has a goatee and narrow-rimmed glasses, and his bulky frame fills out his blue T-shirt like an overstuffed bag. Braun, 35, who has black hair gelled into short spikes, is shorter and bulkier. Stretch marks scar his arms.
In addition to Boca Nutrition, the pair owns the supplements manufacturer Blackstone Labs, which they started in 2012. Since then the company has hawked tens of millions of dollars' worth of products promising to make men stronger, bigger, last longer in the sack, and even gain a mental edge. For the most part, their over-the-counter powders do exactly what they claim to do, in part because they sometimes include compounds not approved or even banned by the FDA. It's a legally dubious but common practice — and an easy way to make a killing while giving people the results they want. (Braun calls this a mischaracterization: "We have always tried to produce nothing but cutting-edge and compliant products. As soon as we have any direction from the FDA on an issue it has not spoken on before, for better or worse, we respect its statement and adjust our products accordingly.") Blackstone has grown by 100 percent every year since opening shop five years ago. Its sales now top $20 million annually, and it's featured in Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing companies. And Braun and Singerman are far from done.
"I am not even fucking close to satisfied with Blackstone Labs," Braun boasted in a video posted to Facebook last year. "I want to be the biggest company in the world."
Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar is their newest venture, a retail store that serves up various protein-packed shakes and sells Blackstone's full line of supplements. The sleek space, with shelves full of oversize bottles and racks of workout gear, is like a Whole Foods for gym rats. They opened the first store seven months ago in West Boca. Today is the grand opening of their second location, and devotees have shown up for discounted supplements and to meet a handful of celebrity bodybuilders flown in for the occasion, including Kai Greene, the most famous weightlifter since Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But among this crowd, Braun and Singerman are the real stars. They pose for photos and hype their cars, a Corvette and a Ferrari, both black and parked prominently out front. One of the fanboys is a 24-year-old named Brett, who drove four hours to attend the event. "I couldn't help but show my support for PJ and Aaron," he says. A personal trainer from Palm Coast, Florida, Brett has used a wide variety of Blackstone products, including one called Ostapure, a supplement that contained steroid-like drugs called SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators). The unlicensed drugs were developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck as a potential treatment for muscle wasting in cancer patients. But it was the drugs' muscle-mass-building properties that made them a big hit among weightlifters like Brett. Blackstone recently stopped selling Ostapure after being sued by another supplements maker hoping to clean up the industry. "The strongest product of theirs," Brett says a bit wistfully.
Inside the store, Braun shows me one of his latest creations, muscle-building pills inside a black bottle labeled brutal 4ce in blocky letters that drip with blue icicles. "It'll make you a lot stronger and more aggressive in the gym," he says. "Let's say you're 35, 40 years old and your testosterone isn't as high as it used to be. This will keep your testosterone so high that you'll be like an 18-year-old!"
When I ask Braun how, he launches into a chemistry lecture. "Your body converts it into 4-andro [a testosterone booster], so it'll bulk you up," he says, noting that Brutal 4ce has the side effect of creating estrogen, which could give you what bodybuilders call "bitch tits." This can be countered, however, by taking an estrogen blocker. "Most of our customers are pretty knowledgeable," he says, "so they know they need to do that."
As the festivities wind down, I grab a $46.99 bottle of Cobra 6 Extreme, an amped-up version of their top-selling Cobra 6, a preworkout supplement formulated with various stimulants. At the checkout, a slim guy in his twenties, part smoothie barista, part pharmacist, looks at what I'm buying and asks me if I've tried it before. No, I say.
"So you don't know what you're getting yourself into?"
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"If you're not used to taking a lot of stimulants, you should start with the regular Cobra 6. You might not like the way this makes you feel."
In the U.S., dietary supplements are a $38-billion-a-year industry. Sixty-five percent of men in America take one, whether to lose weight, grow hair, gain muscle, or keep an erection long into the night. There's a wide range of products, and most veer toward opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side are the homeopathic cures and the herbal remedies like echinacea, products that may not do much of anything besides drain your bank account. On the opposite end are the products that work precisely because they rely on pharmaceutical ingredients, many not listed anywhere on the label. In 2014, for example, the FDA recalled several weight-loss supplements with names like Super Fat Burner because they contained the prescription drug sibutramine, as well as phenolphthalein, a banned laxative linked to genetic mutations — but not before a rash of hospitalizations.
It's the supplements laced with prescription drugs that are more troubling. They result in 23,000 emergency room visits every year, and more than 2,000 hospitalizations. The supplements are often sold under names like Lean FX and Stiff Nights, and the ingredients are a list of acronyms only a chemist could decipher: DMAA, 17b-hydroxy 2a, or 17b-dimethyl 5a-androstan 3-one azine.
"We're talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. "The more likely it helps your workout," Cohen says, "the more likely it's going to adversely affect your health."
The FDA oversees the industry, but it's woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don't bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there's effectively no punishment if they don't. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients. ("Blackstone continues to innovate by researching new products and new ingredients," says Braun. "If anything, we would welcome clearer guidance from the FDA so we don't have to discontinue any products.")
"It's the Wild West," says Dan Fabricant, who was the FDA's director of the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs from 2011 to 2014. "In weight loss, sexual enhancement, and bodybuilding categories, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Blackstone, according to its critics, has exploited this system better than most, and exactly how it does this is a case study in how to game a failing regulatory system. For one, Braun and Singerman aren't shy about marketing their legally ambiguous products: They often advertise the active ingredients right on the label and promote them with ads full of young women who could moonlight in beer commercials. They're also constantly active online. Blackstone has some 25,000 Instagram followers; Braun has over 100,000. His account is littered with shirtless selfies and videos of him driving his Ferrari or pimped-out Jeep. He's also the star of a weekly YouTube show with his wife, the former pro wrestler Celeste Bonin, titled Beauty & Braun, which covers the daily lives of the couple, from gym sessions to discussions about breast implants. Until recently he also hosted a daily question-and-answer session on Periscope called "Cardio Q&A," featuring Braun on a treadmill, chugging orange Pedialyte and answering a wide range of queries from Blackstone users. One time he doled out advice ("No matter how mature you think they are, it's not good to settle down with a 19-year-old girl"), but usually he just hyped his products. During one appearance, Braun announced the "dick pills" Blackstone was working on weren't coming along the way he wanted. "I've been working on that for a long time," he said. "But they will eventually come out."
Two days after the Boca Nutrition opening, I visit Braun and Singerman at Blackstone HQ, an unbranded, 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Boca Raton. The office walls are covered in photos and framed bodybuilding-magazine covers, several of which feature Braun in full flex. On Singerman's desk is a bronze statue of a seminude Adonis-like man holding a barbell. It's a first-place trophy from the Mr. Olympia contest, which Singerman got at auction. "You hate to see that, because it means the guy who sold it was struggling financially and was forced to sell it," Singerman says. "But I love it."
Braun and Singerman each have a long history in bodybuilding. Singerman, from New Orleans, started hitting the gym when he was 13 and kept working out, even through a cocaine and heroin habit he picked up after dropping out of high school. At 27 he witnessed a friend overdose and die, so he got clean and doubled down at the gym. In 2005, he got a job as a personal trainer and started writing thousands of posts on bodybuilding message boards and eventually became marketing director for Ironmag Labs, a supplements company owned by businessman Robert Dimaggio, who had become notorious for selling sketchy supplements. Singerman convinced Dimaggio to bring on Braun, whom he'd met at a bodybuilding competition, as the company's top sponsored athlete.
Braun, who grew up in Connecticut, had taken to the gym in order to try to impress his absentee father. "My father wouldn't be proud or say, 'Good job,' " says Braun. "He would just say, 'Oh, you know, there's always somebody better. You can do better.' " Braun went to the University of Connecticut but dropped out to become a personal trainer. Then he took up professional bodybuilding.
Blackstone's genesis was in 2012, when Braun helped Singerman sell 7,000 units of something called Super DMZ. The product contained two designer steroid-like ingredients, dymethazine and methylstenbolone, that few outside bodybuilding circles knew much about. Braun and Singerman, however, recognized that these prohormones, as they're called, were groundbreaking at helping gym rats get ripped. Their boss, Dimaggio, had helped create Super DMZ but turned it over to Braun and Singerman to hawk. "We were able to sell those 7,000 units in five weeks," Singerman explained in an online interview. "We gave Robert his money back and each made $75,000." But prohormones hadn't yet been banned, so the pair ordered more and continued selling under the name Blackstone Labs. In just 10 months they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and moved operations from a makeshift office in Braun's townhouse into their current warehouse. "We bought more of the Super DMZ, sold it, and created a second product, third product, fourth product, fifth product, etc.," Singerman says in the same video. By the time prohormones were finally banned, in 2014, Blackstone was up and running with a full line of supplements, from postworkout muscle builders to meal-replacement formulas. "We've been fortunate enough to be the hot company," says Braun.
In their office, Singerman points to a small photo of the two men leaning against brown shipping boxes piled up to their armpits. "That's all Super DMZ," Singerman says proudly. "This was our original shipment."
The reason Super DMZ and prohormones finally became illegal has something to do with Blackstone's supplier. The product was being manufactured by a New York company called Mira Health Products. In 2013, at least 29 people developed varying levels of liver disease after taking a vitamin called B-50 sold by the company. After investigating, the FDA discovered B-50 and many of Mira's other products included high levels of prohormones, which were not listed anywhere on the label. The FDA forced Mira to recall all those pills and officially banned prohormones, including the ones in Super DMZ — which Blackstone listed on the bottle. None of that stopped Blackstone from continuing to sell them. In fact, at nearly the same time, the company released a new product called Metha-Quad Extreme, which contained prohormones. It wasn't until September 2014 that Blackstone stopped selling prohormones altogether to abide by FDA regulations.
"We lost 30 percent of our total revenue," Singerman says. "But the following month we went back up, because the truth is that people always want the next best thing."
Back in their warehouse, Braun and Singerman lead me up a flight of stairs to an open space with a long brown table and black swivel chairs. Here they're formulating the "next best thing." Another muscle-bound man, this one with a pink Mohawk and a lip ring, is scribbling symbols and numbers on a whiteboard. "This is our chemist, Bryan," says Singerman. "We're doing some really cool stuff with Bryan."
Bryan Moskowitz joined Blackstone in early 2015. Before that, Braun and Singerman formulated all the company's supplements. Neither of them has any formal education, so they hired Moskowitz, who has a master's degree in organic biochemistry from Georgia Tech and calls himself the "Guerilla Chemist." Moskowitz counts among his role models Patrick Arnold, who's infamous for creating three hard-to-detect steroids, two of which were distributed by balco, the lab linked to disgraced athletes Jose Canseco and Marion Jones — and whose founder, Victor Conte, was sentenced to four months in prison. Moskowitz looks up to Arnold enough that he even posted an Instagram photo of his and Arnold's faces Photoshopped onto an image of Breaking Bad's Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in hazmat suits, having just finished cooking a batch of crystal meth.
Arnold is also credited with introducing the powerful stimulant DMAA to the supplements market. Eli Lilly created the drug in 1944 as a nasal decongestant but removed it from the market in 1983 because it caused headaches, tremors, and increased blood pressure. Arnold reintroduced it years later, in 2006, as a way for its users to get a jolt of energy before the gym. In one month alone, in 2013, the FDA received 70 reports of liver disease and one death caused by OxyElite Pro, a popular supplement with DMAA.
In the boardroom, Braun explains that Moskowitz helped design the company's latest product, Brutal 4ce. The steroid that powers it, DHEA, is banned or prescription-only in just about every country except the United States. When I ask Oliver Catlin, the president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute and the Banned Substances Control Group, why it's still legal, he simply says, "I don't know. Ask Orrin Hatch."
Orrin Hatch is the powerful seven-term senator from Utah who pushed through a 1994 law in Congress called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (dshea). The bill defines what a dietary supplement is: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or amino acid (basically, anything found in nature). And while it explicitly states that it can't be a drug, the law also prevents the government from prescreening and preapproving supplements. So supplements don't require FDA approval the way, say, a cancer drug might, even though they may have the same active ingredient. Utah is one of the major producers of supplements. In fact, it is the state's third-largest industry, earning $10 billion per year. Back when the law was written, the industry was mostly homeopathic products, but it has since boomed, and the law created cover for aggressive manufacturers willing to flaunt the regulations.
Also written into dshea are a series of loopholes that allow steroids sold prior to the law's passing to be grandfathered in, like the DHEA in Blackstone's Brutal 4ce — even though it'll get you banned by nearly every sporting league on the planet, including MLB, the NFL, and the NCAA.
"That's one of those things," says Singerman about sports testing. "When a high school athlete asks if it's OK to take [Blackstone's] Dust V2, I go, 'No, probably not.' "
Braun and Singerman are similarly unfazed about SARMs, the unapproved cancer drugs in Ostapure. "If you look at the actual literature," says Singerman, "it's all positive. I've used it plenty of times, and I like putting out products that I actually use."
When I ask them whether they're worried about the potential side effects of their products, Singerman is quick with a scripted answer. "We go through the available literature and studies," he says. But when I press him, his next response seems more honest.
"I am a libertarian," Singerman says. "I believe that it's the person's decision. As long as they're an adult."
But they have no way of knowing how different people might react. "One person could be fine, and another person could have a heart attack," says Dr. Armand Dorian, an ER physician in Los Angeles who often treats patients injured by dietary supplements. "It's rolling the dice."
Take Jesse Woods. In 2009, the 28-year-old went online and ordered a bottle of M-Drol pills from a Texas-based company called TFSupplements. Woods, who weighed 150 pounds, was looking to add muscle. "I'm a small-framed guy," he says, "so I was trying to bulk up." He did. In just four weeks, he'd packed on 20 pounds of muscle. "I got big for a minute," he says. "Then I got sick."
Five weeks into taking M-Drol, Woods left work early because his stomach was bothering him. When his wife came home, she noticed his eyes were yellow. "I'm taking you to the emergency room," she said. Doctors performed a battery of tests, ultimately determining that Woods was experiencing liver failure. What Woods didn't know is that M-Drol contained the steroid-like prohormone Superdrol.
Woods spent 32 days in the hospital. He threw up nearly every meal he ate, lost 30 pounds, and developed a pungent odor, a common side effect of liver disease. "I never felt old until after that," says Woods, who's now 35. "Now I feel sluggish. I just feel like I aged. My liver has scar tissue on it. Doctors can't say how long I'll live."
When he was released from the hospital, Woods sued both TFSupplements and its supplier, Competitive Edge Labs, settling for an undisclosed amount. But the lawsuit didn't stop companies from selling Superdrol.
Blackstone has yet to be sued by any of its customers, and the FDA has generally left the company alone. "We haven't really had problems with the FDA," says Braun. But that may be simply because the agency is backlogged. It's also far more effective to go after the companies supplying the illegal ingredients than the ones marketing the final product. It's the former that are dealing with the overseas suppliers that produce the untested or illegal drugs. Singerman admits to purchasing Chinese ingredients but says it's something that's taken care of by the plants that manufacture Blackstone's products. I ask him who they are.
"Well, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is one."
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is the best example of a duplicitous company thriving in a broken system. Its founder, Jared Wheat, has a history of hawking high-demand substances. In the early '90s, he ran a high school ecstasy ring in Alabama and served 32 months in prison for it. He started Hi-Tech in 1998, and by 2003 the FDA had already warned the company about its dietary supplements, some of which contained an unlicensed drug similar to the one used in Cialis. But that didn't stop Wheat. By 2005 he was selling supplements that contained the banned stimulant ephedra. In early 2006 government officials raided his offices and seized 200 cases of supplements valued at $3 million, and in 2008 Wheat pleaded guilty to selling adulterated supplements and committing mail and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison, but he continued to operate Hi-Tech from his cell.
When I ask Pieter Cohen how Hi-Tech continues to conduct business in such a manner, he says that allowing any company to regularly sell synthetic ingredients as supplements is due to a major failure on the part of the government. "They're not doing their job," he says.
For their part, Braun and Singerman maintain that everything in their supplements appears right on the label.
To test that claim, I sent the Cobra 6 Extreme I purchased at Boca Nutrition to Oliver Catlin's Banned Substances Control Group. When I received the test results, it turns out Braun is right: The product is now devoid of the banned DMBA, a stimulant very similar to DMAA, that powered it.
"So is it safe to take?" I ask.
"Not necessarily," says Catlin. The readings revealed a powerful mix of new stimulants. That could be due to a combination of the ingredients listed on the label — a formula that includes caffeine and theobromine (an alkaloid of the cacao plant that can be deadly in large doses). "Or it could be something else," he says. "We target drugs we are concerned about, like DMBA, when we screen products like these. But sometimes there are new, unknown compounds present that we can't see."
Soon after my visit to Blackstone Labs, and after four years of working together, Braun and Singerman are at war. Singerman leaves Blackstone to pursue other projects. "But he still owns half the company," Braun explains, insinuating that the split is amicable. But the tone of their relationship quickly changes. "When the companies first split, I hoped we'd be friends again," Braun says during one of his online Q&A sessions. "But he did too many things."
Braun has since divested himself of Boca Nutrition, and Singerman has gone on to start a supplements company called RedCon 1. He is also rebranding another, Prime Nutrition, with none other than Hi-Tech's Jared Wheat, who was released from prison in 2011. Braun has taken over day-to-day control of Blackstone, and despite the schism, the company is thriving. Blackstone has moved into a much larger, 14,000-square-foot space, and Braun has introduced several new products, including a long-awaited libido booster called Entice. But the most surprising of his new releases is Dust Extreme, a preworkout supplement with DMAA, the infamous, banned stimulant popularized by chemist Patrick Arnold. It's a curious decision to sell the illegal ingredient, but Braun justifies it in a long video on Facebook.
"I believe that people should be allowed to take what they want to take," he says. "Are you completely safe if you have health conditions? No. If your blood pressure is high, should you be taking a product like this? Probably not. But these are things you should look at yourself. I believe we should all have the choice to put what we want in our body. You can go and buy cigarettes at any fucking gas station and they're guaranteed to kill you. You will die. So how dare the FDA come in and take away ingredients from us that give us awesome workouts?"
","tag_ids":[4748,5611],"publish_date":"2017-01-31T20:16:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T14:05:21.179Z","updated_at":"2017-01-31T21:51:59.078Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","keywords":"supplements, dietary supplements, blackstone labs, boca nutrition & smoothie bar, bodybuilding, muscle supplements, muscle building, ","description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jzRkyi","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Magazine Photograph by Shana Novak","caption":"P.J. and Celeste Braun were featured on the May 2015 cover of 'Iron Man Magazine.'","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_c-9c57d3e1-802d-4480-a15c-67a5c8a98ac5.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Newswire / Aaron Singerman","caption":"Braun, left, and Singerman turned Blackstone Labs into a a powerhouse earning more than $20 million a year.","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_b-b074ced0-e2a7-47ab-a93b-9835ef973f0c.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photo Illustration by Emily Shur","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_a-7a018373-b943-436b-8215-40db3942a4af.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/the-truth-about-herbal-supplements-20140102","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: The Truth About Herbal Supplements","contentId":168069,"contentHeadline":"The Truth About Herbal Supplements"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/the-dawn-of-bodybuilding-20121118","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Huge","contentId":168456,"contentHeadline":"Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Bodybuilding"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":455184,"old_id":null,"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","short_title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","slug":"/features/articles/the-man-taking-down-big-sugar-w455184","body":"This past fall, Gary Taubes took his wife and two sons on a trip to a wildlife preserve in Sonoma County, California, the kind of place where guests learn firsthand about the species of the Serengeti. They slept in tents and spent the day among giraffes, zebras, antelope, and the like. One morning, Taubes and his boys awoke early. "It was 50 degrees out — freezing by our standards," he recalls. "I took the kids to breakfast, and" — his face takes on a pained expression — "how can I not give them hot chocolate?"
For most parents, indulging the kids with some cocoa would pose no dilemma. But Taubes, one of America's leading and most strident nutrition writers, is no ordinary father. His new book, The Case Against Sugar, seems destined to strike fear into the hearts of children everywhere. Taubes' argument is simple: Sugar is likely poison, and it's what is making our country fat. And not just fat but sick. So don't eat it. Ever.
A little much? Perhaps. But the kids did get the cocoa — on this one special occasion.
For Taubes, the cocoa conundrum is an occupational hazard for someone who describes his current mission as "the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas." But Taubes, 60, has never been one to shy away from extreme positions. His last two books, 2007's Good Calories, Bad Calories and 2010's Why We Get Fat, launched a nationwide movement to shun bread and embrace butter. Both argued that it's not how many calories we consume, but where they come from, and that eating fat doesn't actually make us so. These were bold statements at the time, and they had a big impact. "I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Thanks to Taubes' pro-fat pronouncements, Pollan says, "millions of Americans changed the way they eat. Doughnut, bread, and pasta sales plummeted, and we saw a change in the food conversation, the effects of which are still being felt today."
Now, with The Case Against Sugar, Taubes launches his toughest crusade yet: to prove that we've been bamboozled into thinking that cookies and soda are simply "empty" calories and not uniquely toxic ones. That's the result, he argues, of a long history of deception from the sugar industry and its support of shoddy science.
The audacity of those arguments makes Taubes an anomaly among nutrition writers, says John Horgan, director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. "He isn't content just to do public relations for scientists," Horgan says, meaning he doesn't rewrap scientists' findings with the simple, shiny packaging of journalism. Instead, he digs deep into the research, and if he finds it lacking, he attacks it. "He'll come right out and say if he thinks someone is an idiot," Horgan says.
With his new book, Taubes will likely have his largest platform, and an audience poised to listen. By now, nearly everyone believes that Americans eat too much sugar. Most experts agree that it's a major contributor to our nation's grim health: More than a third of adults are obese, and one in 11 has diabetes. This understanding has spurred campaigns for soda taxes nationwide — five measures were approved by voters in November — and moves by big companies to ban sugary drinks from workplace cafeterias. In August 2016, three class-action lawsuits were filed against General Mills, Kellogg's, and Post, alleging that the companies falsely claimed their cereals are healthy when, in fact, they're loaded with sugar.
Anyone else would be encouraged, but ever the brawler, Taubes points out flaws: Even these new anti-sugar crusaders, he says, are motivated by a naive, and ultimately dangerous, "less is better" view of sugar. To Taubes, the answer to our obesity crisis isn't more expensive soda and less sweetened cereals. It's to stop poisoning ourselves altogether.
"Sugar is like heroin to me," Taubes says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
Like the control room on a battleship, Taubes' office perches atop the Craftsman-style house he shares with his wife, the writer Sloane Tanen, and their sons. His office is a small, book-filled space with views of the surrounding Oakland hills. He guides me to a low seat near his desk.
I knew of Taubes' aggressive reputation and had seen his brash, combative videos on YouTube — densely reasoned, contrarian lectures about everything from the physiology of how insulin works in the blood to why we should eat meat and avoid carbs (which the body converts into sugar). His videos get hundreds of thousands of views and provoke both cheers and hisses in the blogosphere. I am surprised to find him quiet and soft-spoken.
He pulls out a package of Nicorette gum and pops a piece in his mouth.
"Do you smoke?" I ask.
Not for more than 15 years. "Nicotine is a great drug for writing," Taubes says. "I keep thinking once life calms down, I'll quit." His most vexing addiction, however, is the stuff he's spent five years researching. "Sugar is like heroin to me," he says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
He tries to eat no sugar at all, including honey and agave syrup, and limits fruit. But he insists, "I'm not a zealot." The family pantry — stocked by his wife, not incidentally — has an assortment of what he calls "crap snack health-food bars and juice boxes that Sloane says we have for kids who come over, because they expect it." When Taubes wants a treat, he nibbles on 100 percent chocolate. Because who wouldn't prefer a bar of compressed bitter paste to Godiva?
"The type I buy isn't that bad," he assures me, and then immediately recounts a story of a taxi driver he once gave some to who had to pull over to spit it out. While telling me this, he replaces his now well-chomped Nicorette with a new one. He will continue chain-chewing throughout the day.
Sugar and nicotine, he points out, are connected in more ways than we may think. The Case Against Sugar documents that in the early 1900s, tobacco companies began adding sugar to their products, which allowed people to inhale the smoke deeply, making cigarettes more palatable as well as more addictive and deadlier.
While Taubes has been writing and talking about sugar in one form or another since the early 2000s, with this book he wants to do something he says no one yet has: reveal the bad science that has enabled the sugar industry to mislead the public. By rooting through archives and obscure textbooks, he has uncovered, he says, evidence that sugar is not just the harmless, empty calories we indulge in, but that it may well be toxic, dangerous even in small amounts. It's a possibility that might make you hesitate handing your kids a mug of hot cocoa, too.
To get — and stay — lean and healthy, the conventional nutritional wisdom is simple: Eat less and exercise more. That's what the sugar industry would have us believe, too. (Coca-Cola, for example, now offers smaller-size cans to help consumers drink less soda — or just buy more cans of soda.) That's false, according to Taubes, and the reasoning is part of an industry-driven campaign that goes back to the 1950s. It was then that Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist at the University of Minnesota, first stated that fat — not sugar — causes the high cholesterol levels that lead to heart disease. What few people knew, however, is that Keys' research was funded by the sugar industry.
Taubes details how this pattern of influence ramped up in the 1960s and '70s, as the industry funneled money to scientists and public health officials to combat the notion that sugar was a unique cause of obesity and chronic illness. One of those recipients was Fred Stare, whose work as the founder and chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health was supported financially for decades by sugar purveyors like General Foods. The most public defender of sugar, Stare repeatedly asserted, even as late as 1985, that it is not "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
The industry's campaign scored a coup in 1976, when the FDA classified sugar as "generally recognized as safe" and thus not subject to federal regulations. In 1980, the U.S. government released its dietary guidelines, drafted by a team led by Mark Hegsted, who spent his entire career working under Fred Stare at Harvard. Taubes writes that those guidelines assured us: "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes."
The PR work paid off in other ways, too. Americans now consume 130 pounds of sugar a year, twice the amount we did in 1980. And while the industry told us to embrace sugar, dietary experts preached the gospel of low fat. Both groups assume all calories are created equal, whether they come from apples or apple pie. Such logic implies that a calorie of sugar is no more or less capable of causing obesity and diabetes than a calorie from any type of food.
Taubes presents a wholly different role for what sugar does in the body. "A calorie of sugar and one of meat or broccoli all have vastly different effects on the hormones and enzymes that control or regulate the storage of fat in fat cells," he says. But unlike pork or veggies, sugar has a uniquely negative effect: It causes the liver to accumulate fat and, at the same time, prompts the body to pump out insulin. Over time, Taubes insists, these elevated insulin levels lead to weight gain, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases. Which is to say, we don't blimp out or get sick because we eat too much and fail to exercise. It happens because we eat sugar.
At this point you may be wondering why we haven't put this whole debate to bed with broad, well-conducted research. The problem is that studies about nutrition are notoriously difficult to orchestrate. Most research has been observational: Scientists ask a group of people what they ate over a period of time and then try to tease out associations between their food intake and any diseases they contract. Obviously this approach is problematic. Even if subjects report their eating habits accurately (though they almost never do), it's difficult to know which foods initiate a given problem. If an association is found between hamburgers and heart disease, how would anyone know whether the problem is in the burgers or the buns? The best-run studies require confining subjects to a metabolic ward in a hospital for weeks, where researchers can control all the food they take in and measure all the energy they expend. It's incredibly expensive and nearly impossible to find someone willing to fund it.
Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold are among the few who are. After hearing Taubes on a 2011 podcast discuss the kinds of obesity experiments he'd like to see done, John Arnold, a former hedge-fund manager in Houston, reached out. It led to an Arnold Foundation grant of $35.5 million — money bestowed to Taubes to establish a foundation that would find answers to some of nutrition's toughest questions. In 2012, Taubes paired up with Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins trained physician and star in his field, and launched the nonprofit Nutrition Science Institute (NuSI). Taubes and Attia wanted NuSI to be a beacon, an institution with the experts, resources, and clearance to do the precise experimental science no one else had been willing to. "I thought there needed to be specific studies done to resolve what causes obesity and diabetes once and for all," Taubes says. "I wanted to put the issue to rest, have it recognized by people who could influence the medical establishment."
As late as 1985, Harvard nutritionist Fred Stare asserted that it is no "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
Taubes says he has always had issues with authority, beginning with his father, who was a photoelectric engineer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Xerox copying process. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Gary also lived in the shadow of his elder brother, Clifford. "He excelled at everything," says Taubes. "It was either give up or be supercompetitive."
When Clifford went to Harvard for physics, Gary followed suit. But after receiving a C minus in a quantum physics class, he switched to engineering. (Clifford went on to be a celebrated professor of mathematical physics at his alma mater.) It was then that Taubes read All the President's Men, which tells the story of the Watergate scandal, and he realized he could make a living kicking against authority. He became an investigative journalist, focusing on bad science. Nutrition was a natural fit. No other arena offers more complex or thornier issues to tackle or is so dear to the public's heart. Calling out the idiots here meant Taubes could influence what people put in their mouths every day.
While at Harvard, Taubes channeled his competitive fervor into sports. He played football and in the off-season he boxed. By 1987, when he moved to Venice Beach, California, Taubes worked out constantly, climbing the steps in Santa Monica canyon, roller-blading to Malibu and back, or running a five-mile loop. At the time he believed the cardio would allow him to eat whatever and how much he wanted. But despite all that calorie-burning, he began putting on pounds. It wasn't until 2000, when he adopted the low-carb recommendations of cardiologist Robert Atkins, that Taubes succeed in controlling his weight. That experience colored his thinking about the roles of diet and exercise in obesity.
Exercise, he now believes, plays no role in staying lean. Taubes doesn't dispute that exercise is good for the body and soul; it's just no way to lose weight. Yet he does look the part of a gym rat. His face is lean, his frame muscular. But if anything, Taubes says, avoiding sugar and carbs has allowed him to keep trim. His lunch order at a local burger joint: A one-pound slab of ground beef (no bun) heaped with bacon and smothered in guacamole — the only concession to the color green on the plate.
When I visited Taubes in October, a number of houses on his street had yard signs in support of Oakland's Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax. These are positive signs for the success of The Case — a good thing, because its author could use a win. It's been a tough year for Gary Taubes.
In December 2015, his partner Peter Attia abruptly left NuSI. (In a podcast a few months later, Attia disclosed that he's no longer interested in talking about nutrition.) Taubes calls it an amicable divorce, but he also says the Arnolds had invested in his ideas and Attia's competence, and after Attia left, things began to fall apart.
In January 2016, Kevin Hall, a National Institutes of Health scientist who was the lead investigator on the first NuSI study, recused himself from involvement with the foundation. He and Taubes had clashed on how to set up the pilot study — research that was supposed to address whether carbs were the primary driver of obesity — and when the results came out last summer, the two men couldn't agree on the interpretation of the findings or the quality of the study. NuSI, which was founded to bring clarity to the wildly complicated field of nutrition, ended up mired in the basic processes of scientific research. By late summer, the Arnolds had cut their funding. Taubes considers the episode "a learning experience in how easy it is for experiments to go wrong. Peter and I were like the Hardy Boys of not-for-profit research."
NuSI remains afloat, though barely. Taubes and two other employees continue on as volunteers, and he says the foundation still has unfinished studies awaiting results. He will also continue to solicit funding from wealthy investors, but the main hurdle he faces hasn't been lowered: Spending his career attacking the leading scientists in a field has made working with them rather difficult.
But in light of recent sugar-tax initiatives in Berkeley and San Francisco — both of which passed — Taubes seems to be at the front in the charge against sugar. During our interview, his desk was littered with literature from those trying to tax sugary beverages in cities across the country, along with articles on lawsuits being brought against cereal makers. Taubes hopes The Case will provide more ammo for these fights.
Still, he notes with some exasperation that such efforts continue to speak the language of Big Sugar: If we all just drank less soda and ate less cereal, the rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease would drop. Wrong. Taubes points to the public health initiative of putting calorie counts on menus. "That doesn't lead to any significant decrease in weight or consumption," he says, "because they're identifying the wrong problem."
This is key to Taubes' outlook on sugar. While you may eat desserts and drink sodas only occasionally and add just a sprinkle of sugar to your daily coffee — while maintaining a normal weight — he will tell you that you don't know what even that amount of sugar does to your body. As he puts it in The Case: "How much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we'll ingest."
In an ideal world, Taubes says, his book would lead people to force the FDA to investigate whether sugar is safe, as the agency proclaimed in 1976. That, he admits, is improbable, given the influence Big Sugar wields. Not that it will stop him from waging the war. "Once you've said publicly that the conventional thinking is wrong on something so profound as obesity and diabetes, you either move on to something else or you decide the injustice is such that you have to keep doing this work," he says. "And if you have to keep doing it, then you have to take the shit that comes with it."
Just don't sugarcoat it.
","tag_ids":[4748,23195],"publish_date":"2016-12-13T17:55:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","keywords":"sugar, big sugar, the case against sugar, health, feature, interview, problem with sugar, gary taubes, ","description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?"},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hrChGN","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Gary Taubes","caption":"In the 1980s, Taubes trained for New York City's Golden Gloves amateur boxing championship. He was knocked out cold in the second bout.","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_b-1e59e7eb-f6b5-42f9-8968-9305f13ea4eb.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photograph by Cody Pickens ","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_h-35217730-738e-4d8d-a617-041de2d0e40f.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/health-fitness/health/is-sugar-the-new-tobacco-20140723","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Is Sugar the New Tobacco?","contentId":174502,"contentHeadline":"Is Sugar the New Tobacco? "},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/michael-moss-on-the-birth-of-the-triple-double-oreo-20130318","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Birth of the Triple Double Oreo","contentId":168360,"contentHeadline":"Michael Moss on the Birth of the Triple Double Oreo"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454117,"old_id":null,"title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","short_title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","slug":"/features/articles/how-companies-like-kuiu-made-hunting-the-new-action-sport-w454117","body":"It's just before dusk in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and Jason Hairston is getting pummeled. The light is fading, and he's hiking up a ridgeline at 11,000 feet, higher than he's ever been. A cold front is passing through, and wind gusts are reaching in excess of 60 miles per hour. Every few steps another blast hits, knocking him sideways. Hairston's companions, Brendan Burns and Willie Hettinger, aren't faring much better, stumbling around in front of him like a couple of drunks.
The wind is howling with such force that it's almost comical, so Hairston, who's on the mountain hunting sheep, breaks out his iPhone to record an Instagram post, looking like one of those hackneyed meteorologists reporting from the middle of a hurricane. "We saw a group of rams on the far mountain, and now we're heading up to check out another area," he shouts into his phone. "We're just getting hammered by the wind."
Hairston, the 45-year-old founder of the hunting-gear company Kuiu, is after his first Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, a sure-footed ungulate that lives primarily above tree line, often in locations so steep and rocky that they're impossible to negotiate on two feet. "It's the pinnacle of big-game hunting," Hairston says. "You have to go farther and harder for them than for any other species."
Among a segment of hardcore big-game hunters, no brand is as revered as Kuiu. The company's high-performance fabrics — bonded fleece and waterproof breathable synthetics — are pulled directly from the mountaineering world, and its distinct Tetris-like camo pattern looks more like standard-issue SEAL gear than the fake shrubbery so common at Walmart. Today Kuiu camo is as much a status symbol in hook-and-bullet culture as Louis Vuitton's monogram is among the Hamptons set. And it has as many celebrity boosters: UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a fan. Metallica's James Hetfield owns a guitar emblazoned with Kuiu camo, and Kid Rock has a piano wrapped in it.
On Instagram, Hairston has some 21,000 followers who track his far-flung hunts and gear updates and tag their own posts with #kuiunation. Detractors, of which Hairston has a few, occasionally use the comments section to rail against his trophy shots and what they see as hunting for the 1 Percent. But it's hard to say how much Kuiunation or Hairston's critics will get from this impromptu weather report: With the thin air, he inhales heavily between sentences, and his voice is almost entirely drowned out by the wind's roar. After stashing his phone in his pocket, he wipes snot from his nose.
"Ain't sheep hunting great!" he says.
The three hunters spend the next hour scouting and see a group of promising rams, but with darkness creeping over the eastern plains, we call it quits for the night and head back to camp. The next morning, conditions are far more favorable, so we load up our backpacks and set off in the violet predawn looking for a sheep to shoot.
When it comes to finding big rams, Burns and Hettinger are two of the best in the business. Burns works for Kuiu as its lead product tester and resident hunting guide. Hettinger's main gig is as a personal hunting guide for rich clientele; he's here because he knows these mountains better than just about anyone.
Once outside of camp, it takes Burns and Hettinger less than 10 minutes to spot the same group of rams two ridgelines over, a straight-line distance of maybe a mile. Hairston has a rare management tag from the Taos Pueblo, a 120,000-acre tribal homeland in northern New Mexico, which requires him to shoot an old ram, eight to 11 years old, that probably won't survive another winter or two, its molars ground down so far that it'll eventually starve. Based on its horns, the largest in the group looks like a shooter, but to get within range we have to hike up and over a 13,000-foot peak, then down and around the back side of the ridge where the sheep were first seen. Doing so takes most of the morning, stopping and starting to catch our breath and continually watch the movement of the rams. Now, as the three hunters prepare to clamber to the edge of a slight rock outcropping to take a closer look, Hairston unlatches a custom-made .300 WSM rifle from the side of his backpack and loads a 200-grain bullet into the chamber. "It feels good to finally get some lead in the pipe," he says.
But in the four hours we've been on the move, the sheep have wandered into the upper reaches of a grove of pine trees, behind a slight knoll. No shot. The three reassess. They settle on crawling to the edge of the knoll, knowing that Hairston will be within 150 yards of the animals, a strategy that could easily spook them.
"We can roll right over the top," Hettinger says, "but we won't have much time to decide whether to shoot."
"If we push them," says Burns, "we won't see them again — not on this trip."
Both turn to Hairston to make the call. "That's fine," he says with grin. "We're professionals. This is what we do for a living."
You'll be forgiven if your idea of hunting is paunchy old dudes rumbling down back roads in beat-up pickup trucks. Plenty of sportsmen still shoot whitetails out of tree stands or wait on the edge of sloughs for a flock of mallards to decoy in. But these days, hunting has been embraced by a new breed of devotees: athletic, tech-savvy, ethically minded professionals who like to play year-round in the mountains. They're often the same mountain bikers and runners on the trails outside Moab or Bozeman in summer. But come fall, they trade Lycra for camo and pick up a rifle or bow, many for the first time.
Tim Ferriss, the 4-Hour Work Week guru, is a recent convert to hunting. So is actor Chris Pratt. Even Facebook king Mark Zuckerberg has boasted about killing the meat he eats. Much of hunting's newfound appeal is because the payoff is a year's supply of organic, antibiotic-free backstraps — the new ethical eating. But it's also a way for mountain lovers to get deep into the outdoors, tempting people who have no desire to sit in a duck blind.
"It's a totally different way of interacting with these wild places," says Kenton Carruth, co-founder of the performance-hunting apparel company First Lite. "I know plenty of pro mountain guides who are in the woods every day and they've never seen a wolf, but that's because hikers or climbers are always walking around. They're never silent, still, taking in every sound and smell. As a hunter, I've seen a wolf quite a few times."
For adventure athletes, hunting is a challenge that's every bit as difficult as finishing an ultramarathon — stalking animals for miles on end, packing out hundreds of pounds of meat, navigating through the backcountry in snowstorms. It also offers the rush that comes with having to make consequential decisions in the mountains, just like in climbing.
"The athletic world is very physical but pretty sterile," says Mark Paulsen, a former strength and conditioning coach who has worked with NFL players. "Whether you're on a football field or on a basketball court, it's a known event. Whereas you go into the woods, you have no idea what you might be heading into. For people who love the mountains, that's the beauty of it."
Paulsen now owns Wilderness Athlete, which creates nutritional products like meal-replacement powders for these new so-called backpack hunters. Twenty years ago he was training athletes at the University of New Mexico when a friend took him bow-hunting for elk, hiking six miles into the mountains with 70 pounds of gear. The weight and altitude nearly killed him. "I wanted to throw up, lie down, crawl under a tree," he says. "I thought, 'This the most athletic thing I've ever done in my life.' " On the last day of the hunt, a bull elk bugled so close that Paulsen could feel it in his rib cage. He felled the bull with an arrow from 15 yards. "It was the single most exhilarating experience of my life," he says.
If backpack hunting can be said to have a celebrity, Hairston is it. Much of that has to do with his seemingly endless series of big hunts, which he regularly posts about on Instagram, much to the dismay of anti-hunters and even some in the hunting world. In the last six months alone, he has bagged a trophy room full of animals. In July, he shot a 3x4 blacktail buck in northern California. In August, he flew to the Yukon's far north and killed a 10-year-old Dall sheep with perfectly symmetrical 42-inch horns. In September, on private land just north of Bozeman, Montana, while hunting with his eight-year-old son, Cash, and his 72-year-old father, he brought down a monster bull elk with a compound bow.
"It's in our DNA," says Hairston. "It's two million years of genetics. Whenever I hear criticism online I just respond to them: 'Before you knock it, get out and do it.' "
Up close, bighorn rams register less as living creatures than as props in a prehistoric diorama in a natural history museum. Their tousled, purplish coats gleam in the sun, and the growth rings on their horns are demarcated by clear, dark lines. With a good spotting scope, you can age a sheep by counting the rings at a distance of a few hundred yards or more. Few people are better at this, or enjoy it as much, as Hettinger and Burns.
Hairston met Burns at a trade show a decade ago. At the time, Burns had become something of a phenom in the hunting world by besting Montana's archery record for a nontypical elk. He'd tracked the animal for three days before sneaking within 12 yards and shooting it with an arrow. The horns alone weighed 54 pounds. He was just 22 at the time. Burns has racked up an impressive series of kills — two of which landed him on the Boone and Crockett Club's record list, essentially the Billboard music charts for hunters. But these days his knowledge of and obsession with sheep has earned him the nom de guerre Sheep3PO. "The only way to get him to shut up about sheep," Hairston says, "is to turn him off."
Burns and Hairston hunt together multiple times a year, taking pride in going farther afield than nearly anyone. Lately that's meant to Canada's far north for 10-day expeditions with a local guide — a prerequisite when buying a sheep tag up there. "The guides are often excited, because they've never been able to take clients to some of these places," says Hairston. "They're too difficult to access, but with us they know we can go." On their Yukon hunt this year, they flew to a remote airstrip near the Arctic Circle, crossed a river via boat, and then hiked three days into the mountains before they were even in sheep territory.
This New Mexico hunt is a far cry from those expeditions, but it's a better bet for scoring an old bighorn. As we crawl to the edge of the knoll for a closer look at the group of five rams that moved off downhill, it becomes clear the oldest one is perfect. He has a massive body, probably 300 pounds, with thick horns that end in flat stubs, the product of years of bashing heads with rivals during the rut. He's nine, maybe 10 years old based on his growth rings. Hairston drops his backpack and lies flat on his belly, propping the rifle up on his bag to take aim.
"The one on the left," Burns says. "He's the one." The rams are grouped together tightly, and they clearly sense that something is amiss. At first they dart one way, then another. Finally, they disappear into the trees. Hairston never pulls the trigger.
"Fuck," says Burns. "Fuck."
Hairston slowly gets up and looks back with a pained smile. "I never had a shot," he says as way of explanation. Now the animals are gone, maybe for good. "Come on," Burns says. "Let's get ahead of them." So we take off side-hilling it across the mountain, doing our best to catch up to an animal that can run uphill faster than most NFL cornerbacks can on AstroTurf.
Like many hunters, Hairston views the sport as the ultimate proving ground. It's part of the reason he is so fond of the idea of backpack hunting, which may be the sport's purest, most self-reliant expression. Before setting out, he often fills out spreadsheets with each piece of gear and its corresponding weight listed in ounces. "You've got to," he says. "Every once adds up over a 10-day period to thousands of extra calories burned." He budgets two pounds of food per day, divvied up by day in Ziploc bags. He also trains year-round, spending 10 to 15 hours per week in the gym or hiking with sandbags in his backpacks. For mountaineers, none of this is new, but in the hunting world there are only a handful of people who prep the way he does.
Hairston has been hunting in one form or another since he was a kid growing up in Southern California. Like his father, Hairston took up football in high school and then college, playing linebacker. He was good enough that the San Francisco 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1995. He stayed with the team for a season without playing a down, then retired a year later after suffering an injury to his C5 and C6 vertebrae during a mini-camp with another team. His career as an NFL player was over before it even began. "I couldn't really watch football for a few years," he says. "I was angry about what it had done to me."
Hairston then sold commercial real estate, flipped a few franchises, and became increasingly focused on hunting. Around that time he was often out with Jonathan Hart, a friend from college. On their first backcountry hunt together, in Idaho's White Cloud Mountains, the weather fluctuated wildly — cold and snowing one day, sunny and 80 degrees the next — and their gear was soaked nearly the entire time. Both knew there had to be something better.
Hart thought about the gear he used for other outdoor activities. "In my garage I'd have shotguns and rifles and bows and arrows, but I also had kayaks and climbing gear and ice axes," he says. The apparel options for each of those sports, he noticed, was far superior to anything he had for hunting. Hairston had a similar epiphany when realized he was shopping for his gear more in REI than Bass Pro Shops.
So in 2005 Hairston and Hart decided to make high-performance synthetic gear specifically for hunters. They named it Sitka, after a town in Alaska. They designed a new camo pattern, made some sample jackets and pants, and then convinced mail-order catalog Schnee's to take a chance on the line. Sitka was a hit from the get-go, finding a home with sportsman looking for an upgrade from the subpar cotton offerings. By 2008, Sitka topped $4 million in sales and its products were on store shelves across the country, including Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's. In 2009, W.L. Gore & Associates, the $3 billion behemoth behind Gore-Tex, acquired Sitka for an undisclosed sum. Today it's one of the largest brands in the performance-hunting space.
The deal was worth millions, but the partnership between Hairston and Hart unraveled. Hairston never wanted to sell, he says, and his misgivings became apparent during a meeting about the acquisition. Execs wanted to expand Sitka's footprint, making new camo patterns for whitetail and duck hunters. In Hairston's view, this was unthinkable. "You lose the core appeal," he says.
Increasingly frustrated, Hairston left Sitka (Hart says he was simply not offered a job after the sale) and immediately got to work on Kuiu. With Kuiu, which he named after a game-rich Alaskan island — perhaps not coincidentally located across an icy strait from Sitka — Hairston decided to sell online, directly to consumers; that way, he'd be able to control everything and avoid retail markup. He worked with an engineer to create a carbon fiber backpack frame that was lighter and more ergonomic than anything on the market — and that could comfortably carry 120 pounds of fresh meat. He teamed up with the Japanese company Toray, a competitor to Gore-Tex, to develop a line of apparel. During the 18 months it took to produce everything, Hairston blogged obsessively about the process, building anticipation and earning trust among a dedicated contingent of hunters.
Kuiu launched in 2011 and was an immediate success. It now sells everything from $300 rain jackets to backpacks, game bags, and tents. Sales are approaching $50 million, at least according to Hairston, and the company is expanding its offerings beyond hunting. The Navy SEALs, he says, have reached out to develop a line of tactical gear (to be released to Kuiu customers in 2017), and even Disney hired Kuiu to create a backpack frame for its costumed performers. Hairston has plans for the company's first brick-and-mortar store in 2018, and a traveling pop-up store will be hitting the road this summer.
With Kuiu's success, Hairston has fielded a number of offers to buy the company, but says he'd rather be good than big: "I made that mistake with Gore. I won't make clothes for women, and I won't make clothes for fat guys, because then the skinny guys won't look good in them. I want Kuiu to be an aspirational brand."
After passing on the shot on the big ram, Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger get into position atop another rock outcropping, just up-valley from where the rams disappeared. The vantage point offers a clear sight line into the bowl below. But the sheep never show up.
The hunters are silent, pondering the next move — if there is one. Earlier in the morning, Burns had checked his phone and noticed a photo about an acquaintance's recent, unsuccessful hunt. The post basically said the experience of hunting in the mountains was reward enough. "That's great and all," Burns said, "but I'd rather get something. You either win or you lose."
Hairston does not like to lose. In the business world his competitiveness has earned him a fair amount of flak, including criticism by competitors for misleading claims about the performance of his products. But much of the concern centers around conservation. Whereas most of the new hunters packing rifles into the backcountry are doing so on public land, with tags won in public lotteries, many of Hairston's hunts are through private landowners or outfitters. To some this resembles the pay-to-play hunting model so common in Europe, where it's a rich man's sport. Walter Palmer, the dentist who shot Cecil the lion, placed a big order from Kuiu before he jetted off to Zimbabwe. And Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who have been photographed at length with their kills, are Kuiu customers and friends of Hairston's.
Kuiu donates a fair amount of money to conservation organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which have been a boon for those species. But a central tenet of organizations like these and many state wildlife agencies is protecting species with funds raised by auctioning off premium hunting tags, some that sell for upwards of $100,000. It's an effective strategy in some areas, but it's also controversial because it's hard to know just how much money is going to conservation. It can also come at the expense of public-draw hunters.
"We start to get into trouble," says Land Tawney, director of the nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, "when more and more tags are allocated in the name of raising money, and then we turn into a system where only the rich and elite have the opportunity to get those tags."
Plus, selling high-dollar licenses tacitly feeds a trophy-hunting mentality that continues to flag the sport — warranted or not — as hunters go after animals simply because they'll score well on a record list.
"When the pursuit of an animal as a status symbol becomes more important than the experience surrounding it," says author and TV host Steven Rinella, a respected figure in the outdoors world, "you enter into very troubling terrain."
Hairston has turned Kuiu into a cult favorite by transforming his camo apparel into a hardcore-lifestyle brand, much like CrossFit, and making himself the face of the company. That plays well when you're selling products and prepping for big trips, but it can come off as self-aggrandizing once an animal is on the ground.
Jonathan Hart, Hairston's former business partner, sums him up this way: "It's like in Seinfeld, the J. Peterman catalog that Elaine works for. It's all about him. Jason is about Jason."
After losing the rams in the trees, Hairston and Burns discuss their options. By now, the animals may be long gone. The wind is blowing, circling around the mountain, and we start moving back to where we last saw the rams. Hettinger sets off to track where they went. Then suddenly, there they are, just a hundred yards downhill. Hairston and Burns take up nearly the exact same positions they had an hour earlier, while Hettinger creeps closer to spook them out of the trees. This time, the big ram shows itself clean, broadside to Hairston. He shoots.
The report, like a door slam, quickly dissipates in the wind. From below the ridge, the sound of snapping branches rings out — the ram stumbling at full gait into a tree. Then it's just wind. Burns reaches over and fist pumps Hairston. "You got him," he says. "You got him." Burns grabs his spotting scope and runs downhill toward where the ram disappeared. Within seconds he lets out a high-pitched yip. "Yeaaooo! He's right down here."
By the time Hairston arrives, Burns and Hettinger are already marveling at the ram's thick, almost violet cape. "That is as an awesome of a cape as you will find on a bighorn," says Burns. "Look at the mass on that thing!"
"Awesome," Hairston says. "That is awesome."
After admiring the ram for a solid 15 minutes, the hunters drag him under a few big trees for photos. Burns breaks out a bottle of Super Glue to affix the ram's mouth shut, so it doesn't hang lose. Then we spend the next hour shooting photos: Hairston alone with his kill; Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger with the ram; a close-up of the animal's horns. After they're sure there are enough good pics, Burns and Hettinger break out knives no bigger than X-Actos and carefully start removing the hide, everything from the hoofs to the head, to preserve for the taxidermist. Hairston wants a full-body mount to display in Kuiu's offices. As his partners cape the animal and cut off each quarter, Hairston quickly debones the meat, making it lighter for the pack out. Still, the meat, horns, and cape weigh a combined 150 pounds or so, and it takes three and a half hours to get it the mile or two back to camp.
Once there we all unpack our bags into our tents, then regroup around a fire. Soon everyone is emailing about the day's events. Hairston texts with Joe Rogan about an upcoming elk hunt. Eventually, we call it a night. Hairston heads off to his Kuiu tent, tucking the sheep's cape and head into the vestibule so a bear doesn't get it in the night. It's a strange sight, but it's hard to blame him: even sticking out of the top of his pack, the ram still looks regal.
Earlier in the day, shortly after shooting the sheep and walking down to where it lay, Hairston did something almost all hunters do. He set his gun and backpack down and crouched beside the animal, with his hand on its shoulder, clearly in awe. And then a silence came over him. Everyone stopped and let him have the moment.
Finally, Burns weighed in. "That thing is just the perfect sheep," he said.
After a few more seconds of silence, taking in the animal before him, Hairston looked up and agreed. "It's good to be a winner."
","tag_ids":[4748,5099],"publish_date":"2016-12-08T15:42:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"How Companies Like Kuiu Made Hunting the New Action Sport","keywords":"kuiu, hunting, jason hairston, bighorn sheep, big-game hunting, conservation, feature, profile, interview","description":"Cult gear company Kuiu is outfitting a new wave of superfit, adrenaline-craving, tech-savvy athletes who are transforming hunting into the next extreme sport. And critics are taking aim."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2gFOwPz","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"The hunters on their way to the top of 13,113 foot Old Mike Peak.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_d-f370f5f3-b934-4fc1-a047-b4fc27364744.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"The prey: a Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_c-d9522c1a-5aef-4392-9978-4992b42a153a.jpg"},"photo_3":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Hairston taking aim.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_v2_a-105ee416-8e4f-46f7-afe1-d78c4655f75c.jpg"},"photo_4":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Filling up in town before heading to the mountains for three days.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_e-5e658036-2829-4b00-8a5d-54b9b190687d.jpg"},"photo_5":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Packing out his ram.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_f-17988db9-2711-44eb-b1d4-e9d080b78961.jpg"},"photo_6":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Scouting bighorn rams at 11,000 feet in Sangre de Cristo Mountains.","filename":"m0117_fob_toc_a-eb1140de-f638-4778-888c-88e59ad8fd86.jpg"},"photo_7":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Jason Hairston","caption":"Hairston's wife, Kirstyn, with Cash and Coco.","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_i-d6be904c-48bf-4f2c-b95b-1b313c1ed525.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":"Kuiu founder Jason Hairston scans the ridgeline for big ram.","credits":"Photographs by Paul Bride","filename":"m0117_ft_kuiuhunter_a-cab418d7-f527-47c6-8424-61cee5c90d32.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/features/articles/the-last-whale-hunt-for-a-vanishing-village-kivalina-alaska-w443825","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village","contentId":443825,"contentHeadline":"The Last Whale Hunt for a Vanishing Alaskan Village"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/travel/articles/alaskas-wildest-weirdest-frontier-w431953","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: Alaska's Wildest, Weirdest Frontier","contentId":431953,"contentHeadline":"Alaska's Wildest, Weirdest Frontier"},"inset_3":{"slug":"/adventure/articles/the-fight-for-europes-last-wild-river-w444231","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Fight for Europe's Last Wild River","contentId":444231,"contentHeadline":"The Fight for Europe's Last Wild River"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Cult gear company Kuiu is outfitting a new wave of superfit, adrenaline-craving, tech-savvy athletes who are transforming hunting into the next extreme sport. And critics are taking aim.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":448627,"old_id":null,"title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","short_title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","slug":"/features/articles/how-an-11-year-olds-brain-injury-rattled-a-football-family-w448627","body":"It was a crisp Sunday afternoon in Missoula, Montana, and Mike Callaghan stood in the blustery sunshine, doing the thing he loved best: coaching his 11-year-old son's football team. Brogan Callaghan was the Panthers' quarterback and was shaping up as a real leader on the field. Mike, still athletic at age 52, couldn't help but think back to his own days on these fields, with his own father watching.
On that day, the Panthers were playing their archrivals, the Chargers, and were down 14–7 in the second quarter. Brogan took the snap and rolled left, twisting his upper body to throw right. As soon as he released the ball, he was flattened by a defender, so he didn't see that the receiver had made the catch and scored, the bleachers erupting into cheers.
Brogan jumped right up from the hit and jogged into formation for the extra point before switching to linebacker, a position his father once played with the Montana State Bobcats over in Bozeman. As the offense lined up, Mike noticed the Chargers' running back go into motion early. "Sweep!" Callaghan yelled from the sidelines, but Brogan was already on it, slipping left around the Chargers' big right tackle. Brogan was just about to take down the runner when he was slammed from behind — an illegal hit that flexed his spine, snapped his head forward, and sent him colliding into one of his own teammates. He went down hard, banging the back of his head into the dirt.
As a coach, Callaghan generally kept his cool. But now he went straight for the referee, screaming that this was the second time that player had made the same illegal block. "That's twice," Callaghan yelled. "You've got to call that."
But another Panthers coach, Eric Dawald, noticed something more alarming: Brogan wasn't getting up. Dawald rushed onto the field and found the boy on his back, barely conscious. Brogan opened his eyes and looked up. "I can't see," he said.
Brogan's mother, Shannon, was chatting with friends in the bleachers when she heard somebody say, "I think that's Brogan." She ran to the field, arriving at the same time her husband did.
Brogan looked up at his parents. "I can't feel my legs," he said. Shannon glanced at her husband and thought, "Brogan has to be done with football forever. It has to end now."
An ambulance drove onto the grass, and a paramedic removed the face mask from Brogan's helmet. They asked him what day it was, and Brogan answered incorrectly. They asked his birthday, and he couldn't answer that, either. One of the paramedics asked him if his neck hurt. "I can't feel my legs," the boy repeated.
Callaghan had been coaching youth football for 22 years without witnessing anything worse than a broken arm. Certain that Brogan's paralysis was momentary, he knelt beside his son and grabbed a patch of skin on the back of his calf. "You're going to feel this, Brog," he said. "You're fine. You'll feel this." Callaghan pinched, hard, but Brogan did not respond.
Some of his teammates were crying as the paramedics strapped their quarterback to a backboard, placed an oxygen mask over his face, and loaded him into the ambulance. Shannon climbed in, and they sped the boy across the Clark Fork River to St. Patrick Hospital.
Callaghan drove separately, his mind racing through worst-case scenarios: "We'll buy a one-level house. I'll change jobs so I can be home more, learn to care for a paraplegic child." Another thought intruded: "I was the coach. This happened on my watch. How did I do this to my kid?"
While the emergency room doctors evaluated Brogan, Shannon's and Mike's parents arrived at the hospital. After filling them in about Brogan's condition, Shannon turned to Callaghan's father. James Callaghan was an oral surgeon who had played football in college and loved watching his grandson play as much as he had loved watching Mike. In fact, in all of Mike's years of playing youth football, his father missed just one game, when Mike was in the sixth grade. "I don't ever want Brogan to play football again," Shannon told her father-in-law. "And you have to back me up on this." James Callaghan told her that it was none of his business.
Back in the emergency room, Brogan looked at his father and asked, "Am I paralyzed?"
"I think you are," Callaghan thought. "You're going to be all right," he said. He watched a tear roll down his son's cheek and thought, "He knows."
Brogan looked up at Callaghan and said, "Who are you?"
Before the injury, it had been a typical fall weekend for the Callaghans. Friday afternoon at 5, Mike left his office to meet Dawald and Brogan and the rest of the Panthers for practice. Afterward, they jumped into Callaghan's truck and drove across town to Loyola Sacred Heart High School, where they ate hot dogs, sipped Pepsis, and watched one of Callaghan's old MSU teammates coach his own son in a game against Troy High. On Saturday morning, Callaghan and Brogan watched an NCAA game while eating breakfast. If Montana State had been playing at home, they would have driven to Bozeman, where Callaghan did TV color commentary. As it happened, they were away, so Callaghan and Brogan watched the game on TV while plotting the next day's attack against the Chargers. Win or lose, after the game they'd head home to catch the Steelers play the 49ers and dig in to their usual chip buffet — three flavors of Ruffles, tortilla chips, seven-layer dip, and guacamole.
"We might be nuts," Callaghan says. "But so much of our week is taken up by football."
Plenty of other fathers could say the same thing. The NFL and NCAA get all the attention, but the vast majority of football in America is played at the youth level. There are about 2,000 men in the NFL, and 73,000 play on college teams. But more than 3 million boys between the ages of six and 18 play for teams like the Panthers and the Loyola Rams, in towns like Missoula, where football is deeply woven into the fabric of local life.
But that fabric is starting to fray, riven by a growing stack of research linking football to chronic head trauma. In college and the pros, players are consenting adults who make their own choices about that risk. But for those younger than 18, the decision rests with parents — more and more of whom are saying no to tackle football. Between 2010 and 2015, youth-league participation cratered nearly 30 percent.
Even NFL legends have reservations. Casey "Big Snack" Hampton, who played tackle for 12 years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, told me that he refused to let his son play tackle football before high school. "I made him wait," Hampton says. "I've seen little kids get concussions." Other stars, including Brett Favre and Troy Aikman, have expressed similar reservations. "I would not want my child out there," Terry Bradshaw told Jay Leno in 2012. "The fear of them getting these head injuries . . . it's just too great for me."
That stance has football leagues, both amateur and pro, scrambling. Earlier this year, Pop Warner, the nation's oldest youth football league, eliminated kickoffs for kids younger than 11, to limit open-field contact. USA Football, a nonprofit partially funded by the NFL that offers training, education, and equipment subsidies to youth leagues, has introduced a set of practice guidelines for coaches, designed in part to teach safer tackling techniques and to minimize hits to the head. The NFL also holds free "moms clinics" at pro stadiums, where so-called master trainers put mothers through tackling drills in an effort to convince the women that tackling is safe for kids.
Yet new research on head trauma continues to undermine that case. A report in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma found that the likelihood of developing cognitive and emotional problems is linked to a football player's overall exposure to contact and not just to his diagnosed concussions. In other words, every little hit adds up, which explains why NFL veterans who started playing before the age of 12 are more likely to have cognitive problems than those who picked up the game later. These days, many players start earlier — and the truly dedicated scrimmage all year long.
Risk, of course, is part of life, and kids suffer serious injuries doing all kinds of things. What's more, researchers still cannot say what percentage of football players end up suffering long-term cognitive harm.
All of which puts football families in a uniquely confounding position. For Callaghan and his high school and college teammates, football is one of the most important things in their lives. It's the source of their self-confidence and closest friendships, of indelible memories of victory and loss, of their very notion of what it means to be a man. And despite taking their share of hits to the head, they've gone on to lead fulfilling adult lives — lives that continue to be enriched by football. "It would rock me to the soul to learn that football has been bad for all these kids," says Callaghan. "I love the game. It's the greatest avenue that I know to get great life lessons."
Ultimately, the true battle for the future of America's favorite pastime is being waged not in the media or in high-profile court cases, but at public parks and on high school fields nationwide. And the instant Brogan was hit that fall day in Missoula, Mike and Shannon Callaghan joined countless other parents in staring down questions they never wanted to ask.
"I'm your dad." Back in the emergency room, Callaghan answered Brogan's question.
Brogan looked confused, so Callaghan pointed to Shannon and said, "Do you know who that is?" Brogan shook his head. Callaghan felt the life go out of him.
For hours they sat at Brogan's side, hoping for something to change. Then suddenly Shannon spoke up. "His toes moved," she said. "I just saw them. He moved his toes." Relief swept through the room. Mike felt something close to elation, thinking, "He has a concussion, but he will get better."
By evening Brogan could move his legs, sit up in bed, and walk across the room. The family spent that night in the hospital. The following morning Callaghan woke up feeling optimistic. He told his wife that he thought Brogan might be back at practice within a week. Then a doctor arrived and asked Brogan his name. Brogan got his first name right but couldn't remember his last name — or why he was in the hospital.
For years many doctors believed that children were less likely than adults to suffer serious head injuries in football, for the simple reason that they weigh less and run more slowly than adults do. Now it's well understood that until about age 14, a kid's head is much larger than an adult's compared with his body, yet the neck is weaker, which means the head bounces around more in response to collisions. Researchers at Virginia Tech found that seven-year-old football players experienced head blows comparable in force to the impacts suffered by college players.
To make matters worse, the nerve fibers in children's brains are not yet coated with the protective sheathing known as myelin. As a result, "it's easier to tear apart neurons and their connections in children at lower impact," says Dr. Robert Cantu, the author of Concussions and Our Kids and a leading researcher of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain-wasting disease that has been diagnosed in dozens of deceased football players. The threat to emerging neural connections is particularly problematic at Brogan's age. "If you injure your brain during that time," Cantu says, "there is a high likelihood that you will not reach your maximal genetic endowment intellectually, and you'll perhaps not have the same personality with regard to depression, anxiety, and panic attacks."
Brogan's doctors were unsure about the cause of his temporary paralysis, but they agreed that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Still, after two days in the hospital, they determined him well enough to go home. They gave Mike and Shannon a strict rehab protocol that called for avoiding anything that might stimulate brain activity: bright lights, computer screens, video games, even reading. The doctors also cautioned them that irritability and depression are common after a concussion. The Callaghans set up beds for Brogan and themselves in the basement. Shannon went to the local Target to stock up on board games and drawing supplies.
A week later the Callaghans returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit. When the doctor said that Brogan would have to sit out the rest of football season, Callaghan found himself unexpectedly relieved. "I remember being thankful that the doctor told him so I wouldn't have to," Callaghan says. "I was sort of off the hook."
Missing a single season was one thing. But the idea that Brogan might never play again — clearly what Shannon wanted — was nearly impossible for Callaghan to contemplate. For one thing, Brogan loved the game and had the makings of a real standout. What's more, the sport had been central to Callaghan's life for as long as he could remember. He started as a fifth grader in the Little Grizzly league; his coach from those days remained one of his closest confidants. Among his closest friends were teammates from Hellgate High or Montana State. During Callaghan's junior year, in 1984, the MSU Bobcats won the NCAA Division I-AA national championship — a feat Montana football fans still talk about.
Of course, football ends hard: You wake up one day and it's over. Nobody plays tackle ball in middle age. But Callaghan took up coaching, even though he was just a few years out of college with no kids of his own. He started with his nephew's team of fifth and sixth graders. Soon, a few of his old football buddies, including Eric Dawald, came to help. They loved having a reason to hang out after work, teaching the fundamentals, and feeling that old excitement on game days. When one of the group had a son, the others promised to keep coaching as long as the kid played, a pact that soon extended to every son any of them might ever have. And they built something, three nights a week on snow-dusted fields. Their team was undefeated for 15 straight seasons. Boys they'd coached went on to play at local high schools, the University of Montana, Montana State, even the pros.
Callaghan mostly had given up on having children of his own when, at age 40, he met and married Shannon Brown. An interior architect and former competitive swimmer, Shannon had grown up in tiny Havre, Montana, with a pair of football-obsessed brothers. She loved the way Callaghan welcomed Griffin, her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage, onto his team. When Brogan was born, in 2003, Callaghan insisted that his buddies renew their vow to keep coaching.
Brogan started playing flag football in the fourth grade, in 2013. By that time, the relationship between football and brain trauma was well established. Two years earlier, a Missoula kid named Dylan Steigers, who'd started out in local youth leagues, went off to play at Eastern Oregon University and took a big hit in a scrimmage. He died the next day.
Shannon, meanwhile, had been getting warnings from her older brother, Scott Brown, a former high school running back and now an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Portland, Oregon. "I'd see these 40-year-olds coming in just maimed, having these big surgeries from playing football in high school, college, the pros," he says. Brown became convinced that letting a kid play tackle football was akin to child abuse. He implored his siblings to keep their kids off the field.
The youngest, Shannon's brother Howard, got the message; his son plays only flag football. But Shannon felt trapped — nobody could tell her husband what to think about football. All the CTE research, Callaghan argued, had been done on the brains of guys known to have problems. He had attended one of USA Football's Heads Up Football clinics, where he'd been schooled in the latest safe-tackling techniques. And he would never consider letting a concussed kid play before a complete recovery.
So in 2014, Brogan, now a fifth grader, joined Callaghan's team. He knew his dad's track record and dreamed of exceeding it with a Stanford scholarship and a career in the NFL — just like Jordie Tripp, a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks who played on Callaghan's team 10 years earlier.
Brogan, it turned out, had the makings of a natural quarterback, with a great arm and an instinct for reading the field and seeing weaknesses in the opposing team's defense. But as the 2015 season rolled around, a handful of Brogan's teammates did not return. "The moms and I talked," Shannon says, "and they were like, ‘I wouldn't let Brogan play.' "
Similar conversations were happening nationwide, in part due to the efforts of women like Kimberly Archie. Her son, Paul Bright Jr., grew up playing Pop Warner ball in Sparks, Nevada. He was living in Los Angeles, working as an assistant chef, when his behavior grew erratic. Then, on a September evening in 2014, Bright drove an unlicensed motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a car and was posthumously diagnosed with early-stage CTE. Archie began to speak out on radio and television. The American commitment to youth tackle football, she says, "is like letting our kids ride down the highway in the back of the truck at 80 miles per hour because we're afraid we'll make them weak if we stop."
Last September, Archie launched a class action lawsuit in conjunction with Jo Cornell, whose son played Pop Warner football and was found to have CTE after committing suicide. The lawsuit defines members of the plaintiff's class as anyone who has ever played, or had a child play, youth tackle football, and suffered a head injury since 1997. It alleges negligence and fraud by Pop Warner, USA Football, and the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which develops voluntary safety standards for youth-football helmets. The complaint does not specify damages, but the number could amount to billions of dollars.
This isn't the first lawsuit Pop Warner has faced: The league has already settled two others. Pop Warner now requires that each practice session runs no longer than two hours a day and that no more than 25 percent of practice time is devoted to full-speed contact, or scrimmaging. "There's risk in anything kids do, and football's getting a really bad rap," says Pop Warner executive director Jon Butler.
These lawsuits, of course, are the stuff of nightmares for the NFL, which reached its own billion-dollar settlement with 20,000 former players last year. "It's the best game that's ever been invented, and we've got to make sure that moms get the message — because that's who's afraid of our game right now," Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians said recently. "It's not dads. It's moms."
Predictably, the NFL has stepped up its outreach to mothers. It sponsors the Facebook page Touchdown Moms, where NFL employees post heartwarming anecdotes about the mothers of youth players. USA Football sponsors a Team Mom of the Year Award. And then there are those free mom's clinics. Nearly every NFL franchise has hosted at least one such clinic, generally treating mothers to on-field drills and a concussion-awareness presentation.
Archie, who was already working as a sports-safety consultant, attended one of these clinics in Ohio in 2014. This was a month before her son's accident, and even then she was not impressed. "It's condescending to think you can just trick moms," she says.
Three weeks after his injury, Brogan was cleared to go back to school, but he could last only an hour or so a day. He sometimes flew into sudden, inexplicable rages and Shannon mostly stopped working to care for him. Callaghan spent his days at the office and continued to coach the Panthers in the evening. He coached out of a sense of obligation, both to his fellow coaches and to players. But now it felt different: He watched every tackle with anxiety, waiting for the child to get up and walk it off.
Both Shannon's brothers, meanwhile, were relentless. Howard sent his sister one news article after another about kids like Evan Murray, a 17-year-old New Jersey quarterback, Ben Hamm, a 16-year-old linebacker from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and 17-year-old Kenny Bui, from the Seattle suburbs, all of whom died within a month of one another early that fall. All told, more than a dozen kids died playing football that season, and Shannon's brothers made sure she knew about each one.
One night she tried to share these stories with her husband.
"We are not talking about this," he said.
It wasn't until seven weeks after his injury that Brogan was able to form new memories. He started neurological rehab therapy and scored terribly on cognitive tests that included closing his eyes and touching his nose. Math worksheets that would have taken five minutes before the injury now took an hour and left Brogan exhausted. Spinning on a stationary bicycle gave him a headache.
In February, Callaghan and Brogan sat on the couch to watch the Super Bowl. Shannon overheard Brogan begin a sentence with the phrase, "When I play in the NFL . . ."
"That's not going to happen," Shannon said.
Later she heard her husband tell Brogan, "But when you play in high school . . ."
"It's not going to happen," she said.
"We don't have to decide this now," Callaghan replied.
Later still, Brogan asked his mom, "Why won't you let me play?"
"Because God gave you that big brain so you can do something amazing in this world."
"He also made me a good football player," Brogan said.
"But that can't be your future."
Callaghan turned to Shannon. "But what about his dream?"
Shannon thought, "Whose dream is it?"
The last football game Mike Callaghan ever played was against Washington State in 1985, the less memorable season after that epic championship year. The Bobcats were struggling and in the first quarter, he suffered a concussion after being hit by a running back. The team's trainer ordered him out of the game, but Callaghan returned to the field anyway, determined to play every minute of his last college game. At that point somebody grabbed his helmet, locked it in an equipment bin, and sent him to the showers, where he wept uncontrollably. "That's how football ended for me," Callaghan says. "I didn't go out in a blaze of glory. Some guy ran me over. We lost."
As Brogan recovered, Callaghan couldn't help but think of all the concussions he'd suffered in his football career. By his senior year of college, he had experienced so many that he sometimes lost the right side of his visual field during games and had agonizing headaches, to the degree that the team's trainer ordered a brain scan. It came back clean, but the trainer asked Callaghan why he still played. He knew he wasn't NFL material, so what was the point? Why take the risk?
He was now asking similar questions about Brogan — but Mike could not let go of football. He thought about all the things he wanted his son to experience: the friendships, the teamwork, the victories. "I love watching Brogan play the game," he told me. "I love it."
Despite their differences, Shannon understands. "It's like a death," she says. "Mike wants his kid to be a football star. And Brogan would be the star. He's a leader and damn good, and everyone looks up to him."
Callaghan struggled to imagine what his own life would be like without football. What would he do on weekday nights and Sunday mornings in the fall? When would he see his friends? Who would he be? "Every time I thought about it, my mind just went blank," he says.
In August, Callaghan got a call from officials at Missoula Youth Football: Did he plan to coach the 2016 season? After months of agonizing, almost entirely to himself, he'd finally made a decision. "Brogan's not going to play, and I'm not going to coach," he said.
Callaghan couldn't bear to think of it as a permanent decision, telling his son that it was only for the coming season. But Brogan was unconvinced and angry. "You know it's forever," he said. "Mom's never going to let me play again."
Callaghan called Dawald and apologized for leaving the team. Two weeks later, he told his father.
Upon hearing the news James Callaghan said, "I didn't want to ask." Then he said, "Is that your decision or your wife's?"
"We're on the same page for this year," Callaghan said.
"Geez," James said. "That's going to be tough."
"Dad, it may be tough for us," Mike said. "But what I'm starting to figure out is there's a whole other world out there. There's a lot of people who don't consider playing, and they still get through the fall somehow."
Mike and brogan still watch football together — high school games on Friday, Montana State on Saturdays, and his former team on Sunday afternoons. "It's kind of hard, because I'm not playing," Brogan says. "I think about what I would do against the teams when I watch. But there isn't really anything that I can do." He's hurled himself into basketball and recently asked if he could take tennis lessons. Callaghan bought him his first rifle and is planning an elk hunt.
Brogan admits that he hasn't yet fully recovered. Schoolwork doesn't come as easily as it once did, but Shannon isn't worried. "Brogan missed 247 classes in the sixth grade," she says, "and he finished with three A-pluses and three As." Now, instead of going to Stanford to play football, he wants to go to Berkeley to study architecture — his mother's passion — on an academic scholarship.
Callaghan says he often thinks back to a day last November, weeks after Brogan's injury. League officials asked how he wanted to handle that unfinished game with the Chargers. "A big part of me was, ‘I don't want to handle it,' " Callaghan said. But the kids cared, and Callaghan felt it would have been selfish to refuse.
That meant bringing the teams back to the field behind the county fairgrounds. The Chargers and the Panthers lined up exactly where they'd been the moment Brogan was injured — but with Brogan now on the sidelines with his father. The referee set the game clock to where it had stopped and blew the whistle, and they played the remainder of the game. The Panthers lost, and for the first time in his life Callaghan didn't care.
All Brogan's teammates went home, except for two boys, Charlie and Cole. Charlie picked up a football and threw it to Brogan, who caught it and tossed it back. Charlie then passed it to Cole. Ten minutes went by, then 20, and still the kids continued to play. The parents lingered off to the side, making it clear there was no rush. "Brogan was kind of running around," Callaghan says. "Normal isn't the right word, but the normalcy of it, seeing him be a kid again. The game was over, we got beat, and it was good for me. Our kids were fine."
","tag_ids":[4748,4790],"publish_date":"2016-11-04T16:27:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","keywords":"football, concussions, head injury, traumatic brain injury, mike callaghan, kids, sports, ","description":"For Mike Callaghan and his son Brogan, football was everything. But when the 11-year-old QB was sidelined by a head injury, Callaghan faced an agonizing, all too common choice."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2fjP8dM","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Large Vertical Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer"},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Brogan at age 11","filename":"m1216_ft_football_c-2a36e793-c615-4d6d-9de2-7e5a00d1b9ad.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Shannon Callaghan","caption":"Mike Callaghan playing for Montana State.","filename":"m1216_ft_football_b-3e109603-4f13-4726-95d4-c1d85678c14f.jpg"},"photo_3":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Jake Chessum","caption":"Brogan and his mom, Shannon, catching up after school.","filename":"m1216_ft_football_e-7cc09309-f388-4372-97a7-22850b2c4a69.jpg"},"photo_4":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Jake Chessum","caption":"Brogan is the third generation of Callaghans to play tackle football.","filename":"m1216_ft_football_d-f875828b-a9a4-49cd-9929-4c820559a170.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photographs by Jake Chessum","filename":"m1216_ft_football_a-f10cee90-4f15-4522-ae04-2bea3fb9aea4.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/health-fitness/articles/what-to-do-if-your-kid-gets-a-concussion-during-the-game-w443772","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: What To Do If Your Kid Gets a Concussion During a Game","contentId":443772,"contentHeadline":"What To Do If Your Kid Gets a Concussion During a Game"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"For Mike Callaghan and his son Brogan, football was everything. But when the 11-year-old QB was sidelined by a head injury, Callaghan faced an agonizing, all too common choice.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":448002,"old_id":null,"title":"Is Bill Clinton Our New Model Husband?","short_title":"Is Bill Clinton Our New Model Husband?","slug":"/features/articles/is-bill-clinton-our-new-model-husband-w448002","body":"Win or Lose on Tuesday, Hillary’s husband has taken a supporting role in his marriage. Should You? What all American husbands can learn from one of the worst husbands ever.
Hi, guys. Can we talk? No? Tired of talking? I get that. You’ve probably heard more than enough about how you’re doing as a husband — how well you’re balancing earning money, contributing at home, and not acting like an entitled jerk.
So let me start with a story instead.
One recent Sunday night, while in our compact hybrid — which my husband calls our vagina car — driving to a friend’s for dinner, I reminded Dan (said husband) that I was leaving on a work trip the next day and that he’d need to attend back-to-school night by himself. This was, I knew, horrendous news, and sure enough, he stopped the car, turned toward me, and his face became a 3-D GIF, looping through paroxysms of pain and nausea. His You’re-fucking-kidding-right? face.
I know that face well — it’s the man-face of our times. Now, Dan will surf triple overhead waves and dangle off cliffs, but he’s crippled by certain domestic obligations. Among them: sitting in a classroom, being treated like a sixth grader. He’ll snap and yell or decide his life is worthless, then tumble into his default mantra: You suck you suck you suck.
I feel for you guys, really I do. The American Husband is tiptoeing through unmapped, land-mine–filled territory. More is being asked of you, and you’re doing it, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes awkwardly. And of course sometimes you’re falling behind. Your status has declined a bit lately — like, say, that of a certain former president who may soon be serving tea to the wife of the Uruguayan president — and still you’re getting feedback (so much feedback!), reminders that you’re still blithely exploiting male privilege. But if you veer too far into domesticity . . . then men, perhaps yourself included, will think you’re a compact hybrid–driving wuss. There’s no comfortable place, no known haven. Your wife thinks you’re an oaf, and your inner monologue says you’re whipped and you’re exhausted by — to borrow the phrase women are profoundly sick of — trying to do it all.
“Women started talking about ‘the second shift’ when they went into the workforce in large numbers and their role at home didn’t change much,” says Gayle Kaufman, a sociologist at Davidson College. “Men are now experiencing that, in reverse. They have this work role, and now they’re taking on a family role, and it adds a lot of stress.”
This has already been a rough decade for the American Husband. In 2012, Hanna Rosin declared in her pointedly titled The End of Men that men are the new ball and chain. The demise she outlined was a many-pronged fork stuck in the American male ass. One tine was economic: Men lost far more jobs than women did in the 2008 recession. Another was educational: Women now earn more college degrees than men do. A third tine was psychosocial: The world changed, and women embraced it. (Thanks in part to an endless supply of think pieces — verbal grenades tossed across the front lines of the gender wars — intended to shine a blowtorch on how screwed women have been for human history.)
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of the superheroic American Wife, who accomplishes more before 9 a.m. than her husband does all day. An expert multitasker, strutting around in her the future is female T-shirt, she seems to update her OS daily and is now capable of doing approximately 10 bazillion things at once. Meanwhile, you’re overwhelmed, possibly nostalgic (though your cargo shorts are not yet hipster-retro), sputtering along like a Commodore 64.
For years we’ve seen this in pop culture, the American Husband portrayed as a dope. He’s the guy who doesn’t know how to turn on the washing machine or who needs his six-year-old to tell him how to pack her school lunch. The caricature has persisted and now seems not just ungenerous but downright cruel.
The change is disorienting, as until quite recently, husband was the far better gig. Master of the House! He had all the money, all the power; he threw a baseball around with his son in the driveway because he wanted to, not because he was “on duty.” The couple’s lives revolved around him. But that old model has given way to what’s known as the companionate marriage, in which men and women marry their equals, for love.
Now, as Kate Jennings writes, “When I think about the dynamics of our marriage, sumo wrestling comes to mind.”
Great, you want a smart, strong wife. You’re all for equality, philosophically. You maybe even have daughters, and you’ll breathe hellfire on anybody who tries to keep them down. Still, your wife’s rise makes it feel like you fell. You don’t get any top-dog perks. No one gives you sympathy, let alone a scotch, as a reward for a long, hard workday. Instead you’re handed a toddler. Or a text: “Hey babe, running late. What’s for dinner?” Your sex appeal is based on . . . what? Choreplay? A 2016 study on housework and intimacy defined a truly oxymoronic-sounding new eroticism of fairness. Couples who share domestic duties equitably have more sex. And it’s not just quantity: Women report more sexual satisfaction in egalitarian relationships than in so-called conventional ones. Exhibit A: Porn for Women. It’s filled with photos of shirtless men vacuuming and changing toilet paper rolls, and it has sold a half-million copies.
Swiffer, anyone?
Marriage is exhausting, which you doubtlessly know, but the particular kind of exhaustion we’re facing right now can be chalked up, at least in part, to this idea of fairness and the endless accounting toward it: Who’s up, who’s down, who emptied the dishwasher, who moved to what city for whose job, who interrupted whose sister six times at Thanksgiving, who mansplained, who manspread. Some infractions are obvious, others not. Take Matt Lauer. He’s an ass? Yes, he’s an ass. That toxic male culture is the fog you grew up in, and you’re trying to see your way through it, but it’s still easy to get lost in the miasma.
Which brings us to Bill Clinton, the man to lead us out of the marital murk.
I know, I know: counterintuitive choice. In his autobiography, My Life, he writes that “nothing in my background indicated I knew what a stable marriage was all about.” His father married four times (and died at 28). His mother married five times. Bill’s stepfather abused Bill’s mother, and Bill still loved him. Then, of course, there was the infidelity. So much infidelity. So much lying. A nation forced to picture certain acts that are impossible to unsee. This was a horrendous husband performance. On top of that, Hillary had to stand by his side, humiliating herself in that special way only politicians’ wives seem to endure.
But now this famous marriage fuckup could well become America’s First Husband. By all rights this should be a disaster. Our First Gentleman is a megalomaniacal, power-tripping dirty old man. But did you see that speech he gave at the convention? He looked wizened, sure, a tad too vegan, and he did some rambling, but he nailed it.
He did the single thing that working American women — which is to say, pretty much all American women, since they make up 47 percent of the workforce — have been wanting their husbands to do for years: He told the world in painstaking, occasionally boring detail that his wife is slaying her career and that he’s 100 percent behind her promotion to the most powerful position in the land — because she’s earned it. She’s the best person for the job. No discussion of gender required. The next day the headlines came out saying Bill, while delivering his convention speech, looked fetching in his navy pantsuit — payback for the decades of brutal fashion policing perpetrated on Hillary. But the teasing was fine. Fine. Bill returned to the stage the following night and looked not just unperturbed but thrilled by the entire experience. He marveled at his wife, the nation, the miracle of balloons. Never have you seen a husband happier to be attending his wife’s work events.
Bill has been reticent about the possibility of a title change. He doesn’t talk about being the first First Man, or Adam, as some like to call him. The closest Bill has come to admitting in public that he, along with Hillary, is a gender warrior poised to take American husbands into an unmapped future, was at a rally in Des Moines in late 2015.
“There has been a lot of talk about breaking the glass ceiling,” he said, warming up the audience for the headliner, his wife. “I want to break a ceiling. I am tired of the stranglehold that women have had on the job of presidential spouse.”
Femininity is a bitch: You’re frigid or you’re a slut. You don’t smile the right amount. Your body has the half-life of a cake in the rain. But masculinity is a bitch, too. “What we call masculinity is often a hedge against being revealed as a fraud,” writes Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University and author of Guyland and Manhood in America: A Cultural History, “an exaggerated set of activities that keep others from seeing through us, and a frenzied effort to keep at bay those fears within ourselves.” Masculinity, in other words, is a fundamentally defensive posture that you have to prove again and again.
Earning money, or rather, earning more of it than your wife, has been de rigueur. And this breadwinning component of masculinity is where a lot of men are now getting into trouble. If their wives outearn them (God forbid), men feel emasculated, and when men feel emasculated, you get Mike Tyson.
Researchers at Stanford University gave male subjects feedback suggesting they were feminine. And? Those subjects overcompensated with extreme displays of masculinity, expressing increased support for the Iraq War, more homophobia, and newfound desire to purchase SUVs. At the University of Connecticut, sociologist Christin Munsch also found that when men earn less money than their spouses, they overcompensate, too, in some less attractive ways, namely by cheating on their wives. “Their theory is: I’m already feeling emasculated, I’m not making a lot of money, I’m not going to clean the toilet, too,” Munsch told me. (Erotics of fairness be damned.) At the same time, women who outearn their husbands overcompensate as well — minimizing their accomplishments, deferring to their spouses, performing more housework. In short, they act extra feminine, says Munsch, “to maintain their own gender conformity, decrease interpersonal conflict, and shore up their husbands’ masculinity.” Oof.
The way out is forward. Retrenching helps no one, not even you guys. The state of feeling threatened is awful. So is feeling desperate to make more money. More to the point, a husband uncomfortable with his wife’s achievements comes across as pathetic. Sad to revisit it now, but in Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg wrote that people often asked about her husband, himself a tech CEO, who died at age 47: “How is Dave? Is he okay with, you know, all your [whispering] success?”
No man wants such whispers. Besides, the pity is misplaced, at least for younger men. Primary financial responsibility is a burden — that’s just a fact. The pressure takes its toll. Among millennials, men who make significantly more money than their wives are worse off physically and psychologically, while women who make more are happier. Still, the tradition of valuing men’s careers over women’s persists. A study of 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates found that women reached their professional goals less frequently than men do. The reason? Even among this powerhouse crowd, husbands’ jobs took precedence over their wives’.
Note: This doesn’t mean the husbands won. This means their wives are pissed.
The past few years have been disorienting for men and women, husbands and wives: up, down, action, reaction, action, reaction, the seesawing oscillations growing faster and more violent. She’s a bitch; he’s a wuss. Women are put out; men are stuck. Everybody’s rebounding; everybody’s trapped. Some claim this is intrinsic to marriage, that marriage is all about power dynamics, who’s got the upper hand. That it’s basically a competition for whose needs get met. As Michael Vincent Miller writes in Intimate Terrorism, “Marriage consists of two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one.”
But that’s an outdated story, a theory that might have represented the best thinking of its day but which time has proved wrong. That zero-sum game serves no one well now. Winning isn’t possible in the battle of the sexes. The whole match is doomed. The only available victory is to change the terms of the game. And now weirdly, almost miraculously, we have just the guy to do it, a man to guide husbands out of the wilderness — a man so secure in his masculinity that he’s ready and eager to quit his job at the foundation he built, no less, to support his commander-in-chief wife.
Gentlemen, your new hero: Bill Clinton.
I look forward to the inaugural pantsuits.
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The wind is howling with such force that it's almost comical, so Hairston, who's on the mountain hunting sheep, breaks out his iPhone to record an Instagram post, looking like one of those hackneyed meteorologists reporting from the middle of a hurricane. "We saw a group of rams on the far mountain, and now we're heading up to check out another area," he shouts into his phone. "We're just getting hammered by the wind."
Hairston, the 45-year-old founder of the hunting-gear company Kuiu, is after his first Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, a sure-footed ungulate that lives primarily above tree line, often in locations so steep and rocky that they're impossible to negotiate on two feet. "It's the pinnacle of big-game hunting," Hairston says. "You have to go farther and harder for them than for any other species."
Among a segment of hardcore big-game hunters, no brand is as revered as Kuiu. The company's high-performance fabrics — bonded fleece and waterproof breathable synthetics — are pulled directly from the mountaineering world, and its distinct Tetris-like camo pattern looks more like standard-issue SEAL gear than the fake shrubbery so common at Walmart. Today Kuiu camo is as much a status symbol in hook-and-bullet culture as Louis Vuitton's monogram is among the Hamptons set. And it has as many celebrity boosters: UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a fan. Metallica's James Hetfield owns a guitar emblazoned with Kuiu camo, and Kid Rock has a piano wrapped in it.
On Instagram, Hairston has some 21,000 followers who track his far-flung hunts and gear updates and tag their own posts with #kuiunation. Detractors, of which Hairston has a few, occasionally use the comments section to rail against his trophy shots and what they see as hunting for the 1 Percent. But it's hard to say how much Kuiunation or Hairston's critics will get from this impromptu weather report: With the thin air, he inhales heavily between sentences, and his voice is almost entirely drowned out by the wind's roar. After stashing his phone in his pocket, he wipes snot from his nose.
"Ain't sheep hunting great!" he says.
The three hunters spend the next hour scouting and see a group of promising rams, but with darkness creeping over the eastern plains, we call it quits for the night and head back to camp. The next morning, conditions are far more favorable, so we load up our backpacks and set off in the violet predawn looking for a sheep to shoot.
When it comes to finding big rams, Burns and Hettinger are two of the best in the business. Burns works for Kuiu as its lead product tester and resident hunting guide. Hettinger's main gig is as a personal hunting guide for rich clientele; he's here because he knows these mountains better than just about anyone.
Once outside of camp, it takes Burns and Hettinger less than 10 minutes to spot the same group of rams two ridgelines over, a straight-line distance of maybe a mile. Hairston has a rare management tag from the Taos Pueblo, a 120,000-acre tribal homeland in northern New Mexico, which requires him to shoot an old ram, eight to 11 years old, that probably won't survive another winter or two, its molars ground down so far that it'll eventually starve. Based on its horns, the largest in the group looks like a shooter, but to get within range we have to hike up and over a 13,000-foot peak, then down and around the back side of the ridge where the sheep were first seen. Doing so takes most of the morning, stopping and starting to catch our breath and continually watch the movement of the rams. Now, as the three hunters prepare to clamber to the edge of a slight rock outcropping to take a closer look, Hairston unlatches a custom-made .300 WSM rifle from the side of his backpack and loads a 200-grain bullet into the chamber. "It feels good to finally get some lead in the pipe," he says.
But in the four hours we've been on the move, the sheep have wandered into the upper reaches of a grove of pine trees, behind a slight knoll. No shot. The three reassess. They settle on crawling to the edge of the knoll, knowing that Hairston will be within 150 yards of the animals, a strategy that could easily spook them.
"We can roll right over the top," Hettinger says, "but we won't have much time to decide whether to shoot."
"If we push them," says Burns, "we won't see them again — not on this trip."
Both turn to Hairston to make the call. "That's fine," he says with grin. "We're professionals. This is what we do for a living."
You'll be forgiven if your idea of hunting is paunchy old dudes rumbling down back roads in beat-up pickup trucks. Plenty of sportsmen still shoot whitetails out of tree stands or wait on the edge of sloughs for a flock of mallards to decoy in. But these days, hunting has been embraced by a new breed of devotees: athletic, tech-savvy, ethically minded professionals who like to play year-round in the mountains. They're often the same mountain bikers and runners on the trails outside Moab or Bozeman in summer. But come fall, they trade Lycra for camo and pick up a rifle or bow, many for the first time.
Tim Ferriss, the 4-Hour Work Week guru, is a recent convert to hunting. So is actor Chris Pratt. Even Facebook king Mark Zuckerberg has boasted about killing the meat he eats. Much of hunting's newfound appeal is because the payoff is a year's supply of organic, antibiotic-free backstraps — the new ethical eating. But it's also a way for mountain lovers to get deep into the outdoors, tempting people who have no desire to sit in a duck blind.
"It's a totally different way of interacting with these wild places," says Kenton Carruth, co-founder of the performance-hunting apparel company First Lite. "I know plenty of pro mountain guides who are in the woods every day and they've never seen a wolf, but that's because hikers or climbers are always walking around. They're never silent, still, taking in every sound and smell. As a hunter, I've seen a wolf quite a few times."
For adventure athletes, hunting is a challenge that's every bit as difficult as finishing an ultramarathon — stalking animals for miles on end, packing out hundreds of pounds of meat, navigating through the backcountry in snowstorms. It also offers the rush that comes with having to make consequential decisions in the mountains, just like in climbing.
"The athletic world is very physical but pretty sterile," says Mark Paulsen, a former strength and conditioning coach who has worked with NFL players. "Whether you're on a football field or on a basketball court, it's a known event. Whereas you go into the woods, you have no idea what you might be heading into. For people who love the mountains, that's the beauty of it."
Paulsen now owns Wilderness Athlete, which creates nutritional products like meal-replacement powders for these new so-called backpack hunters. Twenty years ago he was training athletes at the University of New Mexico when a friend took him bow-hunting for elk, hiking six miles into the mountains with 70 pounds of gear. The weight and altitude nearly killed him. "I wanted to throw up, lie down, crawl under a tree," he says. "I thought, 'This the most athletic thing I've ever done in my life.' " On the last day of the hunt, a bull elk bugled so close that Paulsen could feel it in his rib cage. He felled the bull with an arrow from 15 yards. "It was the single most exhilarating experience of my life," he says.
If backpack hunting can be said to have a celebrity, Hairston is it. Much of that has to do with his seemingly endless series of big hunts, which he regularly posts about on Instagram, much to the dismay of anti-hunters and even some in the hunting world. In the last six months alone, he has bagged a trophy room full of animals. In July, he shot a 3x4 blacktail buck in northern California. In August, he flew to the Yukon's far north and killed a 10-year-old Dall sheep with perfectly symmetrical 42-inch horns. In September, on private land just north of Bozeman, Montana, while hunting with his eight-year-old son, Cash, and his 72-year-old father, he brought down a monster bull elk with a compound bow.
"It's in our DNA," says Hairston. "It's two million years of genetics. Whenever I hear criticism online I just respond to them: 'Before you knock it, get out and do it.' "
Up close, bighorn rams register less as living creatures than as props in a prehistoric diorama in a natural history museum. Their tousled, purplish coats gleam in the sun, and the growth rings on their horns are demarcated by clear, dark lines. With a good spotting scope, you can age a sheep by counting the rings at a distance of a few hundred yards or more. Few people are better at this, or enjoy it as much, as Hettinger and Burns.
Hairston met Burns at a trade show a decade ago. At the time, Burns had become something of a phenom in the hunting world by besting Montana's archery record for a nontypical elk. He'd tracked the animal for three days before sneaking within 12 yards and shooting it with an arrow. The horns alone weighed 54 pounds. He was just 22 at the time. Burns has racked up an impressive series of kills — two of which landed him on the Boone and Crockett Club's record list, essentially the Billboard music charts for hunters. But these days his knowledge of and obsession with sheep has earned him the nom de guerre Sheep3PO. "The only way to get him to shut up about sheep," Hairston says, "is to turn him off."
Burns and Hairston hunt together multiple times a year, taking pride in going farther afield than nearly anyone. Lately that's meant to Canada's far north for 10-day expeditions with a local guide — a prerequisite when buying a sheep tag up there. "The guides are often excited, because they've never been able to take clients to some of these places," says Hairston. "They're too difficult to access, but with us they know we can go." On their Yukon hunt this year, they flew to a remote airstrip near the Arctic Circle, crossed a river via boat, and then hiked three days into the mountains before they were even in sheep territory.
This New Mexico hunt is a far cry from those expeditions, but it's a better bet for scoring an old bighorn. As we crawl to the edge of the knoll for a closer look at the group of five rams that moved off downhill, it becomes clear the oldest one is perfect. He has a massive body, probably 300 pounds, with thick horns that end in flat stubs, the product of years of bashing heads with rivals during the rut. He's nine, maybe 10 years old based on his growth rings. Hairston drops his backpack and lies flat on his belly, propping the rifle up on his bag to take aim.
"The one on the left," Burns says. "He's the one." The rams are grouped together tightly, and they clearly sense that something is amiss. At first they dart one way, then another. Finally, they disappear into the trees. Hairston never pulls the trigger.
"Fuck," says Burns. "Fuck."
Hairston slowly gets up and looks back with a pained smile. "I never had a shot," he says as way of explanation. Now the animals are gone, maybe for good. "Come on," Burns says. "Let's get ahead of them." So we take off side-hilling it across the mountain, doing our best to catch up to an animal that can run uphill faster than most NFL cornerbacks can on AstroTurf.
Like many hunters, Hairston views the sport as the ultimate proving ground. It's part of the reason he is so fond of the idea of backpack hunting, which may be the sport's purest, most self-reliant expression. Before setting out, he often fills out spreadsheets with each piece of gear and its corresponding weight listed in ounces. "You've got to," he says. "Every once adds up over a 10-day period to thousands of extra calories burned." He budgets two pounds of food per day, divvied up by day in Ziploc bags. He also trains year-round, spending 10 to 15 hours per week in the gym or hiking with sandbags in his backpacks. For mountaineers, none of this is new, but in the hunting world there are only a handful of people who prep the way he does.
Hairston has been hunting in one form or another since he was a kid growing up in Southern California. Like his father, Hairston took up football in high school and then college, playing linebacker. He was good enough that the San Francisco 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1995. He stayed with the team for a season without playing a down, then retired a year later after suffering an injury to his C5 and C6 vertebrae during a mini-camp with another team. His career as an NFL player was over before it even began. "I couldn't really watch football for a few years," he says. "I was angry about what it had done to me."
Hairston then sold commercial real estate, flipped a few franchises, and became increasingly focused on hunting. Around that time he was often out with Jonathan Hart, a friend from college. On their first backcountry hunt together, in Idaho's White Cloud Mountains, the weather fluctuated wildly — cold and snowing one day, sunny and 80 degrees the next — and their gear was soaked nearly the entire time. Both knew there had to be something better.
Hart thought about the gear he used for other outdoor activities. "In my garage I'd have shotguns and rifles and bows and arrows, but I also had kayaks and climbing gear and ice axes," he says. The apparel options for each of those sports, he noticed, was far superior to anything he had for hunting. Hairston had a similar epiphany when realized he was shopping for his gear more in REI than Bass Pro Shops.
So in 2005 Hairston and Hart decided to make high-performance synthetic gear specifically for hunters. They named it Sitka, after a town in Alaska. They designed a new camo pattern, made some sample jackets and pants, and then convinced mail-order catalog Schnee's to take a chance on the line. Sitka was a hit from the get-go, finding a home with sportsman looking for an upgrade from the subpar cotton offerings. By 2008, Sitka topped $4 million in sales and its products were on store shelves across the country, including Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's. In 2009, W.L. Gore & Associates, the $3 billion behemoth behind Gore-Tex, acquired Sitka for an undisclosed sum. Today it's one of the largest brands in the performance-hunting space.
The deal was worth millions, but the partnership between Hairston and Hart unraveled. Hairston never wanted to sell, he says, and his misgivings became apparent during a meeting about the acquisition. Execs wanted to expand Sitka's footprint, making new camo patterns for whitetail and duck hunters. In Hairston's view, this was unthinkable. "You lose the core appeal," he says.
Increasingly frustrated, Hairston left Sitka (Hart says he was simply not offered a job after the sale) and immediately got to work on Kuiu. With Kuiu, which he named after a game-rich Alaskan island — perhaps not coincidentally located across an icy strait from Sitka — Hairston decided to sell online, directly to consumers; that way, he'd be able to control everything and avoid retail markup. He worked with an engineer to create a carbon fiber backpack frame that was lighter and more ergonomic than anything on the market — and that could comfortably carry 120 pounds of fresh meat. He teamed up with the Japanese company Toray, a competitor to Gore-Tex, to develop a line of apparel. During the 18 months it took to produce everything, Hairston blogged obsessively about the process, building anticipation and earning trust among a dedicated contingent of hunters.
Kuiu launched in 2011 and was an immediate success. It now sells everything from $300 rain jackets to backpacks, game bags, and tents. Sales are approaching $50 million, at least according to Hairston, and the company is expanding its offerings beyond hunting. The Navy SEALs, he says, have reached out to develop a line of tactical gear (to be released to Kuiu customers in 2017), and even Disney hired Kuiu to create a backpack frame for its costumed performers. Hairston has plans for the company's first brick-and-mortar store in 2018, and a traveling pop-up store will be hitting the road this summer.
With Kuiu's success, Hairston has fielded a number of offers to buy the company, but says he'd rather be good than big: "I made that mistake with Gore. I won't make clothes for women, and I won't make clothes for fat guys, because then the skinny guys won't look good in them. I want Kuiu to be an aspirational brand."
After passing on the shot on the big ram, Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger get into position atop another rock outcropping, just up-valley from where the rams disappeared. The vantage point offers a clear sight line into the bowl below. But the sheep never show up.
The hunters are silent, pondering the next move — if there is one. Earlier in the morning, Burns had checked his phone and noticed a photo about an acquaintance's recent, unsuccessful hunt. The post basically said the experience of hunting in the mountains was reward enough. "That's great and all," Burns said, "but I'd rather get something. You either win or you lose."
Hairston does not like to lose. In the business world his competitiveness has earned him a fair amount of flak, including criticism by competitors for misleading claims about the performance of his products. But much of the concern centers around conservation. Whereas most of the new hunters packing rifles into the backcountry are doing so on public land, with tags won in public lotteries, many of Hairston's hunts are through private landowners or outfitters. To some this resembles the pay-to-play hunting model so common in Europe, where it's a rich man's sport. Walter Palmer, the dentist who shot Cecil the lion, placed a big order from Kuiu before he jetted off to Zimbabwe. And Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who have been photographed at length with their kills, are Kuiu customers and friends of Hairston's.
Kuiu donates a fair amount of money to conservation organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which have been a boon for those species. But a central tenet of organizations like these and many state wildlife agencies is protecting species with funds raised by auctioning off premium hunting tags, some that sell for upwards of $100,000. It's an effective strategy in some areas, but it's also controversial because it's hard to know just how much money is going to conservation. It can also come at the expense of public-draw hunters.
"We start to get into trouble," says Land Tawney, director of the nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, "when more and more tags are allocated in the name of raising money, and then we turn into a system where only the rich and elite have the opportunity to get those tags."
Plus, selling high-dollar licenses tacitly feeds a trophy-hunting mentality that continues to flag the sport — warranted or not — as hunters go after animals simply because they'll score well on a record list.
"When the pursuit of an animal as a status symbol becomes more important than the experience surrounding it," says author and TV host Steven Rinella, a respected figure in the outdoors world, "you enter into very troubling terrain."
Hairston has turned Kuiu into a cult favorite by transforming his camo apparel into a hardcore-lifestyle brand, much like CrossFit, and making himself the face of the company. That plays well when you're selling products and prepping for big trips, but it can come off as self-aggrandizing once an animal is on the ground.
Jonathan Hart, Hairston's former business partner, sums him up this way: "It's like in Seinfeld, the J. Peterman catalog that Elaine works for. It's all about him. Jason is about Jason."
After losing the rams in the trees, Hairston and Burns discuss their options. By now, the animals may be long gone. The wind is blowing, circling around the mountain, and we start moving back to where we last saw the rams. Hettinger sets off to track where they went. Then suddenly, there they are, just a hundred yards downhill. Hairston and Burns take up nearly the exact same positions they had an hour earlier, while Hettinger creeps closer to spook them out of the trees. This time, the big ram shows itself clean, broadside to Hairston. He shoots.
The report, like a door slam, quickly dissipates in the wind. From below the ridge, the sound of snapping branches rings out — the ram stumbling at full gait into a tree. Then it's just wind. Burns reaches over and fist pumps Hairston. "You got him," he says. "You got him." Burns grabs his spotting scope and runs downhill toward where the ram disappeared. Within seconds he lets out a high-pitched yip. "Yeaaooo! He's right down here."
By the time Hairston arrives, Burns and Hettinger are already marveling at the ram's thick, almost violet cape. "That is as an awesome of a cape as you will find on a bighorn," says Burns. "Look at the mass on that thing!"
"Awesome," Hairston says. "That is awesome."
After admiring the ram for a solid 15 minutes, the hunters drag him under a few big trees for photos. Burns breaks out a bottle of Super Glue to affix the ram's mouth shut, so it doesn't hang lose. Then we spend the next hour shooting photos: Hairston alone with his kill; Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger with the ram; a close-up of the animal's horns. After they're sure there are enough good pics, Burns and Hettinger break out knives no bigger than X-Actos and carefully start removing the hide, everything from the hoofs to the head, to preserve for the taxidermist. Hairston wants a full-body mount to display in Kuiu's offices. As his partners cape the animal and cut off each quarter, Hairston quickly debones the meat, making it lighter for the pack out. Still, the meat, horns, and cape weigh a combined 150 pounds or so, and it takes three and a half hours to get it the mile or two back to camp.
Once there we all unpack our bags into our tents, then regroup around a fire. Soon everyone is emailing about the day's events. Hairston texts with Joe Rogan about an upcoming elk hunt. Eventually, we call it a night. Hairston heads off to his Kuiu tent, tucking the sheep's cape and head into the vestibule so a bear doesn't get it in the night. It's a strange sight, but it's hard to blame him: even sticking out of the top of his pack, the ram still looks regal.
Earlier in the day, shortly after shooting the sheep and walking down to where it lay, Hairston did something almost all hunters do. He set his gun and backpack down and crouched beside the animal, with his hand on its shoulder, clearly in awe. And then a silence came over him. Everyone stopped and let him have the moment.
Finally, Burns weighed in. "That thing is just the perfect sheep," he said.
After a few more seconds of silence, taking in the animal before him, Hairston looked up and agreed. "It's good to be a winner."
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Roughly 300 people — mostly men, from high-school jocks to potbellied dads — know just what they're here for: more muscle, more energy, more libido. "I want to get really vascular," says a guy in his thirties, referencing the pipelike veins coursing beneath the skin of pro bodybuilders. He has short brown hair, hairless arms, and a T-shirt that reads, I may look alone, but really I'm just that far ahead. An older, balding man next to him says he just wants to feel younger.
Working the line is a bouncy brunette pouring plastic shot glasses full of Windex-blue liquid. Most of the guys grab one and toss it back, no questions asked. "It's a preworkout," she says, "and it's $35 inside." By "preworkout" she means it's designed to give you a jolt of energy before the gym. Exactly how it does this isn't a question anyone seems to be asking. Inside the store, Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar, are pills and powders that claim to do everything from boost sex drive to increase muscle mass and dissolve fat.
Boca Nutrition's owners, PJ Braun and Aaron Singerman, are greeting customers like old friends, with bear hugs and handshakes. Both men are absurdly muscular. Singerman, 36, is 6-foot-2 with slicked-back brown hair. He has a goatee and narrow-rimmed glasses, and his bulky frame fills out his blue T-shirt like an overstuffed bag. Braun, 35, who has black hair gelled into short spikes, is shorter and bulkier. Stretch marks scar his arms.
In addition to Boca Nutrition, the pair owns the supplements manufacturer Blackstone Labs, which they started in 2012. Since then the company has hawked tens of millions of dollars' worth of products promising to make men stronger, bigger, last longer in the sack, and even gain a mental edge. For the most part, their over-the-counter powders do exactly what they claim to do, in part because they sometimes include compounds not approved or even banned by the FDA. It's a legally dubious but common practice — and an easy way to make a killing while giving people the results they want. (Braun calls this a mischaracterization: "We have always tried to produce nothing but cutting-edge and compliant products. As soon as we have any direction from the FDA on an issue it has not spoken on before, for better or worse, we respect its statement and adjust our products accordingly.") Blackstone has grown by 100 percent every year since opening shop five years ago. Its sales now top $20 million annually, and it's featured in Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing companies. And Braun and Singerman are far from done.
"I am not even fucking close to satisfied with Blackstone Labs," Braun boasted in a video posted to Facebook last year. "I want to be the biggest company in the world."
Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar is their newest venture, a retail store that serves up various protein-packed shakes and sells Blackstone's full line of supplements. The sleek space, with shelves full of oversize bottles and racks of workout gear, is like a Whole Foods for gym rats. They opened the first store seven months ago in West Boca. Today is the grand opening of their second location, and devotees have shown up for discounted supplements and to meet a handful of celebrity bodybuilders flown in for the occasion, including Kai Greene, the most famous weightlifter since Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But among this crowd, Braun and Singerman are the real stars. They pose for photos and hype their cars, a Corvette and a Ferrari, both black and parked prominently out front. One of the fanboys is a 24-year-old named Brett, who drove four hours to attend the event. "I couldn't help but show my support for PJ and Aaron," he says. A personal trainer from Palm Coast, Florida, Brett has used a wide variety of Blackstone products, including one called Ostapure, a supplement that contained steroid-like drugs called SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators). The unlicensed drugs were developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck as a potential treatment for muscle wasting in cancer patients. But it was the drugs' muscle-mass-building properties that made them a big hit among weightlifters like Brett. Blackstone recently stopped selling Ostapure after being sued by another supplements maker hoping to clean up the industry. "The strongest product of theirs," Brett says a bit wistfully.
Inside the store, Braun shows me one of his latest creations, muscle-building pills inside a black bottle labeled brutal 4ce in blocky letters that drip with blue icicles. "It'll make you a lot stronger and more aggressive in the gym," he says. "Let's say you're 35, 40 years old and your testosterone isn't as high as it used to be. This will keep your testosterone so high that you'll be like an 18-year-old!"
When I ask Braun how, he launches into a chemistry lecture. "Your body converts it into 4-andro [a testosterone booster], so it'll bulk you up," he says, noting that Brutal 4ce has the side effect of creating estrogen, which could give you what bodybuilders call "bitch tits." This can be countered, however, by taking an estrogen blocker. "Most of our customers are pretty knowledgeable," he says, "so they know they need to do that."
As the festivities wind down, I grab a $46.99 bottle of Cobra 6 Extreme, an amped-up version of their top-selling Cobra 6, a preworkout supplement formulated with various stimulants. At the checkout, a slim guy in his twenties, part smoothie barista, part pharmacist, looks at what I'm buying and asks me if I've tried it before. No, I say.
"So you don't know what you're getting yourself into?"
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"If you're not used to taking a lot of stimulants, you should start with the regular Cobra 6. You might not like the way this makes you feel."
In the U.S., dietary supplements are a $38-billion-a-year industry. Sixty-five percent of men in America take one, whether to lose weight, grow hair, gain muscle, or keep an erection long into the night. There's a wide range of products, and most veer toward opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side are the homeopathic cures and the herbal remedies like echinacea, products that may not do much of anything besides drain your bank account. On the opposite end are the products that work precisely because they rely on pharmaceutical ingredients, many not listed anywhere on the label. In 2014, for example, the FDA recalled several weight-loss supplements with names like Super Fat Burner because they contained the prescription drug sibutramine, as well as phenolphthalein, a banned laxative linked to genetic mutations — but not before a rash of hospitalizations.
It's the supplements laced with prescription drugs that are more troubling. They result in 23,000 emergency room visits every year, and more than 2,000 hospitalizations. The supplements are often sold under names like Lean FX and Stiff Nights, and the ingredients are a list of acronyms only a chemist could decipher: DMAA, 17b-hydroxy 2a, or 17b-dimethyl 5a-androstan 3-one azine.
"We're talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. "The more likely it helps your workout," Cohen says, "the more likely it's going to adversely affect your health."
The FDA oversees the industry, but it's woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don't bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there's effectively no punishment if they don't. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients. ("Blackstone continues to innovate by researching new products and new ingredients," says Braun. "If anything, we would welcome clearer guidance from the FDA so we don't have to discontinue any products.")
"It's the Wild West," says Dan Fabricant, who was the FDA's director of the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs from 2011 to 2014. "In weight loss, sexual enhancement, and bodybuilding categories, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Blackstone, according to its critics, has exploited this system better than most, and exactly how it does this is a case study in how to game a failing regulatory system. For one, Braun and Singerman aren't shy about marketing their legally ambiguous products: They often advertise the active ingredients right on the label and promote them with ads full of young women who could moonlight in beer commercials. They're also constantly active online. Blackstone has some 25,000 Instagram followers; Braun has over 100,000. His account is littered with shirtless selfies and videos of him driving his Ferrari or pimped-out Jeep. He's also the star of a weekly YouTube show with his wife, the former pro wrestler Celeste Bonin, titled Beauty & Braun, which covers the daily lives of the couple, from gym sessions to discussions about breast implants. Until recently he also hosted a daily question-and-answer session on Periscope called "Cardio Q&A," featuring Braun on a treadmill, chugging orange Pedialyte and answering a wide range of queries from Blackstone users. One time he doled out advice ("No matter how mature you think they are, it's not good to settle down with a 19-year-old girl"), but usually he just hyped his products. During one appearance, Braun announced the "dick pills" Blackstone was working on weren't coming along the way he wanted. "I've been working on that for a long time," he said. "But they will eventually come out."
Two days after the Boca Nutrition opening, I visit Braun and Singerman at Blackstone HQ, an unbranded, 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Boca Raton. The office walls are covered in photos and framed bodybuilding-magazine covers, several of which feature Braun in full flex. On Singerman's desk is a bronze statue of a seminude Adonis-like man holding a barbell. It's a first-place trophy from the Mr. Olympia contest, which Singerman got at auction. "You hate to see that, because it means the guy who sold it was struggling financially and was forced to sell it," Singerman says. "But I love it."
Braun and Singerman each have a long history in bodybuilding. Singerman, from New Orleans, started hitting the gym when he was 13 and kept working out, even through a cocaine and heroin habit he picked up after dropping out of high school. At 27 he witnessed a friend overdose and die, so he got clean and doubled down at the gym. In 2005, he got a job as a personal trainer and started writing thousands of posts on bodybuilding message boards and eventually became marketing director for Ironmag Labs, a supplements company owned by businessman Robert Dimaggio, who had become notorious for selling sketchy supplements. Singerman convinced Dimaggio to bring on Braun, whom he'd met at a bodybuilding competition, as the company's top sponsored athlete.
Braun, who grew up in Connecticut, had taken to the gym in order to try to impress his absentee father. "My father wouldn't be proud or say, 'Good job,' " says Braun. "He would just say, 'Oh, you know, there's always somebody better. You can do better.' " Braun went to the University of Connecticut but dropped out to become a personal trainer. Then he took up professional bodybuilding.
Blackstone's genesis was in 2012, when Braun helped Singerman sell 7,000 units of something called Super DMZ. The product contained two designer steroid-like ingredients, dymethazine and methylstenbolone, that few outside bodybuilding circles knew much about. Braun and Singerman, however, recognized that these prohormones, as they're called, were groundbreaking at helping gym rats get ripped. Their boss, Dimaggio, had helped create Super DMZ but turned it over to Braun and Singerman to hawk. "We were able to sell those 7,000 units in five weeks," Singerman explained in an online interview. "We gave Robert his money back and each made $75,000." But prohormones hadn't yet been banned, so the pair ordered more and continued selling under the name Blackstone Labs. In just 10 months they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and moved operations from a makeshift office in Braun's townhouse into their current warehouse. "We bought more of the Super DMZ, sold it, and created a second product, third product, fourth product, fifth product, etc.," Singerman says in the same video. By the time prohormones were finally banned, in 2014, Blackstone was up and running with a full line of supplements, from postworkout muscle builders to meal-replacement formulas. "We've been fortunate enough to be the hot company," says Braun.
In their office, Singerman points to a small photo of the two men leaning against brown shipping boxes piled up to their armpits. "That's all Super DMZ," Singerman says proudly. "This was our original shipment."
The reason Super DMZ and prohormones finally became illegal has something to do with Blackstone's supplier. The product was being manufactured by a New York company called Mira Health Products. In 2013, at least 29 people developed varying levels of liver disease after taking a vitamin called B-50 sold by the company. After investigating, the FDA discovered B-50 and many of Mira's other products included high levels of prohormones, which were not listed anywhere on the label. The FDA forced Mira to recall all those pills and officially banned prohormones, including the ones in Super DMZ — which Blackstone listed on the bottle. None of that stopped Blackstone from continuing to sell them. In fact, at nearly the same time, the company released a new product called Metha-Quad Extreme, which contained prohormones. It wasn't until September 2014 that Blackstone stopped selling prohormones altogether to abide by FDA regulations.
"We lost 30 percent of our total revenue," Singerman says. "But the following month we went back up, because the truth is that people always want the next best thing."
Back in their warehouse, Braun and Singerman lead me up a flight of stairs to an open space with a long brown table and black swivel chairs. Here they're formulating the "next best thing." Another muscle-bound man, this one with a pink Mohawk and a lip ring, is scribbling symbols and numbers on a whiteboard. "This is our chemist, Bryan," says Singerman. "We're doing some really cool stuff with Bryan."
Bryan Moskowitz joined Blackstone in early 2015. Before that, Braun and Singerman formulated all the company's supplements. Neither of them has any formal education, so they hired Moskowitz, who has a master's degree in organic biochemistry from Georgia Tech and calls himself the "Guerilla Chemist." Moskowitz counts among his role models Patrick Arnold, who's infamous for creating three hard-to-detect steroids, two of which were distributed by balco, the lab linked to disgraced athletes Jose Canseco and Marion Jones — and whose founder, Victor Conte, was sentenced to four months in prison. Moskowitz looks up to Arnold enough that he even posted an Instagram photo of his and Arnold's faces Photoshopped onto an image of Breaking Bad's Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in hazmat suits, having just finished cooking a batch of crystal meth.
Arnold is also credited with introducing the powerful stimulant DMAA to the supplements market. Eli Lilly created the drug in 1944 as a nasal decongestant but removed it from the market in 1983 because it caused headaches, tremors, and increased blood pressure. Arnold reintroduced it years later, in 2006, as a way for its users to get a jolt of energy before the gym. In one month alone, in 2013, the FDA received 70 reports of liver disease and one death caused by OxyElite Pro, a popular supplement with DMAA.
In the boardroom, Braun explains that Moskowitz helped design the company's latest product, Brutal 4ce. The steroid that powers it, DHEA, is banned or prescription-only in just about every country except the United States. When I ask Oliver Catlin, the president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute and the Banned Substances Control Group, why it's still legal, he simply says, "I don't know. Ask Orrin Hatch."
Orrin Hatch is the powerful seven-term senator from Utah who pushed through a 1994 law in Congress called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (dshea). The bill defines what a dietary supplement is: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or amino acid (basically, anything found in nature). And while it explicitly states that it can't be a drug, the law also prevents the government from prescreening and preapproving supplements. So supplements don't require FDA approval the way, say, a cancer drug might, even though they may have the same active ingredient. Utah is one of the major producers of supplements. In fact, it is the state's third-largest industry, earning $10 billion per year. Back when the law was written, the industry was mostly homeopathic products, but it has since boomed, and the law created cover for aggressive manufacturers willing to flaunt the regulations.
Also written into dshea are a series of loopholes that allow steroids sold prior to the law's passing to be grandfathered in, like the DHEA in Blackstone's Brutal 4ce — even though it'll get you banned by nearly every sporting league on the planet, including MLB, the NFL, and the NCAA.
"That's one of those things," says Singerman about sports testing. "When a high school athlete asks if it's OK to take [Blackstone's] Dust V2, I go, 'No, probably not.' "
Braun and Singerman are similarly unfazed about SARMs, the unapproved cancer drugs in Ostapure. "If you look at the actual literature," says Singerman, "it's all positive. I've used it plenty of times, and I like putting out products that I actually use."
When I ask them whether they're worried about the potential side effects of their products, Singerman is quick with a scripted answer. "We go through the available literature and studies," he says. But when I press him, his next response seems more honest.
"I am a libertarian," Singerman says. "I believe that it's the person's decision. As long as they're an adult."
But they have no way of knowing how different people might react. "One person could be fine, and another person could have a heart attack," says Dr. Armand Dorian, an ER physician in Los Angeles who often treats patients injured by dietary supplements. "It's rolling the dice."
Take Jesse Woods. In 2009, the 28-year-old went online and ordered a bottle of M-Drol pills from a Texas-based company called TFSupplements. Woods, who weighed 150 pounds, was looking to add muscle. "I'm a small-framed guy," he says, "so I was trying to bulk up." He did. In just four weeks, he'd packed on 20 pounds of muscle. "I got big for a minute," he says. "Then I got sick."
Five weeks into taking M-Drol, Woods left work early because his stomach was bothering him. When his wife came home, she noticed his eyes were yellow. "I'm taking you to the emergency room," she said. Doctors performed a battery of tests, ultimately determining that Woods was experiencing liver failure. What Woods didn't know is that M-Drol contained the steroid-like prohormone Superdrol.
Woods spent 32 days in the hospital. He threw up nearly every meal he ate, lost 30 pounds, and developed a pungent odor, a common side effect of liver disease. "I never felt old until after that," says Woods, who's now 35. "Now I feel sluggish. I just feel like I aged. My liver has scar tissue on it. Doctors can't say how long I'll live."
When he was released from the hospital, Woods sued both TFSupplements and its supplier, Competitive Edge Labs, settling for an undisclosed amount. But the lawsuit didn't stop companies from selling Superdrol.
Blackstone has yet to be sued by any of its customers, and the FDA has generally left the company alone. "We haven't really had problems with the FDA," says Braun. But that may be simply because the agency is backlogged. It's also far more effective to go after the companies supplying the illegal ingredients than the ones marketing the final product. It's the former that are dealing with the overseas suppliers that produce the untested or illegal drugs. Singerman admits to purchasing Chinese ingredients but says it's something that's taken care of by the plants that manufacture Blackstone's products. I ask him who they are.
"Well, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is one."
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is the best example of a duplicitous company thriving in a broken system. Its founder, Jared Wheat, has a history of hawking high-demand substances. In the early '90s, he ran a high school ecstasy ring in Alabama and served 32 months in prison for it. He started Hi-Tech in 1998, and by 2003 the FDA had already warned the company about its dietary supplements, some of which contained an unlicensed drug similar to the one used in Cialis. But that didn't stop Wheat. By 2005 he was selling supplements that contained the banned stimulant ephedra. In early 2006 government officials raided his offices and seized 200 cases of supplements valued at $3 million, and in 2008 Wheat pleaded guilty to selling adulterated supplements and committing mail and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison, but he continued to operate Hi-Tech from his cell.
When I ask Pieter Cohen how Hi-Tech continues to conduct business in such a manner, he says that allowing any company to regularly sell synthetic ingredients as supplements is due to a major failure on the part of the government. "They're not doing their job," he says.
For their part, Braun and Singerman maintain that everything in their supplements appears right on the label.
To test that claim, I sent the Cobra 6 Extreme I purchased at Boca Nutrition to Oliver Catlin's Banned Substances Control Group. When I received the test results, it turns out Braun is right: The product is now devoid of the banned DMBA, a stimulant very similar to DMAA, that powered it.
"So is it safe to take?" I ask.
"Not necessarily," says Catlin. The readings revealed a powerful mix of new stimulants. That could be due to a combination of the ingredients listed on the label — a formula that includes caffeine and theobromine (an alkaloid of the cacao plant that can be deadly in large doses). "Or it could be something else," he says. "We target drugs we are concerned about, like DMBA, when we screen products like these. But sometimes there are new, unknown compounds present that we can't see."
Soon after my visit to Blackstone Labs, and after four years of working together, Braun and Singerman are at war. Singerman leaves Blackstone to pursue other projects. "But he still owns half the company," Braun explains, insinuating that the split is amicable. But the tone of their relationship quickly changes. "When the companies first split, I hoped we'd be friends again," Braun says during one of his online Q&A sessions. "But he did too many things."
Braun has since divested himself of Boca Nutrition, and Singerman has gone on to start a supplements company called RedCon 1. He is also rebranding another, Prime Nutrition, with none other than Hi-Tech's Jared Wheat, who was released from prison in 2011. Braun has taken over day-to-day control of Blackstone, and despite the schism, the company is thriving. Blackstone has moved into a much larger, 14,000-square-foot space, and Braun has introduced several new products, including a long-awaited libido booster called Entice. But the most surprising of his new releases is Dust Extreme, a preworkout supplement with DMAA, the infamous, banned stimulant popularized by chemist Patrick Arnold. It's a curious decision to sell the illegal ingredient, but Braun justifies it in a long video on Facebook.
"I believe that people should be allowed to take what they want to take," he says. "Are you completely safe if you have health conditions? No. If your blood pressure is high, should you be taking a product like this? Probably not. But these are things you should look at yourself. I believe we should all have the choice to put what we want in our body. You can go and buy cigarettes at any fucking gas station and they're guaranteed to kill you. You will die. So how dare the FDA come in and take away ingredients from us that give us awesome workouts?"
","tag_ids":[4748,5611],"publish_date":"2017-01-31T20:16:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T14:05:21.179Z","updated_at":"2017-01-31T21:51:59.078Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","keywords":"supplements, dietary supplements, blackstone labs, boca nutrition & smoothie bar, bodybuilding, muscle supplements, muscle building, ","description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jzRkyi","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Magazine Photograph by Shana Novak","caption":"P.J. and Celeste Braun were featured on the May 2015 cover of 'Iron Man Magazine.'","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_c-9c57d3e1-802d-4480-a15c-67a5c8a98ac5.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Newswire / Aaron Singerman","caption":"Braun, left, and Singerman turned Blackstone Labs into a a powerhouse earning more than $20 million a year.","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_b-b074ced0-e2a7-47ab-a93b-9835ef973f0c.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photo Illustration by Emily Shur","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_a-7a018373-b943-436b-8215-40db3942a4af.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/the-truth-about-herbal-supplements-20140102","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: The Truth About Herbal Supplements","contentId":168069,"contentHeadline":"The Truth About Herbal Supplements"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/the-dawn-of-bodybuilding-20121118","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Huge","contentId":168456,"contentHeadline":"Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Bodybuilding"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":463372,"old_id":null,"title":" Public Land For Sale! Here Are Some of the 3.3 Million Acres Being Eyed for \"Disposal\"","short_title":" Public Land For Sale! Here Are Some of the 3.3 Million Acres Being Eyed for \"Disposal\"","slug":"/adventure/articles/public-land-for-sale-here-are-some-of-the-33-million-acres-being-eyed-for-disposal-w463372","body":"Back in 1997, then Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt was required by Congress to "examine their holdings" — basically to rank public lands that the government could sell off to support an Everglades restoration project. The list, which is hosted here on Jason Chaffetz's (R-UT) Congressional Website, offers up a whopping 3.368 million acres in 10 states — specifically Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. While the exact land for sale is not identified, the counties where the land is held (190 in total) is. Connecting the dots isn't too hard to do to see which areas, and communities, will be affected. And it's clear that some of this so-called "disposal land" is far from worthless — especially for hunters, anglers, hikers, and bikers.
Why does this matter now? With public land sales back on the docket (H.R. 621, introduced by Chaffetz), this 1997 document is a sort of wish list of lands for sale (you can find another version on BLM's site). But even in 1997 this document was far from airtight: "Please note many lands identified appear to have conflicts which may preclude them from being considered for disposal or exchange," wrote then Assistant Secretary Bonnie Cohen. "Conflicts include high disposal costs, critical natural or cultural resources and habitat, mineral claims and leases, and hazardous conditions.” Many of the lands are home to endangered species, like the desert tortoise and Mexican gray wolf. Twenty years later, many of the potential conflicts have become more problematic, thanks to new National Monuments, newly identified species, and, let's not forget, outdoorsmen, who have always made use of the land — our land.
Below are some examples of land that could be on the auction block if Chaffetz's bill is passed. Get your checkbook ready!
State: Wyoming
County: Sheridan
The Potential Land: 35,200 acres of BLM-managed land in the Powder River Basin, which is just east of the Bighorn Mountains, popular with hikers, campers, horseback riders, and hunters.
State: Wyoming
County: Park
The Potential Land: 27,300 acres surrounding the Shoshone River, a popular fly-fishing stream in northern Wyoming. Most of the BLM-managed land in Park County is downstream of the town of Cody, which sits between the Big Horn, Owl Creek, Bridger, and Absaroka mountain ranges. Tourism is the town’s primary industry.
State: Oregon
County: Harney
The Potential Land: 44,000 acres in a county that’s home to Steens Mountain, a 9,733-foot peak that’s popular with campers and hunters, and Malheur National Forest.
State: New Mexico
County: Catron
The Potential Land: 25,000 acres that contain “cultural resources,” meaning it’s probably home to pueblo ruins. The land is most likely a giant tract southwest of the town of Quemado, and some of the land abuts the Gila National Forest, home to the endangered Mexican gray wolf, the Gila trout, and some of the best elk hunting in the U.S.
State: Colorado
County: Montrose
The Potential Land: 2,105 acres that is home to endangered species and “historic/cultural resources.” The surrounding area contains the Gunnison Gorge, famous for its rafting and fly-fishing trips, and Uncompahgre National Forest, which is home to elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, and mountain goat.
State: Nevada
County: Elko
The Potential Land: 208,900 acres that contains endangered species, historic resources, and is home to “wetlands/floodplain.” BLM-managed land makes up a giant percentage of land in Elko County, but exactly what land is up for consideration is unclear, or what the effects might be.
State: Arizona
County: Mohave
The Potential Land: 23,525 acres with mining claims and historic resources. A comment attached to the description notes that the land is “classified as habitat for the Desert Tortoise (a sensitive species).”
Total Acres That Could Be Up For Sale, By State:
Arizona: 453,950
Colorado: 93,741
Idaho: 110,022
Montana: 94,520
Nebraska: 6,615
Nevada: 898,460
New Mexico: 813,531
Oregon: 70,308
Utah: 132,931
Wyoming: 694,200
","tag_ids":[5798,5099],"publish_date":"2017-01-27T21:27:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T16:42:27.182Z","updated_at":"2017-01-28T02:45:08.688Z","data":{"meta":{"title":" Public Land For Sale! Here Are Some of the 3.3 Million Acres Being Eyed for \"Disposal\"","keywords":"public lands, hr 621, jason chaffetz, disposal land, land for sale, blm, department of interior, public land, DOI","description":"The Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act is on the docket, meaning a not-so-short list of land for sale is being passed around. How much? Try 3.4 million acres."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jet6hM","label":"PUBLIC LAND OWNER","media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Large Vertical Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":"Fishing in Harney, Oregon, a county that has some 44,000 acres of it deemed fit for \"disposal\" by the Department of Interior.","credits":"Getty Images","filename":"gettyimages-169275130-3749c3ee-f84f-4870-8680-d48bf577e1e1.jpg"}},"embeds":{},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"The Disposal of Excess Federal Lands Act is on the docket, meaning a not-so-short list of land for sale is being passed around. How much? Try 3.4 million acres.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":455184,"old_id":null,"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","short_title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","slug":"/features/articles/the-man-taking-down-big-sugar-w455184","body":"This past fall, Gary Taubes took his wife and two sons on a trip to a wildlife preserve in Sonoma County, California, the kind of place where guests learn firsthand about the species of the Serengeti. They slept in tents and spent the day among giraffes, zebras, antelope, and the like. One morning, Taubes and his boys awoke early. "It was 50 degrees out — freezing by our standards," he recalls. "I took the kids to breakfast, and" — his face takes on a pained expression — "how can I not give them hot chocolate?"
For most parents, indulging the kids with some cocoa would pose no dilemma. But Taubes, one of America's leading and most strident nutrition writers, is no ordinary father. His new book, The Case Against Sugar, seems destined to strike fear into the hearts of children everywhere. Taubes' argument is simple: Sugar is likely poison, and it's what is making our country fat. And not just fat but sick. So don't eat it. Ever.
A little much? Perhaps. But the kids did get the cocoa — on this one special occasion.
For Taubes, the cocoa conundrum is an occupational hazard for someone who describes his current mission as "the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas." But Taubes, 60, has never been one to shy away from extreme positions. His last two books, 2007's Good Calories, Bad Calories and 2010's Why We Get Fat, launched a nationwide movement to shun bread and embrace butter. Both argued that it's not how many calories we consume, but where they come from, and that eating fat doesn't actually make us so. These were bold statements at the time, and they had a big impact. "I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Thanks to Taubes' pro-fat pronouncements, Pollan says, "millions of Americans changed the way they eat. Doughnut, bread, and pasta sales plummeted, and we saw a change in the food conversation, the effects of which are still being felt today."
Now, with The Case Against Sugar, Taubes launches his toughest crusade yet: to prove that we've been bamboozled into thinking that cookies and soda are simply "empty" calories and not uniquely toxic ones. That's the result, he argues, of a long history of deception from the sugar industry and its support of shoddy science.
The audacity of those arguments makes Taubes an anomaly among nutrition writers, says John Horgan, director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. "He isn't content just to do public relations for scientists," Horgan says, meaning he doesn't rewrap scientists' findings with the simple, shiny packaging of journalism. Instead, he digs deep into the research, and if he finds it lacking, he attacks it. "He'll come right out and say if he thinks someone is an idiot," Horgan says.
With his new book, Taubes will likely have his largest platform, and an audience poised to listen. By now, nearly everyone believes that Americans eat too much sugar. Most experts agree that it's a major contributor to our nation's grim health: More than a third of adults are obese, and one in 11 has diabetes. This understanding has spurred campaigns for soda taxes nationwide — five measures were approved by voters in November — and moves by big companies to ban sugary drinks from workplace cafeterias. In August 2016, three class-action lawsuits were filed against General Mills, Kellogg's, and Post, alleging that the companies falsely claimed their cereals are healthy when, in fact, they're loaded with sugar.
Anyone else would be encouraged, but ever the brawler, Taubes points out flaws: Even these new anti-sugar crusaders, he says, are motivated by a naive, and ultimately dangerous, "less is better" view of sugar. To Taubes, the answer to our obesity crisis isn't more expensive soda and less sweetened cereals. It's to stop poisoning ourselves altogether.
"Sugar is like heroin to me," Taubes says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
Like the control room on a battleship, Taubes' office perches atop the Craftsman-style house he shares with his wife, the writer Sloane Tanen, and their sons. His office is a small, book-filled space with views of the surrounding Oakland hills. He guides me to a low seat near his desk.
I knew of Taubes' aggressive reputation and had seen his brash, combative videos on YouTube — densely reasoned, contrarian lectures about everything from the physiology of how insulin works in the blood to why we should eat meat and avoid carbs (which the body converts into sugar). His videos get hundreds of thousands of views and provoke both cheers and hisses in the blogosphere. I am surprised to find him quiet and soft-spoken.
He pulls out a package of Nicorette gum and pops a piece in his mouth.
"Do you smoke?" I ask.
Not for more than 15 years. "Nicotine is a great drug for writing," Taubes says. "I keep thinking once life calms down, I'll quit." His most vexing addiction, however, is the stuff he's spent five years researching. "Sugar is like heroin to me," he says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
He tries to eat no sugar at all, including honey and agave syrup, and limits fruit. But he insists, "I'm not a zealot." The family pantry — stocked by his wife, not incidentally — has an assortment of what he calls "crap snack health-food bars and juice boxes that Sloane says we have for kids who come over, because they expect it." When Taubes wants a treat, he nibbles on 100 percent chocolate. Because who wouldn't prefer a bar of compressed bitter paste to Godiva?
"The type I buy isn't that bad," he assures me, and then immediately recounts a story of a taxi driver he once gave some to who had to pull over to spit it out. While telling me this, he replaces his now well-chomped Nicorette with a new one. He will continue chain-chewing throughout the day.
Sugar and nicotine, he points out, are connected in more ways than we may think. The Case Against Sugar documents that in the early 1900s, tobacco companies began adding sugar to their products, which allowed people to inhale the smoke deeply, making cigarettes more palatable as well as more addictive and deadlier.
While Taubes has been writing and talking about sugar in one form or another since the early 2000s, with this book he wants to do something he says no one yet has: reveal the bad science that has enabled the sugar industry to mislead the public. By rooting through archives and obscure textbooks, he has uncovered, he says, evidence that sugar is not just the harmless, empty calories we indulge in, but that it may well be toxic, dangerous even in small amounts. It's a possibility that might make you hesitate handing your kids a mug of hot cocoa, too.
To get — and stay — lean and healthy, the conventional nutritional wisdom is simple: Eat less and exercise more. That's what the sugar industry would have us believe, too. (Coca-Cola, for example, now offers smaller-size cans to help consumers drink less soda — or just buy more cans of soda.) That's false, according to Taubes, and the reasoning is part of an industry-driven campaign that goes back to the 1950s. It was then that Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist at the University of Minnesota, first stated that fat — not sugar — causes the high cholesterol levels that lead to heart disease. What few people knew, however, is that Keys' research was funded by the sugar industry.
Taubes details how this pattern of influence ramped up in the 1960s and '70s, as the industry funneled money to scientists and public health officials to combat the notion that sugar was a unique cause of obesity and chronic illness. One of those recipients was Fred Stare, whose work as the founder and chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health was supported financially for decades by sugar purveyors like General Foods. The most public defender of sugar, Stare repeatedly asserted, even as late as 1985, that it is not "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
The industry's campaign scored a coup in 1976, when the FDA classified sugar as "generally recognized as safe" and thus not subject to federal regulations. In 1980, the U.S. government released its dietary guidelines, drafted by a team led by Mark Hegsted, who spent his entire career working under Fred Stare at Harvard. Taubes writes that those guidelines assured us: "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes."
The PR work paid off in other ways, too. Americans now consume 130 pounds of sugar a year, twice the amount we did in 1980. And while the industry told us to embrace sugar, dietary experts preached the gospel of low fat. Both groups assume all calories are created equal, whether they come from apples or apple pie. Such logic implies that a calorie of sugar is no more or less capable of causing obesity and diabetes than a calorie from any type of food.
Taubes presents a wholly different role for what sugar does in the body. "A calorie of sugar and one of meat or broccoli all have vastly different effects on the hormones and enzymes that control or regulate the storage of fat in fat cells," he says. But unlike pork or veggies, sugar has a uniquely negative effect: It causes the liver to accumulate fat and, at the same time, prompts the body to pump out insulin. Over time, Taubes insists, these elevated insulin levels lead to weight gain, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases. Which is to say, we don't blimp out or get sick because we eat too much and fail to exercise. It happens because we eat sugar.
At this point you may be wondering why we haven't put this whole debate to bed with broad, well-conducted research. The problem is that studies about nutrition are notoriously difficult to orchestrate. Most research has been observational: Scientists ask a group of people what they ate over a period of time and then try to tease out associations between their food intake and any diseases they contract. Obviously this approach is problematic. Even if subjects report their eating habits accurately (though they almost never do), it's difficult to know which foods initiate a given problem. If an association is found between hamburgers and heart disease, how would anyone know whether the problem is in the burgers or the buns? The best-run studies require confining subjects to a metabolic ward in a hospital for weeks, where researchers can control all the food they take in and measure all the energy they expend. It's incredibly expensive and nearly impossible to find someone willing to fund it.
Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold are among the few who are. After hearing Taubes on a 2011 podcast discuss the kinds of obesity experiments he'd like to see done, John Arnold, a former hedge-fund manager in Houston, reached out. It led to an Arnold Foundation grant of $35.5 million — money bestowed to Taubes to establish a foundation that would find answers to some of nutrition's toughest questions. In 2012, Taubes paired up with Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins trained physician and star in his field, and launched the nonprofit Nutrition Science Institute (NuSI). Taubes and Attia wanted NuSI to be a beacon, an institution with the experts, resources, and clearance to do the precise experimental science no one else had been willing to. "I thought there needed to be specific studies done to resolve what causes obesity and diabetes once and for all," Taubes says. "I wanted to put the issue to rest, have it recognized by people who could influence the medical establishment."
As late as 1985, Harvard nutritionist Fred Stare asserted that it is no "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
Taubes says he has always had issues with authority, beginning with his father, who was a photoelectric engineer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Xerox copying process. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Gary also lived in the shadow of his elder brother, Clifford. "He excelled at everything," says Taubes. "It was either give up or be supercompetitive."
When Clifford went to Harvard for physics, Gary followed suit. But after receiving a C minus in a quantum physics class, he switched to engineering. (Clifford went on to be a celebrated professor of mathematical physics at his alma mater.) It was then that Taubes read All the President's Men, which tells the story of the Watergate scandal, and he realized he could make a living kicking against authority. He became an investigative journalist, focusing on bad science. Nutrition was a natural fit. No other arena offers more complex or thornier issues to tackle or is so dear to the public's heart. Calling out the idiots here meant Taubes could influence what people put in their mouths every day.
While at Harvard, Taubes channeled his competitive fervor into sports. He played football and in the off-season he boxed. By 1987, when he moved to Venice Beach, California, Taubes worked out constantly, climbing the steps in Santa Monica canyon, roller-blading to Malibu and back, or running a five-mile loop. At the time he believed the cardio would allow him to eat whatever and how much he wanted. But despite all that calorie-burning, he began putting on pounds. It wasn't until 2000, when he adopted the low-carb recommendations of cardiologist Robert Atkins, that Taubes succeed in controlling his weight. That experience colored his thinking about the roles of diet and exercise in obesity.
Exercise, he now believes, plays no role in staying lean. Taubes doesn't dispute that exercise is good for the body and soul; it's just no way to lose weight. Yet he does look the part of a gym rat. His face is lean, his frame muscular. But if anything, Taubes says, avoiding sugar and carbs has allowed him to keep trim. His lunch order at a local burger joint: A one-pound slab of ground beef (no bun) heaped with bacon and smothered in guacamole — the only concession to the color green on the plate.
When I visited Taubes in October, a number of houses on his street had yard signs in support of Oakland's Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax. These are positive signs for the success of The Case — a good thing, because its author could use a win. It's been a tough year for Gary Taubes.
In December 2015, his partner Peter Attia abruptly left NuSI. (In a podcast a few months later, Attia disclosed that he's no longer interested in talking about nutrition.) Taubes calls it an amicable divorce, but he also says the Arnolds had invested in his ideas and Attia's competence, and after Attia left, things began to fall apart.
In January 2016, Kevin Hall, a National Institutes of Health scientist who was the lead investigator on the first NuSI study, recused himself from involvement with the foundation. He and Taubes had clashed on how to set up the pilot study — research that was supposed to address whether carbs were the primary driver of obesity — and when the results came out last summer, the two men couldn't agree on the interpretation of the findings or the quality of the study. NuSI, which was founded to bring clarity to the wildly complicated field of nutrition, ended up mired in the basic processes of scientific research. By late summer, the Arnolds had cut their funding. Taubes considers the episode "a learning experience in how easy it is for experiments to go wrong. Peter and I were like the Hardy Boys of not-for-profit research."
NuSI remains afloat, though barely. Taubes and two other employees continue on as volunteers, and he says the foundation still has unfinished studies awaiting results. He will also continue to solicit funding from wealthy investors, but the main hurdle he faces hasn't been lowered: Spending his career attacking the leading scientists in a field has made working with them rather difficult.
But in light of recent sugar-tax initiatives in Berkeley and San Francisco — both of which passed — Taubes seems to be at the front in the charge against sugar. During our interview, his desk was littered with literature from those trying to tax sugary beverages in cities across the country, along with articles on lawsuits being brought against cereal makers. Taubes hopes The Case will provide more ammo for these fights.
Still, he notes with some exasperation that such efforts continue to speak the language of Big Sugar: If we all just drank less soda and ate less cereal, the rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease would drop. Wrong. Taubes points to the public health initiative of putting calorie counts on menus. "That doesn't lead to any significant decrease in weight or consumption," he says, "because they're identifying the wrong problem."
This is key to Taubes' outlook on sugar. While you may eat desserts and drink sodas only occasionally and add just a sprinkle of sugar to your daily coffee — while maintaining a normal weight — he will tell you that you don't know what even that amount of sugar does to your body. As he puts it in The Case: "How much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we'll ingest."
In an ideal world, Taubes says, his book would lead people to force the FDA to investigate whether sugar is safe, as the agency proclaimed in 1976. That, he admits, is improbable, given the influence Big Sugar wields. Not that it will stop him from waging the war. "Once you've said publicly that the conventional thinking is wrong on something so profound as obesity and diabetes, you either move on to something else or you decide the injustice is such that you have to keep doing this work," he says. "And if you have to keep doing it, then you have to take the shit that comes with it."
Just don't sugarcoat it.
","tag_ids":[4748,23195],"publish_date":"2016-12-13T17:55:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","keywords":"sugar, big sugar, the case against sugar, health, feature, interview, problem with sugar, gary taubes, ","description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?"},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hrChGN","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Gary Taubes","caption":"In the 1980s, Taubes trained for New York City's Golden Gloves amateur boxing championship. He was knocked out cold in the second bout.","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_b-1e59e7eb-f6b5-42f9-8968-9305f13ea4eb.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photograph by Cody Pickens ","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_h-35217730-738e-4d8d-a617-041de2d0e40f.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/health-fitness/health/is-sugar-the-new-tobacco-20140723","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Is Sugar the New Tobacco?","contentId":174502,"contentHeadline":"Is Sugar the New Tobacco? "},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/michael-moss-on-the-birth-of-the-triple-double-oreo-20130318","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Birth of the Triple Double Oreo","contentId":168360,"contentHeadline":"Michael Moss on the Birth of the Triple Double Oreo"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454811,"old_id":null,"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","short_title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","slug":"/features/articles/the-long-game-of-liam-neeson---liam-neeson-interview-w454811","body":"Early one autumn evening, Liam Neeson strolls into a restaurant near Central Park, two blocks from his apartment, with one hand in his pocket and the other clutching a green Stanley travel mug.
Neeson carries this mug everywhere: movie sets, red-carpet premieres, New York Rangers games, even the occasional interview. "It's a specific kind of English black tea," he says when I ask what's inside. "Decaf. It's the only thing I drink." He's not kidding: When the waitress comes over to take his order, Neeson reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Ziploc full of tea bags, which he unzips and hands to her. "Could you make me a fresh one of these, please?" Then he hooks a finger into the mug, fishes out the old tea bag, and drops it in his water glass with a plunk. "Thanks, love."
Neeson folds himself into the leather booth as comfortably as is possible for a 6-foot-4 Irishman with shoulders like an armoire. He's feeling a little out of sorts today: He has just finished shooting two movies back-to-back — one in Atlanta, the other in London — and he is in New York for the first time in five and a half months. "It's nice to be home," he says. "But I'm feeling a bit like a three-legged stool." (Which, technically, would be the most stable stool, but you get his drift.) He brings up one of the movies he's here to promote — Silence, a historical epic directed by Martin Scorsese — and asks me how long it's currently running. I tell him the version I saw was just over two and a half hours. Neeson shrugs. "For Martin, I guess that's quite short."
Silence is a passion project of Scorsese's, one he's been trying to make for more than 25 years. It's based on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo about Jesuit missionaries — Neeson plays one named Ferreira — in 1640s Japan, where Christians are being systematically persecuted by the Buddhist dictatorship. The film has been through multiple writers and actors, but Scorsese stuck with it, and it's finally hitting theaters this month.
Neeson understands the value of playing the long game. It's a little hard to remember now that he's entrenched on the A-list, but for most of his career he was a solid leading man, though rarely much more. He was already 41, with 17 years' worth of film roles behind him, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Schindler's List, a role he'd reportedly beaten out Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford to get — but even that failed to give him Ford's or Costner's movie-star career. Neeson spent the next two decades turning in great performances in as many hits as misses (Batman Begins on the one hand, The Haunting on the other), until his late-period pivot toward ass-kicking made him one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. "Liam's ambition wasn't to do all the classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company," his old friend Richard Graham once said. "He wanted big parts in big movies." Now, in the fifth decade of his career, he has his pick of them.
Neeson keeps his coat on for our entire time together, either as a sort of armor or in case he decides to make a quick getaway. He's agreed to talk for 90 minutes, which I tell him isn't long for an in-depth cover story. "Well it's about 88 minutes more than I want to be here," Neeson says. "So."
That this rejoinder — delivered in his peaty growl — does not incite an immediate pants-shitting is due mostly to the fact that, intimidating though he may be, there's an obvious gentleness to Neeson, a vulnerability and tenderness that's plain on his handsome, timeworn face. Before he went around punching Albanians for a living, Neeson was usually cast in more introspective roles — professors, sculptors, and other sensitive types — wounded romantics who, like him, tended toward brooding and self-doubt. Women, naturally, went crazy for him: the lumberjack's body with the poet's heart. "It's not about looks, although he's a terrific-looking guy," his late wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, once said. "It comes from somewhere deeper than that. You feel that he's been through a history."
These days everyone knows that he has. Neeson is a widower, having lost Richardson seven years ago, following a skiing accident. Since then he has raised their two sons alone. Now the younger son is away at college and Neeson is home by himself. He still has his property in upstate New York, a big 1890s farmhouse he bought before he and Richardson were married. "He likes being there on his own, with his pool and his gym," Graham says. "He's always been very happy with his own company.
In many ways Neeson was born to play a priest. Tall, austere; slightly stooped yet unflaggingly upright; those searching eyes, that troubled soul. He's done it half a dozen times already: in 1985's Lamb (Brother Michael); 2005's Breakfast on Pluto (Father Liam); 2002's Gangs of New York (Priest Vallon, who wasn't an actual priest but wore the collar and wielded a crucifix in battle); even an episode of The Simpsons, on which his Father Sean taught Bart the way of the Lord.
Neeson was born William John but called Liam (short for William) after the local priest. He grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, the only son of Barney and Kitty Neeson, a school custodian and a school cook. His mother walked two miles to work each way and brought leftovers home to their council house; his father, according to Neeson's sister, "never said five words when two words would do."
Neeson learned the Mass in Latin as an altar boy: In nomine Patris, Dominus vobiscum, the whole deal. Church is where he first felt the magic of performance, the ceremony and theatricality of it — the robes, the candles, the liturgy; costumes, lighting, a script. His parish priest, Father Darragh, taught him to box when he was nine; a scrappy jabber with a strong left, Neeson eventually became the Ulster Province boys champion in three different weight divisions. But secretly he was afraid of getting hurt and, moreover, of hurting someone else. So when a blow to the head during a fight left him concussed, the 16-year-old hung up his gloves — but not before winning the fight.
It wasn't easy being Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and '60s. "You grew up cautious, let's put it that way," he says. "Our town was essentially Protestant, but there were a few Catholics on our street. The Protestants all had marches and bands and stuff. I didn't quite understand what it was about — 'Remember 1690? When Catholic King James was defeated by Protestant William of Orange?' Who gives a fuck?" As he got older, the situation got grimmer. "The Troubles started in '69 and then really kicked in from '70 to '71," he says. "Drive-by shootings, bombs. I was at university for one abortive year, and we were so fucking naive. You'd be in a bar, drinking a glass of cider, and suddenly soldiers would come in and say, 'Everybody out — there's a bomb scare.' We'd order more drinks to take across the street, then the soldiers would go off and we'd filter back into the bar. Fucking stupid."
Neeson reconnected with his Catholic roots in 1985 when he filmed a movie called The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. The three of them played Catholic missionaries in 18th-century South America. They had a priest with them on set in the jungle, and every Sunday he'd "say a simple little Mass, break a piece of bread, and read the Gospel for the week," Neeson says. "We'd discuss the passage and what it meant in today's world. It was very intimate and very cathartic in a lot of ways." A devilish grin: "Then you'd go home, have a few glasses of Guinness, and get laid. The delights of the flesh."
Neeson's part in The Mission was small but instrumental to his career. De Niro, whom he befriended, introduced him to an American casting director. When she needed an IRA operative for an episode of Miami Vice, she thought of Neeson. That got him a work visa and a foothold in the States.
He's still grateful. "A lovely, lovely man," Neeson says of De Niro. "He's a man of few words — I like that. He's the sort of guy who says, 'I'll call you Thursday at 3 o'clock' — and if he can't call, he'll call you Wednesday to say he can't. When he makes a commitment, he sticks to it. That's rare these days."
It was Neeson's longtime interest in the Jesuits that prompted him to take the role of Father Ferreira in Silence. We first meet Ferreira in the film's opening scene: He's dirty, bearded, his raiments caked in mud — a thoroughly broken man. He's forced to watch as Japanese Christians are crucified and tortured.
Neeson was eager for the chance to reunite with Scorsese, after the very brief experience working with him on Gangs of New York. "Martin demands real focus," Neeson says admiringly. "If there was a grip working a hundred meters away and Martin heard a piece of scaffolding fall — which doesn't even make a noise! — he would stop, turn to the first AD, and say, 'I've asked for silence. Why have you not got it?' Terrific."
(Unlike just about anyone with even a tenuous connection to the legendary director, Neeson calls Scorsese by his full given name. "I just feel I haven't earned the right to call him Marty." he says. "Everybody's always like, 'Marty this, Marty that.' You don't know him. I don't know him.")
Scorsese says that Neeson was one of the key elements to finally getting Silence made. "I needed someone with real gravity to play Ferreira," he says. "You have to feel the character's pain."
Now Neeson doesn't consider himself much of a Catholic. "I admire people with true faith," he says. "Like my mother, who's 90 and gets annoyed if she can't walk to Mass Sunday morning. 'Mom, you're 90! It's OK! God will forgive you.' " These days he isn't even sure if he believes in a God.
I ask if there was a specific incident that precipitated his doubt, and his face darkens. "So this is probably leading toward the death of my wife?"
Neeson is understandably wary on the subject of Richardson. It must be gut-wrenching to have to revisit the worst moment of your life again and again, every time an interviewer needs a new quote. But this was just an open-ended question, I insist. It wasn't leading toward anything.
"OK," he says, sounding unconvinced. "It wasn't." Anyway, as far as his waning faith goes: "I think it was gradual."
When he's in town and the weather is good, Neeson loves to walk around Central Park. "Power walk," he says. "Get a good sweat going." He even has a walking buddy — "a real-estate lady" he met on his walks. "You see the same people, you nod, you say hello," Neeson explains. "Six months later, you're saying, 'How's your kid?' It's nice," he says. "We text each other: You free tomorrow? The usual spot? We do the whole loop — usually six miles, sometimes eight. Fifteen minutes a mile. It's good."
Three years ago, Central Park was the unlikely battleground for one of the most heated fights of Neeson's public life. The topic? Horses. During his 2013 election campaign, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to enact a ban on horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. (The measure was billed as an animal-rights issue, though questions have been raised about the role political donors and real-estate interests played in the proposed ban, and Mayor de Blasio's actions were later investigated.) The horse ban was supported by famous animal advocates like Miley Cyrus and Alec Baldwin. Neeson, who grew up caring for horses on his aunt's farm in County Armagh, waded in to defend the drivers.
"I'm in the park every day," he explains. "I see these guys; I know these guys. There were so many celebrities supporting [the ban], I was like, 'These guys need a celebrity or two.' "
"He really put himself in the line of fire," says Stephen Malone, a second-generation carriage driver and spokesman for the horse-and-carriage industry. "It was a complete game-changer. He hosted a stable visit for the city council on a Sunday afternoon, and if he wasn't there, we might have gotten one or two [members]. We ended up with about 20. They got to take their selfies with Liam Neeson, but they also got to meet the children of the drivers and to see how the stable hands care for the horses. It completely swayed public opinion. That was the moment we knew we were gonna be OK."
Colm McKeever, an Irish-born carriage driver and longtime friend of Neeson's, says, "There's a framed picture of him in every stable. It's the Pope and then Liam Neeson." McKeever says Neeson's support of the drivers wasn't due to their friendship: "We've been fast friends for a number of years, but that has nothing to do with Liam's convictions. He stands up for what he believes in. It's as simple as that."
The proposal was eventually defeated, and now Neeson is a hero to the 300-odd drivers, who often stop him to say thanks. "It's almost like he's part of the tour," jokes McKeever. " 'There's the carousel — and that's Liam Neeson.' " Malone adds: "Liam Neeson is the biggest Hollywood star going right now, and he walks through Central Park and stops to talk to carriage guys. Only a true gentleman would do that."
It's a working-man's solidarity that's apparently characteristically Neeson. "If you speak to film crews, they all love him," says Richard Graham. "He's got friends from crews he still corresponds with — and I'm not talking about higher-ups, just ordinary blokes. It sounds like I'm blowing smoke up his ass, but he truly is an honorable guy."
Ellen Freund was the prop master on two Neeson films, Leap of Faith and Nell — the latter when Neeson and Richardson were still dating. "They had a lovely house with a chef," Freund recalls, "and every weekend they would invite six members of the crew and cook this fantastic dinner, with beautiful wines. It was just the most lovely treat. It wasn't just the upper echelons, either — a grip or an electrician, it didn't matter."
It was Freund who introduced Neeson to his favorite outdoor pastime: fly-fishing. They were shooting Nell on a lake and needed something for Neeson to do in his downtime; Freund had just come off A River Runs Through It, so she showed Neeson how to cast. He was hooked. "He just loved it," she says. "Once we gave him the rod and set him up out there, he wouldn't come off the lake. Every time you looked for him, he was down there practicing."
"When he said he'd discovered fly-fishing," says Graham, "my first thought was, 'My God, that is the perfect hobby for you.' It's peaceful. It's in nature. There's a lot of skill. And the time goes by like you wouldn't believe. So I think that's kind of therapeutic. You've got nothing in your mind, other than trying to catch the fish."
Neeson cites the kind of pastoral tranquility that will be familiar to anyone who's heard an angler wax lyrical about the sport. "Eight times out of 10, I won't catch anything," he says. "The thrill for me is being on a river with my pouch and rod, and I know there's a fish over there, or at least I think there is, so I'll do five or six casts. That fly's not working, take it off, put on another one, try again. Before you know it, three hours will have gone past." It's the opposite of relaxing. "You're trying to outwit a fish that's been around since the Triassic with a piece of yarn or your own hair, he says. "You're working all the time — but it's a different kind of work."
Neeson and Graham have fished together all over the world: Patagonia, arctic Quebec, the Tomhannock Reservoir in upstate New York. "New Zealand, that's the mecca," Neeson says. "Big trout. Stunning. Some of these rivers, we'd take little choppers in, and you're six feet over the rocks and you jump out. You're thirsty, so you put your head in the river and drink, and it's pure." Neeson seems energized by the memory. "Fuck. I haven't done a big trip in a long time," he says. "I'm thinking of going to Brazil, up the Amazon. Heard they have big peacock bass. That'd be a trip." He would also like to get back down to the Bahamas for bonefish. "The phantom of the shallows," he says. "Silvery color. They turn a certain way and disappear. Hence 'phantoms.' But you need a guide, that's the only trouble." He'd rather go alone? "Yeah," he says.
(Says Graham: "We can be fishing side by side, 50 feet apart, and not say a word to each other for hours.")
I ask Neeson if he's learned anything from fly-fishing that he's been able to apply to his career or to the rest of his life. "Patience, I think," he says. "Just taking your time. I remember in the early days, if I was casting and I missed, I'd be very quick to cast again. But trout stay where they are — they like the food to come to them. The fish isn't going anywhere. Take your time."
Neeson's other new movie is A Monster Calls, a live-action tearjerker in which a CGI tree (the titular Monster) visits a boy whose mother is dying. Neeson plays the tree, a yew — "the most important of all the healing trees." He's ancient and massive, twice the size of a house, with gnarled roots, spiky branches, and a voice like a bottomless coal pit. The first time he shows up, he kicks down the boy's house. It's kind of terrifying. Still, you know the Monster is good, because he's played by Liam Neeson.
It's not surprising that Neeson makes a great tree, given that a noted Broadway critic once literally compared him to a sequoia. (He actually called him a "towering sequoia of sex." It was a compliment.) He spent two weeks filming motion-capture in a special room with cameras surrounding him on every side. "What do they call it? Not the space. The volume," he says with a little laugh. "Computer nerds." The end product looks something like a woodsy Transformer — which, weirdly, makes sense, given that Transformers director Michael Bay has said that Neeson's regal bearing was his inspiration for Optimus Prime. ("Really?" says Neeson. "That's news to me.")
A Monster Calls is structured on a series of visits from the Monster, in which he tells fairy tales to the boy to help him work through his grief. The stories are designed to divine meaning from a meaningless world — a world where, as the Monster says at one point, "Farmers' daughters die for no reason." It's a movie, in other words, about death, loss, mourning, and the ways we help one another cope. And this, I warn Neeson, is when I'm leading toward the death of his wife.
Neeson met Richardson when he was a 40-year-old bachelor who'd already dated Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, and Brooke Shields. In 1993 Richardson and Neeson co-starred in a play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and then, before long, were a couple. Two years later they were married in the garden of their farmhouse, and the boys soon followed. Then, in 2009, Richardson was skiing near Montreal when she fell and hit her head. Everything seemed fine at first: "Oh, darling — I've taken a tumble in the snow" is what she told Neeson on the phone that night. But unbeknownst to the doctors, her brain was slowly bleeding. She fell into a coma and died the next day.
Since Richardson's passing, Neeson's grief has colored several of his onscreen characters, a number of which are dealing with some kind of tragic familial backstory. The similarity in A Monster Calls is awful and impossible to ignore: a beautiful young mother struck down before her time. And Neeson's own sons were just 13 and 12 when Richardson died, about the same age as the boy in the movie. Did he think about that at all when preparing for the film?
"Yeah, I don't want to go into that," Neeson says politely but firmly. "It's not fair to them. I'd rather not talk about my boys, other than that they're doing well, college, all that stuff."
By all appearances, the boys are thriving. Micheál, now 21, is an aspiring actor who appeared with Neeson in an LG Super Bowl commercial last year. And Daniel, 20, is a sophomore theater and digital-media production major. "There's a saying," says Neeson. " 'You're only as happy as your unhappiest child.' And the kids are happier than I — so that's a blessing."
We've been talking for a while when Neeson realizes his tea has gone cold. He flags down the waitress. "Sorry, love," he says. "Could you ask the kitchen for some boiling water when you have a second?"
"Boiling-hot water," she says, nodding. "No problem."
Neeson stops her. "But not hot," he says. "If you could make it boil. Tell them it's for me," he adds. "Tell them I will come for them. I will find them. . . ."
Upon recognizing his famous Taken monologue, the waitress cracks ups. "Absolutely," she says, skipping off. After she's gone, I tease Neeson for shamelessly trotting out his shtick. He laughs: "Pathetic, isn't it?"
When Neeson made the first Taken movie in 2009, he had low expectations. " Straight to video is what I thought," he says. No one is more amused than he that eight years later — after The Grey (Taken with wolves), Non-Stop (Taken on a plane), Run All Night (Taken at night), and, of course, Taken 2 and 3 — he's still getting offered this kind of role. He's even reached the point of self-parody, turning in comically self-aware, Neeson-esque cameos in a commercial for the role-playing game Clash of Clans (as vengeful gamer AngryNeeson52) and on Inside Amy Schumer, as a scarily intense funeral-home director whose motto is "I don't bury cowards."
But in a way, Neeson is just fulfilling an opportunity he first had more than two decades ago, when he was being courted to become the new James Bond in the mid-'90s. "I was being considered," Neeson says. "I'm sure they were considering a bunch of other guys, too." He says he would have loved to be 007, but Richardson said she wouldn't marry him if he was. I ask why, and he smiles like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Women. Foreign countries. Halle Berry. It's understandable." Also, Schindler's List had just come out. "She was like, 'You're going to ruin your career,' " Neeson says. "But it's no big deal. It's nice to be inquired after."
Neeson sometimes feels a little embarrassed that he's Social Security–eligible and still pretend-fighting for a living. "Maybe another year," he says of his action-star shelf life. "The audiences let you know — you can sense them going, 'Oh, come on.' But by the way," he hastens to add, "I've never felt fitter in my life."
Neeson doesn't box anymore. ("I'll train — the bags and stuff. But I don't spar. There's always someone coming up to you like, 'Hey, you're that actor Lyle Nelson right?' They want a chance to hurt you a little. 'Guess who I beat up today? He's a pussy.' ") But he proudly points out that he does all his own movie fights. I read him a quote from Steven Seagal — "Look at Liam Neeson. He can't fight. He's a great dramatic actor, a great guy. . . . Is he a great fighter? A great warrior? No" — and Neeson seems amused. "I don't know how to answer that," he says, smiling. "Am I an action guy? Not really. But I do know how to fight. So fuck him."
One thing Neeson absolutely won't do anymore is ride a motorcycle — ever since a horrifying crash in 2000 nearly killed him. "I've read a couple of scripts where the character's on a motorbike, and I'm like, 'Is this important to the script?' 'Yeah, it is.' 'OK, I'm not in.' "
I tell him about a recent spill I took on a bike, and he turns serious. "You have to watch yourself," Neeson tells me. "Get it out of your system. Make a pact with your wife. And don't cheat on it."
Neeson has few vices left these days. He quit the Marlboro Lights years ago and gave up drinking a while back — first the Guinness, then the pinot noir — after he found himself partaking too much in the wake of Richardson's death. He tries to keep busy lest he wallow. "I need to work," he says. "I'm a working-class Irishman. I'm fucking lucky: A stranger gets in touch with my agent and says, 'Could you send Liam Neeson a script?' I'm still flattered by that. So I'll keep doing it till the knees give up. It beats hiding in a basement in eastern Aleppo."
(As Richardson once put it: "I think he probably, on some level — although he wouldn't say it — wakes up every morning thinking, 'Isn't it great I'm not driving a forklift?' ")
Now that he's back in New York, Neeson looks forward to lying low for a while. "Just recharge the batteries," he says. "I don't want to see the inside of an airplane." He'll take in some Broadway shows, catch up on all the programs on his Apple TV: Fargo, Ray Donovan, Breaking Bad. He's also got a big stack of books he wants to tackle — two Ian McEwan novels and a box of classics he recently received as a gift, which included War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
And then, of course, there are those walks in the park.
It all sounds nice, I say. But I'm not sure it's enough to fill up a day.
Neeson smiles. "You'd be surprised."
","tag_ids":[4748,4794],"publish_date":"2016-12-12T16:07:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson - Liam Neeson Interview","keywords":"liam neeson, interview, feature, profile, liam neeson magazine cover, silence, martin scorsese,","description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hvX3IR","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Neeson with Richardson in London, October 2008.","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_b-8f9a8a98-433a-4b2d-8ff5-ed182b83326c.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Marc Hom","caption":"","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_g-6285b0f9-fcaa-4ed9-8955-6792bf4dc162.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photographs by Marc Hom","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_a-cb7e2101-2367-478c-ac0e-e10d94efd88b.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/mark-ruffalos-good-life-formula-3-kids-1-rabbit-47-acres-2-764-miles-from-hollywood-20130509","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood","contentId":168305,"contentHeadline":"Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/features/articles/norman-reedus-the-wild-one-w209199","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Getting to Know Norman Reedus","contentId":209199,"contentHeadline":"Norman Reedus: "}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":448627,"old_id":null,"title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","short_title":"How an 11-Year-Old's Brain Injury Rattled a Football Family","slug":"/features/articles/how-an-11-year-olds-brain-injury-rattled-a-football-family-w448627","body":"It was a crisp Sunday afternoon in Missoula, Montana, and Mike Callaghan stood in the blustery sunshine, doing the thing he loved best: coaching his 11-year-old son's football team. Brogan Callaghan was the Panthers' quarterback and was shaping up as a real leader on the field. Mike, still athletic at age 52, couldn't help but think back to his own days on these fields, with his own father watching.
On that day, the Panthers were playing their archrivals, the Chargers, and were down 14–7 in the second quarter. Brogan took the snap and rolled left, twisting his upper body to throw right. As soon as he released the ball, he was flattened by a defender, so he didn't see that the receiver had made the catch and scored, the bleachers erupting into cheers.
Brogan jumped right up from the hit and jogged into formation for the extra point before switching to linebacker, a position his father once played with the Montana State Bobcats over in Bozeman. As the offense lined up, Mike noticed the Chargers' running back go into motion early. "Sweep!" Callaghan yelled from the sidelines, but Brogan was already on it, slipping left around the Chargers' big right tackle. Brogan was just about to take down the runner when he was slammed from behind — an illegal hit that flexed his spine, snapped his head forward, and sent him colliding into one of his own teammates. He went down hard, banging the back of his head into the dirt.
As a coach, Callaghan generally kept his cool. But now he went straight for the referee, screaming that this was the second time that player had made the same illegal block. "That's twice," Callaghan yelled. "You've got to call that."
But another Panthers coach, Eric Dawald, noticed something more alarming: Brogan wasn't getting up. Dawald rushed onto the field and found the boy on his back, barely conscious. Brogan opened his eyes and looked up. "I can't see," he said.
Brogan's mother, Shannon, was chatting with friends in the bleachers when she heard somebody say, "I think that's Brogan." She ran to the field, arriving at the same time her husband did.
Brogan looked up at his parents. "I can't feel my legs," he said. Shannon glanced at her husband and thought, "Brogan has to be done with football forever. It has to end now."
An ambulance drove onto the grass, and a paramedic removed the face mask from Brogan's helmet. They asked him what day it was, and Brogan answered incorrectly. They asked his birthday, and he couldn't answer that, either. One of the paramedics asked him if his neck hurt. "I can't feel my legs," the boy repeated.
Callaghan had been coaching youth football for 22 years without witnessing anything worse than a broken arm. Certain that Brogan's paralysis was momentary, he knelt beside his son and grabbed a patch of skin on the back of his calf. "You're going to feel this, Brog," he said. "You're fine. You'll feel this." Callaghan pinched, hard, but Brogan did not respond.
Some of his teammates were crying as the paramedics strapped their quarterback to a backboard, placed an oxygen mask over his face, and loaded him into the ambulance. Shannon climbed in, and they sped the boy across the Clark Fork River to St. Patrick Hospital.
Callaghan drove separately, his mind racing through worst-case scenarios: "We'll buy a one-level house. I'll change jobs so I can be home more, learn to care for a paraplegic child." Another thought intruded: "I was the coach. This happened on my watch. How did I do this to my kid?"
While the emergency room doctors evaluated Brogan, Shannon's and Mike's parents arrived at the hospital. After filling them in about Brogan's condition, Shannon turned to Callaghan's father. James Callaghan was an oral surgeon who had played football in college and loved watching his grandson play as much as he had loved watching Mike. In fact, in all of Mike's years of playing youth football, his father missed just one game, when Mike was in the sixth grade. "I don't ever want Brogan to play football again," Shannon told her father-in-law. "And you have to back me up on this." James Callaghan told her that it was none of his business.
Back in the emergency room, Brogan looked at his father and asked, "Am I paralyzed?"
"I think you are," Callaghan thought. "You're going to be all right," he said. He watched a tear roll down his son's cheek and thought, "He knows."
Brogan looked up at Callaghan and said, "Who are you?"
Before the injury, it had been a typical fall weekend for the Callaghans. Friday afternoon at 5, Mike left his office to meet Dawald and Brogan and the rest of the Panthers for practice. Afterward, they jumped into Callaghan's truck and drove across town to Loyola Sacred Heart High School, where they ate hot dogs, sipped Pepsis, and watched one of Callaghan's old MSU teammates coach his own son in a game against Troy High. On Saturday morning, Callaghan and Brogan watched an NCAA game while eating breakfast. If Montana State had been playing at home, they would have driven to Bozeman, where Callaghan did TV color commentary. As it happened, they were away, so Callaghan and Brogan watched the game on TV while plotting the next day's attack against the Chargers. Win or lose, after the game they'd head home to catch the Steelers play the 49ers and dig in to their usual chip buffet — three flavors of Ruffles, tortilla chips, seven-layer dip, and guacamole.
"We might be nuts," Callaghan says. "But so much of our week is taken up by football."
Plenty of other fathers could say the same thing. The NFL and NCAA get all the attention, but the vast majority of football in America is played at the youth level. There are about 2,000 men in the NFL, and 73,000 play on college teams. But more than 3 million boys between the ages of six and 18 play for teams like the Panthers and the Loyola Rams, in towns like Missoula, where football is deeply woven into the fabric of local life.
But that fabric is starting to fray, riven by a growing stack of research linking football to chronic head trauma. In college and the pros, players are consenting adults who make their own choices about that risk. But for those younger than 18, the decision rests with parents — more and more of whom are saying no to tackle football. Between 2010 and 2015, youth-league participation cratered nearly 30 percent.
Even NFL legends have reservations. Casey "Big Snack" Hampton, who played tackle for 12 years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, told me that he refused to let his son play tackle football before high school. "I made him wait," Hampton says. "I've seen little kids get concussions." Other stars, including Brett Favre and Troy Aikman, have expressed similar reservations. "I would not want my child out there," Terry Bradshaw told Jay Leno in 2012. "The fear of them getting these head injuries . . . it's just too great for me."
That stance has football leagues, both amateur and pro, scrambling. Earlier this year, Pop Warner, the nation's oldest youth football league, eliminated kickoffs for kids younger than 11, to limit open-field contact. USA Football, a nonprofit partially funded by the NFL that offers training, education, and equipment subsidies to youth leagues, has introduced a set of practice guidelines for coaches, designed in part to teach safer tackling techniques and to minimize hits to the head. The NFL also holds free "moms clinics" at pro stadiums, where so-called master trainers put mothers through tackling drills in an effort to convince the women that tackling is safe for kids.
Yet new research on head trauma continues to undermine that case. A report in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma found that the likelihood of developing cognitive and emotional problems is linked to a football player's overall exposure to contact and not just to his diagnosed concussions. In other words, every little hit adds up, which explains why NFL veterans who started playing before the age of 12 are more likely to have cognitive problems than those who picked up the game later. These days, many players start earlier — and the truly dedicated scrimmage all year long.
Risk, of course, is part of life, and kids suffer serious injuries doing all kinds of things. What's more, researchers still cannot say what percentage of football players end up suffering long-term cognitive harm.
All of which puts football families in a uniquely confounding position. For Callaghan and his high school and college teammates, football is one of the most important things in their lives. It's the source of their self-confidence and closest friendships, of indelible memories of victory and loss, of their very notion of what it means to be a man. And despite taking their share of hits to the head, they've gone on to lead fulfilling adult lives — lives that continue to be enriched by football. "It would rock me to the soul to learn that football has been bad for all these kids," says Callaghan. "I love the game. It's the greatest avenue that I know to get great life lessons."
Ultimately, the true battle for the future of America's favorite pastime is being waged not in the media or in high-profile court cases, but at public parks and on high school fields nationwide. And the instant Brogan was hit that fall day in Missoula, Mike and Shannon Callaghan joined countless other parents in staring down questions they never wanted to ask.
"I'm your dad." Back in the emergency room, Callaghan answered Brogan's question.
Brogan looked confused, so Callaghan pointed to Shannon and said, "Do you know who that is?" Brogan shook his head. Callaghan felt the life go out of him.
For hours they sat at Brogan's side, hoping for something to change. Then suddenly Shannon spoke up. "His toes moved," she said. "I just saw them. He moved his toes." Relief swept through the room. Mike felt something close to elation, thinking, "He has a concussion, but he will get better."
By evening Brogan could move his legs, sit up in bed, and walk across the room. The family spent that night in the hospital. The following morning Callaghan woke up feeling optimistic. He told his wife that he thought Brogan might be back at practice within a week. Then a doctor arrived and asked Brogan his name. Brogan got his first name right but couldn't remember his last name — or why he was in the hospital.
For years many doctors believed that children were less likely than adults to suffer serious head injuries in football, for the simple reason that they weigh less and run more slowly than adults do. Now it's well understood that until about age 14, a kid's head is much larger than an adult's compared with his body, yet the neck is weaker, which means the head bounces around more in response to collisions. Researchers at Virginia Tech found that seven-year-old football players experienced head blows comparable in force to the impacts suffered by college players.
To make matters worse, the nerve fibers in children's brains are not yet coated with the protective sheathing known as myelin. As a result, "it's easier to tear apart neurons and their connections in children at lower impact," says Dr. Robert Cantu, the author of Concussions and Our Kids and a leading researcher of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain-wasting disease that has been diagnosed in dozens of deceased football players. The threat to emerging neural connections is particularly problematic at Brogan's age. "If you injure your brain during that time," Cantu says, "there is a high likelihood that you will not reach your maximal genetic endowment intellectually, and you'll perhaps not have the same personality with regard to depression, anxiety, and panic attacks."
Brogan's doctors were unsure about the cause of his temporary paralysis, but they agreed that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Still, after two days in the hospital, they determined him well enough to go home. They gave Mike and Shannon a strict rehab protocol that called for avoiding anything that might stimulate brain activity: bright lights, computer screens, video games, even reading. The doctors also cautioned them that irritability and depression are common after a concussion. The Callaghans set up beds for Brogan and themselves in the basement. Shannon went to the local Target to stock up on board games and drawing supplies.
A week later the Callaghans returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit. When the doctor said that Brogan would have to sit out the rest of football season, Callaghan found himself unexpectedly relieved. "I remember being thankful that the doctor told him so I wouldn't have to," Callaghan says. "I was sort of off the hook."
Missing a single season was one thing. But the idea that Brogan might never play again — clearly what Shannon wanted — was nearly impossible for Callaghan to contemplate. For one thing, Brogan loved the game and had the makings of a real standout. What's more, the sport had been central to Callaghan's life for as long as he could remember. He started as a fifth grader in the Little Grizzly league; his coach from those days remained one of his closest confidants. Among his closest friends were teammates from Hellgate High or Montana State. During Callaghan's junior year, in 1984, the MSU Bobcats won the NCAA Division I-AA national championship — a feat Montana football fans still talk about.
Of course, football ends hard: You wake up one day and it's over. Nobody plays tackle ball in middle age. But Callaghan took up coaching, even though he was just a few years out of college with no kids of his own. He started with his nephew's team of fifth and sixth graders. Soon, a few of his old football buddies, including Eric Dawald, came to help. They loved having a reason to hang out after work, teaching the fundamentals, and feeling that old excitement on game days. When one of the group had a son, the others promised to keep coaching as long as the kid played, a pact that soon extended to every son any of them might ever have. And they built something, three nights a week on snow-dusted fields. Their team was undefeated for 15 straight seasons. Boys they'd coached went on to play at local high schools, the University of Montana, Montana State, even the pros.
Callaghan mostly had given up on having children of his own when, at age 40, he met and married Shannon Brown. An interior architect and former competitive swimmer, Shannon had grown up in tiny Havre, Montana, with a pair of football-obsessed brothers. She loved the way Callaghan welcomed Griffin, her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage, onto his team. When Brogan was born, in 2003, Callaghan insisted that his buddies renew their vow to keep coaching.
Brogan started playing flag football in the fourth grade, in 2013. By that time, the relationship between football and brain trauma was well established. Two years earlier, a Missoula kid named Dylan Steigers, who'd started out in local youth leagues, went off to play at Eastern Oregon University and took a big hit in a scrimmage. He died the next day.
Shannon, meanwhile, had been getting warnings from her older brother, Scott Brown, a former high school running back and now an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Portland, Oregon. "I'd see these 40-year-olds coming in just maimed, having these big surgeries from playing football in high school, college, the pros," he says. Brown became convinced that letting a kid play tackle football was akin to child abuse. He implored his siblings to keep their kids off the field.
The youngest, Shannon's brother Howard, got the message; his son plays only flag football. But Shannon felt trapped — nobody could tell her husband what to think about football. All the CTE research, Callaghan argued, had been done on the brains of guys known to have problems. He had attended one of USA Football's Heads Up Football clinics, where he'd been schooled in the latest safe-tackling techniques. And he would never consider letting a concussed kid play before a complete recovery.
So in 2014, Brogan, now a fifth grader, joined Callaghan's team. He knew his dad's track record and dreamed of exceeding it with a Stanford scholarship and a career in the NFL — just like Jordie Tripp, a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks who played on Callaghan's team 10 years earlier.
Brogan, it turned out, had the makings of a natural quarterback, with a great arm and an instinct for reading the field and seeing weaknesses in the opposing team's defense. But as the 2015 season rolled around, a handful of Brogan's teammates did not return. "The moms and I talked," Shannon says, "and they were like, ‘I wouldn't let Brogan play.' "
Similar conversations were happening nationwide, in part due to the efforts of women like Kimberly Archie. Her son, Paul Bright Jr., grew up playing Pop Warner ball in Sparks, Nevada. He was living in Los Angeles, working as an assistant chef, when his behavior grew erratic. Then, on a September evening in 2014, Bright drove an unlicensed motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a car and was posthumously diagnosed with early-stage CTE. Archie began to speak out on radio and television. The American commitment to youth tackle football, she says, "is like letting our kids ride down the highway in the back of the truck at 80 miles per hour because we're afraid we'll make them weak if we stop."
Last September, Archie launched a class action lawsuit in conjunction with Jo Cornell, whose son played Pop Warner football and was found to have CTE after committing suicide. The lawsuit defines members of the plaintiff's class as anyone who has ever played, or had a child play, youth tackle football, and suffered a head injury since 1997. It alleges negligence and fraud by Pop Warner, USA Football, and the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which develops voluntary safety standards for youth-football helmets. The complaint does not specify damages, but the number could amount to billions of dollars.
This isn't the first lawsuit Pop Warner has faced: The league has already settled two others. Pop Warner now requires that each practice session runs no longer than two hours a day and that no more than 25 percent of practice time is devoted to full-speed contact, or scrimmaging. "There's risk in anything kids do, and football's getting a really bad rap," says Pop Warner executive director Jon Butler.
These lawsuits, of course, are the stuff of nightmares for the NFL, which reached its own billion-dollar settlement with 20,000 former players last year. "It's the best game that's ever been invented, and we've got to make sure that moms get the message — because that's who's afraid of our game right now," Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians said recently. "It's not dads. It's moms."
Predictably, the NFL has stepped up its outreach to mothers. It sponsors the Facebook page Touchdown Moms, where NFL employees post heartwarming anecdotes about the mothers of youth players. USA Football sponsors a Team Mom of the Year Award. And then there are those free mom's clinics. Nearly every NFL franchise has hosted at least one such clinic, generally treating mothers to on-field drills and a concussion-awareness presentation.
Archie, who was already working as a sports-safety consultant, attended one of these clinics in Ohio in 2014. This was a month before her son's accident, and even then she was not impressed. "It's condescending to think you can just trick moms," she says.
Three weeks after his injury, Brogan was cleared to go back to school, but he could last only an hour or so a day. He sometimes flew into sudden, inexplicable rages and Shannon mostly stopped working to care for him. Callaghan spent his days at the office and continued to coach the Panthers in the evening. He coached out of a sense of obligation, both to his fellow coaches and to players. But now it felt different: He watched every tackle with anxiety, waiting for the child to get up and walk it off.
Both Shannon's brothers, meanwhile, were relentless. Howard sent his sister one news article after another about kids like Evan Murray, a 17-year-old New Jersey quarterback, Ben Hamm, a 16-year-old linebacker from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and 17-year-old Kenny Bui, from the Seattle suburbs, all of whom died within a month of one another early that fall. All told, more than a dozen kids died playing football that season, and Shannon's brothers made sure she knew about each one.
One night she tried to share these stories with her husband.
"We are not talking about this," he said.
It wasn't until seven weeks after his injury that Brogan was able to form new memories. He started neurological rehab therapy and scored terribly on cognitive tests that included closing his eyes and touching his nose. Math worksheets that would have taken five minutes before the injury now took an hour and left Brogan exhausted. Spinning on a stationary bicycle gave him a headache.
In February, Callaghan and Brogan sat on the couch to watch the Super Bowl. Shannon overheard Brogan begin a sentence with the phrase, "When I play in the NFL . . ."
"That's not going to happen," Shannon said.
Later she heard her husband tell Brogan, "But when you play in high school . . ."
"It's not going to happen," she said.
"We don't have to decide this now," Callaghan replied.
Later still, Brogan asked his mom, "Why won't you let me play?"
"Because God gave you that big brain so you can do something amazing in this world."
"He also made me a good football player," Brogan said.
"But that can't be your future."
Callaghan turned to Shannon. "But what about his dream?"
Shannon thought, "Whose dream is it?"
The last football game Mike Callaghan ever played was against Washington State in 1985, the less memorable season after that epic championship year. The Bobcats were struggling and in the first quarter, he suffered a concussion after being hit by a running back. The team's trainer ordered him out of the game, but Callaghan returned to the field anyway, determined to play every minute of his last college game. At that point somebody grabbed his helmet, locked it in an equipment bin, and sent him to the showers, where he wept uncontrollably. "That's how football ended for me," Callaghan says. "I didn't go out in a blaze of glory. Some guy ran me over. We lost."
As Brogan recovered, Callaghan couldn't help but think of all the concussions he'd suffered in his football career. By his senior year of college, he had experienced so many that he sometimes lost the right side of his visual field during games and had agonizing headaches, to the degree that the team's trainer ordered a brain scan. It came back clean, but the trainer asked Callaghan why he still played. He knew he wasn't NFL material, so what was the point? Why take the risk?
He was now asking similar questions about Brogan — but Mike could not let go of football. He thought about all the things he wanted his son to experience: the friendships, the teamwork, the victories. "I love watching Brogan play the game," he told me. "I love it."
Despite their differences, Shannon understands. "It's like a death," she says. "Mike wants his kid to be a football star. And Brogan would be the star. He's a leader and damn good, and everyone looks up to him."
Callaghan struggled to imagine what his own life would be like without football. What would he do on weekday nights and Sunday mornings in the fall? When would he see his friends? Who would he be? "Every time I thought about it, my mind just went blank," he says.
In August, Callaghan got a call from officials at Missoula Youth Football: Did he plan to coach the 2016 season? After months of agonizing, almost entirely to himself, he'd finally made a decision. "Brogan's not going to play, and I'm not going to coach," he said.
Callaghan couldn't bear to think of it as a permanent decision, telling his son that it was only for the coming season. But Brogan was unconvinced and angry. "You know it's forever," he said. "Mom's never going to let me play again."
Callaghan called Dawald and apologized for leaving the team. Two weeks later, he told his father.
Upon hearing the news James Callaghan said, "I didn't want to ask." Then he said, "Is that your decision or your wife's?"
"We're on the same page for this year," Callaghan said.
"Geez," James said. "That's going to be tough."
"Dad, it may be tough for us," Mike said. "But what I'm starting to figure out is there's a whole other world out there. There's a lot of people who don't consider playing, and they still get through the fall somehow."
Mike and brogan still watch football together — high school games on Friday, Montana State on Saturdays, and his former team on Sunday afternoons. "It's kind of hard, because I'm not playing," Brogan says. "I think about what I would do against the teams when I watch. But there isn't really anything that I can do." He's hurled himself into basketball and recently asked if he could take tennis lessons. Callaghan bought him his first rifle and is planning an elk hunt.
Brogan admits that he hasn't yet fully recovered. Schoolwork doesn't come as easily as it once did, but Shannon isn't worried. "Brogan missed 247 classes in the sixth grade," she says, "and he finished with three A-pluses and three As." Now, instead of going to Stanford to play football, he wants to go to Berkeley to study architecture — his mother's passion — on an academic scholarship.
Callaghan says he often thinks back to a day last November, weeks after Brogan's injury. League officials asked how he wanted to handle that unfinished game with the Chargers. "A big part of me was, ‘I don't want to handle it,' " Callaghan said. But the kids cared, and Callaghan felt it would have been selfish to refuse.
That meant bringing the teams back to the field behind the county fairgrounds. The Chargers and the Panthers lined up exactly where they'd been the moment Brogan was injured — but with Brogan now on the sidelines with his father. The referee set the game clock to where it had stopped and blew the whistle, and they played the remainder of the game. The Panthers lost, and for the first time in his life Callaghan didn't care.
All Brogan's teammates went home, except for two boys, Charlie and Cole. Charlie picked up a football and threw it to Brogan, who caught it and tossed it back. Charlie then passed it to Cole. Ten minutes went by, then 20, and still the kids continued to play. The parents lingered off to the side, making it clear there was no rush. "Brogan was kind of running around," Callaghan says. "Normal isn't the right word, but the normalcy of it, seeing him be a kid again. The game was over, we got beat, and it was good for me. Our kids were fine."
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But when the 11-year-old QB was sidelined by a head injury, Callaghan faced an agonizing, all too common choice.","author":[{"id":4790,"old_id":25,"name":"Daniel Duane","slug":"/contributor/daniel-duane","data":{"meta":{"title":null,"description":null},"email":null,"last_name":"Duane","first_name":"Daniel","google_url":"116110025173205171914","middle_name":null,"twitter_url":null,"facebook_url":null},"updated_at":"2016-12-12T18:50:51.912Z","tag_type_id":4,"site_id":3,"TagType":{"id":4,"name":"contributor","data":{"slug":{"default":"/contributor"}}}}],"reviewArtists":"","body":"It was a crisp Sunday afternoon in Missoula, Montana, and Mike Callaghan stood in the blustery sunshine, doing the thing he loved best: coaching his 11-year-old son's football team. Brogan Callaghan was the Panthers' quarterback and was shaping up as a real leader on the field. Mike, still athletic at age 52, couldn't help but think back to his own days on these fields, with his own father watching.
On that day, the Panthers were playing their archrivals, the Chargers, and were down 14–7 in the second quarter. Brogan took the snap and rolled left, twisting his upper body to throw right. As soon as he released the ball, he was flattened by a defender, so he didn't see that the receiver had made the catch and scored, the bleachers erupting into cheers.
Brogan jumped right up from the hit and jogged into formation for the extra point before switching to linebacker, a position his father once played with the Montana State Bobcats over in Bozeman. As the offense lined up, Mike noticed the Chargers' running back go into motion early. "Sweep!" Callaghan yelled from the sidelines, but Brogan was already on it, slipping left around the Chargers' big right tackle. Brogan was just about to take down the runner when he was slammed from behind — an illegal hit that flexed his spine, snapped his head forward, and sent him colliding into one of his own teammates. He went down hard, banging the back of his head into the dirt.
As a coach, Callaghan generally kept his cool. But now he went straight for the referee, screaming that this was the second time that player had made the same illegal block. "That's twice," Callaghan yelled. "You've got to call that."
But another Panthers coach, Eric Dawald, noticed something more alarming: Brogan wasn't getting up. Dawald rushed onto the field and found the boy on his back, barely conscious. Brogan opened his eyes and looked up. "I can't see," he said.
Brogan's mother, Shannon, was chatting with friends in the bleachers when she heard somebody say, "I think that's Brogan." She ran to the field, arriving at the same time her husband did.
Brogan looked up at his parents. "I can't feel my legs," he said. Shannon glanced at her husband and thought, "Brogan has to be done with football forever. It has to end now."
An ambulance drove onto the grass, and a paramedic removed the face mask from Brogan's helmet. They asked him what day it was, and Brogan answered incorrectly. They asked his birthday, and he couldn't answer that, either. One of the paramedics asked him if his neck hurt. "I can't feel my legs," the boy repeated.
Callaghan had been coaching youth football for 22 years without witnessing anything worse than a broken arm. Certain that Brogan's paralysis was momentary, he knelt beside his son and grabbed a patch of skin on the back of his calf. "You're going to feel this, Brog," he said. "You're fine. You'll feel this." Callaghan pinched, hard, but Brogan did not respond.
Some of his teammates were crying as the paramedics strapped their quarterback to a backboard, placed an oxygen mask over his face, and loaded him into the ambulance. Shannon climbed in, and they sped the boy across the Clark Fork River to St. Patrick Hospital.
Callaghan drove separately, his mind racing through worst-case scenarios: "We'll buy a one-level house. I'll change jobs so I can be home more, learn to care for a paraplegic child." Another thought intruded: "I was the coach. This happened on my watch. How did I do this to my kid?"
While the emergency room doctors evaluated Brogan, Shannon's and Mike's parents arrived at the hospital. After filling them in about Brogan's condition, Shannon turned to Callaghan's father. James Callaghan was an oral surgeon who had played football in college and loved watching his grandson play as much as he had loved watching Mike. In fact, in all of Mike's years of playing youth football, his father missed just one game, when Mike was in the sixth grade. "I don't ever want Brogan to play football again," Shannon told her father-in-law. "And you have to back me up on this." James Callaghan told her that it was none of his business.
Back in the emergency room, Brogan looked at his father and asked, "Am I paralyzed?"
"I think you are," Callaghan thought. "You're going to be all right," he said. He watched a tear roll down his son's cheek and thought, "He knows."
Brogan looked up at Callaghan and said, "Who are you?"
Before the injury, it had been a typical fall weekend for the Callaghans. Friday afternoon at 5, Mike left his office to meet Dawald and Brogan and the rest of the Panthers for practice. Afterward, they jumped into Callaghan's truck and drove across town to Loyola Sacred Heart High School, where they ate hot dogs, sipped Pepsis, and watched one of Callaghan's old MSU teammates coach his own son in a game against Troy High. On Saturday morning, Callaghan and Brogan watched an NCAA game while eating breakfast. If Montana State had been playing at home, they would have driven to Bozeman, where Callaghan did TV color commentary. As it happened, they were away, so Callaghan and Brogan watched the game on TV while plotting the next day's attack against the Chargers. Win or lose, after the game they'd head home to catch the Steelers play the 49ers and dig in to their usual chip buffet — three flavors of Ruffles, tortilla chips, seven-layer dip, and guacamole.
"We might be nuts," Callaghan says. "But so much of our week is taken up by football."
Plenty of other fathers could say the same thing. The NFL and NCAA get all the attention, but the vast majority of football in America is played at the youth level. There are about 2,000 men in the NFL, and 73,000 play on college teams. But more than 3 million boys between the ages of six and 18 play for teams like the Panthers and the Loyola Rams, in towns like Missoula, where football is deeply woven into the fabric of local life.
But that fabric is starting to fray, riven by a growing stack of research linking football to chronic head trauma. In college and the pros, players are consenting adults who make their own choices about that risk. But for those younger than 18, the decision rests with parents — more and more of whom are saying no to tackle football. Between 2010 and 2015, youth-league participation cratered nearly 30 percent.
Even NFL legends have reservations. Casey "Big Snack" Hampton, who played tackle for 12 years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, told me that he refused to let his son play tackle football before high school. "I made him wait," Hampton says. "I've seen little kids get concussions." Other stars, including Brett Favre and Troy Aikman, have expressed similar reservations. "I would not want my child out there," Terry Bradshaw told Jay Leno in 2012. "The fear of them getting these head injuries . . . it's just too great for me."
That stance has football leagues, both amateur and pro, scrambling. Earlier this year, Pop Warner, the nation's oldest youth football league, eliminated kickoffs for kids younger than 11, to limit open-field contact. USA Football, a nonprofit partially funded by the NFL that offers training, education, and equipment subsidies to youth leagues, has introduced a set of practice guidelines for coaches, designed in part to teach safer tackling techniques and to minimize hits to the head. The NFL also holds free "moms clinics" at pro stadiums, where so-called master trainers put mothers through tackling drills in an effort to convince the women that tackling is safe for kids.
Yet new research on head trauma continues to undermine that case. A report in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma found that the likelihood of developing cognitive and emotional problems is linked to a football player's overall exposure to contact and not just to his diagnosed concussions. In other words, every little hit adds up, which explains why NFL veterans who started playing before the age of 12 are more likely to have cognitive problems than those who picked up the game later. These days, many players start earlier — and the truly dedicated scrimmage all year long.
Risk, of course, is part of life, and kids suffer serious injuries doing all kinds of things. What's more, researchers still cannot say what percentage of football players end up suffering long-term cognitive harm.
All of which puts football families in a uniquely confounding position. For Callaghan and his high school and college teammates, football is one of the most important things in their lives. It's the source of their self-confidence and closest friendships, of indelible memories of victory and loss, of their very notion of what it means to be a man. And despite taking their share of hits to the head, they've gone on to lead fulfilling adult lives — lives that continue to be enriched by football. "It would rock me to the soul to learn that football has been bad for all these kids," says Callaghan. "I love the game. It's the greatest avenue that I know to get great life lessons."
Ultimately, the true battle for the future of America's favorite pastime is being waged not in the media or in high-profile court cases, but at public parks and on high school fields nationwide. And the instant Brogan was hit that fall day in Missoula, Mike and Shannon Callaghan joined countless other parents in staring down questions they never wanted to ask.
"I'm your dad." Back in the emergency room, Callaghan answered Brogan's question.
Brogan looked confused, so Callaghan pointed to Shannon and said, "Do you know who that is?" Brogan shook his head. Callaghan felt the life go out of him.
For hours they sat at Brogan's side, hoping for something to change. Then suddenly Shannon spoke up. "His toes moved," she said. "I just saw them. He moved his toes." Relief swept through the room. Mike felt something close to elation, thinking, "He has a concussion, but he will get better."
By evening Brogan could move his legs, sit up in bed, and walk across the room. The family spent that night in the hospital. The following morning Callaghan woke up feeling optimistic. He told his wife that he thought Brogan might be back at practice within a week. Then a doctor arrived and asked Brogan his name. Brogan got his first name right but couldn't remember his last name — or why he was in the hospital.
For years many doctors believed that children were less likely than adults to suffer serious head injuries in football, for the simple reason that they weigh less and run more slowly than adults do. Now it's well understood that until about age 14, a kid's head is much larger than an adult's compared with his body, yet the neck is weaker, which means the head bounces around more in response to collisions. Researchers at Virginia Tech found that seven-year-old football players experienced head blows comparable in force to the impacts suffered by college players.
To make matters worse, the nerve fibers in children's brains are not yet coated with the protective sheathing known as myelin. As a result, "it's easier to tear apart neurons and their connections in children at lower impact," says Dr. Robert Cantu, the author of Concussions and Our Kids and a leading researcher of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain-wasting disease that has been diagnosed in dozens of deceased football players. The threat to emerging neural connections is particularly problematic at Brogan's age. "If you injure your brain during that time," Cantu says, "there is a high likelihood that you will not reach your maximal genetic endowment intellectually, and you'll perhaps not have the same personality with regard to depression, anxiety, and panic attacks."
Brogan's doctors were unsure about the cause of his temporary paralysis, but they agreed that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Still, after two days in the hospital, they determined him well enough to go home. They gave Mike and Shannon a strict rehab protocol that called for avoiding anything that might stimulate brain activity: bright lights, computer screens, video games, even reading. The doctors also cautioned them that irritability and depression are common after a concussion. The Callaghans set up beds for Brogan and themselves in the basement. Shannon went to the local Target to stock up on board games and drawing supplies.
A week later the Callaghans returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit. When the doctor said that Brogan would have to sit out the rest of football season, Callaghan found himself unexpectedly relieved. "I remember being thankful that the doctor told him so I wouldn't have to," Callaghan says. "I was sort of off the hook."
Missing a single season was one thing. But the idea that Brogan might never play again — clearly what Shannon wanted — was nearly impossible for Callaghan to contemplate. For one thing, Brogan loved the game and had the makings of a real standout. What's more, the sport had been central to Callaghan's life for as long as he could remember. He started as a fifth grader in the Little Grizzly league; his coach from those days remained one of his closest confidants. Among his closest friends were teammates from Hellgate High or Montana State. During Callaghan's junior year, in 1984, the MSU Bobcats won the NCAA Division I-AA national championship — a feat Montana football fans still talk about.
Of course, football ends hard: You wake up one day and it's over. Nobody plays tackle ball in middle age. But Callaghan took up coaching, even though he was just a few years out of college with no kids of his own. He started with his nephew's team of fifth and sixth graders. Soon, a few of his old football buddies, including Eric Dawald, came to help. They loved having a reason to hang out after work, teaching the fundamentals, and feeling that old excitement on game days. When one of the group had a son, the others promised to keep coaching as long as the kid played, a pact that soon extended to every son any of them might ever have. And they built something, three nights a week on snow-dusted fields. Their team was undefeated for 15 straight seasons. Boys they'd coached went on to play at local high schools, the University of Montana, Montana State, even the pros.
Callaghan mostly had given up on having children of his own when, at age 40, he met and married Shannon Brown. An interior architect and former competitive swimmer, Shannon had grown up in tiny Havre, Montana, with a pair of football-obsessed brothers. She loved the way Callaghan welcomed Griffin, her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage, onto his team. When Brogan was born, in 2003, Callaghan insisted that his buddies renew their vow to keep coaching.
Brogan started playing flag football in the fourth grade, in 2013. By that time, the relationship between football and brain trauma was well established. Two years earlier, a Missoula kid named Dylan Steigers, who'd started out in local youth leagues, went off to play at Eastern Oregon University and took a big hit in a scrimmage. He died the next day.
Shannon, meanwhile, had been getting warnings from her older brother, Scott Brown, a former high school running back and now an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Portland, Oregon. "I'd see these 40-year-olds coming in just maimed, having these big surgeries from playing football in high school, college, the pros," he says. Brown became convinced that letting a kid play tackle football was akin to child abuse. He implored his siblings to keep their kids off the field.
The youngest, Shannon's brother Howard, got the message; his son plays only flag football. But Shannon felt trapped — nobody could tell her husband what to think about football. All the CTE research, Callaghan argued, had been done on the brains of guys known to have problems. He had attended one of USA Football's Heads Up Football clinics, where he'd been schooled in the latest safe-tackling techniques. And he would never consider letting a concussed kid play before a complete recovery.
So in 2014, Brogan, now a fifth grader, joined Callaghan's team. He knew his dad's track record and dreamed of exceeding it with a Stanford scholarship and a career in the NFL — just like Jordie Tripp, a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks who played on Callaghan's team 10 years earlier.
Brogan, it turned out, had the makings of a natural quarterback, with a great arm and an instinct for reading the field and seeing weaknesses in the opposing team's defense. But as the 2015 season rolled around, a handful of Brogan's teammates did not return. "The moms and I talked," Shannon says, "and they were like, ‘I wouldn't let Brogan play.' "
Similar conversations were happening nationwide, in part due to the efforts of women like Kimberly Archie. Her son, Paul Bright Jr., grew up playing Pop Warner ball in Sparks, Nevada. He was living in Los Angeles, working as an assistant chef, when his behavior grew erratic. Then, on a September evening in 2014, Bright drove an unlicensed motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a car and was posthumously diagnosed with early-stage CTE. Archie began to speak out on radio and television. The American commitment to youth tackle football, she says, "is like letting our kids ride down the highway in the back of the truck at 80 miles per hour because we're afraid we'll make them weak if we stop."
Last September, Archie launched a class action lawsuit in conjunction with Jo Cornell, whose son played Pop Warner football and was found to have CTE after committing suicide. The lawsuit defines members of the plaintiff's class as anyone who has ever played, or had a child play, youth tackle football, and suffered a head injury since 1997. It alleges negligence and fraud by Pop Warner, USA Football, and the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which develops voluntary safety standards for youth-football helmets. The complaint does not specify damages, but the number could amount to billions of dollars.
This isn't the first lawsuit Pop Warner has faced: The league has already settled two others. Pop Warner now requires that each practice session runs no longer than two hours a day and that no more than 25 percent of practice time is devoted to full-speed contact, or scrimmaging. "There's risk in anything kids do, and football's getting a really bad rap," says Pop Warner executive director Jon Butler.
These lawsuits, of course, are the stuff of nightmares for the NFL, which reached its own billion-dollar settlement with 20,000 former players last year. "It's the best game that's ever been invented, and we've got to make sure that moms get the message — because that's who's afraid of our game right now," Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians said recently. "It's not dads. It's moms."
Predictably, the NFL has stepped up its outreach to mothers. It sponsors the Facebook page Touchdown Moms, where NFL employees post heartwarming anecdotes about the mothers of youth players. USA Football sponsors a Team Mom of the Year Award. And then there are those free mom's clinics. Nearly every NFL franchise has hosted at least one such clinic, generally treating mothers to on-field drills and a concussion-awareness presentation.
Archie, who was already working as a sports-safety consultant, attended one of these clinics in Ohio in 2014. This was a month before her son's accident, and even then she was not impressed. "It's condescending to think you can just trick moms," she says.
Three weeks after his injury, Brogan was cleared to go back to school, but he could last only an hour or so a day. He sometimes flew into sudden, inexplicable rages and Shannon mostly stopped working to care for him. Callaghan spent his days at the office and continued to coach the Panthers in the evening. He coached out of a sense of obligation, both to his fellow coaches and to players. But now it felt different: He watched every tackle with anxiety, waiting for the child to get up and walk it off.
Both Shannon's brothers, meanwhile, were relentless. Howard sent his sister one news article after another about kids like Evan Murray, a 17-year-old New Jersey quarterback, Ben Hamm, a 16-year-old linebacker from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and 17-year-old Kenny Bui, from the Seattle suburbs, all of whom died within a month of one another early that fall. All told, more than a dozen kids died playing football that season, and Shannon's brothers made sure she knew about each one.
One night she tried to share these stories with her husband.
"We are not talking about this," he said.
It wasn't until seven weeks after his injury that Brogan was able to form new memories. He started neurological rehab therapy and scored terribly on cognitive tests that included closing his eyes and touching his nose. Math worksheets that would have taken five minutes before the injury now took an hour and left Brogan exhausted. Spinning on a stationary bicycle gave him a headache.
In February, Callaghan and Brogan sat on the couch to watch the Super Bowl. Shannon overheard Brogan begin a sentence with the phrase, "When I play in the NFL . . ."
"That's not going to happen," Shannon said.
Later she heard her husband tell Brogan, "But when you play in high school . . ."
"It's not going to happen," she said.
"We don't have to decide this now," Callaghan replied.
Later still, Brogan asked his mom, "Why won't you let me play?"
"Because God gave you that big brain so you can do something amazing in this world."
"He also made me a good football player," Brogan said.
"But that can't be your future."
Callaghan turned to Shannon. "But what about his dream?"
Shannon thought, "Whose dream is it?"
The last football game Mike Callaghan ever played was against Washington State in 1985, the less memorable season after that epic championship year. The Bobcats were struggling and in the first quarter, he suffered a concussion after being hit by a running back. The team's trainer ordered him out of the game, but Callaghan returned to the field anyway, determined to play every minute of his last college game. At that point somebody grabbed his helmet, locked it in an equipment bin, and sent him to the showers, where he wept uncontrollably. "That's how football ended for me," Callaghan says. "I didn't go out in a blaze of glory. Some guy ran me over. We lost."
As Brogan recovered, Callaghan couldn't help but think of all the concussions he'd suffered in his football career. By his senior year of college, he had experienced so many that he sometimes lost the right side of his visual field during games and had agonizing headaches, to the degree that the team's trainer ordered a brain scan. It came back clean, but the trainer asked Callaghan why he still played. He knew he wasn't NFL material, so what was the point? Why take the risk?
He was now asking similar questions about Brogan — but Mike could not let go of football. He thought about all the things he wanted his son to experience: the friendships, the teamwork, the victories. "I love watching Brogan play the game," he told me. "I love it."
Despite their differences, Shannon understands. "It's like a death," she says. "Mike wants his kid to be a football star. And Brogan would be the star. He's a leader and damn good, and everyone looks up to him."
Callaghan struggled to imagine what his own life would be like without football. What would he do on weekday nights and Sunday mornings in the fall? When would he see his friends? Who would he be? "Every time I thought about it, my mind just went blank," he says.
In August, Callaghan got a call from officials at Missoula Youth Football: Did he plan to coach the 2016 season? After months of agonizing, almost entirely to himself, he'd finally made a decision. "Brogan's not going to play, and I'm not going to coach," he said.
Callaghan couldn't bear to think of it as a permanent decision, telling his son that it was only for the coming season. But Brogan was unconvinced and angry. "You know it's forever," he said. "Mom's never going to let me play again."
Callaghan called Dawald and apologized for leaving the team. Two weeks later, he told his father.
Upon hearing the news James Callaghan said, "I didn't want to ask." Then he said, "Is that your decision or your wife's?"
"We're on the same page for this year," Callaghan said.
"Geez," James said. "That's going to be tough."
"Dad, it may be tough for us," Mike said. "But what I'm starting to figure out is there's a whole other world out there. There's a lot of people who don't consider playing, and they still get through the fall somehow."
Mike and brogan still watch football together — high school games on Friday, Montana State on Saturdays, and his former team on Sunday afternoons. "It's kind of hard, because I'm not playing," Brogan says. "I think about what I would do against the teams when I watch. But there isn't really anything that I can do." He's hurled himself into basketball and recently asked if he could take tennis lessons. Callaghan bought him his first rifle and is planning an elk hunt.
Brogan admits that he hasn't yet fully recovered. Schoolwork doesn't come as easily as it once did, but Shannon isn't worried. "Brogan missed 247 classes in the sixth grade," she says, "and he finished with three A-pluses and three As." Now, instead of going to Stanford to play football, he wants to go to Berkeley to study architecture — his mother's passion — on an academic scholarship.
Callaghan says he often thinks back to a day last November, weeks after Brogan's injury. League officials asked how he wanted to handle that unfinished game with the Chargers. "A big part of me was, ‘I don't want to handle it,' " Callaghan said. But the kids cared, and Callaghan felt it would have been selfish to refuse.
That meant bringing the teams back to the field behind the county fairgrounds. The Chargers and the Panthers lined up exactly where they'd been the moment Brogan was injured — but with Brogan now on the sidelines with his father. The referee set the game clock to where it had stopped and blew the whistle, and they played the remainder of the game. The Panthers lost, and for the first time in his life Callaghan didn't care.
All Brogan's teammates went home, except for two boys, Charlie and Cole. Charlie picked up a football and threw it to Brogan, who caught it and tossed it back. Charlie then passed it to Cole. Ten minutes went by, then 20, and still the kids continued to play. The parents lingered off to the side, making it clear there was no rush. "Brogan was kind of running around," Callaghan says. "Normal isn't the right word, but the normalcy of it, seeing him be a kid again. The game was over, we got beat, and it was good for me. Our kids were fine."
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Working the line is a bouncy brunette pouring plastic shot glasses full of Windex-blue liquid. Most of the guys grab one and toss it back, no questions asked. "It's a preworkout," she says, "and it's $35 inside." By "preworkout" she means it's designed to give you a jolt of energy before the gym. Exactly how it does this isn't a question anyone seems to be asking. Inside the store, Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar, are pills and powders that claim to do everything from boost sex drive to increase muscle mass and dissolve fat.
Boca Nutrition's owners, PJ Braun and Aaron Singerman, are greeting customers like old friends, with bear hugs and handshakes. Both men are absurdly muscular. Singerman, 36, is 6-foot-2 with slicked-back brown hair. He has a goatee and narrow-rimmed glasses, and his bulky frame fills out his blue T-shirt like an overstuffed bag. Braun, 35, who has black hair gelled into short spikes, is shorter and bulkier. Stretch marks scar his arms.
In addition to Boca Nutrition, the pair owns the supplements manufacturer Blackstone Labs, which they started in 2012. Since then the company has hawked tens of millions of dollars' worth of products promising to make men stronger, bigger, last longer in the sack, and even gain a mental edge. For the most part, their over-the-counter powders do exactly what they claim to do, in part because they sometimes include compounds not approved or even banned by the FDA. It's a legally dubious but common practice — and an easy way to make a killing while giving people the results they want. (Braun calls this a mischaracterization: "We have always tried to produce nothing but cutting-edge and compliant products. As soon as we have any direction from the FDA on an issue it has not spoken on before, for better or worse, we respect its statement and adjust our products accordingly.") Blackstone has grown by 100 percent every year since opening shop five years ago. Its sales now top $20 million annually, and it's featured in Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing companies. And Braun and Singerman are far from done.
"I am not even fucking close to satisfied with Blackstone Labs," Braun boasted in a video posted to Facebook last year. "I want to be the biggest company in the world."
Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar is their newest venture, a retail store that serves up various protein-packed shakes and sells Blackstone's full line of supplements. The sleek space, with shelves full of oversize bottles and racks of workout gear, is like a Whole Foods for gym rats. They opened the first store seven months ago in West Boca. Today is the grand opening of their second location, and devotees have shown up for discounted supplements and to meet a handful of celebrity bodybuilders flown in for the occasion, including Kai Greene, the most famous weightlifter since Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But among this crowd, Braun and Singerman are the real stars. They pose for photos and hype their cars, a Corvette and a Ferrari, both black and parked prominently out front. One of the fanboys is a 24-year-old named Brett, who drove four hours to attend the event. "I couldn't help but show my support for PJ and Aaron," he says. A personal trainer from Palm Coast, Florida, Brett has used a wide variety of Blackstone products, including one called Ostapure, a supplement that contained steroid-like drugs called SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators). The unlicensed drugs were developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck as a potential treatment for muscle wasting in cancer patients. But it was the drugs' muscle-mass-building properties that made them a big hit among weightlifters like Brett. Blackstone recently stopped selling Ostapure after being sued by another supplements maker hoping to clean up the industry. "The strongest product of theirs," Brett says a bit wistfully.
Inside the store, Braun shows me one of his latest creations, muscle-building pills inside a black bottle labeled brutal 4ce in blocky letters that drip with blue icicles. "It'll make you a lot stronger and more aggressive in the gym," he says. "Let's say you're 35, 40 years old and your testosterone isn't as high as it used to be. This will keep your testosterone so high that you'll be like an 18-year-old!"
When I ask Braun how, he launches into a chemistry lecture. "Your body converts it into 4-andro [a testosterone booster], so it'll bulk you up," he says, noting that Brutal 4ce has the side effect of creating estrogen, which could give you what bodybuilders call "bitch tits." This can be countered, however, by taking an estrogen blocker. "Most of our customers are pretty knowledgeable," he says, "so they know they need to do that."
As the festivities wind down, I grab a $46.99 bottle of Cobra 6 Extreme, an amped-up version of their top-selling Cobra 6, a preworkout supplement formulated with various stimulants. At the checkout, a slim guy in his twenties, part smoothie barista, part pharmacist, looks at what I'm buying and asks me if I've tried it before. No, I say.
"So you don't know what you're getting yourself into?"
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"If you're not used to taking a lot of stimulants, you should start with the regular Cobra 6. You might not like the way this makes you feel."
In the U.S., dietary supplements are a $38-billion-a-year industry. Sixty-five percent of men in America take one, whether to lose weight, grow hair, gain muscle, or keep an erection long into the night. There's a wide range of products, and most veer toward opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side are the homeopathic cures and the herbal remedies like echinacea, products that may not do much of anything besides drain your bank account. On the opposite end are the products that work precisely because they rely on pharmaceutical ingredients, many not listed anywhere on the label. In 2014, for example, the FDA recalled several weight-loss supplements with names like Super Fat Burner because they contained the prescription drug sibutramine, as well as phenolphthalein, a banned laxative linked to genetic mutations — but not before a rash of hospitalizations.
It's the supplements laced with prescription drugs that are more troubling. They result in 23,000 emergency room visits every year, and more than 2,000 hospitalizations. The supplements are often sold under names like Lean FX and Stiff Nights, and the ingredients are a list of acronyms only a chemist could decipher: DMAA, 17b-hydroxy 2a, or 17b-dimethyl 5a-androstan 3-one azine.
"We're talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. "The more likely it helps your workout," Cohen says, "the more likely it's going to adversely affect your health."
The FDA oversees the industry, but it's woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don't bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there's effectively no punishment if they don't. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients. ("Blackstone continues to innovate by researching new products and new ingredients," says Braun. "If anything, we would welcome clearer guidance from the FDA so we don't have to discontinue any products.")
"It's the Wild West," says Dan Fabricant, who was the FDA's director of the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs from 2011 to 2014. "In weight loss, sexual enhancement, and bodybuilding categories, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Blackstone, according to its critics, has exploited this system better than most, and exactly how it does this is a case study in how to game a failing regulatory system. For one, Braun and Singerman aren't shy about marketing their legally ambiguous products: They often advertise the active ingredients right on the label and promote them with ads full of young women who could moonlight in beer commercials. They're also constantly active online. Blackstone has some 25,000 Instagram followers; Braun has over 100,000. His account is littered with shirtless selfies and videos of him driving his Ferrari or pimped-out Jeep. He's also the star of a weekly YouTube show with his wife, the former pro wrestler Celeste Bonin, titled Beauty & Braun, which covers the daily lives of the couple, from gym sessions to discussions about breast implants. Until recently he also hosted a daily question-and-answer session on Periscope called "Cardio Q&A," featuring Braun on a treadmill, chugging orange Pedialyte and answering a wide range of queries from Blackstone users. One time he doled out advice ("No matter how mature you think they are, it's not good to settle down with a 19-year-old girl"), but usually he just hyped his products. During one appearance, Braun announced the "dick pills" Blackstone was working on weren't coming along the way he wanted. "I've been working on that for a long time," he said. "But they will eventually come out."
Two days after the Boca Nutrition opening, I visit Braun and Singerman at Blackstone HQ, an unbranded, 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Boca Raton. The office walls are covered in photos and framed bodybuilding-magazine covers, several of which feature Braun in full flex. On Singerman's desk is a bronze statue of a seminude Adonis-like man holding a barbell. It's a first-place trophy from the Mr. Olympia contest, which Singerman got at auction. "You hate to see that, because it means the guy who sold it was struggling financially and was forced to sell it," Singerman says. "But I love it."
Braun and Singerman each have a long history in bodybuilding. Singerman, from New Orleans, started hitting the gym when he was 13 and kept working out, even through a cocaine and heroin habit he picked up after dropping out of high school. At 27 he witnessed a friend overdose and die, so he got clean and doubled down at the gym. In 2005, he got a job as a personal trainer and started writing thousands of posts on bodybuilding message boards and eventually became marketing director for Ironmag Labs, a supplements company owned by businessman Robert Dimaggio, who had become notorious for selling sketchy supplements. Singerman convinced Dimaggio to bring on Braun, whom he'd met at a bodybuilding competition, as the company's top sponsored athlete.
Braun, who grew up in Connecticut, had taken to the gym in order to try to impress his absentee father. "My father wouldn't be proud or say, 'Good job,' " says Braun. "He would just say, 'Oh, you know, there's always somebody better. You can do better.' " Braun went to the University of Connecticut but dropped out to become a personal trainer. Then he took up professional bodybuilding.
Blackstone's genesis was in 2012, when Braun helped Singerman sell 7,000 units of something called Super DMZ. The product contained two designer steroid-like ingredients, dymethazine and methylstenbolone, that few outside bodybuilding circles knew much about. Braun and Singerman, however, recognized that these prohormones, as they're called, were groundbreaking at helping gym rats get ripped. Their boss, Dimaggio, had helped create Super DMZ but turned it over to Braun and Singerman to hawk. "We were able to sell those 7,000 units in five weeks," Singerman explained in an online interview. "We gave Robert his money back and each made $75,000." But prohormones hadn't yet been banned, so the pair ordered more and continued selling under the name Blackstone Labs. In just 10 months they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and moved operations from a makeshift office in Braun's townhouse into their current warehouse. "We bought more of the Super DMZ, sold it, and created a second product, third product, fourth product, fifth product, etc.," Singerman says in the same video. By the time prohormones were finally banned, in 2014, Blackstone was up and running with a full line of supplements, from postworkout muscle builders to meal-replacement formulas. "We've been fortunate enough to be the hot company," says Braun.
In their office, Singerman points to a small photo of the two men leaning against brown shipping boxes piled up to their armpits. "That's all Super DMZ," Singerman says proudly. "This was our original shipment."
The reason Super DMZ and prohormones finally became illegal has something to do with Blackstone's supplier. The product was being manufactured by a New York company called Mira Health Products. In 2013, at least 29 people developed varying levels of liver disease after taking a vitamin called B-50 sold by the company. After investigating, the FDA discovered B-50 and many of Mira's other products included high levels of prohormones, which were not listed anywhere on the label. The FDA forced Mira to recall all those pills and officially banned prohormones, including the ones in Super DMZ — which Blackstone listed on the bottle. None of that stopped Blackstone from continuing to sell them. In fact, at nearly the same time, the company released a new product called Metha-Quad Extreme, which contained prohormones. It wasn't until September 2014 that Blackstone stopped selling prohormones altogether to abide by FDA regulations.
"We lost 30 percent of our total revenue," Singerman says. "But the following month we went back up, because the truth is that people always want the next best thing."
Back in their warehouse, Braun and Singerman lead me up a flight of stairs to an open space with a long brown table and black swivel chairs. Here they're formulating the "next best thing." Another muscle-bound man, this one with a pink Mohawk and a lip ring, is scribbling symbols and numbers on a whiteboard. "This is our chemist, Bryan," says Singerman. "We're doing some really cool stuff with Bryan."
Bryan Moskowitz joined Blackstone in early 2015. Before that, Braun and Singerman formulated all the company's supplements. Neither of them has any formal education, so they hired Moskowitz, who has a master's degree in organic biochemistry from Georgia Tech and calls himself the "Guerilla Chemist." Moskowitz counts among his role models Patrick Arnold, who's infamous for creating three hard-to-detect steroids, two of which were distributed by balco, the lab linked to disgraced athletes Jose Canseco and Marion Jones — and whose founder, Victor Conte, was sentenced to four months in prison. Moskowitz looks up to Arnold enough that he even posted an Instagram photo of his and Arnold's faces Photoshopped onto an image of Breaking Bad's Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in hazmat suits, having just finished cooking a batch of crystal meth.
Arnold is also credited with introducing the powerful stimulant DMAA to the supplements market. Eli Lilly created the drug in 1944 as a nasal decongestant but removed it from the market in 1983 because it caused headaches, tremors, and increased blood pressure. Arnold reintroduced it years later, in 2006, as a way for its users to get a jolt of energy before the gym. In one month alone, in 2013, the FDA received 70 reports of liver disease and one death caused by OxyElite Pro, a popular supplement with DMAA.
In the boardroom, Braun explains that Moskowitz helped design the company's latest product, Brutal 4ce. The steroid that powers it, DHEA, is banned or prescription-only in just about every country except the United States. When I ask Oliver Catlin, the president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute and the Banned Substances Control Group, why it's still legal, he simply says, "I don't know. Ask Orrin Hatch."
Orrin Hatch is the powerful seven-term senator from Utah who pushed through a 1994 law in Congress called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (dshea). The bill defines what a dietary supplement is: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or amino acid (basically, anything found in nature). And while it explicitly states that it can't be a drug, the law also prevents the government from prescreening and preapproving supplements. So supplements don't require FDA approval the way, say, a cancer drug might, even though they may have the same active ingredient. Utah is one of the major producers of supplements. In fact, it is the state's third-largest industry, earning $10 billion per year. Back when the law was written, the industry was mostly homeopathic products, but it has since boomed, and the law created cover for aggressive manufacturers willing to flaunt the regulations.
Also written into dshea are a series of loopholes that allow steroids sold prior to the law's passing to be grandfathered in, like the DHEA in Blackstone's Brutal 4ce — even though it'll get you banned by nearly every sporting league on the planet, including MLB, the NFL, and the NCAA.
"That's one of those things," says Singerman about sports testing. "When a high school athlete asks if it's OK to take [Blackstone's] Dust V2, I go, 'No, probably not.' "
Braun and Singerman are similarly unfazed about SARMs, the unapproved cancer drugs in Ostapure. "If you look at the actual literature," says Singerman, "it's all positive. I've used it plenty of times, and I like putting out products that I actually use."
When I ask them whether they're worried about the potential side effects of their products, Singerman is quick with a scripted answer. "We go through the available literature and studies," he says. But when I press him, his next response seems more honest.
"I am a libertarian," Singerman says. "I believe that it's the person's decision. As long as they're an adult."
But they have no way of knowing how different people might react. "One person could be fine, and another person could have a heart attack," says Dr. Armand Dorian, an ER physician in Los Angeles who often treats patients injured by dietary supplements. "It's rolling the dice."
Take Jesse Woods. In 2009, the 28-year-old went online and ordered a bottle of M-Drol pills from a Texas-based company called TFSupplements. Woods, who weighed 150 pounds, was looking to add muscle. "I'm a small-framed guy," he says, "so I was trying to bulk up." He did. In just four weeks, he'd packed on 20 pounds of muscle. "I got big for a minute," he says. "Then I got sick."
Five weeks into taking M-Drol, Woods left work early because his stomach was bothering him. When his wife came home, she noticed his eyes were yellow. "I'm taking you to the emergency room," she said. Doctors performed a battery of tests, ultimately determining that Woods was experiencing liver failure. What Woods didn't know is that M-Drol contained the steroid-like prohormone Superdrol.
Woods spent 32 days in the hospital. He threw up nearly every meal he ate, lost 30 pounds, and developed a pungent odor, a common side effect of liver disease. "I never felt old until after that," says Woods, who's now 35. "Now I feel sluggish. I just feel like I aged. My liver has scar tissue on it. Doctors can't say how long I'll live."
When he was released from the hospital, Woods sued both TFSupplements and its supplier, Competitive Edge Labs, settling for an undisclosed amount. But the lawsuit didn't stop companies from selling Superdrol.
Blackstone has yet to be sued by any of its customers, and the FDA has generally left the company alone. "We haven't really had problems with the FDA," says Braun. But that may be simply because the agency is backlogged. It's also far more effective to go after the companies supplying the illegal ingredients than the ones marketing the final product. It's the former that are dealing with the overseas suppliers that produce the untested or illegal drugs. Singerman admits to purchasing Chinese ingredients but says it's something that's taken care of by the plants that manufacture Blackstone's products. I ask him who they are.
"Well, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is one."
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is the best example of a duplicitous company thriving in a broken system. Its founder, Jared Wheat, has a history of hawking high-demand substances. In the early '90s, he ran a high school ecstasy ring in Alabama and served 32 months in prison for it. He started Hi-Tech in 1998, and by 2003 the FDA had already warned the company about its dietary supplements, some of which contained an unlicensed drug similar to the one used in Cialis. But that didn't stop Wheat. By 2005 he was selling supplements that contained the banned stimulant ephedra. In early 2006 government officials raided his offices and seized 200 cases of supplements valued at $3 million, and in 2008 Wheat pleaded guilty to selling adulterated supplements and committing mail and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison, but he continued to operate Hi-Tech from his cell.
When I ask Pieter Cohen how Hi-Tech continues to conduct business in such a manner, he says that allowing any company to regularly sell synthetic ingredients as supplements is due to a major failure on the part of the government. "They're not doing their job," he says.
For their part, Braun and Singerman maintain that everything in their supplements appears right on the label.
To test that claim, I sent the Cobra 6 Extreme I purchased at Boca Nutrition to Oliver Catlin's Banned Substances Control Group. When I received the test results, it turns out Braun is right: The product is now devoid of the banned DMBA, a stimulant very similar to DMAA, that powered it.
"So is it safe to take?" I ask.
"Not necessarily," says Catlin. The readings revealed a powerful mix of new stimulants. That could be due to a combination of the ingredients listed on the label — a formula that includes caffeine and theobromine (an alkaloid of the cacao plant that can be deadly in large doses). "Or it could be something else," he says. "We target drugs we are concerned about, like DMBA, when we screen products like these. But sometimes there are new, unknown compounds present that we can't see."
Soon after my visit to Blackstone Labs, and after four years of working together, Braun and Singerman are at war. Singerman leaves Blackstone to pursue other projects. "But he still owns half the company," Braun explains, insinuating that the split is amicable. But the tone of their relationship quickly changes. "When the companies first split, I hoped we'd be friends again," Braun says during one of his online Q&A sessions. "But he did too many things."
Braun has since divested himself of Boca Nutrition, and Singerman has gone on to start a supplements company called RedCon 1. He is also rebranding another, Prime Nutrition, with none other than Hi-Tech's Jared Wheat, who was released from prison in 2011. Braun has taken over day-to-day control of Blackstone, and despite the schism, the company is thriving. Blackstone has moved into a much larger, 14,000-square-foot space, and Braun has introduced several new products, including a long-awaited libido booster called Entice. But the most surprising of his new releases is Dust Extreme, a preworkout supplement with DMAA, the infamous, banned stimulant popularized by chemist Patrick Arnold. It's a curious decision to sell the illegal ingredient, but Braun justifies it in a long video on Facebook.
"I believe that people should be allowed to take what they want to take," he says. "Are you completely safe if you have health conditions? No. If your blood pressure is high, should you be taking a product like this? Probably not. But these are things you should look at yourself. I believe we should all have the choice to put what we want in our body. You can go and buy cigarettes at any fucking gas station and they're guaranteed to kill you. You will die. So how dare the FDA come in and take away ingredients from us that give us awesome workouts?"
","tag_ids":[4748,5611],"publish_date":"2017-01-31T20:16:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T14:05:21.179Z","updated_at":"2017-01-31T21:51:59.078Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","keywords":"supplements, dietary supplements, blackstone labs, boca nutrition & smoothie bar, bodybuilding, muscle supplements, muscle building, ","description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jzRkyi","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Magazine Photograph by Shana Novak","caption":"P.J. and Celeste Braun were featured on the May 2015 cover of 'Iron Man Magazine.'","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_c-9c57d3e1-802d-4480-a15c-67a5c8a98ac5.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Newswire / Aaron Singerman","caption":"Braun, left, and Singerman turned Blackstone Labs into a a powerhouse earning more than $20 million a year.","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_b-b074ced0-e2a7-47ab-a93b-9835ef973f0c.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photo Illustration by Emily Shur","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_a-7a018373-b943-436b-8215-40db3942a4af.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/the-truth-about-herbal-supplements-20140102","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: The Truth About Herbal Supplements","contentId":168069,"contentHeadline":"The Truth About Herbal Supplements"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/the-dawn-of-bodybuilding-20121118","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Huge","contentId":168456,"contentHeadline":"Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Bodybuilding"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":463386,"old_id":null,"title":"RIP 'Surfing Magazine': The Rag That Captured the Sport in All Its Irreverent Glory","short_title":"RIP 'Surfing Magazine': The Rag That Captured the Sport in All Its Irreverent Glory","slug":"/adventure/articles/rip-surfing-magazine-the-rag-that-captured-the-sport-in-all-its-irreverent-glory-w463386","body":"When I started writing for surf magazines in the 1990s, the internet was an obscure hobby for geeks, and the Holy Trinity of surf media went like this: Surfer’s Journal was the new, upscale quarterly full of serious think-pieces and rosy-hued nostalgia trips for older longboarders; Surfing Magazine, which was founded in 1964 and died this week, targeted teenagers through contest coverage and loud graphics and minuscule blocks of irreverent text; and Surfer Magazine acted as the clear Bible of the Sport and is still its most recognizable brand.
I wrote earnestly brainy stuff for The Surfer’s Journal, and I joined packs of pro surfers on trips to Iceland and the Galapagos Islands for Surfer, but Surfing Magazine was the one I picked up every time I saw a new issue in the grocery store. I read it cover to cover in those pre-Facebook, pre-Snapchat, pre-YouTube days, when splashy pictures and words in a monthly magazine were a surfer’s only source of news about the giant waves ridden at Waimea Bay three months ago and the secret to the so-called “pig dog” stance for backside tube-riding. There were years when I burned with envy over Surfing’s surprisingly long articles by giants like the iconoclastic surfer/monk Dave Parmenter, the insanely loquacious historian/prophet Sam George, and the plain-old-brilliant Chris Carter, who went on to create the X-Files TV series. For a while, Surfing Magazine struck an excellent balance between eye-catching design, unabashed obsession with young guns and big airs, and smart commentary.
Over the years, though, as Web-delivered content became the freight train roaring down the tracks that every print magazine was trapped on — and as we all learned to expect YouTube videos of epic Pipeline barrels within hours of their happening — every member of the old Holy Trinity appeared to double down on their target demographics. Surfing Magazine, in other words, seemed to become ever-more tailored to the under-16 ADHD set, ever-less relevant to anyone inclined to sit still for more than 60 seconds. “Surfing did launch a half-assed website called surfing.com back in 1998,” says Matt Warshaw, caretaker of encyclopediaofsurfing.com and a former editor-in-chief of Surfer, “but all they did to change the print magazine was remove things. They took out contest coverage, they took out letters to the editor, and they ended up with a magazine that felt thin and pointless.”
If you're wondering how such an iconic publication could die after so many successful years in such a popular and youth-driven sport, consider the following question: If you were a surf-trunks manufacturer looking to reach the eyeballs of surf-crazed 14-year-old boys, would you spend a fortune on print advertisements in a magazine that came out only once a month, filled its pages with frame-grab photos of barrel rides everybody watched on Surfline.com ages ago, and required kids to read actual words on a page? Or would you spend a fraction of that money on bikini-chick web ads that popped up every time those boys tried to watch a 30-second wipe-out video on their mobile phones?
That’s another way of saying that Surfing Magazine died for the same reason lots of print magazines are in trouble, but sooner than most because it was uniquely ill-positioned to survive the impact of the Internet freight train. “All that’s really happened here,” says Matt Warshaw, “is that a magazine that’s long been on life support has been mercifully put down.” Still, it’s a damn shame because videos of wipe-outs and barrels and tubes and monster waves — fun as they are — do nothing to connect a surf-stoked grommet with the broader culture and traditions of the coolest sport on earth. But maybe the surfer’s education and the sense of identity it can bring will happen later now, after kids grow up and subscribe to Surfer’s Journal and discover the joy of putting down that smart phone and sacking out on the couch with a long and thoughtful article about the glory days of surf magazines, and how there used to be this kind of Holy Trinity, and, well, you get the idea.
","tag_ids":[5798,4790],"publish_date":"2017-01-27T18:29:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T17:57:41.055Z","updated_at":"2017-01-27T23:40:36.618Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"RIP 'Surfing Magazine': The Rag That Captured the Sport in All Its Irreverent Glory","keywords":"surfing magazine, sam george, chris carter, surfing, Dave Parmenter","description":"A writer and surfer reflects on the end of 'Surfing Magazine', a 53-year-old rag that taught him to love the sport."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jdXVD9","label":"SURFING","media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Horizontal Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"left","title":"","credit":"","caption":"","filename":"surfing-march-2016-cover-578f3bd1-3b42-4692-ac7b-e2c82ed8631d.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":"Surfing Magazine, the loud, splashy face of the sport since 1964, folded this week. ","credits":null,"filename":"surf-mag-bd13be8d-b705-4b24-8597-e27f18b78fb5.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/health-fitness/articles/8-healthy-habits-of-big-wave-surfer-laird-hamilton-w457910","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: 8 Healthy Habits of Big-Wave Surfer Laird Hamilton","contentId":457910,"contentHeadline":"8 Healthy Habits of Big-Wave Surfer Laird Hamilton"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/adventure/articles/epic-one-day-adventures-surfing-in-montauk-w436071","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: Epic One-Day Adventures: Surfing in Montauk","contentId":436071,"contentHeadline":"Epic One-Day Adventures: Surfing in Montauk"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"A writer and surfer reflects on the end of 'Surfing Magazine', a 53-year-old rag that taught him to love the sport.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":null,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":455184,"old_id":null,"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","short_title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","slug":"/features/articles/the-man-taking-down-big-sugar-w455184","body":"This past fall, Gary Taubes took his wife and two sons on a trip to a wildlife preserve in Sonoma County, California, the kind of place where guests learn firsthand about the species of the Serengeti. They slept in tents and spent the day among giraffes, zebras, antelope, and the like. One morning, Taubes and his boys awoke early. "It was 50 degrees out — freezing by our standards," he recalls. "I took the kids to breakfast, and" — his face takes on a pained expression — "how can I not give them hot chocolate?"
For most parents, indulging the kids with some cocoa would pose no dilemma. But Taubes, one of America's leading and most strident nutrition writers, is no ordinary father. His new book, The Case Against Sugar, seems destined to strike fear into the hearts of children everywhere. Taubes' argument is simple: Sugar is likely poison, and it's what is making our country fat. And not just fat but sick. So don't eat it. Ever.
A little much? Perhaps. But the kids did get the cocoa — on this one special occasion.
For Taubes, the cocoa conundrum is an occupational hazard for someone who describes his current mission as "the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas." But Taubes, 60, has never been one to shy away from extreme positions. His last two books, 2007's Good Calories, Bad Calories and 2010's Why We Get Fat, launched a nationwide movement to shun bread and embrace butter. Both argued that it's not how many calories we consume, but where they come from, and that eating fat doesn't actually make us so. These were bold statements at the time, and they had a big impact. "I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Thanks to Taubes' pro-fat pronouncements, Pollan says, "millions of Americans changed the way they eat. Doughnut, bread, and pasta sales plummeted, and we saw a change in the food conversation, the effects of which are still being felt today."
Now, with The Case Against Sugar, Taubes launches his toughest crusade yet: to prove that we've been bamboozled into thinking that cookies and soda are simply "empty" calories and not uniquely toxic ones. That's the result, he argues, of a long history of deception from the sugar industry and its support of shoddy science.
The audacity of those arguments makes Taubes an anomaly among nutrition writers, says John Horgan, director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. "He isn't content just to do public relations for scientists," Horgan says, meaning he doesn't rewrap scientists' findings with the simple, shiny packaging of journalism. Instead, he digs deep into the research, and if he finds it lacking, he attacks it. "He'll come right out and say if he thinks someone is an idiot," Horgan says.
With his new book, Taubes will likely have his largest platform, and an audience poised to listen. By now, nearly everyone believes that Americans eat too much sugar. Most experts agree that it's a major contributor to our nation's grim health: More than a third of adults are obese, and one in 11 has diabetes. This understanding has spurred campaigns for soda taxes nationwide — five measures were approved by voters in November — and moves by big companies to ban sugary drinks from workplace cafeterias. In August 2016, three class-action lawsuits were filed against General Mills, Kellogg's, and Post, alleging that the companies falsely claimed their cereals are healthy when, in fact, they're loaded with sugar.
Anyone else would be encouraged, but ever the brawler, Taubes points out flaws: Even these new anti-sugar crusaders, he says, are motivated by a naive, and ultimately dangerous, "less is better" view of sugar. To Taubes, the answer to our obesity crisis isn't more expensive soda and less sweetened cereals. It's to stop poisoning ourselves altogether.
"Sugar is like heroin to me," Taubes says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
Like the control room on a battleship, Taubes' office perches atop the Craftsman-style house he shares with his wife, the writer Sloane Tanen, and their sons. His office is a small, book-filled space with views of the surrounding Oakland hills. He guides me to a low seat near his desk.
I knew of Taubes' aggressive reputation and had seen his brash, combative videos on YouTube — densely reasoned, contrarian lectures about everything from the physiology of how insulin works in the blood to why we should eat meat and avoid carbs (which the body converts into sugar). His videos get hundreds of thousands of views and provoke both cheers and hisses in the blogosphere. I am surprised to find him quiet and soft-spoken.
He pulls out a package of Nicorette gum and pops a piece in his mouth.
"Do you smoke?" I ask.
Not for more than 15 years. "Nicotine is a great drug for writing," Taubes says. "I keep thinking once life calms down, I'll quit." His most vexing addiction, however, is the stuff he's spent five years researching. "Sugar is like heroin to me," he says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
He tries to eat no sugar at all, including honey and agave syrup, and limits fruit. But he insists, "I'm not a zealot." The family pantry — stocked by his wife, not incidentally — has an assortment of what he calls "crap snack health-food bars and juice boxes that Sloane says we have for kids who come over, because they expect it." When Taubes wants a treat, he nibbles on 100 percent chocolate. Because who wouldn't prefer a bar of compressed bitter paste to Godiva?
"The type I buy isn't that bad," he assures me, and then immediately recounts a story of a taxi driver he once gave some to who had to pull over to spit it out. While telling me this, he replaces his now well-chomped Nicorette with a new one. He will continue chain-chewing throughout the day.
Sugar and nicotine, he points out, are connected in more ways than we may think. The Case Against Sugar documents that in the early 1900s, tobacco companies began adding sugar to their products, which allowed people to inhale the smoke deeply, making cigarettes more palatable as well as more addictive and deadlier.
While Taubes has been writing and talking about sugar in one form or another since the early 2000s, with this book he wants to do something he says no one yet has: reveal the bad science that has enabled the sugar industry to mislead the public. By rooting through archives and obscure textbooks, he has uncovered, he says, evidence that sugar is not just the harmless, empty calories we indulge in, but that it may well be toxic, dangerous even in small amounts. It's a possibility that might make you hesitate handing your kids a mug of hot cocoa, too.
To get — and stay — lean and healthy, the conventional nutritional wisdom is simple: Eat less and exercise more. That's what the sugar industry would have us believe, too. (Coca-Cola, for example, now offers smaller-size cans to help consumers drink less soda — or just buy more cans of soda.) That's false, according to Taubes, and the reasoning is part of an industry-driven campaign that goes back to the 1950s. It was then that Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist at the University of Minnesota, first stated that fat — not sugar — causes the high cholesterol levels that lead to heart disease. What few people knew, however, is that Keys' research was funded by the sugar industry.
Taubes details how this pattern of influence ramped up in the 1960s and '70s, as the industry funneled money to scientists and public health officials to combat the notion that sugar was a unique cause of obesity and chronic illness. One of those recipients was Fred Stare, whose work as the founder and chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health was supported financially for decades by sugar purveyors like General Foods. The most public defender of sugar, Stare repeatedly asserted, even as late as 1985, that it is not "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
The industry's campaign scored a coup in 1976, when the FDA classified sugar as "generally recognized as safe" and thus not subject to federal regulations. In 1980, the U.S. government released its dietary guidelines, drafted by a team led by Mark Hegsted, who spent his entire career working under Fred Stare at Harvard. Taubes writes that those guidelines assured us: "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes."
The PR work paid off in other ways, too. Americans now consume 130 pounds of sugar a year, twice the amount we did in 1980. And while the industry told us to embrace sugar, dietary experts preached the gospel of low fat. Both groups assume all calories are created equal, whether they come from apples or apple pie. Such logic implies that a calorie of sugar is no more or less capable of causing obesity and diabetes than a calorie from any type of food.
Taubes presents a wholly different role for what sugar does in the body. "A calorie of sugar and one of meat or broccoli all have vastly different effects on the hormones and enzymes that control or regulate the storage of fat in fat cells," he says. But unlike pork or veggies, sugar has a uniquely negative effect: It causes the liver to accumulate fat and, at the same time, prompts the body to pump out insulin. Over time, Taubes insists, these elevated insulin levels lead to weight gain, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases. Which is to say, we don't blimp out or get sick because we eat too much and fail to exercise. It happens because we eat sugar.
At this point you may be wondering why we haven't put this whole debate to bed with broad, well-conducted research. The problem is that studies about nutrition are notoriously difficult to orchestrate. Most research has been observational: Scientists ask a group of people what they ate over a period of time and then try to tease out associations between their food intake and any diseases they contract. Obviously this approach is problematic. Even if subjects report their eating habits accurately (though they almost never do), it's difficult to know which foods initiate a given problem. If an association is found between hamburgers and heart disease, how would anyone know whether the problem is in the burgers or the buns? The best-run studies require confining subjects to a metabolic ward in a hospital for weeks, where researchers can control all the food they take in and measure all the energy they expend. It's incredibly expensive and nearly impossible to find someone willing to fund it.
Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold are among the few who are. After hearing Taubes on a 2011 podcast discuss the kinds of obesity experiments he'd like to see done, John Arnold, a former hedge-fund manager in Houston, reached out. It led to an Arnold Foundation grant of $35.5 million — money bestowed to Taubes to establish a foundation that would find answers to some of nutrition's toughest questions. In 2012, Taubes paired up with Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins trained physician and star in his field, and launched the nonprofit Nutrition Science Institute (NuSI). Taubes and Attia wanted NuSI to be a beacon, an institution with the experts, resources, and clearance to do the precise experimental science no one else had been willing to. "I thought there needed to be specific studies done to resolve what causes obesity and diabetes once and for all," Taubes says. "I wanted to put the issue to rest, have it recognized by people who could influence the medical establishment."
As late as 1985, Harvard nutritionist Fred Stare asserted that it is no "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
Taubes says he has always had issues with authority, beginning with his father, who was a photoelectric engineer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Xerox copying process. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Gary also lived in the shadow of his elder brother, Clifford. "He excelled at everything," says Taubes. "It was either give up or be supercompetitive."
When Clifford went to Harvard for physics, Gary followed suit. But after receiving a C minus in a quantum physics class, he switched to engineering. (Clifford went on to be a celebrated professor of mathematical physics at his alma mater.) It was then that Taubes read All the President's Men, which tells the story of the Watergate scandal, and he realized he could make a living kicking against authority. He became an investigative journalist, focusing on bad science. Nutrition was a natural fit. No other arena offers more complex or thornier issues to tackle or is so dear to the public's heart. Calling out the idiots here meant Taubes could influence what people put in their mouths every day.
While at Harvard, Taubes channeled his competitive fervor into sports. He played football and in the off-season he boxed. By 1987, when he moved to Venice Beach, California, Taubes worked out constantly, climbing the steps in Santa Monica canyon, roller-blading to Malibu and back, or running a five-mile loop. At the time he believed the cardio would allow him to eat whatever and how much he wanted. But despite all that calorie-burning, he began putting on pounds. It wasn't until 2000, when he adopted the low-carb recommendations of cardiologist Robert Atkins, that Taubes succeed in controlling his weight. That experience colored his thinking about the roles of diet and exercise in obesity.
Exercise, he now believes, plays no role in staying lean. Taubes doesn't dispute that exercise is good for the body and soul; it's just no way to lose weight. Yet he does look the part of a gym rat. His face is lean, his frame muscular. But if anything, Taubes says, avoiding sugar and carbs has allowed him to keep trim. His lunch order at a local burger joint: A one-pound slab of ground beef (no bun) heaped with bacon and smothered in guacamole — the only concession to the color green on the plate.
When I visited Taubes in October, a number of houses on his street had yard signs in support of Oakland's Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax. These are positive signs for the success of The Case — a good thing, because its author could use a win. It's been a tough year for Gary Taubes.
In December 2015, his partner Peter Attia abruptly left NuSI. (In a podcast a few months later, Attia disclosed that he's no longer interested in talking about nutrition.) Taubes calls it an amicable divorce, but he also says the Arnolds had invested in his ideas and Attia's competence, and after Attia left, things began to fall apart.
In January 2016, Kevin Hall, a National Institutes of Health scientist who was the lead investigator on the first NuSI study, recused himself from involvement with the foundation. He and Taubes had clashed on how to set up the pilot study — research that was supposed to address whether carbs were the primary driver of obesity — and when the results came out last summer, the two men couldn't agree on the interpretation of the findings or the quality of the study. NuSI, which was founded to bring clarity to the wildly complicated field of nutrition, ended up mired in the basic processes of scientific research. By late summer, the Arnolds had cut their funding. Taubes considers the episode "a learning experience in how easy it is for experiments to go wrong. Peter and I were like the Hardy Boys of not-for-profit research."
NuSI remains afloat, though barely. Taubes and two other employees continue on as volunteers, and he says the foundation still has unfinished studies awaiting results. He will also continue to solicit funding from wealthy investors, but the main hurdle he faces hasn't been lowered: Spending his career attacking the leading scientists in a field has made working with them rather difficult.
But in light of recent sugar-tax initiatives in Berkeley and San Francisco — both of which passed — Taubes seems to be at the front in the charge against sugar. During our interview, his desk was littered with literature from those trying to tax sugary beverages in cities across the country, along with articles on lawsuits being brought against cereal makers. Taubes hopes The Case will provide more ammo for these fights.
Still, he notes with some exasperation that such efforts continue to speak the language of Big Sugar: If we all just drank less soda and ate less cereal, the rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease would drop. Wrong. Taubes points to the public health initiative of putting calorie counts on menus. "That doesn't lead to any significant decrease in weight or consumption," he says, "because they're identifying the wrong problem."
This is key to Taubes' outlook on sugar. While you may eat desserts and drink sodas only occasionally and add just a sprinkle of sugar to your daily coffee — while maintaining a normal weight — he will tell you that you don't know what even that amount of sugar does to your body. As he puts it in The Case: "How much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we'll ingest."
In an ideal world, Taubes says, his book would lead people to force the FDA to investigate whether sugar is safe, as the agency proclaimed in 1976. That, he admits, is improbable, given the influence Big Sugar wields. Not that it will stop him from waging the war. "Once you've said publicly that the conventional thinking is wrong on something so profound as obesity and diabetes, you either move on to something else or you decide the injustice is such that you have to keep doing this work," he says. "And if you have to keep doing it, then you have to take the shit that comes with it."
Just don't sugarcoat it.
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Neeson carries this mug everywhere: movie sets, red-carpet premieres, New York Rangers games, even the occasional interview. "It's a specific kind of English black tea," he says when I ask what's inside. "Decaf. It's the only thing I drink." He's not kidding: When the waitress comes over to take his order, Neeson reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Ziploc full of tea bags, which he unzips and hands to her. "Could you make me a fresh one of these, please?" Then he hooks a finger into the mug, fishes out the old tea bag, and drops it in his water glass with a plunk. "Thanks, love."
Neeson folds himself into the leather booth as comfortably as is possible for a 6-foot-4 Irishman with shoulders like an armoire. He's feeling a little out of sorts today: He has just finished shooting two movies back-to-back — one in Atlanta, the other in London — and he is in New York for the first time in five and a half months. "It's nice to be home," he says. "But I'm feeling a bit like a three-legged stool." (Which, technically, would be the most stable stool, but you get his drift.) He brings up one of the movies he's here to promote — Silence, a historical epic directed by Martin Scorsese — and asks me how long it's currently running. I tell him the version I saw was just over two and a half hours. Neeson shrugs. "For Martin, I guess that's quite short."
Silence is a passion project of Scorsese's, one he's been trying to make for more than 25 years. It's based on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo about Jesuit missionaries — Neeson plays one named Ferreira — in 1640s Japan, where Christians are being systematically persecuted by the Buddhist dictatorship. The film has been through multiple writers and actors, but Scorsese stuck with it, and it's finally hitting theaters this month.
Neeson understands the value of playing the long game. It's a little hard to remember now that he's entrenched on the A-list, but for most of his career he was a solid leading man, though rarely much more. He was already 41, with 17 years' worth of film roles behind him, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Schindler's List, a role he'd reportedly beaten out Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford to get — but even that failed to give him Ford's or Costner's movie-star career. Neeson spent the next two decades turning in great performances in as many hits as misses (Batman Begins on the one hand, The Haunting on the other), until his late-period pivot toward ass-kicking made him one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. "Liam's ambition wasn't to do all the classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company," his old friend Richard Graham once said. "He wanted big parts in big movies." Now, in the fifth decade of his career, he has his pick of them.
Neeson keeps his coat on for our entire time together, either as a sort of armor or in case he decides to make a quick getaway. He's agreed to talk for 90 minutes, which I tell him isn't long for an in-depth cover story. "Well it's about 88 minutes more than I want to be here," Neeson says. "So."
That this rejoinder — delivered in his peaty growl — does not incite an immediate pants-shitting is due mostly to the fact that, intimidating though he may be, there's an obvious gentleness to Neeson, a vulnerability and tenderness that's plain on his handsome, timeworn face. Before he went around punching Albanians for a living, Neeson was usually cast in more introspective roles — professors, sculptors, and other sensitive types — wounded romantics who, like him, tended toward brooding and self-doubt. Women, naturally, went crazy for him: the lumberjack's body with the poet's heart. "It's not about looks, although he's a terrific-looking guy," his late wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, once said. "It comes from somewhere deeper than that. You feel that he's been through a history."
These days everyone knows that he has. Neeson is a widower, having lost Richardson seven years ago, following a skiing accident. Since then he has raised their two sons alone. Now the younger son is away at college and Neeson is home by himself. He still has his property in upstate New York, a big 1890s farmhouse he bought before he and Richardson were married. "He likes being there on his own, with his pool and his gym," Graham says. "He's always been very happy with his own company.
In many ways Neeson was born to play a priest. Tall, austere; slightly stooped yet unflaggingly upright; those searching eyes, that troubled soul. He's done it half a dozen times already: in 1985's Lamb (Brother Michael); 2005's Breakfast on Pluto (Father Liam); 2002's Gangs of New York (Priest Vallon, who wasn't an actual priest but wore the collar and wielded a crucifix in battle); even an episode of The Simpsons, on which his Father Sean taught Bart the way of the Lord.
Neeson was born William John but called Liam (short for William) after the local priest. He grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, the only son of Barney and Kitty Neeson, a school custodian and a school cook. His mother walked two miles to work each way and brought leftovers home to their council house; his father, according to Neeson's sister, "never said five words when two words would do."
Neeson learned the Mass in Latin as an altar boy: In nomine Patris, Dominus vobiscum, the whole deal. Church is where he first felt the magic of performance, the ceremony and theatricality of it — the robes, the candles, the liturgy; costumes, lighting, a script. His parish priest, Father Darragh, taught him to box when he was nine; a scrappy jabber with a strong left, Neeson eventually became the Ulster Province boys champion in three different weight divisions. But secretly he was afraid of getting hurt and, moreover, of hurting someone else. So when a blow to the head during a fight left him concussed, the 16-year-old hung up his gloves — but not before winning the fight.
It wasn't easy being Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and '60s. "You grew up cautious, let's put it that way," he says. "Our town was essentially Protestant, but there were a few Catholics on our street. The Protestants all had marches and bands and stuff. I didn't quite understand what it was about — 'Remember 1690? When Catholic King James was defeated by Protestant William of Orange?' Who gives a fuck?" As he got older, the situation got grimmer. "The Troubles started in '69 and then really kicked in from '70 to '71," he says. "Drive-by shootings, bombs. I was at university for one abortive year, and we were so fucking naive. You'd be in a bar, drinking a glass of cider, and suddenly soldiers would come in and say, 'Everybody out — there's a bomb scare.' We'd order more drinks to take across the street, then the soldiers would go off and we'd filter back into the bar. Fucking stupid."
Neeson reconnected with his Catholic roots in 1985 when he filmed a movie called The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. The three of them played Catholic missionaries in 18th-century South America. They had a priest with them on set in the jungle, and every Sunday he'd "say a simple little Mass, break a piece of bread, and read the Gospel for the week," Neeson says. "We'd discuss the passage and what it meant in today's world. It was very intimate and very cathartic in a lot of ways." A devilish grin: "Then you'd go home, have a few glasses of Guinness, and get laid. The delights of the flesh."
Neeson's part in The Mission was small but instrumental to his career. De Niro, whom he befriended, introduced him to an American casting director. When she needed an IRA operative for an episode of Miami Vice, she thought of Neeson. That got him a work visa and a foothold in the States.
He's still grateful. "A lovely, lovely man," Neeson says of De Niro. "He's a man of few words — I like that. He's the sort of guy who says, 'I'll call you Thursday at 3 o'clock' — and if he can't call, he'll call you Wednesday to say he can't. When he makes a commitment, he sticks to it. That's rare these days."
It was Neeson's longtime interest in the Jesuits that prompted him to take the role of Father Ferreira in Silence. We first meet Ferreira in the film's opening scene: He's dirty, bearded, his raiments caked in mud — a thoroughly broken man. He's forced to watch as Japanese Christians are crucified and tortured.
Neeson was eager for the chance to reunite with Scorsese, after the very brief experience working with him on Gangs of New York. "Martin demands real focus," Neeson says admiringly. "If there was a grip working a hundred meters away and Martin heard a piece of scaffolding fall — which doesn't even make a noise! — he would stop, turn to the first AD, and say, 'I've asked for silence. Why have you not got it?' Terrific."
(Unlike just about anyone with even a tenuous connection to the legendary director, Neeson calls Scorsese by his full given name. "I just feel I haven't earned the right to call him Marty." he says. "Everybody's always like, 'Marty this, Marty that.' You don't know him. I don't know him.")
Scorsese says that Neeson was one of the key elements to finally getting Silence made. "I needed someone with real gravity to play Ferreira," he says. "You have to feel the character's pain."
Now Neeson doesn't consider himself much of a Catholic. "I admire people with true faith," he says. "Like my mother, who's 90 and gets annoyed if she can't walk to Mass Sunday morning. 'Mom, you're 90! It's OK! God will forgive you.' " These days he isn't even sure if he believes in a God.
I ask if there was a specific incident that precipitated his doubt, and his face darkens. "So this is probably leading toward the death of my wife?"
Neeson is understandably wary on the subject of Richardson. It must be gut-wrenching to have to revisit the worst moment of your life again and again, every time an interviewer needs a new quote. But this was just an open-ended question, I insist. It wasn't leading toward anything.
"OK," he says, sounding unconvinced. "It wasn't." Anyway, as far as his waning faith goes: "I think it was gradual."
When he's in town and the weather is good, Neeson loves to walk around Central Park. "Power walk," he says. "Get a good sweat going." He even has a walking buddy — "a real-estate lady" he met on his walks. "You see the same people, you nod, you say hello," Neeson explains. "Six months later, you're saying, 'How's your kid?' It's nice," he says. "We text each other: You free tomorrow? The usual spot? We do the whole loop — usually six miles, sometimes eight. Fifteen minutes a mile. It's good."
Three years ago, Central Park was the unlikely battleground for one of the most heated fights of Neeson's public life. The topic? Horses. During his 2013 election campaign, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to enact a ban on horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. (The measure was billed as an animal-rights issue, though questions have been raised about the role political donors and real-estate interests played in the proposed ban, and Mayor de Blasio's actions were later investigated.) The horse ban was supported by famous animal advocates like Miley Cyrus and Alec Baldwin. Neeson, who grew up caring for horses on his aunt's farm in County Armagh, waded in to defend the drivers.
"I'm in the park every day," he explains. "I see these guys; I know these guys. There were so many celebrities supporting [the ban], I was like, 'These guys need a celebrity or two.' "
"He really put himself in the line of fire," says Stephen Malone, a second-generation carriage driver and spokesman for the horse-and-carriage industry. "It was a complete game-changer. He hosted a stable visit for the city council on a Sunday afternoon, and if he wasn't there, we might have gotten one or two [members]. We ended up with about 20. They got to take their selfies with Liam Neeson, but they also got to meet the children of the drivers and to see how the stable hands care for the horses. It completely swayed public opinion. That was the moment we knew we were gonna be OK."
Colm McKeever, an Irish-born carriage driver and longtime friend of Neeson's, says, "There's a framed picture of him in every stable. It's the Pope and then Liam Neeson." McKeever says Neeson's support of the drivers wasn't due to their friendship: "We've been fast friends for a number of years, but that has nothing to do with Liam's convictions. He stands up for what he believes in. It's as simple as that."
The proposal was eventually defeated, and now Neeson is a hero to the 300-odd drivers, who often stop him to say thanks. "It's almost like he's part of the tour," jokes McKeever. " 'There's the carousel — and that's Liam Neeson.' " Malone adds: "Liam Neeson is the biggest Hollywood star going right now, and he walks through Central Park and stops to talk to carriage guys. Only a true gentleman would do that."
It's a working-man's solidarity that's apparently characteristically Neeson. "If you speak to film crews, they all love him," says Richard Graham. "He's got friends from crews he still corresponds with — and I'm not talking about higher-ups, just ordinary blokes. It sounds like I'm blowing smoke up his ass, but he truly is an honorable guy."
Ellen Freund was the prop master on two Neeson films, Leap of Faith and Nell — the latter when Neeson and Richardson were still dating. "They had a lovely house with a chef," Freund recalls, "and every weekend they would invite six members of the crew and cook this fantastic dinner, with beautiful wines. It was just the most lovely treat. It wasn't just the upper echelons, either — a grip or an electrician, it didn't matter."
It was Freund who introduced Neeson to his favorite outdoor pastime: fly-fishing. They were shooting Nell on a lake and needed something for Neeson to do in his downtime; Freund had just come off A River Runs Through It, so she showed Neeson how to cast. He was hooked. "He just loved it," she says. "Once we gave him the rod and set him up out there, he wouldn't come off the lake. Every time you looked for him, he was down there practicing."
"When he said he'd discovered fly-fishing," says Graham, "my first thought was, 'My God, that is the perfect hobby for you.' It's peaceful. It's in nature. There's a lot of skill. And the time goes by like you wouldn't believe. So I think that's kind of therapeutic. You've got nothing in your mind, other than trying to catch the fish."
Neeson cites the kind of pastoral tranquility that will be familiar to anyone who's heard an angler wax lyrical about the sport. "Eight times out of 10, I won't catch anything," he says. "The thrill for me is being on a river with my pouch and rod, and I know there's a fish over there, or at least I think there is, so I'll do five or six casts. That fly's not working, take it off, put on another one, try again. Before you know it, three hours will have gone past." It's the opposite of relaxing. "You're trying to outwit a fish that's been around since the Triassic with a piece of yarn or your own hair, he says. "You're working all the time — but it's a different kind of work."
Neeson and Graham have fished together all over the world: Patagonia, arctic Quebec, the Tomhannock Reservoir in upstate New York. "New Zealand, that's the mecca," Neeson says. "Big trout. Stunning. Some of these rivers, we'd take little choppers in, and you're six feet over the rocks and you jump out. You're thirsty, so you put your head in the river and drink, and it's pure." Neeson seems energized by the memory. "Fuck. I haven't done a big trip in a long time," he says. "I'm thinking of going to Brazil, up the Amazon. Heard they have big peacock bass. That'd be a trip." He would also like to get back down to the Bahamas for bonefish. "The phantom of the shallows," he says. "Silvery color. They turn a certain way and disappear. Hence 'phantoms.' But you need a guide, that's the only trouble." He'd rather go alone? "Yeah," he says.
(Says Graham: "We can be fishing side by side, 50 feet apart, and not say a word to each other for hours.")
I ask Neeson if he's learned anything from fly-fishing that he's been able to apply to his career or to the rest of his life. "Patience, I think," he says. "Just taking your time. I remember in the early days, if I was casting and I missed, I'd be very quick to cast again. But trout stay where they are — they like the food to come to them. The fish isn't going anywhere. Take your time."
Neeson's other new movie is A Monster Calls, a live-action tearjerker in which a CGI tree (the titular Monster) visits a boy whose mother is dying. Neeson plays the tree, a yew — "the most important of all the healing trees." He's ancient and massive, twice the size of a house, with gnarled roots, spiky branches, and a voice like a bottomless coal pit. The first time he shows up, he kicks down the boy's house. It's kind of terrifying. Still, you know the Monster is good, because he's played by Liam Neeson.
It's not surprising that Neeson makes a great tree, given that a noted Broadway critic once literally compared him to a sequoia. (He actually called him a "towering sequoia of sex." It was a compliment.) He spent two weeks filming motion-capture in a special room with cameras surrounding him on every side. "What do they call it? Not the space. The volume," he says with a little laugh. "Computer nerds." The end product looks something like a woodsy Transformer — which, weirdly, makes sense, given that Transformers director Michael Bay has said that Neeson's regal bearing was his inspiration for Optimus Prime. ("Really?" says Neeson. "That's news to me.")
A Monster Calls is structured on a series of visits from the Monster, in which he tells fairy tales to the boy to help him work through his grief. The stories are designed to divine meaning from a meaningless world — a world where, as the Monster says at one point, "Farmers' daughters die for no reason." It's a movie, in other words, about death, loss, mourning, and the ways we help one another cope. And this, I warn Neeson, is when I'm leading toward the death of his wife.
Neeson met Richardson when he was a 40-year-old bachelor who'd already dated Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, and Brooke Shields. In 1993 Richardson and Neeson co-starred in a play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and then, before long, were a couple. Two years later they were married in the garden of their farmhouse, and the boys soon followed. Then, in 2009, Richardson was skiing near Montreal when she fell and hit her head. Everything seemed fine at first: "Oh, darling — I've taken a tumble in the snow" is what she told Neeson on the phone that night. But unbeknownst to the doctors, her brain was slowly bleeding. She fell into a coma and died the next day.
Since Richardson's passing, Neeson's grief has colored several of his onscreen characters, a number of which are dealing with some kind of tragic familial backstory. The similarity in A Monster Calls is awful and impossible to ignore: a beautiful young mother struck down before her time. And Neeson's own sons were just 13 and 12 when Richardson died, about the same age as the boy in the movie. Did he think about that at all when preparing for the film?
"Yeah, I don't want to go into that," Neeson says politely but firmly. "It's not fair to them. I'd rather not talk about my boys, other than that they're doing well, college, all that stuff."
By all appearances, the boys are thriving. Micheál, now 21, is an aspiring actor who appeared with Neeson in an LG Super Bowl commercial last year. And Daniel, 20, is a sophomore theater and digital-media production major. "There's a saying," says Neeson. " 'You're only as happy as your unhappiest child.' And the kids are happier than I — so that's a blessing."
We've been talking for a while when Neeson realizes his tea has gone cold. He flags down the waitress. "Sorry, love," he says. "Could you ask the kitchen for some boiling water when you have a second?"
"Boiling-hot water," she says, nodding. "No problem."
Neeson stops her. "But not hot," he says. "If you could make it boil. Tell them it's for me," he adds. "Tell them I will come for them. I will find them. . . ."
Upon recognizing his famous Taken monologue, the waitress cracks ups. "Absolutely," she says, skipping off. After she's gone, I tease Neeson for shamelessly trotting out his shtick. He laughs: "Pathetic, isn't it?"
When Neeson made the first Taken movie in 2009, he had low expectations. " Straight to video is what I thought," he says. No one is more amused than he that eight years later — after The Grey (Taken with wolves), Non-Stop (Taken on a plane), Run All Night (Taken at night), and, of course, Taken 2 and 3 — he's still getting offered this kind of role. He's even reached the point of self-parody, turning in comically self-aware, Neeson-esque cameos in a commercial for the role-playing game Clash of Clans (as vengeful gamer AngryNeeson52) and on Inside Amy Schumer, as a scarily intense funeral-home director whose motto is "I don't bury cowards."
But in a way, Neeson is just fulfilling an opportunity he first had more than two decades ago, when he was being courted to become the new James Bond in the mid-'90s. "I was being considered," Neeson says. "I'm sure they were considering a bunch of other guys, too." He says he would have loved to be 007, but Richardson said she wouldn't marry him if he was. I ask why, and he smiles like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Women. Foreign countries. Halle Berry. It's understandable." Also, Schindler's List had just come out. "She was like, 'You're going to ruin your career,' " Neeson says. "But it's no big deal. It's nice to be inquired after."
Neeson sometimes feels a little embarrassed that he's Social Security–eligible and still pretend-fighting for a living. "Maybe another year," he says of his action-star shelf life. "The audiences let you know — you can sense them going, 'Oh, come on.' But by the way," he hastens to add, "I've never felt fitter in my life."
Neeson doesn't box anymore. ("I'll train — the bags and stuff. But I don't spar. There's always someone coming up to you like, 'Hey, you're that actor Lyle Nelson right?' They want a chance to hurt you a little. 'Guess who I beat up today? He's a pussy.' ") But he proudly points out that he does all his own movie fights. I read him a quote from Steven Seagal — "Look at Liam Neeson. He can't fight. He's a great dramatic actor, a great guy. . . . Is he a great fighter? A great warrior? No" — and Neeson seems amused. "I don't know how to answer that," he says, smiling. "Am I an action guy? Not really. But I do know how to fight. So fuck him."
One thing Neeson absolutely won't do anymore is ride a motorcycle — ever since a horrifying crash in 2000 nearly killed him. "I've read a couple of scripts where the character's on a motorbike, and I'm like, 'Is this important to the script?' 'Yeah, it is.' 'OK, I'm not in.' "
I tell him about a recent spill I took on a bike, and he turns serious. "You have to watch yourself," Neeson tells me. "Get it out of your system. Make a pact with your wife. And don't cheat on it."
Neeson has few vices left these days. He quit the Marlboro Lights years ago and gave up drinking a while back — first the Guinness, then the pinot noir — after he found himself partaking too much in the wake of Richardson's death. He tries to keep busy lest he wallow. "I need to work," he says. "I'm a working-class Irishman. I'm fucking lucky: A stranger gets in touch with my agent and says, 'Could you send Liam Neeson a script?' I'm still flattered by that. So I'll keep doing it till the knees give up. It beats hiding in a basement in eastern Aleppo."
(As Richardson once put it: "I think he probably, on some level — although he wouldn't say it — wakes up every morning thinking, 'Isn't it great I'm not driving a forklift?' ")
Now that he's back in New York, Neeson looks forward to lying low for a while. "Just recharge the batteries," he says. "I don't want to see the inside of an airplane." He'll take in some Broadway shows, catch up on all the programs on his Apple TV: Fargo, Ray Donovan, Breaking Bad. He's also got a big stack of books he wants to tackle — two Ian McEwan novels and a box of classics he recently received as a gift, which included War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
And then, of course, there are those walks in the park.
It all sounds nice, I say. But I'm not sure it's enough to fill up a day.
Neeson smiles. "You'd be surprised."
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The wind is howling with such force that it's almost comical, so Hairston, who's on the mountain hunting sheep, breaks out his iPhone to record an Instagram post, looking like one of those hackneyed meteorologists reporting from the middle of a hurricane. "We saw a group of rams on the far mountain, and now we're heading up to check out another area," he shouts into his phone. "We're just getting hammered by the wind."
Hairston, the 45-year-old founder of the hunting-gear company Kuiu, is after his first Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, a sure-footed ungulate that lives primarily above tree line, often in locations so steep and rocky that they're impossible to negotiate on two feet. "It's the pinnacle of big-game hunting," Hairston says. "You have to go farther and harder for them than for any other species."
Among a segment of hardcore big-game hunters, no brand is as revered as Kuiu. The company's high-performance fabrics — bonded fleece and waterproof breathable synthetics — are pulled directly from the mountaineering world, and its distinct Tetris-like camo pattern looks more like standard-issue SEAL gear than the fake shrubbery so common at Walmart. Today Kuiu camo is as much a status symbol in hook-and-bullet culture as Louis Vuitton's monogram is among the Hamptons set. And it has as many celebrity boosters: UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a fan. Metallica's James Hetfield owns a guitar emblazoned with Kuiu camo, and Kid Rock has a piano wrapped in it.
On Instagram, Hairston has some 21,000 followers who track his far-flung hunts and gear updates and tag their own posts with #kuiunation. Detractors, of which Hairston has a few, occasionally use the comments section to rail against his trophy shots and what they see as hunting for the 1 Percent. But it's hard to say how much Kuiunation or Hairston's critics will get from this impromptu weather report: With the thin air, he inhales heavily between sentences, and his voice is almost entirely drowned out by the wind's roar. After stashing his phone in his pocket, he wipes snot from his nose.
"Ain't sheep hunting great!" he says.
The three hunters spend the next hour scouting and see a group of promising rams, but with darkness creeping over the eastern plains, we call it quits for the night and head back to camp. The next morning, conditions are far more favorable, so we load up our backpacks and set off in the violet predawn looking for a sheep to shoot.
When it comes to finding big rams, Burns and Hettinger are two of the best in the business. Burns works for Kuiu as its lead product tester and resident hunting guide. Hettinger's main gig is as a personal hunting guide for rich clientele; he's here because he knows these mountains better than just about anyone.
Once outside of camp, it takes Burns and Hettinger less than 10 minutes to spot the same group of rams two ridgelines over, a straight-line distance of maybe a mile. Hairston has a rare management tag from the Taos Pueblo, a 120,000-acre tribal homeland in northern New Mexico, which requires him to shoot an old ram, eight to 11 years old, that probably won't survive another winter or two, its molars ground down so far that it'll eventually starve. Based on its horns, the largest in the group looks like a shooter, but to get within range we have to hike up and over a 13,000-foot peak, then down and around the back side of the ridge where the sheep were first seen. Doing so takes most of the morning, stopping and starting to catch our breath and continually watch the movement of the rams. Now, as the three hunters prepare to clamber to the edge of a slight rock outcropping to take a closer look, Hairston unlatches a custom-made .300 WSM rifle from the side of his backpack and loads a 200-grain bullet into the chamber. "It feels good to finally get some lead in the pipe," he says.
But in the four hours we've been on the move, the sheep have wandered into the upper reaches of a grove of pine trees, behind a slight knoll. No shot. The three reassess. They settle on crawling to the edge of the knoll, knowing that Hairston will be within 150 yards of the animals, a strategy that could easily spook them.
"We can roll right over the top," Hettinger says, "but we won't have much time to decide whether to shoot."
"If we push them," says Burns, "we won't see them again — not on this trip."
Both turn to Hairston to make the call. "That's fine," he says with grin. "We're professionals. This is what we do for a living."
You'll be forgiven if your idea of hunting is paunchy old dudes rumbling down back roads in beat-up pickup trucks. Plenty of sportsmen still shoot whitetails out of tree stands or wait on the edge of sloughs for a flock of mallards to decoy in. But these days, hunting has been embraced by a new breed of devotees: athletic, tech-savvy, ethically minded professionals who like to play year-round in the mountains. They're often the same mountain bikers and runners on the trails outside Moab or Bozeman in summer. But come fall, they trade Lycra for camo and pick up a rifle or bow, many for the first time.
Tim Ferriss, the 4-Hour Work Week guru, is a recent convert to hunting. So is actor Chris Pratt. Even Facebook king Mark Zuckerberg has boasted about killing the meat he eats. Much of hunting's newfound appeal is because the payoff is a year's supply of organic, antibiotic-free backstraps — the new ethical eating. But it's also a way for mountain lovers to get deep into the outdoors, tempting people who have no desire to sit in a duck blind.
"It's a totally different way of interacting with these wild places," says Kenton Carruth, co-founder of the performance-hunting apparel company First Lite. "I know plenty of pro mountain guides who are in the woods every day and they've never seen a wolf, but that's because hikers or climbers are always walking around. They're never silent, still, taking in every sound and smell. As a hunter, I've seen a wolf quite a few times."
For adventure athletes, hunting is a challenge that's every bit as difficult as finishing an ultramarathon — stalking animals for miles on end, packing out hundreds of pounds of meat, navigating through the backcountry in snowstorms. It also offers the rush that comes with having to make consequential decisions in the mountains, just like in climbing.
"The athletic world is very physical but pretty sterile," says Mark Paulsen, a former strength and conditioning coach who has worked with NFL players. "Whether you're on a football field or on a basketball court, it's a known event. Whereas you go into the woods, you have no idea what you might be heading into. For people who love the mountains, that's the beauty of it."
Paulsen now owns Wilderness Athlete, which creates nutritional products like meal-replacement powders for these new so-called backpack hunters. Twenty years ago he was training athletes at the University of New Mexico when a friend took him bow-hunting for elk, hiking six miles into the mountains with 70 pounds of gear. The weight and altitude nearly killed him. "I wanted to throw up, lie down, crawl under a tree," he says. "I thought, 'This the most athletic thing I've ever done in my life.' " On the last day of the hunt, a bull elk bugled so close that Paulsen could feel it in his rib cage. He felled the bull with an arrow from 15 yards. "It was the single most exhilarating experience of my life," he says.
If backpack hunting can be said to have a celebrity, Hairston is it. Much of that has to do with his seemingly endless series of big hunts, which he regularly posts about on Instagram, much to the dismay of anti-hunters and even some in the hunting world. In the last six months alone, he has bagged a trophy room full of animals. In July, he shot a 3x4 blacktail buck in northern California. In August, he flew to the Yukon's far north and killed a 10-year-old Dall sheep with perfectly symmetrical 42-inch horns. In September, on private land just north of Bozeman, Montana, while hunting with his eight-year-old son, Cash, and his 72-year-old father, he brought down a monster bull elk with a compound bow.
"It's in our DNA," says Hairston. "It's two million years of genetics. Whenever I hear criticism online I just respond to them: 'Before you knock it, get out and do it.' "
Up close, bighorn rams register less as living creatures than as props in a prehistoric diorama in a natural history museum. Their tousled, purplish coats gleam in the sun, and the growth rings on their horns are demarcated by clear, dark lines. With a good spotting scope, you can age a sheep by counting the rings at a distance of a few hundred yards or more. Few people are better at this, or enjoy it as much, as Hettinger and Burns.
Hairston met Burns at a trade show a decade ago. At the time, Burns had become something of a phenom in the hunting world by besting Montana's archery record for a nontypical elk. He'd tracked the animal for three days before sneaking within 12 yards and shooting it with an arrow. The horns alone weighed 54 pounds. He was just 22 at the time. Burns has racked up an impressive series of kills — two of which landed him on the Boone and Crockett Club's record list, essentially the Billboard music charts for hunters. But these days his knowledge of and obsession with sheep has earned him the nom de guerre Sheep3PO. "The only way to get him to shut up about sheep," Hairston says, "is to turn him off."
Burns and Hairston hunt together multiple times a year, taking pride in going farther afield than nearly anyone. Lately that's meant to Canada's far north for 10-day expeditions with a local guide — a prerequisite when buying a sheep tag up there. "The guides are often excited, because they've never been able to take clients to some of these places," says Hairston. "They're too difficult to access, but with us they know we can go." On their Yukon hunt this year, they flew to a remote airstrip near the Arctic Circle, crossed a river via boat, and then hiked three days into the mountains before they were even in sheep territory.
This New Mexico hunt is a far cry from those expeditions, but it's a better bet for scoring an old bighorn. As we crawl to the edge of the knoll for a closer look at the group of five rams that moved off downhill, it becomes clear the oldest one is perfect. He has a massive body, probably 300 pounds, with thick horns that end in flat stubs, the product of years of bashing heads with rivals during the rut. He's nine, maybe 10 years old based on his growth rings. Hairston drops his backpack and lies flat on his belly, propping the rifle up on his bag to take aim.
"The one on the left," Burns says. "He's the one." The rams are grouped together tightly, and they clearly sense that something is amiss. At first they dart one way, then another. Finally, they disappear into the trees. Hairston never pulls the trigger.
"Fuck," says Burns. "Fuck."
Hairston slowly gets up and looks back with a pained smile. "I never had a shot," he says as way of explanation. Now the animals are gone, maybe for good. "Come on," Burns says. "Let's get ahead of them." So we take off side-hilling it across the mountain, doing our best to catch up to an animal that can run uphill faster than most NFL cornerbacks can on AstroTurf.
Like many hunters, Hairston views the sport as the ultimate proving ground. It's part of the reason he is so fond of the idea of backpack hunting, which may be the sport's purest, most self-reliant expression. Before setting out, he often fills out spreadsheets with each piece of gear and its corresponding weight listed in ounces. "You've got to," he says. "Every once adds up over a 10-day period to thousands of extra calories burned." He budgets two pounds of food per day, divvied up by day in Ziploc bags. He also trains year-round, spending 10 to 15 hours per week in the gym or hiking with sandbags in his backpacks. For mountaineers, none of this is new, but in the hunting world there are only a handful of people who prep the way he does.
Hairston has been hunting in one form or another since he was a kid growing up in Southern California. Like his father, Hairston took up football in high school and then college, playing linebacker. He was good enough that the San Francisco 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1995. He stayed with the team for a season without playing a down, then retired a year later after suffering an injury to his C5 and C6 vertebrae during a mini-camp with another team. His career as an NFL player was over before it even began. "I couldn't really watch football for a few years," he says. "I was angry about what it had done to me."
Hairston then sold commercial real estate, flipped a few franchises, and became increasingly focused on hunting. Around that time he was often out with Jonathan Hart, a friend from college. On their first backcountry hunt together, in Idaho's White Cloud Mountains, the weather fluctuated wildly — cold and snowing one day, sunny and 80 degrees the next — and their gear was soaked nearly the entire time. Both knew there had to be something better.
Hart thought about the gear he used for other outdoor activities. "In my garage I'd have shotguns and rifles and bows and arrows, but I also had kayaks and climbing gear and ice axes," he says. The apparel options for each of those sports, he noticed, was far superior to anything he had for hunting. Hairston had a similar epiphany when realized he was shopping for his gear more in REI than Bass Pro Shops.
So in 2005 Hairston and Hart decided to make high-performance synthetic gear specifically for hunters. They named it Sitka, after a town in Alaska. They designed a new camo pattern, made some sample jackets and pants, and then convinced mail-order catalog Schnee's to take a chance on the line. Sitka was a hit from the get-go, finding a home with sportsman looking for an upgrade from the subpar cotton offerings. By 2008, Sitka topped $4 million in sales and its products were on store shelves across the country, including Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's. In 2009, W.L. Gore & Associates, the $3 billion behemoth behind Gore-Tex, acquired Sitka for an undisclosed sum. Today it's one of the largest brands in the performance-hunting space.
The deal was worth millions, but the partnership between Hairston and Hart unraveled. Hairston never wanted to sell, he says, and his misgivings became apparent during a meeting about the acquisition. Execs wanted to expand Sitka's footprint, making new camo patterns for whitetail and duck hunters. In Hairston's view, this was unthinkable. "You lose the core appeal," he says.
Increasingly frustrated, Hairston left Sitka (Hart says he was simply not offered a job after the sale) and immediately got to work on Kuiu. With Kuiu, which he named after a game-rich Alaskan island — perhaps not coincidentally located across an icy strait from Sitka — Hairston decided to sell online, directly to consumers; that way, he'd be able to control everything and avoid retail markup. He worked with an engineer to create a carbon fiber backpack frame that was lighter and more ergonomic than anything on the market — and that could comfortably carry 120 pounds of fresh meat. He teamed up with the Japanese company Toray, a competitor to Gore-Tex, to develop a line of apparel. During the 18 months it took to produce everything, Hairston blogged obsessively about the process, building anticipation and earning trust among a dedicated contingent of hunters.
Kuiu launched in 2011 and was an immediate success. It now sells everything from $300 rain jackets to backpacks, game bags, and tents. Sales are approaching $50 million, at least according to Hairston, and the company is expanding its offerings beyond hunting. The Navy SEALs, he says, have reached out to develop a line of tactical gear (to be released to Kuiu customers in 2017), and even Disney hired Kuiu to create a backpack frame for its costumed performers. Hairston has plans for the company's first brick-and-mortar store in 2018, and a traveling pop-up store will be hitting the road this summer.
With Kuiu's success, Hairston has fielded a number of offers to buy the company, but says he'd rather be good than big: "I made that mistake with Gore. I won't make clothes for women, and I won't make clothes for fat guys, because then the skinny guys won't look good in them. I want Kuiu to be an aspirational brand."
After passing on the shot on the big ram, Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger get into position atop another rock outcropping, just up-valley from where the rams disappeared. The vantage point offers a clear sight line into the bowl below. But the sheep never show up.
The hunters are silent, pondering the next move — if there is one. Earlier in the morning, Burns had checked his phone and noticed a photo about an acquaintance's recent, unsuccessful hunt. The post basically said the experience of hunting in the mountains was reward enough. "That's great and all," Burns said, "but I'd rather get something. You either win or you lose."
Hairston does not like to lose. In the business world his competitiveness has earned him a fair amount of flak, including criticism by competitors for misleading claims about the performance of his products. But much of the concern centers around conservation. Whereas most of the new hunters packing rifles into the backcountry are doing so on public land, with tags won in public lotteries, many of Hairston's hunts are through private landowners or outfitters. To some this resembles the pay-to-play hunting model so common in Europe, where it's a rich man's sport. Walter Palmer, the dentist who shot Cecil the lion, placed a big order from Kuiu before he jetted off to Zimbabwe. And Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who have been photographed at length with their kills, are Kuiu customers and friends of Hairston's.
Kuiu donates a fair amount of money to conservation organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which have been a boon for those species. But a central tenet of organizations like these and many state wildlife agencies is protecting species with funds raised by auctioning off premium hunting tags, some that sell for upwards of $100,000. It's an effective strategy in some areas, but it's also controversial because it's hard to know just how much money is going to conservation. It can also come at the expense of public-draw hunters.
"We start to get into trouble," says Land Tawney, director of the nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, "when more and more tags are allocated in the name of raising money, and then we turn into a system where only the rich and elite have the opportunity to get those tags."
Plus, selling high-dollar licenses tacitly feeds a trophy-hunting mentality that continues to flag the sport — warranted or not — as hunters go after animals simply because they'll score well on a record list.
"When the pursuit of an animal as a status symbol becomes more important than the experience surrounding it," says author and TV host Steven Rinella, a respected figure in the outdoors world, "you enter into very troubling terrain."
Hairston has turned Kuiu into a cult favorite by transforming his camo apparel into a hardcore-lifestyle brand, much like CrossFit, and making himself the face of the company. That plays well when you're selling products and prepping for big trips, but it can come off as self-aggrandizing once an animal is on the ground.
Jonathan Hart, Hairston's former business partner, sums him up this way: "It's like in Seinfeld, the J. Peterman catalog that Elaine works for. It's all about him. Jason is about Jason."
After losing the rams in the trees, Hairston and Burns discuss their options. By now, the animals may be long gone. The wind is blowing, circling around the mountain, and we start moving back to where we last saw the rams. Hettinger sets off to track where they went. Then suddenly, there they are, just a hundred yards downhill. Hairston and Burns take up nearly the exact same positions they had an hour earlier, while Hettinger creeps closer to spook them out of the trees. This time, the big ram shows itself clean, broadside to Hairston. He shoots.
The report, like a door slam, quickly dissipates in the wind. From below the ridge, the sound of snapping branches rings out — the ram stumbling at full gait into a tree. Then it's just wind. Burns reaches over and fist pumps Hairston. "You got him," he says. "You got him." Burns grabs his spotting scope and runs downhill toward where the ram disappeared. Within seconds he lets out a high-pitched yip. "Yeaaooo! He's right down here."
By the time Hairston arrives, Burns and Hettinger are already marveling at the ram's thick, almost violet cape. "That is as an awesome of a cape as you will find on a bighorn," says Burns. "Look at the mass on that thing!"
"Awesome," Hairston says. "That is awesome."
After admiring the ram for a solid 15 minutes, the hunters drag him under a few big trees for photos. Burns breaks out a bottle of Super Glue to affix the ram's mouth shut, so it doesn't hang lose. Then we spend the next hour shooting photos: Hairston alone with his kill; Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger with the ram; a close-up of the animal's horns. After they're sure there are enough good pics, Burns and Hettinger break out knives no bigger than X-Actos and carefully start removing the hide, everything from the hoofs to the head, to preserve for the taxidermist. Hairston wants a full-body mount to display in Kuiu's offices. As his partners cape the animal and cut off each quarter, Hairston quickly debones the meat, making it lighter for the pack out. Still, the meat, horns, and cape weigh a combined 150 pounds or so, and it takes three and a half hours to get it the mile or two back to camp.
Once there we all unpack our bags into our tents, then regroup around a fire. Soon everyone is emailing about the day's events. Hairston texts with Joe Rogan about an upcoming elk hunt. Eventually, we call it a night. Hairston heads off to his Kuiu tent, tucking the sheep's cape and head into the vestibule so a bear doesn't get it in the night. It's a strange sight, but it's hard to blame him: even sticking out of the top of his pack, the ram still looks regal.
Earlier in the day, shortly after shooting the sheep and walking down to where it lay, Hairston did something almost all hunters do. He set his gun and backpack down and crouched beside the animal, with his hand on its shoulder, clearly in awe. And then a silence came over him. Everyone stopped and let him have the moment.
Finally, Burns weighed in. "That thing is just the perfect sheep," he said.
After a few more seconds of silence, taking in the animal before him, Hairston looked up and agreed. "It's good to be a winner."
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Should You? What all American husbands can learn from one of the worst husbands ever","author":[{"id":22993,"old_id":null,"name":"Elizabeth Weil","slug":"/contributor/elizabeth-weil","data":{"ads":{"mobile":{"trigger":null,"overwrite":{"date":{"end":null,"start":null},"active":0,"trigger":null}},"tablet":{"trigger":null,"overwrite":{"date":{"end":null,"start":null},"active":0,"trigger":null}},"desktop":{"trigger":null,"overwrite":{"date":{"end":null,"start":null},"active":0,"trigger":null}}},"meta":{"title":null,"description":null},"last_name":"Weil","first_name":"Elizabeth","google_url":null},"updated_at":"2016-12-12T18:50:51.912Z","tag_type_id":4,"site_id":3,"TagType":{"id":4,"name":"contributor","data":{"slug":{"default":"/contributor"}}}}],"reviewArtists":"","body":"Win or Lose on Tuesday, Hillary’s husband has taken a supporting role in his marriage. Should You? What all American husbands can learn from one of the worst husbands ever.
Hi, guys. Can we talk? No? Tired of talking? I get that. You’ve probably heard more than enough about how you’re doing as a husband — how well you’re balancing earning money, contributing at home, and not acting like an entitled jerk.
So let me start with a story instead.
One recent Sunday night, while in our compact hybrid — which my husband calls our vagina car — driving to a friend’s for dinner, I reminded Dan (said husband) that I was leaving on a work trip the next day and that he’d need to attend back-to-school night by himself. This was, I knew, horrendous news, and sure enough, he stopped the car, turned toward me, and his face became a 3-D GIF, looping through paroxysms of pain and nausea. His You’re-fucking-kidding-right? face.
I know that face well — it’s the man-face of our times. Now, Dan will surf triple overhead waves and dangle off cliffs, but he’s crippled by certain domestic obligations. Among them: sitting in a classroom, being treated like a sixth grader. He’ll snap and yell or decide his life is worthless, then tumble into his default mantra: You suck you suck you suck.
I feel for you guys, really I do. The American Husband is tiptoeing through unmapped, land-mine–filled territory. More is being asked of you, and you’re doing it, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes awkwardly. And of course sometimes you’re falling behind. Your status has declined a bit lately — like, say, that of a certain former president who may soon be serving tea to the wife of the Uruguayan president — and still you’re getting feedback (so much feedback!), reminders that you’re still blithely exploiting male privilege. But if you veer too far into domesticity . . . then men, perhaps yourself included, will think you’re a compact hybrid–driving wuss. There’s no comfortable place, no known haven. Your wife thinks you’re an oaf, and your inner monologue says you’re whipped and you’re exhausted by — to borrow the phrase women are profoundly sick of — trying to do it all.
“Women started talking about ‘the second shift’ when they went into the workforce in large numbers and their role at home didn’t change much,” says Gayle Kaufman, a sociologist at Davidson College. “Men are now experiencing that, in reverse. They have this work role, and now they’re taking on a family role, and it adds a lot of stress.”
This has already been a rough decade for the American Husband. In 2012, Hanna Rosin declared in her pointedly titled The End of Men that men are the new ball and chain. The demise she outlined was a many-pronged fork stuck in the American male ass. One tine was economic: Men lost far more jobs than women did in the 2008 recession. Another was educational: Women now earn more college degrees than men do. A third tine was psychosocial: The world changed, and women embraced it. (Thanks in part to an endless supply of think pieces — verbal grenades tossed across the front lines of the gender wars — intended to shine a blowtorch on how screwed women have been for human history.)
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of the superheroic American Wife, who accomplishes more before 9 a.m. than her husband does all day. An expert multitasker, strutting around in her the future is female T-shirt, she seems to update her OS daily and is now capable of doing approximately 10 bazillion things at once. Meanwhile, you’re overwhelmed, possibly nostalgic (though your cargo shorts are not yet hipster-retro), sputtering along like a Commodore 64.
For years we’ve seen this in pop culture, the American Husband portrayed as a dope. He’s the guy who doesn’t know how to turn on the washing machine or who needs his six-year-old to tell him how to pack her school lunch. The caricature has persisted and now seems not just ungenerous but downright cruel.
The change is disorienting, as until quite recently, husband was the far better gig. Master of the House! He had all the money, all the power; he threw a baseball around with his son in the driveway because he wanted to, not because he was “on duty.” The couple’s lives revolved around him. But that old model has given way to what’s known as the companionate marriage, in which men and women marry their equals, for love.
Now, as Kate Jennings writes, “When I think about the dynamics of our marriage, sumo wrestling comes to mind.”
Great, you want a smart, strong wife. You’re all for equality, philosophically. You maybe even have daughters, and you’ll breathe hellfire on anybody who tries to keep them down. Still, your wife’s rise makes it feel like you fell. You don’t get any top-dog perks. No one gives you sympathy, let alone a scotch, as a reward for a long, hard workday. Instead you’re handed a toddler. Or a text: “Hey babe, running late. What’s for dinner?” Your sex appeal is based on . . . what? Choreplay? A 2016 study on housework and intimacy defined a truly oxymoronic-sounding new eroticism of fairness. Couples who share domestic duties equitably have more sex. And it’s not just quantity: Women report more sexual satisfaction in egalitarian relationships than in so-called conventional ones. Exhibit A: Porn for Women. It’s filled with photos of shirtless men vacuuming and changing toilet paper rolls, and it has sold a half-million copies.
Swiffer, anyone?
Marriage is exhausting, which you doubtlessly know, but the particular kind of exhaustion we’re facing right now can be chalked up, at least in part, to this idea of fairness and the endless accounting toward it: Who’s up, who’s down, who emptied the dishwasher, who moved to what city for whose job, who interrupted whose sister six times at Thanksgiving, who mansplained, who manspread. Some infractions are obvious, others not. Take Matt Lauer. He’s an ass? Yes, he’s an ass. That toxic male culture is the fog you grew up in, and you’re trying to see your way through it, but it’s still easy to get lost in the miasma.
Which brings us to Bill Clinton, the man to lead us out of the marital murk.
I know, I know: counterintuitive choice. In his autobiography, My Life, he writes that “nothing in my background indicated I knew what a stable marriage was all about.” His father married four times (and died at 28). His mother married five times. Bill’s stepfather abused Bill’s mother, and Bill still loved him. Then, of course, there was the infidelity. So much infidelity. So much lying. A nation forced to picture certain acts that are impossible to unsee. This was a horrendous husband performance. On top of that, Hillary had to stand by his side, humiliating herself in that special way only politicians’ wives seem to endure.
But now this famous marriage fuckup could well become America’s First Husband. By all rights this should be a disaster. Our First Gentleman is a megalomaniacal, power-tripping dirty old man. But did you see that speech he gave at the convention? He looked wizened, sure, a tad too vegan, and he did some rambling, but he nailed it.
He did the single thing that working American women — which is to say, pretty much all American women, since they make up 47 percent of the workforce — have been wanting their husbands to do for years: He told the world in painstaking, occasionally boring detail that his wife is slaying her career and that he’s 100 percent behind her promotion to the most powerful position in the land — because she’s earned it. She’s the best person for the job. No discussion of gender required. The next day the headlines came out saying Bill, while delivering his convention speech, looked fetching in his navy pantsuit — payback for the decades of brutal fashion policing perpetrated on Hillary. But the teasing was fine. Fine. Bill returned to the stage the following night and looked not just unperturbed but thrilled by the entire experience. He marveled at his wife, the nation, the miracle of balloons. Never have you seen a husband happier to be attending his wife’s work events.
Bill has been reticent about the possibility of a title change. He doesn’t talk about being the first First Man, or Adam, as some like to call him. The closest Bill has come to admitting in public that he, along with Hillary, is a gender warrior poised to take American husbands into an unmapped future, was at a rally in Des Moines in late 2015.
“There has been a lot of talk about breaking the glass ceiling,” he said, warming up the audience for the headliner, his wife. “I want to break a ceiling. I am tired of the stranglehold that women have had on the job of presidential spouse.”
Femininity is a bitch: You’re frigid or you’re a slut. You don’t smile the right amount. Your body has the half-life of a cake in the rain. But masculinity is a bitch, too. “What we call masculinity is often a hedge against being revealed as a fraud,” writes Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University and author of Guyland and Manhood in America: A Cultural History, “an exaggerated set of activities that keep others from seeing through us, and a frenzied effort to keep at bay those fears within ourselves.” Masculinity, in other words, is a fundamentally defensive posture that you have to prove again and again.
Earning money, or rather, earning more of it than your wife, has been de rigueur. And this breadwinning component of masculinity is where a lot of men are now getting into trouble. If their wives outearn them (God forbid), men feel emasculated, and when men feel emasculated, you get Mike Tyson.
Researchers at Stanford University gave male subjects feedback suggesting they were feminine. And? Those subjects overcompensated with extreme displays of masculinity, expressing increased support for the Iraq War, more homophobia, and newfound desire to purchase SUVs. At the University of Connecticut, sociologist Christin Munsch also found that when men earn less money than their spouses, they overcompensate, too, in some less attractive ways, namely by cheating on their wives. “Their theory is: I’m already feeling emasculated, I’m not making a lot of money, I’m not going to clean the toilet, too,” Munsch told me. (Erotics of fairness be damned.) At the same time, women who outearn their husbands overcompensate as well — minimizing their accomplishments, deferring to their spouses, performing more housework. In short, they act extra feminine, says Munsch, “to maintain their own gender conformity, decrease interpersonal conflict, and shore up their husbands’ masculinity.” Oof.
The way out is forward. Retrenching helps no one, not even you guys. The state of feeling threatened is awful. So is feeling desperate to make more money. More to the point, a husband uncomfortable with his wife’s achievements comes across as pathetic. Sad to revisit it now, but in Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg wrote that people often asked about her husband, himself a tech CEO, who died at age 47: “How is Dave? Is he okay with, you know, all your [whispering] success?”
No man wants such whispers. Besides, the pity is misplaced, at least for younger men. Primary financial responsibility is a burden — that’s just a fact. The pressure takes its toll. Among millennials, men who make significantly more money than their wives are worse off physically and psychologically, while women who make more are happier. Still, the tradition of valuing men’s careers over women’s persists. A study of 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates found that women reached their professional goals less frequently than men do. The reason? Even among this powerhouse crowd, husbands’ jobs took precedence over their wives’.
Note: This doesn’t mean the husbands won. This means their wives are pissed.
The past few years have been disorienting for men and women, husbands and wives: up, down, action, reaction, action, reaction, the seesawing oscillations growing faster and more violent. She’s a bitch; he’s a wuss. Women are put out; men are stuck. Everybody’s rebounding; everybody’s trapped. Some claim this is intrinsic to marriage, that marriage is all about power dynamics, who’s got the upper hand. That it’s basically a competition for whose needs get met. As Michael Vincent Miller writes in Intimate Terrorism, “Marriage consists of two people trying to make a go of it on emotional and psychological supplies that are only sufficient for one.”
But that’s an outdated story, a theory that might have represented the best thinking of its day but which time has proved wrong. That zero-sum game serves no one well now. Winning isn’t possible in the battle of the sexes. The whole match is doomed. The only available victory is to change the terms of the game. And now weirdly, almost miraculously, we have just the guy to do it, a man to guide husbands out of the wilderness — a man so secure in his masculinity that he’s ready and eager to quit his job at the foundation he built, no less, to support his commander-in-chief wife.
Gentlemen, your new hero: Bill Clinton.
I look forward to the inaugural pantsuits.
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Working the line is a bouncy brunette pouring plastic shot glasses full of Windex-blue liquid. Most of the guys grab one and toss it back, no questions asked. "It's a preworkout," she says, "and it's $35 inside." By "preworkout" she means it's designed to give you a jolt of energy before the gym. Exactly how it does this isn't a question anyone seems to be asking. Inside the store, Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar, are pills and powders that claim to do everything from boost sex drive to increase muscle mass and dissolve fat.
Boca Nutrition's owners, PJ Braun and Aaron Singerman, are greeting customers like old friends, with bear hugs and handshakes. Both men are absurdly muscular. Singerman, 36, is 6-foot-2 with slicked-back brown hair. He has a goatee and narrow-rimmed glasses, and his bulky frame fills out his blue T-shirt like an overstuffed bag. Braun, 35, who has black hair gelled into short spikes, is shorter and bulkier. Stretch marks scar his arms.
In addition to Boca Nutrition, the pair owns the supplements manufacturer Blackstone Labs, which they started in 2012. Since then the company has hawked tens of millions of dollars' worth of products promising to make men stronger, bigger, last longer in the sack, and even gain a mental edge. For the most part, their over-the-counter powders do exactly what they claim to do, in part because they sometimes include compounds not approved or even banned by the FDA. It's a legally dubious but common practice — and an easy way to make a killing while giving people the results they want. (Braun calls this a mischaracterization: "We have always tried to produce nothing but cutting-edge and compliant products. As soon as we have any direction from the FDA on an issue it has not spoken on before, for better or worse, we respect its statement and adjust our products accordingly.") Blackstone has grown by 100 percent every year since opening shop five years ago. Its sales now top $20 million annually, and it's featured in Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing companies. And Braun and Singerman are far from done.
"I am not even fucking close to satisfied with Blackstone Labs," Braun boasted in a video posted to Facebook last year. "I want to be the biggest company in the world."
Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar is their newest venture, a retail store that serves up various protein-packed shakes and sells Blackstone's full line of supplements. The sleek space, with shelves full of oversize bottles and racks of workout gear, is like a Whole Foods for gym rats. They opened the first store seven months ago in West Boca. Today is the grand opening of their second location, and devotees have shown up for discounted supplements and to meet a handful of celebrity bodybuilders flown in for the occasion, including Kai Greene, the most famous weightlifter since Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But among this crowd, Braun and Singerman are the real stars. They pose for photos and hype their cars, a Corvette and a Ferrari, both black and parked prominently out front. One of the fanboys is a 24-year-old named Brett, who drove four hours to attend the event. "I couldn't help but show my support for PJ and Aaron," he says. A personal trainer from Palm Coast, Florida, Brett has used a wide variety of Blackstone products, including one called Ostapure, a supplement that contained steroid-like drugs called SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators). The unlicensed drugs were developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck as a potential treatment for muscle wasting in cancer patients. But it was the drugs' muscle-mass-building properties that made them a big hit among weightlifters like Brett. Blackstone recently stopped selling Ostapure after being sued by another supplements maker hoping to clean up the industry. "The strongest product of theirs," Brett says a bit wistfully.
Inside the store, Braun shows me one of his latest creations, muscle-building pills inside a black bottle labeled brutal 4ce in blocky letters that drip with blue icicles. "It'll make you a lot stronger and more aggressive in the gym," he says. "Let's say you're 35, 40 years old and your testosterone isn't as high as it used to be. This will keep your testosterone so high that you'll be like an 18-year-old!"
When I ask Braun how, he launches into a chemistry lecture. "Your body converts it into 4-andro [a testosterone booster], so it'll bulk you up," he says, noting that Brutal 4ce has the side effect of creating estrogen, which could give you what bodybuilders call "bitch tits." This can be countered, however, by taking an estrogen blocker. "Most of our customers are pretty knowledgeable," he says, "so they know they need to do that."
As the festivities wind down, I grab a $46.99 bottle of Cobra 6 Extreme, an amped-up version of their top-selling Cobra 6, a preworkout supplement formulated with various stimulants. At the checkout, a slim guy in his twenties, part smoothie barista, part pharmacist, looks at what I'm buying and asks me if I've tried it before. No, I say.
"So you don't know what you're getting yourself into?"
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"If you're not used to taking a lot of stimulants, you should start with the regular Cobra 6. You might not like the way this makes you feel."
In the U.S., dietary supplements are a $38-billion-a-year industry. Sixty-five percent of men in America take one, whether to lose weight, grow hair, gain muscle, or keep an erection long into the night. There's a wide range of products, and most veer toward opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side are the homeopathic cures and the herbal remedies like echinacea, products that may not do much of anything besides drain your bank account. On the opposite end are the products that work precisely because they rely on pharmaceutical ingredients, many not listed anywhere on the label. In 2014, for example, the FDA recalled several weight-loss supplements with names like Super Fat Burner because they contained the prescription drug sibutramine, as well as phenolphthalein, a banned laxative linked to genetic mutations — but not before a rash of hospitalizations.
It's the supplements laced with prescription drugs that are more troubling. They result in 23,000 emergency room visits every year, and more than 2,000 hospitalizations. The supplements are often sold under names like Lean FX and Stiff Nights, and the ingredients are a list of acronyms only a chemist could decipher: DMAA, 17b-hydroxy 2a, or 17b-dimethyl 5a-androstan 3-one azine.
"We're talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. "The more likely it helps your workout," Cohen says, "the more likely it's going to adversely affect your health."
The FDA oversees the industry, but it's woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don't bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there's effectively no punishment if they don't. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients. ("Blackstone continues to innovate by researching new products and new ingredients," says Braun. "If anything, we would welcome clearer guidance from the FDA so we don't have to discontinue any products.")
"It's the Wild West," says Dan Fabricant, who was the FDA's director of the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs from 2011 to 2014. "In weight loss, sexual enhancement, and bodybuilding categories, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Blackstone, according to its critics, has exploited this system better than most, and exactly how it does this is a case study in how to game a failing regulatory system. For one, Braun and Singerman aren't shy about marketing their legally ambiguous products: They often advertise the active ingredients right on the label and promote them with ads full of young women who could moonlight in beer commercials. They're also constantly active online. Blackstone has some 25,000 Instagram followers; Braun has over 100,000. His account is littered with shirtless selfies and videos of him driving his Ferrari or pimped-out Jeep. He's also the star of a weekly YouTube show with his wife, the former pro wrestler Celeste Bonin, titled Beauty & Braun, which covers the daily lives of the couple, from gym sessions to discussions about breast implants. Until recently he also hosted a daily question-and-answer session on Periscope called "Cardio Q&A," featuring Braun on a treadmill, chugging orange Pedialyte and answering a wide range of queries from Blackstone users. One time he doled out advice ("No matter how mature you think they are, it's not good to settle down with a 19-year-old girl"), but usually he just hyped his products. During one appearance, Braun announced the "dick pills" Blackstone was working on weren't coming along the way he wanted. "I've been working on that for a long time," he said. "But they will eventually come out."
Two days after the Boca Nutrition opening, I visit Braun and Singerman at Blackstone HQ, an unbranded, 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Boca Raton. The office walls are covered in photos and framed bodybuilding-magazine covers, several of which feature Braun in full flex. On Singerman's desk is a bronze statue of a seminude Adonis-like man holding a barbell. It's a first-place trophy from the Mr. Olympia contest, which Singerman got at auction. "You hate to see that, because it means the guy who sold it was struggling financially and was forced to sell it," Singerman says. "But I love it."
Braun and Singerman each have a long history in bodybuilding. Singerman, from New Orleans, started hitting the gym when he was 13 and kept working out, even through a cocaine and heroin habit he picked up after dropping out of high school. At 27 he witnessed a friend overdose and die, so he got clean and doubled down at the gym. In 2005, he got a job as a personal trainer and started writing thousands of posts on bodybuilding message boards and eventually became marketing director for Ironmag Labs, a supplements company owned by businessman Robert Dimaggio, who had become notorious for selling sketchy supplements. Singerman convinced Dimaggio to bring on Braun, whom he'd met at a bodybuilding competition, as the company's top sponsored athlete.
Braun, who grew up in Connecticut, had taken to the gym in order to try to impress his absentee father. "My father wouldn't be proud or say, 'Good job,' " says Braun. "He would just say, 'Oh, you know, there's always somebody better. You can do better.' " Braun went to the University of Connecticut but dropped out to become a personal trainer. Then he took up professional bodybuilding.
Blackstone's genesis was in 2012, when Braun helped Singerman sell 7,000 units of something called Super DMZ. The product contained two designer steroid-like ingredients, dymethazine and methylstenbolone, that few outside bodybuilding circles knew much about. Braun and Singerman, however, recognized that these prohormones, as they're called, were groundbreaking at helping gym rats get ripped. Their boss, Dimaggio, had helped create Super DMZ but turned it over to Braun and Singerman to hawk. "We were able to sell those 7,000 units in five weeks," Singerman explained in an online interview. "We gave Robert his money back and each made $75,000." But prohormones hadn't yet been banned, so the pair ordered more and continued selling under the name Blackstone Labs. In just 10 months they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and moved operations from a makeshift office in Braun's townhouse into their current warehouse. "We bought more of the Super DMZ, sold it, and created a second product, third product, fourth product, fifth product, etc.," Singerman says in the same video. By the time prohormones were finally banned, in 2014, Blackstone was up and running with a full line of supplements, from postworkout muscle builders to meal-replacement formulas. "We've been fortunate enough to be the hot company," says Braun.
In their office, Singerman points to a small photo of the two men leaning against brown shipping boxes piled up to their armpits. "That's all Super DMZ," Singerman says proudly. "This was our original shipment."
The reason Super DMZ and prohormones finally became illegal has something to do with Blackstone's supplier. The product was being manufactured by a New York company called Mira Health Products. In 2013, at least 29 people developed varying levels of liver disease after taking a vitamin called B-50 sold by the company. After investigating, the FDA discovered B-50 and many of Mira's other products included high levels of prohormones, which were not listed anywhere on the label. The FDA forced Mira to recall all those pills and officially banned prohormones, including the ones in Super DMZ — which Blackstone listed on the bottle. None of that stopped Blackstone from continuing to sell them. In fact, at nearly the same time, the company released a new product called Metha-Quad Extreme, which contained prohormones. It wasn't until September 2014 that Blackstone stopped selling prohormones altogether to abide by FDA regulations.
"We lost 30 percent of our total revenue," Singerman says. "But the following month we went back up, because the truth is that people always want the next best thing."
Back in their warehouse, Braun and Singerman lead me up a flight of stairs to an open space with a long brown table and black swivel chairs. Here they're formulating the "next best thing." Another muscle-bound man, this one with a pink Mohawk and a lip ring, is scribbling symbols and numbers on a whiteboard. "This is our chemist, Bryan," says Singerman. "We're doing some really cool stuff with Bryan."
Bryan Moskowitz joined Blackstone in early 2015. Before that, Braun and Singerman formulated all the company's supplements. Neither of them has any formal education, so they hired Moskowitz, who has a master's degree in organic biochemistry from Georgia Tech and calls himself the "Guerilla Chemist." Moskowitz counts among his role models Patrick Arnold, who's infamous for creating three hard-to-detect steroids, two of which were distributed by balco, the lab linked to disgraced athletes Jose Canseco and Marion Jones — and whose founder, Victor Conte, was sentenced to four months in prison. Moskowitz looks up to Arnold enough that he even posted an Instagram photo of his and Arnold's faces Photoshopped onto an image of Breaking Bad's Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in hazmat suits, having just finished cooking a batch of crystal meth.
Arnold is also credited with introducing the powerful stimulant DMAA to the supplements market. Eli Lilly created the drug in 1944 as a nasal decongestant but removed it from the market in 1983 because it caused headaches, tremors, and increased blood pressure. Arnold reintroduced it years later, in 2006, as a way for its users to get a jolt of energy before the gym. In one month alone, in 2013, the FDA received 70 reports of liver disease and one death caused by OxyElite Pro, a popular supplement with DMAA.
In the boardroom, Braun explains that Moskowitz helped design the company's latest product, Brutal 4ce. The steroid that powers it, DHEA, is banned or prescription-only in just about every country except the United States. When I ask Oliver Catlin, the president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute and the Banned Substances Control Group, why it's still legal, he simply says, "I don't know. Ask Orrin Hatch."
Orrin Hatch is the powerful seven-term senator from Utah who pushed through a 1994 law in Congress called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (dshea). The bill defines what a dietary supplement is: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or amino acid (basically, anything found in nature). And while it explicitly states that it can't be a drug, the law also prevents the government from prescreening and preapproving supplements. So supplements don't require FDA approval the way, say, a cancer drug might, even though they may have the same active ingredient. Utah is one of the major producers of supplements. In fact, it is the state's third-largest industry, earning $10 billion per year. Back when the law was written, the industry was mostly homeopathic products, but it has since boomed, and the law created cover for aggressive manufacturers willing to flaunt the regulations.
Also written into dshea are a series of loopholes that allow steroids sold prior to the law's passing to be grandfathered in, like the DHEA in Blackstone's Brutal 4ce — even though it'll get you banned by nearly every sporting league on the planet, including MLB, the NFL, and the NCAA.
"That's one of those things," says Singerman about sports testing. "When a high school athlete asks if it's OK to take [Blackstone's] Dust V2, I go, 'No, probably not.' "
Braun and Singerman are similarly unfazed about SARMs, the unapproved cancer drugs in Ostapure. "If you look at the actual literature," says Singerman, "it's all positive. I've used it plenty of times, and I like putting out products that I actually use."
When I ask them whether they're worried about the potential side effects of their products, Singerman is quick with a scripted answer. "We go through the available literature and studies," he says. But when I press him, his next response seems more honest.
"I am a libertarian," Singerman says. "I believe that it's the person's decision. As long as they're an adult."
But they have no way of knowing how different people might react. "One person could be fine, and another person could have a heart attack," says Dr. Armand Dorian, an ER physician in Los Angeles who often treats patients injured by dietary supplements. "It's rolling the dice."
Take Jesse Woods. In 2009, the 28-year-old went online and ordered a bottle of M-Drol pills from a Texas-based company called TFSupplements. Woods, who weighed 150 pounds, was looking to add muscle. "I'm a small-framed guy," he says, "so I was trying to bulk up." He did. In just four weeks, he'd packed on 20 pounds of muscle. "I got big for a minute," he says. "Then I got sick."
Five weeks into taking M-Drol, Woods left work early because his stomach was bothering him. When his wife came home, she noticed his eyes were yellow. "I'm taking you to the emergency room," she said. Doctors performed a battery of tests, ultimately determining that Woods was experiencing liver failure. What Woods didn't know is that M-Drol contained the steroid-like prohormone Superdrol.
Woods spent 32 days in the hospital. He threw up nearly every meal he ate, lost 30 pounds, and developed a pungent odor, a common side effect of liver disease. "I never felt old until after that," says Woods, who's now 35. "Now I feel sluggish. I just feel like I aged. My liver has scar tissue on it. Doctors can't say how long I'll live."
When he was released from the hospital, Woods sued both TFSupplements and its supplier, Competitive Edge Labs, settling for an undisclosed amount. But the lawsuit didn't stop companies from selling Superdrol.
Blackstone has yet to be sued by any of its customers, and the FDA has generally left the company alone. "We haven't really had problems with the FDA," says Braun. But that may be simply because the agency is backlogged. It's also far more effective to go after the companies supplying the illegal ingredients than the ones marketing the final product. It's the former that are dealing with the overseas suppliers that produce the untested or illegal drugs. Singerman admits to purchasing Chinese ingredients but says it's something that's taken care of by the plants that manufacture Blackstone's products. I ask him who they are.
"Well, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is one."
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is the best example of a duplicitous company thriving in a broken system. Its founder, Jared Wheat, has a history of hawking high-demand substances. In the early '90s, he ran a high school ecstasy ring in Alabama and served 32 months in prison for it. He started Hi-Tech in 1998, and by 2003 the FDA had already warned the company about its dietary supplements, some of which contained an unlicensed drug similar to the one used in Cialis. But that didn't stop Wheat. By 2005 he was selling supplements that contained the banned stimulant ephedra. In early 2006 government officials raided his offices and seized 200 cases of supplements valued at $3 million, and in 2008 Wheat pleaded guilty to selling adulterated supplements and committing mail and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison, but he continued to operate Hi-Tech from his cell.
When I ask Pieter Cohen how Hi-Tech continues to conduct business in such a manner, he says that allowing any company to regularly sell synthetic ingredients as supplements is due to a major failure on the part of the government. "They're not doing their job," he says.
For their part, Braun and Singerman maintain that everything in their supplements appears right on the label.
To test that claim, I sent the Cobra 6 Extreme I purchased at Boca Nutrition to Oliver Catlin's Banned Substances Control Group. When I received the test results, it turns out Braun is right: The product is now devoid of the banned DMBA, a stimulant very similar to DMAA, that powered it.
"So is it safe to take?" I ask.
"Not necessarily," says Catlin. The readings revealed a powerful mix of new stimulants. That could be due to a combination of the ingredients listed on the label — a formula that includes caffeine and theobromine (an alkaloid of the cacao plant that can be deadly in large doses). "Or it could be something else," he says. "We target drugs we are concerned about, like DMBA, when we screen products like these. But sometimes there are new, unknown compounds present that we can't see."
Soon after my visit to Blackstone Labs, and after four years of working together, Braun and Singerman are at war. Singerman leaves Blackstone to pursue other projects. "But he still owns half the company," Braun explains, insinuating that the split is amicable. But the tone of their relationship quickly changes. "When the companies first split, I hoped we'd be friends again," Braun says during one of his online Q&A sessions. "But he did too many things."
Braun has since divested himself of Boca Nutrition, and Singerman has gone on to start a supplements company called RedCon 1. He is also rebranding another, Prime Nutrition, with none other than Hi-Tech's Jared Wheat, who was released from prison in 2011. Braun has taken over day-to-day control of Blackstone, and despite the schism, the company is thriving. Blackstone has moved into a much larger, 14,000-square-foot space, and Braun has introduced several new products, including a long-awaited libido booster called Entice. But the most surprising of his new releases is Dust Extreme, a preworkout supplement with DMAA, the infamous, banned stimulant popularized by chemist Patrick Arnold. It's a curious decision to sell the illegal ingredient, but Braun justifies it in a long video on Facebook.
"I believe that people should be allowed to take what they want to take," he says. "Are you completely safe if you have health conditions? No. If your blood pressure is high, should you be taking a product like this? Probably not. But these are things you should look at yourself. I believe we should all have the choice to put what we want in our body. You can go and buy cigarettes at any fucking gas station and they're guaranteed to kill you. You will die. So how dare the FDA come in and take away ingredients from us that give us awesome workouts?"
","tag_ids":[4748,5611],"publish_date":"2017-01-31T20:16:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T14:05:21.179Z","updated_at":"2017-01-31T21:51:59.078Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","keywords":"supplements, dietary supplements, blackstone labs, boca nutrition & smoothie bar, bodybuilding, muscle supplements, muscle building, ","description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jzRkyi","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Magazine Photograph by Shana Novak","caption":"P.J. and Celeste Braun were featured on the May 2015 cover of 'Iron Man Magazine.'","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_c-9c57d3e1-802d-4480-a15c-67a5c8a98ac5.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Newswire / Aaron Singerman","caption":"Braun, left, and Singerman turned Blackstone Labs into a a powerhouse earning more than $20 million a year.","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_b-b074ced0-e2a7-47ab-a93b-9835ef973f0c.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photo Illustration by Emily Shur","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_a-7a018373-b943-436b-8215-40db3942a4af.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/the-truth-about-herbal-supplements-20140102","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: The Truth About Herbal Supplements","contentId":168069,"contentHeadline":"The Truth About Herbal Supplements"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/the-dawn-of-bodybuilding-20121118","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Huge","contentId":168456,"contentHeadline":"Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Bodybuilding"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":455184,"old_id":null,"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","short_title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","slug":"/features/articles/the-man-taking-down-big-sugar-w455184","body":"This past fall, Gary Taubes took his wife and two sons on a trip to a wildlife preserve in Sonoma County, California, the kind of place where guests learn firsthand about the species of the Serengeti. They slept in tents and spent the day among giraffes, zebras, antelope, and the like. One morning, Taubes and his boys awoke early. "It was 50 degrees out — freezing by our standards," he recalls. "I took the kids to breakfast, and" — his face takes on a pained expression — "how can I not give them hot chocolate?"
For most parents, indulging the kids with some cocoa would pose no dilemma. But Taubes, one of America's leading and most strident nutrition writers, is no ordinary father. His new book, The Case Against Sugar, seems destined to strike fear into the hearts of children everywhere. Taubes' argument is simple: Sugar is likely poison, and it's what is making our country fat. And not just fat but sick. So don't eat it. Ever.
A little much? Perhaps. But the kids did get the cocoa — on this one special occasion.
For Taubes, the cocoa conundrum is an occupational hazard for someone who describes his current mission as "the nutritional equivalent of stealing Christmas." But Taubes, 60, has never been one to shy away from extreme positions. His last two books, 2007's Good Calories, Bad Calories and 2010's Why We Get Fat, launched a nationwide movement to shun bread and embrace butter. Both argued that it's not how many calories we consume, but where they come from, and that eating fat doesn't actually make us so. These were bold statements at the time, and they had a big impact. "I can't think of another journalist who has had quite as profound an influence on the conversation about nutrition," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Thanks to Taubes' pro-fat pronouncements, Pollan says, "millions of Americans changed the way they eat. Doughnut, bread, and pasta sales plummeted, and we saw a change in the food conversation, the effects of which are still being felt today."
Now, with The Case Against Sugar, Taubes launches his toughest crusade yet: to prove that we've been bamboozled into thinking that cookies and soda are simply "empty" calories and not uniquely toxic ones. That's the result, he argues, of a long history of deception from the sugar industry and its support of shoddy science.
The audacity of those arguments makes Taubes an anomaly among nutrition writers, says John Horgan, director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology. "He isn't content just to do public relations for scientists," Horgan says, meaning he doesn't rewrap scientists' findings with the simple, shiny packaging of journalism. Instead, he digs deep into the research, and if he finds it lacking, he attacks it. "He'll come right out and say if he thinks someone is an idiot," Horgan says.
With his new book, Taubes will likely have his largest platform, and an audience poised to listen. By now, nearly everyone believes that Americans eat too much sugar. Most experts agree that it's a major contributor to our nation's grim health: More than a third of adults are obese, and one in 11 has diabetes. This understanding has spurred campaigns for soda taxes nationwide — five measures were approved by voters in November — and moves by big companies to ban sugary drinks from workplace cafeterias. In August 2016, three class-action lawsuits were filed against General Mills, Kellogg's, and Post, alleging that the companies falsely claimed their cereals are healthy when, in fact, they're loaded with sugar.
Anyone else would be encouraged, but ever the brawler, Taubes points out flaws: Even these new anti-sugar crusaders, he says, are motivated by a naive, and ultimately dangerous, "less is better" view of sugar. To Taubes, the answer to our obesity crisis isn't more expensive soda and less sweetened cereals. It's to stop poisoning ourselves altogether.
"Sugar is like heroin to me," Taubes says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
Like the control room on a battleship, Taubes' office perches atop the Craftsman-style house he shares with his wife, the writer Sloane Tanen, and their sons. His office is a small, book-filled space with views of the surrounding Oakland hills. He guides me to a low seat near his desk.
I knew of Taubes' aggressive reputation and had seen his brash, combative videos on YouTube — densely reasoned, contrarian lectures about everything from the physiology of how insulin works in the blood to why we should eat meat and avoid carbs (which the body converts into sugar). His videos get hundreds of thousands of views and provoke both cheers and hisses in the blogosphere. I am surprised to find him quiet and soft-spoken.
He pulls out a package of Nicorette gum and pops a piece in his mouth.
"Do you smoke?" I ask.
Not for more than 15 years. "Nicotine is a great drug for writing," Taubes says. "I keep thinking once life calms down, I'll quit." His most vexing addiction, however, is the stuff he's spent five years researching. "Sugar is like heroin to me," he says. "I'm never satisfied with a sweet. I could eat until I get sick."
He tries to eat no sugar at all, including honey and agave syrup, and limits fruit. But he insists, "I'm not a zealot." The family pantry — stocked by his wife, not incidentally — has an assortment of what he calls "crap snack health-food bars and juice boxes that Sloane says we have for kids who come over, because they expect it." When Taubes wants a treat, he nibbles on 100 percent chocolate. Because who wouldn't prefer a bar of compressed bitter paste to Godiva?
"The type I buy isn't that bad," he assures me, and then immediately recounts a story of a taxi driver he once gave some to who had to pull over to spit it out. While telling me this, he replaces his now well-chomped Nicorette with a new one. He will continue chain-chewing throughout the day.
Sugar and nicotine, he points out, are connected in more ways than we may think. The Case Against Sugar documents that in the early 1900s, tobacco companies began adding sugar to their products, which allowed people to inhale the smoke deeply, making cigarettes more palatable as well as more addictive and deadlier.
While Taubes has been writing and talking about sugar in one form or another since the early 2000s, with this book he wants to do something he says no one yet has: reveal the bad science that has enabled the sugar industry to mislead the public. By rooting through archives and obscure textbooks, he has uncovered, he says, evidence that sugar is not just the harmless, empty calories we indulge in, but that it may well be toxic, dangerous even in small amounts. It's a possibility that might make you hesitate handing your kids a mug of hot cocoa, too.
To get — and stay — lean and healthy, the conventional nutritional wisdom is simple: Eat less and exercise more. That's what the sugar industry would have us believe, too. (Coca-Cola, for example, now offers smaller-size cans to help consumers drink less soda — or just buy more cans of soda.) That's false, according to Taubes, and the reasoning is part of an industry-driven campaign that goes back to the 1950s. It was then that Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist at the University of Minnesota, first stated that fat — not sugar — causes the high cholesterol levels that lead to heart disease. What few people knew, however, is that Keys' research was funded by the sugar industry.
Taubes details how this pattern of influence ramped up in the 1960s and '70s, as the industry funneled money to scientists and public health officials to combat the notion that sugar was a unique cause of obesity and chronic illness. One of those recipients was Fred Stare, whose work as the founder and chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health was supported financially for decades by sugar purveyors like General Foods. The most public defender of sugar, Stare repeatedly asserted, even as late as 1985, that it is not "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
The industry's campaign scored a coup in 1976, when the FDA classified sugar as "generally recognized as safe" and thus not subject to federal regulations. In 1980, the U.S. government released its dietary guidelines, drafted by a team led by Mark Hegsted, who spent his entire career working under Fred Stare at Harvard. Taubes writes that those guidelines assured us: "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes."
The PR work paid off in other ways, too. Americans now consume 130 pounds of sugar a year, twice the amount we did in 1980. And while the industry told us to embrace sugar, dietary experts preached the gospel of low fat. Both groups assume all calories are created equal, whether they come from apples or apple pie. Such logic implies that a calorie of sugar is no more or less capable of causing obesity and diabetes than a calorie from any type of food.
Taubes presents a wholly different role for what sugar does in the body. "A calorie of sugar and one of meat or broccoli all have vastly different effects on the hormones and enzymes that control or regulate the storage of fat in fat cells," he says. But unlike pork or veggies, sugar has a uniquely negative effect: It causes the liver to accumulate fat and, at the same time, prompts the body to pump out insulin. Over time, Taubes insists, these elevated insulin levels lead to weight gain, obesity, and Type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases. Which is to say, we don't blimp out or get sick because we eat too much and fail to exercise. It happens because we eat sugar.
At this point you may be wondering why we haven't put this whole debate to bed with broad, well-conducted research. The problem is that studies about nutrition are notoriously difficult to orchestrate. Most research has been observational: Scientists ask a group of people what they ate over a period of time and then try to tease out associations between their food intake and any diseases they contract. Obviously this approach is problematic. Even if subjects report their eating habits accurately (though they almost never do), it's difficult to know which foods initiate a given problem. If an association is found between hamburgers and heart disease, how would anyone know whether the problem is in the burgers or the buns? The best-run studies require confining subjects to a metabolic ward in a hospital for weeks, where researchers can control all the food they take in and measure all the energy they expend. It's incredibly expensive and nearly impossible to find someone willing to fund it.
Billionaire philanthropists John and Laura Arnold are among the few who are. After hearing Taubes on a 2011 podcast discuss the kinds of obesity experiments he'd like to see done, John Arnold, a former hedge-fund manager in Houston, reached out. It led to an Arnold Foundation grant of $35.5 million — money bestowed to Taubes to establish a foundation that would find answers to some of nutrition's toughest questions. In 2012, Taubes paired up with Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins trained physician and star in his field, and launched the nonprofit Nutrition Science Institute (NuSI). Taubes and Attia wanted NuSI to be a beacon, an institution with the experts, resources, and clearance to do the precise experimental science no one else had been willing to. "I thought there needed to be specific studies done to resolve what causes obesity and diabetes once and for all," Taubes says. "I wanted to put the issue to rest, have it recognized by people who could influence the medical establishment."
As late as 1985, Harvard nutritionist Fred Stare asserted that it is no "remotely true that modern sugar consumption contributes to poor health."
Taubes says he has always had issues with authority, beginning with his father, who was a photoelectric engineer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Xerox copying process. Growing up in Rochester, New York, Gary also lived in the shadow of his elder brother, Clifford. "He excelled at everything," says Taubes. "It was either give up or be supercompetitive."
When Clifford went to Harvard for physics, Gary followed suit. But after receiving a C minus in a quantum physics class, he switched to engineering. (Clifford went on to be a celebrated professor of mathematical physics at his alma mater.) It was then that Taubes read All the President's Men, which tells the story of the Watergate scandal, and he realized he could make a living kicking against authority. He became an investigative journalist, focusing on bad science. Nutrition was a natural fit. No other arena offers more complex or thornier issues to tackle or is so dear to the public's heart. Calling out the idiots here meant Taubes could influence what people put in their mouths every day.
While at Harvard, Taubes channeled his competitive fervor into sports. He played football and in the off-season he boxed. By 1987, when he moved to Venice Beach, California, Taubes worked out constantly, climbing the steps in Santa Monica canyon, roller-blading to Malibu and back, or running a five-mile loop. At the time he believed the cardio would allow him to eat whatever and how much he wanted. But despite all that calorie-burning, he began putting on pounds. It wasn't until 2000, when he adopted the low-carb recommendations of cardiologist Robert Atkins, that Taubes succeed in controlling his weight. That experience colored his thinking about the roles of diet and exercise in obesity.
Exercise, he now believes, plays no role in staying lean. Taubes doesn't dispute that exercise is good for the body and soul; it's just no way to lose weight. Yet he does look the part of a gym rat. His face is lean, his frame muscular. But if anything, Taubes says, avoiding sugar and carbs has allowed him to keep trim. His lunch order at a local burger joint: A one-pound slab of ground beef (no bun) heaped with bacon and smothered in guacamole — the only concession to the color green on the plate.
When I visited Taubes in October, a number of houses on his street had yard signs in support of Oakland's Sugar Sweetened Beverage Tax. These are positive signs for the success of The Case — a good thing, because its author could use a win. It's been a tough year for Gary Taubes.
In December 2015, his partner Peter Attia abruptly left NuSI. (In a podcast a few months later, Attia disclosed that he's no longer interested in talking about nutrition.) Taubes calls it an amicable divorce, but he also says the Arnolds had invested in his ideas and Attia's competence, and after Attia left, things began to fall apart.
In January 2016, Kevin Hall, a National Institutes of Health scientist who was the lead investigator on the first NuSI study, recused himself from involvement with the foundation. He and Taubes had clashed on how to set up the pilot study — research that was supposed to address whether carbs were the primary driver of obesity — and when the results came out last summer, the two men couldn't agree on the interpretation of the findings or the quality of the study. NuSI, which was founded to bring clarity to the wildly complicated field of nutrition, ended up mired in the basic processes of scientific research. By late summer, the Arnolds had cut their funding. Taubes considers the episode "a learning experience in how easy it is for experiments to go wrong. Peter and I were like the Hardy Boys of not-for-profit research."
NuSI remains afloat, though barely. Taubes and two other employees continue on as volunteers, and he says the foundation still has unfinished studies awaiting results. He will also continue to solicit funding from wealthy investors, but the main hurdle he faces hasn't been lowered: Spending his career attacking the leading scientists in a field has made working with them rather difficult.
But in light of recent sugar-tax initiatives in Berkeley and San Francisco — both of which passed — Taubes seems to be at the front in the charge against sugar. During our interview, his desk was littered with literature from those trying to tax sugary beverages in cities across the country, along with articles on lawsuits being brought against cereal makers. Taubes hopes The Case will provide more ammo for these fights.
Still, he notes with some exasperation that such efforts continue to speak the language of Big Sugar: If we all just drank less soda and ate less cereal, the rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease would drop. Wrong. Taubes points to the public health initiative of putting calorie counts on menus. "That doesn't lead to any significant decrease in weight or consumption," he says, "because they're identifying the wrong problem."
This is key to Taubes' outlook on sugar. While you may eat desserts and drink sodas only occasionally and add just a sprinkle of sugar to your daily coffee — while maintaining a normal weight — he will tell you that you don't know what even that amount of sugar does to your body. As he puts it in The Case: "How much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we'll ingest."
In an ideal world, Taubes says, his book would lead people to force the FDA to investigate whether sugar is safe, as the agency proclaimed in 1976. That, he admits, is improbable, given the influence Big Sugar wields. Not that it will stop him from waging the war. "Once you've said publicly that the conventional thinking is wrong on something so profound as obesity and diabetes, you either move on to something else or you decide the injustice is such that you have to keep doing this work," he says. "And if you have to keep doing it, then you have to take the shit that comes with it."
Just don't sugarcoat it.
","tag_ids":[4748,23195],"publish_date":"2016-12-13T17:55:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Man Taking Down Big Sugar","keywords":"sugar, big sugar, the case against sugar, health, feature, interview, problem with sugar, gary taubes, ","description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?"},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hrChGN","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Gary Taubes","caption":"In the 1980s, Taubes trained for New York City's Golden Gloves amateur boxing championship. He was knocked out cold in the second bout.","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_b-1e59e7eb-f6b5-42f9-8968-9305f13ea4eb.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photograph by Cody Pickens ","filename":"m0117_ft_taubes_h-35217730-738e-4d8d-a617-041de2d0e40f.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/health-fitness/health/is-sugar-the-new-tobacco-20140723","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Is Sugar the New Tobacco?","contentId":174502,"contentHeadline":"Is Sugar the New Tobacco? "},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/michael-moss-on-the-birth-of-the-triple-double-oreo-20130318","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: The Birth of the Triple Double Oreo","contentId":168360,"contentHeadline":"Michael Moss on the Birth of the Triple Double Oreo"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Gary Taubes has uncovered the bad science and corrupt industry that enabled our addiction to a substance he believes it not just fattening but toxic. Dessert, anyone?","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454811,"old_id":null,"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","short_title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson","slug":"/features/articles/the-long-game-of-liam-neeson---liam-neeson-interview-w454811","body":"Early one autumn evening, Liam Neeson strolls into a restaurant near Central Park, two blocks from his apartment, with one hand in his pocket and the other clutching a green Stanley travel mug.
Neeson carries this mug everywhere: movie sets, red-carpet premieres, New York Rangers games, even the occasional interview. "It's a specific kind of English black tea," he says when I ask what's inside. "Decaf. It's the only thing I drink." He's not kidding: When the waitress comes over to take his order, Neeson reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Ziploc full of tea bags, which he unzips and hands to her. "Could you make me a fresh one of these, please?" Then he hooks a finger into the mug, fishes out the old tea bag, and drops it in his water glass with a plunk. "Thanks, love."
Neeson folds himself into the leather booth as comfortably as is possible for a 6-foot-4 Irishman with shoulders like an armoire. He's feeling a little out of sorts today: He has just finished shooting two movies back-to-back — one in Atlanta, the other in London — and he is in New York for the first time in five and a half months. "It's nice to be home," he says. "But I'm feeling a bit like a three-legged stool." (Which, technically, would be the most stable stool, but you get his drift.) He brings up one of the movies he's here to promote — Silence, a historical epic directed by Martin Scorsese — and asks me how long it's currently running. I tell him the version I saw was just over two and a half hours. Neeson shrugs. "For Martin, I guess that's quite short."
Silence is a passion project of Scorsese's, one he's been trying to make for more than 25 years. It's based on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo about Jesuit missionaries — Neeson plays one named Ferreira — in 1640s Japan, where Christians are being systematically persecuted by the Buddhist dictatorship. The film has been through multiple writers and actors, but Scorsese stuck with it, and it's finally hitting theaters this month.
Neeson understands the value of playing the long game. It's a little hard to remember now that he's entrenched on the A-list, but for most of his career he was a solid leading man, though rarely much more. He was already 41, with 17 years' worth of film roles behind him, when he was nominated for an Oscar for Schindler's List, a role he'd reportedly beaten out Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford to get — but even that failed to give him Ford's or Costner's movie-star career. Neeson spent the next two decades turning in great performances in as many hits as misses (Batman Begins on the one hand, The Haunting on the other), until his late-period pivot toward ass-kicking made him one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. "Liam's ambition wasn't to do all the classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company," his old friend Richard Graham once said. "He wanted big parts in big movies." Now, in the fifth decade of his career, he has his pick of them.
Neeson keeps his coat on for our entire time together, either as a sort of armor or in case he decides to make a quick getaway. He's agreed to talk for 90 minutes, which I tell him isn't long for an in-depth cover story. "Well it's about 88 minutes more than I want to be here," Neeson says. "So."
That this rejoinder — delivered in his peaty growl — does not incite an immediate pants-shitting is due mostly to the fact that, intimidating though he may be, there's an obvious gentleness to Neeson, a vulnerability and tenderness that's plain on his handsome, timeworn face. Before he went around punching Albanians for a living, Neeson was usually cast in more introspective roles — professors, sculptors, and other sensitive types — wounded romantics who, like him, tended toward brooding and self-doubt. Women, naturally, went crazy for him: the lumberjack's body with the poet's heart. "It's not about looks, although he's a terrific-looking guy," his late wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, once said. "It comes from somewhere deeper than that. You feel that he's been through a history."
These days everyone knows that he has. Neeson is a widower, having lost Richardson seven years ago, following a skiing accident. Since then he has raised their two sons alone. Now the younger son is away at college and Neeson is home by himself. He still has his property in upstate New York, a big 1890s farmhouse he bought before he and Richardson were married. "He likes being there on his own, with his pool and his gym," Graham says. "He's always been very happy with his own company.
In many ways Neeson was born to play a priest. Tall, austere; slightly stooped yet unflaggingly upright; those searching eyes, that troubled soul. He's done it half a dozen times already: in 1985's Lamb (Brother Michael); 2005's Breakfast on Pluto (Father Liam); 2002's Gangs of New York (Priest Vallon, who wasn't an actual priest but wore the collar and wielded a crucifix in battle); even an episode of The Simpsons, on which his Father Sean taught Bart the way of the Lord.
Neeson was born William John but called Liam (short for William) after the local priest. He grew up in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, the only son of Barney and Kitty Neeson, a school custodian and a school cook. His mother walked two miles to work each way and brought leftovers home to their council house; his father, according to Neeson's sister, "never said five words when two words would do."
Neeson learned the Mass in Latin as an altar boy: In nomine Patris, Dominus vobiscum, the whole deal. Church is where he first felt the magic of performance, the ceremony and theatricality of it — the robes, the candles, the liturgy; costumes, lighting, a script. His parish priest, Father Darragh, taught him to box when he was nine; a scrappy jabber with a strong left, Neeson eventually became the Ulster Province boys champion in three different weight divisions. But secretly he was afraid of getting hurt and, moreover, of hurting someone else. So when a blow to the head during a fight left him concussed, the 16-year-old hung up his gloves — but not before winning the fight.
It wasn't easy being Catholic in Northern Ireland in the 1950s and '60s. "You grew up cautious, let's put it that way," he says. "Our town was essentially Protestant, but there were a few Catholics on our street. The Protestants all had marches and bands and stuff. I didn't quite understand what it was about — 'Remember 1690? When Catholic King James was defeated by Protestant William of Orange?' Who gives a fuck?" As he got older, the situation got grimmer. "The Troubles started in '69 and then really kicked in from '70 to '71," he says. "Drive-by shootings, bombs. I was at university for one abortive year, and we were so fucking naive. You'd be in a bar, drinking a glass of cider, and suddenly soldiers would come in and say, 'Everybody out — there's a bomb scare.' We'd order more drinks to take across the street, then the soldiers would go off and we'd filter back into the bar. Fucking stupid."
Neeson reconnected with his Catholic roots in 1985 when he filmed a movie called The Mission, starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons. The three of them played Catholic missionaries in 18th-century South America. They had a priest with them on set in the jungle, and every Sunday he'd "say a simple little Mass, break a piece of bread, and read the Gospel for the week," Neeson says. "We'd discuss the passage and what it meant in today's world. It was very intimate and very cathartic in a lot of ways." A devilish grin: "Then you'd go home, have a few glasses of Guinness, and get laid. The delights of the flesh."
Neeson's part in The Mission was small but instrumental to his career. De Niro, whom he befriended, introduced him to an American casting director. When she needed an IRA operative for an episode of Miami Vice, she thought of Neeson. That got him a work visa and a foothold in the States.
He's still grateful. "A lovely, lovely man," Neeson says of De Niro. "He's a man of few words — I like that. He's the sort of guy who says, 'I'll call you Thursday at 3 o'clock' — and if he can't call, he'll call you Wednesday to say he can't. When he makes a commitment, he sticks to it. That's rare these days."
It was Neeson's longtime interest in the Jesuits that prompted him to take the role of Father Ferreira in Silence. We first meet Ferreira in the film's opening scene: He's dirty, bearded, his raiments caked in mud — a thoroughly broken man. He's forced to watch as Japanese Christians are crucified and tortured.
Neeson was eager for the chance to reunite with Scorsese, after the very brief experience working with him on Gangs of New York. "Martin demands real focus," Neeson says admiringly. "If there was a grip working a hundred meters away and Martin heard a piece of scaffolding fall — which doesn't even make a noise! — he would stop, turn to the first AD, and say, 'I've asked for silence. Why have you not got it?' Terrific."
(Unlike just about anyone with even a tenuous connection to the legendary director, Neeson calls Scorsese by his full given name. "I just feel I haven't earned the right to call him Marty." he says. "Everybody's always like, 'Marty this, Marty that.' You don't know him. I don't know him.")
Scorsese says that Neeson was one of the key elements to finally getting Silence made. "I needed someone with real gravity to play Ferreira," he says. "You have to feel the character's pain."
Now Neeson doesn't consider himself much of a Catholic. "I admire people with true faith," he says. "Like my mother, who's 90 and gets annoyed if she can't walk to Mass Sunday morning. 'Mom, you're 90! It's OK! God will forgive you.' " These days he isn't even sure if he believes in a God.
I ask if there was a specific incident that precipitated his doubt, and his face darkens. "So this is probably leading toward the death of my wife?"
Neeson is understandably wary on the subject of Richardson. It must be gut-wrenching to have to revisit the worst moment of your life again and again, every time an interviewer needs a new quote. But this was just an open-ended question, I insist. It wasn't leading toward anything.
"OK," he says, sounding unconvinced. "It wasn't." Anyway, as far as his waning faith goes: "I think it was gradual."
When he's in town and the weather is good, Neeson loves to walk around Central Park. "Power walk," he says. "Get a good sweat going." He even has a walking buddy — "a real-estate lady" he met on his walks. "You see the same people, you nod, you say hello," Neeson explains. "Six months later, you're saying, 'How's your kid?' It's nice," he says. "We text each other: You free tomorrow? The usual spot? We do the whole loop — usually six miles, sometimes eight. Fifteen minutes a mile. It's good."
Three years ago, Central Park was the unlikely battleground for one of the most heated fights of Neeson's public life. The topic? Horses. During his 2013 election campaign, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to enact a ban on horse-drawn carriages in Central Park. (The measure was billed as an animal-rights issue, though questions have been raised about the role political donors and real-estate interests played in the proposed ban, and Mayor de Blasio's actions were later investigated.) The horse ban was supported by famous animal advocates like Miley Cyrus and Alec Baldwin. Neeson, who grew up caring for horses on his aunt's farm in County Armagh, waded in to defend the drivers.
"I'm in the park every day," he explains. "I see these guys; I know these guys. There were so many celebrities supporting [the ban], I was like, 'These guys need a celebrity or two.' "
"He really put himself in the line of fire," says Stephen Malone, a second-generation carriage driver and spokesman for the horse-and-carriage industry. "It was a complete game-changer. He hosted a stable visit for the city council on a Sunday afternoon, and if he wasn't there, we might have gotten one or two [members]. We ended up with about 20. They got to take their selfies with Liam Neeson, but they also got to meet the children of the drivers and to see how the stable hands care for the horses. It completely swayed public opinion. That was the moment we knew we were gonna be OK."
Colm McKeever, an Irish-born carriage driver and longtime friend of Neeson's, says, "There's a framed picture of him in every stable. It's the Pope and then Liam Neeson." McKeever says Neeson's support of the drivers wasn't due to their friendship: "We've been fast friends for a number of years, but that has nothing to do with Liam's convictions. He stands up for what he believes in. It's as simple as that."
The proposal was eventually defeated, and now Neeson is a hero to the 300-odd drivers, who often stop him to say thanks. "It's almost like he's part of the tour," jokes McKeever. " 'There's the carousel — and that's Liam Neeson.' " Malone adds: "Liam Neeson is the biggest Hollywood star going right now, and he walks through Central Park and stops to talk to carriage guys. Only a true gentleman would do that."
It's a working-man's solidarity that's apparently characteristically Neeson. "If you speak to film crews, they all love him," says Richard Graham. "He's got friends from crews he still corresponds with — and I'm not talking about higher-ups, just ordinary blokes. It sounds like I'm blowing smoke up his ass, but he truly is an honorable guy."
Ellen Freund was the prop master on two Neeson films, Leap of Faith and Nell — the latter when Neeson and Richardson were still dating. "They had a lovely house with a chef," Freund recalls, "and every weekend they would invite six members of the crew and cook this fantastic dinner, with beautiful wines. It was just the most lovely treat. It wasn't just the upper echelons, either — a grip or an electrician, it didn't matter."
It was Freund who introduced Neeson to his favorite outdoor pastime: fly-fishing. They were shooting Nell on a lake and needed something for Neeson to do in his downtime; Freund had just come off A River Runs Through It, so she showed Neeson how to cast. He was hooked. "He just loved it," she says. "Once we gave him the rod and set him up out there, he wouldn't come off the lake. Every time you looked for him, he was down there practicing."
"When he said he'd discovered fly-fishing," says Graham, "my first thought was, 'My God, that is the perfect hobby for you.' It's peaceful. It's in nature. There's a lot of skill. And the time goes by like you wouldn't believe. So I think that's kind of therapeutic. You've got nothing in your mind, other than trying to catch the fish."
Neeson cites the kind of pastoral tranquility that will be familiar to anyone who's heard an angler wax lyrical about the sport. "Eight times out of 10, I won't catch anything," he says. "The thrill for me is being on a river with my pouch and rod, and I know there's a fish over there, or at least I think there is, so I'll do five or six casts. That fly's not working, take it off, put on another one, try again. Before you know it, three hours will have gone past." It's the opposite of relaxing. "You're trying to outwit a fish that's been around since the Triassic with a piece of yarn or your own hair, he says. "You're working all the time — but it's a different kind of work."
Neeson and Graham have fished together all over the world: Patagonia, arctic Quebec, the Tomhannock Reservoir in upstate New York. "New Zealand, that's the mecca," Neeson says. "Big trout. Stunning. Some of these rivers, we'd take little choppers in, and you're six feet over the rocks and you jump out. You're thirsty, so you put your head in the river and drink, and it's pure." Neeson seems energized by the memory. "Fuck. I haven't done a big trip in a long time," he says. "I'm thinking of going to Brazil, up the Amazon. Heard they have big peacock bass. That'd be a trip." He would also like to get back down to the Bahamas for bonefish. "The phantom of the shallows," he says. "Silvery color. They turn a certain way and disappear. Hence 'phantoms.' But you need a guide, that's the only trouble." He'd rather go alone? "Yeah," he says.
(Says Graham: "We can be fishing side by side, 50 feet apart, and not say a word to each other for hours.")
I ask Neeson if he's learned anything from fly-fishing that he's been able to apply to his career or to the rest of his life. "Patience, I think," he says. "Just taking your time. I remember in the early days, if I was casting and I missed, I'd be very quick to cast again. But trout stay where they are — they like the food to come to them. The fish isn't going anywhere. Take your time."
Neeson's other new movie is A Monster Calls, a live-action tearjerker in which a CGI tree (the titular Monster) visits a boy whose mother is dying. Neeson plays the tree, a yew — "the most important of all the healing trees." He's ancient and massive, twice the size of a house, with gnarled roots, spiky branches, and a voice like a bottomless coal pit. The first time he shows up, he kicks down the boy's house. It's kind of terrifying. Still, you know the Monster is good, because he's played by Liam Neeson.
It's not surprising that Neeson makes a great tree, given that a noted Broadway critic once literally compared him to a sequoia. (He actually called him a "towering sequoia of sex." It was a compliment.) He spent two weeks filming motion-capture in a special room with cameras surrounding him on every side. "What do they call it? Not the space. The volume," he says with a little laugh. "Computer nerds." The end product looks something like a woodsy Transformer — which, weirdly, makes sense, given that Transformers director Michael Bay has said that Neeson's regal bearing was his inspiration for Optimus Prime. ("Really?" says Neeson. "That's news to me.")
A Monster Calls is structured on a series of visits from the Monster, in which he tells fairy tales to the boy to help him work through his grief. The stories are designed to divine meaning from a meaningless world — a world where, as the Monster says at one point, "Farmers' daughters die for no reason." It's a movie, in other words, about death, loss, mourning, and the ways we help one another cope. And this, I warn Neeson, is when I'm leading toward the death of his wife.
Neeson met Richardson when he was a 40-year-old bachelor who'd already dated Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, and Brooke Shields. In 1993 Richardson and Neeson co-starred in a play on Broadway, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and then, before long, were a couple. Two years later they were married in the garden of their farmhouse, and the boys soon followed. Then, in 2009, Richardson was skiing near Montreal when she fell and hit her head. Everything seemed fine at first: "Oh, darling — I've taken a tumble in the snow" is what she told Neeson on the phone that night. But unbeknownst to the doctors, her brain was slowly bleeding. She fell into a coma and died the next day.
Since Richardson's passing, Neeson's grief has colored several of his onscreen characters, a number of which are dealing with some kind of tragic familial backstory. The similarity in A Monster Calls is awful and impossible to ignore: a beautiful young mother struck down before her time. And Neeson's own sons were just 13 and 12 when Richardson died, about the same age as the boy in the movie. Did he think about that at all when preparing for the film?
"Yeah, I don't want to go into that," Neeson says politely but firmly. "It's not fair to them. I'd rather not talk about my boys, other than that they're doing well, college, all that stuff."
By all appearances, the boys are thriving. Micheál, now 21, is an aspiring actor who appeared with Neeson in an LG Super Bowl commercial last year. And Daniel, 20, is a sophomore theater and digital-media production major. "There's a saying," says Neeson. " 'You're only as happy as your unhappiest child.' And the kids are happier than I — so that's a blessing."
We've been talking for a while when Neeson realizes his tea has gone cold. He flags down the waitress. "Sorry, love," he says. "Could you ask the kitchen for some boiling water when you have a second?"
"Boiling-hot water," she says, nodding. "No problem."
Neeson stops her. "But not hot," he says. "If you could make it boil. Tell them it's for me," he adds. "Tell them I will come for them. I will find them. . . ."
Upon recognizing his famous Taken monologue, the waitress cracks ups. "Absolutely," she says, skipping off. After she's gone, I tease Neeson for shamelessly trotting out his shtick. He laughs: "Pathetic, isn't it?"
When Neeson made the first Taken movie in 2009, he had low expectations. " Straight to video is what I thought," he says. No one is more amused than he that eight years later — after The Grey (Taken with wolves), Non-Stop (Taken on a plane), Run All Night (Taken at night), and, of course, Taken 2 and 3 — he's still getting offered this kind of role. He's even reached the point of self-parody, turning in comically self-aware, Neeson-esque cameos in a commercial for the role-playing game Clash of Clans (as vengeful gamer AngryNeeson52) and on Inside Amy Schumer, as a scarily intense funeral-home director whose motto is "I don't bury cowards."
But in a way, Neeson is just fulfilling an opportunity he first had more than two decades ago, when he was being courted to become the new James Bond in the mid-'90s. "I was being considered," Neeson says. "I'm sure they were considering a bunch of other guys, too." He says he would have loved to be 007, but Richardson said she wouldn't marry him if he was. I ask why, and he smiles like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Women. Foreign countries. Halle Berry. It's understandable." Also, Schindler's List had just come out. "She was like, 'You're going to ruin your career,' " Neeson says. "But it's no big deal. It's nice to be inquired after."
Neeson sometimes feels a little embarrassed that he's Social Security–eligible and still pretend-fighting for a living. "Maybe another year," he says of his action-star shelf life. "The audiences let you know — you can sense them going, 'Oh, come on.' But by the way," he hastens to add, "I've never felt fitter in my life."
Neeson doesn't box anymore. ("I'll train — the bags and stuff. But I don't spar. There's always someone coming up to you like, 'Hey, you're that actor Lyle Nelson right?' They want a chance to hurt you a little. 'Guess who I beat up today? He's a pussy.' ") But he proudly points out that he does all his own movie fights. I read him a quote from Steven Seagal — "Look at Liam Neeson. He can't fight. He's a great dramatic actor, a great guy. . . . Is he a great fighter? A great warrior? No" — and Neeson seems amused. "I don't know how to answer that," he says, smiling. "Am I an action guy? Not really. But I do know how to fight. So fuck him."
One thing Neeson absolutely won't do anymore is ride a motorcycle — ever since a horrifying crash in 2000 nearly killed him. "I've read a couple of scripts where the character's on a motorbike, and I'm like, 'Is this important to the script?' 'Yeah, it is.' 'OK, I'm not in.' "
I tell him about a recent spill I took on a bike, and he turns serious. "You have to watch yourself," Neeson tells me. "Get it out of your system. Make a pact with your wife. And don't cheat on it."
Neeson has few vices left these days. He quit the Marlboro Lights years ago and gave up drinking a while back — first the Guinness, then the pinot noir — after he found himself partaking too much in the wake of Richardson's death. He tries to keep busy lest he wallow. "I need to work," he says. "I'm a working-class Irishman. I'm fucking lucky: A stranger gets in touch with my agent and says, 'Could you send Liam Neeson a script?' I'm still flattered by that. So I'll keep doing it till the knees give up. It beats hiding in a basement in eastern Aleppo."
(As Richardson once put it: "I think he probably, on some level — although he wouldn't say it — wakes up every morning thinking, 'Isn't it great I'm not driving a forklift?' ")
Now that he's back in New York, Neeson looks forward to lying low for a while. "Just recharge the batteries," he says. "I don't want to see the inside of an airplane." He'll take in some Broadway shows, catch up on all the programs on his Apple TV: Fargo, Ray Donovan, Breaking Bad. He's also got a big stack of books he wants to tackle — two Ian McEwan novels and a box of classics he recently received as a gift, which included War and Peace and The Grapes of Wrath.
And then, of course, there are those walks in the park.
It all sounds nice, I say. But I'm not sure it's enough to fill up a day.
Neeson smiles. "You'd be surprised."
","tag_ids":[4748,4794],"publish_date":"2016-12-12T16:07:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":null,"updated_at":null,"data":{"meta":{"title":"The Long Game of Liam Neeson - Liam Neeson Interview","keywords":"liam neeson, interview, feature, profile, liam neeson magazine cover, silence, martin scorsese,","description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2hvX3IR","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"","caption":"Neeson with Richardson in London, October 2008.","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_b-8f9a8a98-433a-4b2d-8ff5-ed182b83326c.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Marc Hom","caption":"","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_g-6285b0f9-fcaa-4ed9-8955-6792bf4dc162.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photographs by Marc Hom","filename":"m0117_ft_neeson_a-cb7e2101-2367-478c-ac0e-e10d94efd88b.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/mark-ruffalos-good-life-formula-3-kids-1-rabbit-47-acres-2-764-miles-from-hollywood-20130509","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood","contentId":168305,"contentHeadline":"Mark Ruffalo's Good Life Formula: 3 Kids, 1 Rabbit, 47 Acres, 2,764 Miles From Hollywood"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/features/articles/norman-reedus-the-wild-one-w209199","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: Getting to Know Norman Reedus","contentId":209199,"contentHeadline":"Norman Reedus: "}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Whether he's taking down Albanian thugs or big-city mayors, the soulful Irishman picks his fights (and his roles) with care. At 64, he still knows how to throw a punch.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":454117,"old_id":null,"title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","short_title":"The New Predators: Look Who's Turning Hunting into an Action Sport","slug":"/features/articles/how-companies-like-kuiu-made-hunting-the-new-action-sport-w454117","body":"It's just before dusk in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and Jason Hairston is getting pummeled. The light is fading, and he's hiking up a ridgeline at 11,000 feet, higher than he's ever been. A cold front is passing through, and wind gusts are reaching in excess of 60 miles per hour. Every few steps another blast hits, knocking him sideways. Hairston's companions, Brendan Burns and Willie Hettinger, aren't faring much better, stumbling around in front of him like a couple of drunks.
The wind is howling with such force that it's almost comical, so Hairston, who's on the mountain hunting sheep, breaks out his iPhone to record an Instagram post, looking like one of those hackneyed meteorologists reporting from the middle of a hurricane. "We saw a group of rams on the far mountain, and now we're heading up to check out another area," he shouts into his phone. "We're just getting hammered by the wind."
Hairston, the 45-year-old founder of the hunting-gear company Kuiu, is after his first Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, a sure-footed ungulate that lives primarily above tree line, often in locations so steep and rocky that they're impossible to negotiate on two feet. "It's the pinnacle of big-game hunting," Hairston says. "You have to go farther and harder for them than for any other species."
Among a segment of hardcore big-game hunters, no brand is as revered as Kuiu. The company's high-performance fabrics — bonded fleece and waterproof breathable synthetics — are pulled directly from the mountaineering world, and its distinct Tetris-like camo pattern looks more like standard-issue SEAL gear than the fake shrubbery so common at Walmart. Today Kuiu camo is as much a status symbol in hook-and-bullet culture as Louis Vuitton's monogram is among the Hamptons set. And it has as many celebrity boosters: UFC commentator Joe Rogan is a fan. Metallica's James Hetfield owns a guitar emblazoned with Kuiu camo, and Kid Rock has a piano wrapped in it.
On Instagram, Hairston has some 21,000 followers who track his far-flung hunts and gear updates and tag their own posts with #kuiunation. Detractors, of which Hairston has a few, occasionally use the comments section to rail against his trophy shots and what they see as hunting for the 1 Percent. But it's hard to say how much Kuiunation or Hairston's critics will get from this impromptu weather report: With the thin air, he inhales heavily between sentences, and his voice is almost entirely drowned out by the wind's roar. After stashing his phone in his pocket, he wipes snot from his nose.
"Ain't sheep hunting great!" he says.
The three hunters spend the next hour scouting and see a group of promising rams, but with darkness creeping over the eastern plains, we call it quits for the night and head back to camp. The next morning, conditions are far more favorable, so we load up our backpacks and set off in the violet predawn looking for a sheep to shoot.
When it comes to finding big rams, Burns and Hettinger are two of the best in the business. Burns works for Kuiu as its lead product tester and resident hunting guide. Hettinger's main gig is as a personal hunting guide for rich clientele; he's here because he knows these mountains better than just about anyone.
Once outside of camp, it takes Burns and Hettinger less than 10 minutes to spot the same group of rams two ridgelines over, a straight-line distance of maybe a mile. Hairston has a rare management tag from the Taos Pueblo, a 120,000-acre tribal homeland in northern New Mexico, which requires him to shoot an old ram, eight to 11 years old, that probably won't survive another winter or two, its molars ground down so far that it'll eventually starve. Based on its horns, the largest in the group looks like a shooter, but to get within range we have to hike up and over a 13,000-foot peak, then down and around the back side of the ridge where the sheep were first seen. Doing so takes most of the morning, stopping and starting to catch our breath and continually watch the movement of the rams. Now, as the three hunters prepare to clamber to the edge of a slight rock outcropping to take a closer look, Hairston unlatches a custom-made .300 WSM rifle from the side of his backpack and loads a 200-grain bullet into the chamber. "It feels good to finally get some lead in the pipe," he says.
But in the four hours we've been on the move, the sheep have wandered into the upper reaches of a grove of pine trees, behind a slight knoll. No shot. The three reassess. They settle on crawling to the edge of the knoll, knowing that Hairston will be within 150 yards of the animals, a strategy that could easily spook them.
"We can roll right over the top," Hettinger says, "but we won't have much time to decide whether to shoot."
"If we push them," says Burns, "we won't see them again — not on this trip."
Both turn to Hairston to make the call. "That's fine," he says with grin. "We're professionals. This is what we do for a living."
You'll be forgiven if your idea of hunting is paunchy old dudes rumbling down back roads in beat-up pickup trucks. Plenty of sportsmen still shoot whitetails out of tree stands or wait on the edge of sloughs for a flock of mallards to decoy in. But these days, hunting has been embraced by a new breed of devotees: athletic, tech-savvy, ethically minded professionals who like to play year-round in the mountains. They're often the same mountain bikers and runners on the trails outside Moab or Bozeman in summer. But come fall, they trade Lycra for camo and pick up a rifle or bow, many for the first time.
Tim Ferriss, the 4-Hour Work Week guru, is a recent convert to hunting. So is actor Chris Pratt. Even Facebook king Mark Zuckerberg has boasted about killing the meat he eats. Much of hunting's newfound appeal is because the payoff is a year's supply of organic, antibiotic-free backstraps — the new ethical eating. But it's also a way for mountain lovers to get deep into the outdoors, tempting people who have no desire to sit in a duck blind.
"It's a totally different way of interacting with these wild places," says Kenton Carruth, co-founder of the performance-hunting apparel company First Lite. "I know plenty of pro mountain guides who are in the woods every day and they've never seen a wolf, but that's because hikers or climbers are always walking around. They're never silent, still, taking in every sound and smell. As a hunter, I've seen a wolf quite a few times."
For adventure athletes, hunting is a challenge that's every bit as difficult as finishing an ultramarathon — stalking animals for miles on end, packing out hundreds of pounds of meat, navigating through the backcountry in snowstorms. It also offers the rush that comes with having to make consequential decisions in the mountains, just like in climbing.
"The athletic world is very physical but pretty sterile," says Mark Paulsen, a former strength and conditioning coach who has worked with NFL players. "Whether you're on a football field or on a basketball court, it's a known event. Whereas you go into the woods, you have no idea what you might be heading into. For people who love the mountains, that's the beauty of it."
Paulsen now owns Wilderness Athlete, which creates nutritional products like meal-replacement powders for these new so-called backpack hunters. Twenty years ago he was training athletes at the University of New Mexico when a friend took him bow-hunting for elk, hiking six miles into the mountains with 70 pounds of gear. The weight and altitude nearly killed him. "I wanted to throw up, lie down, crawl under a tree," he says. "I thought, 'This the most athletic thing I've ever done in my life.' " On the last day of the hunt, a bull elk bugled so close that Paulsen could feel it in his rib cage. He felled the bull with an arrow from 15 yards. "It was the single most exhilarating experience of my life," he says.
If backpack hunting can be said to have a celebrity, Hairston is it. Much of that has to do with his seemingly endless series of big hunts, which he regularly posts about on Instagram, much to the dismay of anti-hunters and even some in the hunting world. In the last six months alone, he has bagged a trophy room full of animals. In July, he shot a 3x4 blacktail buck in northern California. In August, he flew to the Yukon's far north and killed a 10-year-old Dall sheep with perfectly symmetrical 42-inch horns. In September, on private land just north of Bozeman, Montana, while hunting with his eight-year-old son, Cash, and his 72-year-old father, he brought down a monster bull elk with a compound bow.
"It's in our DNA," says Hairston. "It's two million years of genetics. Whenever I hear criticism online I just respond to them: 'Before you knock it, get out and do it.' "
Up close, bighorn rams register less as living creatures than as props in a prehistoric diorama in a natural history museum. Their tousled, purplish coats gleam in the sun, and the growth rings on their horns are demarcated by clear, dark lines. With a good spotting scope, you can age a sheep by counting the rings at a distance of a few hundred yards or more. Few people are better at this, or enjoy it as much, as Hettinger and Burns.
Hairston met Burns at a trade show a decade ago. At the time, Burns had become something of a phenom in the hunting world by besting Montana's archery record for a nontypical elk. He'd tracked the animal for three days before sneaking within 12 yards and shooting it with an arrow. The horns alone weighed 54 pounds. He was just 22 at the time. Burns has racked up an impressive series of kills — two of which landed him on the Boone and Crockett Club's record list, essentially the Billboard music charts for hunters. But these days his knowledge of and obsession with sheep has earned him the nom de guerre Sheep3PO. "The only way to get him to shut up about sheep," Hairston says, "is to turn him off."
Burns and Hairston hunt together multiple times a year, taking pride in going farther afield than nearly anyone. Lately that's meant to Canada's far north for 10-day expeditions with a local guide — a prerequisite when buying a sheep tag up there. "The guides are often excited, because they've never been able to take clients to some of these places," says Hairston. "They're too difficult to access, but with us they know we can go." On their Yukon hunt this year, they flew to a remote airstrip near the Arctic Circle, crossed a river via boat, and then hiked three days into the mountains before they were even in sheep territory.
This New Mexico hunt is a far cry from those expeditions, but it's a better bet for scoring an old bighorn. As we crawl to the edge of the knoll for a closer look at the group of five rams that moved off downhill, it becomes clear the oldest one is perfect. He has a massive body, probably 300 pounds, with thick horns that end in flat stubs, the product of years of bashing heads with rivals during the rut. He's nine, maybe 10 years old based on his growth rings. Hairston drops his backpack and lies flat on his belly, propping the rifle up on his bag to take aim.
"The one on the left," Burns says. "He's the one." The rams are grouped together tightly, and they clearly sense that something is amiss. At first they dart one way, then another. Finally, they disappear into the trees. Hairston never pulls the trigger.
"Fuck," says Burns. "Fuck."
Hairston slowly gets up and looks back with a pained smile. "I never had a shot," he says as way of explanation. Now the animals are gone, maybe for good. "Come on," Burns says. "Let's get ahead of them." So we take off side-hilling it across the mountain, doing our best to catch up to an animal that can run uphill faster than most NFL cornerbacks can on AstroTurf.
Like many hunters, Hairston views the sport as the ultimate proving ground. It's part of the reason he is so fond of the idea of backpack hunting, which may be the sport's purest, most self-reliant expression. Before setting out, he often fills out spreadsheets with each piece of gear and its corresponding weight listed in ounces. "You've got to," he says. "Every once adds up over a 10-day period to thousands of extra calories burned." He budgets two pounds of food per day, divvied up by day in Ziploc bags. He also trains year-round, spending 10 to 15 hours per week in the gym or hiking with sandbags in his backpacks. For mountaineers, none of this is new, but in the hunting world there are only a handful of people who prep the way he does.
Hairston has been hunting in one form or another since he was a kid growing up in Southern California. Like his father, Hairston took up football in high school and then college, playing linebacker. He was good enough that the San Francisco 49ers signed him as an undrafted free agent in 1995. He stayed with the team for a season without playing a down, then retired a year later after suffering an injury to his C5 and C6 vertebrae during a mini-camp with another team. His career as an NFL player was over before it even began. "I couldn't really watch football for a few years," he says. "I was angry about what it had done to me."
Hairston then sold commercial real estate, flipped a few franchises, and became increasingly focused on hunting. Around that time he was often out with Jonathan Hart, a friend from college. On their first backcountry hunt together, in Idaho's White Cloud Mountains, the weather fluctuated wildly — cold and snowing one day, sunny and 80 degrees the next — and their gear was soaked nearly the entire time. Both knew there had to be something better.
Hart thought about the gear he used for other outdoor activities. "In my garage I'd have shotguns and rifles and bows and arrows, but I also had kayaks and climbing gear and ice axes," he says. The apparel options for each of those sports, he noticed, was far superior to anything he had for hunting. Hairston had a similar epiphany when realized he was shopping for his gear more in REI than Bass Pro Shops.
So in 2005 Hairston and Hart decided to make high-performance synthetic gear specifically for hunters. They named it Sitka, after a town in Alaska. They designed a new camo pattern, made some sample jackets and pants, and then convinced mail-order catalog Schnee's to take a chance on the line. Sitka was a hit from the get-go, finding a home with sportsman looking for an upgrade from the subpar cotton offerings. By 2008, Sitka topped $4 million in sales and its products were on store shelves across the country, including Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's. In 2009, W.L. Gore & Associates, the $3 billion behemoth behind Gore-Tex, acquired Sitka for an undisclosed sum. Today it's one of the largest brands in the performance-hunting space.
The deal was worth millions, but the partnership between Hairston and Hart unraveled. Hairston never wanted to sell, he says, and his misgivings became apparent during a meeting about the acquisition. Execs wanted to expand Sitka's footprint, making new camo patterns for whitetail and duck hunters. In Hairston's view, this was unthinkable. "You lose the core appeal," he says.
Increasingly frustrated, Hairston left Sitka (Hart says he was simply not offered a job after the sale) and immediately got to work on Kuiu. With Kuiu, which he named after a game-rich Alaskan island — perhaps not coincidentally located across an icy strait from Sitka — Hairston decided to sell online, directly to consumers; that way, he'd be able to control everything and avoid retail markup. He worked with an engineer to create a carbon fiber backpack frame that was lighter and more ergonomic than anything on the market — and that could comfortably carry 120 pounds of fresh meat. He teamed up with the Japanese company Toray, a competitor to Gore-Tex, to develop a line of apparel. During the 18 months it took to produce everything, Hairston blogged obsessively about the process, building anticipation and earning trust among a dedicated contingent of hunters.
Kuiu launched in 2011 and was an immediate success. It now sells everything from $300 rain jackets to backpacks, game bags, and tents. Sales are approaching $50 million, at least according to Hairston, and the company is expanding its offerings beyond hunting. The Navy SEALs, he says, have reached out to develop a line of tactical gear (to be released to Kuiu customers in 2017), and even Disney hired Kuiu to create a backpack frame for its costumed performers. Hairston has plans for the company's first brick-and-mortar store in 2018, and a traveling pop-up store will be hitting the road this summer.
With Kuiu's success, Hairston has fielded a number of offers to buy the company, but says he'd rather be good than big: "I made that mistake with Gore. I won't make clothes for women, and I won't make clothes for fat guys, because then the skinny guys won't look good in them. I want Kuiu to be an aspirational brand."
After passing on the shot on the big ram, Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger get into position atop another rock outcropping, just up-valley from where the rams disappeared. The vantage point offers a clear sight line into the bowl below. But the sheep never show up.
The hunters are silent, pondering the next move — if there is one. Earlier in the morning, Burns had checked his phone and noticed a photo about an acquaintance's recent, unsuccessful hunt. The post basically said the experience of hunting in the mountains was reward enough. "That's great and all," Burns said, "but I'd rather get something. You either win or you lose."
Hairston does not like to lose. In the business world his competitiveness has earned him a fair amount of flak, including criticism by competitors for misleading claims about the performance of his products. But much of the concern centers around conservation. Whereas most of the new hunters packing rifles into the backcountry are doing so on public land, with tags won in public lotteries, many of Hairston's hunts are through private landowners or outfitters. To some this resembles the pay-to-play hunting model so common in Europe, where it's a rich man's sport. Walter Palmer, the dentist who shot Cecil the lion, placed a big order from Kuiu before he jetted off to Zimbabwe. And Eric Trump and Donald Jr., who have been photographed at length with their kills, are Kuiu customers and friends of Hairston's.
Kuiu donates a fair amount of money to conservation organizations like the Wild Sheep Foundation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which have been a boon for those species. But a central tenet of organizations like these and many state wildlife agencies is protecting species with funds raised by auctioning off premium hunting tags, some that sell for upwards of $100,000. It's an effective strategy in some areas, but it's also controversial because it's hard to know just how much money is going to conservation. It can also come at the expense of public-draw hunters.
"We start to get into trouble," says Land Tawney, director of the nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, "when more and more tags are allocated in the name of raising money, and then we turn into a system where only the rich and elite have the opportunity to get those tags."
Plus, selling high-dollar licenses tacitly feeds a trophy-hunting mentality that continues to flag the sport — warranted or not — as hunters go after animals simply because they'll score well on a record list.
"When the pursuit of an animal as a status symbol becomes more important than the experience surrounding it," says author and TV host Steven Rinella, a respected figure in the outdoors world, "you enter into very troubling terrain."
Hairston has turned Kuiu into a cult favorite by transforming his camo apparel into a hardcore-lifestyle brand, much like CrossFit, and making himself the face of the company. That plays well when you're selling products and prepping for big trips, but it can come off as self-aggrandizing once an animal is on the ground.
Jonathan Hart, Hairston's former business partner, sums him up this way: "It's like in Seinfeld, the J. Peterman catalog that Elaine works for. It's all about him. Jason is about Jason."
After losing the rams in the trees, Hairston and Burns discuss their options. By now, the animals may be long gone. The wind is blowing, circling around the mountain, and we start moving back to where we last saw the rams. Hettinger sets off to track where they went. Then suddenly, there they are, just a hundred yards downhill. Hairston and Burns take up nearly the exact same positions they had an hour earlier, while Hettinger creeps closer to spook them out of the trees. This time, the big ram shows itself clean, broadside to Hairston. He shoots.
The report, like a door slam, quickly dissipates in the wind. From below the ridge, the sound of snapping branches rings out — the ram stumbling at full gait into a tree. Then it's just wind. Burns reaches over and fist pumps Hairston. "You got him," he says. "You got him." Burns grabs his spotting scope and runs downhill toward where the ram disappeared. Within seconds he lets out a high-pitched yip. "Yeaaooo! He's right down here."
By the time Hairston arrives, Burns and Hettinger are already marveling at the ram's thick, almost violet cape. "That is as an awesome of a cape as you will find on a bighorn," says Burns. "Look at the mass on that thing!"
"Awesome," Hairston says. "That is awesome."
After admiring the ram for a solid 15 minutes, the hunters drag him under a few big trees for photos. Burns breaks out a bottle of Super Glue to affix the ram's mouth shut, so it doesn't hang lose. Then we spend the next hour shooting photos: Hairston alone with his kill; Hairston, Burns, and Hettinger with the ram; a close-up of the animal's horns. After they're sure there are enough good pics, Burns and Hettinger break out knives no bigger than X-Actos and carefully start removing the hide, everything from the hoofs to the head, to preserve for the taxidermist. Hairston wants a full-body mount to display in Kuiu's offices. As his partners cape the animal and cut off each quarter, Hairston quickly debones the meat, making it lighter for the pack out. Still, the meat, horns, and cape weigh a combined 150 pounds or so, and it takes three and a half hours to get it the mile or two back to camp.
Once there we all unpack our bags into our tents, then regroup around a fire. Soon everyone is emailing about the day's events. Hairston texts with Joe Rogan about an upcoming elk hunt. Eventually, we call it a night. Hairston heads off to his Kuiu tent, tucking the sheep's cape and head into the vestibule so a bear doesn't get it in the night. It's a strange sight, but it's hard to blame him: even sticking out of the top of his pack, the ram still looks regal.
Earlier in the day, shortly after shooting the sheep and walking down to where it lay, Hairston did something almost all hunters do. He set his gun and backpack down and crouched beside the animal, with his hand on its shoulder, clearly in awe. And then a silence came over him. Everyone stopped and let him have the moment.
Finally, Burns weighed in. "That thing is just the perfect sheep," he said.
After a few more seconds of silence, taking in the animal before him, Hairston looked up and agreed. "It's good to be a winner."
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On that day, the Panthers were playing their archrivals, the Chargers, and were down 14–7 in the second quarter. Brogan took the snap and rolled left, twisting his upper body to throw right. As soon as he released the ball, he was flattened by a defender, so he didn't see that the receiver had made the catch and scored, the bleachers erupting into cheers.
Brogan jumped right up from the hit and jogged into formation for the extra point before switching to linebacker, a position his father once played with the Montana State Bobcats over in Bozeman. As the offense lined up, Mike noticed the Chargers' running back go into motion early. "Sweep!" Callaghan yelled from the sidelines, but Brogan was already on it, slipping left around the Chargers' big right tackle. Brogan was just about to take down the runner when he was slammed from behind — an illegal hit that flexed his spine, snapped his head forward, and sent him colliding into one of his own teammates. He went down hard, banging the back of his head into the dirt.
As a coach, Callaghan generally kept his cool. But now he went straight for the referee, screaming that this was the second time that player had made the same illegal block. "That's twice," Callaghan yelled. "You've got to call that."
But another Panthers coach, Eric Dawald, noticed something more alarming: Brogan wasn't getting up. Dawald rushed onto the field and found the boy on his back, barely conscious. Brogan opened his eyes and looked up. "I can't see," he said.
Brogan's mother, Shannon, was chatting with friends in the bleachers when she heard somebody say, "I think that's Brogan." She ran to the field, arriving at the same time her husband did.
Brogan looked up at his parents. "I can't feel my legs," he said. Shannon glanced at her husband and thought, "Brogan has to be done with football forever. It has to end now."
An ambulance drove onto the grass, and a paramedic removed the face mask from Brogan's helmet. They asked him what day it was, and Brogan answered incorrectly. They asked his birthday, and he couldn't answer that, either. One of the paramedics asked him if his neck hurt. "I can't feel my legs," the boy repeated.
Callaghan had been coaching youth football for 22 years without witnessing anything worse than a broken arm. Certain that Brogan's paralysis was momentary, he knelt beside his son and grabbed a patch of skin on the back of his calf. "You're going to feel this, Brog," he said. "You're fine. You'll feel this." Callaghan pinched, hard, but Brogan did not respond.
Some of his teammates were crying as the paramedics strapped their quarterback to a backboard, placed an oxygen mask over his face, and loaded him into the ambulance. Shannon climbed in, and they sped the boy across the Clark Fork River to St. Patrick Hospital.
Callaghan drove separately, his mind racing through worst-case scenarios: "We'll buy a one-level house. I'll change jobs so I can be home more, learn to care for a paraplegic child." Another thought intruded: "I was the coach. This happened on my watch. How did I do this to my kid?"
While the emergency room doctors evaluated Brogan, Shannon's and Mike's parents arrived at the hospital. After filling them in about Brogan's condition, Shannon turned to Callaghan's father. James Callaghan was an oral surgeon who had played football in college and loved watching his grandson play as much as he had loved watching Mike. In fact, in all of Mike's years of playing youth football, his father missed just one game, when Mike was in the sixth grade. "I don't ever want Brogan to play football again," Shannon told her father-in-law. "And you have to back me up on this." James Callaghan told her that it was none of his business.
Back in the emergency room, Brogan looked at his father and asked, "Am I paralyzed?"
"I think you are," Callaghan thought. "You're going to be all right," he said. He watched a tear roll down his son's cheek and thought, "He knows."
Brogan looked up at Callaghan and said, "Who are you?"
Before the injury, it had been a typical fall weekend for the Callaghans. Friday afternoon at 5, Mike left his office to meet Dawald and Brogan and the rest of the Panthers for practice. Afterward, they jumped into Callaghan's truck and drove across town to Loyola Sacred Heart High School, where they ate hot dogs, sipped Pepsis, and watched one of Callaghan's old MSU teammates coach his own son in a game against Troy High. On Saturday morning, Callaghan and Brogan watched an NCAA game while eating breakfast. If Montana State had been playing at home, they would have driven to Bozeman, where Callaghan did TV color commentary. As it happened, they were away, so Callaghan and Brogan watched the game on TV while plotting the next day's attack against the Chargers. Win or lose, after the game they'd head home to catch the Steelers play the 49ers and dig in to their usual chip buffet — three flavors of Ruffles, tortilla chips, seven-layer dip, and guacamole.
"We might be nuts," Callaghan says. "But so much of our week is taken up by football."
Plenty of other fathers could say the same thing. The NFL and NCAA get all the attention, but the vast majority of football in America is played at the youth level. There are about 2,000 men in the NFL, and 73,000 play on college teams. But more than 3 million boys between the ages of six and 18 play for teams like the Panthers and the Loyola Rams, in towns like Missoula, where football is deeply woven into the fabric of local life.
But that fabric is starting to fray, riven by a growing stack of research linking football to chronic head trauma. In college and the pros, players are consenting adults who make their own choices about that risk. But for those younger than 18, the decision rests with parents — more and more of whom are saying no to tackle football. Between 2010 and 2015, youth-league participation cratered nearly 30 percent.
Even NFL legends have reservations. Casey "Big Snack" Hampton, who played tackle for 12 years with the Pittsburgh Steelers, told me that he refused to let his son play tackle football before high school. "I made him wait," Hampton says. "I've seen little kids get concussions." Other stars, including Brett Favre and Troy Aikman, have expressed similar reservations. "I would not want my child out there," Terry Bradshaw told Jay Leno in 2012. "The fear of them getting these head injuries . . . it's just too great for me."
That stance has football leagues, both amateur and pro, scrambling. Earlier this year, Pop Warner, the nation's oldest youth football league, eliminated kickoffs for kids younger than 11, to limit open-field contact. USA Football, a nonprofit partially funded by the NFL that offers training, education, and equipment subsidies to youth leagues, has introduced a set of practice guidelines for coaches, designed in part to teach safer tackling techniques and to minimize hits to the head. The NFL also holds free "moms clinics" at pro stadiums, where so-called master trainers put mothers through tackling drills in an effort to convince the women that tackling is safe for kids.
Yet new research on head trauma continues to undermine that case. A report in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma found that the likelihood of developing cognitive and emotional problems is linked to a football player's overall exposure to contact and not just to his diagnosed concussions. In other words, every little hit adds up, which explains why NFL veterans who started playing before the age of 12 are more likely to have cognitive problems than those who picked up the game later. These days, many players start earlier — and the truly dedicated scrimmage all year long.
Risk, of course, is part of life, and kids suffer serious injuries doing all kinds of things. What's more, researchers still cannot say what percentage of football players end up suffering long-term cognitive harm.
All of which puts football families in a uniquely confounding position. For Callaghan and his high school and college teammates, football is one of the most important things in their lives. It's the source of their self-confidence and closest friendships, of indelible memories of victory and loss, of their very notion of what it means to be a man. And despite taking their share of hits to the head, they've gone on to lead fulfilling adult lives — lives that continue to be enriched by football. "It would rock me to the soul to learn that football has been bad for all these kids," says Callaghan. "I love the game. It's the greatest avenue that I know to get great life lessons."
Ultimately, the true battle for the future of America's favorite pastime is being waged not in the media or in high-profile court cases, but at public parks and on high school fields nationwide. And the instant Brogan was hit that fall day in Missoula, Mike and Shannon Callaghan joined countless other parents in staring down questions they never wanted to ask.
"I'm your dad." Back in the emergency room, Callaghan answered Brogan's question.
Brogan looked confused, so Callaghan pointed to Shannon and said, "Do you know who that is?" Brogan shook his head. Callaghan felt the life go out of him.
For hours they sat at Brogan's side, hoping for something to change. Then suddenly Shannon spoke up. "His toes moved," she said. "I just saw them. He moved his toes." Relief swept through the room. Mike felt something close to elation, thinking, "He has a concussion, but he will get better."
By evening Brogan could move his legs, sit up in bed, and walk across the room. The family spent that night in the hospital. The following morning Callaghan woke up feeling optimistic. He told his wife that he thought Brogan might be back at practice within a week. Then a doctor arrived and asked Brogan his name. Brogan got his first name right but couldn't remember his last name — or why he was in the hospital.
For years many doctors believed that children were less likely than adults to suffer serious head injuries in football, for the simple reason that they weigh less and run more slowly than adults do. Now it's well understood that until about age 14, a kid's head is much larger than an adult's compared with his body, yet the neck is weaker, which means the head bounces around more in response to collisions. Researchers at Virginia Tech found that seven-year-old football players experienced head blows comparable in force to the impacts suffered by college players.
To make matters worse, the nerve fibers in children's brains are not yet coated with the protective sheathing known as myelin. As a result, "it's easier to tear apart neurons and their connections in children at lower impact," says Dr. Robert Cantu, the author of Concussions and Our Kids and a leading researcher of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the brain-wasting disease that has been diagnosed in dozens of deceased football players. The threat to emerging neural connections is particularly problematic at Brogan's age. "If you injure your brain during that time," Cantu says, "there is a high likelihood that you will not reach your maximal genetic endowment intellectually, and you'll perhaps not have the same personality with regard to depression, anxiety, and panic attacks."
Brogan's doctors were unsure about the cause of his temporary paralysis, but they agreed that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Still, after two days in the hospital, they determined him well enough to go home. They gave Mike and Shannon a strict rehab protocol that called for avoiding anything that might stimulate brain activity: bright lights, computer screens, video games, even reading. The doctors also cautioned them that irritability and depression are common after a concussion. The Callaghans set up beds for Brogan and themselves in the basement. Shannon went to the local Target to stock up on board games and drawing supplies.
A week later the Callaghans returned to the hospital for a follow-up visit. When the doctor said that Brogan would have to sit out the rest of football season, Callaghan found himself unexpectedly relieved. "I remember being thankful that the doctor told him so I wouldn't have to," Callaghan says. "I was sort of off the hook."
Missing a single season was one thing. But the idea that Brogan might never play again — clearly what Shannon wanted — was nearly impossible for Callaghan to contemplate. For one thing, Brogan loved the game and had the makings of a real standout. What's more, the sport had been central to Callaghan's life for as long as he could remember. He started as a fifth grader in the Little Grizzly league; his coach from those days remained one of his closest confidants. Among his closest friends were teammates from Hellgate High or Montana State. During Callaghan's junior year, in 1984, the MSU Bobcats won the NCAA Division I-AA national championship — a feat Montana football fans still talk about.
Of course, football ends hard: You wake up one day and it's over. Nobody plays tackle ball in middle age. But Callaghan took up coaching, even though he was just a few years out of college with no kids of his own. He started with his nephew's team of fifth and sixth graders. Soon, a few of his old football buddies, including Eric Dawald, came to help. They loved having a reason to hang out after work, teaching the fundamentals, and feeling that old excitement on game days. When one of the group had a son, the others promised to keep coaching as long as the kid played, a pact that soon extended to every son any of them might ever have. And they built something, three nights a week on snow-dusted fields. Their team was undefeated for 15 straight seasons. Boys they'd coached went on to play at local high schools, the University of Montana, Montana State, even the pros.
Callaghan mostly had given up on having children of his own when, at age 40, he met and married Shannon Brown. An interior architect and former competitive swimmer, Shannon had grown up in tiny Havre, Montana, with a pair of football-obsessed brothers. She loved the way Callaghan welcomed Griffin, her nine-year-old son from a previous marriage, onto his team. When Brogan was born, in 2003, Callaghan insisted that his buddies renew their vow to keep coaching.
Brogan started playing flag football in the fourth grade, in 2013. By that time, the relationship between football and brain trauma was well established. Two years earlier, a Missoula kid named Dylan Steigers, who'd started out in local youth leagues, went off to play at Eastern Oregon University and took a big hit in a scrimmage. He died the next day.
Shannon, meanwhile, had been getting warnings from her older brother, Scott Brown, a former high school running back and now an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Portland, Oregon. "I'd see these 40-year-olds coming in just maimed, having these big surgeries from playing football in high school, college, the pros," he says. Brown became convinced that letting a kid play tackle football was akin to child abuse. He implored his siblings to keep their kids off the field.
The youngest, Shannon's brother Howard, got the message; his son plays only flag football. But Shannon felt trapped — nobody could tell her husband what to think about football. All the CTE research, Callaghan argued, had been done on the brains of guys known to have problems. He had attended one of USA Football's Heads Up Football clinics, where he'd been schooled in the latest safe-tackling techniques. And he would never consider letting a concussed kid play before a complete recovery.
So in 2014, Brogan, now a fifth grader, joined Callaghan's team. He knew his dad's track record and dreamed of exceeding it with a Stanford scholarship and a career in the NFL — just like Jordie Tripp, a linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks who played on Callaghan's team 10 years earlier.
Brogan, it turned out, had the makings of a natural quarterback, with a great arm and an instinct for reading the field and seeing weaknesses in the opposing team's defense. But as the 2015 season rolled around, a handful of Brogan's teammates did not return. "The moms and I talked," Shannon says, "and they were like, ‘I wouldn't let Brogan play.' "
Similar conversations were happening nationwide, in part due to the efforts of women like Kimberly Archie. Her son, Paul Bright Jr., grew up playing Pop Warner ball in Sparks, Nevada. He was living in Los Angeles, working as an assistant chef, when his behavior grew erratic. Then, on a September evening in 2014, Bright drove an unlicensed motorcycle at 60 miles per hour into a car and was posthumously diagnosed with early-stage CTE. Archie began to speak out on radio and television. The American commitment to youth tackle football, she says, "is like letting our kids ride down the highway in the back of the truck at 80 miles per hour because we're afraid we'll make them weak if we stop."
Last September, Archie launched a class action lawsuit in conjunction with Jo Cornell, whose son played Pop Warner football and was found to have CTE after committing suicide. The lawsuit defines members of the plaintiff's class as anyone who has ever played, or had a child play, youth tackle football, and suffered a head injury since 1997. It alleges negligence and fraud by Pop Warner, USA Football, and the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which develops voluntary safety standards for youth-football helmets. The complaint does not specify damages, but the number could amount to billions of dollars.
This isn't the first lawsuit Pop Warner has faced: The league has already settled two others. Pop Warner now requires that each practice session runs no longer than two hours a day and that no more than 25 percent of practice time is devoted to full-speed contact, or scrimmaging. "There's risk in anything kids do, and football's getting a really bad rap," says Pop Warner executive director Jon Butler.
These lawsuits, of course, are the stuff of nightmares for the NFL, which reached its own billion-dollar settlement with 20,000 former players last year. "It's the best game that's ever been invented, and we've got to make sure that moms get the message — because that's who's afraid of our game right now," Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians said recently. "It's not dads. It's moms."
Predictably, the NFL has stepped up its outreach to mothers. It sponsors the Facebook page Touchdown Moms, where NFL employees post heartwarming anecdotes about the mothers of youth players. USA Football sponsors a Team Mom of the Year Award. And then there are those free mom's clinics. Nearly every NFL franchise has hosted at least one such clinic, generally treating mothers to on-field drills and a concussion-awareness presentation.
Archie, who was already working as a sports-safety consultant, attended one of these clinics in Ohio in 2014. This was a month before her son's accident, and even then she was not impressed. "It's condescending to think you can just trick moms," she says.
Three weeks after his injury, Brogan was cleared to go back to school, but he could last only an hour or so a day. He sometimes flew into sudden, inexplicable rages and Shannon mostly stopped working to care for him. Callaghan spent his days at the office and continued to coach the Panthers in the evening. He coached out of a sense of obligation, both to his fellow coaches and to players. But now it felt different: He watched every tackle with anxiety, waiting for the child to get up and walk it off.
Both Shannon's brothers, meanwhile, were relentless. Howard sent his sister one news article after another about kids like Evan Murray, a 17-year-old New Jersey quarterback, Ben Hamm, a 16-year-old linebacker from Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and 17-year-old Kenny Bui, from the Seattle suburbs, all of whom died within a month of one another early that fall. All told, more than a dozen kids died playing football that season, and Shannon's brothers made sure she knew about each one.
One night she tried to share these stories with her husband.
"We are not talking about this," he said.
It wasn't until seven weeks after his injury that Brogan was able to form new memories. He started neurological rehab therapy and scored terribly on cognitive tests that included closing his eyes and touching his nose. Math worksheets that would have taken five minutes before the injury now took an hour and left Brogan exhausted. Spinning on a stationary bicycle gave him a headache.
In February, Callaghan and Brogan sat on the couch to watch the Super Bowl. Shannon overheard Brogan begin a sentence with the phrase, "When I play in the NFL . . ."
"That's not going to happen," Shannon said.
Later she heard her husband tell Brogan, "But when you play in high school . . ."
"It's not going to happen," she said.
"We don't have to decide this now," Callaghan replied.
Later still, Brogan asked his mom, "Why won't you let me play?"
"Because God gave you that big brain so you can do something amazing in this world."
"He also made me a good football player," Brogan said.
"But that can't be your future."
Callaghan turned to Shannon. "But what about his dream?"
Shannon thought, "Whose dream is it?"
The last football game Mike Callaghan ever played was against Washington State in 1985, the less memorable season after that epic championship year. The Bobcats were struggling and in the first quarter, he suffered a concussion after being hit by a running back. The team's trainer ordered him out of the game, but Callaghan returned to the field anyway, determined to play every minute of his last college game. At that point somebody grabbed his helmet, locked it in an equipment bin, and sent him to the showers, where he wept uncontrollably. "That's how football ended for me," Callaghan says. "I didn't go out in a blaze of glory. Some guy ran me over. We lost."
As Brogan recovered, Callaghan couldn't help but think of all the concussions he'd suffered in his football career. By his senior year of college, he had experienced so many that he sometimes lost the right side of his visual field during games and had agonizing headaches, to the degree that the team's trainer ordered a brain scan. It came back clean, but the trainer asked Callaghan why he still played. He knew he wasn't NFL material, so what was the point? Why take the risk?
He was now asking similar questions about Brogan — but Mike could not let go of football. He thought about all the things he wanted his son to experience: the friendships, the teamwork, the victories. "I love watching Brogan play the game," he told me. "I love it."
Despite their differences, Shannon understands. "It's like a death," she says. "Mike wants his kid to be a football star. And Brogan would be the star. He's a leader and damn good, and everyone looks up to him."
Callaghan struggled to imagine what his own life would be like without football. What would he do on weekday nights and Sunday mornings in the fall? When would he see his friends? Who would he be? "Every time I thought about it, my mind just went blank," he says.
In August, Callaghan got a call from officials at Missoula Youth Football: Did he plan to coach the 2016 season? After months of agonizing, almost entirely to himself, he'd finally made a decision. "Brogan's not going to play, and I'm not going to coach," he said.
Callaghan couldn't bear to think of it as a permanent decision, telling his son that it was only for the coming season. But Brogan was unconvinced and angry. "You know it's forever," he said. "Mom's never going to let me play again."
Callaghan called Dawald and apologized for leaving the team. Two weeks later, he told his father.
Upon hearing the news James Callaghan said, "I didn't want to ask." Then he said, "Is that your decision or your wife's?"
"We're on the same page for this year," Callaghan said.
"Geez," James said. "That's going to be tough."
"Dad, it may be tough for us," Mike said. "But what I'm starting to figure out is there's a whole other world out there. There's a lot of people who don't consider playing, and they still get through the fall somehow."
Mike and brogan still watch football together — high school games on Friday, Montana State on Saturdays, and his former team on Sunday afternoons. "It's kind of hard, because I'm not playing," Brogan says. "I think about what I would do against the teams when I watch. But there isn't really anything that I can do." He's hurled himself into basketball and recently asked if he could take tennis lessons. Callaghan bought him his first rifle and is planning an elk hunt.
Brogan admits that he hasn't yet fully recovered. Schoolwork doesn't come as easily as it once did, but Shannon isn't worried. "Brogan missed 247 classes in the sixth grade," she says, "and he finished with three A-pluses and three As." Now, instead of going to Stanford to play football, he wants to go to Berkeley to study architecture — his mother's passion — on an academic scholarship.
Callaghan says he often thinks back to a day last November, weeks after Brogan's injury. League officials asked how he wanted to handle that unfinished game with the Chargers. "A big part of me was, ‘I don't want to handle it,' " Callaghan said. But the kids cared, and Callaghan felt it would have been selfish to refuse.
That meant bringing the teams back to the field behind the county fairgrounds. The Chargers and the Panthers lined up exactly where they'd been the moment Brogan was injured — but with Brogan now on the sidelines with his father. The referee set the game clock to where it had stopped and blew the whistle, and they played the remainder of the game. The Panthers lost, and for the first time in his life Callaghan didn't care.
All Brogan's teammates went home, except for two boys, Charlie and Cole. Charlie picked up a football and threw it to Brogan, who caught it and tossed it back. Charlie then passed it to Cole. Ten minutes went by, then 20, and still the kids continued to play. The parents lingered off to the side, making it clear there was no rush. "Brogan was kind of running around," Callaghan says. "Normal isn't the right word, but the normalcy of it, seeing him be a kid again. The game was over, we got beat, and it was good for me. Our kids were fine."
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But when the 11-year-old QB was sidelined by a head injury, Callaghan faced an agonizing, all too common choice.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}}]},"contentType":"article","embed":null,"instantCanonical":"http://www.mensjournal.com/features/articles/is-bill-clinton-our-new-model-husband-w448002","disableComments":false},"adSettings":{"path":"/4236/mensj.channels/content/other/article","keywords":[],"topic":["Features","Elizabeth Weil"],"author":["Elizabeth Weil"],"con":[],"celeb":[],"trigger":{"mobile":"inview","tablet":"inview","desktop":"inview"},"channel":"features","type":"article","lead":""},"ads":{"templateName":"_ad","content":"article","pageType":"content","channel":"other","tags":"[]","topics":"[\"Features\",\"Elizabeth Weil\"]","authors":"[\"Elizabeth Weil\"]","cons":"[]","celebs":"[]"},"components":[{"templateName":"_ad","content":"article","pageType":"content","channel":"other","tags":"[]","topics":"[\"Features\",\"Elizabeth Weil\"]","authors":"[\"Elizabeth Weil\"]","cons":"[]","celebs":"[]"}],"legacy":false,"sponsor":{},"customTemplate":{"active":null},"cacheKeys":["/features/articles/is-bill-clinton-our-new-model-husband-w448002"],"autoPlay":false},{"contentData":{"id":447526,"slug":"/features/articles/elon-musk-your-homes-roof-is-the-future-of-energy-w447526","bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2efjUpa","title":"Elon Musk: Your Home's Roof Is the Future of Energy","metaTitle":"Elon Musk: Your Home's Roof Is the Future of Energy","shortTitle":"Elon Musk: Your Home's Roof Is the Future of Energy","labelData":"SOLARCITY","publish_date":"2016-10-31T17:07:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":"","description":"Elon Musk offers what he thinks the future of solar looks like: Panels that look exactly like those on our home's roof. ","author":[{"id":5246,"old_id":601,"name":"G. Clay Whittaker","slug":"/contributor/g-clay-whittaker","data":{"meta":{"title":null,"description":null},"email":null,"last_name":"Whittaker","first_name":"G. Clay","google_url":null,"middle_name":null,"twitter_url":null,"facebook_url":null},"updated_at":"2016-12-12T18:50:51.912Z","tag_type_id":4,"site_id":3,"TagType":{"id":4,"name":"contributor","data":{"slug":{"default":"/contributor"}}}}],"reviewArtists":"","body":"Elon Musk is convinced that humanity won't need to make use of his SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets to flee this warming planet if we just do one thing: embrace solar energy. This weekend, from the Tesla headquarters, Musk made an announcement on what he thinks the future of solar looks like — much of it brought to us by the company his cousin heads, SolarCity. “We really need to make solar panels as appealing as electric cars have become,” Musk said, and at a “cost that is less than a normal roof plus the cost of electricity.”
Musk announced a new roof panel from SolarCity as well as a new battery system. Here are the key takeaways.
1. The killer hardware is, simply, a roof. To complicate that, it's a roof that is composed of a bunch of interlocking solar panels. The new system is not a series of panels to be attached to an existing roof, but are roofing tiles themselves. That means that you only need to worry about one product to protect your house, and to power it.
2. It looks good. Really good — certainly better than the tar and shingles covering your current home. Using hydrographic printing, SolarCity made each and every panel unique, meaning the roof doesn’t look fake. As Musk explains, the goal was for “the aesthetics [to] actually get better.” No two roofs will be the same, even if you’re ordering the same product.
3. It will save you money. That's the promise, at least. While not giving an exact price, Musk announced the roof solar panels are priced to compete with traditional roofing systems (though an official price is not yet available). Which means, if you are replacing your roof, you should think about this move, which will also save you on your energy bills. All this, of course, depends on how competitive it really is (remember, the first Tesla car, the Roadster, cost $109,000, not quite priced to compete).
4. You can't see the solar cells. The panels are made of glass that opaques from the sides, a nice trick of optics that make the cells only visible from above. That means from the lawn, or the next door neighbor’s window, your roof tiles look, for the most part, like a normal roof.
5. You're going to need a big battery — and Tesla is happy to sell it to you. Musk also debuted a new Tesla home battery, the Powerwall 2, which has 14 kWh of storage, 7 kWh of output — essentially double the capacity of the first iteration. Musk says a typical homeowner could indefinitely power a home with one battery, if they have solar panels. “During the day you fill up the battery,” says Musk, “dusk to dawn you use the battery... You can solve the whole energy equation that way.” Powerwall 2 costs about $5,500.
","tags":{"channel":[{"id":4748,"old_id":3274,"name":"Features","slug":"/features","data":{"ads":{"all":{"path":"other"}},"meta":{"title":"Features & Investigative Journalism | Men's Journal","keywords":"long reads, featured profiles, in-depth investigations, exclusive stories","description":"Want the full story? Check out the best of Men's Journal long reads, including featured profiles, in-depth investigations, and exclusive stories."}},"updated_at":"2016-12-12T18:50:51.912Z","tag_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"TagType":{"id":1,"name":"channel","data":{"slug":{"default":""}}}}],"contributor":[{"id":5246,"old_id":601,"name":"G. Clay Whittaker","slug":"/contributor/g-clay-whittaker","data":{"meta":{"title":null,"description":null},"email":null,"last_name":"Whittaker","first_name":"G. Clay","google_url":null,"middle_name":null,"twitter_url":null,"facebook_url":null},"updated_at":"2016-12-12T18:50:51.912Z","tag_type_id":4,"site_id":3,"TagType":{"id":4,"name":"contributor","data":{"slug":{"default":"/contributor"}}}}]},"editTags":[],"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Horizontal Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":null,"filename":"unknown-e83e058b-03f6-41f5-ac80-719f472a37aa.jpg"}},"advertorial":false,"embeds":{"inset_1":{"contentId":443821,"type":"article","slug":"/features/articles/elon-musk-lyndon-rive-and-the-plan-to-put-solar-panels-on-every-roof-in-america-w443821","headline":"FEATURE: Elon Musk, Lyndon Rive, and the Plan to Put Solar Panels on Every Roof in America","promoHed":"Elon Musk, Lyndon Rive, and the Plan to Put Solar Panels on Every Roof in America","description":"Now head of the embattled SolarCity, Lyndon Rive, Elon Musk's cousin, wants to see panels atop every rooftop in America. But is he flying too close to the sun?","contentHeadline":"Elon Musk, Lyndon Rive, and the Plan to Put Solar Panels on Every Roof in America","media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Large Vertical Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer"},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Courtesy Lyndon Rive","caption":"Lyndon and his pet crow, Arthur, in South Africa","filename":"m1116_ft_rive_d-cce5c904-09ff-4c6d-88e9-8a1073d42024.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Von Holden / AP","caption":"From left: Peter Rive, Elon Musk, and Lyndon Rive, following SolarCity's IPO in 2012.","filename":"m1116_ft_rive_c-e59eb3cb-aedb-4507-9c35-8af138229c8f.jpg"},"photo_3":{"align":"left","title":"","credit":"Photograph by Peter Yang","caption":"Brainstorming at SolarCity headquarters.","filename":"m1116_ft_rive_b-655a69d5-02cb-46d5-a439-10733840ffd1.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photograph by Peter Yang","filename":"m1116_ft_rive_a-73f0412a-6823-40ae-aa21-c4bcedb10d9b.jpg"}}},"inset_2":{"contentId":168029,"type":"article","slug":"/magazine/bill-kochs-fight-against-alternative-energy-20140212","headline":"ALSO: Bill Koch's Fight Against Alternative Energy","promoHed":"Bill Koch's Fight Against Alternative Energy","description":"The other Koch brother, Bill has spent freely to protest environmental regulations and to elect politicians \"who understand how foolhardy alternative energy is.\"","contentHeadline":"Bill Koch's Fight Against Alternative Energy","media":{"lead":{"type":"Horizontal Image"},"square":{"filename":"mj-298_298_the-other-koch-brother.jpg"},"featured":{"filename":"mj-390_294_the-other-koch-brother.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"title":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Kim Sargent / Palm Beach High School Foundation / Getty Images","filename":"mj-618_348_the-other-koch-brother.jpg"}}},"related":[{"id":463303,"old_id":null,"title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","short_title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","slug":"/features/articles/how-two-florida-gym-rats-conquered-the-shadowy-world-of-dietary-supplements-w463303","body":"At the far end of a palm-lined strip mall in Boca Raton, Florida, a crowd waits in line for a miracle. Roughly 300 people — mostly men, from high-school jocks to potbellied dads — know just what they're here for: more muscle, more energy, more libido. "I want to get really vascular," says a guy in his thirties, referencing the pipelike veins coursing beneath the skin of pro bodybuilders. He has short brown hair, hairless arms, and a T-shirt that reads, I may look alone, but really I'm just that far ahead. An older, balding man next to him says he just wants to feel younger.
Working the line is a bouncy brunette pouring plastic shot glasses full of Windex-blue liquid. Most of the guys grab one and toss it back, no questions asked. "It's a preworkout," she says, "and it's $35 inside." By "preworkout" she means it's designed to give you a jolt of energy before the gym. Exactly how it does this isn't a question anyone seems to be asking. Inside the store, Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar, are pills and powders that claim to do everything from boost sex drive to increase muscle mass and dissolve fat.
Boca Nutrition's owners, PJ Braun and Aaron Singerman, are greeting customers like old friends, with bear hugs and handshakes. Both men are absurdly muscular. Singerman, 36, is 6-foot-2 with slicked-back brown hair. He has a goatee and narrow-rimmed glasses, and his bulky frame fills out his blue T-shirt like an overstuffed bag. Braun, 35, who has black hair gelled into short spikes, is shorter and bulkier. Stretch marks scar his arms.
In addition to Boca Nutrition, the pair owns the supplements manufacturer Blackstone Labs, which they started in 2012. Since then the company has hawked tens of millions of dollars' worth of products promising to make men stronger, bigger, last longer in the sack, and even gain a mental edge. For the most part, their over-the-counter powders do exactly what they claim to do, in part because they sometimes include compounds not approved or even banned by the FDA. It's a legally dubious but common practice — and an easy way to make a killing while giving people the results they want. (Braun calls this a mischaracterization: "We have always tried to produce nothing but cutting-edge and compliant products. As soon as we have any direction from the FDA on an issue it has not spoken on before, for better or worse, we respect its statement and adjust our products accordingly.") Blackstone has grown by 100 percent every year since opening shop five years ago. Its sales now top $20 million annually, and it's featured in Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest-growing companies. And Braun and Singerman are far from done.
"I am not even fucking close to satisfied with Blackstone Labs," Braun boasted in a video posted to Facebook last year. "I want to be the biggest company in the world."
Boca Nutrition & Smoothie Bar is their newest venture, a retail store that serves up various protein-packed shakes and sells Blackstone's full line of supplements. The sleek space, with shelves full of oversize bottles and racks of workout gear, is like a Whole Foods for gym rats. They opened the first store seven months ago in West Boca. Today is the grand opening of their second location, and devotees have shown up for discounted supplements and to meet a handful of celebrity bodybuilders flown in for the occasion, including Kai Greene, the most famous weightlifter since Arnold Schwarzenegger.
But among this crowd, Braun and Singerman are the real stars. They pose for photos and hype their cars, a Corvette and a Ferrari, both black and parked prominently out front. One of the fanboys is a 24-year-old named Brett, who drove four hours to attend the event. "I couldn't help but show my support for PJ and Aaron," he says. A personal trainer from Palm Coast, Florida, Brett has used a wide variety of Blackstone products, including one called Ostapure, a supplement that contained steroid-like drugs called SARMs (selective androgen receptor modulators). The unlicensed drugs were developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck as a potential treatment for muscle wasting in cancer patients. But it was the drugs' muscle-mass-building properties that made them a big hit among weightlifters like Brett. Blackstone recently stopped selling Ostapure after being sued by another supplements maker hoping to clean up the industry. "The strongest product of theirs," Brett says a bit wistfully.
Inside the store, Braun shows me one of his latest creations, muscle-building pills inside a black bottle labeled brutal 4ce in blocky letters that drip with blue icicles. "It'll make you a lot stronger and more aggressive in the gym," he says. "Let's say you're 35, 40 years old and your testosterone isn't as high as it used to be. This will keep your testosterone so high that you'll be like an 18-year-old!"
When I ask Braun how, he launches into a chemistry lecture. "Your body converts it into 4-andro [a testosterone booster], so it'll bulk you up," he says, noting that Brutal 4ce has the side effect of creating estrogen, which could give you what bodybuilders call "bitch tits." This can be countered, however, by taking an estrogen blocker. "Most of our customers are pretty knowledgeable," he says, "so they know they need to do that."
As the festivities wind down, I grab a $46.99 bottle of Cobra 6 Extreme, an amped-up version of their top-selling Cobra 6, a preworkout supplement formulated with various stimulants. At the checkout, a slim guy in his twenties, part smoothie barista, part pharmacist, looks at what I'm buying and asks me if I've tried it before. No, I say.
"So you don't know what you're getting yourself into?"
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"If you're not used to taking a lot of stimulants, you should start with the regular Cobra 6. You might not like the way this makes you feel."
In the U.S., dietary supplements are a $38-billion-a-year industry. Sixty-five percent of men in America take one, whether to lose weight, grow hair, gain muscle, or keep an erection long into the night. There's a wide range of products, and most veer toward opposite ends of a spectrum. On one side are the homeopathic cures and the herbal remedies like echinacea, products that may not do much of anything besides drain your bank account. On the opposite end are the products that work precisely because they rely on pharmaceutical ingredients, many not listed anywhere on the label. In 2014, for example, the FDA recalled several weight-loss supplements with names like Super Fat Burner because they contained the prescription drug sibutramine, as well as phenolphthalein, a banned laxative linked to genetic mutations — but not before a rash of hospitalizations.
It's the supplements laced with prescription drugs that are more troubling. They result in 23,000 emergency room visits every year, and more than 2,000 hospitalizations. The supplements are often sold under names like Lean FX and Stiff Nights, and the ingredients are a list of acronyms only a chemist could decipher: DMAA, 17b-hydroxy 2a, or 17b-dimethyl 5a-androstan 3-one azine.
"We're talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans," says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. "The more likely it helps your workout," Cohen says, "the more likely it's going to adversely affect your health."
The FDA oversees the industry, but it's woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don't bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there's effectively no punishment if they don't. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients. ("Blackstone continues to innovate by researching new products and new ingredients," says Braun. "If anything, we would welcome clearer guidance from the FDA so we don't have to discontinue any products.")
"It's the Wild West," says Dan Fabricant, who was the FDA's director of the Division of Dietary Supplement Programs from 2011 to 2014. "In weight loss, sexual enhancement, and bodybuilding categories, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Blackstone, according to its critics, has exploited this system better than most, and exactly how it does this is a case study in how to game a failing regulatory system. For one, Braun and Singerman aren't shy about marketing their legally ambiguous products: They often advertise the active ingredients right on the label and promote them with ads full of young women who could moonlight in beer commercials. They're also constantly active online. Blackstone has some 25,000 Instagram followers; Braun has over 100,000. His account is littered with shirtless selfies and videos of him driving his Ferrari or pimped-out Jeep. He's also the star of a weekly YouTube show with his wife, the former pro wrestler Celeste Bonin, titled Beauty & Braun, which covers the daily lives of the couple, from gym sessions to discussions about breast implants. Until recently he also hosted a daily question-and-answer session on Periscope called "Cardio Q&A," featuring Braun on a treadmill, chugging orange Pedialyte and answering a wide range of queries from Blackstone users. One time he doled out advice ("No matter how mature you think they are, it's not good to settle down with a 19-year-old girl"), but usually he just hyped his products. During one appearance, Braun announced the "dick pills" Blackstone was working on weren't coming along the way he wanted. "I've been working on that for a long time," he said. "But they will eventually come out."
Two days after the Boca Nutrition opening, I visit Braun and Singerman at Blackstone HQ, an unbranded, 8,000-square-foot warehouse in Boca Raton. The office walls are covered in photos and framed bodybuilding-magazine covers, several of which feature Braun in full flex. On Singerman's desk is a bronze statue of a seminude Adonis-like man holding a barbell. It's a first-place trophy from the Mr. Olympia contest, which Singerman got at auction. "You hate to see that, because it means the guy who sold it was struggling financially and was forced to sell it," Singerman says. "But I love it."
Braun and Singerman each have a long history in bodybuilding. Singerman, from New Orleans, started hitting the gym when he was 13 and kept working out, even through a cocaine and heroin habit he picked up after dropping out of high school. At 27 he witnessed a friend overdose and die, so he got clean and doubled down at the gym. In 2005, he got a job as a personal trainer and started writing thousands of posts on bodybuilding message boards and eventually became marketing director for Ironmag Labs, a supplements company owned by businessman Robert Dimaggio, who had become notorious for selling sketchy supplements. Singerman convinced Dimaggio to bring on Braun, whom he'd met at a bodybuilding competition, as the company's top sponsored athlete.
Braun, who grew up in Connecticut, had taken to the gym in order to try to impress his absentee father. "My father wouldn't be proud or say, 'Good job,' " says Braun. "He would just say, 'Oh, you know, there's always somebody better. You can do better.' " Braun went to the University of Connecticut but dropped out to become a personal trainer. Then he took up professional bodybuilding.
Blackstone's genesis was in 2012, when Braun helped Singerman sell 7,000 units of something called Super DMZ. The product contained two designer steroid-like ingredients, dymethazine and methylstenbolone, that few outside bodybuilding circles knew much about. Braun and Singerman, however, recognized that these prohormones, as they're called, were groundbreaking at helping gym rats get ripped. Their boss, Dimaggio, had helped create Super DMZ but turned it over to Braun and Singerman to hawk. "We were able to sell those 7,000 units in five weeks," Singerman explained in an online interview. "We gave Robert his money back and each made $75,000." But prohormones hadn't yet been banned, so the pair ordered more and continued selling under the name Blackstone Labs. In just 10 months they made hundreds of thousands of dollars and moved operations from a makeshift office in Braun's townhouse into their current warehouse. "We bought more of the Super DMZ, sold it, and created a second product, third product, fourth product, fifth product, etc.," Singerman says in the same video. By the time prohormones were finally banned, in 2014, Blackstone was up and running with a full line of supplements, from postworkout muscle builders to meal-replacement formulas. "We've been fortunate enough to be the hot company," says Braun.
In their office, Singerman points to a small photo of the two men leaning against brown shipping boxes piled up to their armpits. "That's all Super DMZ," Singerman says proudly. "This was our original shipment."
The reason Super DMZ and prohormones finally became illegal has something to do with Blackstone's supplier. The product was being manufactured by a New York company called Mira Health Products. In 2013, at least 29 people developed varying levels of liver disease after taking a vitamin called B-50 sold by the company. After investigating, the FDA discovered B-50 and many of Mira's other products included high levels of prohormones, which were not listed anywhere on the label. The FDA forced Mira to recall all those pills and officially banned prohormones, including the ones in Super DMZ — which Blackstone listed on the bottle. None of that stopped Blackstone from continuing to sell them. In fact, at nearly the same time, the company released a new product called Metha-Quad Extreme, which contained prohormones. It wasn't until September 2014 that Blackstone stopped selling prohormones altogether to abide by FDA regulations.
"We lost 30 percent of our total revenue," Singerman says. "But the following month we went back up, because the truth is that people always want the next best thing."
Back in their warehouse, Braun and Singerman lead me up a flight of stairs to an open space with a long brown table and black swivel chairs. Here they're formulating the "next best thing." Another muscle-bound man, this one with a pink Mohawk and a lip ring, is scribbling symbols and numbers on a whiteboard. "This is our chemist, Bryan," says Singerman. "We're doing some really cool stuff with Bryan."
Bryan Moskowitz joined Blackstone in early 2015. Before that, Braun and Singerman formulated all the company's supplements. Neither of them has any formal education, so they hired Moskowitz, who has a master's degree in organic biochemistry from Georgia Tech and calls himself the "Guerilla Chemist." Moskowitz counts among his role models Patrick Arnold, who's infamous for creating three hard-to-detect steroids, two of which were distributed by balco, the lab linked to disgraced athletes Jose Canseco and Marion Jones — and whose founder, Victor Conte, was sentenced to four months in prison. Moskowitz looks up to Arnold enough that he even posted an Instagram photo of his and Arnold's faces Photoshopped onto an image of Breaking Bad's Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in hazmat suits, having just finished cooking a batch of crystal meth.
Arnold is also credited with introducing the powerful stimulant DMAA to the supplements market. Eli Lilly created the drug in 1944 as a nasal decongestant but removed it from the market in 1983 because it caused headaches, tremors, and increased blood pressure. Arnold reintroduced it years later, in 2006, as a way for its users to get a jolt of energy before the gym. In one month alone, in 2013, the FDA received 70 reports of liver disease and one death caused by OxyElite Pro, a popular supplement with DMAA.
In the boardroom, Braun explains that Moskowitz helped design the company's latest product, Brutal 4ce. The steroid that powers it, DHEA, is banned or prescription-only in just about every country except the United States. When I ask Oliver Catlin, the president of the Anti-Doping Sciences Institute and the Banned Substances Control Group, why it's still legal, he simply says, "I don't know. Ask Orrin Hatch."
Orrin Hatch is the powerful seven-term senator from Utah who pushed through a 1994 law in Congress called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (dshea). The bill defines what a dietary supplement is: a vitamin, mineral, herb, or amino acid (basically, anything found in nature). And while it explicitly states that it can't be a drug, the law also prevents the government from prescreening and preapproving supplements. So supplements don't require FDA approval the way, say, a cancer drug might, even though they may have the same active ingredient. Utah is one of the major producers of supplements. In fact, it is the state's third-largest industry, earning $10 billion per year. Back when the law was written, the industry was mostly homeopathic products, but it has since boomed, and the law created cover for aggressive manufacturers willing to flaunt the regulations.
Also written into dshea are a series of loopholes that allow steroids sold prior to the law's passing to be grandfathered in, like the DHEA in Blackstone's Brutal 4ce — even though it'll get you banned by nearly every sporting league on the planet, including MLB, the NFL, and the NCAA.
"That's one of those things," says Singerman about sports testing. "When a high school athlete asks if it's OK to take [Blackstone's] Dust V2, I go, 'No, probably not.' "
Braun and Singerman are similarly unfazed about SARMs, the unapproved cancer drugs in Ostapure. "If you look at the actual literature," says Singerman, "it's all positive. I've used it plenty of times, and I like putting out products that I actually use."
When I ask them whether they're worried about the potential side effects of their products, Singerman is quick with a scripted answer. "We go through the available literature and studies," he says. But when I press him, his next response seems more honest.
"I am a libertarian," Singerman says. "I believe that it's the person's decision. As long as they're an adult."
But they have no way of knowing how different people might react. "One person could be fine, and another person could have a heart attack," says Dr. Armand Dorian, an ER physician in Los Angeles who often treats patients injured by dietary supplements. "It's rolling the dice."
Take Jesse Woods. In 2009, the 28-year-old went online and ordered a bottle of M-Drol pills from a Texas-based company called TFSupplements. Woods, who weighed 150 pounds, was looking to add muscle. "I'm a small-framed guy," he says, "so I was trying to bulk up." He did. In just four weeks, he'd packed on 20 pounds of muscle. "I got big for a minute," he says. "Then I got sick."
Five weeks into taking M-Drol, Woods left work early because his stomach was bothering him. When his wife came home, she noticed his eyes were yellow. "I'm taking you to the emergency room," she said. Doctors performed a battery of tests, ultimately determining that Woods was experiencing liver failure. What Woods didn't know is that M-Drol contained the steroid-like prohormone Superdrol.
Woods spent 32 days in the hospital. He threw up nearly every meal he ate, lost 30 pounds, and developed a pungent odor, a common side effect of liver disease. "I never felt old until after that," says Woods, who's now 35. "Now I feel sluggish. I just feel like I aged. My liver has scar tissue on it. Doctors can't say how long I'll live."
When he was released from the hospital, Woods sued both TFSupplements and its supplier, Competitive Edge Labs, settling for an undisclosed amount. But the lawsuit didn't stop companies from selling Superdrol.
Blackstone has yet to be sued by any of its customers, and the FDA has generally left the company alone. "We haven't really had problems with the FDA," says Braun. But that may be simply because the agency is backlogged. It's also far more effective to go after the companies supplying the illegal ingredients than the ones marketing the final product. It's the former that are dealing with the overseas suppliers that produce the untested or illegal drugs. Singerman admits to purchasing Chinese ingredients but says it's something that's taken care of by the plants that manufacture Blackstone's products. I ask him who they are.
"Well, Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is one."
Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals is the best example of a duplicitous company thriving in a broken system. Its founder, Jared Wheat, has a history of hawking high-demand substances. In the early '90s, he ran a high school ecstasy ring in Alabama and served 32 months in prison for it. He started Hi-Tech in 1998, and by 2003 the FDA had already warned the company about its dietary supplements, some of which contained an unlicensed drug similar to the one used in Cialis. But that didn't stop Wheat. By 2005 he was selling supplements that contained the banned stimulant ephedra. In early 2006 government officials raided his offices and seized 200 cases of supplements valued at $3 million, and in 2008 Wheat pleaded guilty to selling adulterated supplements and committing mail and wire fraud. He was sentenced to 50 months in prison, but he continued to operate Hi-Tech from his cell.
When I ask Pieter Cohen how Hi-Tech continues to conduct business in such a manner, he says that allowing any company to regularly sell synthetic ingredients as supplements is due to a major failure on the part of the government. "They're not doing their job," he says.
For their part, Braun and Singerman maintain that everything in their supplements appears right on the label.
To test that claim, I sent the Cobra 6 Extreme I purchased at Boca Nutrition to Oliver Catlin's Banned Substances Control Group. When I received the test results, it turns out Braun is right: The product is now devoid of the banned DMBA, a stimulant very similar to DMAA, that powered it.
"So is it safe to take?" I ask.
"Not necessarily," says Catlin. The readings revealed a powerful mix of new stimulants. That could be due to a combination of the ingredients listed on the label — a formula that includes caffeine and theobromine (an alkaloid of the cacao plant that can be deadly in large doses). "Or it could be something else," he says. "We target drugs we are concerned about, like DMBA, when we screen products like these. But sometimes there are new, unknown compounds present that we can't see."
Soon after my visit to Blackstone Labs, and after four years of working together, Braun and Singerman are at war. Singerman leaves Blackstone to pursue other projects. "But he still owns half the company," Braun explains, insinuating that the split is amicable. But the tone of their relationship quickly changes. "When the companies first split, I hoped we'd be friends again," Braun says during one of his online Q&A sessions. "But he did too many things."
Braun has since divested himself of Boca Nutrition, and Singerman has gone on to start a supplements company called RedCon 1. He is also rebranding another, Prime Nutrition, with none other than Hi-Tech's Jared Wheat, who was released from prison in 2011. Braun has taken over day-to-day control of Blackstone, and despite the schism, the company is thriving. Blackstone has moved into a much larger, 14,000-square-foot space, and Braun has introduced several new products, including a long-awaited libido booster called Entice. But the most surprising of his new releases is Dust Extreme, a preworkout supplement with DMAA, the infamous, banned stimulant popularized by chemist Patrick Arnold. It's a curious decision to sell the illegal ingredient, but Braun justifies it in a long video on Facebook.
"I believe that people should be allowed to take what they want to take," he says. "Are you completely safe if you have health conditions? No. If your blood pressure is high, should you be taking a product like this? Probably not. But these are things you should look at yourself. I believe we should all have the choice to put what we want in our body. You can go and buy cigarettes at any fucking gas station and they're guaranteed to kill you. You will die. So how dare the FDA come in and take away ingredients from us that give us awesome workouts?"
","tag_ids":[4748,5611],"publish_date":"2017-01-31T20:16:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T14:05:21.179Z","updated_at":"2017-01-31T21:51:59.078Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"How Two Florida Gym Rats Conquered the Shadowy World of Dietary Supplements","keywords":"supplements, dietary supplements, blackstone labs, boca nutrition & smoothie bar, bodybuilding, muscle supplements, muscle building, ","description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jzRkyi","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"photo_1":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Magazine Photograph by Shana Novak","caption":"P.J. and Celeste Braun were featured on the May 2015 cover of 'Iron Man Magazine.'","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_c-9c57d3e1-802d-4480-a15c-67a5c8a98ac5.jpg"},"photo_2":{"align":"full","title":"","credit":"Newswire / Aaron Singerman","caption":"Braun, left, and Singerman turned Blackstone Labs into a a powerhouse earning more than $20 million a year.","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_b-b074ced0-e2a7-47ab-a93b-9835ef973f0c.jpg"},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Photo Illustration by Emily Shur","filename":"m0317_ft_supplement_a-7a018373-b943-436b-8215-40db3942a4af.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/magazine/the-truth-about-herbal-supplements-20140102","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: The Truth About Herbal Supplements","contentId":168069,"contentHeadline":"The Truth About Herbal Supplements"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/magazine/the-dawn-of-bodybuilding-20121118","type":"article","align":"","headline":"MORE: Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Huge","contentId":168456,"contentHeadline":"Venice Beach, Gold's Gym, and the Dawn of Bodybuilding"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Muscle-building powders. Libido-boosting pills. Brain-enhancing smoothies. How two Florida gym rats made tens of millions of dollars in the shadowy world of dietary supplements.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":1,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":463434,"old_id":null,"title":"Federer Vs. Nadal: The Greatest Rivalry in Tennis Faces Off Again","short_title":"Federer Vs. Nadal: The Greatest Rivalry in Tennis Faces Off Again","slug":"/sports/articles/federer-vs-nadal-at-australian-open-the-greatest-rivalry-in-tennis-rematch-w463434","body":"The greatest tennis rivalry of our time is getting one more chapter: after years of injuries and missed opportunities Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal will face each other in a championship match once again.
It’s been six years since Federer and Nadal last met in the finals and many doubted it would happen again. Both men are in their 30s — old in pro tennis terms — and have had injury plagued seasons for the last two years.
But this week has proved one thing to the world: neither man is done.
Their play already in this tournament has been incredible. Both took five sets to close out their semi-final matches. It took nearly five hours for Nadal to beat Grigor Dimitrov — a few backhand errors from Dimitrov are all that separated the two. Federer put away Stan Wawrinka (who beat Nadal in 2014 at the French Open) in about three hours.
This could be Federer's last chance to break Nadal’s impressive winning streak. Nadal has beaten him every one of the three times they’ve played in Australia, including a final in 2009. In fact Nadal’s overall advantage is an incredible 23-to-11 victory ratio over his so-called greatest rival.
Whether you're rooting for Federer, the underdog in this match; hoping Nadal puts another nail in his own winning legacy; or just in the mood to watch a historic moment in sports, tune in on Sunday morning..
How to Watch
Because the Australian Open is, well, in Australia, the final airs at 3 AM on Sunday. We suggest going on a media blackout until after you watch it re-aired on ESPN2 at 9 AM ET.
","tag_ids":[4764,5246],"publish_date":"2017-01-28T16:04:23.317Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-27T19:26:47.261Z","updated_at":"2017-01-28T16:04:23.403Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"Federer Vs. Nadal at Australian Open, The Greatest Rivalry in Tennis Rematch","keywords":"federer, nadal, roger federer, australian open, rematch, tennis, sunday","description":"Roger Federer will play Rafael Nadal at the Australian Open this Sunday, giving the greatest tennis rivalry of our time is getting one more chapter."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jAIlQF","label":null,"media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Horizontal Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":"Spain's Rafael Nadal and Switzerland's Roger Federer greet each other during practice at the International Premier Tennis League (IPTL) event in New Delhi on December 12, 2015.","credits":"Sajjad Hussain / AFP / Getty Images","filename":"gettyimages-501076914-23c60d9a-c717-4b68-b92f-e1830f2786f3.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/adventure/races-sports/searching-for-the-next-federer-20150911","type":"article","align":"","headline":"ALSO: Searching for the Next Federer","contentId":171918,"description":"Alex Lazarov is a world-class tennis player. But you may never know it. A week in the life of a wannabe-pro junior tennis player. ","contentHeadline":"Searching for the Next Federer"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"Roger Federer will play Rafa Nadal at the Australian Open this Sunday, giving the greatest tennis rivalry of our time is getting one more chapter.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":null,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":462109,"old_id":null,"title":"Scientists Flee Antarctic Research Station as a 30-Mile-Long Crack Threatens Safety","short_title":"Scientists Flee Antarctic Research Station as a 30-Mile-Long Crack Threatens Safety","slug":"/adventure/articles/scientists-flee-antarctic-research-station-as-a-30-mile-long-crack-threatens-safety-w462109","body":"More than 80 members of the British Antarctic Survey team at the Halley VI Research Station were forced to relocate when a 30-mile crack opened along an ice shelf.
The crack, which opened up 10 miles away from the station, has the potential to split a massive segment of ice off and set it adrift as an iceberg, taking the station with it.
Antarctica is currently in summer, and British researchers cautioned that waiting until the colder months set in could have made safe extraction “extremely difficult.” The station is a mobile ski-top lab that can be repositioned, and it is expected to be relaunched in 10 months — in a different location.
Ice cracks in the Antarctic are not as common as in the Arctic, where population, ocean currents, and adjoining land masses bring warming temperatures to frozen areas more quickly. And ice shelf breaks are not necessarily a signal of climate damage — in fact, typically, ice sheets, which form over water rather than land, frequently break from growth as they stretch farther into the ocean.
2016 was recently declared the hottest year on record (again; the third in a row), but the line from climate change to this ice crack is not direct. Antarctic ice shelves have actually experienced overall growth on a few occasions in recent years, despite massive melts in other cold areas like the Arctic, thanks in large part to natural protections from oceanic currents. Still, Antarctic ice melts and breakaways — especially those involving land ice — are a significant concern for rising ocean levels over the next century.
Of course, that’s why scientists are in the Antarctic in the first place: to study environmental conditions. Halley Research Stations (there have been several) are famous for achievements like the discovery of the ozone hole in the 1980s.
","tag_ids":[5798,5246],"publish_date":"2017-01-20T17:39:00.000Z","updated_publish_date":null,"advertorial":false,"created_at":"2017-01-20T17:25:20.793Z","updated_at":"2017-01-20T19:22:32.339Z","data":{"meta":{"title":"Scientists Flee Antarctic Research Station as a 30-Mile-Long Crack Threatens Safety","keywords":"antarctica, climate change, scientists, british antarctic survey, Halley VI Research Station, science, arctic","description":"The British Antarctic Survey team at the Halley VI Research Station were forced to relocate when a 30-mile crack opened along an ice shelf."},"bitly":"http://mjm.ag/2jI0M6P","label":"CLIMATE CHANGE","media":{"lead":{"id":null,"alt":null,"code":null,"type":"Featured Image","credits":null,"details":null,"filename":null,"provider":"jwplayer","text_color":null},"main_image":{"alt":null,"caption":null,"credits":"Getty Images","filename":"gettyimages-578261944-1ec3d2bc-f54a-48c0-ae46-9808155b0929.jpg"}},"embeds":{"inset_1":{"slug":"/adventure/articles/how-to-ram-your-way-through-an-antarctic-iceberg-w454806","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"MORE: How to Ram Your Way Through an Antarctic Iceberg","contentId":454806,"contentHeadline":"How to Ram Your Way Through an Antarctic Iceberg"},"inset_2":{"slug":"/adventure/articles/buzz-aldrin-recovering-from-altitude-sickness-after-traveling-to-south-pole-w453844","type":"article","align":"fullnoimage","headline":"ALSO: Buzz Aldrin Recovering From Altitude Sickness After Traveling to South Pole","contentId":453844,"contentHeadline":"Buzz Aldrin Recovering From Altitude Sickness After Traveling to South Pole"}},"poll_id":null,"breaking":null,"exclusive":null,"description":"The British Antarctic Survey team at the Halley VI Research Station were forced to relocate when a 30-mile crack opened along an ice shelf.","overwrite_slug":null,"custom_template":{"active":null},"google_standout":null,"is_editors_pick":1,"disable_comments":null,"not_included_in_rss":null,"third_party_standout":null,"useAlternativeGoogleNewsArticleType":1},"content_type_id":1,"site_id":3,"status_id":2,"Status":{"id":2,"name":"published"},"ContentType":{"id":1,"name":"article","data":{"slug":{"3":"articles","4":"","5":"","default":"news"},"label":{"default":"Article"},"show_issue_field":{"4":true,"default":false},"homepage_horizontal_crop":{"4":true,"default":false}}}},{"id":461381,"old_id":null,"title":"Amazon Prime User? You Should Have this Credit Card","short_title":"Amazon Prime User? You Should Have this Credit Card","slug":"/gear/articles/amazon-prime-user-you-should-have-this-credit-card-w461381","body":"If you’re an Amazon Prime user and are responsible enough to pay off your credit card bills, you should get the new Amazon Prime Visa.
The two main benefits are enough to make this a no-brainer: As an Amazon Prime member you get 5 percent back as a statement credit on all Amazon purchases. Additionally, you get an instant $70 Amazon gift card applied to your gift balance when you’re accepted.
Beyond these two benefits, cardholders get 2 percent back on restaurant, drugstore, and gas station purchases, and 1 percent on everything else. Additionally, the card has no foreign transaction fees, making this a solid card for travelers as well.
The card, a Visa Signature issued by Chase, is only available to Prime members, so technically there is a $99 annual fee. But honestly, given everything you get for a Prime membership (from streaming television to free shipping), most Amazon users should look at this as a cost-savings offer.
For the last few years Amazon has been pushing its way into the credit card market, and offered some excellent perks, but this card combines all the best previous perks into one competitive offering.
There are caveats. For one, the statement credit is awarded at milestones, so you get $20 every time you hit 2,000 points, or every $400 spent on Amazon purchases. Second, you need to buy a fair amount of stuff from Amazon for this offer to best other cash-back cards.
Prime members with the existing Visa that gives 3 percent cash back will be upgraded automatically, according to Business Insider. Anyone else can sign up and receive their $70 gift card, as long as they’re already on Prime.
You can sign up for the card at amazon.com/visa.
Scottish beer-maker BrewDog is getting into the whisky business. A beer house getting into spirits isn't wholly remarkable — Stone, Dogfish Head, Ballast Point, and Rogue are all in the game with their own spirits after all. But BrewDog, characteristically the odd duck, are not leaning on their remarkably well-publicized name to sell the whisky. Instead, they're calling it "Uncle Duke's," a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson that leaves us wondering if this is an honest homage or a marketing ploy.
This Scottish-style whisky, aged three years in virgin oak barrels (like for bourbon), is an unusual type of whisky, but not all that out there when you consider its makers brought you, among other things, expensive beer in a dead squirrel, and did peyote on camera while making a beer in Mexico. The Hunter nod is, for what it's worth, subtle: The whisky was born from the idea of Thompson as a "lone voice kicking against the machine of corporate and political America," according to BrewDog — plus, the man loved whisky. He famously enjoyed bourbon and Scotch in equal parts, typically going for Wild Turkey and Chivas, respectively. This whisky looks to walk that line in flavor profile.
According to BrewDog, it’s not an official tribute. A spokesperson for the company told us, in no uncertain terms, “There’s no relation between Uncle Duke’s and Hunter S. Thompson," which is something of a walk-back from what co-founder James Watt told Munchies in a recent interview:
“Yeah, [Hunter S. Thompson’s] a bit of a hero to myself and Martin,” said Watt. “His kind of rebellious, counter-to-everything-that’s-going-on attitude and his whole positioning is what we took inspiration from, for the packaging and the design.
“And the name too. Raoul Duke from Fear and Loathing, right?” asked reporter Jelisa Castrodale, to which Watt responded, “Yes, well spotted.”
The BrewDog team wrote on their blog that they're not sure whether Thompson’s alter ego would have been okay with the tribute, official or not. “Maybe Duke would have approved of this blog, maybe he wouldn’t. Either way he would have approved of this virgin oak-aged single-grain sippin’ whisky reaching out to the 21st century.”
Duke-approved or not, this isn't the first time BrewDog used another big name for their campaign. Early last year, founders James Watt and Martin Dickie found themselves under threat of legal action over another tribute/inspiration product: their Elvis Juice IPA. Apparently the Presley estate is litigious about the name. In response to that, both BrewDog founders legally changed their names to Elvis. Now it’s just a fun, tasty IPA that happens to share its name with its creators.
With Thompson’s name also poised to make a big impact on the cannabis world with some of the man's favorite pot strains potentially coming to market, it’s possible the BrewDog guys could be in for a fight if things get ugly — or they'll just ride a marketing wave and some Google searches.
At the end of the day, BrewDog has a solid track record. We're certainly looking forward to trying this bottle, even if the marketing ends up leaving a slightly bitter taste — and not the kind you find in their damn good Hardcore IPA.