Southernlion
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He Thought He Was Getting Football Physicals. He Was Being Abused.
Chuck Christian was on some of Bo Schembechler’s best Michigan teams. More than 40 years later, he sees a connection between a university doctor’s assaults and a dire prognosis.
Chuck Christian was on some of Bo Schembechler’s best Michigan teams. More than 40 years later, he sees a connection between a university doctor’s assaults and a dire prognosis.
For more than 40 years, Chuck Christian did not call himself a victim because he did not think he was one.
He was a muralist who had played tight end at Michigan. He grew up poor in Detroit but came to be a world traveler. He contracted prostate cancer and outlived his doctors’ predictions.
Then, in February, an old teammate called.
Remember Dr. Robert E. Anderson? The team doctor at Michigan who performed painful, unexplained rectal exams? Someone reported him, the former teammate said, and it turns out that what he did to you, and to so many other players, was probably a crime.
“I realized that he had victimized so many of us,” Christian said in a recent interview.
Since February, when the university first revealed findings of a secret, long-running investigation, hundreds of people have complained about Anderson’s conduct. As the inquiry unfolded, lawyers said it was increasingly clear that while Michigan achieved decades of success with many of the nation’s finest athletes, it also harbored a vast sexual abuse scandal.
Christian in his Michigan uniform. He arrived on campus in 1977.
Christian soon learned that, like him, many other athletes had quietly left the campus without recognizing that Anderson’s behavior demanded an investigation. These days, Christian grapples with questions about how long his cancer may have grown undetected because his experience with Anderson had instilled a lasting distrust of doctors.
“Dr. Anderson left a stain behind,” Christian, 60, said last month. “Now others will have to clean up his mess.”
‘It hurt like crazy.’
Christian was the youngest of four boys, and his first field was Frederick Street, on a Detroit block near Mt. Elliott Cemetery.
“If it snowed, we’d go out, shovel the snow, put on our gloves and still play,” Christian said. He was probably four or five inches too short to earn a basketball scholarship, and when it came time to consider a pile of football offers, his mother wanted him to stay close to home.
Ann Arbor was less than 50 miles away, and Coach Bo Schembechler was making Michigan into a Rose Bowl mainstay. Christian chose the Wolverines.
Not long after he arrived on campus in 1977, Christian went to see Anderson, who earned his medical degree from the university in 1953. Anderson came to be regarded as “a pioneer in the field of sports medicine,” as an alumni magazine said later, but at the time, he drew power from his status as a gateway to Michigan’s gridiron: He oversaw annual physicals for football players.
When Christian first went for his, he expected a physical as routine as those he had undergone in high school: a hernia check and some testing of his joints. Anderson did those, Christian said, but also — inexplicably and inappropriately, medical experts said — put on a glove and conducted a rectal exam.
“It hurt like crazy, and I screamed like a baby,” Christian said. “He said, ‘Oh, you feel pressure?’ I said, ‘No, I feel pain.’”
But he passed the physical. A teammate who had gone before him was waiting outside so they could return to practice together, and they confided in each other that they had felt “violated.” (In a separate interview, the teammate, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss abusive treatment, described a similar exam and the conversation with Christian.)
They learned from other players that an intimate exam was the norm for many Michigan athletes, and Christian eventually asked his girlfriend, a nursing student whom he would eventually marry, whether the rectal procedure was unusual. Early in her training, she assumed incorrectly that it was as standard as a Pap smear for women, and Christian concluded that it was a “very unfortunate part of what you’ve got to go through to play Division I football.”
So each year, he braced for his physical. Each year, he said nothing.
“I knew if I said, ‘No, no, don’t do that,’ it could cause him to fail me with my physical,” Christian said. “And I didn’t want to fail my physical, because I really wanted to play football at Michigan.”
Wearing No. 85, he played in Michigan’s first Rose Bowl victory since 1965.
‘This is not supposed to be happening.’
Christian remembers being the only art major who also wore a football letter jacket at Michigan, but he followed a fairly ordinary path as he finished college. He earned his degree, married his girlfriend and moved to Massachusetts to escape a wretched economy in Michigan. He worked at a bank for a while but felt trapped and out of place.
He turned to a career in art and had three sons as the family settled into one of Boston’s southern suburbs. He would see Anderson on television during games but did not dwell on their encounters because, he said, “you tuck it away somewhere you don’t have to deal with it, don’t have to think about it, don’t have to talk about it.”