Johnny 'Blood' McNally: He’s Got Blood On the Brain

Johnny McNally grew up in Wisconsin and was born in 1903. That means this man lived through WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, and The Nam, before dying in 1985. No wonder a little blood on the brain didn’t faze Mr. Hematoma.

Allegedly, Johnny McNally’s nickname didn’t come from the fact that he basically played through his brain swelling on the field. No, instead, it was a nickname he picked with a buddy when they saw the title of the movie “Blood and Sand” with Rudolph Valentino in it. McNally was blood, and his friend was sand.

Apparently “Blood” was Johnny’s last name alias while he was trying to play some pro football on the side while he got to see if he could return to Notre Dame. He was suspended on account of recurrent abscesses and was never invited back. 

McNally ended up playing legally for five different NFL franchises, but the nickname stuck. He played for 14 seasons with the Milwaukee Badgers, Duluth Eskimos, Pottsville Maroons, Green Bay Packers, and Pittsburgh Pirates. Don’t you recognize most of these names? The NFL used to be like the UFL in terms of new franchises popping up as fast as others collapsed in McNally’s days. 

Johnny McNally was a real firecracker of a man, and we’ll get into his wild ways and funny stories in another article, but for now, we’ll just cover some bare-bone facts.

Just a Wee Lad

McNally was 14 when he graduated from high school. He was apparently a bit of a genius. After taking some time off to work and study, he went off to college at 17. Not Notre Dame, though; that was basically a failed experiment. He attended school at Saint John’s University, which was a two-year college at the time. 

Mr. Hematoma did get his bachelor’s degree post-football career in 1946, and not that much later he got his master’s when he was 50 years old. Degrees were more of a pursuit of knowledge for Johnny Blood; they were not career-oriented. He did a little bit of everything.

Besides playing, coaching, and playing-coaching, McNally literally did it all. He inspected light houses in his 60s. McNally was an air force staff sergeant during WWII, working as a cryptographer in India and China. Add bar tending, mining, farming, salesman, sports writer, and being a law and hotel clerk, and that’s a third of what he did for work. 

Getting Personal

A self-described vagabond and career meditator, McNally would be married twice. Once for 10 years and another time for about 20 years until he died. We lost Johnny Blood in 1985 at 82 years old from a stroke. He was survived by his second wife, Catherine, and three sons: Joseph, Michael, and John. 

There’s not much information about the four-time NFL champion (the precursor to the Super Bowl), Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee, Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame member, and Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Honor member. It’s unfortunate for research purposes that some of the older gentlemen of the league were so private about their health challenges.

Interestingly, John was described as nimble and quick, even in his 60s. The truth behind that statement can be called into question. We know Blood was a rough and tumble guy who got his fair share of injuries before sports medicine was a thing. Just hearing about Joe Namath and his knee brace fiasco (read my article on him here) in the 1960s makes me say ‘no way’ to a nimble Johnny Blood. 

Blood on the Brain

Johnny McNally had a lot of alarming injuries in his time. His first reported injuries were in 1934, when he either had a bad knee or a hernia surgery. In 1937, he had some type of shoulder injury. Add the undisclosed injuries that led to his football retirement and the assumption that his nickname was “blood” because of how often he got roughed up on the field, and you get the idea. 

It wasn’t the shoulder, hernia, or roughed-up face that was so scary. No, it was his 1935 “blood on the brain” incident.

A Slight Concussion

The injury was described as a “slight” concussion by some. Attending physicians at the time were quoted as saying: “a hemorrhage and blood clot on the brain. If Blood does not suffer a ruptured blood vessel, he will recover.” That’s ominous… What is even more scary is the fact that Johnny McNally played less than a month later, despite the “slight” concussion that could have killed him.

We should probably check medical licenses because this little description is beyond confusing. A hemorrhage is caused by ruptured blood vessels, so he clearly had them. Many ruptured blood vessels are not fatal at all. A hemorrhage in your brain is the bleeding of your brain, and a clot is your body stopping the bleeding. How was he diagnosed with both at once?

Getting Brainy

Also, not to be overly critical, but brain scans weren’t even really a thing until the 1970s, so doctors could not easily diagnose a hemorrhage, blood clot, or ruptured blood vessel in Johnny McNally’s days. 

Pneumoencephalography is a fancy word for a terrifying procedure where blood and other fluids would be drained from a spinal tap and replaced with air that would make the brain easier to image with an x-ray. Technically, doctors could identify a hemorrhage in John McNally if they did a spinal tap. And with this primitive method of x-rays, they may have been able to see a clot, but just as easily they could miss it.

Spinal taps are a nightmare today, and they were even more so in the 1920s. Spinal cord fun like paralysis can occur, along with headaches, so extensive bed rest is needed. It’s unlikely doctors would be concerned enough over a “slight” concussion to do all that for Johnny McNally. The team wouldn’t want to pay for and deal with the side effects of all that medical hoopla for their “investment” either. 

Doctors weren’t completely lost, though. It’s said that the NCAA doctors and neurologists of the time knew that concussions were dangerous by the 1930s. As in, oh crap, NFL players get punch drunk too after too many hits, just like boxers. Neurologists didn’t understand what CTE meant, but they knew that football was very bad for the brain, both short-term and long-term, by the 1890s. 

The attending doctors sounded nonchalant about their diagnosis, and they likely were. Not everyone cares, even if they know (am I right, NFL?).

The ‘Return to Play’ Plan

It’s now advised that athletes not participate in physical activity for a month after a clot is found. After the clot is treated with medicine for a full month, a return to play can be considered. Blood thinners were not prescribed until the 1940s. So even if McNally was diagnosed with a blood clot, no medicine was available, and this would have been dangerous. One month wasn’t long enough, either.

Brainbleeds are extremely dangerous. Returning to play is always a risk. If you’re really lucky, you might be mostly unscathed in a few weeks, months, or years. Side effects are often present, permanent, and life-altering. Some people never recover. If you’ve had one, you’re more predisposed to another as well. Heaven help us, McNally never should have returned to play if he did in fact have a brain bleed. 

Most likely, McNally didn’t have a “slight” concussion, a brain hemorrhage, or a blood clot. He probably had a severe concussion without a clot or significant bleeding. Returning to play within a month is pretty typical in modern-day football, even with a severe concussion. 

One look at Antonio Brown, and the prospect of a player getting a serious concussion is scary today. Back in Johnny McNally’s time, it would have been that much worse. There were no reliable scans, medicine, or physical therapy to rely on. Our concussion protocol is woefully inadequate, but at least we are informed. 

Blood’s Prognosis

In the 1960s, in an interview, McNally was described as contemplative, quiet, and brief, with the occasional ramble. It’s really hard to get a clear idea of what the state of his mind was after such a terrifying injury much earlier in life. 

Was his “philosophical take” actually his mind wandering and an inability to process basic information? Maybe. Was he contemplative or just trying to keep up? Was he quiet and brief in his words because he had trouble putting them together? We’ll never know.

People in the 1960s were much more likely to hide their woes and bear through things, and others were more willing to deal with another person’s intricacies if they could ignore the possibility that something more serious existed.