Former Washington NFL Player Denied Workers’ Compensation for Hip

Stuart Anderson, who played linebacker for the National Football League’s Washington Redskins (now known as the Washington Commanders) in the mid-1980s, has lost his bid to collect workers’ compensation medical benefits.

Anderson filed clams in 2018 and 2019 seeking benefits under the District of Columbia Workers’ Compensation Act for arthritis in his hips that he claims is related to injuries and cumulative trauma he suffered 34 years earlier as a player.

The Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) denied Anderson’s claims as being time-barred under the workers’ compensation law’s one-year window, and the Compensation Review Board (CRB) affirmed.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals last week upheld the denial of benefits.

The D.C. workers’ compensation act provides that a claim for a work-related disability or death is barred unless it is filed within one year after the injury or death. The time for filing a claim does not begin to run until the employee is aware, or should reasonably have been aware, of the injury or death.

In cases involving cumulative trauma claims, the CRB has applied a “manifestation rule,” which sets the date of injury as “the date the employee first seeks medical treatment for his/her symptoms or the date the employee stops working due to his/her symptoms, whichever first occurs.”

The ALJ determined that Anderson should have filed several years earlier than he did. That would have been when he first sought disability benefits under the NFL’s Player Retirement Plan for a bilateral hip injury. Anderson’s 2014 application to the NFL listed his need for hip replacements.

Anderson argued that his claims were timely because he told his NFL team trainer that he had hip pain when he injured his groin playing football in 1984. He maintained that was sufficient notice to his employer.

The ALJ discredited that argument. She was not convinced that a hip injury was diagnosed in 1984. The team did not file a report of such an injury and records of his physical therapy and 55 visits to his trainer do not show he ever made such a complaint. Moreover, X-rays of his pelvis and right hip taken in 1984 showed “no evidence of a fracture or destructive lesion of the right hip” and no other sign of recent injury to it.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals affirmed the ALJ’s determination that Anderson’s claims were untimely.