If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
As a former football player, Esiason's dream of being the star quarterback and winning the Superbowl has been outseated by something much more valuable.
If the experts in traumatic brain injury think there's value in using genotyping to gauge the risks of high-impact sports for their own children, as noted by the authors in a recent research paper, it must be of value to others, too.
Eric LeGrand suffered a spinal cord injury that paralyzed him. Even though LeGrand will never play football again, he is set to graduate from college next year and hopefully become a well-known sportscaster.
Every death can bring us together. I've talked to people I haven't spoken with in over 10 or 20 years. Rummaged through pictures and videos. Tapped down memory lane a bit. But I've also seen that we continuously have choices.
My question to all North Carolinians is this: Do we really want Amendment 1 of the North Carolina Constitution to restrict the rights of fellow citizens?
Chris Hale has a great personality, a million-dollar smile, and a wry sense of humor. He's 5'7" and, as he would tell you now, no one would mistake him for an NFL vet. But he is.
This man whom we held in such high regard killed himself quite possibly as a direct result of suffering repeated head trauma while providing us with entertainment. And that makes me very, very uncomfortable. I feel something tight and burning that can only be called guilt.
The Junior Seau tragedy is so very sad. But I'm afraid it won't be the last. Until something is done to protect a player's brain from trauma, many won't be equipped to handle life after they leave the game.
The NFL has been stuck in a swamp of tragedy and negativity recently, but enter Greg Schiano and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their recent 'symbolic' signing of Eric LeGrand, and immediately, a smile comes across your face!
I knew Junior Seau from our days at USC when I worked as a student intern in the football office. I hadn't talked to him in years, but we share many friends and memories from what most of us consider to be some of the best years of our lives.
Playing for USC put me in contact with a few men who went on to play in the NFL and had to give up the game in their 20s and 30s. And they all, to a man, shared some kind of dip in their spirits.
The league needs to tackle its inconvenient truth -- that for the remarkable athletes who've made their game into a $9-billion-a-year enterprise, the NFL is fast becoming the No Future League.
Welcome to TV in America, where violence, no matter how malicious or senseless, is just fine but sex is decried, maligned and verboten in all but the most secure corners of the schedule. TV's ban on sexuality not only covers scenes of nudity or sexual acts, but our very language itself.
The fact that Andrew Luck has been widely praised for his athleticism and Robert Griffin III for his leadership qualities and comprehension of sophisticated passing schemes may reflect a change in the tormented way that we talk about quarterbacks and race.
What if the poor performers could pick up an Andrew Luck every few years? Couldn't those schools start building around that player? What if students each day were challenged by smart, energetic teachers bringing new playbooks to the game?
Inside the question of whether gratuitous mayhem is a strategic element of pro football is a question of a different kind. It involves former Saints standout Steve Gleason and a filmmaker, Sean Pamphilon, who's making a documentary about Gleason's struggle with ALS.
