The Final Penalty
September 12, 2024 at 07:53PMIt’s no secret that some former NFL players have struggled with memory loss, depression, personality changes, and movement disorders after repeated concussions and sub-concussive hits endured during their playing days. They denied it at first, but the NFL eventually admitted a link between football and degenerative brain disease. Players eventually sued the league, and under the 2014 settlement, the NFL agreed to fund a program that would pay retired players “between $25,000 and $5 million if they had neurocognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).” For The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Gambacorta reports that now—with many of these players in their 60s and 70s, living with the long-term aftereffects of their playing days—they’re facing an uphill battle trying to navigate the NFL program’s morass of requirements and caveats in order to receive their compensation.
LeMaster had been adamant that his brain be donated to Boston University’s CTE Center. Hours after he died, Robinson was unsure of how to proceed. She called Vermeil, who gave her a contact for the center. Four months later, Robinson’s phone rang. The university had the results of the exam of LeMaster’s brain.
“They said, ‘We did not even need to put this under the microscope,’” Robinson recalled, “‘to see the level of CTE in his brain.’”
In her Point Pleasant, N.J., home, Robinson keeps a handful of mementos from LeMaster’s career. Her most prized item, one she cradled on a recent afternoon, is a cream-colored football that had been gifted to LeMaster long ago.
On one side of the ball, someone had carefully drawn green and silver helmets and written the date: 1-11-81.
Above the helmets was inscribed a score — Eagles 20, Cowboys 7 — and below was a message about the traits that had helped that Eagles team reach the Super Bowl on that frigid afternoon: hard work, discipline, mutual respect, and love.
“No squad,” Dick Vermeil had written across the football, “has paid a greater price for success than you guys.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/12/the-final-penalty/
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