In 2007, professional wrestler Chris Benoit murdered his wife and 7-year-old son in their Atlanta home before hanging himself. It was a shocking act that still has people grasping for an answer nearly five years later.
This was the first time I began to understand or even consider the long-term effects of brain injuries suffered by certain sports or sports-entertainment participants.
I bring this up because as a 16-year-old wrestling fan, I felt the same shock and devastation upon hearing of Benoit’s death that I did Wednesday when learning about the death of former NFL linebacker Junior Seau. Local police are investigating the death as a suicide.
Seau was a 12-time Pro Bowler and sure-fire Hall of Famer. He made his mark as one of the NFL’s great linebackers as a member of the San Diego Chargers and only enhanced his legacy in recent years when he came out of a very brief retirement to join the New England Patriots, contributing to their near-undefeated 2007 season. His career, which spanned 20 years, was the pinnacle of excellence for the modern linebacker.
I emphasize that neither I nor any other commentator discussing this tragedy knows the true reason behind Seau’s untimely death. As in all cases, this is a complex issue and there were surely many factors that played roles in his demise. But the fact that my first instinct was to question the effects of football on Junior Seau’s brain says something about this country’s greatest and most popular sport.
I certainly was not the only person to make this connection. Former Chicago Bear linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer recently retired because of concussions and was clearly disturbed by the recent news, as was former NFL safety Shaun Gayle.
So, even if it turns out that Seau’s death did not, in fact, have any correlation to brain injuries suffered during his lengthy football career, should we somehow breathe a collective sigh of relief and go about our business?
Over the past seven years, many former football players, including Terry Long, Andre Waters, Ray Easterling and Dave Duerson have taken their own lives and were later discovered to have been suffering from some form of traumatic brain injury.
If you are not familiar with those names, you are not alone. But most people, even in passing, had at least heard of Seau because of his 1990s stardom. He was without a doubt the most high-profile name to succumb to this fate. If anyone in the mainstream public was not paying attention to this issue before Wednesday, they certainly are now.
Should it have taken this long?
Maybe scrutiny should have started when John Mackey, who played in the NFL from 1963-1972 and was perhaps the greatest tight end in NFL history, was rendered speechless by the time of his death because of the effects dementia had taken on his brain.
Perhaps it was avoiding this same fate that was on Seau’s mind when he allegedly shot himself. It seems likely this was the case for Duerson, who, according to The New York Times, “complained of headaches, blurred vision and a deteriorating memory in the months before his death.”
It should be noted that Duerson shot himself in the chest, presumably to preserve his brain. He left a final note requesting that his brain be donated to a brain bank to be analyzed for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disorder that is discovered post-mortem and has been found in several former football players. Seau also shot himself in the chest.
These violent and shocking deaths grab national headlines momentarily before being piled onto the list of similar fatalities.
So, maybe it isn’t surprising that on the same day of Seau’s death, 46 percent of the people who voted in an ESPN poll believed that the year-long suspension given to New Orleans Saints linebacker Jonathan Vilma, a ringleader in the team’s bounty program, was too harsh.
This is after audio from this year’s playoffs was released with Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams telling his players, “kill the head.”
As a private school, Northwestern lists neither its football expenses nor its revenues. Still, it doesn’t take an economist to count the Dan Persa billboards off of the Kennedy Expressway leading up to the 2011 season to discern the source of the athletic department’s money.
It would be wrong to assume that administrators, players and coaches are not phased by this shocking news. The fact is that this is the case at nearly every university in the country with a Division I football program.
At the professional level, Super Bowl XLVI this past February was the most-watched program in American television history, a record which the event seems to break every year. Bloomberg reported that a 30-second advertisement during that game cost $4 million.
I hate to sound like I am admonishing anyone or turning my nose up at the football-viewing public, because I am as big a football fan as anyone. But with all of the money invested in the game at every level, I am starting to wonder how many more of these tragedies must take place before consumers stop feeding the beast.
Football has never been a more popular and prosperous business, yet at the same time we are learning its true costs.
After Chris Benoit’s double murder-suicide, I stopped watching pro wrestling. For me, wrestling now only prompts nostalgic memories and passing glances when I scroll by it on the television. Whether I am right or wrong, it just made me too uneasy to continue watching.
A study on Chris Benoit’s brain after his death by the Sports Legacy Institute showed that he had the brain of an 85-year-old Alzheimer's patient. Findings from a study done on the brain of the aforementioned former NFL safety Andre Waters, who died in 2006, yielded the same results.
Now, it’s time for NFL fans to evaluate the merit of watching football.
The questions surrounding Junior Seau’s death should not be about whether football was to blame. The focus needs to shift to the question of how many more of these deaths do we need to see before we feel that same uneasiness I feel for wrestling.
If we ask this question, I fear the answer.