44 current or former NFL players aged 50 or younger have died since the start of 2021. That number is staggering. But it doesn’t account for their peers’ despair:
In all, 44 current or former NFL players aged 50 or younger have died since the start of 2021, according to Pro Football Reference. While pro footballers tend to have longer lifespans than the general population , they are more vulnerable than their counterparts in other sports to suffering neurodegenerative or cardiovascular disease. And more likely to die of suicide.
“I don’t want to just sit around and wait for something to happen,” Harris says. “It’s definitely scary.” Crockett’s subsequent spiral—his divorce and and poor financial decisions, paralleled by drug and alcohol abuse, much of which he attributes to the sense of identity he lost when his career came to an end—reached the point where in 2013 he says he found himself sitting alone for hours on a closet floor one night, a pistol in his lap. He couldn’t escape the shadows cast by Seau and Duerson. He was convinced that his own end would mirror theirs.
Crockett decided that night that instead he would attempt to keep the delusions and depression at bay. Today he sees a therapist and a psychiatrist, and he attacks each day, he says, as if he were pressing a receiver at the line of scrimmage, fearful of letting dark thoughts slip past. So Tretter engaged in conversations throughout that evening and into the subsequent days about how to better hold teams, the league, even players accountable to ever-evolving concussion practices shaped by ever-evolving science.
The men who 20-odd years ago gathered each fall in the Chargers’ receivers room developed bonds that transcended free agency, retirement or relocation. One group of players—Jackson, Keenan McCardell, Greg Camarillo, Kassim Osgood, Malcom Floyd and Eric Parker, as well as their position coach, James Lofton—maintained a longstanding text thread, on which they’d check in on one another, trade jokes and, on occasion, revel in the news that one of them had become a husband or a father.
Some 20 former Chargers gathered for the first call in March 2021, only a month after Jackson’s death. They ruminated at first on Jackson, sharing how his loss had shaped their own thoughts and feelings of pain and confusion, but eventually they opened up with each other, too, about problems that might be driving them down a similar road: financial worries, marital strife, mental and physical struggles.
“[We were] literally the same age—we came into the league together,” says Camarillo of his old teammate. “If [Jackson] had CTE, then we all could, and that’s scary.”Harris, after retiring in 2009, remembers not being able to watch football for two years, such was his struggle with the loss of identity and structure after two decades in the game.
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