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Sundays this time of year mean only one thing:
Football.
As a New York Giants fan, with a new season underway, I can’t wait to see how Jaxson Dart, the young quarterback, and Malik Nabers, the young wide receiver, will perform in 2026. I’m not suggesting the duo will remind anyone of Montana and Rice, but as pitiful as the Giants have been the last three years, there is finally reason for hope in the Big Apple.
Yet I’m disturbed by the eventual cost to many players I root for and against. A number of them will suffer dementia. Some will die by suicide.
I wonder: Am I a hypocrite for still loving the sport?
The most recent evidence: According to a study by the British Medical Journal, close to 25% percent of the nearly 900 former players who died between 2016 and 2021 had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that often leads to dementia and suicide. The actual figure may be much higher, as the study relies on brains donated by athletes or their families.
The most shocking thing about the latest statistics on CTE in football is that we find them so shocking
Was I shocked by the study? Absolutely not.
I’ve known about CTE for close to two decades, even co-writing a book with sports agent Leigh Steinberg (the inspiration for the 1996 film “Jerry Maguire”), who had referred to the concussion issue as a “ticking time bomb.”
And did this knowledge prevent me from cheering when one of my Giants creamed an opponent carrying the ball?
Again, absolutely not.
So, what’s different now? Why the sudden guilt?
Maybe as I’m inching — sometimes it feels like speeding — toward the big 7-0, I recognize the cost to everything in ways I didn’t before.
In sports and in life.
One thing was certain: I needed to talk to those who have spent their lives around the game. To find out if I was, indeed, a hypocrite.
I first reached out to Bill Courtney, a high school football coach in Memphis and a good friend. I worked on a book with Courtney, the subject of “Undefeated,” which won the Academy Award in 2012 for best documentary.
Courtney, 58, also has deep concerns.
“I now know what I didn’t know as a young man and a young coach, and that is the game, as we play it today, can kill people.”
Nonetheless, he’s convinced he wouldn’t be as successful as he is now — he runs a lumber company in addition to coaching — if not for the lessons he learned as a player in high school. He also, like others, sees ways to make football safer.
One way is to not allow kids to put on a helmet and shoulder pads until sixth grade. Another is to change tackling techniques starting in junior high, as well as train and certify coaches who can teach them. “Any headfirst tackle would be a 15-yard penalty,” he said, “and the second time, you can’t play anymore.”
Courtney makes sense. Except, even if the changes in tackling are implemented — and that would require a ton of will and cooperation from coaches around the country — any effects wouldn’t be noticeable at the professional level for many years.
I then spoke to Everson Walls, 66, a former defensive back for the Giants, Dallas Cowboys, and Cleveland Browns.
“I feel like a hypocrite as well,” he told me. “I don’t know how to back out of this. It [football] is a big part of who I am.” He said he wasn’t aware of the risks to his long-term health when he played in the 1980s and ’90s, but even if he had known, he is quite sure he would do it again. “Once you find out that you are really good,” Walls said, “I wouldn’t say ‘damn the consequences,’ but you are going to eagerly take that on.”
Is he worried about dementia?
Of course he is.
“My wife looks at me side-eyed all the time,” he said. “All [professional football players’] wives should. It would be foolish of them not to.”
Finally, I went to Steinberg. I knew from our talks years ago that he, too, had questioned his involvement with football. “I tortured myself with it,” he reminded me recently.
Ultimately, though, he decided it would be better to advocate for player health from inside the system instead of “drop out and feel morally superior.”
He said that with the players themselves now aware of the risks, that should be good enough for me. “They would be angry that because of the blows, people were turned off by the game,” he added.
Steinberg assured me progress has been made on several fronts with regard to concussions.
I felt more hopeful. Until he said something that is obvious and yet easy to forget:
“At the end of the day, it is a collision sport. There’s a traffic accident on every play.”
So, where do the three conversations leave me?
In the same spot as before: Rooting for my Giants. Yet troubled by the toll the game takes on the men who play it.
Michael Arkush has written or co-written 18 books, including New York Times best-sellers with Phil Jackson, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Scottie Pippen.
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