Lost in the tedious melodrama of an inflated ball scandal that should have ended months ago are the real issues the NFL and its players are going to have to address. On Tuesday, a day before league and union attorneys met in a New York courtroom to continue to parse the language of Tom Brady’s suspension, an ex-NFL quarterback reportedly shot himself in a California motel room.
The ex-wife of 50-year-old Erik Kramer told NBC News that Kramer had attempted suicide. She said he had been depressed for years. She said this was football’s fault.
“He is a very amazing man, a beautiful soul but he has suffered depression since he was with the Bears,” Marshawn Kramer told NBC. “I can promise you he is not the same man I married.”
Kramer’s battles with depression have been public for years. He has described them in the past, in part after the death of his son from a drug overdose in 2011. But the story of Kramer’s struggle is a familiar one among retired NFL players. Wives and children wonder how their brilliant, dynamic husbands with booming personalities go dark in the decades after football. They call it a mystery. They beg for answers.
No one can know for sure if football is the cause of Kramer’s depression. The immediate suspicion, because it is always the suspicion now, is that he had suffers from the effects of head trauma incurred while playing. Maybe this is the factor for what has happened to him the last few years. Maybe it isn’t. More and more football families believe that it is. They are certain the game is killing its men early, destroying their brains, ruining their lives.
Kramer’s story comes just days after a controversial Hall of Fame induction ceremony for Junior Seau who killed himself in 2012, a suicide his family believes was the result of football concussions. Hall officials let Seau’s daughter speak at the program only after public outcry over her omission. Many accused the Hall of protecting the NFL in the fear she would blame the league when talking about her father. Their worry is that no one associated with football wants an open discussion on head trauma.
Eventually the fight over Brady’s four-game suspension in a ball deflation case will go away. Brady will play again and football will move on. What won’t disappear are the stories of former players who are broken, damaged and hopeless. There are too many diagnoses of ALS, early-onset Alzheimer’s and reports of suicide attempts.
The battle over the exact PSI of a football in a game is trivial when compared to the collapse of the men who play with those footballs. Deflategate is deflecting attention away from the one issue that has loomed over the game but head trauma and its long-term effects will remain as an issue long after everyone has debated whether a courtroom artist’s sketch made Brady sufficiently handsome.
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the number of children age 6-to-14 playing for school and organized football teams dropped only 4% the last six years even as concussions became a national issue. These numbers counter the belief that football will soon struggle to find young people to play it. But the statistics don’t address the bigger issue that players in high school, college and even the NFL don’t want to see …
What happens to them when football is done?
Even before the head trauma stories appeared, the NFL and the players union were well aware that a vast number of former players struggled in the years after retirement. While all athletes go through a transition after the cheering stops, the jump from football to normal life has seemed higher. The stories of that adjustment will continue to come. Questions will keep being asked. The fight for answers is going to go on.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department says Kramer did not suffer life-threatening injuries. He will be as OK as a 50-year-old man with depression can be OK. Perhaps when all the lawyers are finishing debating the meaning of text messages from locker room equipment guys and chuckling over Brady’s anger about the price of a pool cover attention can turn to men like Erik Kramer.
Or does an ex-quarterback trying to figure out life after the NFL matter less than the firmness of a football?
