NORTH RICHLAND HILLS, Texas _ On May 3, 2012, Junior Seau, a star linebacker with the San Diego Chargers for 20 seasons, shot himself in the chest and died. He was 43. Fifteen months earlier, Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson, a four-time Pro Bowl selection, ended his struggle the same way at age 50. He left a note.
Tormented, Duerson wanted his family to donate his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation in Boston.
The autopsy of Duerson's brain revealed he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, now commonly known as CTE, the degenerative brain disease related to repeated blows to the head. Immediately it was speculated that Seau, one of the NFL's most punishing players, had secretly been succumbing to CTE, too.
As Seau's death reverberated across the league, two former NFL players _ and likely many more _ trapped within their own mysteriously deteriorating minds and coping as best they could with depression, sleeplessness, motor impairment, irritability, fits of aggression and dementia, suddenly realized the truth as sure as the white spots that flashed before their eyes after a jarring hit.
"We were watching TV that night and he just said, 'Man, you know, that's what's going on,' " said Kim Bush, repeating the words of her longtime boyfriend and former Raiders quarterback Kenny Stabler, who was hearing near-constant ringing in his ears.
Bush said Stabler, who was later diagnosed with Stage 3 CTE, was "lucky" to die from prostate cancer in 2015 at age 69, before CTE could unleash its full horror.
That same night, in a spacious Colleyville home, former Seattle Seahawks center Grant Feasel, once a mountain of man, 6 foot 7 and 278 pounds, sat as he usually did at this point, in a darkened bedroom, drinking, with a purpose.
Feasel grew up in Barstow, Calif., and followed his older brother Greg to play football at Abilene Christian, married his college sweetheart Cyndy and delayed medical school as his NFL career unexpectedly flourished.
But after hearing the news of Seau's suicide, he would soon tell Cyndy, who divorced him only months earlier while on the verge of her own breakdown after years of struggling to make sense of his increasingly erratic and inebriated behavior: "You know, I think I've got what Mike (Webster) and Junior and Keli (McGregor) and all these guys have. There's something wrong with me."
On July 15, 2012, two months after Seau's suicide and one month after 62-year-old former Falcons star safety Ray Easterling shot himself, Feasel, 52 and a father of three, was dead.
Cirrhosis of the liver was the official cause of death. But his ex-wife believes it only masked the true killer, the same one that drove Duerson, Seau and Easterling to pick up a gun.
Cyndy kept a journal during their struggles with CTE, which evolved to the November release of her book, After the Cheering Stops: An NFL Wife's Story of Concussions, Loss and the Faith That Saw Her Through. She also co-founded a new support group called Faces of CTE, and on Monday at the St. Regis hotel in Houston _ in the shadow of Super Bowl LI _ Cyndy and co-founder Kimberly Archie will lead a news conference to shed more light on football's dark side.
Dr. Ann McKee, the pioneering neurologist in the study of CTE at Boston University, who sliced into the brains of Duerson, Easterling and Seau before Feasel, and Stabler and many others after him, discovered that Feasel had Stage 3 CTE. Affecting the brain's frontal lobs, key in governing impulse control, CTE almost assuredly made it near-impossible for Feasel to resist the urge to self-medicate with vodka.
"I really do believe that if these individuals could see what was happening to them at the end of their lives, and see how it's destroying their family, they never would have played football," McKee said.
Over the past decade, multiple concussion lawsuits have been filed against the NFL and NCAA. Thousands of former NFL players who have been diagnosed with brain injuries linked to repeated concussions will soon begin collecting on a $1 billion settlement with the league. The NCAA settled a $75 million lawsuit with former players providing medical monitoring.
A Fort Worth law firm this month filed a concussion lawsuit in Indianapolis against the NCAA and Big 12.
