Love, Zac

by Reid Forgrave

  For a school that had never been known for smashmouth football, this change in philosophy was thrilling. “People would come out in our community just to watch our punt returns,” Kluver said. “We would absolutely lay people out. Now, you get flagged for hits like that.” What the Indians lacked in size they made up for in heart. They went to an I-formation offense, an old-school style with the quarterback, fullback, and running back bunched together perpendicular to the line of scrimmage. “We needed to shorten the game and control the football and give ourselves a chance to win at the end,” Kluver said. “It was a lot of three yards and a cloud of dust.”

  By the time Zac was a freshman, his older brother’s exploits were already legendary. Like any football legend—whether in hulking NFL coliseums or on patches of turf carved into cornfields—Myles II’s greatness wasn’t fully conveyed by his player profile. To be sure, that profile was impressive. He was a physical, hard-hitting safety who was speedy enough to cover receivers downfield. Once, Myles sprinted from the safety position, smashed the running back in the backfield, popped the ball out, then ran it in for a touchdown. “We were all looking at each other on the sidelines: ‘Did he really just do that?’ ” Kluver recalled. Another time, against suburban powerhouse Ankeny, the opposing running back came out of the backfield on a bubble pass route. The quarterback’s throw led him and left him exposed to Myles. Myles hit him so hard, the running back dropped the ball as his cleats popped off his feet. Myles recorded seventy tackles his junior season and eighty-two his senior year, which also included a team-leading five interceptions and one defensive touchdown. Those exploits unanimously nabbed him a spot on the all-conference first team.

  But legends aren’t made of numbers. Legends are made of bigger-than-life stories. And Myles II had a story of toughness that stood up to generations of Easter men’s exploits. He always fought through injuries, but one was particularly gruesome. During a game his junior year, Myles leaned forward to tackle someone, and the runner’s knee connected with his bicep. The injury hurt, but he played through it. After the game, his bicep tightened. He couldn’t extend his arm. A blood clot, rock hard and the size of a golf ball, had lodged in his bicep. But there was another game the next Friday, so Myles was outfitted with a soft cast and a brace that tugged at his arm to straighten it out. He wore it in class, in practices, in bed. “It sucked, painful as shit,” Myles said. “But I felt I could still cover people, still tackle people, so I could still play, even though most people wouldn’t have played with just one arm.” His right arm was immobilized in a ninety-degree position, so his dad put him on the side of the field where he could tackle with his left arm instead.

  During his senior year came another wild injury: An opposing wide receiver ran a crossing route, and Myles went over to smoke him. But the opposing receiver ducked, and Myles flipped over him, his heels hitting the back of his head. He broke the L4 and L5 vertebrae in his lower back. He played the rest of the season with fractured vertebrae. “That’s what you do because it’s football,” he said. “We’re a tough family. I could play through it. It wasn’t like I had a broken leg and couldn’t move.”

  By the time Zac was a freshman, he’d internalized those lessons his father and brother had taught about how a man was supposed to act.

  “Starting freshman football I felt like I had something to prove because my dad was a hard ass football coach and my older brother was a football stud,” Zac wrote. “I look back now and can say I always felt [inadequate] as a football player compared to my brother and my father as well and that was a reason I always tried to be tough and play through the pain. There was also the ‘Easter Mentality’ stereo type that I had to live up to. This ‘Easter Mentality’ is the name that all the other coaches and kids in sports called us because the Easter family was such a tough nosed football family and the reputation was that football was our lives and we would play through any pain. My dad was an intimidating hard ass football coach and the Easter mentality meant that we were supposed to always be tough as nails, show no weakness, and never get taken out of game for being hurt.

  “My freshman year of football I played linebacker and fullback as usual. Once again I literally used my head as a battering ram on every play and even though I was one of the shortest kids on the team, I could kick anyone’s ass and run over someone twice my size. My freshman year I also played was plagued by not only constant headaches, but shoulder and neck injuries. Since I lead with my head on every play, I obviously had neck problems which lead to me having tons of stingers and shoulder problems. Coach Tucker would always tell me to quit hitting the hole with my head down, but I never listened because I loved being able to bring it. There were a few games and practices when my stingers got so bad that I could not feel my left arm for a day or two after a game. I also remember one game my freshman year when I had to of had a concussion against Ankeny. I don’t remember much of the game, but I remember Joe Hogan telling me about how I couldn’t even walk straight during the game and how I couldn’t even line up in a three-point stance correctly. We laughed about it when we were watching game tape, but now I look back and wish I could of stopped myself right there.”

  Even then, before concussions were such a big topic, Indianola coaches taught safety through proper tackling. “See what you hit!” they repeated. “Eyes up!” they drilled. “Run and wrap!” they shouted. Zac heard it all. And he ignored it. “Zac definitely, at times, he’d lower his head—I remember that vividly, not doing exactly what he was coached to do,” Kluver recalled. But to Zac, the benefits of using his head as the tip of his body’s missile outweighed any nagging headaches. It was how he made up for his relatively small body. And a way to become a real man.

  By his senior year, Zac was a varsity captain, just like his older brother.

  “Usually, when you have these reckless, crazy athletes, they don’t really care,” said the school’s trainer, Sue Wilson. “They’re just stupid and crazy. That was not Zac. He was very passionate about football. He worked hard. Zac always had control of his body. That’s different than reckless. Zac was very calculated and controlled. He knew exactly when to use force. He just did it at any cost.”

  Messages from elders were mixed. Coaches criticized his techniques. They made him wear a cowboy collar, a foam roll around his neck, to force him to hit with his head up. Nick Haworth, one of Zac’s best friends, remembers him hearing coaches’ criticism: “That’s reckless,” coaches would say. “Don’t do that.” (Later, Haworth would recognize that while coaches admonished Zac, they didn’t impose consequences. “Coaches, all they can do is coach,” he later told me. “They can’t be out there on the field with you.”) And even as coaches preached safety, they praised his biggest hits. So did teammates. In the Saturday-morning training room after Friday-night games, teammates would get ice baths while they flipped through the sports pages to hunt for photographs or stories from their game. When they relived their biggest hits, they were often talking about Zac.

  “I still take self pride for never pulling myself out of game,” Zac wrote. “I was tougher than nails. Everyone on the team looked up to me as the leader and being tough. I played every game with a constant headache, and I remember one game against Knoxville where I got dinged so hard that after the game I hid in the locker room during the varsity game and cried because my head hurt so bad.”

  Kluver had a tradition: to give a T-shirt emblazoned with the words BIG HAMMER to the player who doled out the game’s most punishing hit. BIG HAMMER T-shirts were coveted, a physical talisman of warrior-like courage. In high school, Zac won two. Later, once the fear of traumatic brain injuries cast a cloud over football—and once the hits that won BIG HAMMER T-shirts started getting flagged as illegal—Kluver stopped handing them out. He felt remorse: “Maybe that shouldn’t have been a reward,” he lamented. But for years afterward, BIG HAMMER shirts still appeared in the halls of Indianola High School, passed down from older brothers to younger brothers. Players would nudge
Kluver about it: “How come we don’t get those shirts?” Implicit in their question was that their test of manhood was weaker than that of their predecessors.

  Zac’s hard-hitting mentality had gained him notice since before he could walk: He loved putting his body in danger’s way. He was reckless on jet skis. He was nutty when he climbed trees. He was fearless on the four-wheeler, confident that, no matter how fast he pushed it, he would always be in control—and would never get hurt. “That’s what you want on a football team,” his father said. Once, Zac and his father were riding the four-wheeler together at night when they misjudged a hill near a creek bed. “Get off!” Myles Sr. shouted. Zac pushed himself off the back of the four-wheeler. His dad landed on his head with the all-terrain vehicle on top of him. His head was bleeding. “Zac rolled it off me and said, ‘You all right?’ ” his father recalled. He was fine, though the scar was permanent. “That is not funny,” Brenda told them. The boys laughed anyway. She was always trying to protect her boys from danger, but a mother of three Easter boys quickly came to realize it was a fruitless fight.

  As Zac’s football collisions came against players exponentially bigger, stronger, and faster than those he’d mauled in his youth, Zac’s ability to hide the effects of his injuries waned. At one point, a friend told the trainer Zac’s stingers—a nerve injury that often occurs during tackling, when the shoulder gets forced one way and the head and neck the other way—had gotten so bad he couldn’t feel his left arm. Wilson made him sit out a few games.

  “Once I realized telling them the truth would make me half to sit out,” Zac wrote, “I stopped telling them and often lied about ever injury.”

  His junior year, Zac tore a quad and missed a few games. Once he was back, he pledged to hit harder than ever. Teammates teased him about being a dirty player because on every play, Zac hit as hard as he could, even if he didn’t have to. By the time Zac was a senior in late summer 2009, he was a varsity captain like his older brother had been. “He was the next Easter in line,” Kluver said. “He wanted to live up to that Easter name.”

  During Zac’s junior year, Sue Wilson, the trainer, spotted something weird. During one game, she noticed Zac’s left arm hung limply to one side. His head was tilted to the same side. Zac had been on her radar for years as a high-risk player. From the first time she saw him play, she noticed that he led with his head. When she told him he needed to tackle with his head up, his answer was scary: “I don’t know how. I don’t know how to be powerful with my head up.” So when she saw him running lopsidedly during that game his junior year, she approached him. “Sue, it hurts bad,” Zac told her. She asked why his head was tilted. “It’s not,” he said. It was. He couldn’t tell; he thought his head was perfectly vertical. She walked to the coach and said: “He’s done.” He sat out the rest of that game. Doctors later noted his brachial plexus, a network of nerves that stretches from the neck down to the top rib and into the armpit, was pulling away from the spinal column.

  By the summer of 2009, most of high school had flown by. Zac was a popular jock, but he was never a bully, never a jerk. Like Odie from Garfield and Friends, Zac was friends with everybody. He was excited for his final season. The week before practices started, Zac and his father caravanned with others three hours southeast to Kirksville, Missouri, for a padded, full-contact football camp at Truman State University. Zac was going against players from other states, so he could impress college coaches while making a statement to teammates that this season would be his time. He teed off on opponents at every opportunity. At one point, Zac was trying to lay a big hit on a ball carrier. He lowered his head, and . . . BAM! Helmet to helmet. The noise was so loud that players winced—“OH!”—and other campers turned their heads to see who got crunched. “Zac came off to the side, and he looked dizzy,” his friend Haworth recalled. “He was really quiet. He didn’t want to say anything. He knew he’d get taken out. Zac never wanted to appear weak, and if you had to sit out, he thought it made you look pretty weak, like you couldn’t hack it.”

  “I remember getting my concussion the second day of camp during the very first tackling drill of the morning,” Zac wrote. “We were doing an outside linebacker rip and tackle drill. I was even holding a bag, but I still lead with my head to smoke this ball carrier who was from a different team. I put him on his ass, but could barely stand up right after. The headache was so intense I could barely talk to anyone. As usual, I sucked it up and practiced the whole time and made sure I never let up to show any weakness on ever play. I was so mentally engrained on being the toughest baddest that I almost started to take pleasure in having a pounding headache and still bringing it on ever play . . . By the last scrimmage that day, I could barely walk or call the plays, and once again it was my best friends who told the coaches.”

  Zac was held out of contact drills the rest of camp. But when the high school team held its first practice a week later, there Zac was, ready to play football. He was eighteen years old and invincible. As Haworth would say later, “They wanted us to be tough guys, hard-ass and tough. And it’s hard to be tough when you’re standing on the sidelines.” For a few days, Zac complained to his older brother that his head hurt. At home after school, he lay down and put a towel over his face. “Then, he popped out of it and seemed normal,” Myles II recalled. “His neck was fucked up. But he just played the whole year like that.”

  “When I got home [from the preseason camp] I saw a doctor and lied about all my concussion symptoms,” Zac wrote. “I continued practice before the season with terrible headaches and never said a word to anyone.”

  Zac was conscious of his body image and obsessed with working out.

  The second concussion of Zac’s senior year came on the night of the fourth game, in mid-September. Knowing Zac’s history and his mindset, Sue Wilson was nervous. But his primary care physician had cleared him to play, and he certainly wanted to play. During the game, Wilson kept a close eye on him. On one play, Zac smashed against an opponent, a loud helmet-to-helmet hit. Wilson heard it from the other end of the field and walked toward him. His head was down. He staggered, then fell. “Sue, Zac needs you,” a teammate said. Zac jogged to the sidelines, pretending everything was all right. “Look at me,” Wilson instructed. He tried to zero in on her, but he couldn’t. “Your eyes are all over the place,” she told him. “Where are you?” Zac just shook his head. “Are you going to throw up?” He shook his head again. “You’re done,” she said.

  A coach came over to Wilson, seemingly brushing off the situation: “He just got his bell rung, right?” At the end of the quarter, she went back to Zac and stared in his eyes. They were still darting about, something called saccades, rapid and simultaneous movements of both eyes, as opposed to the smooth movements eyes normally make together. It was a muscle-control issue in the brain, convincing evidence Zac was concussed.

  “I want to go back in,” Zac told her.

  “It’s not an option.”

  “This is why I don’t tell you anything.”

  “Your coaches know you’re done,” Wilson told Zac, taking his helmet. “Don’t try to get back on the field.”

  When he came into the trainer’s office the next morning, he told Wilson he felt just as off as the night before. The symptoms hadn’t cleared up. “I just feel weird,” he said. Wilson told him to rest, and that he wouldn’t play in the next game.

  At this point, Zac certainly knew stories of ex-football players struggling with bad knees or bum shoulders. But you could live with that, the price of becoming a man. He had never heard of the disease that would soon change the way Americans thought about football. During Zac’s freshman year, in January 2007, Alan Schwarz of the New York Times had published the first piece in mainstream American media that indicated a connection between playing football and sustaining brain damage. The article was about Andre Waters, a hard-hitting NFL safety for twelve seasons who committed suicide a decade after retiring. But suicide could come from any number of causes;
Zac’s own father reasoned that a rash of high-profile suicides of NFL players in the late 2000s was probably because retired players struggled with living life out of the spotlight. In September of Zac’s senior year, GQ magazine published a piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas that profiled a young Pittsburgh neuropathologist named Bennet Omalu. That story would eventually be adapted for the Will Smith movie Concussion, about a Nigerian immigrant who researched connections between football and brain injuries and battled the mighty NFL.

  But by Zac’s senior year, the concern about connections between concussions in football and debilitating brain damage had yet to reach a fever pitch. And when he graduated from high school and ended his football career, Zac Easter had never once heard of the neurodegenerative disease that was taking root in his brain.

  By the time Cyndy Feasel first heard of CTE, it was too late. Far too late.

  Her name was Cyndy Davy when she met Grant Feasel at Abilene Christian University in the near-desert of West Texas. He was a towering six-foot-seven, strong-jawed California kid whose boyish good looks brought to mind John F. Kennedy Jr., the former president’s son. He hoped to become a dentist, but the allure of football diverted him from that, even after being accepted at Texas Southwestern Medical School. He’d played since age eight. The sport got him a full ride to a university he otherwise couldn’t afford, and it also offered him a chance at whatever measure of fame and fortune could be earned by a center, whose profession is to snap the ball between his legs, then push, claw, and shove at opponents trying to tackle the man with the ball.