Zac: Thanks, babe. I really needed that. I’m kind of down tonight
Ali: I know you are. But know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and a huge fucking bright light for you . . . I’ll always believe in you even on your worst days. Takes time and lots of effort but you’re the best and strongest person I know and you’re gonna make it because on the days that you’re the most hopeless I’ll be there to lean on and remind you of the amazing things and people in your life and why you should have faith
Zac: Your sole is beautiful. I won’t lie, I’ve asked myself why a girl like you stays with a guy like me.
Ali: You’ve been the biggest constant in my life. I’ve never not had feelings for you and I believe that means something. I truly believe we were meant to be and no matter what happens with our relationship in the future (although I hope for only amazing things lol) I’ll love you forever and always believe in you and always be there for you and never let you fall. I’ve never loved someone the way I love you and I’ll never let that go.
Zac: I know my feelings for you are real when I can’t tell when every other feeling is real or fake. I may be slowly loosing my mind and I can’t help that, but I do know your always going to be my Winslow ;)
Ali: You’ll never really lose your mind with me around. I won’t let you. I really really love you. And like you said, even [on] your worst days I know you truly love me. That feeling will always be real. Ps Jacob wants me to tell you high
Ali: Hi*
Zac: Lol you got high and hi mixed up ;) is someone a little stoned? Lol and tell him I said hi back. And also tell him go pack go ;)
Ali: No I’m just typing fast . . .
Zac: I love Alison for Alison
Ali: I love zac for zac
Zac: I miss the old Zac. He was a nice guy with a loving heart. Idk who I am now
Ali: You’re still a nice guy with a loving heart. I know you don’t see that right now but I FEEL it every day. With time and work and help and medicine you’ll feel yourself again. I 100% know this
Zac: No thank you for everything. You’ve helped me through so much and never ever blame yourself for anything. I love you and will always be over your shoulder looking after you no matter what. Always keep having fun. Always remember me. Always keep striving for greatness or shall I say first female president. Never quit fighting for what you believe for ;) I love you Winslow.
Ali: I love you, too babe but that sounds so past tense and is making me worried. I don’t want you to talk that way . . . Are you okay. Please be honest. I can call you
Zac didn’t reply. Ali called. Her call went to voicemail after one ring. Sometimes he just fell asleep, and Ali didn’t want to worry anybody by freaking out. But something felt off. She called again. No answer.
Ali texted him: “Seriously zac. I’m worried now. I know you’re having an off day but it will be okay—I know you have the fight in you. Please talk to me”
Jake noticed the concern on Ali’s face. “You want a beer?” he offered. She immediately started bawling. It was midnight. It dawned on Jake what could be happening. He grabbed Ali and their friends, walked out of the bar with them, and went straight to his pickup. They sped back to Indianola. Ali called Zac’s older brother, Myles II, who called Brenda. “Hey, is Zac upstairs?” Myles II asked his sleeping mother. Zac’s dad sprinted up the stairs to his middle son’s room. Zac wasn’t there. A note was on his bed, scrawled on a torn-out piece of white notebook paper. Myles grabbed his reading glasses and read the note, written in Zac’s angular, messy script.
Please! Look on my computer and print off my story and last wishes to everyone. PLEASE FULLFILL MY last wishes!
Make sure Ali gets her letters. I love her and watch over her.
Also give my story to the rest of family, print off. Also post all of it on Facebook eventually.
Dad I’m sorry I broke into your truck.
Thank you all for wanting to help.
But I can’t be helped.
Love Zac
Myles frantically called his son. Zac didn’t pick up. Zac’s mom called Ali in a panic. She told Ali that Zac had left a note. Ali was crying hysterically in the back of Jake’s truck. They all figured there was only one place Zac could have gone: Lake Ahquabi. They called the police.
Ali texted Zac: “Baby. It’s winslow. Please think of me please talk to me. I believe in you. I know you’re upset but please talk to me.”
Nothing.
“I need you to text me back,” Ali texted.
Brenda and Myles drove down the winding, tree-lined hill that led to the lake. A patrol car was already there. “I’m sorry,” the police officer told them.
Zac’s body was lying on the ground, a 20-gauge shotgun slug torn through his chest.
As Jake was pulling into the state park, an ambulance was leaving with its lights off. Ali bolted from the truck and vomited.
Ten
The Future
Zac had printed the thirty-nine-page, double-spaced Microsoft Word document and left it in his room, by his desk, before he went to the basement to retrieve the shotgun slug. Titled “Concussions: My Silent Struggle,” it was a brief autobiography of how those football concussions had led him to this. (His handwritten journals were stashed nearby in a file box.) After getting his story down, he went back to the beginning of the document and inserted a preamble of sorts.
My last wishes
IT’s taken me about 5 months to write all of this. Sorry for the bad grammar in a lot of spots.
I WANT MY BRAIN DONATED TO THE BRAIN BANK!! I WANT MY BRAIN DONATED TO THE SPORTS LEGACY INSTITUE A.K.A THE CONCUSSION FOUNDATION. If you go to the concussion foundation website you can see where there is a spot for donatation. I want my brain donated because I don’t know what happened to me and I know the concussions had something to do with it.
Please please please give me the cheapest burial possible. I don’t want anything fancy and I want to be cremated. Once cremated, I want my ashes spread in the timber on the side hill where I shot my 10 point buck. That is where I was happiest and that I where I want to lay. Feel free to spread my ashes around the timber if you’d like, but just remember on the side hill is where I would like most of my remains. I am truly sorry if I put you in a financial burden. I just cant live with this pain any more.
I don’t want anything expensive at my funeral or what ever it is. Please please please I beg you to chose the cheapest route and not even buy me a burial plot at a cemetary. It is what I, Zac Easter WANTS!!
I also do not want a military funeral If there are color guardsmen or anyone else at my funerial or whatever you have I will haunt you forever. I DO NOT WANT A MILITARY FUNERIAL. I DON’T WANT THE MILITATRY ENVOVLED AT ALL. Fuck the army and fuck the government . . .
You will have to turn in my military equipment in though. That is in the trunk of my car in a green army duffle bag and stuff in levi’s room like my uniforms . . . Please tell them my story.
Levi gets my car, it will need a oil change and breaks/tires done her shortly. Please take care of old red. It will need cleaned out as well because I am a slob.
Thank you for being the best family in the world. I will watch over you all and please take my last wishes into consideration. Do not do something I do no want. Just remember, I don’t want a military funeral like grandpas. It is my last wishes and last rights.
I am with the lord now.
- Look, Im sorry every one for the choice I made. Its wrong and we all know it.
Family and friends gathered at the Easter household that night. They stayed almost until sunrise. They cried. They hugged. Zac’s older brother punched a hole in a wall.
For much of the next forty-eight hours, Zac’s dad stood outside in the cold. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. Regret was almost suffocating him. Myles Easter would pick up his son’s autobiography once, shortly after his death. He read through the entire thing, just one time, trying to understand what had happened to his son’s tor
tured mind. Standing out in the cold, he was numb. As family and friends gathered in the Easters’ home to share in their grief, not many came up to talk with him. “Nobody,” Myles Sr. recalled later, “knew what the hell to say.”
Four days later, Eric Kluver, the head football coach at Indianola High School, stood over his former player’s casket. Inside was the body of the young man who represented everything Kluver loved about football, the wild child who for two summers put in some good, honest work alongside him in the sweltering Iowa heat. Later, Kluver would pin photographs from Zac’s funeral to the walls of his basement. He didn’t want to forget any of this, or the feeling of guilt that maybe he had helped create this moment.
Did football do this? he thought as he stood over the casket. Did I do this? He and his staff had always taught Zac proper tackling technique, of course, but they’d never insisted that he scale back his aggression. If anything, that aggression—the feeling that Zac would sacrifice his own body for the good of the team—made him an easy role model for younger players. Zac’s body might not have been the ideal football body, but his mentality—his mind—was the archetype: the hard-nosed player every football coach dreams of.
And yet his story became the superhero movie that ends in tragedy: Zac Easter’s greatest strength turned out to be his greatest weakness.
Kluver knew football played a role in Zac’s destruction: football, and the culture around America’s favorite sport. He could compartmentalize the life-altering injuries to Matt Hanke and Joey Goodale as freak brain injuries that happened to occur on a football field. But Zac? This was from football, and from the way Zac played the sport for nearly half his life, since when he was a little kid until he graduated from high school. It was like the old dilemma from football’s earliest days: unnecessary roughness versus necessary roughness. The violence that’s outside the bounds of the game’s propriety versus the violence that this game glorifies. Zac’s injury felt like, quite simply, part of the game, at least the old-fashioned, hard-hitting, devil-may-care way that Zac played the game.
“To see him lying in that casket,” Kluver said later, “you would think that would be enough to make you say that enough is enough. It almost makes me sick to keep doing what I’m doing.”
And yet, months after saying this, Kluver would lead his high school football team out of the sparkling new locker room at Indianola High School for its first game of the new season. In the hallways of the school, he would still see the occasional BIG HAMMER T-shirt worn by a younger brother of a player who had earned one many years ago, before Kluver stopped handing them out to reward the most bone-crunching of hits.
Despite everything, Kluver still believes in football. He believes more good comes from the sport than bad. Far more good. He believes life is full of risks, and that we should not pad our children in Bubble Wrap. Boys must be boys. But his faith in football is rattled. When I told him Zac wrote in parts of his journal that he wished he’d never played football, Kluver squeezed his eyes shut and put a hand to his forehead.
“There’s definitely been times where I’ve said, ‘Is this worth it?’ ” the coach said.
What Kluver was debating inside his own mind parallels perhaps the defining question of this era in American sports: Is football worth it? Or, to put a finer point on it: What are we willing to sacrifice as a society to keep our beloved national sport recognizable as the same sport we have enjoyed—the sport that has helped shape us as a country—for more than a century? If 10 percent of NFL players end up with shortened lives and with less quality of life due to brain injuries sustained by playing the sport, is that an acceptably low number for us to continue as unabated, unabashed fans of the sport? What if that number is 25 percent? Or 50 percent? (The best guesses of current science indicate former NFL players die with brain disease at much higher rates, somewhere between 5 and 8 percent, than the normal population.) And how does that determination change when we are talking about collegiate players, who are paid not in the millions of dollars but in scholarships that cover tuition and room and board? It is one thing when old football warriors suffer from bad knees and constant joint pain. Every football player since the sport’s beginning has known these pains later in life were the price of admission. But the idea that this sport could severely damage the brain, the ability to reason—the very thing that makes us human—changes the equation into something closer to an existential crisis.
Another more complicated part of the equation: What about the Zac Easters of our world? What level of risk are we willing to take on as a society when we are talking about the ways that football hurts the high school standouts who’ll never advance to the highest levels of this sport? For a teenager with zero shot at the pros—someone who goes into sports for the fun and the camaraderie and maybe even the life lessons—is playing on a football team a significantly better life experience than playing a sport with a lower chance of permanent brain trauma: basketball or baseball or track? Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist who helped bring CTE to the public consciousness, zeroes in on this point. He’s become a controversial figure in scientific circles for many reasons, not the least of which is that his research has segued into what often feels like a campaign against youth playing contact sports. He does not blame the NFL for the current concussion crisis. But his solution for how society should wrestle with this is as simple and practical as it is threatening to football’s existence, and he argues it with an evangelical fervor.
Here’s what Omalu argues: He compares football to smoking. Both are dangerous, and both are things that some humans enjoy. So make tackle football like smoking: something that American men are only permitted to do after they turn eighteen. This approach would protect the Zac Easters of the world from any sort of brain trauma related to youth or high school football, and would also limit the years that a college or professional football player is exposed to repetitive hits to the head. But this solution likely would also dry out the talent pool for college football and the NFL. I think it’s fair to assume a ban on tackle football for youths younger than eighteen would within a couple of generations cause the marginalization, or even extinction, of college and professional football.
“What Zac’s case tells us is that parents need to know that when you put a helmet on your son’s head and send him out to play football, there is a risk of your child suffering permanent brain damage,” Omalu told me. “The truth is inconvenient. The truth could be painful. This is a game people love. But as a society we evolve. And as we evolve we become more intelligent, and as we become more intelligent we give up the less intelligent ways of the past. Knowing what we know today, there is no justification for children under the age of eighteen to engage in high-impact contact sports.”
Which for Eric Kluver makes perfect sense theoretically. But emotionally, the solution is not so simple. Take away football from these high school boys, and we as a nation lose something important that’s shaped generations of American men.
In the wake of Zac’s death, Kluver has changed the way he coaches football. He has drastically decreased the contact in practices. His coaches now teach Hawk tackling, a rugby-style tackle popularized by Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. It tries to take the head out of the impact of the tackle, as opposed to previous styles of tackling that taught players to get their head out in front. Players are now taught to keep their heads behind, and to avoid slamming their face masks with the ball carrier. In preseason meetings with parents, Kluver stresses the importance of taking concussions seriously, and tells them that any player with a suspected concussion will go through a concussion protocol. “People know Zac’s story,” Kluver said. “It’s the elephant in the room.”
The other elephant in the room: Football is violent. It just is. Millions of American boys and young men aren’t suddenly going to trade in the cathartic violence of tackle football for the simulacrum that is flag football. The love for the sport would disappear in a flag football world. So instead of the Omalu solution,
football tries to improve incrementally, to get safer on the margins while retaining the core element of physical danger and risk that’s been central to its appeal since before Theodore Roosevelt.
“No matter how you slice it, it’s going to be a contact sport,” Kluver said. “I don’t know how you change the game while still keeping it similar.”
Two weeks after Zac turned the shotgun on himself and pulled the trigger, I met the Easter family for the first time in person, having spoken to Brenda by phone a few days earlier. In the living room—with Zac’s ten-point buck mounted to the wall and hovering over us—Zac’s father, his mother, his older brother, Ali, Sue Wilson, and I sat in a semicircle. We spoke for almost four hours. There were not many tears, in part because the family was still in shock, and in part because they now had a charge.
In the writings he left behind, Zac gave his family and friends clear instructions: They should not let his death be in vain. His family framed his suicide not as the ultimate selfish act but as something very different: as a sacrifice that meant his death could take on a greater meaning and could be used to help others like him. So the family moved quickly from the stasis of mourning into actually doing something. Starting a foundation in his honor. Speaking to football players about the risk of concussions. Pushing the NFL to take the risks more seriously. Raising money and awareness for research into concussions and CTE. Anything to give a sense of meaning to Zac’s senseless death.
How did they feel about football, and the sport’s future? Well, it’s complicated. Brenda Easter—who had winced back in college when her future husband would get in an on-field collision playing for Drake University and cringed whenever her three sons were involved in crunching hits on the gridiron—was done with the sport. She would put up with it on the television in the living room because this sport was so ingrained in the family’s consciousness and history. But there would be zero chance that her grandchildren would play. They could play basketball or baseball or run track instead.
Love, Zac Page 22