“There was a time when football was instilled in everybody in society,” Brenda told me. “In the small towns, that’s all they had to do. Football Friday nights is the thing to do. But does that mean that it can’t be changed? That something else safer can’t replace it?” Her feelings against football, especially for youth, would only harden with time and with more research. Like when she learned about a Harvard study that showed the average white American male lives to age seventy-eight, and the average black American male lives to seventy, but the average professional football player in both the United States and Canada lives to his mid to late fifties. Or when she learned about a study—commissioned by the NFL right around the time Zac was a high school senior and conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research—that reported Alzheimer’s disease and similar memory-related diseases among NFL retirees were nineteen times the normal rate for men ages thirty to forty-nine. The answer to her felt obvious: Less football would mean safer children.
On a summer night a couple of years after Zac’s death, after I had gotten to know the family quite well, I sat at the Easters’ kitchen table with Brenda and Myles for hours, drinking beer and talking about Zac and about football. At one point, when I kept pressing Brenda on how she feels about football today, and if the lessons learned from football outweigh the risks of the sport, Brenda lost her temper with me. “I get angry every day,” she told me. “You asked me, ‘Do I hate football?’ I don’t hate football. I get angry that the thing that everybody loves is so dangerous. Do I hate the sport? It’s a struggle. Because I want to hate the sport so bad. Because it took my son. But I can’t. Because I know how much Zac loved it. I know how much all the boys and the fans love it. What I wish is that we could figure out today how to protect them so they can continue to do what they love. The fact I can’t protect them, despite knowing what I know today, makes me ill.”
For Myles Easter, the guilt was overwhelming. He had pushed his three sons to play the sport, and now his middle one was gone because of it. Yet decades of playing and coaching and watching a specific version of football—the old-school version that exalted the Easter mentality—had formed so much of who Myles Easter was. He still didn’t want football to change too much. This was the sport that forged men from boys. It’s been a common reaction as long as people have been trying to reform the violence out of football. After a 1931 report by the Carnegie Foundation predicted touch football would replace tackle football, Lone Star Dietz, a former teammate of Jim Thorpe and then the head football coach at Haskell Institute, responded angrily: “They’re trying to make a sissy game out of football.” Even after all he’d been through, that’s still how Myles Easter ultimately felt about his beloved game of football. All these new rules were weakening the sport. He missed the old days. More accurately, he missed the naïve days, when you could play football and coach football and watch football without knowing exactly what those hits to the head were doing to the players’ brains.
Ali still recognized how much Zac had adored the sport. But in her mind, football would forever be the thing that killed her boyfriend and changed the trajectory of her life. “I have such a complicated relationship with football,” she said. “I feel conflicted. I understand the benefits, and why people love it, but I also know so much needs to change. It’s the sport that contributed to my boyfriend’s death. What do you do from there?” In the years after his death, Ali would throw herself into fund-raising for scientific research to protect athletes, especially youth athletes, from going down the same road as Zac. She would make frequent visits to the cemetery (the one wish of Zac’s they didn’t follow). She would bring flowers and a Monster Energy drink, Zac’s favorite, and just sit by his memorial headstone and talk with him.
As we spoke in the Easters’ living room just weeks after Zac’s death, the television was on mute, tuned to the Vikings-Packers. Huge game. Bitter rivals, the NFC North title on the line. As we spoke about Zac’s zest for life and Zac’s struggles that led to his death, the men in the house, including me, kept peeking at our phones. We were checking our fantasy-football scores.
Zac left instructions: Print his story off his laptop, post it to Facebook, use the pain of his life and too-early death to warn the world about CTE. Get people like us—football fans, football players, football parents, football lifers—to face the truth about people like him. And his family did all that, and continues to, through their nonprofit foundation, CTE Hope, dedicated to aiding scientific research to limit and prevent concussions in sports. Ali continues to be a driving force for the foundation, as does Sue Wilson. After graduating magna cum laude from law school and being named a national law student of the year by National Jurist, Ali took a job at a corporate law firm in New York City. She’s doing the type of high-powered legal work—in her firm’s white-collar, investigations, securities litigation, and compliance group—that Zac expected from her. On the side, she coordinates the foundation’s communications. She returns to Iowa each year to organize the foundation’s spring gala.
Sue Wilson got a taste of public service as vice president of the state’s Advisory Council on Brain Injury; in that capacity, she helped develop a brain injury screening tool for places like jails and homeless shelters to determine if mental health issues had been caused by a previous brain injury. Sue then decided to run for a spot on the Indianola School Board on a platform of addressing students’ mental health. She won. The woman who a dozen years ago was an unwelcome sight on the Indianola Indians’ sidelines has since gained an outsize voice in the community. As one of the cofounders of CTE Hope, Sue spearheaded a research partnership with Myles’s alma mater, Drake University. The university is helping develop treatment protocols for people suffering from early symptoms of CTE. The school is also starting a brain injury curriculum in its health sciences department. The classes are geared toward those studying pharmacy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and athletic training. Sue will be an adjunct professor.
If Zac were around to see the foundation’s growth, he’d be thrilled to see how his family, his girlfriend, and his friends followed his instructions. His family and the foundation advocated for legislation for Iowa high schools to update their return-to-play protocol, which was signed by the governor a couple of years after Zac’s death. They are also advocating for more controversial nationwide legislation to eliminate tackle football before age fourteen, when a young and developing brain is most susceptible to traumatic brain injury. The foundation launched a saliva research study, which has collected around four thousand saliva samples from football and soccer players statewide and sent them to a research lab at Harvard Medical School. The study aims to measure inflammatory markers and proteins associated with head trauma, with a goal of developing a device, similar to a pregnancy test or a blood-sugar testing device, that can immediately identify a concussion. His family has followed Zac’s instructions to a T.
Although he doesn’t know the Easter family and hasn’t been active in the foundation, Dr. Shawn Spooner has, in his own way, followed Zac’s instructions as well. Inspired by Zac and a few other patients who struggled to find timely, quality concussion-related care, he pushed his health-care provider, UnityPoint Health, to build a new facility focused largely on concussion. It’s the same model Spooner worked with in Afghanistan, with a large interdisciplinary team—a sports neuropsychologist and a specialty physician, a speech-language pathologist and an athletic trainer and several physical therapists—all under one roof.
But Zac’s instructions left no guidance about how to mourn, and no guidance about how we should think about our national sport.
So now what?
We could ban football. (But we love football.) We could allow people to play football only once they turn eighteen, as Omalu has proposed. (OK, but what happens when eighteen-year-old athletic phenoms—freight trains who have never learned to tackle properly—are suddenly turned loose on one another? Would that be better?) We could take aw
ay tackling. (Sorry, no one’s watching the National Flag Football League.) We could build a safer helmet. (Which will only encourage players to use their heads as weapons.) We could have a consistent concussion protocol through all levels of football. (We already do in the NFL.)
Every solution ends up not solving enough of the problem.
And for most of us, this is perfectly OK. The paradox of CTE’s discovery is that it’s given most of us a sneaky ethical out, hasn’t it? No professional football player can claim now to be unaware of the risks. It’s a free country. We’re all adults here.
Unless we’re not adults.
Unless we’re kids.
Unless we’re Zac.
The email arrived in Brenda Easter’s Hotmail inbox at 5:33 p.m. on Tuesday, May 24, 2016, five months after Zac had committed suicide. The email was from Bennet Omalu. Shortly after Zac’s death, Brenda had shipped Zac’s brain to Omalu’s old forensic neuropathology lab in Pittsburgh, the same lab that studied Mike Webster’s brain. Pathologists had cut Zac’s brain into paper-thin slices, put them on slides, and used special chemicals to study whether the buildup of tau proteins in Zac’s brain indicated he had CTE.
“Brain Report,” Omalu’s subject line read. Attached was a PDF document: “Zachary Easter, Brain Forensic Neuropathology Report.”
The report was completed by a pathologist named Dr. Julia Kofler and contained plenty of basic details. That Zac had died by suicide in December 2015. That he had played football from age nine until eighteen and sustained multiple confirmed concussions from playing. That his brain weighed 1,540 grams. But right there on the first page of the report, the CTE diagnosis that Zac had feared was confirmed. Tau protein buildup was “widespread” in his brain. The report cited the multiple concussions from football as a potential cause.
Zac was right. The crazy brain disease that had felled famous football players like seventeen-year NFL veteran Mike Webster or twenty-year NFL veteran Junior Seau had, somehow, crept into Zac’s brain by the time he was twenty-four. To his parents, the diagnosis brought conflicting emotions. First, it felt impossible. Sure, he was a reckless player, but Zac hadn’t even played football past high school.
But, then, the diagnosis also felt strangely comforting. Zac was right all along. If neuropathologists had looked at his brain and seen nothing out of order, his parents would have been doubly devastated. There wouldn’t have been an explanation for his death that made any sense. Now, at the very least, they could say they knew what their son was experiencing. The email brought the family a peculiar type of relief.
Can you imagine football just . . . going away?
No more feelings of anticipation as the long days of summer start to wane, and as training camps kick off, and as football openers are right around the corner. No more autumn tableaus of Americana where preteens play raucous, helmetless games of tackle football in yards covered with leaves. No more Thanksgivings spent gathered around the television to watch the Dallas Cowboys or the Detroit Lions. No more Friday night lights, no more Saturday morning tailgates, no more Sundays blanketed with NFL games, no more NFL Monday Night Football: A new era in which America simply can no longer stomach the repercussions of this sport.
No more football? No way. Americans have a remarkable capability to compartmentalize our morality. Convincing ourselves that, sure, this sport has obvious negative side effects, and that those negative side effects are far greater than we’d ever imagined but deciding that we love it anyway. “That’s what the NFL is banking on these next few years—hypocrisy, basically—as more stories emerge about the tortured lives of retired players,” sportswriter Bill Simmons wrote in the wake of the NFL’s Bountygate scandal, with New Orleans Saints coaches accused of paying out cash bonuses, or “bounties,” for a Saint injuring an opposing player. “You hear these things, you sigh, you feel remorse, you forget . . . and then you go back to looking forward to the next football season.”
I don’t say all this as some self-righteous tut-tutter of America’s football hypocrisy but instead as a full-blown participant in it. I’m still a hard-core NFL fan. Even as I write this book about how football played a role in Zac Easter’s death—as I interview family members of others who committed suicide after suffering from football-induced CTE, as I nod in agreement when my wife says there’s zero chance our two young sons, Owen and Lincoln, will ever play the sport—I still watch.
And it’s not some sick addiction that I hide from my family. I wear it proudly, looking forward to watching NFL games on Sundays alongside my rambunctious three-year-old son, Lincoln. Like Zac, our second son is joyous and kind, devious and destructive. “FOOTBAAAAALL!” Lincoln will scream at me, then try to bowl me over. We’ve nicknamed him Lincoln the Marauder. It’s only a matter of time before these theoretical discussions between my wife and me about football become very real, when all Lincoln’s friends are suiting up for the team and he wants to suit up, too.
Omalu diagnoses America’s inability to rationally think about football’s future as cognitive dissonance: Our views are shaped by societal expectations and traditions, and we simply ignore evidence that goes against those long-held beliefs. “God did not intend for us to play football,” Omalu told me. “Nature, our human bodies, did not intend for us to expose our heads to repeated blunt force trauma . . . Your child, I guarantee you, has some degree of brain damage if he plays this game for a length of time.”
It’s a moral problem, yes. But it’s a business problem, too; football is a big business. Billionaire owners of NFL teams, major American universities that have staked their public reputations on the sport, small towns that have made shrine-like high school football stadiums among the most important pieces of infrastructure in their town: We’re all invested. The sport’s tentacles go deep.
“It is possible that football will grow less popular in this country,” Steve Almond writes in his book, Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto. “Here’s how it might happen: First, several retired stars might reveal the depth of their neurological impairment. Steve Young on 60 Minutes. Brett Favre weeping to Oprah. Second, the safer equipment and rules that fans are forever touting as silver bullets may do little to alter the brutal physics of the game. Third, medical technology inevitably will make visible the damage done to young men who play the sport. Fourth, a major college or pro player might be paralyzed or killed during a game. Fifth, a successful class-action suit at the high school or college level could trigger a domino effect.”
Myles Easter can remember, as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, gathering around the television to watch boxing matches with his father. When Myles’s father was growing up, boxing was considered one of our top national sports, “a symbol of American sport,” according to a 1944 article in the Journal of Health and Physical Education.
But Myles never watched boxing matches with his own sons, perhaps because our society came to deem boxing too primitive, too dangerous, and we lost our collective stomach for it. Boxing still exists, of course, but as a niche sport. There used to be boxing clubs all over American high schools and colleges. Now, those are few and far between. One of the watershed moments of the sport’s fall from grace came in 1982, when Howard Cosell, an ABC sportscaster and one of the foremost faces of American boxing for a quarter century, witnessed Larry Holmes beat down Tex Cobb in a bloody, lopsided fight. A couple of weeks before, Ray Mancini had beat down Duk Koo Kim in another bloody, lopsided fight (nationally televised on CBS) that caused Kim to die from brain injuries. Cosell was disgusted; he vowed after the Holmes fight to never call another professional match. “I’ve had it,” Cosell told the New York Times. “I now favor the abolition of professional boxing.” There have been plenty of ex-football players to offer similar critiques of their sport. Americans have mostly shrugged them off. Ed Cunningham, a former NFL player who was a college football analyst for ESPN and ABC, resigned in 2017 because of his concerns with the sport. Plenty of high-profile NFL players have retired early because
of concerns about brain trauma. Perhaps, though, that rejection of football by people who are intimately in its orbit will, in time, reach some sort of tipping point.
“Maybe [football is] popular because it’s the one huge cultural space where we can safely indulge all the shit we haven’t worked out yet as a people: our lust for violence, our racial neuroses, our yearning for patriarchal dominion, our sexual hang-ups,” Almond writes. “It’s the place where men get to be boys—before the age of reason, before the age of guilt.”
But today, as a society, we’re in the age of reason, in the age of guilt. We can no longer plead ignorance that we simply didn’t know what all those hits to the head could do to the human brain. Now, we know. We are no longer innocent bystanders but active participants, complicit in whatever damage football brings. We look back at those old NFL films—NFL’s Greatest Hits or Big Blocks and King Size Hits, Crunch Course or Thunder and Destruction—as stuff of a prior age. We look back at the old introduction to Monday Night Football, with two helmets ramming into each other and exploding, as an unenlightened form of this sport. We cringe when we think about the old ESPN segment, “Jacked Up,” in which sportscasters would show a big hit and then chant, “You just got . . . JACKED UP!” We realize that handing out BIG HAMMER T-shirts to high school students to celebrate a punishing hit from a football game probably is not the best practice. We punish the NFL coach for paying his defensive players $1,500 apiece for hits that resulted in opponents being knocked out: “Kill the head, the body will die!” New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams would tell his players. But then, after being suspended for one season, we welcome that coach back into the league.
We think that we have reformed football. We say that football is safer now than it ever has been. But do we really know how true that is?
There are only two morally upstanding ways to approach the concerns we have about football as our national sport: To devote every resource we have to making it as safe as possible when it comes to brain injuries. Or to renounce the sport completely.
Love, Zac Page 23