by Glenn Stout
I won’t lie I look back now and always felt like I had something to prove to my dad and trying to fill my older brothers football shoes . . . I was tired of teachers and even Principal Monroe comparing me to my brother and asking me why I wasn’t as good of a student as my older brother. I guess I got to the point then where I just didn’t care and realized the only way to fill adequate to fill the Easter family shoes was to play football . . . 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 . . . [From another journal around the same time] I’ve never really felt good enough for him. I know the remarks he will say. Im sure he loves me but he’s always had a hard time showing it. I feel like all my concussions were for him in the first place because I just wanted to impress him and feel tough. I regret all that now and wish I never even played sports.
Zac’s football career ended in October of his senior year. The team at Indianola High School was a perfect fit for Zac: they were always smaller, always scrappier, and always played like the chips were stacked against them. Indianola had the lowest enrollment in a conference filled with schools from Des Moines’s suburbs, but they took pride in not playing like it. When their head coach, Eric Kluver, had arrived years before, he quickly realized there was a gem in his own backyard: Myles Easter Sr., a veteran college coach who had three sons coming up in the Indianola youth football system and was eager to help. Myles was tough. So were his players. Kluver hired him.
At first Kluver tried to innovate with a speedy spread offense, but he quickly realized that wouldn’t fly here; he simply couldn’t get the type of athletes to make it work. So instead he went old-school: a smashmouth I-formation offense. Pound the ball and wear out bigger, faster, stronger—but softer—teams. It was catnip to Iowa country boys like Myles Easter Sr. Soon, things began to change for Indianola. Local fans would come to games just to watch the special teams tee off on opponents during kick returns. Kluver handed out a BIG HAMMER T-shirt for the most crushing hit in that week’s game; Zac earned one his junior year and another his senior year. The Easter Mentality had become the Indianola football mentality.
By his senior year, Zac had become an anchor of the team’s defense. On this chilly Friday night, the seventh game of the 2009 season, Zac was taking the field for the first time in a month. A concussion had knocked him out in the season’s fourth game, but Zac was determined to be back for the game against league rival Ankeny High School. Ankeny was much bigger than Zac’s school, one of the largest in the state, more affluent, and most obnoxiously, they were good. “We just thought they were kind of rich pricks,” says Nick Haworth, Zac’s best friend since preschool and an offensive lineman on the team.
Zac was fired up. Indianola’s athletic trainer, Sue Wilson, was not. She’d been hired in 2005, and her focus was concussions; this was the same year that Bennet Omalu, a neuropathologist in Pittsburgh who studied the brain of deceased Pittsburgh Steelers star Mike Webster, had published his groundbreaking paper “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player.” Even now, in 2009, she was a mostly unwelcome presence on the sidelines. Parents yelled at her when she took away their sons’ helmets in the middle of a game; they wanted them to play. So did the coaches.
On this Friday night, Wilson was already focused on Zac. He’d always played through pain. He’d already suffered two concussions in as many months: one in August, before games started, during a tackling drill at a full-contact football camp, and then another during a game in early September—the one that sidelined him for a month. By now, Myles Sr. had grown concerned enough about the repeated head injuries that he’d ordered a special Xenith helmet. The helmet was supposed to reduce the risk of concussion, but it kept falling off Zac’s head during games. He was also wearing a cowboy collar to protect his neck. He was armored up, like a soldier heading into battle.
Prior to the game, Zac had passed Wilson’s concussion protocol, but if she’d known what was really going on inside his brain, there’s no way she would have let him near the field. After the concussion during the game in September, a teammate told Zac that he was looking at him cross-eyed. Later that night, he would write in his journal, “I saw a doctor and lied about all my concussion symptoms.”
Of course he lied. It was his senior year. He wanted to play.
From “Concussions: My Silent Struggle”
The truth was I had severe headaches every day and constantly felt sick or dizzy, but the tough guy in me told them I was still totally fine. I remember leaving some of my classes because I would be feeling sick and sitting there soaking myself in sweat. Around this time is when I started feeling depressed. I felt ashamed that I was hurt and had to sit out . . .
I finally got to play in the next game against Ankeny . . . Even my friends noticed that week that I wasn’t as willing to hit as hard and I would actually shy away from contact. During the Ankeny game I remember the first play of the game is when I got my bell seriously rung . . . I went head to head with the running back at full speed on the first play during a quarter back rollout to try and run him over. I could of ripped through the running back and made a sack, instead I wanted to punish this running back on the first play and get inside his head. Instead he got inside of mine, I never pulled myself out of the game though and Chia told me that during halftime he remembered me trying to take a knee in the locker room and I fell over because I was so disorientated and I couldn’t get back up without a friend helping. Ofcourse I told him I was fine and showed no weakness.
It wasn’t long during the 3rd quarter when my helmet came off during a play and I guess I hit a guy without a helmet on, head to head. The next play I shit canned a pulling guard and that’s about all I remember. From what I was told I could barely get up and wasn’t able to walk off the field on my own.
It happened away from the ball, so the collision that ended Zac Easter’s football career can’t be seen on the game tape. But on a third-quarter drive, you can tell that No. 44 is suddenly missing from Indianola’s defense. And later in the game, at the bottom of the screen, Zac can be seen on the sidelines, arguing heatedly with someone: Wilson, the trainer. She is clutching his helmet. He wants to go back in. No way, she says.
What happened in the moments just after Zac’s final play remains burned into Wilson’s memory: two teammates pulled a player off the ground and dragged him toward her. She couldn’t tell who it was until she saw the jersey number, 44, and her heart dropped into her stomach. Zac’s feet were barely under him.
“Sue, he’s not right,” one teammate told her.
“I looked at him, and he looked at me, and he just didn’t say a word,” Wilson says now. “I took his helmet. And he just put his head down. He started crying on the bench. I walked away to give him his space. I came back and asked him if there’s anything I could do. He just said, ‘No. I just don’t feel good.’ I said, ‘Are you going to get sick?’ He said, ‘I don’t know.’”
She kept an eye on him the rest of the game. He could still speak. He could still stick his tongue out. He wasn’t vomiting. His head was pounding, but he didn’t seem to be in need of urgent medical attention. In the locker room after the game, Haworth says, Zac’s blue eyes had drifted into a haze—“a thousand-yard stare.”
Wilson ordered Zac to rest for the next week. No football, no exercise, nothing. But Zac ignored her. By this point, he’d figured out that exercise was the only way to ease the pounding in his brain, so he’d run on a treadmill—sometimes an hour, sometimes two. He knew his football career was over. No one had told him yet, but he knew it. Still, he needed to stay in shape for wrestlin
g season.
About a month later, though, he was still exhibiting symptoms. When he saw Wilson to get cleared for wrestling, she wouldn’t sign off.
“I’ll never forget the look in Zac’s eyes when I told him he wasn’t going to wrestle his senior year,” she says now. “I think his exact words were ‘Fuck you.’”
From “Concussions: My Silent Struggle”
Something changed in me after that last concussion against Ankeny. My depression kicked into full gear and I started having symptoms of anxiety. My emotions have never been the same after the last football concussion either . . . I love my family to death, but I felt like I was snapping on them for no reason some days and I could see that somethings I said were hurting them. It just seemed like anything and everything would want to set me off . . . [At college] I kept going out on the weekends and drinking my ass off though and using any drug I could find . . . I started drinking and getting so shitfaced I often started pissing the bed and started to have my drinking problem come back. Some nights I would tell my friends and roommate I’m busy and sit in my room and drink alone. Before my senior year [of college] started I also got a prescription of Adderall because I thought I had adhd. All I did was start abusing the Adderall right away. When I picked up my first prescription I went home and snorted several lines . . . It seemed the only I could get myself to seem smart and outgoing was to be high on amphetamines from the Adderall.
I feel like I’ve started to become delusional or I’ve been kind of hearing and seeing things. A few times I’ve gone down stairs and have asked the guys what they wanted because I sware I heard someone calling my name. A lot of this freaked me out because I’m not sure if I was going schitzo or not. I’ve felt like some days I’ve just been out of it. Over the years I’ve been starting to forget peoples names and just forget daily things. My roommates even joked about an alzhiemers commercial about an old lady losing her shit because I’ve felt like I’ve lost mine slowly.
My impulse control problems have been killing me a lot lately to. I can’t seem to get a grip with my money spending habits. I used to be a tight ass and all about money, but now I just find myself spending all my money and money that I don’t even have. I think I’ve spent about 10k in the past three months and nothing to show for it. I cant seem to stop binge eating unless im on Adderall. I don’t know if I have that brain decise that people talk about or if I really am crazy.
On the night of his 24th birthday, Zac Easter and his cousin met at the Sports Page Grill in Indianola, ordered Coors Lights, and waited for Zac’s parents to arrive. Zac was nervous. His cousin could hear it in his voice. By this point, June 2015, not quite six years since his final football game, he’d become convinced that his five diagnosed concussions (plus countless more that weren’t) across a decade of using his head as a weapon had triggered his downward spiral.
“I’ve noticed I’m relying on drugs to try and be who I want to be,” he wrote in his journal around this time. “I need to stop, but at the same time I’m like Fuck it. I won’t lie, I feel kind of scared and depressed bout my future. I found some info online about CTE and got scared. I’m not looking at that stuff again.”
Meanwhile, Zac’s parents believed their son was on top of the world. He’d just graduated from college with honors. He was a star in the Iowa National Guard—he won a Soldier of the Year award for his unit and was short-listed for Army Ranger school. He turned it down because the war in Afghanistan had become so dangerous. Inspired by The Wolf of Wall Street, he’d made a get-rich-soon pact with his elder brother, Myles Jr. They’d pound their fists on their chests, like Matthew McConaughey in the film. He’d grown closer with Ali, their on-again-off-again relationship inching toward something real and special. A full life awaited him.
But what his parents saw—the degree, the girlfriend, the job, the stability—was a mirage. Yes, he had just graduated from college, but he’d also just told his first employer, an annuity-and-insurance marketing company, that he needed time away from work. When he was making sales calls, he would forget what he was talking about midsentence. It got so bad that he even wrote himself a two-page script to get through a call.
When his parents arrived for his birthday dinner, Zac took an anxious swig from his Coors Light, gathered himself, then told them he needed to talk. “Something’s been going on with my head,” he began.
From there, he laid it all out: He was quitting his job because he needed to focus on his health. He was often tired and dizzy and nauseated. During college he used to set his alarm for 3:30 a.m. to work out and run for hours; now he would go for a jog, feel sick, and only make it 1.4 miles in 20 minutes. He got headaches all the time. Sometimes while driving, he’d go into these trances; he’d snap out of it when he drove his car into a curb. Panic attacks came without warning. He had started writing down a long list of questions for his doctor; one of them was “Do you think I’m showing signs of CTE or dementia?”
In fact, he already knew the answer to that one. He had just visited a doctor who specialized in concussions and who told him that, yes, he very well might have CTE. He had started seeing a speech pathologist to help him manage his cognitive struggles and improve his memory, attention span, language-processing abilities, and problem-solving skills.
His parents were stunned. They knew some things were off. Sometimes on the phone it sounded like Zac was talking with marbles in his mouth. And they’d noticed that his bank account was suddenly hemorrhaging money. But mostly they just assumed their son was a young man grappling with adulthood and independence.
But now he was telling them that he might have a mysterious brain disease that afflicted NFL players, haunting them for decades after their careers had ended. One psychologist even told Zac that he would—not could, would—end up penniless, homeless, and in a mental institution. Zac had walked out of that guy’s office terrified.
Myles Easter Sr. had seen the news reports of ex-NFL stars whose lives unraveled post-retirement and ended in suicide. Mike Webster, Andre Waters, Dave Duerson, Junior Seau—the Sunday gladiators who once were the apotheosis of all that he worshiped about the game of football. But Myles never really believed the disease existed. To be honest, even the mention of it kind of disgusted him. CTE was an excuse, he had always thought: a bunch of millionaire athletes who had it made, blew through all their money, fell out of the limelight, got depressed, then killed themselves. But now, hearing his own son—still just a kid, no jaded pro, someone who had never played a day of football above the high school level—say that he might have CTE?
“It just caught me so off guard,” Myles Sr. says. “I was honestly dumbfounded.”
The dinner table went quiet. Then Brenda, Zac’s mom, broke the silence.
“Well,” she said, “let’s fix it.”
Zac Easter’s Journal
June 2015
Even with two 30 mg Adderall in me about another 10 mgs I poored out and snorted, I still got lost all around Menards and the dollar store . . . IDK what it was but I felt like I kept walking all around the store and passed what I was looking for several times. I straight up felt confused on what I was looking and kept forgetting even right after I looked at my list . . . I only went for like 3 things to. I guess [my speech pathologist] is right, I only have about a 3 minute memory after that I’m fucked. I even took three wrong turns on the way home. Shit happens I guess.
July 2015
I wish I could put a finger on what is wrong with me. Its either from the concussions or Im just bat shit crazy. Im tired of feeling emotionless or too many emotions. Im trying to find a new hobby but nothing really quite makes me want to do it. Tomorrow I meet w/ Spooner [the concussion specialist] about everything to me, theres just NO way those concussions didn’t change me. I think I might just donate my brain and let them figure it out.
August 2015
I still havent been working or looking for work. I got put on Zoloft and my new psychiatrist seems to know his meds. I’m still fighti
ng the side effects. Sleep has been dismal and I’ve still been going to speech therapy and PT. It sounds like they really arent on my side anymore and they want me to be focusing on my mood disorder. I cant really blame them. I have been fucked up with depression the past few weeks. I’ve been going out more but using more drugs. Smoked pot a few times, rolled on Molly and now I got some coke. All that plus Adderall fuck it! Its the only way I feel normal
September 2015
Im scared if I can’t get help or feel better I may want to just end it all. As in suicide. Im just so tired of feeling so shitty and anxious. I had a job interview, two of them and its hard for me to not have panic attacks. It seems like I still cant get over my anxiety. IDK lifes just a bitch. Im try to forget about that fact that Im mentally ill and that I might have a traumatic brain disorder. I plan on going home tonight so hopefully I’ll be able to talk to my rents a little more. I might even move home next month if I cant get some income coming in . . .
I just got my Adderall script and started snorting it right away! Im going to try and leave it home when I go home so I don’t use it all. Physically my heart rate is still always nuts whether I’m Adderall or not. I’m trying to work out but its just getting harder each day.
Friday, November 13, 2015. 1:34 p.m.
Text exchange between Zac and Ali.
I’m sorry you fell in love with a guy
with a ducked up brain.
You can’t choose who you fall in