Growing Up on the Gridiron

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Explores the experience of one young man and the concerns about CTE he helped to illuminate, and the cultural allure of football in America that keeps boys trying to make the team despite the dangersAward-winning journalist Vicki Mayk offers deep insights in telling the story of Owen Thomas—a star football player at Penn, who took his own life when he was 21, the result of the pain and paranoia caused by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). It was Owen's landmark case which demonstrated that a player didn't need years of head bashing in the NFL, or multiple sustained brain concussions, or even a single skull-rattling hit to cause the mind-altering, life-threatening, degenerative disease known as CTE. This is also the story of Dr. Ann McKee, the neuropathologist who bucked conventional wisdom, and the football establishment, as she explored Owen's brain and its larger significance with the tenacity of a rampaging linebacker, building an ever-stronger case...