NFL, CTE, SB50

One by one, the gridiron gods of my youth are proving terribly mortal. It is not just that a lot of ex-football players are dying. It is how they are dying. Their brains, to put it non-technically, have been turned to mush by the game they love. What’s taking these heroes out is not the silent artillery of time, but the loud cacophony of shoulder pads, helmets and human bodies.

Every week, it seems, the ranks of pro football players lost to chronic traumatic encephalopathy acquires a new victim.  This Super Bowl week it was Ken “The Snake” Stabler, the former Raiders QB, who died last summer and whose family offered up his brain for study. And many of those still living are sunk in hopeless dementia -- like Willie Wood, the superlative defensive back for the Packers of the Lombardi glory years, who can no longer recall the stellar interception he made in the first Super Bowl fifty years ago. Or anything else, for that matter.

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