One of the most popular types of posts we do here at For The Win is called a reaction post. It’s simply where we gather what people are saying about a certain piece of news and present it in a tidy package for you to scroll through quickly.
I’ve always loved the fact that you, our readers, love these posts. There’s something elementally human and raw about wanting to know how others are dealing with complicated or exhilarating or, as is often the case, tragic news.
Back when former NFL wide receiver Demaryius Thomas died, we quickly put together a reaction post, because people everywhere were gutted.
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These reactions are filled with all the angst and bewilderment you might expect at the death of a 33-year-old man who was once nearly unstoppable on a football field.
This morning, when news broke that Thomas’ brain had been examined and found to have Stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, I wondered if there’d be a reaction post to do. It’s huge news. Yet another dead football player — there’ve been more than 300 now — diagnosed with CTE by Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University.
A young, recently retired player. A four-time Pro Bowl selection. The leading receiver on the Broncos team that won Super Bowl 50. The guy who caught a pass from Peyton Manning in 2013 that set records for most TD passes and yardage by a QB in a season. Who went on to make 13 catches (then a record) in the Super Bowl a few weeks later.
But as you’ll notice, this is not a reaction post. Because there’s been very little reaction to this news, aside from the same people who talk about this issue each time it arises.
Thomas did not die, according to his parents, due to complications from CTE, so this is a different case than others:
EXCLUSIVE: The parents of 33 years old Super Bowl Champion, Demaryius Thomas, reveal he suffered from Stage 2 CTE and his death was caused by a separate seizure disorder that led to cardiac arrest.https://t.co/RvJ2YUDeNl
— Good Morning America (@GMA) July 5, 2022
But Thomas’ final months were marred by hallmarks of the disease, and how could we not all recoil at thinking of him this way?
“Once I became aware of CTE and began to familiarize myself with the symptoms, I noticed that Demaryius was isolating himself and I saw other changes in him,” said Katina Smith, Demaryius’ mother. “He was just so young, and it was horrible to see him struggle. His father and I hope all families learn the risks of playing football. We don’t want other parents to have to lose their children like we did.”
Why, in the face of such a devastating revelation, are we not seeking the solace of shared understanding? Why do we let this bit of news float by without a thought?
Despite years of talking to people, thinking and writing about this topic, I don’t have any new theory. It’s just this: Football is too engrained and too much fun for us to take time to reckon with the price paid by the players.
Also, we’ve been told to give extra weight to the other side of this, to the way football can lift young men to places they otherwise would struggle to go. Thomas is a prime example. As detailed by Ken Belson in The New York Times today, his traumatic family backstory became a popular storyline for Super Bowl 50:
In the lead up to Thomas’s next championship appearance, his family history gained as much attention as his play. After 17 years of appeals and lobbying from the family, President Barack Obama commuted Smith’s sentence as part of a Department of Justice focus on clemency for nonviolent drug offenders. Their story became a focus of the lead up to Super Bowl 50, with media reporting extensively about Smith’s finally being able to watch her son play in person on the game’s biggest stage.
All of the networks that regularly televise the NFL are awash in these emotionally charged packages you know so well. A player looking pensively off into the distance. Flash to a shot of him in his Pop Warner uniform. Hear about friends who didn’t make it out. A snippet from an interview with the high school coach who helped the player’s work ethic flourish.
We are inundated with that side of the story. The end, for Thomas and so many others, is reported largely as a series of conclusions.
He died.
A few months later: He had CTE.
Parents and friends might attest — as in the GMA piece linked above — to the horrors that came before the end, but often they are so shut out that they don’t really know what the person they loved actually went through. In many cases, they end up shocked that this thing they’ve heard plenty about happened to their loved one. Even to those who know them the best, NFL players can seem invincible. To those whose lives have been changed forever because their son or husband or best friend beat the odds and became a star, that player is always going to be special, blessed, untouchable, unharmed, resilient.
That’s how those players want to see themselves too, how they’ve had to see themselves to make it this far. These dynamics create a system where players and their families often don’t ask for help until it’s too late (and when they do seek help, they can find accessing it to be frustrating, if not impossible.)
Our exalting of athletes who used sports to build a better life also makes it difficult to create meaningful change in football culture. Players need to grind, they need to fight through, they need to be tough (honing the ability to not show pain extends to later in life when they struggle mentally, too). It’s a difficult loop to break out of.
Though there’s been real progress in limiting the overall number of hits college and pro football players take, there’s still more progress to be made, especially with youth football (where hitting is far too frequent). As for erasing the impetus of striving young players to hide symptoms and return to the field despite not feeling 100 percent, good luck.
There’s still plenty of work to be done by the medical and scientific community, too, when it comes to fully understanding what CTE is, how prevalent it is and how, exactly, it shows up in those suffering from it. But anecdotes about former players isolating themselves are plentiful.
At the time of Thomas’ death last December, I was writing a story about Casey FitzSimmons, a former Lions tight end whose career was ended by a concussion that left him debilitated for years. As I spoke with him and his wife about the months directly following his traumatic brain injury, the same theme emerged: Casey was alone in his own head, where nothing worked like it once did, and not even the woman who had been by his side since college could get through. Though there was no visible wound, he protected his brain like an animal with a gash on its leg: By hiding it away while he tried to heal.
According to the accounts released today, Thomas’ final years were spent the same way. The problem is, when it’s your brain that has been damaged you don’t always make reasonable choices about how to heal, or who to turn to when you do reach out.
Even on the most triumphant night of his career, Thomas was already being forced to withdrawal from those he had relied on most.
I was at Levi’s Stadium when the Broncos beat the Panthers to win Super Bowl 50, and remember listening to Thomas after the game. He’d been limited to one catch and had taken a crushing hit from Luke Kuechly (who would suffer a brutal concussion the next season, then retire at age 28 to save his body from further damage) but he seemed to be in good spirits. Thomas fielded a question about whether Manning was going to retire and said he hadn’t discussed it with him.
He answered questions for a few minutes and then, I always assumed, went to celebrate with his teammates.
Except that he didn’t. According to his mother, his head hurt too badly for that.
“He was like, ‘Hey, y’all, I need to leave and go by myself because I don’t feel too good,’ ” Smith recounted. “And so, you know, he left and didn’t even finish celebrating or anything like that.”
He hung in the league for a few years, pushing to continue playing even after his results on the field declined. He officially announced his retirement last summer with an upbeat video from the Broncos.
“I’m just happy to say I’m done,” he said, “and it did me well.”
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